Page 65 of Breaking All The Rules
“Nah.” He grinned to hide the fact that his heart was thudding hard in his chest at how important it felt to show her that part of him. “Making you see stars.”
She laughed as she set the glass down on the bench top and slinked back in his direction. “You are very good at that.”
“I am.” What was the point of being modest? Austin had always prided himself on giving before getting, but with Beatrice, his sexual satisfaction was so closely entwined with hers, it was the most natural thing in the world to reach for the stars.
“Maybe I need a bigger sample size to truly judge, though? One thing I learned in advertising was the efficacy of a decent sample size.”
“God, corporate speak.” He grinned. “I love it.”
Halting at the end of the bed, she asked, “You mean like efffficacy?”
Austin swore his dick twitched at her deliberate tease. “Uh-huh.”
“And sample size.”
“Yup. And for the record, I think you definitely do. Need one. Gotta be sure.”
She pulled her T-shirt off over her head, then tossed it on the ground, causing Princess to meow indignantly as the shirt almost landed on her head. But Beatrice wasn’t paying any attention to the cat and neither was Austin. His attention was fixed firmly on her breasts and the way her nipples had hardened into two succulent-looking berries just waiting to be sucked.
Putting her knee on the bed, she said, “Prepare to be sampled.”
Austin unfurled his legs, straightening them out in front of him, his cock resting hard as an iron bar against his belly. “Be gentle with me.”
She wasn’t.
…
Beatrice woke late and wearing Princess as a hat again—she had the whole damn bed for pity’s sake!—the next morning after another night of sex, TV, popcorn, and laughter with Austin. And another five a.m. send-off before he crawled out of bed for the ranch, then work, while she went back to sleep, riding a dopamine high.
A high that lasted until she opened her laptop and checked her email, desperately curious about how Kim had reacted to her drawings. She assumed that Kim probably wouldn’t answer at all. That she’d either be irritated by Bea’s lack of seriousness or annoyed at how Bea had essentially poked fun at something Kim was obviously passionate about.
But Kim was neither of those things. She was…ecstatic?…if the subject line of her email was any indication. It simply said, Yaaaas! More, please!
Bea stared at the screen. What the hell? Was Kim on drugs? Had the pressures of a new business and the go-big-or-go-home mentality of LALA land caused her to crack?
Quickly, she scanned the email for the gist, which was that they absolutely loved her Cranky Bea drawings. They loved the irreverence and the complete disregard for the traditional greeting card genre and that they were sure these would appeal to a younger demographic as well as women over thirty-five or for those looking for a card that expressed their feelings of tiredness, dissatisfaction, and exasperation with honesty and humor.
And could they please put them up on their social media platforms to gauge if the public liked them as much as they all did with the view of putting them into their production lineup?
Oh, and they’d pay her for the three drawings. An amount that made Bea blink a little.
If she’d received an email from the king of England asking her to tea at Buckingham Palace, she’d have been less surprised. She glanced at Princess, who was purring loudly beside her, furry chin resting on Bea’s leg, the deep rumble of her purrs being felt all the way down to her damn femur.
That snaggletooth was even more off-putting as she looked at Bea through her half-opened good eye. She wasn’t sure if the cat was sleeping or if this was just Princess’s snooty, regal expression she reserved for commoners. She hadn’t yet gotten to know all the cat’s faces.
Her initial instinct to reject the request was quickly and surprisingly overridden. She’d done the hard part—she’d drawn the images. What harm could some sampling do? In fact, she was way more comfortable with that side of it than the creative process. It was who she was, after all—an ad executive, not an artist.
She was her father’s daughter, not her mother’s.
“What do you think, kitty cat?” Bea stroked down the patchy fur of Princess’s back. “You ready to have your face plastered all over TikTok and Instagram?”
Princess opened her good eye fully for a beat, then let it fall to half-mast again, obviously not considering Beatrice’s question worthy of her brain cells.
“Yeah. My thoughts exactly.”
She shot off a quick reply to Kim, basically telling her to go for it, because, hell, why not? She’d wanted a new life, right?
Why not this? Why not now?
