Chapter 18
“I
bet you’ve never had an edible phallus in your car before.” I place the chocolate cock—or the Cockolate as the box says—at my feet, and lean back in the passenger seat.
My sides and cheeks ache from both laughing and trying not to laugh. “That was the funniest evening since forever.”
“Yeah, but the thing you enjoyed most was me not enjoying it.” Tom rests his left forearm on the steering wheel and twists to face me.
I roll my head against the headrest to look at him. “Yup. Just goes to show the best treats are priceless. I don’t need your billions of music dollars to have a damn good laugh.”
“And that”—he plants a gentle kiss on the tip of my nose—“is one of the things I adore about you.”
It sounds like there’s a whole story behind that sentence. “Was your wife all about the money?”
“Oh, yes. She came from money, so she was used to it. And thank God she had her own cash or there’d never have been a quickie divorce. For her, the marriage was all about the showbiz connections she couldn’t get by herself.”
“You mean she was more after the lifestyle that comes with you?” The thought of someone being with Tom for that shallow bullshit, not because her existence would be meaningless without him, stabs at my heart. He deserves to be with someone who considers him no less than the love of her life.
“I think so.” His tone says he came to terms with it years ago. “I met her when the label was just taking off. She was a trust-fund kid, following her favorite band around and trying to hang out with them. I guess the clues were there.”
“You must have liked something about her, though?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, she was hot.”
I laugh despite myself. “That’s nice and superficial. But she must have made you feel something as well. I can’t imagine you marrying someone without a good reason.”
He looks away and gazes through the windshield at the charming village softly illuminated by streetlamps. “I thought marrying her, and building a home and a life with her, would finally make me feel like I could set down some roots, create my own family.”
Like a blow to the chest, his words knock the wind out of me. It takes an effort not to emit an audible gasp. With all Tom’s success and wealth, and that self-assured charisma he carries everywhere with him, it’s easy to forget he might still be scarred by his disrupted and traumatic childhood.
“After losing Mom and Dad, then being with Maggie and Jim for a while, then going to London and living with Bob and Linda…I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to be. Where I belonged. Or if anyone wanted me.”
“I wanted you.” The words are out before I have time to filter them.
He turns back, his face lit up by a tender smile, and reaches across to tuck my hair behind my ear. “I know. Well, I do now. And I couldn’t be more sorry.”
Voices and the dinging of the bell over the door draw our attention to the women pouring out of the chocolate shop carrying their boxes of Cockolates. Mother of the Groom is swinging a half-finished bottle of sparkling wine.
“See, those folks,” Tom says, looking at them over his shoulder. “They all know where they belong.” He returns his gaze to me. “I still don’t know where I fit. I’m neither one thing nor the other. You heard them in there, calling me The Hot Brit. Well, I’m not a born Brit. But I also don’t feel totally like a Boston guy anymore either. So, who the hell am I? Where do I belong?”
His words shine a blinding spotlight on an issue I never dreamed he’d have.
The man I thought had everything—the stupendously successful business, the money, the cars, the global travel with amazing bands, the marriage to the glamorous wife—that man has felt lost and alone this whole time.
It’s simultaneously shocking and heartbreaking.
And I can’t keep my hands off him any longer. All this time I’d thought I was the only one in pain, but he was struggling too. I stroke his cheek with the backs of my fingers. “I can’t answer the bigger question. But I can tell you that right now it feels to me that you belong right here.”
And it does. In this moment, in this car, outside this shop, with a boxed Cockolate at my feet, we are both right where we are supposed to be.
Together.
I lean up and press my lips against his. The luscious lips that have tried very hard for the last hour not to laugh at the endless dick jokes. The lips that made it very clear he wanted to leave, but he stayed anyway—for me. The lips that, in a previous life, taught me how to kiss. And the lips that make my insides melt like warm, smooth, sweet chocolate.
“Christ, Hannah.” Tom lunges for my ass and pulls me toward him as his tongue finds mine, desperate, hungry. “How I kept my hands off you in there, I have no idea.”
His hair tickles my face. I push it off and hold his stubbled chin tight as though if I let go, he’ll disappear from my life again. “Me too. You have no idea how hot you are when you’re uncomfortable.”
He smiles against my mouth. “That has nothing on you licking that fucking chocolate cock. If no one else had been in that room, I would have hitched you up on the counter and poured sprinkles over you right there and then.”
“There’s no one here now,” I whisper. “You can do whatever you like.”
