On her third pass at his shoulder, which was finally starting to loosen up, she asked, “What did you do to this thing? I can’t believe you had any mobility at all this morning.”
He laughed a little, his back shaking under her hands. “Had a little altercation last night. Might’ve gotten carried away defending a lady’s honor.”
“Does that mean you beat somebody up?”
He lifted his head a little. “That offend you?”
Violence didn’t offend her even a little. She’d been in more than her fair share of scrapes. “Nope. Just trying to imagine you defending a lady’s honor.”
Again, he gave her that creased-brow-plus-smirk look that seemed to say he was both confused and amused by her. “You don’t know me, girl. You’re pretty quick to jump to conclusions.”
“You drive a Hummer. All I need to know.”
“I do. Which is a vehicle, not a statement.”
“Oh, bullshit. You are what you drive.” Shut up, mouth. Shut up, shut up, shut up. But for some reason, she could tell that she wasn’t going to shut up. She was kind of enjoying this conversation, even though it would very likely get her fired and probably blackballed.
“Yeah? And what do you drive?”
A brown 1978 Honda Civic with like a billion miles on it. Manny blinked and didn’t answer.
“Let me take a stab. Some ancient, ugly-ass piece of shit that’s supposed to say that you don’t give a fuck about possessions or success or anything the ‘sheep’ care about. Probably got a couple dozen bumper stickers plastered all over the back end that say shit like ANARCHY NOW.” He came up on his elbows again; this time he didn’t wince. “M’I close?”
Only eleven bumper stickers. A couple of them might or might not have had the anarchy symbol on them.
She stepped off the stool and lifted the sheet, catching a full glimpse of his extremely good ass before she dropped the sheet to a more appropriate level. “Time to roll over.”
He did, gracefully.
He was rock hard. And she had been very, very, very wrong about the size of his dick. Holy tree trunk, Batman.
She made an effort not to react, and she succeeded. But when she looked at his face, he was watching her in a way that suggested he’d been waiting for a reaction. Which was kind of douchey. But she was still enjoying herself more than was seemly. This session would never make it to an orientation video about how to comport oneself with a client, and maybe she was reading him way wrong, and he’d complain to everyone he could find about her rudeness. Her compass was not good for navigating that shit. But she was having a good time.
So she grinned back at him. “I stand corrected. Don’t you think a Hummer is kinda overkill, considering?”
“Manny…if that’s your real name…I’m not some millionaire executive in a five-thousand dollar suit driving a tank because it makes him feel like a conquering hero. I work construction and live on the Atlantic Ocean. I surf. I sail. I dive. I hike. I camp. I ride off-road. I do search and rescue. I need a truck that can handle all that. And, yeah. I like the way it looks. I ride a Ducati Monster, too, which is also a wicked badass piece of machinery. Permission requested to operate what the fuck I want and not have it define everything about me?”
He was smiling throughout that monologue. His eyes were a kind of green. Nice. And Manny was rendered kind of speechless by that list of macho shit he did. If she’d been on her toes, she would have made another snarky comment about overkill, but instead, she just let her smile widen the way it wanted and said, “Granted. Now lie back down.”
His front was better and more muscular than his back, as if that were possible. He had a light-ish covering of brown hair over his chest and belly, but nothing ridiculous. It just added to the ironman thing he had going. Arcing over his belly, just under his ribs, was a text tattoo, two words in script, in what Manny assumed was Italian: Sempre Famiglia.
As she ran her hands over it she said, “Nice ink. What’s this mean?”
His eyes closed, his cock still like an iron pole under the sheet, he muttered, “Sempre famiglia. It means ‘family forever’ in Italian.”
“You speak Italian?” Why was she initiating all the conversation with this guy?
“Enough to find a beer, a bed, and a fuck. And to tell somebody to fuck off. But no, not really.”
“Huh. That surprises me. Seems like there’s a ton of Italians around here. More even than in the city.”
“There are. It was an early settlement for dagos off the boat at Ellis. But I guess there was a big push for assimilation around the time my people came over, and the language kind of died out in a lot of families. Most of my buds don’t speak it, either.”