and runs back home. Jules thinks he’ll stay longer.” She stopped at the end of his bed. “The nurse said you just had a massage, but you don’t look very relaxed.”
Man, she was beautiful. There was a Van Morrison song, “Brown-Eyed Girl.” It played in Max’s head whenever Gina smiled at him the way she was smiling now.
“You know what you need?” she asked. He braced himself because he knew that the words about to come out of her mouth could be damn near anything.
“I need a lot of things,” he said evenly. “World peace. A nonviolent society. The extinction of religious fanaticism—”
“A happy ending. You should have asked for one,” Gina cut him off, mischief and laughter in her eyes.
For about a half a second he didn’t get it. And then he did. And he laughed, too. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s on the massage menu here. Besides, the masseur—big guy, name of Pete?—not my type.”
“I’m your type,” she pointed out, and he stopped laughing.
Oh, hell.
And okay. Yeah. Max had had his share of healthy sexual fantasies, starting when he was around ten years old and saw Ann-Margret for the first time, when
Viva Las Vegas
played on channel eleven’s Million Dollar Movie. Then, as now, his fantasy usually involved a well-endowed, unbelievably gorgeous young woman locking the door to the—fill in the blank. Office, classroom, bathroom, conference room, bedroom—and approaching him with a knowing smile, as she stripped down to her unbelievably sexy underwear.
“Hey,” he said as Gina’s skirt hit the floor, but he sounded decidedly less than enthusiastic in his attempt to make her stop. “This isn’t—”
“Shhh,” she admonished, finger to her lips. “Don’t talk.”
Gina, apparently, still shopped at Victoria’s Secret. Today, as it turned out, she was wearing an extremely attractive sheer black bra and panties that were remarkably miniscule and . . . Thong. Yes. God. The late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window made her belly-button ring sparkle and her bare skin glow.
She had such beautiful skin. Max knew for a fact just how soft she would feel beneath his hands, his mouth . . .
“Gina,” he said, but it came out sounding like a sigh.
She smiled as she joined him on the bed, on her knees this time, and she leaned toward him again. This time, however, she didn’t stop.
This time, she kissed him.
First on the mouth, as she worked the bed controls, lowering him down into more of a prone position, as all that skin slid beneath his fingers.
“Gina,” he tried again, but she silenced him with another deep, searingly sweet kiss.
As she kept on kissing him, she pulled back the blankets, unfastened his pajamas, and then . . . She kissed him yet again.
Hoh yeah.
This was where—since his mouth was now free—he was supposed to tell her to stop, to put her clothes back on. They were friends.
Remember how they’d had that discussion—all two sentences of it—while he was in the hospital? He’d said, “I don’t want to mislead you. What happened between us that night—” and she’d cut him off, saying, “I’m here as a friend.”
But his “friend” was now . . .
Oh, man.
“Gina,” he managed again, but couldn’t quite find the air needed to tell her that he loved her dearly, he truly did, but this wasn’t the kind of relationship he wanted from her.
Liar.
In truth he wanted her to live beneath his desk, so she could do exactly what she was doing, six, seven times a day and . . . Gohhhd . . .
Her underwear joined her other clothes on the floor. She’d covered him with a condom that she’d conjured out of nowhere and she straddled him now, the most beautiful, vibrant, magnificent, courageous, smart, funny, exciting woman he’d ever known—naked and gasping with pleasure because he was inside of her.
It was an unbelievable turn on.
She moved slowly on top of him, her eyes closed, face upturned, hair tumbled down around her