Besides, after all my trash talking, I couldn't be the one to chicken out, so I blurted into the phone, "Have you always been this way?"
"What way? Handsome, charming, and irresistible?"
That made me laugh. "You know what I mean…" Grabbing a fuzzy knitted blanket from the bed, I tucked myself in the window seat. "Kinky, I guess?"
He breathed a puff of air into the phone, and I watched him settle into his own window seat across the way. "You're my biggest kink."
I groaned. "Lame."
"But sweet?"
"Enough to give me a toothache. If I believed you. Which I don't."
"Ouch. I thought you said I was trustworthy? I told you, Becca. I've been crushing on you since forever. And I tried a lot of crazy things to get your attention—"
"If you count the parade of bubbly blond cheerleaders you brought home."
"That was to make you jealous."
I curled tighter into the blanket. "Bullshit."
"Making out with bubbly blond cheerleaders was just a fantastic consolation prize."
I rolled my eyes. "So this is just another crazy thing you're doing to get my attention?"
"I've already got your attention," Ben said, just cocky enough to pull it off. "I'm doing this to keep your attention. Because you've got me running so goddamned hot that I feel like I need to roll in a drift of snow just hearing your voice. It's a winter wonderland out there and I'm walking around the house in an undershirt because every time I remember how it felt to have my hand in your panties, it makes me want to spontaneously combust."
Little spirals of arousal sparked and burst into flames inside me at me as I remembered, too. "You have surprisingly dextrous fingers, Ben."
"My basketball practice pays off at long last…"
I grinned. "I'm never going to look at my mom's garage the same way."
"I'm not seriously the first guy you've fooled around with there, am I?"
"Yeah, but the rest of the house is already christened. I was a wild child."
"I remember," he said with a chuckle. "And just for the record, I really didn't rat you out when you climbed out of your window and down that tree at night. But I was jealous of every one of those huge losers you used to date."
"Those guys were losers, but you couldn't have handled me back then…"
"Maybe not," he admitted. "But I can handle you now."
"Remains to be seen," I shot back. "So what's your fantasy?"
"Hmm?"
I wrapped the blanket tighter round me. "I told you mine. I wanna know yours."
"I've got too many to count, but at the moment I'm fantasizing about watching you bring yourself off. Think you could do that for me?"
My mouth actually dropped open a little bit. One glance at the window told me he was deadly earnest. "Wow, give you an opening and you just smash right through it."
"That's what I do."
"Since when?"
"It's kinda my job in the military. Look for openings. Exploit them ruthlessly. Turns out, it's good practice for women, too. See, in ten years of living next to you, I never once peeped in your window to get a glimpse of anything you didn't want me to see. Because I'm a gentleman. But now I've got the opportunity to ask you to show me, and I'm taking it, because I'm a gentleman who wants to fuck you."