Arielle trailed behind Mitchell to the waiting limo, and she steeled herself to keep her hands off him during the two-hour ride that skirted the fog-shrouded waters of Monterey Bay.
“Sorry about the long ride,” Mitchell said as they drove, glancing at her as he thumbed texts into his phone with one hand while his other wrapped around her fingers on the seat between them. “I had planned to have business meetings in San Francisco tonight and tomorrow evening.”
“So, you’re busy tonight?” Arielle asked, keeping her voice light and not revealing the disappointment that dropped from her heart to her stomach.
Mitchell stared at his phone. “I’m canceling them.”
He was? “Oh, you don’t have to.”
He sneaked another peek at her before looking back at his phone. “It’s better this way.”
Oh, Arielle knew why. “You must be exhausted. You got, what, a few hours of sleep last night before you had to drive to Boston to catch the plane? Did you sleep on the plane at all?”
“Three hours last night,” he answered, “and not much on the plane. But I’ll be fine. It’s fine. You?”
“I was up most of the night hitting refresh on the airline websites, trying to find a flight and kicking myself for not just jumping in the car and starting to drive when the flight was canceled yesterday afternoon. It’s at least twelve hours, though, by the time you stop for gas and stuff. Plus, it’s through LA, so there’s always traffic there. And I would’ve hit rush-hour traffic trying to get out of Phoenix.”
Mitchell scoffed, “Right. I wouldn’t have wanted you to drive that alone.”
“It’s a long way for a single driver.”
He dropped his phone in his computer bag on the floor. “There. Done. I moved them all to Monday afternoon.”
“Okay. Cool.” She looked out her window at the fog-shrouded ocean.
The solid divider between them and the driver slowly ascended, encapsulating them in the back seat.
Arielle pointed at it. “Are you doing that?”
He shrugged. “Just in case you wanted to sleep. You said you were tired.”
“Are you tired?” she asked him.
“I’m okay. I’ll probably wait to rest until we get to the hotel. If you want to nap a bit, I have a book with me.”
Arielle unclicked her seatbelt, gathered handfuls of her white gauze dress dampened from the fog, and crawled across the seat to straddle Mitchell’s thighs.
He leaned his head on the back of the seat, and he slid his hands up her thighs to her hips. A slow smile stretched one corner of this mouth.
Arielle whispered, “I don’t think we were convincing today at the photoshoot.”
“Right,” Mitchell agreed. His smile was small, but it filled his eyes.
“We should probably practice,” she said, her breath light and fluttering in her lungs.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, running one hand up her arm to the back of her head and drawing her down to his lips.
The kiss started slow and light, caresses of his mouth as his hands roamed her thighs splayed over him. Arielle breathed him in, the soft scent of his cologne puffing from his collar at the end of the day. His hands stroked her hips to her waist and up her back, massaging her, until the languid kiss enveloped her mind and the rest of the world fell away.
His mouth under hers, his tongue stroking hers, and his hands caressing her skin enthralled her. The mountains and sea flying outside the car and the engine humming under her knees on the leather seat faded to nothing.
His hands were in her hair, caressing her neck and scalp, and his thumbs ran over the edges of her ears. She fell against his chest, kissing down his neck to his collar, and he yanked at his tie to loosen it and unfastened his top button to bare another inch to her lips. His cologne trickling from his skin was woodsy and herbal, a balm that soothed the harried last few months away.
Mitchell grasped her waist and lifted her to run his lips down her neck. Arielle arched in his hands, the friction of his lips shivering through her skin. Her body ached for him, a desperation to open herself to him and feel the friction of him inside her. She wanted more, and she wanted it now.
She reached down beside his hip and unlatched his seat belt, letting it retract.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and squeezed her against him, opening his mouth under hers and then grasping her hair near the back of her neck to pull her head back and caress her neck with his mouth again. His lips dipped lower, first to her collarbones and then, as he pulled her back to sit back on her feet and rest her head against the car’s thick divider, to the tops of her breasts.
His lips and breath feathered over her chest, dipping lower every time she gasped for air. She held his broad shoulders and ran her hand up the back of his neck, the velvet of his hair tickling her palm. His mouth skirted the low neckline of her dress as he cradled her breasts in his hands.
When he brushed his thumb over the thin fabric covering the tight peak of her nipple, sensation shot through her, and her body arched, seeking more.
“Say yes,” he whispered against her skin.
“Yes,” she gasped, leaning back as far as she could and holding onto her own ankles in a backbend, trying to give him space.
Mitchell dragged the elastic neckline of her dress down and shoved her bra out of the way to engulf her boob with his mouth, warmth and wetness on her, and then suction pulling at her skin. He circled her nipple with his tongue in his mouth, and the world whirled when she rolled her head on the divider. He feasted on her, sucking and laving until she was squirming on his lap.
Under her skirt draped over them, her panties pressed the hard ridge in his pants. The tension in her lower belly tightened when she moved, and Mitchell growled against her skin.
Arielle pulled her head up, the car swimming in her vision as she tried to see the ocean and cliffs rushing by outside. She reached between them, feeling for his belt buckle. Her fingertips found the cold metal, and she threaded the leather strap through.
Mitchell grabbed her hands, whirled her on the seat, and ended up between her legs with Arielle on her back. The leather cooled her back through her thin dress.
He yanked her dress up over her boob. “No,” he told her, swatting her hand away from his belt. “My first time with you isn’t going to be a tawdry screw in the back of a car, and it’s not going to be when we’re both so exhausted that we’re practically hallucinating.” His kisses became brushes on her lips. “I always do this right. I won’t make this something sordid, especially with you.”
