Chapter Twenty – Angela
Chapter Twenty
Angela
“I’m glad you have a driver,” I told Mark.
We’d almost reached the bottle of wine’s end.
Neither one of us had brought up the elephant in the room—what’d happened this morning, and what Mark was presumably going to do about it.
Maybe he’d already set things in motion.
I sent my finger swirling along the rim of my wine glass, wondering if I wanted to ask.
He finished off his glass and set it back down. “Did you do what I told you to do?”
I looked up at him and then down again, flushing, not just from the wine.
I’d thought about it, twice, when the panic had started to rise—picturing myself in his office again, my thighs pressed against the sharp edge of his desk as he took my ass, something we hadn’t yet done, imagining feeling myself filled by him someplace new. “Yes,” I answered, a truthful whisper.
“Did it help?”
I nodded faintly.
“Good.”
I’d had enough wine to feel a little spinny, but not so much as to make bad decisions, and I knew that as I looked over at him. “Would you like to spend the night?”
A knowing smile spread across his face. “I would.”
At that, I put one finger to my lips for quiet, and stood and took his hand.
Halfway up the stairs, his hands were on my ass.
I slapped them away, then finished pulling him to my room, past Rabbit’s and the bathroom’s door.
My bedroom was not set up for company, I had dresses all over a decorating screen, a vanity full of potions, and my queen didn’t look big enough for the both of us.
He walked in and looked around, naturally gravitating toward the bed.
“I feel like I’m in high school.”
“Me too.” I felt like I’d just snuck a boy in. “I’ve never brought anyone home before. So, uh, welcome to me.” I spun around, indicating my four walls.
He made a show of pacing the room, stopping in front of a framed 12 x 12 painting of a curled and sleeping rabbit, so perfect that only brush strokes proved it wasn’t a photo. “That’s lovely—is it your work?”
“Jack made it for me,” I said. “A long time ago.”
“Ahh.” He surveyed everything else in silence, stopping only to close the blinds on my windows.
I knew what he meant by it—he didn’t want anyone to see us fuck—but I still didn’t know what I was hoping for.
I got the sex. I’d always gotten the sex.
But him, here, really knowing me? Except for the werewolf part… .
The wine made me do it. “Mark—why me?”
He turned back from his inspection of my belongings, looking over a shelf of clay animals that Rabbit had crafted and I’d kept. “What?”
“I mean—I’m a hassle.”
He smiled. “A sexy hassle.”
“This is Vegas. It’s pretty easy to find hassle-free sex here.”
His head tilted as he considered me. “I want to help you.”
“I know you do. But before all that, and before this morning. I know why I want to be with you—you’re smart and handsome, you make me laugh, and we are epic in bed. But—why would someone like you want to be with me?”
He sat down on my bed in front of me. “I’ve been here for a while, ever since my uncle told me to come out here and go to law school.
” He put his hands behind him, leaning back into my unmade bed.
“I spent a long time doing things I shouldn’t have.
Things I thought would make me happy. I had a really fierce coke habit.
Not because I even really liked it, but because of who I was and who I hung with, it was expected of me.
After I flunked out of school though—I don’t know, I realized I wasn’t happy.
I stopped the coke, switched schools and started studying.
It took me awhile longer to get over my showgirl habit, but I kicked them too.
” His lips curved into a gentle smile. “All day long I talk to people who have something to prove, guys who want to chest bump me, and women who live plastic lives. And you? You’re like this whirlwind of reality.
You get what’s important in life. I love that your kid matters to you, more than anything—more than me.
That you care about, and take care of, your mom.
I don’t want to take you away from all this—I just want to add to it. ”
My heart swelled to bursting. And he pushed himself forward, I thought to stand, but instead he went down on his knees.
“Come here,” he said, and I did, stepping forward.
He knelt, his hands starting at my calves, running down them to unlace my sandals, helping me to kick them off, one by one, and then he began to touch me.
His hands trailed slowly, like he was a sculptor, molding me, stroking my calves one by one, then tracing the backs of my knees, before coming around to push up my thighs, his thumbs coming dangerously close, before he pushed back to palm the curve of my ass and reach up, up, up to finger the waistband of my underwear and tug.
