One Night Only: An After Dark Standalone in The Extravagant Series by Lauren Blakely

Author:Lauren Blakely [Blakely, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Lauren Blakely After Dark
Published: 2020-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

By the end of the second week post epic sex, the longing starts to normalize. But only in the sense that wanting Callum is like breathing, and somehow the wanting becomes a part of the fabric of my life. When I talk to Callum as he escorts me to dinners, to events, and to a gala fundraiser I’m hosting for the children’s hospital, I sometimes imagine he’s not only the man watching my back, but the man by my side.

I pretend that people whisper about us. Oh, that’s Ivy Carmichael with that gorgeous man who only has eyes for her.

I crave those whispers. Because they’d mean he was mine. That we were more.

When he takes me home, I hope he’ll ask again to come inside.

He never does.

After the third week, I stop pretending. But I don’t stop thinking of him when I’m alone in bed at night. I want to, but I can’t. He invades all my midnight thoughts.

Trouble is, I have to hold all those thoughts at bay when I see him. We are a rubber band that snaps back to bodyguard-client, as if we never engaged in any other kind of relationship.

At the end of a long day in the fourth week, he escorts me to my suite. I slide off my pumps in the elevator, sighing with relief.

Exhaustion gets the better of me.

“Getting a little risqué, aren’t you?” he asks, and that—that teasing again—feels good. I’ve missed it. So damn much.

I laugh. “Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

“True. Though if memory serves—”

He stops himself. But I know where he’s going. “I didn’t take them off that night,” I say, finishing for him.

He draws a sharp breath, taking a beat, like he’s considering whether to speak at all. When he does, his voice is low, controlled. “No, you left your shoes on,” he says, as if it costs him everything to keep his tone neutral. But it’s hardly neutral. I can hear the lust in it. Thick and heavy.

I want to revel in it. Wrap myself in it. But he needs to make the move. He needs to take the step toward me.

We reach my floor and walk down the hall, my shoes in my hand. The door seems to loom larger, like a tantalizing invitation into another world.

Into a daring, dangerous world pulsing with nighttime desires.

A world I should avoid.

A world I can’t reconcile with my days.

Just like I don’t know how to exist with wanting a man I see every day but can’t have.

When I reach my door, I turn to Callum, my heart pounding, my chest aching.

“Callum,” I say, desperate to add more, to say, Take me to bed tonight.

“Ivy.” It comes out raspy, needy.

My fingers twitch. My body aches. I want him to jerk me against him, slam his pelvis to mine, drag his hands through my hair. I want him to toss me on the bed, flip me onto all fours, pound into me, come on me.

Then hold me all night.

I draw a breath, wishing it would erase all the conflicting images.

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