Panty Dropper (A Sexy Standalone Contemporary Romance) (11 page)

“Oh, fuck,” he said, and his hips jerked faster and faster until we were both screaming out. I dug my nails into Leo’s back as he sent me completely over the edge, squeezing myself around him as I pushed my hips up to meet his as the release came, bursting through the scream in my mouth and the explosion on my pussy. Leo groaned with me and fell into the crook of my neck, both of us completely spent.

We lay panting like that for several moments, me trying to get my senses back while not wanting to let go of Leo. He had my head spinning.

“Even if an earthquake started right now,” he said, still panting, “I wouldn’t be able to move.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if you just caused an earthquake,” I said, my hand on my forehead as I tried to catch my breath.

He sat up on his forearm and looked down at me, a playful grin on his flushed face. “That was all you,” he said, lightly kissing my lips.

“Please,” I said, but couldn't stop myself from grinning.

“You are far sexier than you know, Sophie,” he said.

We fell asleep like that, tangled in each other’s limbs, a happy grin on both our faces. I wondered if I’d ever feel so full and content again.

W
hen I woke
up the next morning, it wasn’t with Leo Armstrong, the youngest studio head in Epix history. It wasn’t even Leo Armstrong, the panty dropper playboy. It was Leo Armstrong, the man who hated pop music and loved a good prosecco. The man who wanted to try new things with his studio, things that might get him laughed out of town. The man whose one kiss could send me to another planet on a wave of ecstasy. Leo Armstrong, the man laying beside me so peacefully, his lashes resting on his cheekbones, his breathing deep and even, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world instead of a billion dollar empire on his shoulders and millions of eyeballs watching his every move.

Of course, those thoughts were immediately followed by the conflicting emotions I still had around what this thing between us really was and the lies I was continuing to tell.

Leo had made it perfectly clear that our relationship wasn’t serious.

And his history with other women made it almost impossible to forget that someday soon, I would become just another notch on his belt, another woman in his long list of female conquests.

But I like him. I really do like him
, I kept thinking, as if that changed anything.

I knew, in the end, how I felt about Leo didn’t make an ounce of difference about any of it.

I leaned over him and kissed his cheek, then his forehead. He took in a breath and stretched his long body even longer, the sheet, which had been carelessly draped over his perfect body, now exposed his strong chest.

Without opening his eyes, he reached for me and pulled me close, burying his face in my neck, making me squeal with delight.

“That tickles,” I said, pulling away and laughing. He growled and bit some more, moving his still-naked body on top of mine.

“You don’t know what you do to me,” he said into my neck. From the rising cock between his legs, I had a good idea. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him close, already wet and open and ready for him.

After teasing my neck, Leo leaned on one elbow and looked down at me, brushing the hair out of my face. When he whispered my name, I reached down for him, taking him in my hand and guiding him into me. He let out a soft moan, his eyes falling shut. He slowly slid in and out of me, and as much as I wanted him to pump as hard into me as he had last night, I also wanted this, wanted this gentleness to make it last longer. Every moment Leo was inside me was a moment I was in total, blissful heaven. I moved my body in tandem with his, reaching to hold his firm, tight ass in my hands, feeling the motion and matching the rhythm he made. He kissed my neck but gently, sweetly. He whispered in my ear how sexy I was, let his hand roam over my breast, all the while never stopping, always moving inside me.

He pushed my knee open, making me feel more of him. He shifted his position so that his hard, wet cock moved against my clit, bringing me so close I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut against the intense pleasure of his body inside of mine. But Leo kept his steely blue eyes on mine, watching me as he moved, as I panted and grew more heated, holding him closer and tighter. He picked up his speed but slightly, moving in just the right place until I didn’t think I could hold it off any longer.

“God, Sophie,” he said, watching me, and hearing my name on his lips sent me straight over, pleasure bursting out of me, a loud cry coming from deep in my throat as I squeezed my eyes against it all. I rocked my hips up to his, wanting every last bit. Leo groaned and dropped his head back into my neck where it fit so perfectly. After a moment, he slowly lowered my leg.

“Don’t go,” I said, grabbing his ass again as he tried to slide out of me. That was the last thing I wanted.

He chuckled into my neck. “Should we just stay here like this all day?”

“All weekend,” I said. What I wanted to say was,
Forever
.

“So you’re staying all weekend, I see?”

