Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) by Julia Kent Page A

out into the street and run away from me. Like I have tentacles and crawl into your body at night to turn you into a pod person.”
    “You have one tentacle that crawls into me at night,” she said suggestively.
    “And if I had more, they would join it.” As if his cock were listening, it rose slowly, cockeyed ( no pun intended ) at first, then slowly straightened out, long and strong, the sedate politeness of his foreskin turtlenecking down.
    “Seriously?” She made a dismissive, but joking, sound as she stared at his rod. “You’re ready again?”
    “Always ready.”
    “I know that’s not true, because there was that one time—”
    Alex grabbed some underwear and quickly put them on, as if his penis were offended by the conversation and needed to have its ears covered. “That one time I’d just come off an unexpected thirty-eight-hour labor, drank five beers, and you rolled over and started humping me! Give a guy a break.” He stretched a simple, moss-green t-shirt over his head, pulling the thin cotton with a furious rush. “And besides, I still managed to make you come a few times!” 
    “They need to patent that tongue of yours,” she agreed.
    “Can we stop talking about the one time I couldn’t perform to your satisfaction?” 
    “It’s not that you didn’t—” she protested. 
    “Or shall I bring up the time you fell asleep during sex?”
    “Hey! Not fair! I was on painkillers after that dental surgery and—” The look on his face made her shut up. He was right. Not fair. “Fine. Truce.” The quick kiss they shared righted the world. The steamy gurgle from the kitchen made it all even better.
    Sitting at her— their —kitchen table, sipping from breast-shaped mugs Darla had given Josie as a gag birthday gift ( “Mama won them in an online sweepstakes contest. You should have seen the molded chocolates that came with them!” ), she sighed with contentment. And then she ruined the moment.
    “I need your help in convincing Mike and Dylan to sit down and talk with Trevor and Joe.”
    Alex’s surprised look quickly turned to confusion. “What the hell would those four have in common? Oh…” His voice went low and his eyes registered suspicion. “What are you up to? Is this some stunt for Good Things Come in Threes?” 
    “No! It’s not a stunt. It’s more that Laura’s so lost lately, and even though she’s happy and life is better now that Jillian’s out of the infant phase, it seems like she needs to talk to someone who’s in the same kind of unique relationship.”
    “I’m not connecting the dots.”
    “She and Darla are getting together for lunch at Jeddy’s.”
    “And you want Mike and Dylan to have lunch with Trevor and Joe? Joe? The kid is an inscrutable blowhard asshole—”
    “You still can’t let go of the fact that you smashed your face into a parking sign because you saw me touching him.”
    She expected protest, not: “Damn right I can’t. Fucker.”
    “Alex! You’re still jealous? I was touching his heart surgery scar at Darla’s insistence! He was shirtless and we were on the porch and you and I were broken up and—”
    His face had gone bright red and his fingers floated up to the tiny scar along his eye. It had been nearly a year and yet…
    “It’s not jealousy in the traditional sense. You never dated him, never kissed him, never…but in that moment I was so lost without you, and running past your house—no matter how juvenile—was a way to connect with you. And then to run past and see you touching another man just destroyed my world.”
    She gave him a look of sympathy and pain. He took a long drink of his coffee and continued. “Yeah. The guy bugs me. And even if you’d never touched him and I didn’t have that imprinted in my mind on top of my emotional state at the time, he’s a judgmental, condescending prick anyhow. The kind of guy I couldn’t stand in high school and college.’
    “He’s twenty-three! Half the guys I knew