Chapter 41 #2
I can’t do either without adding time to my sentence, so I just sit there, shaking, jaw clenched so tight it aches.
Then he yanks down my trousers, and I realize the difficulty of this little game is ramping up. His hands slide under my thighs and lift just enough to shift me deeper into the settee cushions. My breath catches, sharp and foolish.
He presses a kiss to the inside of my knee. Then higher. The soft meat of my thigh. The crease of my hip. The place where my body goes most private and helpless.
Every inch slow. Every inch deliberate. Spreading me.
The first touch of his tongue near ends me.
Because it’s Okee, proud and solemn, on his knees between mine, licking me open with the same care he’d give stitching a wound.
A sound tears up my throat. I bite it back too late.
His hands tighten on my thighs.
“Hour and a half,” he murmurs against me, punctuating the sentence with a long, cruel lick. “Did you think I stopped keeping an account?”
I ought to remind him this whole exercise in silence has gone well past unreasonable, but he sucks one of my balls into his mouth and any bit of reason flees clean through clenched teeth.
He takes hold of my hips and turns me like he’s got every right in the world, guiding me forward until my hands brace against the settee arm.
My pulse races, every little hair on my arms perking up at the heat of Okee behind me, big and warm and steady.
His fly rustles open quick while Lula hums in the other room, oblivious, as he spreads me apart and buries his face like a wolf gone nose deep in a fresh kill.
“Christ almighty,” I groan, backing deeper onto his tongue. I swear I can feel him smile against me a moment before he pulls away and slides his hand up my back. The blunt head of his cock nudges my hole.
Then his hand leaves my hip.
I hear the little tin open before I feel his fingers.
Lula’s salve. Course.
Only in this house could a man get bent over the sitting-room settee with supper on the stove and an apothecary preparation involved.
She made it months ago with the same stern care she gives fever drafts and burn poultices, sliding the little blue tin across the table like contraband.
“For comfort,” she’d said, chin lifted.
Okee warms it between his fingers first, thoughtful even when he is fixing to ruin me. Then he touches me there, slick and careful, circling slow until my arms weaken against the settee. From the kitchen, Lula hums to herself, entirely unaware or pretending hard at it.
Okee’s mouth brushes the back of my neck. “Easy,” he says.
His fingers press and my body remembers exactly why that little blue tin lives in the drawer beside the lamp.
“Oh my God, yes—” I moan and the words escape before I even know my lips are moving.
I push back when he thrusts into me. “Okee, please.”
“Please what?”
“Don’t stop.”
He smiles down at me, playfully biting my shoulder.
“At this rate, you may never be allowed to speak again, my love.” He slows to a stop, letting me feel the stillness.
I push back, chasing it like a desperate fool ready to fuck myself senseless on his perfect cock.
I curse enough to serve ten consecutive life sentences, and from the kitchen a spoon clatters against a bowl.
Then Lula calls, “Boone Maddox, are you being murdered or indecent?”
“His ass is being murdered,” Okee shouts.
One of the perks of having our only neighbor be a whorehouse is that you can scream things like that with no one asking any questions.
From the kitchen comes a long, loaded silence. Then Lula says, “I am standing over a pot of beans.”
Okee’s mouth brushes my shoulder, and I can feel the bastard smiling.
Her footsteps cross the kitchen. Slow. Measured. Dangerous. She appears in the doorway and her eyebrows lift. “Well,” she says. “That explains the hollering.”
It comes out sounding interested, not shocked.
Then her mouth curves, slow as honey off a spoon.
“You’re going to make me burn my beans,” she says, biting her bottom lip.
Okee starts moving again, slow and shameless, because now he has an audience and the devil in him has always enjoyed proving a point.
“Oh,” I cry, louder than what’s dignified. “Just like that.”
“You like that, love?” he teases. “Like Lula watching you?”
Heat rises to my face the way it does. Though I know I got no reason to be shy, there’s a special kind of vulnerability, bent over, stretched wide and full.
“Yes.”
“Well if I stay, I’m not standing around like parlor furniture.”
Okee stills behind me, his grip firm on my hip.
“You want her to join us?” he asks, low enough it’s only mine.
I ought to say something smart. Something easy. Something that makes this feel less like standing bare-hearted in the middle of our own sitting room.
Lula waits in the doorway, no coyness in her face now. Just heat. Just patience.
“Yeah,” I manage. “If she wants.”
“I do,” she says.
Simple as that. Like she’s answering whether she wants sugar in her coffee. Like wanting us is ordinary. Like there ain’t a thing in this room that needs hiding.
The trouble with three, I reckon, is a man starts counting hands.
Who’s touching who. Who’s being tended. Who’s been left wanting too long.
But Lula ain’t one to keep score.
Lord knows there’ve been nights Okee and I took her apart between us until she couldn’t say either of our names right. Nights she laid soft and trembling in the middle of the bed while we fussed over her like she was something sacred.
So when she sits on the settee in front of me, skirts spilling around her knees, I don’t think much past getting my mouth on her.
“Sit back,” I tell her.
Her eyes flash, amused by the command, but she does it. Settles against the cushions like a queen granting favor.
My hands shake some when I ruck her skirts up.
It ain’t that I’m nervous. It’s from Okee still behind me, moving slow and deep, hitting that place inside me that turns my bones to pudding.
I grit my teeth and pull Lula’s drawers down her legs, my mouth near watering for the taste of her.