Free Past Midnight by Jasmine Haynes Page B

DOMINIC HAD TOSSED THE KEYS TO THE valet, and when the car arrived, he’d bundled her inside as if she were a porcelain doll.
    Some other woman had hurled those insults at her husband. Some other person had sat speechless while Dominic told a stranger that she loved to masturbate for him. Someone else had let those words turn her inside out with heat and desire, had let Dominic take her on the cold tile countertop, fucked him, kissed him, climaxed, and begged for more. Some other woman had loved every moment.
    She wanted to say it was the champagne. She turned her head on the seat to tell him she was sleepy and drunk and she couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done tonight, but his profile was crystal clear.
    She reached for Dominic, laying cold fingers on his warm arm. He covered her hand with his palm. “That was hot, baby.”
    She absolutely could not deny it. Or that she needed more of it, the mindless sex that kept the rest of her life at bay.
     
     
    WEARING ONLY BRA AND A THONG PANTY THAT OUTLINED HER firm, heart-shaped ass, Erin leaned over the bathroom counter applying her makeup. Already showered and dressed—they’d agreed he’d leave for the exhibition hall early, and she would meet him later—Dominic leaned against the doorjamb watching. After that hot episode in Miterberg’s rented mansion, he’d had the nerve to reach for her in the night. She hadn’t turned him away. She’d let him kiss her again. It wasn’t the sweet melding of lips in the early dawn of attraction and desire, but nor was it the perfunctory swap of tongues in a relationship’s fading twilight. He couldn’t assign a name to it, only acknowledge that she allowed it, just as she had last night in the opulent mansion bathroom. That had to mean something, a step forward.
    She moved from her brows to her lashes, whisking them with a mascara wand. She always worked from the top down, brows, eyes, cheeks, then lips. Why not up, lips first? He’d been present for the process countless times, but he’d never stopped long enough to take it all in. Until Jay morphed from baby to toddler, she’d done her makeup in her panties, like now. When he started running around and hadn’t learned to knock, she’d taken to wearing a robe. At home, she still used the robe, yet here, despite the hotel garment hanging on the door, she wore only her underthings. For the life of him, Dominic couldn’t remember what she’d worn yesterday morning as they were getting ready, or if the change in her had come about during the night.
    “Why are you watching me?” she asked without smudging the stroke of her eyeliner.
    Because last night was kinky and hot, and her reaction to that scene with Winter made him hope they’d passed a threshold. What threshold would they cross if he pushed her into action rather than fantasy and talk? Because really, that’s all last night had been. Fantasy. She’d fucked him, yet that was still part of the fantasy. No one had seen a thing.
    “Would you have done it if I’d asked you to?”
    Her hand jerked, leaving a tiny smear on her eyelid. She hissed and grabbed a cotton swab to wipe it away. “Done what?”
    A rumble of tension snaked through his abdomen as he recognized the signs of shutdown. When you don’t want to answer, pretend you don’t understand the question.
    If he didn’t force the issue here, he’d never get the chance at home. “If I’d told you to masturbate for him, would you have done it?”
    She screwed the brush back into the tube of liner, then smoothed a finger over the eye shadow on her lids. She had her routine, always did it that way. Yet he detected the pulse at her throat, its beat faster than it should have been as she weighed the consequences of a lie. Or the truth.
    Finally, she pulled out her blusher compact and swept the brush over her skin, adding color to her cheeks. “Yes.”
    A rush of adrenaline hit his bloodstream. In one moment, he was hard, cock aching with need. Yet