Tiffany and Jericho had gotten soaked while sprinting for the shelter, but at least they hadn’t been hit by lightning.
Flashes of it painted the windows yellow, and immediate thunder shook the shack.
She unwove her arms from the straps of her golf bag and slung it to the floor, grabbing a clean towel from her bag to dab the water out of her hair, trying to save the style. Luckily, she’d been wearing the wide-brimmed golf hat to keep the sun off of her skin, and it seemed to have protected her hair from the worst of the rain, too.
Her drenched shirt clung to her soggy exercise bra, and she plucked at the fabric, wishing she could strip and wring it out.
Wooden benches lined the walls of the shack that served as a storm shelter. The club had stored a few of the old deck chairs in there when they’d bought new ones five years ago.
Jericho had also been deluged by the sudden spring thunderstorm. His clothes—and Tiffany could tell by the brand that they were far more expensive than hers—were pasted on him. His shirt stuck to his rounded shoulders and arms, broad chest, and the stacked bricks of his abdominals like a blue second skin, and raindrops shimmered in his dark blond hair. His golf pants, which were supposed to wick sweat away, had sucked up rainwater like a sponge and shrink-wrapped the thick muscles of his thighs and calves. A long, thick bulge curved down into his right pants leg.
Sweet Baby Jesus, Jericho Parr was even sexier when wet. The man did not skip leg day at the gym, and he was definitely not smooth like a Ken doll down there.
Whoa.
Tiffany looked away, lest he catch her gawking at his fine form again.
Damn, why did he have to be her boss?
Jericho sat in one of the low deck chairs and stretched his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. “Well, it looks like we’ve got time to talk now. You can ask your two questions from winning the fifth hole and your next thirteen questions that you’re going to win, if you want.”
Tiffany plopped her soggy butt in another low chair near him and stretched out her legs, grinning. “You don’t think you’re going to win even one skin?”
He chuckled and ripped open the Velcro on his left-handed golf glove. “I haven’t had my ass kicked this badly since I was fourteen years old and got suckered into a blackjack game at boarding school with a German prince who could count cards. I had to ask my father for money to cover my gambling debts. I’ve only wagered like that twice in my life. You’d think I might have learned not to gamble. Evidently, I suck at it.”
As he peeled off his glove inside-out like a freaking striptease, Tiffany idly noted that Jericho wasn’t wearing a ring of any sort on his left hand.
Just noticed.
Not that she was looking.
There was nothing wrong with noticing that.
She said, “You were fourteen. You shouldn’t have been playing blackjack with an adult.”
“Oh, he was sixteen. He was a junior in the upper school. I was a freshman.”
“I don’t even want to ask why you were hanging out with European royalty in high school,” she said, kicking off her shoes. Water oozed out the sides. So much for them being water-resistant.
Jericho laughed one rueful chuff and did the same with his shoes. Water spilling out of his shoes darkened the wooden floor. “My parents shipped me off to boarding school in Switzerland when I was six. The school, which is called the Le Rosey Institute, launched a big advertising campaign in the Northeast aimed at well-off parents who wanted to one-up the other old money parents who were sending their kids to Andover Academy or Phillips-Exeter. I think their marketing materials must have mentioned the fact that there was no way we could call them to come pick us up every weekend.”
“That’s sad.” She was careful to make it sound like she was sad for him, but seriously, what kind of parents would think of that as a selling point? “But it couldn’t have been that bad. How much money could you have lost in a high school card game?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars,” Jericho muttered.
Her jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me?”
“Not at all.”
“Wow, you are quite a gambler, Jericho Parr.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he muttered.
“My daddy would’ve paddled my butt if I’d have lost fifteen thousand dollars in a card game. No, he would’ve killed me and buried my dead body somewhere in the woods because it’d be cheaper that way. He’s got three other kids. I’m expendable.”
He chuckled. “From what I found out later, they’d been going easy on us because we were Americans. Most of the time, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars changed hands. One of the other guys in the card game, Pierre, is going to be the sovereign Prince of Monaco, like the casino in the James Bond movies. He’s going to rule a country.”
