Chapter Nine #3
“Yes,” she said, rising up onto her knees and moving toward the end of the bed. “You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I’ve never wanted another one. In spite of my best efforts.”
“You don’t need another one,” he said.
“Maybe not.”
She smiled, just slightly, and he wanted to taste it. So he did.
He got onto the bed, and she moved around him, lightly pushing on his chest and laying him on his back. She hovered over him, her red hair shrouding them both as she leaned in and pressed kisses to his chest.
Down farther. And farther still.
She wrapped her hand around his arousal, and squeezed hard, then licked him from base to tip with the flat of her tongue. He let his head fall back, his breath hissing through his teeth.
“Do you like that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you want more?”
“Yes,” he said.
She teased him. Brushed his skin with her hair, nipped at the head of his cock, sucked him in deep and didn’t hold him long enough.
She pushed him all the way to the edge, again and again.
He was shaking, sweating. It would’ve been easy to believe that he was the virgin, and not so recently her.
She bit his hipbone, and he groaned, overcome by his desire for her.
By his need for more.
She moved over him, straddling him, her slick heat glorious against his hardness, and she moved her hips, taking him in an inch, before letting him slip out, denying them both what they so desperately wanted. She did it over and over again, the sensation maddening. Driving him to his limit.
Pushing him to the edge.
“Beg,” she said.
“Please,” he said.
“My name,” she said. “I know you’ve been with other women. How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many times did you think of me?”
He laughed, dark and humorless. There was nothing funny about any of this.
“Every time,” he said.
“Then it is a privilege for you to be able to have me. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he ground out, his hands on her hips.
“Beg me,” she said.
“Please, Heather,” he said.
She rocked her hips back, and slid onto him, taking him in slowly, letting her head fall back on a sigh when he was buried all the way inside of her.
And then, he could not wait any longer.
He reversed their positions, driving into her, desperate, starving. He kissed her. Deep and hard while he was buried inside of her. She moved her hands up over her head, and he gathered them in his palm, holding her wrists together as he continued to take her.
He was lost. In this, in her. He had never experienced anything like this before. Anything like her.
And as he growled out his satisfaction, she cried out her own, clenching tightly around him and sending him into another time and space.
And tomorrow he would be with her, sitting across from his mother.
He let out a hard breath that was nearly a laugh as he collapsed, taking hold of her face and kissing her, the endorphin release so strong it took him by surprise.
“What?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Nothing. It is only that you will be the only woman I’ve ever slept with to meet my mother.”
“And that’s funny?”
“It’s only… Our relationship makes it mildly amusing, I suppose.”
“I would prefer not to think about your other lovers,” she said, burrowing into the covers.
“But if we stick to our agreement it’s possible that both of us will have them,” he said.
“Possible,” she returned.
Jealousy and possessiveness gripped him.
He did not like the idea, of course. But the idea of binding them both to a traditional marriage when they had never had any sort of relationship that wasn’t antagonistic before the last week or so seemed foolish at best.
Hell, it had barely been a week of them getting along.
And ninety percent of it had been fucking. They did quite well when it came to that.
“I feel that I have to warn you about my mother,” he said. “She is sometimes the most delightful and engaging person you’ve ever met. And other times…”
“I think you’re forgetting that I have met your mother.”
“No, I’m not. But whatever aspects of her erratic nature you experienced back then, it is worse now.”
“I’m an editor,” she said. “Do you have any idea the number of erratic personalities that I work with at a given time? Writers are not the most mentally stable people.”
He chuckled. “Are they not?”
“No. Typically, they are emotional, often missing deadlines, and then you have to try to manage their stress all while dealing with yours, and trying to make them feel like they’re geniuses, while gently suggesting they fix the dreck that you received from them.
It’s a tightrope. I’m good at walking it.
You know, initially I was going into publicity, and I thought that I would use it in the hospitality business.
But what I’ve discovered is that part of being an editor is engaging in customer service. ”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Of course not. I didn’t get into the job for that.
I thought it would be reading, and helping shape stories, and I am.
I love it. But I also have to figure out which stories are going to make money, and present that to a team, make the case for it.
I have to attend more meetings during the week than I would like, though I’ve been let off the hook from a few of them because of the time difference.
A lot of the reading I do on my own time. ”
“I’m surprised, in many ways, that you didn’t pursue work under the Accardi banner.”
“Of course you are. Because you always thought that was what I wanted. I’m not going to say that I didn’t get a lot out of suddenly becoming rich overnight. Of course I did. But it wasn’t all quite the way that you thought.”
“I see that now.”
“Why did you end up getting into that business when you were so angry at your father?”
“I wanted to prove to him that given the same arena I could do better than he did. But I was valuable, perhaps.”
“He was proud of you.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. He had never talked about these things with anyone else. But no one had ever asked him these sorts of questions.
She was interesting. The way she spoke about her work. The way she wanted to know about his.
He had branded her as something frivolous.
Pointless. Because it had been convenient for him to do so, and yet on some level he must’ve known there was more to her.
More to her than he had wanted to see. Than he had wanted to acknowledge.
But it felt so much simpler to cast everyone in black and white, as he did his level best to keep his mother from imploding.
It was easier to see things the way that she did. The appropriate people as villains.
And certainly not…
He certainly couldn’t afford to be anyone else’s savior.
That night that he had stopped Heather’s sexual encounter with that man, he had been filled with such a deep, profound sense of rage and possessiveness. It had been nearly overwhelming, and he had no more room in him for that. Anger was easy. Wanting to protect less so.
It had a cost. Such an intense cost.
“Don’t worry about your mother,” she said, kissing him on the shoulder. The simple affectionate gesture nearly took his breath away.
“Sadly, Heather,” he said, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. “I have been doing nothing but worrying about her for the last twenty years. I’m not going to stop just because you told me to.”
“But what if you did?” she whispered.
And without giving it too much thought, he fell asleep with a woman beside him.