Page 36 of I Hate You More

“Why?” His hand hovered over his fly. “What are you going to do?”

“I won’t make a sound,” she promised. “And I’ll keep the exact same amount of clothing as I have on now. But that’s all I can guarantee. Everything else is fair game.”

She half expected him to argue, but as she lifted her hand to the lip of her bra, tracing the line where fabric met the soft swell of skin, all he seemed capable of was licking his lips.

“I can agree to those rules,” he said.

Ruby had spent the majority of her adult life escaping the rigidity and discipline of rules. Rules and competitions had stolen her childhood. They’d prepared her for a lifetime of disappointment and failure. They’d turned her mother into someone who could throw away a marriage to a nice, decent man.

But right now, looking into the eyes of a man whose life was shaped by rules of every variety, she could only remember the excitement. The anticipation.The joy.

“Then you’d better get started,” Ruby said with a nod toward his lower half. “May the best man win.”

It took all Ruby’s concentration not to make a sound as Spencer tugged at the fly of his slacks to reveal the flat planes of his lower abdomen. Caleb had made it a point to remove his shirt several times during training, so Ruby already knew that the Wilson genes were good ones. This ridiculous game they played—all those push-ups and crunches and burpees—only enhanced what nature had given them. They were lean without being thin, strong without being sculpted, muscular without making a show of it. But while Caleb preened and pranced and did everything he could to draw attention to himself, Spencer was content to focus on the task at hand.

The task atliteralhand.

No matter how many times or how strenuously she echoed the wordsthigh apexinside her head, she could only marvel at the vision before her. Spencer was a tall, well-built man with all the parts to match—and even better, he was weirdly unconcerned with it. After the amount of effort it had taken her to get to this point, she expected him to face his back toward her or at least be more furtive in his movements. There was nothing boastful about the way he handled himself, but there was nothing bashful about it, either.

It had been her intention to win this challenge as quickly as possible. There were all manner of tricks she could pull that didn’t involve making sounds or removing clothing. She had lips to bite and breasts to touch, eyelashes to bat and hips to undulate. In her experience, it didn’t take much to move a man to completion—especially when he was obviouslyupfor anything.

She hadn’t been counting on Spencer Wilson.

“One,” he said, and moved his hand so slowly that she could see his erection being revealed to her inch by painstaking inch.

He took a deep breath and did it again—even slower this time, though how such a thing was possible, she didn’t know. “Two.”

She glanced at the clock on the wall behind her. “Um, I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your brother, but he won’t be running errands forever. I doubt you’re going to want him walking in on this.”

Spencer didn’t comment on the fact that she’d made a sound—several of them, in fact—but smiled and shook his head instead. “I have plenty of time. He won’t be home for another forty-five minutes. I’ll use every single one of them if I have to.”

Forty-five minutes of this?Ruby didn’t think she’d make it.

“What if he gets done picking up the dry cleaning quickly? What if he forgot something and has to come back to get it?”

“He won’t.”

The confidence with which he uttered this rivaled the confidence with which he continued his penance. Three. Four. Five. Six. Each stroke seemed to come slower than the last, as if Spencer wanted to eke this moment out as long as humanly possible.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

“That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” she said. The whimper was back again, though she managed to keep it contained. “Arealstroke is fast and hard and—”

This time, he did put up a protest. “You’re not allowed to make any sounds. And I don’t need your advice on how to get myself off, thanks. I think I’ve got the mechanics worked out by now.”

“This doesn’t count.”

“Ten,” he said and stroked.

“You’re not doing it right.”

“Eleven,” he said. “Twelve.”

It occurred to her with a start that he was doing this on purpose—presenting himself like a god, showing how much control he had. It was the same thing he did whenever getting Wheezy to do what he wanted. He made the rules. He was in charge. He was the master.