My So-Called Sex Life (How to Date, #1)(80)
Finally, she relents. “Axel! Just do it. Write the two best words, and then show it to me. Now.”
Ha. I knew she’d break first. Acting all blasé, I say, “Fine.”
Then I type The End, and I share the final scene with her.
She dives right in, and if that isn’t the sexiest she’s ever looked, I don’t know what is. Smiling, cackling, rapt. It’s gorgeous, watching her read.
When she reaches the final words, she draws a deep breath, and gasps. Then reaches across the table and kisses me. “We did it,” she says when she breaks the kiss.
We sure did.
It wasn’t easy. We butted heads a few times, disagreed on some moments, and fought ruthlessly over whether Lacey would bang her head on the headboard during a particularly athletic sex scene—I shocked Hazel by saying no, she shocked me by saying yes—but in the end we found our way through. We wrote and rewrote and compromised, and we made each other better together.
Poor Lacey though. She wound up with a goose egg the next day. But hey, that was the price she paid for three orgasms.
After we polish the final scene—translation: Hazel adds a line here or there but finds zero, count ’em, zero grammatical errors—we take off into the chilly New York day.
“So, should we celebrate finishing our book by going to a billionaire’s party tonight?” she asks. Then bumps her elbow with mine. “Confession: I’m going to be taking notes all night long on what his Fifth Avenue penthouse looks like. I’ve only ever written them. I’ve never seen one.”
“Me too. And it better be grander than my imagination. Though I can imagine a lot,” I say.
“I’m still kind of surprised we were invited.”
“Baby, he likes us. We’re the reason he’s having this engagement party.”
She smiles. “Maybe we are.” Then she waggles an eyebrow. “And I get to see you in a suit tonight.”
I roll my eyes. “You do love a man in a suit.”
“Correction—I love you in a suit.”
“How do you know? You’ve never seen me in a suit.”
It’s her turn to roll her eyes. “Some things you just know.”
J. Hudson Bettencourt
I wasn’t supposed to be on the train the day I met Amy Chandler six months ago. But that’s how it goes with so many of life’s moments.
They were never supposed to be on the schedule. Your flight is canceled, your car won’t start, the snow keeps you in a cabin.
At the time, these beats certainly don’t seem like moments. They seem like inconveniences. Annoying flat tires that threaten to ruin your day.
That was how I felt that evening in Nice. I’d been in the French city, meeting with a new green energy company I’d invested in, and I was slated to catch a flight to London. I had a meeting the next day with the JHB executive board, based in London, where I’d lived for the last few years as my holdings expanded in Europe.
But as I checked out of the hotel in Nice, my flight alert flashed on my phone. There was rain in London.
Well, what else was new? That city was always home to a gray storm.
This time, though, there was so much goddamn rain, so much infernal thunder and lightning, that the airport shut down.
All flights were canceled.
But man can’t rely on one mode of transportation, one source of fuel. That’s the foundation my business was built on. I’d simply go to London another way.
I headed to the train station in Nice instead, planning to catch the midnight train to Paris, then transfer to a London railway. But when I walked into the station and stood under the departure board checking the times, my attention strayed to a woman with chestnut hair.
She walked past me, chatting amiably with a group of tourists, perhaps. Three other women wearing Tshirts that said Book Besties. My gaze stayed on the brunette. She was tall, with lush hair cinched back in a ponytail, and the most inviting smile I’d ever seen.
Her smile was warm, real, and also…intriguing.
When the three women excused themselves for the restroom, the brunette headed toward the departure board and craned her neck to check the times.
“I’ve only double-checked the departure twenty times, but I can’t seem to stop,” she said, then shrugged. “You never know when they might switch times.”
“A train line that switches departures capriciously? I might have something to say about that,” I said, and I had a lot to say about it in fact. Efficiency was the cornerstone of my clean energy business.
She turned to me, her brown eyes curious and friendly. “I trust you don’t like capricious train lines?”
“In fact, I forbid them,” I said, and that was the truth, though of course she probably had no idea.
She laughed. “Well, glad you have your priorities straight.”
Then she walked away.
That was that.
She was gone. I had no idea what train she was taking. Would she be on one of my trains to London? To Barcelona? Or one of the many others departing in the next hour, fanning out all over Europe?
What did it matter, though? She was simply a woman I had exchanged a few lines with in front of the departure board.
Except as I waited in the station for my train to leave, I replayed that brief exchange too many goddamn times for my own good. We’d barely talked and yet I couldn’t get her out of my head.