Is this what being a superhero feels like? Because that was fucking awesome.

“Let’s do that again.”

She shakes her head, her hair a mess around her. “I can’t. I need a break. I can’t.”

I fall beside her on the bed. My heart pounds and my thighs are slick for her but I can feel her exhaustion, making her heavy and warm.

“I’ve never done that before,” she says, a little breathless.

“You mean you’ve never squirted?” I kiss her cheek.

She laughs, throaty and satisfied. “I don’t think so.”

“You’d know.”

“I should change these sheets,” she says.

I roll onto my side, pushing her hair back from her face. “You rest. I’ll change them.”

It might be the light or the color of the walls but her eyes look especially green, the same color as the glass of my favorite bottle of red wine.

“No.” She heaves herself onto her elbows but I push her back down with an easy hand on her chest. “I want to make you squirt, too,” she whines.

“Remember when you told me that you had a hard time coming.” I laugh when she scowls at me.

“I do,” she says. “You just have a magic mouth.”

My grin could crack my face. “Thank you. I take my cunnilingus skills very seriously.” I nod to the bathroom. “Take a moment. I’ll change the sheets.” I kiss down her chest.

“Fine.” She stops me with my mouth against her palm. “You take good care of me.”

If I were the type of person to gloat, I’d gloat about that. I bite the pad of her finger instead. “I thought you didn’t like that.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“I do.” I pull her up into a sitting position. “I like taking care of you.”

I’d like to take care of you forever. The thought feels illicit. Like the worst kind of secret. Not because it’s wrong but because she deserves more than a grumpy woman who’s married to her job.

“Can I stay the night?” I ask instead.

“You’d better.”

Sophie slides off the bed and wobbles, fawn-like, to her bathroom. I find fresh sheets on a shelf in her closet, pull the soaked ones off and throw them in the washing machine in her spare bathroom. She returns looking fresh and far more awake than she was before. I’m warm under the covers, in nothing but my underwear. She takes a sip from the glass of water I placed on her bedside table and smacks her lips. Sophie hurries under the covers, smiling and so fucking beautiful I could drop dead.

And maybe I am a grump who spends too much time at her restaurant that is on the cusp of failure. But maybe I’m also not as much like my father as I try to convince myself I am.

And even if I am, maybe I deserve Sophie.

Chapter Eighteen

Amy

A wad of rolled up straw wrapper lands on my keyboard. I flick it away without breaking rhythm typing. Wes huffs from the other side of my laptop, his grumbling blending into the coffee shop sounds.