He laughed again. The warm timbre of his voice rose from his throat and she could virtually feel the vibrations of his vocal cords between her legs. Everything about him was sexy. And still he refused to sleep with her.

‘You always have sex on your mind,’ he said.

Judith licked her lips. ‘It’s like telling someone they can’t eat chocolate for six months. It’s bound to be all they want to do.’ She could see by the boyish grin on his face that she wasn’t going to get any sympathy. ‘It’s pure torture,’ she lamented.

‘Focus, baby. We’re almost there.’ Wes wasn’t just referring to the mountain cabin where they’d be spending the weekend in the peace and quiet of the snowy vacation town. They were almost to the six-month mark, an arbitrary amount of time picked by him before they could have sex. Six months of dates and late-night conversations, six months of introductions to each other’s friends and families. Six months of holding hands, holding each other, even bathing together. Six months of the lightest of kisses and sleeping next to him, in his arms, but never taking that last, dirty plunge into intimacy.

Before Judith started seeing him, she would have argued that someone who believed purposefully not having sex could be as arousing and satisfying as sex itself was not only wrong, but probably insane too. ‘Have you ever even screwed?’ she would have screamed at them. How can not having that connection be better than having it?

But it was the challenge that attracted her to him in the first place. Before they first went out, she had overheard a couple girls in the office talking about him. Jenny, one floor down, had told Beth up here, who had told these two. Wes over in marketing was a waiter. No, not a waiter ‑ a wait-er. Jenny had gone out with him a few times before she realised that he had no intention of sleeping with her, at least not any time soon. He wouldn’t even eat her out or let her give him head. Upon hearing that, one had to wonder. Jenny was a bombshell. She was nicely endowed, successful and charming, despite her penchant for kissing and telling, or in this case, not-kissing and telling. The gossip travelled up the line and then those two, over coffee and creamer and next to her office door, had it figured out. He was gay, or fanatically religious. One or the other.

Wes Lancaster was not a man who went unnoticed, even without weird ideas regarding sex peppering his office reputation. He had obliviousness to his appeal that made him even sexier and a confidence in everything he did that made him a hit with most everyone, especially the clients, female and male alike. She knew he wasn’t gay. The way he’d taken a nice, long and confidently casual look at her cleavage when she had bent over his desk one day and reamed him for a misstep with an important client had confirmed that he most definitely appreciated what the female form had to offer.

A few days later, he walked into her office and asked her out. She laughed in his face and considered ripping him a new one again. He sat, brazenly perched on the corner of her desk. She took a long look at him, at the hint of lean muscle beneath his suit, at the way his fingertips played with the edge of her desk just nervously enough to come off as cute, and her curiosity got the better of her. She decided she liked a good challenge now and again. What she didn’t realise at the time was that he did too.

‘It’s about maximising pleasure,’ Wes told her on their third date. ‘And not just the sexual pleasure at the end of the six months. The pleasure of getting to know someone, growing close to them, being able to focus on that instead of the physical. But also the satisfaction you get after you’ve waited and you finally take that step. It feels so right.’