"I'm not staring you down…"
"Will you…just, come here."
Dash pulled her in close, and Harper leaned in, finally. With her red curls splayed out on his chest and his arms wrapped around her, he finally felt that she was safe. He didn't know why, but it was easier to talk like this.
"I want to keep seeing you. I want to see you and nobody else. It's crazy because up until yesterday, you couldn't stand me, and I couldn't stand you. But the truth is, I don't want you to date anybody else. And I know what you're like. You have a lot going on. You probably see lots of guys. I don't want to cramp your style. But if we're going to keep doing this, I need to be exclusive. Will you…I mean, are you into that?"
She took a deep breath and asked, "Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?"
He kissed the top of her head. "I'm asking you to be my girlfriend. Yes. I can't believe I'm saying it but here we are."
A thrill spiked through him as her hand traveled across his arm that enfolded her. "I think we were already there in our subconscious, but the sex was just pointing the way."
"My girl is so profound."
Harper snuggled into him. "I like the way that sounds. Yeah. I'm into it. It fits."
"Good."
Dash's wicked fingers traveled down under the water to once again caress the curve of her hips.
"I believe I still owe you something," he murmured, reaching his other hand down under the surface of the water. He nudged her thighs apart and massaged her sex. Harper sucked in a breath. "Yeah, you do."
Finding her clit, Dash worked circles around it with two fingers. Her face turned up toward him, and she moaned into his neck. He watched her face as she came; she looked like a goddess, feeling her power. She had so much power over him. Maybe she always had, and he was just now realizing that fact.
"I don't want to inflate your ego or anything," she said. "But I've never come that many times in one night."
"Well, it was one time last night and then two or three more orgasms after midnight, so…"
"Oh my god, are you mansplaining how clocks work?"
He shook his head. "No. No, I am not. I have stopped talking now."
"Good."
Chapter Ten
Harper
Her pop-song alarm ringtone woke her the same as it did every morning, but today, she had a tall, lean, tasty man in her bed. So today was a new day.
Dash started awake at hearing her ringtone. "What the fuck was that?"
Harper grinned and shrugged. "It starts my morning by making me smile? What's wrong with that?"
She waited for that familiar grouchy face to emerge. His wrinkled forehead, his knit-together brows. He surprised her with a broad smile that spread across his face in a look that was pure sunshine.
The smile changed everything. The Dash she knew was wound so tight he could have been ready to snap at any moment. This new Dash was going to take some getting used to.
"I like seeing your smile first thing in the morning," he said. Dash rolled his warm body over top of her as she lay on her back, grinning up at him.
"I didn't think you were a morning person," she said. "I was going to get up and make you breakfast in bed."
He looked down at her curiously and said, "But you already did."
Before she could follow up and ask for some clarification, Dash's head disappeared under the blanket. "Oh," she said, "I—oh…OK, then."
Nothing shut her up quite like Dash's mouth and the delicious bristle of his beard. When his mouth went south, that statement was at its most true.
That morning, he didn't bother with the buildup. He was ready. One noisy, sloppy deep kiss between her legs wiped out every day she had ever felt numb in her life. The sensation was so much her brain shorted out. Dash was doing to her pussy the same moves he used on her mouth—making out. There was no other phrase for it.
The more he stroked with his tongue inside her cunt, then dragged it flat up to her clit, the more every cell in her body lit up like a Christmas tree.
Some men were happy to oblige eating pussy. Some men enjoyed it. Dash? Fucking loved it. He devoured her noisily, hungrily. He only paused to breathe, and when he did, he would whisper sweet nothings to her pussy. Most of the time, she could not tell what he was saying.
When Harper's climax exploded through her, Dash drank her down throughout her release, and she thought, in her orgasm-drunk haze, she heard him murmur, "There's my girl, squirting for me and only me."
The talking pulled a shattering aftershock out of her.
Dash kept up his soft words of adoration even after she completed, after she was utterly spent.
"That was…"
"Good?"
She nodded. "So good."
She had so much more to say, but that could wait.
Harper looked down at her plate of blueberry pancakes and smiled up at Dash. "I don't know how you managed to whip this up with what I had in the kitchen, but I'm very grateful. And starving."
"Eat, and stop talking."
She ate with gusto, careful not to drip butter or syrup on the shirt she wore because it belonged to Dash.
He noticed her acting extra careful about taking small bites over her plate and dabbing her mouth. "Don't worry about the shirt. I want it to smell like you; it needed to be clean."
"Is me funking up your tee-shirt some kind of mating ritual I don't know about?"
Dash lifted one shoulder and leaned back in Harper's kitchen chair, eyeing her. He'd consumed his stack of pancakes in less than five minutes and then sat back and watched her eat with the same look on his face
