Big Dick Energy - Cindi Madsen Page 0,41
her pants.
Then again, I was hardly after a full-blown relationship.
Shit. I didn’t want a mirror held up to my life, reflecting all the ways I’d failed the woman at my side. Same way I’d failed my sister and my mom and pretty much every female I’d claimed to care about. I didn’t want to remain as ignorant as Chase, either. “I’m going to do a better job of practicing the chivalry I claim to have, too. No more patting myself on the back for the bare minimum.”
“Well, look at that,” she said with a small smile that struck me in the center of my chest. “That’s twice now we’ve agreed on something.”
One minute I thought we were going to have the type of explosive fights my parents were famous for—not that Penelope and I were a couple, but the chemistry was there—and the next I wanted to kiss the hell out of there.
In between were moments of longing to grab a beer to chat sports and the stretches I questioned her sanity and mine. No matter what reaction she sparked within in me, it turned into the all-encompassing one.
She gnawed at her lower lip, still neon pink despite our full day, and then she sucked it into her mouth. Desire surged, along with the insistence I take over the biting and sucking for her.
“If I’m being one-hundred-percent honest, since I could never get away with slapping Chase, I didn’t totally hate watching you try to put him in his place. Talk about a fragile male ego.” The whirring noise took me a second to register, the divider window between us and the driver already halfway down. Penelope thanked the driver and burst from the car.
I fired a “Thanks, man” in the general direction of the front seat and bailed out after her.
Evidently, she was trying to win some race I wasn’t aware of, and I’d missed the gunshot that told us to go. The fresh air hit me, the jolt adding to the record-scratch sound in my mind. I’d been so caught up in my attraction that it’d taken me too long to put together the missing letters in the crossword puzzle.
“Hey, wait up.” I picked up my pace. “Penelope.” I lunged and snagged her wrist, gently spinning her to face me. Her lips parted as if she were surprised to find me there, despite calling her name. “What happened with Chase Blakely?”
I’d kill him. Forget the saying about not meeting your heroes. I’d bury mine.
“He…” She shrugged, as though we were talking about something as nonchalant as the weather. “It’s not a big deal. Nothing I haven’t dealt with before.”
“Explain,” I said, the word coming out sharp. At the tension that crept through her shoulders, I placed my palms over them and softened my voice. “Please.”
“I met him at the beginning of courting the Pythons for the project. Red flags cropped up like kernels in the microwave. For one, he’s overly handsy, and anytime I pull away, he doesn’t take the hint. Whenever I brush off his advances, indignance flashes through his eyes. That’s why I’m cautiously friendly and a pinch flirty, to hold him at bay and prevent him from feeling snubbed. I can handle myself; I just don’t want to be alone with him.”
“That’s not okay. We need to talk to Scott and—”
“No way. If the Pythons even caught wind of me dissing their golden boy…” She shook her head. “I’d be removed from the account for sure, and I refuse to lose this opportunity over some man-child lashing out over me telling him no. It’s not the first time it’s happened, and it’ll hardly be the last. It’s why I was so harsh to you at the bar the first night we met. That and… Well, something my friends and I were discussing, but I’m not going to go into that.”
Talk about piqued curiosity, but after she’d been so honest and vulnerable with me,
the last thing I was going to do was push. I’d also let what I’d seen as flirty behavior fuel my irritation at her, when she’d been in survival mode. Talk about experiencing what it felt like to stand two inches tall.
Come to think of it, her laugh had sounded hollow, I’d just been too jealous to notice until I replayed it with her lens.
“Promise me, Archer. Not a word. Just erase it—I’ll go to MIB headquarters for a flashy-thingy if I have to.”
While I appreciated the callback, the joke didn’t strike me