“Thought you said he was a German prince,” Tiffany said. Liars changed their stories.
“Different guy,” Jericho said, lazily drawing circles in the air with a finger to indicate the several royal princes sitting around the poker table all those years ago.
A table of teenage royals playing cards was so far outside of Tiffany’s experience that she couldn’t even picture it. “I didn’t go to high school with anybody like that. I thought it was pretty nifty that the mayor’s kids went to Newcastle Free Academy instead of a private school. Even when I was at Tennessee State, everybody I knew was fighting their way up for a place in the world, not already living at the top.”
Jericho was still smiling at her, his head tilted.
“Do you still keep in touch with guys like that? You just call them up and say, hey, Prince Bob, what’re you doing for dinner Friday? You want to get some Cheesecake Factory?”
Jericho was chuckling by the time she was done. “There were twelve Americans in my graduating class. Of course, we hung out together, but there were some groups even within that. I hung around with guys whose parents had also been taken in by the advertising. Le Rosey recruited half a dozen scholarship kids in my year, too.”
“I guess that’s nice.”
“I think it was for public relations. The scholarship kids seemed to think that, too. Le Rosey had gotten a reputation for being the most expensive and exclusive boarding school in the world and only enrolling the children of royalty and Russian mafia oligarchs. So they branched out the year I started. They began accepting a lot more kids from the ruling political party of China, Indian tech billionaires, and upper-upper-class families in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritius. I might’ve had five million dollars in my trust fund, but those people were wealthy. I learned humility real quick.”
Rain continued to pound on the wooden roof of the storm shelter in runs and thrills, and thunder rumbled in the distance. “Wow, and I thought you were rich, dropping millions of dollars on a golf course in the middle of the night.”
He shrugged. “It was a good price.”
“NGC cost you more than five million dollars.”
Jericho nodded. “I may have been exaggerating when I said that Plan A hadn’t worked out for me. It turns out I’m pretty good at venture capital, and my three buddies are, too. The company that we started, Last Chance, Inc., has done well enough. We’re comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” One of her eyebrows started twitching because she’d wrenched it up so far.
“Comfortable,” he confirmed.
“That means you’re rich, doesn’t it?”
“It means we’re comfortable.”
“Right.” Tiffany began her attack. “But now you’re going to raise NGC’s dues and price out the families.”
Jericho shook his head. Water droplets shook out of his hair, showering his shoulders and spotting the floor. “I don’t want to do that, but I have to charge what the club will be worth. This isn’t a charity.”
“Newcastle Golf Club never was a charity, but it was an important part of the community. A lot of golfers got their start here.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, bobbing his head from side to side. “Just so you know, I’m not going to throw the high school golf team off the course. They’ll still have range time and tee times on the course, but I think it needs to be scaled back. No other high school golf team has that kind of course privileges. Most of them have less than half that time.”
“That’s because Newcastle Free Academy is special. Do you know how many kids NFA sent to college on golf scholarships last year?”
“Twelve,” Jericho said.
“Wait—I—how’d you know that?”
He smiled. “You told me that the first day we met, when you thought I was a bag boy.”
Oh, fine. He’d listened to her. She’d have to watch this guy. “Then you should understand why NGC is so important to this community. Ten of those scholarship kids were Black, and all of them needed those scholarships. Those kids are twelve more kids who are going to college than who would’ve otherwise. About half of them were recruited by historically black colleges and universities like Tennessee State, and the rest of them went to regular universities, but every single one of them was the first kid in their family to go to college. The NFA golf team didn’t just change twelve lives this year. It changed twelve families. All the other kids and cousins in those families just saw one of their own go to college.”
Jericho sat motionless, watching her. His hands were resting on his stomach, and his legs were stretched out and so still that it looked like he was trying not to scare her like she was a skittish cat. He asked, very gently, “Were you the first person in your family to go to college?”
She flipped her fingers in the air because she didn’t need anyone’s pity. “My dad got a degree through the military, but I was the first person in my family to go away to a college right after high school. But because I did, because they saw me do it and saw how I applied for loans and grants and got them, three more of my cousins and my little brother are at universities now, and two more cousins are attending River Rapids Community College. I made it look possible.”