I immediately cringed. How foolish, how presumptuous to think I could stay here, that he didn’t have a million better things to do.

“No, I mean, I’m sure you have…”

Leo stopped my worries by pushing his still-hard cock further inside me. Moving gently he said, “Stay as long as you like.”

I turned to look at him, eye to eye. I ran my hand over the morning’s stubble, golden and tan and only slightly prickly. Instead of answering him, I kissed him.

When we finally untangled our bodies I was sticky with love and starving hungry from all the energy. Leo said I could take a shower while he went searching for food in the kitchen.

“To be honest, I have no idea what’s stocked here,” he said.

Before he went, I had to have him help me figure out the shower. There wasn’t just a knob to turn the water on. It was all digitized so that the temperature of the water could be set at whatever the user liked.

“It doesn’t have to be this complicated,” I said, standing naked in the shower big enough for ten people as he punched buttons on the keypad.

“I honestly only know how to do it for myself,” he said. “I just push this button and it’s set on the temperature I like.”

“So push it!”

“Screw it, then I’m getting in with you.”

“I win,” I cheered as he tossed his boxers and started the water. It was colder than I liked, but Leo’s arms around me, taking great care to lather every part of my body as the two of us grinned like fools made me feel warmer than I had in years.

And then Leo made me breakfast.
Leo Armstrong made me breakfast
. He found some eggs and turkey sausage that he cooked up with apple slices on the side and two steaming cups of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. The sun was shining over the ocean, showing a new view than what I’d had last night—the sapphire blue water kicking up on the beach, locals taking morning strolls or walking their dogs.

“You know,” Leo said, breaking into my zoned-out daze. “We haven’t talked about the ending.”

…of our relationship
, is what I heard at the end of his sentence, even though he hadn’t spoken it. I wasn’t prepared to think about anything but each moment I had with Leo, at least until Monday morning. Besides, I knew what he meant.

“The ending of the screenplay,” I said. We hadn’t made it all the way through the script last night so I actually didn’t know how the story ended. I pictured Vivienne, the nurse, setting up shop on the Gold Coast and her true love, Ian, teaching her how to surf.

“Come on,” Leo said, setting down his coffee mug. “I want to show you something.”

He led me across the smooth, shiny floors to an office on the other end of the house. From a shelf behind a desk he took a silver picture frame and showed it to me. It was a faded photo of a woman in a white halter swimsuit, grinning on a beach.

“Who is this?” I asked. “She’s beautiful.”

“That’s my grandmother,” he said, “on Bondi Beach in 1952.”

I looked up at him. “That’s in Australia.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Like your script.” He nodded. “Is this Vivienne?”

“Technically that’s Alice,” he said. “But Vivienne is a version of my grandmother.”

Putting it all together, I said, “So the story in the screenplay is about your grandmother? It’s a true story?”

“No, not entirely,” he said. “But all fiction has a bit of the writer’s truth in it. I didn’t want to do a straight re-telling of my family’s story.”

Yesterday we’d talked a lot about the characters—how Vivienne was a strong-willed woman, bold for the time she lived in. She was a nurse in the army and volunteered to go help soldiers during the Korean War. Her fiancé, Ronald, practically forbade her from going. And during her leave—her vacation while stationed in Korea—she and a couple of her girlfriends went to Australia where she met Ian, a dashing Aussie with a mega-watt smile. Leo and I talked about how Ian was everything Ronald was not—spontaneous, full of life, adventurous. Things that Vivienne wanted in her life but felt stifled by being a young woman in the 1950s. But we hadn’t gotten beyond that.

“Is she still alive?” I asked. “Your grandmother?”

“No,” he said. “She passed recently, actually.”

“What about your grandfather,” I said. “The Ian character?” I wondered where his photo was.

Leo shook his head. “He’s not my grandfather. When she finished her service in Korea and came back to the States, she picked up right where she left with Ronald.”

I looked back down at the smiling woman in the photo, clearly so happy and full of life. “But what about Ian?”

“What about him?” Leo said, rather harshly. “In my family, there are obligations—to be with the right person, to have the right job, live in the right city. I’m the one to break that cycle.” He took the photo from me and set it back on the shelf. “I keep her photo to remind me to live my own life. My parents followed a similar path as my grandparents. They were two people who never should have been together but their families deemed it a good match. They divorced before I was four and went on to marry three other times. All I’ve seen my whole life is a series of failed relationships, disastrous marriages, useless stepsiblings. My family has become a wasteland of various strangers who have passed through on the way to another failed relationship. I won’t have that in my life. I’ll never marry, and when a relationship ends, that’s it. I walk away and don’t look back.” He shrugged as if this was all normal. “It’s the way I learned. And I think it’s an interesting enough story to tell.”

