Back to the Best Western

The Most Eligible Bachelorette — Bonus Chapter
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of The Most Eligible Bachelorette and contains major spoilers. Read the full novel first. This scene is explicit, graphic, and significantly hotter than the main book. You’ve been warned.

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Back to the Best Western

The reservation was under the name Navarro.

Not Calloway. Not Calloway-Navarro. Not any of the aliases Maeve’s security team had suggested when they’d learned their boss intended to spend her first anniversary at a $129-a-night hotel off a commercial boulevard. Just Navarro. My name. My credit card. My room.

Maeve stood in the parking lot in jeans and sneakers and the sweater she’d worn the night she showed up at Siren, and looked at the Best Western sign like she was seeing a cathedral.

“It’s exactly the same,” she said.

“Were you expecting renovations?”

“I was expecting it to feel different. It doesn’t. It feels—” She stopped. Touched the place on her wrist where the watch usually sat. She’d left it at home. Again. Our anniversary tradition, established today: no armor.

“It feels like the first time,” she said.

I took her hand. Led her through the lobby. Our room was on the second floor. Different room number, same layout. Queen bed with the ivory comforter. Window with the blackout curtains that didn’t quite meet in the middle. Bathroom with soap the size of a domino.

And across the parking lot, visible through the gap in the curtains: the Taco Bell. Still there. Still open. Still the most romantic landmark in our relationship, because romance, I’d learned, wasn’t about the setting. It was about the person you were in it with.

Maeve closed the door. I locked it. The click was the same—heavy, final, the sound of a space becoming private. The sound that had started everything a year ago.

“One year,” she said.

“One year.”

“One year since you brought me to the ugliest hotel room in Los Angeles and gave me the best morning of my life.”

“The mattress was terrible.”

“The mattress was perfect.”

“The mattress was objectively terrible. You said so. You said, and I quote, ‘this mattress is worse than I remembered.’”

“I said a lot of things that morning. Most of them were your name.”

The air in the room changed. Not gradually—immediately, the way it always did when Maeve stopped performing and started wanting. I could see it happen in real time: the shift in her posture, the squaring of her shoulders, the darkening of her gray-green eyes from casual to intent. The specific way her breathing changed—shallower, quicker—when she looked at me and decided she was done talking.

A year of this and the shift still hit me in the center of my body. Still made my pulse jump and my skin prickle and the space between my legs tighten with a want that was as familiar as my own heartbeat and as urgent as the first time.

“I brought something,” I said.

I opened my overnight bag—a bag I’d packed with deliberation and zero subtlety—and laid the contents on the nightstand like an offering. The purple one, because it was still her favorite—the curve she liked, the size she asked for by name now without blushing, the toy that had been the first thing she’d ever explicitly requested during sex and that still made her voice change when she said it. A newer addition in black, thicker, the one we’d bought together at the shop in the Village where the salesperson had compared Maeve’s selection process to a Series B evaluation and Maeve had not denied it. A bottle of the good lube—the silicone one, because a year of practice had taught us that preparation wasn’t a chore but a ritual, and the ritual was its own foreplay. Two silk ties from Maeve’s closet that she’d pretended not to notice me packing.

And, because I was Dani Navarro and I believed in setting a tone: a bodega coffee, cold by now, purchased from the same bodega on the same boulevard.

Maeve looked at the coffee. Looked at the toys. Looked at the silk ties. Looked at me.

“You are the most romantic person I have ever met,” she said, “and I include the time you told me my Spanish was the whitest thing you’d ever heard.”

She crossed the room. Put her hands on my face. “I love you,” she said. “I love you in this hotel room and in our apartment and at board meetings and in bodegas and in every room I’ve ever been afraid to enter. You made me brave.”

“Shut up and kiss me.”

She kissed me. A year of kissing and it still hit like the first time. I knew that her lower lip was more sensitive than her upper. That she liked it when I bit gently and pulled. That the sound she made when my tongue found hers—a low, involuntary hum that vibrated against my mouth—was the sound of Maeve Calloway letting go, and it still made me wet faster than any deliberate touch.

She tasted like mints and coffee and the particular, irreducible chemistry of Maeve—clean and warm and underneath it, the vetiver perfume she still wore because I’d told her once that it smelled like being pushed against a wall in a room you shouldn’t be in.

We undressed each other with quick, sure efficiency. I hooked my thumbs under the waistband of her underwear and pulled them down slowly, watching her face. She stood naked in front of me and I looked at her the way I’d looked at her the first time: slowly, thoroughly, with the kind of attention that felt like worship.