Jericho nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“And I learned to golf at this club.” She stabbed the wide chair arm with her finger three times to make her point. “And every one of those twelve kids last year learned to golf at this club”—more finger stabbing—“during the free summer clinics that we hold. And then either they joined the club on a junior membership or else their family joined on a family membership.”
“How much do junior memberships cost?” he asked.
“Two hundred dollars a year.”
His eyebrows went up. “That’s all?”
“And we have scholarships if kids can’t afford it or their families won’t pay.”
Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance and lit up the inside of the shack through one of the small windows. Thunder crashed and shook the wooden walls half a minute later.
Tiffany jumped in her seat, and Jericho was watching the windows.
The storm didn’t seem to be letting up.
They waited for a minute.
Tiffany told him, “The storm shelter has a lightning rod a little ways away. We’re supposed to be safe in here.”
Finally, Jericho nodded to her. “Go on.”
She sucked a deep breath in, shaking out the nerves. “Okay, well, NGC is important to Newcastle. It’s changed the community here. Newcastle is fifty percent Black, more than half Black Americans but a lot of Haitian immigrants, too. And then another twenty percent is Brazilian and Vietnamese immigrants and their kids. This golf club could have been one of the places that divided people, that was a barrier, but it wasn’t. We had young Black men working here as caddies in the nineteen-sixties, which was pretty common for back then. But those guys learned to golf here. And when they grew up and had their own families and wanted to teach their own kids to golf, NGC admitted them. It admits anyone and has for decades. That’s pretty unusual, and it was our source of pride.”
Jericho blinked. “Golf isn’t known for being a particularly inclusive sport.”
“That’s what makes NGC so special, and it’s why I don’t want you to mess it up. We’re producing not just the next generation of Black college graduates with those scholarships, we are producing the next generation of Black golfers, and no one else is. You know that golf is important for business relationships. How many of your business deals are made on the golf course?”
Jericho nodded. “All of them, it seems like.”
“Yep, but what if you’d grown up with basketball and football all your life, and you’d never had a chance to learn to golf?”
Jericho nodded slowly. “I would have missed those deals and relationships. It’s classist, of course, but I’ve met a lot of people at charity tournaments that were important for networking.”
“Right. Did you know that in the nineteen-seventies, ten Black professional golfers were playing on the PGA Tour?”
“The only Black golfer I know of is Tiger Woods.”
“That’s because since the nineties, he’s been the only Black golfer on the Tour with any real success because he’s Tiger Woods.”
“Right.”
She tugged her deck chair closer to Jericho’s because the constant drumming of the rain was making it a little hard to hear him. “Right, but there used to be more of us out there. In the 1970s, Lee Elder and Calvin Peete played, and there were usually ten of us out there at any given time.”
Jericho’s gaze strayed to the roof of the storm shelter, and he nodded thoughtfully. It looked like he was remembering.
She said, “But then in the 2000s, there was only Tiger Woods and one or two more depending on the year, and that was because of the demise of the caddie system.”
Jericho looked back at her, and he turned his chair and scooted a little closer to her, too. “I would have thought the caddie system was discriminatory.”
“The caddie system was our in. The caddie system was how Black people got into golf and learned it, how we got equipment and range time. Then, somebody went and invented those stupid gas-guzzling golf carts that belch unfiltered exhaust all over the golf course, and it automated away the caddie jobs. But a golf cart will never tell you that the seventh green is an optical illusion, and all the putts roll the opposite direction of what you think they’re going to.”
Jericho leaned forward in his chair with his hands clasped between his knees. “Wait. What did you say?”
Tiffany modeled the double-slanted green with her hands. “The seventh green is built on a hill. It looks like it slants to the west, but the whole thing is an optical illusion. Everything rolls toward the two pine trees on the east side of the green. Once you know that, the green is simple to read.”
Jericho rolled his eyes and flopped back in his chair. “I five-putted that green two days ago. I thought I had the yips.”
