Anything For You by Sarah Mayberry

was anymore.
    “Hey, Delaney, you dirty dog,” Debbie said meaningfully as Delaney paused to collect her mail.
    A bone-deep heat rushed up Delaney’s chest and shoulders and into her face. Debbie knew. How did she know? Had Sam told her? Why would he do that?
    “Wh-what?” Delaney managed to stammer.
    “Look at you—I guess Jake must be as good as all the rumors say,” Debbie said, eyebrows wiggling salaciously.
    Delaney blinked. What in the hell was the other woman talking about? Jake? Who was Jake?
    In a flash, her brain caught up. Debbie was talking about Jake, the printing rep. The man she’d had dinner with last night. The man with the take-no-prisoners tongue. Riiiiiiight.
    “So how was it? Did you go somewhere nice?” Debbie asked, all avid interest.
    “Um, yes. Dinner was just…. fine,” Delaney said, momentarily stumped for a way to deflect the other woman’s curiosity. But maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing if the office staff thought she had something going on with Jake. It might stop them from taking one look at her and realizing that she’d shagged Sam senseless that very morning.
    Summoning a strained little smile, she flicked her eyes across to Sam’s office. To her relief, it was clearly empty. He hadn’t arrived yet. Good. She had some time to get herself together, put her game face on. When he asked her what was going on, why she’d thrown him to the ground and had her way with him, she was going to need all her hard-won sangfroid where he was concerned to convince him that the reason she’d jumped him had been hormonal. Or astrological. Or political—whatever worked, in fact. Anything but that she was in love with him, and had been all her adult life.
    Her relief at his absence lasted about an hour. Then she began to feel uneasy. Was he not coming in at all? Had she scared him so much that he was now too terrified to set foot in his own workplace?
    Just before lunch time, Sam hobbled in, a graze on his left cheekbone, his knee a bloody mess of scraped skin. Delaney sat in her office, her heart pounding at about a million miles an hour as she watched Debbie cross to the kitchenette to collect the first-aid kit. Taking a deep breath, Delaney pushed herself out of her chair and intercepted the receptionist as she returned to Sam’s side.
    “I’ll do it,” she said, relieving Debbie of the kit. She’d cleaned Sam’s cuts and grazes so often that she practically had a medical degree, and it was good to have something to break the ice before they discussed what had happened.
    Indicating Sam should head for his office, Delaney followed him in and waited while he propped himself on his desk. Both of them were very careful to avoid eye contact, looking anywhere but at each other.
    “What happened?” Delaney asked as she knelt to inspect his knee. It looked a lot worse than it was, she judged.
    “Got slammed doing a boardslide grind.” Sam shrugged.
    Delaney knew this meant Sam had been trying to slide his skateboard down the handrail on a flight of stairs. It was highly dangerous, but a spectacular stunt if pulled off. Unfortunately, most of the time it ended in a spill.
    “Hmm,” she said, tipping some antiseptic onto a square of sterile gauze.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.
    “Nothing. Except that you could have killed yourself,” she said, pressing the soaked gauze onto his wound.
    “Ow!” Sam howled, flinching away.
    “Don’t be such a sook. I have to clean it up so I can see where the gravel is,” Delaney said matter-of-factly.
    Despite everything that had happened between them, it felt good to wrap her hand around his calf and return his foot to its resting place on her bent thigh. His skin was warm and his muscles firm. She’d wondered for so many years what it would be like to sleep with Sam. She’d imagined his hands on her body, tried to envisage the length and breadth of his erection, what it would feel like inside her. Nothing had prepared her