The Satin Sash

No man is an island....

He’d heard this from a retiring construction worker who spent his lunchtimes with a book.

Heath had snorted. I’m it, buddy. Lunchtime is over.

He didn’t like emotional entanglements and he didn’t like messy good-byes, which made his relationship with Grey so easy. Grey wasn’t sentimental; his partner was forthright and the most level-headed man Heath knew.They worked. Heath elbowed him. Grey let himself be amused sometimes.They were themselves.

Heath pretty much didn’t give a shit about anything else.

But watching Grey and Toni kiss . . . fuck, just the way they stared at each other . . . damn, even watching Grey fondle her little hand . . .

Some kind of creepy, unwelcome loneliness gripped at his chest. Maybe the knowledge that his partner and best friend was as emotionally isolated as he was had kept the feeling at bay, kept him from feeling like an oddity. But something in Grey had cracked, and something in Heath envied it.

He was torn with wants. He wanted to rise from the table and find something to do other than watch them. And he wanted to slide up to crowd her from behind and plunge into her silken depths. Most of all, he wanted to bend her over the table and fuck her until they both passed out.

Instead he raised his wine—the Hermi-whatever—and tossed back the liquid. He desperately craved a beer. Once they drew apart, Grey left Toni’s hair in a delectable, thoroughly touchable mess, and she brought a pair of glazed forest green eyes to Heath’s.

His mouth ran dry. He’d never seen a more kissable, more fuck able pair of lips, no bullshit. Her pupils were dilated with arousal. The black almost swallowed the gold-speckled green of her irises. Sweat glistened across her small forehead, and that fine- sized chest of hers rose and fell heavily with each breath. She smelled of woman in heat, and if he didn’t have her soon he’d . . . he didn’t know. But it wouldn’t be good.

“This fire . . .” he gruffly told her, caressing the inside of her wrist as he turned her hand to stroke its smooth center with his thumb. He liked that part of a woman, the dent in her palm, and he liked fucking it with his thumb. Slowly and sinuously, until the meaning of what he was doing became clear.

Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

“This fire isn’t just Grey’s.”He watched the color rise in her cheeks as her lust heightened.“It’s mine, too. I fed it and stoked it, and I want it.” In a bold, unequivocal move, he brought her hand under the table and almost groaned when she held him.“This one’s for you.”

Beneath the light touch of her palm, his crotch was rock. Fire. Hot male dick pulsing against her—for her. “That’s your fire. And I promise you no one’s putting it out but you.”

He’d tried, and nope. He wanted Toni.

Withdrawing her hand with notable hesitation, she gave one last wistful look at her sash.

And Toni pursed those pretty lips just so, and he could see the steel in her eyes when she swung her gaze to his. A challenge.The sweetest challenge he’d been issued in his thirty- five years.To take that shimmering red material. And then her body.

This little she-cat wasn’t fooling around.

With a smile he couldn’t quite suppress, he reached out and enfolded it in his grip. He imagined he was closing his hand around something more intimate of hers. The satin was cool and flimsy, begging him to lift it up to his n

ose and take a whiff of her perfume. Tonight he’d wrap it around his cock, and he’d play with it, and this weekend . . .

“Cabo?” he asked, the word for Grey.

Grey directed his reply at Toni, with a look so carnal Heath seriously envied the sweaty, headboard-banging, animal-sex session those two had coming.

“Cabo.”

Chapter Five

Ménage . . .

It sang like a chant in her brain. It sang this morning when she slipped into the shower. It sang when she e- mailed her clients to notify them of her three-day absence. It sang when she turned off her computer, tucked her cell phone in her desk drawer, and hauled her suitcase out the door, following Grey.

Ménage . . .

It kept clamoring when Heath Solis, his jeans, his smile, and his plain black T-shirt joined them at the airport, and it screamed in her head as they flew forty thousand feet above the ground in their fine little company jet, a Citation X that soared smooth as a bird and flew faster than any other private aircraft.

Ménage . . .

Grey wanted it. She wanted it. Craved it. The looks they had shared the entire week were charged with it. The knowledge that they would do this. Together. It had been with them all week, in their sex, their looks, their touches.