She pulled my underwear off with less patience and her hand slid between my legs before I’d finished stepping out of them. Two fingers pressing against my clit through the slick that was already there, already evidence, and the contact made my hips jerk and my breath catch.

“Already?” she said. Low and rough and amused.

“Your mouth. On me. While I use the purple one on you.”

Her fingers stilled against me. I felt her breathing change—a hitch, a catch, the specific respiratory disruption that occurred when Maeve Calloway heard something she wanted described in explicit terms.

I pushed her backward onto the bed. Climbed over her, straddling her hips.

“Tell me what you want,” I said. Our opening. Our ritual.

“I want your mouth. I want you to take your time. And then I want the purple one, and I want you on top, and I want you to fuck me until the headboard hits the wall hard enough that whoever is on the other side gets a very clear picture of what’s happening.”

“Anything else?”

She glanced at the silk ties. “Tie my wrists.”

My stomach clenched. A year ago, she’d been so afraid of losing control she’d kept her clothes on while she made me come. Now she was asking to have her hands bound. The distance she’d traveled in twelve months was immeasurable.

I kissed her wrists—left, then right, pressing my mouth against her pulse points, feeling her heartbeat quick and hard against my lips. Then I wrapped the silk around her wrists and secured them to the headboard’s metal frame. Not tight—snug. Firm enough to feel the restraint, loose enough to pull free if she needed to.

Maeve tested the ties. The silk held. Her arms were stretched above her head, her body long and bare and open, and the sight of her—Maeve Calloway, who had spent her entire adult life controlling every variable, lying on a Best Western bed with her hands tied and her body exposed and trust in her eyes instead of fear—was the most erotic thing I had ever seen.

I started at her throat. Kissed the tendon, the hollow, the spot where her pulse was hammering. Her breasts—I took the left one in my mouth, sucked gently, and she arched beneath me with a sound that went straight between my legs. I used my teeth—lightly, the way she liked, the way that made her pull against the ties and gasp.

My hand between her legs—not inside, not yet, just pressing, cupping, feeling the heat and the wet through my fingers. She was soaked. The evidence of how much she wanted this slicked my palm, and I pressed the heel of my hand against her clit and felt her hips grind upward with a desperation that made me groan against her skin.

I settled between her legs. Looked up at her—arms stretched above her, hands wrapped in silk, chest heaving, eyes dark and waiting.

“I love you,” I said, and put my mouth on her.

The first touch of my tongue made her cry out—full-throated, uninhibited, the cry of a woman who had learned that being heard was not a weakness but a gift. I went slow. Deliberately, luxuriously slow—long, flat strokes of my tongue from her entrance to her clit, tasting her, savoring her, the salt and the heat and the specific, intimate flavor that was Maeve and only Maeve. She rolled her hips against my face, trying to direct the pace, but the ties held her arms and my hands held her hips and the combination of restraint and patience was exactly the dynamic that undid her.

I circled her clit with the tip of my tongue. Light. Teasing. Not enough pressure to get her there, just enough to keep her climbing. She swore—a string of profanity that would have shocked the shareholders of Calloway Ventures—and pulled against the silk and said my name in a voice that cracked on both syllables.

“Dani—please—”

“Please what?”

“Please stop teasing and make me come.”

I pressed my tongue flat against her clit. Firm. Direct. And slid two fingers inside her at the same time—deep, curving, finding the spot that I’d mapped months ago and that made her voice change pitch every single time. She cried out—a high, sharp sound—and her thighs clenched around my head and her hips bucked and I held steady, tongue and fingers working together, building the rhythm that her body was already chasing.

She came hard. I felt it everywhere—the clench around my fingers, the pulse against my tongue, the shaking in her legs, the raw, broken sound that tore out of her throat and filled the room. Her hands twisted in the silk ties. Her back arched off the mattress. Her eyes squeezed shut and then flew open, finding mine, and the eye contact during the orgasm—watching her face while she came apart, seeing every unguarded second of it—was the most intimate act either of us had ever performed.

I gentled my mouth but didn’t stop. Slowed the pace of my fingers, softened the pressure of my tongue, and brought her down gradually while the aftershocks pulsed through her. She was panting. Trembling. Tears at the corners of her eyes—not sadness, never sadness, just overflow.

I kissed her thigh. Crawled up her body and kissed her mouth, and she tasted herself on me and made a sound halfway between a moan and a laugh.

“Untie me,” she whispered.

“Not yet.”

Her eyes went wide. Then dark. Then the specific shade of want that said I trust you completely and I want whatever comes next and I am not afraid.