“So the movie isn’t a romance,” I said. “It’s a tragedy.”

“Of sorts,” he said. He turned his eyes to me and said, “A cautionary tale.”

It crushed me to think of anyone living that way. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. To cover myself I added, “In the script, I mean. People like love. They like romance.”

He smiled at me, but it was a sad kind of smile. “That’s what I love about you, Sophie Adams. You’re still untarnished enough to believe that.”

It took me a moment to recover for the words. The
I love you
bit—okay,
I love
about
you
bit. But then I heard what he was really saying—that I was naïve, and he would never be anything more to me than the mind-blowing sex of last night.

“I don’t want you to have any false expectations,” he said, putting the final nail through my heart. “With me or the ending of the script.”

I steeled myself against the words, reminding myself again what my goal was—that damned article.

“I’m confused,” I said to Leo, leaning on the desk. “Are you using me for my body or my mind?”

Leo expression softened as he looked at me. “Both. Equally.”

“What do you want to use right now?” I teased.

He leaned across the desk and gently kissed my lips. “Both,” he said.

We ended up back in the living—working on the script. Every time I suggested a tweak for a scene or length of dialogue, Leo pushed me one step further.

“That’s the easy thing to say,” he’d tell me of the suggested dialogue. “Audiences expect her to say that, or in that way. Go deeper,” he’d say. “Say it stronger.” And so I’d come up with a better way for the character to state her point, or a better scene for Vivienne and Ian to meet for the first time.

The work thrilled me more than I ever thought it would. Leo was not easy on me. He was demanding and took on a tone that intimidated me. But I wanted to do well by him, and the story he wanted to tell. Before I knew it, the sun was setting, and Leo ordered dinner to be delivered.

We took a break to eat on the deck as the sun set. We dug into the food realizing how hungry we’d become. Once we got started on the script, we hadn’t taken a single break. The time flew by.

“You never did tell me,” Leo said as he bit into his taco. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“Didn’t we decide that’s a minefield?”

“No, we decided not to talk about music,” he said.

“You decided,” I said. “I could talk about it all day.”

“Please don’t,” he said. “My ears can’t take it.”

“So what, then?”

“Movie,” he said again. “Your favorite. What is it?”

I really didn’t want to tell him. It felt too personal or something. I once read this book that I fell madly in love with. I couldn’t stop talking about it, so my ex, Paul, said he wanted to read it, too. When he finished, he deemed it “obvious,” and I’d felt as if someone had just told me my firstborn was ugly or something. I swore I’d never make that mistake again.

But since I gave Leo grief about his ending, I decided to lead by example and tell him.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” I said, hoping to soften the blow in case he did laugh or roll his eyes at me.

“Easy,” Leo said without an ounce of shame. “
Apocalypse Now
.”

I groaned. “Should have known. Big, bloody, manly war movie. You really are in the right business.”

“‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning,’” he quoted. “Best line in cinema history.”

“Gah,” I said.

“Come on, Sophie. You should know me well enough by now to know that I am deeper than that,” he said. “
Apocalypse Now
explores the darkness in all of us. The darkness of war, the insatiable appetite for destruction. It’s human nature on celluloid. It’s brilliant.”

“More like human nature on steroids,” I grumbled.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I told you mine. Now tell me yours. What’s your favorite movie?”

I paused, not for dramatic affect but out of uncertainty. Flashbacks of Paul’s diss washed over me, but I pushed past. “Fine. It’s
Dead Poets Society
.”

“Never saw it,” he said, scooping up a bite of rice.

That was it? No reaction? I couldn't decide if I was relieved or annoyed.

“How is that possible?” I asked. “You’re in the movie business. That is one of the classics.”

He waved away my comment. “Do you know how many classics there are? It’s an ever-shifting list of films that are randomly deemed amazing for one reason or another. I don’t want to see them all, and I don’t need to see them all.”

“But…
Dead Poets Society
! It’s…amazing!”

“Remind me never to have you write film reviews,” he said.