His kisses slowed, and Arielle let him unwind themselves from each other’s arms until they sat in their places, seatbelted in, and holding hands across the center of the seat.
They were both still turned toward each other, though, and Arielle didn’t want to look away from the clear green of his eyes as he talked to her gently about something her brain didn’t even register.
The car arrived at the Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco at Embarcadero, and the chauffeur held Arielle’s door. He didn’t make eye contact, and she hurriedly looked at the cement under her feet.
Mitchell held the hotel door open for Arielle, almost bowing a fraction of an angle from his waist. “Allow me.”
At the reservation desk, the hotel clerk was very apologetic. “We have the reservation for the Presidential Suite, bay view, but I don’t see another reservation under your name.”
“There has to be,” Mitchell said, the skin between his eyebrows creasing. “We always have two rooms reserved.” He turned to Arielle. “We always have two reservations, right?”
“Yes,” Arielle piped up, doing her best to sound horrified. “We always do.”
The clerk sounded chagrined at her lack of a reservation in his name. Her nametag read Ai. “Were they both under the same name?”
“Of course. It’s a business trip,” Mitchell said.
Ai glanced over her counter at their hands, their fingers still intertwined.
Arielle released Mitchell’s hand and crossed her arms over her boobs, trying to look businesslike instead of sexually frustrated. She knew she was failing miserably.
“Yeah,” Ai said. “Sometimes, if two separate rooms are booked under the same name during high-traffic times, especially on a corporate card, the reservation system assumes it’s an error and deletes one of them. It always deletes the lower-priced reservation, too. I’m so sorry.”
“But surely you have another room,” Mitchell said to her. “We’re willing to pay whatever you’re renting it for.”
The woman winced, her skin crinkling around the edges of her eyes. “There’s a financial convention in town, something to do with commodities and crypto, and absolutely every room in the hotel is booked. We literally had people asking about the broom closet. We’ve been turning people away for hours. There aren’t any hotel rooms left anywhere in the Bay Area or two hundred miles around for the whole week.”
Mitchell frowned. “And that’s why all the hotels in Monterey Bay were sold out.”
“Uh.” Arielle didn’t know what to say. “I—Well, that’s quite a conundrum.”
“Right.” Mitchell grabbed her hand again and led her away from the reservation desk.
A glass pedestal and vase in the center of the lobby were so crystal clear that the blue hydrangeas appeared to be floating in midair.
He bent at the waist and said to her, “You can have the suite. I’ll find another room somewhere else.”
Arielle gestured at the reservation desk. “The clerk just said that the whole city is sold out. You even said there were no rooms in Monterey.”
He was watching her eyes. “Yes, but it wouldn’t be right—”
“We’re adults, Mitchell. We can share a hotel suite for a night without accidentally tripping over each other and having sex.”
“It’s unseemly,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re here for business, as our contract states.”
“It’s no big deal,” Arielle said, her desire to not be a bother warring with her sense of propriety, and then there was a longing in her chest that she wouldn’t name. “Is the suite as huge as most of the ones you’ve been staying in?”
He shrugged. “It’s supposed to be. I haven’t stayed in this Four Seasons before.”
“Well then, there are probably two beds. There might even be two bedrooms. That one suite in San Diego had two bedrooms.”
Mitchell touched his lips with one finger, pondering, and said, “I don’t think it does.”
“Well, maybe it does,” she said, pressing on. “And we can figure it out. Look, I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted.”
He nodded, raising his eyebrows in defeat. “I have been running on coffee fumes for the last five hours.”
She argued, “It’s nine o’clock at night. There are no other rooms for miles around. Since we’ve been standing here arguing, it’s nine-fifteen now.” She flipped her fingers at a clock on the wall of the lobby. “Even if you did manage to find another room, it would probably be eleven or later by the time you checked in. And then there’s food. We didn’t have supper. When would you eat? Plus, we have to leave to go back to Monterey to finish the shoot at seven tomorrow morning, and the car is picking us up here, right?”
He nodded, looking down at his dress shoes.
Arielle had made a solid case. Arguing with insurance companies at work had trained her to craft solid cases. “It would be ridiculous to go searching for another hotel room in a fully booked city when we’re both exhausted, and you have to be back here early tomorrow morning. We’ll be fine.”
They checked into the suite, and then they were the only people in the elevator riding up to the top of the building.
Mitchell stood with his hands clasped in front of himself, rocking back on his heels.
Arielle watched the numbers above the doors count up slowly as her feet grew heavy.
They didn’t move toward each other or speak.
She felt like she was hanging, suspended over the side of a cliff and wheeling her arms, trying not to teeter over the edge.
Mitchell unlinked his hands, his arms dangling at his sides.
They’d been holding hands in the car and the lobby. It was a natural, almost instinctive, reaction when Arielle reached out and wove her fingers into his.
Mitchell yanked on her hand, wheeled her around like they were dancing, and shoved her against the elevator wall. His mouth crashed down on hers, kissing her again.
Arielle wrapped both arms and one leg around Mitchell, practically climbing him to kiss him harder. Her pulse accelerated right back to where it had been in the car, racing in her veins and pounding in her temples as his hands caressed her sides from the swells of her breasts to her hips.
The elevator bell dinged, and they untangled themselves, managing not to be necking when the doors opened to a, thankfully, empty hallway.
Arielle breathed relief and refused to think about the black half-globe stuck to the elevator’s ceiling.
Mitchell waved his phone over the door lock and pushed the door to their suite open, letting her go in first. “Allow me.”
As Arielle walked inside, it became glaringly obvious that beyond the living room and huge outdoor terrace overlooking San Francisco Bay, only one door in the back of the suite led to exactly one bedroom.
And there was, of course, only one bed.