“See? A good caddie would’ve told you that. Probably would’ve saved you four strokes. But the caddie system was where the first Black golfers learned to play because there were Black golfers all the way back to when golf became a professional sport. The first African-American ever to play in a PGA event was John Shippen in 1896.”
“Eighteen ninety-six?” Jericho asked, one eyebrow raised.
“He played in the second U.S. Open ever at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club when he was seventeen years old, where he worked as a caddie. He came in sixth, and then he went on and played in five more U.S. Opens, all because of the caddie system.”
“I’m surprised they let him because—you know,” Jericho said.
“Yeah, I know,” she scoffed. “But as much as golf and The Masters, especially, are tainted with systemic racism, other people stood up to it. When John Shippen was going to play in his first U.S. Open, some people didn’t want him to. But the president of the USGA, Theodore Havemeyer, put his foot down and made sure that Shippen and a Shinnecock tribal member and golfer, Oscar Bunn, played that year.” Tiffany dug a pink golf tee out of the sodden fabric of her pants pocket and held it up. “Heck, this was invented by a Black guy, George Grant, in 1899. He was a dentist in Boston. Before that, you had to scrape together a little hill of sand to put your ball on.”
Jericho smiled, and damn, he was gorgeous when he smiled. “That’s pretty cool.”
Tiffany shifted her chair even closer to him, and the wooden arm of her deck chair bonked his. “Oops, sorry.”
He twisted toward her, bringing their knees closer together, and then his leg grazed hers. “Don’t be sorry.”
Warmth seeped through the wet fabric of their clothes.
She was not going to—she should not—
She was so chilled from the April air and having cold water dumped over her, and that was why she leaned her leg firmly against Jericho’s strong, warm calf and knee.
For the warmth.
She said, “Um, okay, but the, um, caddie system…” Dang it, she did not get flummoxed like this.
Jericho tilted his head, not smiling but leaning toward her. “And the caddie system fell apart because of golf carts.”
Back on track. “Nasty things, those golf carts, and the club probably spends as much to buy and maintain them as we would to pay caddies. Seriously, those things do not have catalytic converters on them. They belch black, unfiltered exhaust like a cheap lawnmower. Mrs. Sullivan is asthmatic and can’t be around them. She keeps petitioning the club to switch to electric, but that would be another huge expense, buying all new golf carts.”
Jericho was nodding along. “I hadn’t realized that.”
His leg was so warm, and hard, and rounded with muscle.
She leaned in, and his knee slipped past hers to press against her inner thigh.
He inhaled through his nose like he was smelling something good, and she saw the dark of his pupils expand in the blue irises in his eyes.
Tiffany shrugged. “It’s just another example of things getting harder.”
Jericho cleared his throat, and Tiffany did not dare look at his lap. She hadn’t meant it as an innuendo, but there they were.
The cold air inside the wooden shack clung to her wet clothes, chilling her skin.
Things happened when girls got cold, she told herself, which must be why her nipples were gathered into tight peaks. She pressed her arms over her chest to warm them up and hide them.
Yeah, it must be the cold.
Jericho’s sandy brown eyebrows had lowered. “Unintended consequences.”
Was he talking about—oh, he must mean the golf carts and the caddie system. She said, “Funny how Black people tend to bear a lot of those unintended consequences.”
Jericho glanced down at his hand that was inches from hers where they rested on the arms of their chairs. It seemed like he agreed when he said, “Yeah. Funny, that.”
“So, what do you want to do—to Newcastle Golf Club?” Her voice was throatier than she’d meant, and she’d almost faltered before she’d named the club at the end of her sentence.
She couldn’t ask him what he wanted to do.
He moved his thumb on the arm of the chair like he was exploring the peeling paint and weathered wood with the pad of his thumb. “I hadn’t made any decisions, but now I have more to think about.”
It would have to suffice for that day. Tiffany was talked out, having made her case and vented all she could deal with, and she found herself tracing the edge of her chair’s arm, her finger just missing his thumb as they went round and round.
“I’d like more consultations as we go along,” Jericho said, looking up, and his blue eyes stared into hers.
