Page 62 of Hot for the Jerk

Oh fuck, now all I could think about was the fact that Jagger called me Elsa, and that I didn’t actually mind the nickname.I even liked it when he called me Rosebush, or a little cactus.Damn him.

Gabrielle made herself comfortable in her favorite chair in my house—an overstuffed, dark-green, velvet thing I bought at a vintage store in Seattle—and Naomi got into a comfy position back on the cream leather couch.“We’re not leaving or letting it go until you tell us justexactlywhat went down in that inn,” Gabrielle said.

Oh, word choice.“What went down …”Fuck.

I must have flinched or done something, because my eldest cousin’s gaze flared.“What did I just say to triggerthatresponse?”she asked.

I glanced at them both, my eyes shifting back and forth like I was at a tennis match.“Tell a soul, and I will murder both of you.Then I’ll bury the bodies under the grapevines, and we’ll have akillercrop that year.”

Gabrielle’s lip twitched, Naomi’s eyes gleamed.

“He … he went down on me.”

They both gasped at the exact same time.

Fucking hell.

“That was it?”Naomi asked, after she found her voice.“You didn’t have sex?”

“We didn’t even kiss,” I added.“Somehow we got on the topic of … well, not somehow.The first night, we got really drunk.Basically, because we both agreed that the only way we could even tolerate each other was to drink ourselves numb.Then we decided to watch a movie on his laptop.But when he turned it on, porn popped up.”

“Men aresoooopredictable,” Naomi murmured.

“Somehow he coaxed out of me my preferred porn.”

Neither of them said anything.

“Which is the angle from the woman’s POV and the guy is going down on her,” I said quickly.

They both nodded, like they agreed.

“Anyway, the next night, we were both sober and hungover, and the conversation made its way back to that being my preferred porn.I let it slip—I would like to add that the man has an uncanny and irritating ability to get you to open up.It’s like he does some kind of hypnosis or something.”

“It’s the beard and the eyes,” Naomi said plainly.“I’d tell him my bank PIN if he smiled at me long enough.”

Gabrielle snorted.

“Anyway,” I rolled my eyes, “I confessed that while it was my favorite porn, I’d never actually had a man do that.”

“Was he shocked?”

“Of course he was.He then went on to say that some men enjoy doing it.That they get pleasure from giving pleasure.I said I didn’t believe it because, well …”

“Yeah, we were all married to similar men.We get it,” Gabrielle said with zero inflection in her voice, almost like she was reading off a teleprompter.It was her way of protecting herself.She’d made herself so numb over the years in the hopes of just forgetting her old life that when any part of it came up in discussion, she disassociated really fast.

“He offered to prove me wrong.”

“No fucking way,” Naomi said, slamming her hand on the couch cushion and lunging forward slightly.

“I, of course, said as much.That I didn’t need him to do that.”

“I bet things got awkward as fuck after that,” Naomi mused.

“Pretty much.”

“But at some point, you caved?Obviously.”

I hung my head and nodded.“Yeah.I couldn’t stop thinking about it.And he was offering.And he’s hot.Ugh …”

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