As the elevator shoots us up to my floor, since I booked a room for the night, I set my hand on his arm. “I just want you to know, as we embark on plus-oneing with the best man, that I will behave like your friend as we planned. There will be no deliberate or even accidental taking of dick pics, and no deliberate or even accidental asking for them. And I would never attempt to sell them.”
He wipes a hand across his forehead in a whew gesture.
“Because I live by the belief that friends shouldn’t ask friends for dick pics. And they shouldn’t take them either,” I say, raising my finger to make a point.
He laughs. “I do believe I’ve seen that on a bumper sticker somewhere. Along with Friends don’t ask friends to bang and Friends don’t ask friends for boob shots,” he says as the elevator stops at my floor. We step out, and as we walk down the hall, he drapes an arm around me, pals-style. “Also, told you I’d find out if you said ‘dick.’ I’m pretty confident I can get you to say ‘fuck’ now.”
I fling my hand across my mouth, Bette-Boop-style, playing it up. “Oops! Did I say . . .” I take my time, making him wait for it, before I finish with “Dick?”
He licks his lips and growls sexily. “Better than ‘eggplant.’ Soon you’ll be saying ‘cock.’”
I have nothing against cock.
Hell, I have nothing at all against cocks.
Someday I’d like to enjoy a cock against me.
But since I don’t say those words in the boardroom, and since I haven’t had the chance to say them in the bedroom, how it feels on my tongue is truly virgin territory.
“You never know,” I say with a flirty shrug. “For now, be happy I said ‘dick,’ since it’s way better than ‘wiener pic.’”
“How about ‘shaft shot’?”
“Oh, that’s good. But what about . . . ‘member pic’?”
He taps his chin, murmuring his approval. “I like that because it’s so euphemistic, the perfect amount of innuendo.”
“‘Member pic’ it is,” I declare, banging an imaginary gavel.
“You can accidentally ask me to show you a member pic anytime,” he says with a laugh, then the laughter fades as I dip my hand into my clutch purse, fishing out the key card when we reach my door.
He meets my gaze. His irises are rich with possibilities. “You know, if this were Plus-Oneing with the Best Man, this would be the scene where he accidentally shows her a member pic, they double over in laughter, she stumbles forward, and he catches her,” he says.
The movie reel of that moment unspools before my eyes.
And I like it.
I like it a lot.
Heat flares through me, a match striking. “I wonder what that would look like. The stumbling part.”
“And the catching part,” he adds.
“And whatever comes next,” I say in a softer voice.
Like we’re both tempting fate.
Testing possibilities.
“In a plus-one situation, it’s important to know those things,” he says, his voice husky, a bare scrape of want and wishes.
“I’d definitely like to know,” I say, taking my time with each word.
His blue eyes blaze. The vein in his neck pulses. His lips part, and he stares hungrily at mine. “I imagine after she stumbles, there’s an accidental kiss.”
Those words.
Accidental kiss.
They ignite a riot in my chest. They send flurries of sparks across my skin. They light up my insides.
My heart beats like a wild drum. “I wonder what that looks like.”
He lifts a brow, his voice all smoky. “Or feels like.”
“A lot like a real kiss?” I ask, my stomach flipping.
There’s a charge between us. Ions and atoms are self-replicating, multiplying at an exponential rate, and that electricity tugs me closer to him. “But maybe we should just test it out to be sure. After all, we tested the accidental butt squeeze,” I say.
For a few seconds, I wonder who this bold woman is inside me. Who this woman is who’s trying to have a kiss with this man. Is it the champagne? Is it him? Is it me? And most of all, will I regret this in the morning? But I don’t regret the dancing, I don’t regret the talking, and I definitely don’t regret the butt squeeze. That was not at all accidental, but totally deliberate.
And because I don’t really believe in accidents—I believe in doing things on purpose—I decide to do just that.
If we’ve made it through this night so far as buddies who flirt, as buddies who squeeze, as buddies who tease and toy, then surely we can weather a kiss.
Taking a step, I pretend to stumble.
Crosby catches me, steadying me. He runs his hands down my arms, brushes my hair off my shoulder, and then presses the sexiest, most tender kiss to the hollow of my throat, murmuring, “You smell so good. All night long. You’ve been in my senses.”
My eyes float closed, and my body screams, Touch me.
I whisper, “You’re definitely in mine.”
His lips travel softly along my neck, closer to my jaw, brushing there and making me shiver. He cups my cheek. “This is what an accidental kiss looks like in the movies,” he says.
Then he sweeps his lips across mine.
I melt.
We’re talking tingles everywhere.
Along my arms, down my chest, between my legs.
Tingles of desire and longing as he kisses me in a kiss to end all kisses.
It’s a kiss that lights up the sky. A kiss that makes you want to write down every detail, record every second, imprint it on your mind for all posterity, so you can recall later on what it felt like to be kissed like this.
It feels like how kissing was meant to be.
A delicious, decadent good-night kiss.
His lips brush mine gently at first, a whisper of a kiss. His breath is soft, a needy exhale, like he’s wanted this all night.
And my God, so have I.
I’ve been craving it while denying it, but I don’t want to deny anything now.
Not the tender sweep of his lips, not the
