Shameless. Tori Carrington

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СКАЧАТЬ tension the mere suggestion of sex between any combination of the three of us is causing.”

      Nina waved for him to sit back down. “Hold on, Kev. Let’s see where he’s going with this.”

      “Got it,” Gauge said, snapping the fingers of his left hand together. The knuckles bore the fading letters L-O-V-E he’d had tattooed on them when he was thirteen. “You don’t sleep with us—”

      Kevin interjected, “Smartest thing you’ve said all night.”

      “But we do arrange for you to sleep with someone….” He drifted off.

      Kevin sat back down as if incapable of doing anything that required any sort of mental concentration at the moment.

      Nina couldn’t seem to drag her gaze from Gauge’s striking face.

      “Someone completely anonymous. No names allowed.”

      Nina twisted her lips. “But how do I know I’ll be attracted to him?”

      “What does it matter? You won’t see him.”

      Kevin clasped his hands together between his knees as if trying to keep from slugging his friend. “What do you mean, she won’t see him? If we arrange for her to go out with someone—”

      “Ah, but that’s where you’re not getting me. I didn’t say anything about her going out with someone, like on a date.” He moved from the ottoman to sit in the chair next to Kevin’s, putting him closer to them both. “This is about sex, can we all agree on that?”

      Silence.

      Nina didn’t know how to respond.

      “About fundamental human urges. Look, we all agree that Nina’s made some bad choices because she has a tendency to go without for too long and then jump in too quickly as a result.”

      “Go without?” Kevin repeated.

      Nina smiled. “No, no. He’s got a point.” She gestured with her hand. “Go on.”

      “So we set up something where you won’t be able to see the guy, but he’ll be able to see you.”

      “What, are you suggesting she be blindfolded?” Kevin asked, looking more and more dangerous. Nina found it interesting that Gauge appeared not to notice his friend’s agitated state. Then again, maybe he did notice. He just didn’t care.

      “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.” Gauge grinned and spread his hands wide as if his idea were the solution to all the world’s problems. “Nina gets the hot, anonymous sex she’s looking for…and we don’t have to put up with some moron boyfriend hanging around for the next six months until she boots him out.”

      No one said anything.

      “And then, maybe, with the whole sex element out of the way, she’ll finally find some guy deserving of her,” Gauge added.

      Kevin got out of his chair and for a second Nina thought he might sucker punch Gauge. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

      He instead turned to reshelf the book he’d been reading.

      “Nina?”

      She realized she’d been watching the fit of Kevin’s jeans as he moved and blinked to look back at Gauge. He grinned at her.

      “Would the guy be either of you?”

      She’d intended the question to be as forthright as his suggestion. Instead it came out as a husky whisper.

      She shivered all over, her nipples growing hard, her panties growing damp.

      She’d never felt so wanton in her life. An idea like this was something more up her grandmother’s alley—at least if you believed what she said when she talked about the old Motown days, and Nina did.

      But now that the proposal was floating out there as a possibility, she found that she’d also never felt more turned on.

      She looked at both of them leisurely. Took in Kevin’s intense, soul-searching gaze. Pondered Gauge’s sexy, suggestive grin.

      “Well?” she asked, a fire igniting deep in her belly. “Would it?”

      Gauge shrugged. “If it did include either one of us, you’d never know, would you?”

      3

      LATER THAT NIGHT, Nina lay back against her iron bedstead in her apartment above the store, staring at the ceiling. Her twenty-pound cat Ernest Hemingway’s furry body curved against her thigh on top of the down comforter, his soft snores breaking the silence.

      But it wasn’t her cat she was mindful of just now. No, the suggestive conversation she’d shared with Kevin and Gauge was what dominated her thoughts to such a degree that she found it impossible to close her eyes.

      Naughty images trailed through her mind one after another. First, there was Gauge holding himself above her, his hair framing his handsome face as he stared into her eyes. Then she blinked and his features were replaced by Kevin’s full mouth as he leaned in to kiss her.

      She caught her breath and groaned, tossing the comforter off and covering Ernie with it. While the downstairs area of the old workspace had been completely updated when the three of them had joined forces three years ago, the two upstairs apartments had been left as is, the radiator heat hard to get exactly right. It was either too cold in her sprawling, two-bedroom place, or way too hot.

      Of course, she recognized that her thoughts might be just as much to blame for her overheated condition.

      She licked her lips and threw her arm over her head, watching as Ernie freed himself from the blankets and twitched his tail at her before turning his back and jumping from the bed. She idly listened as his nails clicked against the areas of the polished wood floor not covered by rugs and then heard him crunching his dry food in the kitchen.

      She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a sleepless night thinking about a man. Correction, two men. Her best friends and business partners.

      And if she had a brain in her head, she’d turn on the television in the corner and let Conan laugh her to sleep, putting a smile on her face that had nothing to do with either Gauge or Kevin or, Lord forbid, both of them at the same time.

      What made secret fantasies special was that they were secret.

      Okay, so, yes, she could admit to herself in the safety of her own bed, she’d had a dream once that had featured the two men in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with friendship or business. It had been last summer and on the heels of a memory that now stood out in stark clarity. The three of them had been at a garden party one of Kevin’s late mother’s friends had thrown. While everyone else gathered around the ice sculptures and buffet tables, they had changed into their suits and taken advantage of the Olympic-size pool nestled in a landscape designed to look like a mountain oasis. They’d been fooling around, splashing each other to break the boring monotony established by the stuffy gathering, then they’d graduated to dunking each other.

      And СКАЧАТЬ