Bodywork by Marie Harte

cleaning up the mess his brother and Mac had left. He couldn’t get Saturday afternoon out of his mind. He’d had sex . Mr. Vanilla , as he’d been labeled, the plain, uninteresting guy Lisa had thrown over for some schmuck with piercings and covered in tattoos , had fucked a woman in his office on his desk. And he’d come not once, but twice inside the tightest pussy he’d had in a long, long time.
    Just thinking about it made him feel dirty…and turned on. Though proud of his quickie s in his office, the emotion attached to the act didn’t jibe with the idea of a one night stand.
    God, he wanted her again. Not some faceless woman in a scene straight out of any guy’s fantasy, but Shelby Vanzant. Talking dirty to her, shoving into her on his desk, where he worked, made him feel like a real man. Stupid, but true. He wanted to be able to leave it as an incredible experience, to be more like Mac and fuck and forget her. But he couldn’t. Shane liked Shelby. He’d loved seeing the expression on her face when she came. Learning what pleased her, how she felt around him.
    He glared down at his constant erection, wishing he could find one of Mac’s many admirers, several of whom had made overtures in his direction, and relieve this ache. But he didn’t want any of them. He wanted Shelby. But this time he’d bend her over while they fucked. Or he’d tie her up. He’d always wanted to do that. Or he’d fuck those beautiful breasts…
    “Stop. Let it go.” He tried to thwart his impulse to build a relationship. He didn’t want commitment again, not yet . He knew that. But he couldn’t convince himself he wanted sex with no strings attached either. Damn it. He liked the woman he’d fucked, and he felt bad because of it ?
    I am so not normal.
    Sunday blurred into the next week. He worked hard on the Grace project, but he accomplished more at home than at the office. The desk gave him too many reminders that he wasn’t whom he wanted to be. Not a lighthearted Romeo like Mac, or even G eorge. Shane was a stick-in-the- mud serial date r. God, he needed to do more casual sex and let himself enjoy it without getting so attached .
    Didn’t he?
    Thursday night, his brother swung by to drop off the movies he’d “borrowed.”
    “Thief.” Shane snatched his Lord of the Rings trilogy from his sticky-fingered brother the moment he walked in the door .
    “Dude, relax. I’m sure your Aragorn fan club buddies will forgive you for lending them out.” George rolled his eyes. The kid did exasperated better than anyone, even Mac.
    “Don’t be a jerk . Next time ask before you take.”
    “Yeah, whatever.” George hopped onto Shane’s kitchen counter, despite being told a million times to use a chair. “So what’s going on?”
    “Nothing. Work. Why?”
    George shrugged, but he had that look in his eye , the one he wore when he was up to something.
    “What did you do?”
    “Me? Nothing.” George fiddled with the magazine next to him. “So , you talk to Lisa lately?”
    Shane just stared. “Lisa?” He hadn’t heard from th at wo man i n eight blessed months, since she’d dumped him for Mr. Tattoo . Yet hadn’t he been thinking about her just now? “Why ask about her?”
    “I know she broke your heart, man.” George looked into his eyes with an odd determination. “And I want you to be over it.”
    “Uh, I am.” I’m getting there, at least. “It’s obvious she and I would have been a bad mix.”
    “So if she came to you tomorrow, begging you to take her back, you wouldn’t?”
    An image of Shelby, on her knees, begging to suck his cock, appeared in his mind’s eye. He hurried to replace it with thoughts of his mother and cut off the erection before it could manifest fully. Jesus, he had issues if just the idea of Shelby could get him hard.
    “Dude?” George looked worried.
    “No way. Nope. I’m over Lisa. Permanently.” Disloyalty, and the things she’d said about him while trying to steal half