Page 142 of Little Sunshine

And curious.

My only serious boyfriend had claimed that men had to orgasm every time they got hard, or their balls could explode. I hadn’t believed it as a sixteen-year-old, and I sure as hell didn’t believe it as a twenty-year-old.

But I was still surprised that Ash was going to sleep without any relief. I’d seen and felt how turned on he’d been. Thick and hard and just as massive as the rest of him.

Thinking of it sent another tremor through me that was part apprehension but mostly arousal.

Ash misread it as a shiver and pulled the blanket higher.

Pulling my lips between my teeth, I barely breathed as I slowly set my hand on his chest near my face.

Then I lowered it to his abs. His many, many, many abs.

It took a few minutes to build the confidence to move again, and even then I didn’t just lower my hand. Nope. As smooth as freaking sandpaper, I feigned an itchy nose and lifted my hand to scratch it. When I set it back down, it landed much lower on his abdomen.

Just a little farther and…

I yelped when Ash’s long fingers wrapped around my wrist, thwarting my progress. His voice was thick and rough. “What exactly are you doing?”

“I, uhh, was just trying to get comfortable,” I lied.

“You wanna touch my dick for comfort, you do it any time. Starting tomorrow.”

“But you made me… and you didn’t…”

Maybe I should finish a sentence.

I didn’t get the chance before Ash spoke, his tone firm and clipped like I’d upset him. “There are gonna be plenty of times when I get you off ’cause I want your scent or taste or just because I can. It’s not quid pro quo.”

“You mean quid pro O,” I muttered.

He chuckled at my bad joke, and his voice was lighter. “Point is, this isn’t transactional. You don’t owe me. You never owe me.”

“I know,” I said even though I didn’t. Not really. In my experience, everyone was out for themselves. I wasn’t used to Ash’s selflessness. But it didn’t matter since that wasn’t the only reason I’d been trying to touch him. A fact I shyly shared. “It wasn’t that I thought I had to. I wanted to.”

“Today was a lot, sunshine. I want you to think it over. Do more research if you need to.”

“All I ever do is think and overthink,” I told him honestly. “And I don’t need to research stuff when I don’t know what applies to you or not. Anything else I need to know, you can teach me because I want to be with you. With all of it. Everything.”

Ash shifted to reach off the bed, and the small light flared brighter. He propped himself up to look down at me. “Be sure you know what you’re agreeing to. Because once you give me you, it’ll take a restraining order to get me away.” Smirking down at me, he shrugged. “And even then…”

I wanted to laugh at his joke, but I couldn’t.

A tiny voice of doubt warned me that the unknown was too dark and scary, like the infinite void of space. And that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up alone and lost in it—or in that timeshare on Mars.

That doubt wasn’t new.

The feeling of rightness that overpowered it was. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt more confident in a decision.

And that certainty came through when I said, “I want you to be my Daddy.”

Chapter 23

Let Someone Else Do It for Once

MILA

There was no more talking.

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