He pulled the cotton down with just as much care as he’d stroked up, deliberately, like he was unwrapping a present the old fashioned way, saving the wrapping paper.
I wanted to help him, to shuck it off and skip to what I hoped was coming—but I loved how he was taking his time.
I shifted from foot to foot, helping him free me from the thin cotton chain, then he looked up.
“Pull your skirt up for me, Angie.”
I whispered, “Okay,” and held my skirt up like a peasant girl stepping over a puddle, as he leaned forward to kiss the insides of my thighs.
I gasped lightly—I’d known this was coming, and yet—I spread my legs to make more room, to show him more of me.
He took one of my thighs in both of his hands and started kissing, nuzzling me up from my knee.
I could feel the roughness of his beard’s shadow chasing the heat of his breath from each kiss as his hands crawled up, moving now to push my thighs apart.
I arched toward him, and he murmured his assent into my thigh, creeping ever higher until he was looking up at me, his amber eyes dark, and my pussy aching.
One hand reached up to press up my stomach and stretch me up, the other held a thigh.
Pinned between his hands, his mouth came up and kissed.
Mark slid the flat of his tongue across my clit, forward and back, rolling it out from under its hood. If he could just keep doing that, stay there like some delicious machine made for my pleasure—I went weak in the knees and moaned softly.
He rose up and came closer, to kiss more of me, to move his tongue more roughly as his lips sucked and pulled me open.
His chin ground up and in and I was not ladylike in the way I pressed down to give him more.
I couldn’t help but watch him—my strong and dangerous giant, tamed enough to kneel to take me.
No, not tamed, but confident. To know that he knew what I wanted, and how best to give it to me.
I shuddered with a sudden release of power, feeling safe, feeling—possessed—and—I dropped my skirt and wound both my hands into his hair and started to ride.
He grabbed hold of my ass, the strength of his grip betraying his urgency.
I started to use his mouth like I might a toy, thinking only of myself.
I closed my eyes and pulled him harder onto me, grinding my clit against his tongue, listening to him purr as my wetness flowed down around his chin, his stubble pressing perfectly against me.
His hand on my thigh slid in and he set his thumb inside my pussy, giving me both more and less leverage as I rocked.
I was using him shamelessly—and he liked it.
Every throb, every rock, every lick that pushed me closer to the cliff—his mouth and hands worked in synchrony, me and my body just holding on.
He knew exactly what he was doing and was going to keep on doing it until—I rose up on my toes again, this time my ass clenched and wouldn’t stop tensing and everything in me narrowed to one shining spot that he claimed with his tongue and—my hands clenched in his hair.
“Mark,” I hissed low, bucking my clit against his tongue.
“Mark—" I said, even louder, then bit my lips to stay quiet, as my orgasm made me reel.
I shuddered over him, hips twitching, me trying to stifle small sounds as my body tensed and released over and over again.
When the last of it was wrung out of me, he leaned back looking smug, and I sagged, slumping down as he caught me, my skirt billowing innocently out.
He held me against his chest, in his lap, me breathless. His face was half-wet, and I knew that sensitive parts of me would have beard-burn tomorrow. I leaned up to kiss him, and he kissed me back, true and deep, before I fell back again in exhaustion, and he moved to lean us both against my bed.
“I like it when you taste like me,” I murmured into his chest, dreamily.
“Since I like tasting you, that works out nicely.”
The light from the streetlight outside peeked in through my blinds and made stripes on his face. “I’m not sure what I did to deserve you.”
He brushed my hair back and kissed my forehead. “You let the right stranger buy you a drink?”
“I didn’t even want to go out that night. But my mom told me I shouldn’t miss Jenny’s party—"
I heard his chest rumble as he chuckled, and slowly I inhabited my body again. I was curled up against him—it was easy for me to wriggle my hand down between us just right—and he made a pleased sound as my hand grazed the inseam of his slacks.
“As much as I want to desecrate your bedroom, in all sorts of ways—" he pushed me forward. “I can’t stay here tonight.”
I pursed my lips and gave him a challenging glare. “Is that how long you think it’d take me?”