I pushed the door open and gasped. It was an enormous room with a vast skylight. Wooden furniture and offcuts of wood were everywhere. In the middle of it was Johnny, dressed only in low-slung jeans, wielding a small hammer over a huge chest of drawers.
He heard me and turned around. I could see the sweat making his muscles glisten and forgot about my intention to leave, asking faintly as I looked around, “This is where you work?”
He put down the hammer. “This is my workshop.”
I walked in and couldn’t help trailing my hand over an exquisitely carved small dresser. I stopped. “What is this?”
Johnny came closer and said gruffly, “It’s a drawing room cabinet. Made out of American black walnut.”
I looked at him. “How long did it take you to make?”
He shrugged. “A few months. It’s for a client. This is what I’m doing, making bespoke furniture. I’ve been lucky enough to be spotted and have gotten a few lucrative commissions. I’m building a clientele, slowly but surely.”
I shook my head. “It’s beautiful.”
Suddenly Johnny was too close, and I remembered last night and where I was. I avoided his eye, feeling a little raw to have seen this, and him working. It felt ridiculously intimate. “I, ah...I’m sorry. I meant to leave last night, but I fell asleep. You should have woken me.”
“I almost did...” His voice was rueful, and I looked up. Some expression I couldn’t read was on his face and it made my heart beat faster.
“But you looked dead to the world. And I needed to do some work anyway.”
That last was said too lightly, and I didn’t believe him for a second. He’d wanted me to go, yet he hadn’t woken me. That sent those conflicting emotions through me again. I stepped back. “I’ll go now.”
But suddenly Johnny reached out and grabbed my arm. “Wait.” He tugged me toward him and any indecipherable expressions were gone and replaced by a much more recognizable one. Desire.
“You’re here now. Seems an awful shame to head back so soon.”
I forced down the sudden urge to run and keep running. My libido was wide-awake and panting. “Does it now?”
He put both hands on my waist now and tugged me into him. “Yes,” he growled softly. “It does.”
And then he bent his head and kissed me until I was straining against his big body, craving him all over again. He took my hand and tugged me back upstairs with him, and when we were naked again and he was poised over me on the bed, something incredibly tender moved through me. In a bid to force it back down I moved so that Johnny was under me and I was straddling him.
His hands came to my hips and I could feel the hard thrust of his erection at my buttocks. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and grabbed it. The silk tie.
I wrapped it around my hands as Johnny had done a few hours ago and pulled it taut. His expression changed from hot to wary and I welcomed it because it seemed to help dilute the sudden intimacy that had cocooned us since I’d found him downstairs.
Smiling sweetly I said, “I think it’s about time you had a taste of your own medicine.”
Johnny scowled. I could see the reluctance on his face and could well imagine that he preferred to be in control at all times. Right then I wanted to see that control slip. Properly slip.
I yanked the tie between my hands. “Whaddya say, Ryan? Are you too chickenshit to let a little bitty girl tie you up?”
He just smiled then, and it was wicked. “Bring it on, Sullivan.” And like the sexiest sacrificial lamb in existence, he lifted his hands over his head and curled his fingers around the wooden slats. I don’t know how I stopped myself from coming there and then.
* * *
“Okay, Sullivan, take me somewhere I’ve never been,” Johnny said a couple of hours later.
I had to force my gaze up from Johnny’s mouth to his eyes. I still felt a little raw after that last session in the bedroom. His jaw was clean shaven. He’d let me shave it after our shower, and by the time I’d finished there had been more shaving cream on us than on his face or in the sink, which had meant taking another shower and inevitably more...
We’d just had a late breakfast in an achingly hip Williamsburg diner and had walked back to his apartment. We’d agreed to take a sightseeing tour en route to work. I’d tried to argue that Johnny didn’t have to come back to work at the bar but he’d quelled me with one dark blue look.
I wrinkled up my nose to think for a second and then said, “Have you been to the High Line yet?”
He frowned. “The high what?”
“It’s an old disused railway line that runs above the ground on the west side for a few blocks, around the Meatpacking District. They’ve turned it into a city park.”