Trillion(42)

“I know.” While I like the idea of leaving, I couldn’t do that to my employees. And the Westcott name is synonymous with Chicago. Practically royalty. I’d be pissing all over my family’s legacy if I left.

I sit beside her.

“May I?” I point to her feet, which are covered in welts the color of bitten lips.

Sophie nods, and I take her right foot, pressing my thumb along the center of her arched sole. Her skin is baby smooth, delicate and feminine, and her toes are painted a milky white.

She exhales, head tossed back until her hair nearly touches the top of the mattress. The Seattle drizzle earlier tonight dampened her waves until they became swollen and untamed, and as the evening progressed, I couldn’t look at her without picturing her naked body wrapped in sheets, sex hair spilling around her shoulders and a satisfied smile claiming her ripe mouth.

Her lips part, followed by a sweet burst of liquor-scented breath. A pleasured wince covers her pretty face.

I’m certain this is what she’d look like if my tongue were between her thighs right now …

I massage the spaces between her toes and then I work my way to her Achilles tendon before moving higher, to her calf.

“My god. How are you so good at this?” She bites her lip as if stifling a moan, eyes squeezed tight.

My cock swells, straining beneath my boxers. I massage deeper, but not too deep. Just enough to incite another breathy moan.

“All I have to do is watch your face … it tells me where I need to go.” The technique has never steered me wrong in the bedroom. But it works for this, too …

She gives me a sideways glance before trading one foot for the other.

“Thank you for celebrating with me tonight.” It was different commemorating an acquisition with someone for a change. I didn’t hate it.

“How do you normally celebrate?”

“By prepping for my next deal.”

Her eyes widen. “You don’t stop to appreciate it? You don’t take a trip or have a drink or … I don’t know, get laid?”

“Why? Are you offering?” I laugh through my nose. I’m teasing, but it doesn’t hurt to plant the seed. There’s nothing wrong with a little physical release when the moment’s right.

In my twenties, getting laid was all I cared about and there was no shortage of beautiful women clawing down my door, blowing up my phone, throwing themselves in my path—figuratively and otherwise. But after a while, my reckless ways grew unfulfilling and the women were all the same. I tried the dating thing. Raquel was my longest relationship on record, and toward the latter part of our relationship, I’d kept meaning to end it but work obligations were getting in the way so the talk got sidelined until the day I came home early and found her by the pool doing a line of blow off her tennis coach’s six-pack.

“When was the last time you got laid?” she asks.

“Last month.” I don’t remember her name, just that I met her in an exclusive Chicago speakeasy and she wore a red dress that left little to the imagination. Unfortunately it turned out to be false advertising. I might as well have been grinding against a dead fish for an hour—silent, unmoving, wide-eyed. A handful of times I debated whether or not to check her pulse. When it was over, she told me she had a boyfriend, grabbed her things, and got the hell out of there. “What about you?”

“Same,” she says.

“Boyfriend or hook-up?”

“Hook-up. Always a hook-up.” She runs a hand through her mussed-up mane.

“Relationships,” I huff, half-teasing. “Who has time for that?”

Sophie snickers. “Apparently not us.”

If I had a drink in my hand, I’d drink to that. Instead I continue working on her calves, inching higher by the second.

“You look beautiful tonight. I don’t think I told you that.”

“Thank you,” she says without pause. Her lashes flutter as she stares at me the way women do sometimes, mesmerized, starstruck.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say, bored with small talk.

“This game again?”

“It’s not a game. Just trying to know you more. In a couple of months you’ll be my wife, so …”

“I’m allergic to cantaloupe.”

“Don’t insult me with tedious trivia,” I say. “Give me something better than that. What’s your greatest fear? Who was your first love?”

“I fear nothing.” She spreads her arms wide and wears a goofy grin. “And I don’t have one.”

Bullshit.

“As per usual, you’re a terrible liar.”

“I used to be terrified of spiders when I was little,” she says. “But I grew out of that. And fine. I had a first love, but he was a jerk.”

“Aren’t they all …”

“Every last one.” She leans back on the bed, arms behind her neck, and the hem of her skirt rides up her thighs, exposing her silky soft legs.

I lie beside her, watching her, head resting on my hand. “I still don’t understand you.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Either your eyes are lit and you’re slinging sassy one-liners my way or you’re completely shut down, and there’s nothing in between,” I say. “I want to know who you are, Sophie. The real you. Tell me, what makes you tick? What gets you going every morning? And what made you finally agree to marry me?”