LITMIR.BIZ

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wedding. Wondering if she was freaking out because her parents had gotten a terrible divorce several years ago and she feared turning out exactly like them.

      But he had decided that they should get to know each other all over again. He wanted to “court” her. It was a fairly sweet word for what they’d been doing.

      Just as Riley was about to say something in response to her pink shopping bag, her phone rang.

      “It’s got to be Leigh,” she said, dropping her purchases.

      Riley merely smiled at her, then went to the patio door, no doubt to get their steaks going.

      Dani watched him leave, her heart fisting in her chest as the phone rang again. She was going to make him happy tonight—and for the rest of their lives. She just had to figure out how to feel happy herself.

      When he was gone, she grabbed her phone, looked at the ID screen, then put the call on speakerphone. “Are you alive?” she asked.

      Leigh laughed. “No, I’m coming at you from the Other Side. Boo!”

      “Stop it. I was just worried about you.”

      “You shouldn’t have been. I’m outside Mystery Man’s house by the gate, waiting for Margot to pick me up.”

      “And...?”

      Leigh’s voice lowered. “It was...different.”

      “How?”

      “First off, he never showed himself to me.”

      Why did Dani’s thoughts immediately go to somewhere horny? Probably because of what was in her pink bag.

      “Do you mean that he kept being Mystery Man?” she asked. “The whole night?”

      “That’s exactly what I mean.”

      Dani started to hum the Twilight Zone theme until Leigh shushed her.

      “The situation really wasn’t as oddball as it sounds.” Leigh skipped a beat. “I think.”

      “You sound as confused as I am.”

      “It’s just that I got used to the way he was running things. After Beth brought me up to the house, I did meet him. Sort of. He was on a phone.”

      Dani frowned. “That’s how it stayed the entire time? With him talking to you on an electronic device?”

      “It was fun. Like...phone sex. I don’t know how to explain it.”

      “You guys had phone sex?”

      “No.” Leigh laughed again. “He watched me cook dinner as we chatted—”

      “Did he have a TV to watch you on? Is that how he was keeping an eye on you?” This was getting kookier by the second.

      “I’m not sure how he was watching me. Anyway, after I cooked, I ate the dinner.”

      “By yourself.”

      “Right. Actually, I didn’t eat. I wasn’t very hungry.”

      It was probably a rich meal anyway, and Dani knew that Leigh was always watching her intake. “Did he eat?”

      “Not with me. A good way to put it is that while I was at the table, I ate the most of the honey and some bread while he watched me from wherever he was.”

      Dani sucked in a breath, then whispered, “You did food sex?”

      “I won’t get into details, but it actually was fun. And I think it was the first time I ever had any real fun on a date. Usually, you just go through the motions with a guy, trying to impress him, trying to be polite and not get food between your teeth or look like a pig at dinner. Boring as hell, right? Until now.”

      Dani sat in a nearby chair. “You liked it. You’re into some kink and you never even knew it.”

      Leigh got a teasing tone to her voice. “Maybe you’re right. Because I’m going back there.”

      “You’re what?”

      “I said I’m going back. I think. He pretty much invited me to the house again at the end of dinner.”

      Riley ambled into the room with a plate of steaks in hand. Dani took in the aroma, along with the smell of mushrooms that already permeated the kitchen.

      He nodded toward the phone. “Hey, Leigh, are you still alive or did the boogeyman get you?”

      “Hah-hah,” Leigh said. “You two must share thoughts as well as everything else.”

      He set the steaks down and began to put them on two plates. “I’m just checking up on you. We’d kind of like to have you around, in one piece.”

      “That’s sweet, Riley.” Leigh changed topic. “Oh—here’s Margot. Talk to you all soon, okay?”

      Dani shook a finger at the phone. “You be careful when you go back there.”

      “Yeah, yeah.”

      They signed off, leaving Dani and Riley at the table, alone at last.

      He glanced at the pink bag on the floor but didn’t say anything about it as he sat, opening a bottle of beer for her, then one for him.

      “I’m not even going to ask what happened on that date,” he said.

      Even though she and Riley shared everything—as Leigh had pointed out—Dani hesitated to tell him the details of the night. They were just too...

      She was about to say “insane,” but then she got that flippy-floppy turn of the stomach, telling her that Leigh’s date had actually captured her imagination.

      Phone sex. A dark stranger.

      Dani bypassed her steak and beer, pulling her chair closer to Riley’s and grabbing her pink bag on the way.

      “Do you think we could hold off on the steak and take a little break before dinner?” she asked.

      This time, instead of that sadness in his gaze, she detected a spark. And when she brought out the pair of blue fuzzy handcuffs she’d purchased, he put down his beer.

      She got out of her chair and went to an odds-and-ends drawer near the oven, taking out a length of blue fabric she occasionally used to decorate the center of the table. She showed it to him.

      “I wonder,” she said, “how it felt when Leigh realized that her date wasn’t going to show her who he was tonight.”

      Riley cocked a brow. “He did what?”

      “Long story.” She went over to him, then trailed the material over his shoulder. “I want to know what it feels like to have some mystery going on with us, Riley.”

      He grabbed the material, wrapping it around his hand, and she knew that they’d started some courting.

      Not long ago, when she had told Riley that she wanted to push their boundaries in the bedroom, he had asked her if she was unhappy in their relationship. She wasn’t. Hadn’t ever been.

      But there were so many things she hadn’t enjoyed in life yet. Would she regret never exploring those things before they got married and then realize years down the road that it was too late?

      She sat on his lap, snuggling her butt toward his groin, which was already straining against his button fly.

      “Blindfold me,” she said.

      He looked at the steaks, as practical a man as ever, until she cupped his chin with a hand and made him focus on her.

      “Those can wait,” she said, already sounding like the type of woman who would go into a dark house to meet a dark man.

      He grinned, and it wasn’t a carefree Riley grin, either. It was a hungry one, and it shocked her deep in her groin.

      As he slid a hand up her ribs,

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