Tom’s mouth is on my neck, his hand under my sweater finding its way to my bra.
As I rest my chin on his shoulder and my eyes drift shut, the bright lights of the chocolate shop behind him flick off, snapping me back to reality.
Delia emerges, locks the door, and walks off down the street.
“Shit, Tom. We’re on Main Street. We can’t do this here.”
“I don’t care,” he says, his mouth back on mine, deep and strong, sucking and sliding his tongue against mine like his life depends on it.
I pull back a little and run my finger around the outline of his lips. “If we carry on like this, we’ll get arrested.”
“Home it is then.” He lets go of me, turns on the engine, and slams the car into drive. “I’ll sneak you up to my room. Somehow.”
That’s impossible. “There’s no way in without Maggie and Jim noticing. Even if the front door didn’t squeak like an overexcited mouse.”
He rests his arm across the back of my seat and turns to look out the rear window as he backs up. “Then we’ll go to your part of the house.”
“And what if Maggie brings Dylan back?” Christ, is there really nowhere private?
“Fuck.” His shoulders slump as he looks at me. “It’s like we’re back in high school. Nowhere to make out without the risk of being caught by the grown-ups.”
“Or my kid,” I add.
“Yeah, that part’s not quite like high school.”
A memory flashes across my mind. “I know! The park that Dylan went to on Saturday. It has lots of trees and you can drive pretty far into it, just on the other side of the village.” I grab my seat belt. “Go straight down here. I’ll show you.”
“Are you kidding me?” Tom nods toward the sign that reads Beaver Creek Park. “You picked somewhere with a name like that?”
He turns off the road and into the wooded area. “Brings a bit of equality to a night swamped by dick jokes, I guess.”
At the second empty parking lot, he pulls into the farthest, darkest corner under overhanging trees.
The wheels have barely stopped turning when he opens his door.
“Where are you going?”
“The back seat. Come on, Hepburn. Out you get.”
He slams the door and almost immediately appears behind me before I’ve even fumbled for my door handle.
“Too slow,” he says.
Before I can reply he’s lunged between the seats and his lips are on my neck.
A surprised breath flies out of me, immediately followed by a quiet moan as I sink sideways into his mouth. Goosebumps burst onto my skin, radiating from the sucks and tongue-teases like ripples on a pond.
Is this what it’s like to feel truly desired? To have someone want you so urgently they can’t keep their hands off you? Yes, men have wanted to have sex with me before. But this is different. Tom and I know each other in a way that’s only possible if you knew each other when you were kids. This isn’t just lustful desire—there’s a depth to it, a heavy history.
Tom’s hand is on my belly, his fingers finding their way under my top, my skin trembling under his touch.
I need that man’s mouth on mine right now. I turn into him, finding his lips and tongue, and his hand slides around my waist, reaching around my back. My body shivers as his warm palm glides up my spine.
“Come back here,” he breathes as he half lifts, half pulls me between the seats.
“I won’t fit through there. I’ll get out.”
“I’m not letting go of you. Sure, you’ll fit.”
I tuck my legs up under me and try to clamber through the gap. “Ow.” My knee smacks into the console.
“I’ll kiss it better in a minute.” He holds me steady in a way that suggests he’s all I’ll ever need to keep me safe. “Just get the hell back here.”
I should have gone feetfirst, not headfirst, because I lose my balance scrambling around in the dark and fly forward, landing with my face on Tom’s chest, my legs still between the seats, my feet flapping around somewhere near the gearshift.
Classy.
“Right on target,” Tom says as he tips me onto my back so I can bend my knees and pull my legs through. “Absolutely fucking perfect.”
He looks down at me like I’m the treasure on a map he’s been trying to figure out forever and he’s finally found the spot marked X.
Before this moment, I would have thought that lying prostrate on the back seat of a car would feel cheap or furtive—like I was taking part in a meaningless one-off grapple. But it’s impossible to cheapen this thing between Tom and me. A diamond set in tin, is still a diamond.
I have never felt more wanted in my life. And I’ve never wanted anyone as much as I want Tom right now.
The animal passion rising inside me washes away more than a decade and a half of conflicted thoughts and feelings about him. He’s woken something in me that’s been in a coma for years. Seventeen to be precise.
But it’s combined with something else, an adult desire running way deeper than anything we were capable of back then—a profound, desperate need I didn’t even know was possible to feel for someone.
The blend of want and need is exhilarating.
I shift under him to wrap my legs around his waist. “I’ve never made out in a car before. Isn’t that something you usually do when you’re a teenager?”
