Page 23 of Dial F for Finance

He grins. “I do everything on purpose.”

He kisses me before I can manage a comeback, slower this time, deliberately slower, like he’s making a point about pace. His hand finds the zip at the side of my dress, but he doesn’t pull it. He traces the line with his thumb, eyes locked on mine.

Waiting.

“Take it off,” I demand.

Something fierce moves across his face.

Then he pulls the zip.

The dress comes apart at my side in one long whisper.

The moment hits.

It’s the moment I’ve been having for half my life, in every bedroom with a man wealthy enough or beautiful enough to be a risk. The moment where the dress comes off and I have to be a body, and the body is six feet one and pear-shaped and full-thighed and big-armed and the man is going to either pretend he doesn’t see what he sees or—worse—be kind about it.

I make a small motion with my hand. Not consciously. Just the muscle memory of every other time. My hand starts to go, on its own, toward the lamp on the bedside table.

He catches it.

“No,” he says, against my mouth. Quiet. Absolute.

“It’s—”

“No.”

“The light⁠—”

“Stays on, Pemberton.”

I don’t have anything to say to that.

He lifts up onto his elbow above me. His hand goes back to my side, where the zip is, and he peels the dress open the rest of the way with the kind of unhurried attention I have given to fewer than a dozen objects in my life. He sits up enough to slide it down my body. I lift, automatically. He gets it past my hips and my thighs and off, and he tosses it somewhere behind him in the same way he did with his jacket, and then he sits back on his heels at the foot of the bed and looks at me.

I’m in black underwear that doesn’t match.

The bra is boring. The panties are nice—lace-edged, cotton everywhere else. Against the white sheets, my size is impossible to edit small. I watch his face for the adjustment.

Dominic only looks hungrier.

Fuck.

He doesn’t move to undress me more. He drags his eyes over every inch, then flicks his gaze up like he’s checking to see if I’m still here. I am. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m not thinking about what I look like to him. I’m thinking about him, and how he’s looking at me.

Holy fuck.

He keeps his eyes locked on mine as he pushes his own shirt up, drawing it over his head in a motion that only comes from never needing to try. The undershirt comes too, leaving his skin bare, the lines of his body gym-cut and tattooed.

I stare at the intricate black ink that spreads across both pecs in wings and steel bars then travels down his left arm in a tangle of shapes and swirls. His body is an entire piece of artwork I barely knew existed because it was mostly hiding under his suit. I mean, I’ve seen his forearm and occasionally a little ink when he unbuttoned his shirt at the end of a long day. But this is way more than I expected.

He waits, lets me look at him the same way he looked at me. And when my eyes return to his, he moves over me again.

“You have tattoos.”

“I have one massive tattoo,” he confirms, voice gravel. “You’ve seen me with my sleeves rolled up.”

“Yes, but how did I not know it covered half your chest and one whole arm?” I don’t know why, but I’m unsettled by this fact. Like it’s proof that I don’t know Dominic the way I thought I did. That maybe I . . . was wrong somehow.