They were sitting so close, and the dark sky drummed rain on the roof, isolating them, enclosing them in that tiny storm shelter away from the rest of the world, and it seemed almost—intimate.
Tiffany found herself drifting forward. Jericho was a good-looking man, and she hadn’t had a boyfriend since her college boyfriend had declined to move from Georgia to Connecticut, so they’d gone their separate ways.
His knee reached the middle of her inner thigh.
The storm shelter felt like a bubble in time and space, separate from everything else. They were both leaning forward, the magnetism impossible to deny.
If he were leaning back, this would be different, right?
But all his body language was focused on her. He was almost crouching on the edge of his chair, leaning with his hand right beside hers, his leg between hers like she could stand and straddle him, and he practically crouched to spring at her.
There had been that—spark—or whatever, when she’d thought he was a bag boy a few days before, and her rationale at that point was because she didn’t want to get in trouble with the club management because she was his boss.
But now, Jericho was the boss. She wasn’t going to get in trouble for—anything.
He didn’t look away when he said, “I can’t promise I’ll do everything you want, and indeed, I can promise that I can’t. That’s the nature of venture capital acquisitions. A lot is going on behind the scenes. But I’d like consults on what I’m doing so we won’t be surprised by unintended consequences.”
His deep voice echoed off the fog around her brain, and he was so close that she could feel tiny rivulets of heat wafting from his warm body.
She almost leaned forward.
Jericho looked at her lips, and then up to her eyes again.
Oh, this would be complicated in so many ways, but it didn’t have to be forever. She’d learned that when she and Tyrone had broken up. “That’s all I can ask for.”
His voice had lowered to just above a whisper. “I know one unintended consequence I’d like to talk about.”
Oh, Lord. Tiffany could feel the puffs of his breath on her lips and sliding over her cheeks. His lips would taste faintly of mint if she leaned just three more inches in.
“What’s that?” she asked, her whisper catching in her throat.
“When I bought this golf course, I became your boss. I liked it better when you were my boss.” His blue eyes flicked up and met hers with their lips just inches apart. “Because then I could’ve made the first move.”
But a guy should make the first move because she wasn’t sure that he wanted to and all the weird stuff she knew was patriarchy and yet if he wanted to kiss her he should—
White light blasted, and the air crashed around her.
Lightning struck outside the shack.
Jumping away from the direction of the deafening crash was instinctive.
Throwing her arms around his neck as their lips met was instinctive, too.
His lips opened under hers, and one of his strong arms wrapped around her waist and caught her as she leaped. The other ran up her back and grabbed the back of her neck, steadying her as she almost toppled them over the back of his chair when she landed on him.
The chair that she was somehow kneeling on rocked back, teetering on two legs. Jericho stood and dragged her up and to her feet. His tongue stroked hers, tender and yet insistent.
The heat from his body soaked through their wet clothes, showing her what it would feel like when they were skin to skin.
He was bending down, and she pressed up on her toes, her wet socks squishing on the wooden floor.
His hands explored her waist and hips, smoothing her wet clothes over her curves, and one of his hands rubbed up her ribcage, cupped her breast in his hand, and he ran his thumb over her cold-beaded nipple.
Tiffany sucked in a breath of surprise.
When he rubbed his thumb over that nip back and forth, she let her breath out in a moan, and her head tipped back.
He bent and raked his teeth over her throat, and his other hand dropped lower and palmed her ass. His arm moved up to around her waist, pressing her against him. Against her stomach and through their wet clothes, she could feel that he was hard for her already.
She might have made the first move, but Jericho was making all the moves.
Under her palms and fingers, Jericho’s abdominals and back tensed, and he kissed her slower, backing off. “That’s enough for now.”
Tiffany didn’t want to stop. She was drunk on him, with the scent of his cologne mixed with rainwater, from the warmth of his body in the cold air. It had been nearly two years since the last time she’d gotten laid, and Jericho was a big hunk of man that she wanted to taste.
She inserted her fingers into his waistband and began unbuckling his belt.
