by Penny Reid
I whimper. A strange sound to my ears—misery mixed with utter pleasure.
“I’ve got you, baby.”
All this time I thought the worst thing that could happen would be me being exposed as Vonda.
I was wrong.
The worst thing that can happen is the possibility that he might love Vonda.
I rip my hands from his grip and pull him closer. “This is hardly fair. You with all the clothes.” I reach down to his cock, grab the bulge, fitting my fingers around best as I can with his pants still on.
I know when I get it feeling right, because he growls. I pull, erasing everything he’s doing. I bite his ear, taking back control.
“Not. Fair,” I say.
“Fair is for judges.” He rises up over me and undoes his belt, looking at me naked under him. He yanks it clear out of the belt loops, all hot and crass.
The tender mood is gone.
“I plan to be totally unfair with you. I’m going to exploit every advantage. I'm going to keep you naked underneath me and fuck you until you’re screaming my name.”
“Uh,” I say.
He presses my hand to my sex. “Do yourself, baby. Get yourself ready.”
“I want you to.”
He gives me a stern look. Bossy, stern Henry hasn’t quite left his CEO self behind. I’m feeling better now. I slide my fingers between my legs. He unbuttons his shirt, gaze heavy on my skin. I get up a rhythm.
He strips off his shirt, revealing a muscled chest. He tosses the thing aside, then rips off the rest of his clothes, gaze never leaving my fingers. “You don’t know how hot you are.”
“Come here,” I say. I need him to cover me.
He’s fumbling in his bedside drawer. A thrill sparkles through me. I turn on my side and slide my palm up his thigh, a smooth, massive pillar below his cock, which juts out hard, thick and veiny and beautiful in the moody shadows of the room.
Henry’s cock is beautiful, just like him.
“Didn’t you have a job you were supposed to be doing?” he growls.
“I have a different job now.” I take hold and he groans. “A lateral move,” I add.
He groans again as I slide my hand around steely hardness. “…gonna kill me,” he mumbles.
I sit up and lick up the side. “There might be a graze of teeth involved.” I swirl my tongue around the glistening head, salty and smooth.
With a strangled cry he has me on my back. He’s tossing a condom wrapper. He’s rolling a condom onto himself with quick, efficient movements, gaze never leaving mine.
“Fuck me,” I say. My words sound breathless. My entire being feels like it’s in suspension, waiting for him, craving him.
“You sure?” he asks, sliding his head to my clit with the help of his thumb, which gets me reeling, almost setting me off.
“I’m sure.” I buck my hips, urging him on.
He presses me back down, pinning my hips to the bed as he glides himself around on me with perfectly tantalizing pressure.
He’s rubbing my clit harder and more mercilessly, zeroing in on the most wildly tickly parts of me.
I make a little begging sound. I’m moving under him, rhythmically, like he’s already fucking me.
I let out a breath as he pushes into my swollen sex, huge and thick.
“Holy shit,” he says, voice full of wonder.
My blood races. Everything is spinning out of control. Being joined with him is too much truth, suddenly. Truth hiding a painful lie.
“Henry—”
He kisses the line of my jaw and starts to move inside me. “We don’t have to think of anything,” he says. “Just concentrate on me moving inside you. How hard you have me. What you do to me…” He seems to lose his train of thought here. “How unbelievably good…” He drives on, driving us upward, stoking the flame of us.
His skin glistens with sweat. Hard planes of muscle. A shiver of hair on his belly when I put my hand down there.
I’m on top awhile, then he’s on top. Then it’s me against the headboard. Every new thing seems to be the best idea ever.
“I want to memorize every sound you make,” he says. His glistening biceps bulge as he moves over me. Hot, hard flesh. The smell of sweat. Breath sawing. “Everything is new with you. Every way I feel is new with you.”
“Me, too,” I whisper thickly.
“You’re close,” he says, and he begins to move slow and steady. He changes his angle, seems to swell inside me, stretching me. It’s painful and good at the same time.
His eyes burn into mine. The intimacy of it sears.
Then he’s hitting my clit, and I’m spinning away. “Henry, please! More.” I grab his hair.
He goes harder. “Pull it, baby. Take what you need.”
I cry out as an orgasm tears through me.
He presses his face to my shoulder, stilling, shuddering inside me, coming with a small guttural sound.
When we’re done, when he’s out of me, he cages me with his arms. “You are so unbelievable,” he says.
I slide a finger down his cheek, then run it back up, down and up, loving the feel of his face, his whiskers. I think he likes when I touch his face almost as much as I do. Or maybe because I do.
“I was going to take more time,” he says. “I had a plan.”
I smile.
“I mean it. I want everything perfect for you.”
“You were supposed to leave your CEO role behind, remember?”
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be. You make me feel like one of your people. You’re so beautiful with your people. They’re so lucky.”
“You are my people.”
I swallow and press my finger to his lip, trace the pillow of it.
I’m his people.
My throat is so clogged up with emotion, I couldn’t reply even if I wanted to.
He kisses me again, and I’m in heaven on the cool sheets below him.
