Unlikely by Sylvie Fox

She just hadn’t imagined that her very responsible friend could be so careless. She winced thinking back to Saturday night with Ryan. She’d been so self-conscious of her body, of the sex act itself, that pulling out her unused box of condoms would have been mortifying. But seeing Holly overwhelmed by an unplanned pregnancy convinced Sophie that she’d have to get over her embarrassment and take charge of protecting herself—that was, if she ever got the chance again.
     
    Ryan picked at the Cobb salad his assistant Evangeline had brought. Healthy eating was one thing, but sometimes he just wanted real food for lunch. Shoving more eggs, bacon, and avocado into his mouth, and ignoring all that lettuce, he worried over the pages of notes he’d made on a yellow legal pad. In bold print at the top of the pad, he’d written, “Sophie.” It had taken the better part of three days, snatching whatever time he could in the office between meetings, to come up with a plan to persuade Sophie to give this lawyer a chance.
    Before he lost his nerve, and the afternoon work demands overwhelmed him, he clipped on his headphones and dialed the eight one eight number Sophie had so reluctantly given him.
    “Sophie Reid,” she answered crisply.
    Ryan paused, flustered. She sounded so grown up and well dressed on the phone. He’d been imagining her far more vulnerable and, well, naked.
    “Can I help you?” Her voice broke the static filled air.
    Thank goodness he was wearing headphones otherwise he probably would have dropped an ordinary receiver into the cradle out of sheer embarrassment.
    “It’s Ryan. Ryan Becker,” he echoed her no-nonsense tone. Wow. That was stupid. She already knew his name.
    A quiet “Oh” was all he heard through his headset.
    Unsettled by the sparseness of her side of the conversation, he waded in. “First, I’m sorry I didn’t call before now. I’ve been swamped at work. But I’ve devised an eleven -point plan to get you to orgasm,” he said, dropping to a whisper with the last word.
    Sophie laughed. The full throaty sound arrowed straight to his groin. “Not a ten or twelve point plan?”
    “No, eleven is the number I ended up with.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the plan is predicated on you coming out with me Friday night.”
    “I think maybe that’s something I can agree to.” She hesitated. “What’s the catch, Mr. Three Syllable Man?”
    Did he sound that much like a pompous lawyer? He was going to have to get more friends who spoke plain English. “The only catch is that our date, so to speak, would be in Big Bear. And it wouldn’t be just Friday, but the weekend as well.”
    “What time are you picking me up?” she asked.
    Wow. That was much easier than he thought it would be. He’d expected her to grill him on his eleven-point plan. He’d made a dozen bullet points to convince her to go. She never ceased to surprise him.
    “T -two o’clock okay?” he stammered. “I, um, looked up the production schedule for your show and it seems that you’re off…”
    “Yep. Studio teacher said the kids’ hours were too low. Nothing you can do about that. I’ll see you Friday.”
    “Oh, you can bring Sasha,” he said before she could hang up.
    “Cool.” She rang off.
    He pressed the disconnect button on his wireless headphones and yanked them off, dropping them unceremoniously on his desk. Standing before his view of the ocean, he raked a hand through his hair and shook his arms, trying to rid himself of the nervous feeling that had gripped him during the entire call.
    Looking at the tent in his pleated pants, he wondered how he could ever have thought she wasn’t his type. Everything about Sophie made him hot, from the sexy rasp in her voice to the slight protrusion of her dusky areolas. His mouth watered at the prospect of feeling her hard nipples in his mouth again. He swore there and then, he would do things right this time, delaying his own pleasure for as long as