I pushed my laptop off my thighs and lifted my hair off my neck. A welcome breeze swept over my skin, cooling my lust.
“Count me in,” I said. “I don’t have work tonight.”
I didn’t love playing third wheel, but I’d be an idiot to turn down a meal at Monarch. It’d been on my restaurant bucket list forever, and it would be a good distraction from my unsettling Kai fantasies.
I couldn’t wait to tell Romero—about dinner, not Kai. Besides engineering, my brother’s greatest joy in life was food, and he was going to die when— Wait. Romero.
“Oh my God, I totally forgot!” The adrenaline of remembering a forgotten task surged through me, erasing any lingering thoughts about a certain pesky billionaire. I reached forward and pulled my backpack onto my lap. “I promised Rom I’d give this to you guys to try.”
After some rummaging, I triumphantly fished out a high-tech, beautifully ribbed, bright pink dildo.
Two brand-new packaged toys sat at the bottom of my bag, but I liked to show off the goods first, so to speak.
Romero was a senior design engineer at Belladonna, a leading adult toy manufacturer, which was a fancy way of saying he made vibrators and dildos for a living. They relied on testers for early feedback, and somehow, he’d roped me into recruiting my friends for the task.
It wasn’t as weird as it sounded on paper. Romero was a total science geek; if you placed a naked supermodel and the newest design software in front of him, his priority would be mastering the software. To him, there was nothing sexual about the toys. They were simply products that needed perfecting before they hit the market.
That being said, I didn’t test out his designs. Even Romero agreed that would be too creepy, but my friends and acquaintances were fair game.
“No.” Sloane pressed her lips together. “I don’t need another dildo. I have a whole cabinet of those things, and they take up valuable space.”
Like her office, clothing, and pretty much everything else in her life, Sloane’s apartment was an exercise in stark minimalism. Besides the television and, well, us, the only sign of life in her white-on-white living room was the oblivious goldfish swimming in the corner. The previous tenant had left it behind, and Sloane had been threatening to flush the Fish （yes, that was its name） down the toilet for the past two years.
“But this is state of the art,” I argued, shaking the dildo. “You’re one of Romero’s most trusted reviewers!”
Unlike Vivian, who softened her feedback with encouraging words, Sloane specialized in scathing evaluations that dissected each product down to the bone. This was the same woman who wrote multipage critiques of every romantic comedy she watched; her capacity for preempting strangers’
hurt feelings hovered somewhere in the negative thirties. On the flip side, if she said she liked something, you knew she wasn’t bullshitting you.
After more cajoling, threatening, and bribing in the form of a promise to watch every new Hallmark rom-com with her, I convinced Sloane to continue her reign as Belladonna’s most feared and revered tester.
I was still coming down from the high of winning an argument with her when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it.” Vivian was in the bathroom and Sloane was busy scribbling in her notebook—based on how aggressively she was writing, the poor movie was getting eviscerated—so I scrambled off the couch and made my way to the front door.
Thick dark hair, broad shoulders, olive skin. A quick twist of the doorknob revealed Vivian’s husband, looking every inch the billionaire CEO in a midnight-black Hugo Boss shirt and pants.
“Hi!” I said brightly. “You’re early, but that’s okay because the movie just finished. You know, the male lead kind of reminds me of you. Super grumpy with daddy issues and a perpetual frown—until he finds the love of his life, of course.”
Actually, the male lead had been a cinnamon roll, but I liked to poke fun at Dante whenever possible. He was so serious all the time, though his disposition had improved dramatically since he married Vivian.
A flush crawled across his sculpted cheekbones and over the bridge of his nose. At first, I thought I’d annoyed him so much he was having a heart attack right there in the hallway, but then I noticed two things in rapid succession.
One, Dante’s gaze was fixed on my right hand, which still held the prototype toy from Belladonna.
Two, he wasn’t alone.
Kai stood behind him, tie straight and suit neatly pressed, his appearance so perfect it was hard to believe he engaged in a sport as brutal as boxing.
My eyes dropped to his hands, searching for bruised knuckles and bloody cuts, but I only saw crisp white cuffs and the glint of an expensive watch. Not a single wrinkle or piece of lint.
Would he exert the same level of fastidious control in the bedroom, or would he abandon it for something more uninhibited?
Both possibilities sent a heady rush through my veins. My grip instinctively tightened around the toy, and I lifted my gaze in time to see Kai’s attention drift from my face to the fuchsia dildo with the agonizing speed of a slow-motion car crash.
Silence engulfed the hall. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could’ve sworn the dildo vibrated a little despite not being plugged in, like it couldn’t contain its excitement from all the attention.
While Dante looked like he’d swallowed a wasp, Kai’s expression didn’t flicker. I might as well have been holding a piece of fruit or something equally innocuous. Still, heat scorched my cheeks and the back of my neck, making my skin prickle.
“We were testing this,” I said. The guys’ eyes widened, prompting a hasty clarification. “Not on each other. Just…in general. To see how many speeds it has.”
Dante shook his head and rubbed a hand over his face. Meanwhile, the corner of Kai’s mouth twitched, as if he were constraining a smile.
A bubble of laughter cascaded over my shoulder. I dropped my free hand from the doorknob, turned, and glared at Vivian, who’d returned from the bathroom and was watching me flounder with far too much amusement for a supposed best friend.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me I was still holding this,” I said, waving the dildo in the air.
Dante let out a choked noise that landed somewhere between a sputtering car engine and a dying cat.
“Friends don’t let friends answer the door with phallic accessories. Don’t come running to me if your husband keels over from cardiac shock.”
“How is it my fault?” Vivian protested between laughs. She appeared wholly unconcerned by her husband’s imminent demise. “I was in the bathroom. Blame Sloane for not warning you.”
I glanced at my other traitorous friend. She’d moved on from her film critique and was glaring at her phone like it’d personally produced, directed, and starred in her most hated rom-coms.
Interrupting Sloane when she was in a foul mood was like tossing a hapless gazelle in front of an enraged lion. No, thank you. I liked my head right where it was.
“Kai, are you joining us for dinner?” Vivian asked, drawing my attention back to the hall. Her laughter had finally subsided. She moved next to her husband, who wrapped a protective arm around her waist and dropped a soft kiss on the top of her head. A pang of envy wormed its way into my gut before I banished it. “Like I told the girls, we can easily change the reservation.”