Run To You

the restaurant and said just loud enough for him to hear, “All over.”
    Slowly he straightened his head. “Oral sex?”
    “Yes.”
    He sat still for several seconds before he resumed eating. “Oral sex is still sex.”
    She shrugged. “It’s not intercourse.”
    “Someone could argue that a man’s mouth between your legs is more intimate.”
    Her eyes widened and she felt a tight knot pull low in her abdomen. “Maybe.” She resisted the urge to look around again. “I don’t know. All I do know is that it’s mine to give a man, and I want that man to be someone I love and who loves me, too.”
    A crooked smile tugged at one corner of his lips. “Love and marriage?”
    “Yes.”
    “How long did you end up dating those three and a half boyfriends?”
    “Not all that long.” If he wasn’t embarrassed by the turn in conversation, neither was she. Of course, he always had the excuse that he was drunk and she wasn’t. “Men like to get but don’t like to return the favor. If you know what I mean.”
    He paused long enough in his eating to ask, “Says who?”
    “Me.” She reached for glass of water and took a drink. “Men are more eager at get than give.” She set the glass back on the table and brushed the red lipstick near the rim.
    “You’ve obviously been with the wrong men,” Beau said as he watched her thumb wipe the lip print.
    “One of my boyfriends was okay at it.”
    “Okay?” He glanced up and his eyes looked a deeper gray than before. “A man can be okay at basketball or matching his pants and shirts. He should never be ‘okay’ at oral sex. Sex is pretty much our most important job. It’s the one thing we have to nail—so to speak—so we get invited back for more. It’s pretty much the reason we take a shower and brush our hair.”
    She fought the urge to squirm in her seat, but the hot little knot in her stomach slid lower. While she was getting all hot and tingly, he didn’t appear all that affected by their conversation. He actually picked up the pace and ate faster. God, did he go at sex like he did mealtime? All intense and ravenous? “Well, ah . . .” And why did she find it so hot, and why was she thinking of sex with Beau at all? Definitely not a good idea. “That hasn’t been my experience.”
    “Then you’ve been with boys not men. I like everything about women. The smell of a woman’s neck and hair and where you all put perfume on your wrists. I like the weight of a woman’s breasts in my hands and the softness of her skin against mine. I like a woman’s moan in my ears.” He shoved the last bite of his steak into his mouth, then lifted one hip and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “I love a pair of warm thighs and the taste of a woman in my mouth. Especially if the woman is as into it as I am.” He stood and threw a hundred-dollar bill on the table. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I got a date with a cold shower or the porn channel. I haven’t decided which. Maybe both.”

Chapter Nine
    B eau took off his beige ball cap and reached for a discarded T-shirt on the downed cypress tree. The New Orleans temperature hung at eighty-five while the humidity had dropped from that morning’s high of ninety percent to a livable sixty-four. Beau wiped sweat and sawdust from his face and the back of his neck. “I should have known this was your work proposition,” he said to the man with the chain saw.
    Gunnery Sergeant Kasper Pennington laughed and cut the small engine. He set the chain saw on the cypress stump and reached inside a cooler. “You probably wouldn’t have come.” He grabbed two bottles of ice-cold water and tossed one to Beau.
    Beau caught it mid-air and unscrewed the top. His friend and fellow HOG was likely right. For the past few years, he’d been too busy building his business to take time and hang out with buddies. Being with Kasper reminded him that he needed to make the time. Even if it was just cutting down trees. “I finally got to see this house of yours,” he said before he raised the bottle to his lips and guzzled half. Beau had logged a lot of hours tipping back whiskey or holed up in a shelled-out building waiting for action, with nothing to do but listen to Kasper go on about home. The two-hundred-year-old plantation house that had been in Kasper’s family since before the Civil War. The place had been one of the South’s leading sugar producers, but now the big home sat on five acres of mostly overgrown cypress