She snorted that adorable laugh of hers. “Fuck that.”

I pulled away, grinning. “Let’s get put back together since I’m starving now.” I glanced down at my rumpled shirt. “They’re going to totally know what we were doing since you practically ripped my shirt off while you were shamelessly seducing me.”

She hit my arm with the back of her hand, laughing, then refastened her bra. “Let me get this tied up again and we can go.”

“Yeah,” I said, tucking in my shirt. “Get that pretty gift wrapped up so I can enjoy unwrapping it again later.” The thought of “later” sent a jolt of lust straight down to my crotch again. If I weren’t so goddamn hungry, I’d be ready for round two in minutes.

Next time I’d at least wait for us to get horizontal. She tied off her dress, we took a minute to clean up, and Emilia did her best to hide any indication of what we’d just done. She’d succeeded, except for a large dark bruise at the base of her neck, which she had apparently not noticed in the mirror and I refrained from pointing out to her.

My eyes fixed on it and I smiled to myself. In my own swirl of lust I’d branded her with my mark. Mine.

I put my hand on that delicious curve at the small of her back and guided her out the door. The process of arousing a woman was not unlike designing a computer program. Old-school designers used to lay out flowcharts before they’d ever crank out a line of code. Programming itself was all about cause and effect. Turning a woman on was like that—inputting certain information in order to receive the desired output; pun intended.

With machines, the initial state was always the same, but with a woman it was variable. The process followed a pattern, but there were different factors that affected her initial state: how her day was going, whether or not she was tired, how long it had been since the previous time. Look deep into her eyes with clear intent on a bad day and she’d sigh and turn away, brushing you off. But on a good day, you could push through your subsets and subprograms—stroke these places and you’d get her wet, kiss those places and you’d make her moan, lick her here and she’d open to you. It didn’t always work. Sometimes the subroutines you chose didn’t achieve the required results.

As with code, experimentation was necessary. If one spot did not produce a pleasure response, then it was necessary to try another, or another. Input parameters were very important: if a guy wanted to input anything into his partner, he was going to have to make sure the parameters were correct or the whole routine would fail.

So I’d used my five minutes of free seduction wisely—made sure my subroutines would achieve the highest yield. And in no time at all, I’d had her moving under my hands. Easy as coding!

When we made it to dinner, we interrupted Peter and Kim sipping wine over a plate of appetizers, laughing, their heads tipped toward each other.

They looked up when we sat down. I grinned. “Sorry we’re late.”

Peter and Kim exchanged a glance and Emilia blushed.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Kim.

“It was my fault. So what’s the special? I’m starving.”

When they weren’t looking, I turned and winked at Emilia.

“I hope you’ve recovered your manners and we aren’t going to see any more Jabba the Hutt imitations,” Emilia sighed dramatically, her lips twisting into a grin.

She had that well-pleasured, just-fucked look. Her skin was still flushed, her hair slightly askew, her nipples still erect and rubbing against her dress. I licked my lips. Right now, I was hungry as hell for dinner. Later, I’d be hungry for more of her.

Chapter Two

After we returned home from the national park, we had a wonderful lazy ten days to enjoy each other before I was due to return to work. And we made every second of our time count. Until that very last day.

But our time off ended on a dark Monday morning in late September. Sometime around 6 a.m., I heard her rustling around in the bed, turning over as if to get up. She reached for the alarm clock and fumbled with it, presumably to turn it off before it woke me up. When she grabbed the sheets to get up, I rolled over and hooked my arm around her waist, staying her. She froze.

“Sorry. Did I wake you?”

“Nope,” I said, pulling her back fast against me and pressing my morning wood to her pert ass. “I’m up.”

She laughed. “In more ways than one, I see.”

My lips grazed the soft, fragrant skin at her neck just at the juncture where it met her shoulder. “I didn’t hear any complaints last night. Or yesterday afternoon in the pool…”