Chapter 25
Vicky
I shower while he makes phone calls about the Ten.
I dry off and put on one of his soft, beautifully made dress shirts. When I wander out of the bathroom, the smell of garlic and cheese hits my pleasure center full blast.
I find him cooking. Shirtless. Bare feet. Jeans hugging his hips just so.
“What are you making?”
He turns. His eyes go dark. “What are you wearing?”
I give him an innocent look. “This?”
He swears and turns back to the stove. “Alfredo sauce. And I’m at a critical point in this operation. There’s wine breathing. Why don’t you pour us a glass.”
It’s breathing. He’s so nerdy about doing everything perfectly.
I pour two glasses and go back. Set his by the stove top.
“You have to add the cheese to the sauce so slowly,” he says, adding a microscopic amount of cheese to the pound of melted butter and heavy cream he’s been stirring slowly and methodically. “So slowly.”
“It smells amazing.”
He adds another micro amount, and another, and another. “Most people don’t do it like this.”
But Henry does.
I set down my wine and put my arms around him, making contact with the muscles and hard planes of him.
“You are so going to ruin dinner.”
I kiss his back. “I’m trying not to.”
“Trying.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “Trying is not doing.” He flicks off the stove, smashes a lid onto the pan and turns. “Look at you,” he says, advancing on me.
I back up. “Look at me what?”
He reaches out but I move just out of his grasp and turn. And run. His place is huge and you can run in it. I make it to the living room.
Rough hands grab me, turn me around to face him. He grabs the shirt and rips it open, then pushes me down to the couch.
A condom appears. We fuck furiously, hands grasping, teeth grazing. His hot weight pins me.
He pulls up m
y leg to get deeper.
I hold his hair, taking him, pain and pleasure mingling.
He smashes his sweaty forehead to my chest when he comes. I stop pulling his hair and just kiss it, coming down from my orgasm and enjoying his.
I kiss his hair as he comes. He’s everything.
He flops over at my side.
He gets this serious look. “It was never like this.” He slides a hank of my hair through two fingers, with an expression like it’s the most amazing hair he’s ever felt.
“Me, too,” I say.
He seems to like that. He watches me with such warmth and affection. It feeds my soul. “I'm glad,” he says. “That was unbelievable. I wanted to do everything to you.”
“You kind of did.”
“Oh, hardly.”
“Oh, hardly.” I smile. “I love to feel you come inside me. I love how your body feels.”
“I love how you breathe,” he says. “Sometimes you just breathe and I want you.”
I kiss him on the nose.
“And that biting thing…”
“Yeah?” I smile.
“Yeah,” he says. “And that wet finger thing.”
I narrow my eyes. “What wet finger thing?”
“You know. The touch.”
I furrow my brow, trying to think what he means.
“When you lightly touched my asshole with your wet finger? It was…hot.”
I frown. God, was I in that much of a fugue state? “I wasn’t doing anything like that.”
“You just touched it, really lightly.”
I study his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s joking or what. That’s when Smuckers jumps up and runs over the back of the couch, looking down at us, tail wagging, tongue hanging out. “Oh…” I say.
“What? What’s wrong?” He follows the direction of my gaze, and a look of horror comes over him.
Horror.
I snort and smash my face to his chest.
“So not funny,” he says.
“It’s a little funny,” I say into the sweaty pillow of muscle on his chest.
“Go away, Smuckers!”
I’m just laughing. “I honestly don’t know if that clinches your Most Eligible Bastard status or destroys it,” I say.
“Don’t even,” he says, rolling on top of me, caging me.
I snort. “And to think I imagined you didn’t like dogs.”
“That has to be the last joke you make about that.” He leans down, biceps bulging.
I frown. “The last? Isn’t that a little extreme?”
He kisses my neck. “I mean it. Or I might retaliate in the most excruciating way.”
“I might like it,” I say. “But okay. Last joke.”
Chapter 26
Henry
It’s after seven by the time we sit down to eat. I pour more wine and watch Vicky pick up her fork.
“You think the sauce survived?” she asks.
“I know it did.” I set down the bottle and stand behind her, rest my hands over her shoulders. “I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with this dish.”
She looks up at me. “You just think you’re Mr. Awesome.”
“Kind of.” I kiss her cheek.
“I’ll be the judge of that.” She swirls the noodles in the sauce. “The talent portion of Most Eligible Bastard contest,” she jokes.
I lean in closer. “I do believe I aced the talent portion of the contest earlier tonight.”
“Hmmm,” she says. “Good point.”
She slips the forkful of fettuccini between her pretty lips.
A sheen of pure wonder creeps into her gaze. “Oh my god,” she says.
“What’s that?”
She gazes back up at me, brown eyes sparkling. “Parmesan garlic taste freak-out.”
I sit down. We eat. A lot. She actually has seconds, like the best date ever.
After dinner we take Smuckers out, strolling around in search of dessert. We decide on a bag of warm baklava from a food truck. We take it into Central Park and sit on a bench, feasting while we watch an extremely acrobatic man dance to a fiddle and a snare drum.