“Yeah, we should have done that. Guess we have a lot of time to make up for.”
And he drops his mouth onto mine in the deepest kiss of my life.
As our tongues glide together, he pulls my thigh tight against his waist before running his fingers up and down the back of it, getting closer and closer to my desperate, aching, soaking wet center with every stroke.
He lifts off me a little and releases my leg to free both hands, then pushes my jacket off my shoulders and drags up my top.
There’s no messing around here, no wasting time. My jacket’s on the floor, top under my armpits, and my bra undone before I know it.
“Christ, you are fucking beautiful,” he says, before grasping my nipple between his lips and giving it the treat of its life.
Everything around us fades away as I sink into another plane of existence.
“You can’t see me,” I pant. “It’s too dark.” I push my fingers through that sexy, sexy hair and inhale its spicy, woodsy aroma—a unique scent that lights up my brain and my lady bits.
“I can see enough.” His breath is hot against my skin. “And I can feel you.” He laps at my nipple. “And taste you.”
As he sucks and licks, a hand slides between my legs and immediately hits the spot. Every nerve ending in my body lights up as my back arches, pushing my breast deeper, harder into his mouth, my head bucking back against the seat.
I could come right here and now, but I can’t let that happen. I want—need—his flesh on my flesh.
To make this man remove his mouth from my nipple would be a crime against humanity, but I slide my hands against his chest and ease him off me anyway.
“Don’t make me stop.” His tongue searches for my other aching nipple, which does feel a tad left out, but it can have its turn later.
I push him harder until he’s kneeling between my legs on the seat. “I need to see what you were hiding in your hands that morning on the landing.”
“You just said it’s too dark to see.” His voice is low and heavy.
I trace the outline of the shape in his jeans, causing him to suck in air between his teeth.
“I can see enough.” I repeat his words back to him. “And I can feel you.” I give his hardness a squeeze, and every muscle in his body tenses. “And I want to taste you.”
Part of me wants this to last forever, but urgency overtakes me. I pop open the button, slide down the zipper, and yank down his jeans and boxers until I’m eye to eye with a penis that’s bigger, harder, and more delicious-looking than anything made in the chocolate shop this evening.
I stroke from balls, to shaft, to tip. The sensation of him under my fingers is enough to set my inner walls clenching with my need to feel him there too.
He shudders under my touch. “Please do what you did to the one in the shop.”
“Do you mean this?”
I take his silky head between my lips. My entrance throbs with desperation, jealous of my mouth. I find the ridge with my tongue and run it all the way around.
Tom grabs the back of the driver’s seat with one hand and fists my hair with the other. “Fuck. Hannah. Fuck. That’s so good.”
Lapping my tongue over the smooth head, I suck and massage it, then pop it from my mouth just as I’d done with the chocolate one.
“Christ, I need you.” He reaches for my waistband. “I need you like I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t have you.” He undoes my jeans and grapples with them, making zero progress. “But there’s no way I can get these off you in this tight space.”
“Condom?” I ask.
“Of course not. I don’t just carry those things around with me.” He sounds offended. “Oh.” Then the realization hits. “Shit.”
This might be the most frustrating moment of my entire existence. “You brought me on a date with no condom?”
“I guess I wasn’t sure we’d…didn’t want to assume we’d…”
“And there you were, thinking that accidentally booking us into a chocolate penis-making class was your biggest organizational error of the evening.”
He shifts to sit on his butt. “Take your jeans off.” He yanks his the rest of the way down.
“What? But?—”
“Just take them off. I promise this plan will work.” Swiftly kicking off both shoes, he pushes his pants all the way off over his feet and lobs them onto the drivers’ seat.
“Your others haven’t gone so well.”
He sits next to me, naked from the waist down, erection bobbing around in the moonlight shining through the side window. “Oh, I promise you this one is going to go very well indeed.”
As someone who’s spent their whole adult life raising a child, constantly being the one to do all the thinking, all the decision-making, all the instructing, there is something indefinably hot about Tom’s commanding tone, about being the one to receive the instructions for once.
I press my feet into the back of the passenger seat and somehow shimmy myself out of my jeans and give them a victory toss into the front of the car. “My unhooked bra flapping around isn’t helping.”
“I’ll take your mind off it. Come here.” He grabs my ankles and swings them around until I’m lying on my side, my back flat against the back of the seat.
“Whoa. Smooth move.”
“You might like this one too.”
