Page 7 of The Hardest Hit

“Not that you’re counting.”

“It’s hard not to, when—” She stopped herself. “Never mind.”

He was watching her with a bemused smile on his face. “Was cheater so great?”

She stared at him, with his penetrating, almost blue, mostly gray eyes and the lips that she could imagine kissing her all over and…oh, fuck it. He’d already seen her puke and he was still talking to her, so why not?

“Cheater was not so great, except in one department. He asked me to marry him, I said yes, we had sex, and the next day I found out that he’d been sleeping with Tara Barnett the naturopathic ‘doctor’ for six months and I haven’t had an orgasm since.”

He choked on a sip of wine. “What?” he asked, wiping wine off his chin.

“I think I’m broken.”

“No,” he said firmly.

“I have had three boyfriends since Clark and I broke up and… nothing. I ended up faking it because I was bored with having someone hop up and down on top of me like a pygmy goat in heat.”

He paused with the glass halfway to his lips. “Pygmy goat?”

“There’s a surprising amount of bouncing. Anyway, it’s hard not to count the time past with that as a marker. Like I said, I think I’m broken.”

“No,” he said again.

“Oh, really? You know so much?” Olivia was annoyed. He didn’t get to argue about her life. It washerlife. She planted her hands on her hips and stood in front of him.

“About that? Yes.” He looked annoyingly confident and he hadn’t moved from the doorway. He just leaned there, a glass of wine dangling from one hand a smug smile on his face.

“You just met me.”

“I’m still right.”

“Fine.” She glared at him, assessing how far she was willing to push things. She had promised herself when she moved that she wouldn’t get tied up in second-guessing what she wanted. And she was pretty sure that Evan was what she wanted. “Care to put your money where your mouth is?”

“Anytime, anywhere,” he said.

There was silence in the room.

“Oh,” said Olivia. She blinked up at him. She hadn’t expected him to say yes. She actually didn’t have any experience with first date sex and she wasn’t sure what the rules were. Polite clarification was probably in order. “Um. I was serious. Were you serious?”

His smile broadened to a grin. “Yes.”

“Oh.” That hadn’t helped any. “Um. I don’t know what to do next.”

He finished his glass in one long swallow and set the glass down on the bookshelf next to the door. “Come on.” He grabbed her by the hand and tugged her down the hall to his bedroom, where she’d left her costume on a chair.

“I once met a woman on a layover in Tokyo,” he said. “She was a professional, if you know what I mean. And she said that most women have a hard time coming because they can’t stop thinking about the next item on their to-do list. They’re too busy taking care of other people and they don’t take the time to relax.”

He reached down and worked his t-shirt off of her. “You’re going to relax me into an orgasm?” she asked skeptically as the shirt cleared her head.

“Yes,” he said, pushing his sweats off her hips. They dropped to the floor with a soft thump of heavy fleece, leaving her standing in her bra and panties. She thought that probably ought to make her embarrassed, but it was her good bra, and from the way he was eyeing her cleavage, he thought it was pretty good too, so it was probably fine. He stripped out of his shirt and then went back to the door, dimmed the lights, and adjusted the heat upward.

“I’m not sure that’s pertinent data,” she said. “What would a hooker know about making women happy?”

“Well, that was the interesting part,” he said. “She only worked with women.”

“That is a more relevant sampling,” she agreed.

He grinned and reached around to unsnap her bra. His hands caressed her skin for just a second, but she tingled where he touched her.