“I said, enough.” But his voice growled low in his throat, and his hand clenched around her ass cheek and shoved her hips harder against his pelvis and erection. “I don’t have a condom with me.”
Tiffany dragged one leg behind herself and dropped to one knee, mouthing down his wet shirt as she wrestled with his belt buckle.
Jericho groaned and his hands clenched around her shoulders, and then he growled, “Like I said on the tee box, ladies first.”
He ducked and shoved her backward, grabbing her around her waist and laying her back on the wooden floor. He braced himself on his arms and knees over her, and he stared right into her eyes. “Say yes.”
“Yes!” she cried out, grabbing at his shirt to drag him down to her.
His strong arms bent as he kissed her again, harder this time, his mouth open and their tongues tangling. The fine sand of early five o’clock shadow on his jaw was rough against her cheek.
He pushed her shirt up with one hand and popped the front hook-closure on her sports bra. With a groan, he dipped his head to lave his warm tongue over her breast and then took it into his mouth.
The suction drew the energy in Tiffany up, and her back arched off the floor. She turned her head, finding a spot to rest her head between the beads in her braids that were digging into her skull, but she couldn’t resist arching when he stroked her nipple with his warm tongue. It felt like he was sucking her whole body into his mouth.
And he was moving between her legs, even though they were still clothed. He was gigantic, an enormous man, and worry crept in that he was going to rip her apart by sheer force.
But his fingers trailed down, and he unfastened her slacks and began shoving her pants and the elastic of her panties down her hips.
He released her breast and glanced downward, and then he squeezed his eyes closed. “Good God, your panties match your pink golf balls.”
Tiffany was a girlie girl sometimes. “I like pink.”
“Do you always match your golf balls to your panties?” He growled into her neck. “When I see what color golf ball you’re playing with, will I know what color your panties are that you’re wearing under your clothes?”
Maybe not before, but she was going to from then on. “Yes.”
“I’m never going to be able to golf with you again because I’ll be thinking about your panties and slipping my fingers inside them the whole time.”
To make his point, he stroked through her folds with one finger, sending a tingle through her.
She gasped at the shock.
“Or my tongue.” He grabbed her around her waist and back and lifted her like she weighed nothing at all. Maybe testosterone turned him into the incredible hunk. Tiffany didn’t know, but he carried her in his hands like she was a kitten.
He slung her onto the bench against the wall and pressed her chest with one hand until the wooden wall met her back. Grabbing her pants and underwear in his fist, he yanked downward.
The waistband of her slacks caught on the top of her knee brace. Stripping the Velcro, she helped him wrestle the fabric and her brace off of her leg.
“What’s that?” Jericho asked, shoving her backward and nipping the inside of her thigh.
“Nothing,” she told him. Good Lord, if he wanted to stop and talk, she was going to burst into tears or stomp out of the shelter into the rain.
But his lips followed her pants down the curve of her stomach and lower, until he stripped her clothes off one of her ankles and fell to his knees between her legs.
Oh, wow, he was going to—
His lips and tongue stroked up the inside of her thigh where his knee had rested, and he parted her folds with his mouth.
A wave of yes rushed through her. Not an orgasm, but a deep, coiling, relaxed anticipation because everything was in the right place and felt good.
His tongue caressing her was velvety and firm, a perfect sensation that was instantly building inside her.
Tiffany braced one heel on the bench and slid her other thigh over his strong shoulder as he devoured her, sucking and tonguing every bit of softness.
Hard, blunt pressure at her opening amidst the velvet onslaught of his mouth caught her by surprise, but she tilted her hips farther up. His fingers pushed inside, a counterpressure to his tongue that drove her harder, faster, as he devoured her with his mouth.
And then her whole body was opening to him, her skin begging for him, and she could have sworn he licked every inch of her from her fingertips and inside her mouth and her breasts while he was sucking her clit, and then the waves broke over her.
Shudders of pleasure poured over her skin, crashed over her head and drowned her in bliss, and became a throbbing that did not stop but only slowed, drifted inward, and returned to her heartbeat.
