I took a seat on the opposite arm of the sofa. “Not unless you’ve got a personality transplant scheduled.” Laurent turned his head to give me a hard look, my response to meet it with a grin. “Look, whatever else you might feel about it, it’s a compliment. I’m basically saying you’re so attractive that even I’m not immune to it.”
“U-huh.” Laurent went silent for a moment. “And what are you expecting me to say to that?” Before I could answer, he asked another question. “And what do you think is going to happen now?”
“I thought… I hoped…” Shit! Why was this so hard? I’d already made the decision when I’d kissed him. All I had to do was verbalize it. “I thought you might want to explore it with me.”
Laurent’s laugh this time was more surprise than scorn. “Explore it?”
“Why not?”
“You want to experiment with me?”
“I guess so.”
“I should tell you what you can do with that idea.”
Mimicking Laurent’s earlier move, I slid off the arm and twisted to face him. “Why? You’re single. I’m single. You’re attracted to me.” I was ready for Laurent’s snort this time. “That wasn’t a baguette down your trousers when I kissed you.”
Laurent rolled his eyes. “It’s been a while. If a dog licked me, I’d probably respond.”
I bit my lip to stop myself from laughing at the rather strange comment. “If you’re getting aroused by dogs, it’s well past the time you got some action.”
Laurent’s gaze slid over me so slowly and so thoroughly that I forgot how to breathe. “And that’s what you’re offering, is it? Some action?”
“If you think you can handle me.”
Laurent shook his head. “How do you do that?”
“How do I do what?”
“Manage to sound so arrogant about something you know nothing about.”
“I’ve had sex,” I argued. “Plenty of times. It can’t be that different.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.” Despite my words, my pulse throbbed in my temples, and my palms were sweaty.
“So, if I asked you to get on your knees right now, you’d do that, would you? You wouldn’t balk at it?”
The throbbing of my pulse became a crescendo. The challenge in Laurent’s eyes said I wouldn’t, that he was only suggesting it to make me run for the door. He slid down further on the sofa, parting his thighs to make a space between them. His fingers rested just above his groin, tapping out an irregular rhythm to bring attention to the area. I tried to swallow, but found myself lacking saliva.
“It’s just sex,” Laurent mocked. “Just a blow job. Oh, wait. You were probably expecting me to play the female role. Is that right? It’s one thing to get a blow job. It’s quite another to give one.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to play the female role.” There was no lie there. But mainly because I hadn’t gotten as far as thinking about it. It’d only been a few hours since I’d confronted my feelings, and I was operating solely on instinct and bravado. A bravado that was starting to feel wafer thin when confronted by Laurent’s ability to meet any situation head on.
A hundred things tumbled through my head in the silence that followed. None of them fully formed enough to be classed as thoughts, and as a result, none of them reaching any sort of worthwhile conclusion.
Laurent laughed. “Yeah, I thought so.”
The thunk of my knees on the floor as I slid off the sofa sounded absurdly loud to my ears, the carpet doing little to muffle it. Laurent’s laughter died in his throat. And for the first time since I’d met him, he looked uncertain as I knee-walked my way toward him. It was that uncertainty that fed me, that made me keep going when doubts screeched in my head.
If I’d imagined where this might go, I would have chosen a far more gradual build-up, but Laurent was right to call my bluff. If I couldn’t handle what it entailed, then I had no right to be dipping my toe in this world.
His thighs felt firm and muscled as I grabbed onto them to make my way between them. His thighs were muscular. I knewthat from the shorts he’d worn to go climbing. He’d gotten changed back into jeans after his shower, the denim warm and soft beneath my palms. I slid my hands higher, almost into the V of his crotch.
“Mac…?” The way he’d said my name transmitted a lot of Laurent’s thoughts and emotions. Wariness, disbelief, a warning. Overriding them all, though, was arousal.
“Shhh,” I whispered. “I need to concentrate.” It surprised me how steady my fingers were as I undid the top button of Laurent’s jeans and pulled the zipper down to reveal the white of his briefs beneath. His cock, already straining at the fabric, had me smiling. Yeah, he was into this.
