“Yes,” she promised, and she would. This was her job; this was what she lived for. Okay, the perks were nice, but fixing the city? That was even nicer. Tomorrow, Cleo would talk to the mayor’s secretary. It’d be a start.
“Then we toast,” he said, pulling out a bottle of champagne from behind the counter and pouring two flutes of bubbling, fizzing champagne that hurt just to look at it. “It’s my brother’s best. If you don’t tell him, I’ll replace it before he notices it.”
She lifted her glass, took the obligatory inhale, but it was him that kept drawing her senses. Champagne was for sissies.
Sean O’Sullivan was like a cauldron of steamy magic, calling her name. The intense heat warming her skin, the strong emotions tickling her nose and the taste…she couldn’t imagine the taste, but her mouth was watering for a taste.
“You’re being very nice about helping me out,” he told her, sounding disgustingly surprised.
Cleo sighed. “I should have known you’d be a chauvinist.”
The dark brows rose. “I thought I was giving you a compliment.”
“If there was no surprise in your voice, it’d be a compliment. With that tone, it’s a backhanded one at best. If I yell at people, if I make someone do their job, if I put huge demands on people, I’m, well…you know the word. It’s not my favorite. Put a man in my shoes, with my mouth, and he’d be a hero.”
“I read the article about you. Fascinating. The Wicked Witch of Murray Street. Is that why you got the nickname?”
It wasn’t a story that she told often, it definitely wasn’t the story she’d told the reporter, but she was tired, and she liked the way Sean’s eyes focused on her with such intensity, as if she was the only woman who existed. “Right out of college, I got a job in the city’s public housing office. It’s a total zoo there. When I started, I was a complete greenhorn. I said please and thank-you and told people how great they were doing. Management 101. Nothing ever got done, and my performance reviews sucked eggs. Finally, after eighteen months, one of my superiors—a woman—took me aside and told me that this was New York, not Buckingham Palace, and I needed to grow a pair and that people were going to walk all over me if I kept acting nice. So I stopped, and you know what? She was right. I yelled, I got problems solved. I perfected my snarl, and people did things outside the job description for the first time in their careers. I embraced my inner dictator, and lo and behold, I got noticed. Why do you think I’m the only female Deputy Mayor on his staff?”
“I heard he likes the ladies,” he remarked casually, those intense eyes focused on her mouth.
Quickly Cleo downed her champagne, feeling the buzz, but not from the alcohol. “Is that your not so subtle way of asking if I’m sleeping with him?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“I bet he’s disappointed,” he murmured, piercing eyes full of questions.
“I make him look good, he deals with the disappointment.”
“So is there somebody?” he asked, refilling her glass.
“Is there somebody I’m sleeping with?” she clarified, wondering if that would deter him. She didn’t think so. He looked like a man with one driving goal.
Her.
“Sleeping, not sleeping, dating, involved with, living with, etc. Any of the above.”
“There’s no one,” she told him, because she didn’t have space in her life for anyone.
“Good. Then who’s Mark?”
Cleo felt something warm her cheeks. Some people referred to it as ‘curl up and die’ embarrassment. There were things she would confess, but a ludicrous sexual fantasy where she was the ruler of the world was not one of them. “He’s nobody.”
“You can tell me,” Sean coaxed, his voice dripping with innuendo, like a man who knew she had sexual fantasies and wanted to hear them all—in explicit, step-by-step, nerve-shattering detail.
No.
“What if there is another man?” she shot back, deciding his ego was entirely too big.
He shrugged. “It’s a challenge. But not impossible.”
“You think you’re that good?” She arched a brow in what she hoped was patent disbelief, rather than hopeful enthusiasm.
“See, that’s a trap that a lot of people fall into. They think there’s some silver bullet to sex. But the truth is that every woman is unique and most men are too lazy to discover that all-important fact. Every woman has that one place on her skin that aches to be touched, and it’s a man’s job to find it. The one way of kissing her that makes her mouth hum. That one thing that she’s dying to do, but would never confess to anyone. Everything comes down to that moment when her eyes get hot and wild, and she’s not seeing anyone else but you.”
“And you know all that about me?” she asked, both terrified and aroused, her breath quickening with each slow and seductive word.
“Not yet,” he said, and he took her right hand, turned it over, and stroked his index finger over her palm. “A woman’s body is like a map. You start at one place. Then another. Then another and eventually you discover what she wants.”
Cleo struggled to breathe. That sounded like a helluva lot longer than forty-five minutes.
Discreetly she sneaked a look at her watch before she remembered. She didn’t have a lot longer than thirty minutes. She didn’t even have a little longer. All she had was what she had, and she knew that thirty minutes was never going to cut it.
He wasn’t the kind of man who did quickies, she recalled, cutting off the disappointment before it could start.
Time to leave. Time to cut her losses and scram. She kept telling herself that, but instead she sat, foolishly glued to the bar stool. Her hand was clutching his, as she fell into the dark, dangerous eyes.
“I have to leave,” she said, her voice weak with what sounded like longing.
Before she could move, before she could leave, before she could come to her senses, he had pulled her into his lap. His mouth came down on hers, and longing started in earnest.
Until now, Cleo had never been a fan of kissing. When your schedule was tight, foreplay was a waste of time, but Sean O’Sullivan’s kiss wasn’t foreplay. This was pure, electric sex. Mouth sex.
Her wayward hands crept up his chest, not wasting the time to explore. Instead, she locked him to her, fusing one powerful male chest to her two aching female breasts. Cleo’s world fell away, focusing on the feel of man-body surrounding her. A man’s mouth making love to her.
This was definite longing.
Hard thighs cradled her, deliciously hard thighs, but that wasn’t the best part. The best part was burning thick, throbbingly stiff against her rear, reminding her that no matter how she yelled, no matter how she swore, she was no man. At this exact moment, she’d never been happier of that fact in her life.
His hand gripped her jaw, his tongue stroking inside her mouth, so seductive, so coaxing, and she felt her mouth hum with pleasure, and her hips matched the rhythm of his tongue. Perfect, perfect rhythm. Cleo was hypnotized by the rhythm, caught up in a non-orgasmic orgasm of bliss.
A woman could get used to this bliss. A woman could turn all soft and yielding from all this bliss.
The rhythm had a sound, she could hear it in her head. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The sound stopped.
The bliss stopped.
Cleo raised her head, stared at the ticking clock on the wall and