Beautiful Secret

Upstairs, a balcony lined the sides and back of the room, looking down on the action, and had begun to fill with a few people holding cocktails. Already the floor had started to fill, and the humid air created by over a hundred bodies tripped my claustrophobic wire. As if sensing my impending panic, Ruby tugged my sleeve, pulling me to the bar.

“Two gin gimlets, tons of limes!” she yelled to the bartender. With a nod, he grabbed two glasses, filling them with ice. “I mean a lot of limes,” she added with a charming smile.

The oily hipster bartender smiled back at her, eyes stalling at her mouth before glancing at her chest and lingering.

Without thinking, I reached an arm around her shoulders, jerking her back against my front. The move surprised her. I could tell in the way she caught herself by wrapping both hands around my forearm, by the way she broke into a delighted laugh. Arching into me, Ruby slipped her hands behind her and around my lower back to hold me closer.

She turned her head, leaning against my chest and I bent so that her mouth was closer to my ear. “I’ve been crazy for you for months,” she reminded me with a small bite to my jaw. “Seeing you jealous like that just completely made my life.”

“I don’t share,” I warned her quietly.

“I don’t either.”

“And I don’t flirt.”

She paused, as she seemed to understand the depth of my reaction. I wasn’t even sure I understood the depth of my reaction. I’d never been jealous with Portia; even when she tried, by dancing at parties or getting drunk and flirtatious with friends. But with Ruby . . . there was an instinctive pull, some desire to claim her that made me at once uneasy and thrilled.

“I know I’m flirty,” she admitted, her eyes searching my face, “but I’d never betray anyone like that.”

And somehow, I knew that. In the dim light of the bar and in the midst of such a bustling crowd, our conversation felt even more intimate.

“I’m having more fun with you than I can remember having,” I told her. “I trust you, even though sometimes it feels like I know so much about you, and other times I remember that we’re barely acquainted.”

I had to remind myself that Ruby was only twenty-three, that she had broader sexual experience than I did, and far more experience with flirting—but no long-term relationships, nothing showing her how to enter into something to be treated initially as fragile. I wanted to balance her tendency to run headlong into things against my tendency to hide my head in the sand.

“We are not ‘barely acquainted,’ ” she growled, pinching my backside in her hand. “Just because this is a new relationship doesn’t mean I don’t know you in ways no one else does. How else are we supposed to start? You can’t know everything at the get-go.”

The bartender returned with our drinks and I released Ruby from my hold and paid before she could get her wallet out of her small bag. She offered me a petulant glare, and then turned, stretching to pull me into a kiss I expected to be only a small brush of her lips but immediately turned deep, her tongue sliding into my mouth, claiming me in the playfully brazen way she had.

And for a moment, I forgot that we were away from the privacy of our hotel or the safety of London. With my hand cupping her neck and her palms pressed flat to my chest, it was just Ruby and I, as lovers, falling forward into this thing that had captured me so immediately.

I pulled away to catch my breath and slow my pulse, jerking back into awareness of the press of bodies all around us at the crowded bar, the eyes on us attempting to not stare, the hint of a smartphone capturing a public flash of our passion. The bartender deposited my change on the bar with a smack that told me he’d been watching us, too. And Ruby couldn’t care less. She lifted her drink, raised her eyebrows cheekily at me, and took a long swallow.

“You kiss like it’s your goddamn job,” she said.

With a little smile, I pulled out a few of the multitude of limes in my drink to drop onto a bar napkin. I liked limes as much as the next bloke, but my Ruby seemed to want her gimlet as limes with a side of gin.

My Ruby.

I swallowed, staring at her as I licked the juice from my fingers. My Ruby. She watched my tongue slide over my fingers with wide, fascinated eyes.

“Right now,” I began with a grin, “are you imagining how far I could work my tongue inside you, or how many of my fingers would fit?”

Her breath caught, and her eyes went wild for a flash before her confident smile took center stage. “I’m actually wondering if you would like to watch me lick your fingers as much as I like watching you do it.”