He slides down and with a couple of grunts contorts himself to kneel on the floor.
“Right, now…” he growls, bending over me to leave fast, hot, wet kisses on my thigh en route to his goal—his prize and mine.
And then he’s there, his tongue prizing my flesh apart, searching for the buried treasure of my pulsating, engorged clit.
The wet warmth of his tongue is an electrical surge to my core, to my brain, to my heart, to my very essence as he circles and sucks and brings me to the edge in a handful of seconds.
He shifts onto the seat beside me, feet near the door behind my head. Oh, I see the plan. I also see—as well as I can in almost complete darkness—the most beautiful dick I’ve ever set eyes on in my life, right in my face.
“I do like this plan,” I breathe, taking him in my fist and stroking.
Tom parts me wider, and a gasp flies out of me as a finger circles my slick entrance.
That’s it. I need him. I need him now.
I take him into my mouth and bury him at the back of my throat just as Tom thrusts a finger, then another, as far inside me as he can reach.
As I ride his fingers and his tongue, he rides my mouth. Both at each other’s mercy.
We match each other lap for lap, our tongues, our sucks, beating the same rhythm.
My inner walls clench—he already has me at the point of no return. I bear down harder on his hand, press my clit against his circling tongue.
I suck him harder, massaging his balls with one hand, quickening my strokes on his shaft with the other. He shudders as I run my tongue under the rim, like that’s what does it for him and, good God, I want to do it for him.
For a second he breaks contact with me to groan. “I’m going to come, Hannah. I’m going to come.”
I pop him from my mouth for a second. “Good. That should be part of your plan.”
Then his tongue is back to work, his fingers thrusting in and out of me, hitting the magic spot.
Everything goes misty as I lose myself in the pleasure of his mouth and hands.
Massaging the tip between my tongue and the back of my throat, I suck and stroke his throbbing, jerking dick. Come with me, Tom, come on.
And there he goes. Warm, fresh cum shoots down the back of my throat and tips me over the edge.
Fireworks, stars, galaxies explode behind my eyes, in my brain, and in my heart as we grind against each other’s faces.
This is a whole other level of pleasure. A whole other level of body-shattering, mind-blowing, otherworldly pleasure.
As the thrashing becomes more of a rocking, I slide him from my mouth.
What the hell just happened? Whatever it was, I will remember it for the rest of my life. Not the part about being in the back of the car, or the seat leather sticking to my side, or the way I now realize the hook of my bra is somehow digging into my armpit. But the way it’s possible to give myself entirely to someone, to let go completely, to sink into the pure, uninhibited pleasure Tom wanted so badly to give me. And to give that same pleasure in return.
“You’re amazing,” Tom says, planting soft kisses below my belly button and gently easing his fingers out of me.
“Well, I think we’ve finally found something you’re good at planning,” I tell him, turning flat on my back to wallow in a full-body glow that makes me feel like I’m lying on a sunny Caribbean beach, not on the back seat of a car on a frosty New England evening.
Tom lifts the lid of the console and takes out a box of tissues. “If this is the only thing I’m good at planning, maybe I should stick to just planning this one thing over and over.”
He drops the box next to me as I push myself up to sitting. “Maybe the next one could involve a condom, though.”
I take a tissue and wipe my mouth.
Tom’s phone buzzes in the pocket of his bundled up jeans.
“Whoever that is can fuck right off,” he says, attempting to untangle his boxers from the pile. As he tries to shake them free, the phone falls out and shows the name Desmond.
“Fuck, that’s my managing director,” he says.
I reach behind me to do up my bra. “But it’s the middle of the night over there.”
“Um, did you realize it’s midnight? Here, I mean. That makes it five a.m. in London. And apparently Desmond is up. What the hell’s going on?”
“Midnight. Shit.” Reality slaps me in the face like a cold, wet rag. “We have to get back. Fuck. Dylan will wonder where I am. Maggie and Jim will wonder where we are.”
Throwing all dignity out the window, bare ass in the air, I clamber back between the seats to find my jeans and the pretty thong that, in the end, no one saw anyway.
“Oh, fuck,” Tom says.
“What?” As I yank my underwear on, I turn to see his beautiful face lit up by the phone he’s holding, the other hand keeping his hair back on top of his head. Good God, I could fall for this man all over again right this very second.
His eyes lift from the phone to meet mine. My stomach flips, but not in a good way. There’s something behind his gaze that tells me he knows I’m not going to like what he’s about to say.
“I have to go back to London.”