“Why can’t you have everything? When I go to bed with a woman her pleasure is my top priority, and I don’t take mine until she gets hers.”

“What if she’s faking?”

“I told you already. You can tell.”

“How?”

She was staring him down, her blue eyes glittering, and he knew that he was being issued a challenge. She was trying to make him back down. She was trying to make him uncomfortable.

It was not going to work.

Because if there was one thing he had learned over all these years of mastering his cravings for her, mastering the various needs that his body had, it was how to face a problem head-on when he wanted to turn away from it. It was how to hold steady when he wanted to crack. And he knew how to fake it. Since he had become responsible for an entire household he knew how to fake a smile when he didn’t feel like it. Yeah, he’d learned all that. Sammy wasn’t going to pull one over on him.

“First of all, her breathing changes. Her pupils dilate. Her skin gets flushed. Not a blush. Flushed. Color that spreads up your neck and into your face. Goes all the way down over your breasts.” His heart was starting to pound heavily, his blood running hot in his veins. Because it was far too easy for him to build a picture in his mind that put Sammy into the position of lover. And that was something that he didn’t do. But he was breaking a host of rules right now. With her. And he didn’t know how to turn back now.

“Her nipples are tight. She’s wet between her legs.”

“That’s arousal,” she said breathlessly, taking a drink of beer. “That’s not an orgasm.”

“You didn’t let me finish. Because then that’s when the magic happens. Some women are quiet. Some women are loud. But their muscles tighten and shake. And if I’m buried inside them, or my fingers are, I can feel all that pleasure squeezing them tight, deep and desperate. It’s almost as good as coming yourself. If you’re the kind of man who knows the value of pleasing his partner. And I sure as hell do.”

“Great,” she said, her voice thin. “Thank you for the sex-ed lesson.”

“Not a problem.”

She was shaken by that. And a damn good thing, too, because so was he. He took a long drink of beer.

But maybe she might be too consumed by her own issues to pay attention to how he was looking right now. It was only sheer force of will that prevented him from being physically affected by that moment.

But he had a lot of practice not getting hard with Sammy.

So this was not an unusual experience for him.

“What about Lincoln?” she asked, gesturing to a man standing in the corner with a beanie pushed back on his head and one of those small French artist-looking beards that seemed like a man lacked either the testosterone or commitment to go with the full beard. Neither of which spoke well of him, in Ryder’s opinion.