Looking Inside

“All off at Monroe. This is the last stop!”

She started in shock at the sound of the man’s voice bellowing from below. It’d been the boat captain.

She instinctively jerked the lapels of her coat over her tingling breasts.

“Slow down,” Trey said, his finger still inserted in her.

She blinked at the sound of his voice. He sounded quiet, but she heard the edge of his arousal.

“He’s not coming up two flights to get rid of us. Not in a hurry, he’s not. Did you get a good look at him when we boarded?”

Eleanor briefly recalled the older, stout man who had taken their fare. “But we should—”

“Shhh,” he hissed, and she saw a gleam of determination in his eyes. He withdrew from her. The next thing she knew, he was pressing his fingertips against her lips. She instinctively parted for him. He slid across her tongue, holding her stare. She whimpered and closed around him.

His fingers were thickly lubricated with her juices.

“Suck, Eleanor.”

She did what he demanded without thought, tasting her essence for the first time. He made a low, rough sound of aroused satisfaction in his throat. Before she could divine his intent, he withdrew his fingers. She watched in wonder while he dipped the same two fingers into his mouth. Then he kissed her, hard and thorough, sharing the residue of her pleasure.

The pilot shouted again, this time sounding closer. And more annoyed.

He stood abruptly, startling her from her sex-drugged state. He grabbed her hands and helped her stand, immediately jerking up her jeans. In the distance, she heard a slow, heavy tread on the stairs. She hurried to assist him. He just continued to help her adjust her clothing, his actions methodical, but not frantic like hers were. The hard slant to his mouth gave her the impression that any harsh words the boat pilot might hurl at them for their truancy would bounce straight off him. He’d gotten what he wanted.

And he was far from sorry.

—

She seemed distracted during dinner. If he’d ever thought that about other women he’d been out with before, that would have been a negative. What guy wanted to be out with a preoccupied woman? But somehow, Eleanor even made distraction fascinating.

Perhaps distracted wasn’t the right word. She seemed dazed, but happy. He liked to think that small smile she wore and the shine in her limpid eyes had something to do with him. He was sure the rosy color of her cheeks and lips related to him, or at least what he’d done to her on the water taxi. Heat expanded in him at the memory. He watched through a narrow-eyed stare as she lifted a glass of wine to pink, slightly puffy lips and tipped the red liquid between them, her stare trained on him over the glass. He’d kissed the hell out of those lips on the taxi.

Before the night was over, he planned to ravage them even more. Maybe that prospect was what was distracting him the most.

It took him a moment to realize that he’d been thinking of them being on a date, even though he’d established from the first he wasn’t interested in getting involved in a relationship. When had that shift occurred?

And what would Eleanor think of it? He found himself wanting both to know the answer to that, and dreading it at once.

“What are you frowning about?” she asked him amusedly.

He blinked. “Nothing. You’re not eating very much,” he said, never breaking their stare across the candlelit table. She’d ordered a salad and a side dish of fettuccine. She’d plucked at the salad ineffectively while her gaze skittered around the restaurant, and then frequently landed on him and stuck. The fettuccine hadn’t been touched. If he’d had to guess, he’d say she felt nervous about them staring at each other like moony human versions of Lady and the Tramp, and forced herself to look away from him. He, also, typically disliked displays of lovesick infatuation.

So he couldn’t figure out why he kept getting annoyed every time she ripped her stare off him, like she did now.

“You haven’t eaten much either,” she observed, nodding at his half-eaten plate of chicken Parmesan. He liked the sound of her voice: low and a little husky. Sexy as hell. “I guess we weren’t as hungry as we thought we were.”

“Not for food, maybe.”

She rolled her eyes at his lame joke, but it was her curving, lush mouth he focused on. He pushed his plate back and put his elbows at the edge of the table, leaning forward slightly.

“Why are you so preoccupied?” he asked.

She set down her fork and took a drink of water. “I guess I was thinking about . . .”

She trailed off, biting her lower lip.

“The water taxi?”