Vicky makes exactly zero jokes about what I’ll refer to as The Smuckers Incident. In fact, she doesn’t have to; all she has to do is look at Smuckers and then look at me with an utterly innocent expression, and the joke is in the air.
“Fuck off,” I growl.
“What?” she laughs. “I can’t look at you guys now? My two fave guys?”
“No, you can’t,” I snarl.
I’m not mad. It’s fun. It’s all fun with her, like the best kind of escape, the way it was at Southfield Studios, us hiding from the world and carving out our own zone of simple pleasure inside the larger, more complicated real world.
She leans against me. Whatever hesitation she had about us being together before seems gone.
What was it?
She’s an enigma, but I don’t mind. The more layers of her I peel away, the more I like her. The more I want her.
I put my arm around her. She snuggles closer and something in me warms.
It’s strange sitting in the park with Vicky. And it strikes me as strange that it would strike me as strange…until it occurs to me that every activity in my life fits into one of two categories: seduction and business.
Sitting in the moonlit park fits into neither. It’s just nice.
How did my life get so unbalanced? Even my beach house in the Hamptons—I use it to entertain clients or I don’t use it at all.
It’s not there for pleasure, and I certainly never take women up there—I don’t like to give them the wrong idea, which is that our short-term hookups might not be short-term hookups.
“Hey,” I say. “What are you and Carly doing for Labor Day weekend?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing special.”
“You want to get out of the city? I have a beach place in the Hamptons.”
She sits up, seeming alarmed.
I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. It’s so sexy when she wears it down. “What is it?”
“Well…” She stares at a crushed Pepsi can, shining in the grass. “With everything so crazy…”
No, she means.
I almost don’t comprehend it. She’s taking the one night, no roles thing seriously. Treating this as a hookup. It defies my understanding of the universe, like water swirling the wrong way down the drain.
I spent most of my dating career enforcing hookup rules. I recognize it when I see it.
Three words: No. Fucking. Way.
I set my fingertips to her chin with the gentle touch that gets her hot. I brush a kiss onto her lips. “Why not extend it?” I say. “Vacation holiday. Who says we can’t extend it? Nothing intruding.”
Her pulse bangs in her throat. “Just for the record, things will be set right.” She watches my eyes. It’s important to her that I get that. It feels right to trust her on that.
“I’m not worried about that. I take you at your word. I'm not talking about the company, I’m talking about this.” I lower my voice. “You know you want to. We’re in this far. Let’s keep it going. All the complications. Screw it all. Three more days.”
This gets her thinking about it.
“We leave the whole spiderweb of our lives behind,” I say. “We leave it here.” I kiss her again. “Or, actually, in the limo.”
“I can’t leave Carly.” She puts her hands in her lap. “Not for a weekend. I mean, she’s sixteen. She would probably be fine. She’d love me to leave her with the place to herself but—”
“I didn’t mean just you, I meant both of you,” I say. “I’d love to meet her and have her up with us. The best beach is just a few blocks away. We have a full staff. She can have her own room. We could leave Friday, early.”
I can tell she’s thinking about it. “The traffic....”
“Right,” I say. “If only I owned a strange machine with a propeller on the top of it that could fly right
over cars and buildings. Oh, wait, I do.”
She grins. “Tell me it’s not blue.”
“It’s blue.”
She studies my eyes, as though she’s not sure whether to take me seriously. What’s going on? Am I pushing things too fast?
She pulls out her phone, swipes around, then groans. “Carly has two day-long can’t-miss dates to run lines with her girlfriend,” she says. “They’re trying to get leads in the fall production. I forgot they carved those out for this long weekend.”
“Have her bring her girlfriend. Trust me, we have the space.” I trace the shell of her ear. She’s caving.
“Of course, they might not get much studying done. Two of the guys from One Direction have rented the place next to mine. They might be rehearsing for some kind of duet tour. It could be distracting.”
Her jaw falls open. “Seriously?”
“Would I joke about something like One Direction?”
“This feels like blackmail,” she says. “If I don’t say yes and she finds out, she’ll literally kill me.”
“That would be terrible,” I say.
Chapter 27
Henry
Carly has Vicky’s laugh, Vicky’s eyes, and definitely Vicky’s spirit.
But while Vicky has brown hair, Carly is a fiery redhead. It’s amazing to see them together, to see Vicky in girl mode, laughing and pointing with Carly and her sarcastic friend Bess as I take off over the city.
Carly says soothing words to Smuckers, who’s in his little case in the back and not loving the ride.
We land on the helipad at the estate garden house.
It’s fun to see the three of them experience the grandeur of the place, which was built in the 1920s by one of the Vanderbilts. They make me love it all over again.
Vicky goes to help the girls settle while I give instructions to Francine, the head of the staff. “I know it’s not what you’re used to,” I say to her.
“It’s a breath of fresh air,” she says.
“You know how messy teenaged girls are?”
“It’s thrilling to see you have…friends here. We’re all so pleased.”
I’m about to protest that I bring friends here. But I don’t.