As she batted her eyes open, thunder rumbled, but it was farther away. The rain pattered on the roof, and the sky outside the windows had turned pale gray.
She sighed, “Oh, wow.”
Jericho’s strong arms surrounded her, and her cheek pressed against his shoulder. “You good?”
“I’m good for a year,” she sighed, snuggling closer to his warmth.
He chuckled. “I might not want to wait that long.”
“I’ll do you in a second, I promise, but my legs are overcooked spaghetti right now.”
His arms tightened around her. “The rain is letting up.”
“Yeah, just give me a minute.” Her arms encircled his trim, damp waist, and his warmth soothed her.
Jericho said, “We should probably get back to the clubhouse before they send the National Guard out after us. My phone is blowing up with texts from Kowalski and the pro shop asking if we got hit by lightning.”
“Oh!” Tiffany checked her phone and found the same. She texted everyone back, assuring them that they’d been in the storm shelter off the fifth green and were soggy but not dead. “Oh, jeez, yeah. Coach is going to have my hide for worrying him.”
And then she realized she wasn’t wearing pants, and her bra was unhooked, her boobs swinging, and Jericho was completely dressed.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Oh, my God! Turn around!”
Jericho cracked up but rolled over to his other hip to face away from her while he texted. “I literally just had my tongue in your—”
She muscled her boobs into her bra and hooked the front, and then she yanked her panties and pants up. “Don’t say it! And oh God, Jericho! You can’t say anything to anybody!”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” he muttered.
“No, I’m serious,” Tiffany said.
“Why, are you worried that if your reputation is tarnished, no one in the ton will think you’re marriageable, and you’ll be ruined?” he asked, laughing at her.
“Hey! Seriously! I’m a Black woman in a very white job. I cannot have people thinking I slept my way into this job or that I sleep with any guys at work. You got me? I don’t need that, too!”
“I understand,” Jericho said, and his voice sounded low and serious. “I wouldn’t talk about us in any circumstance, but definitely not now. You have my word.”
It seemed like he’d taken her seriously, and there was evidence—twelve—that he listened to her when she talked. “Okay, then.”
She finished strapping on her knee brace and arranging her clothes. “I’m decent. You can turn around now.”
Jericho stood and turned around, tapping on his phone as he texted.
His pants were mostly dry and much less form-fitting, and his shirt was beginning to release its grip around his flat stomach.
As the rain on the roof sputtered above them, finally trailing off, she remembered something. “Um, I didn’t—”
“Yeah, what?” he asked, looking up from his phone and tucking it in his pocket.
She sidled up to him, swinging her hips a little, and crooked one finger in his belt. “You’re up next.”
He smiled and stepped closer, so their bodies were a scant fraction of an inch apart, and he ran his hands up her arms. “I’ve got a better idea.”
She stroked her arms up his chest, feeling his thick muscles under his shirt. “You’ve got a better idea than a blow job? I’ve got to hear this one. Oh, no butt stuff. We just met.”
He chuckled, and he smiled down at her from practically up near the dang ceiling. He was so tall. “Have supper with me Saturday night.”
She looked up at him. “That’s your idea of better than a blow job?”
“I didn’t say instead of a BJ. Why not both?”
“Okay.” The wooden shack was getting chillier as the storm front blew through, and Tiffany’s clammy clothes sucked the heat right out of her skin. Without even thinking about it because Jericho was so much warmer than she was, she scooted forward that last fraction of an inch and leaned against his chest.
His arms wrapped around her, and it almost felt like some affection might be there.
Dang, she was chilly. She huddled closer, scooting her feet until they were between his.
Oh, it was cold in the shack. When guys got cold they—
She almost giggled.
Jericho might be worried about not presenting himself at his best.
Okay, that made sense.
Tiffany slipped her arms around his waist. “Okay, I’ll have dinner with you.”
“Saturday, here at the club.”
“Did you not hear me tell you that I don’t want people around here to know anything that we did or that we will ever do?”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll text you with the name of the restaurant.”
“Not too close to here.” She had swarms of cousins waiting tables in the greater Newcastle area. “Somewhere a little ways away, where we can relax.”