As he mouthed the hard tips of her nipples, her legs quivered against his thighs. She locked him against her, sighing in approval. He held her tightly as he felt her body stiffen with pleasure, and brought one hand lower to stroke the sensitive inside of her legs.
Then his mind went blank. His fingers sought fabric and found only bare skin.
He moaned helplessly against her neck. “That is...the damn sexiest...”
His words sputtered as he touched her softness. She gasped and writhed her hips beneath his hand, urging him to touch her harder and deeper. Just when he thought she was about to find her release, she stopped him and fumbled for his pants.
* * *
Now. It had to be now. All of him, right now.
She was dizzy with need for him, desperate as she tore blindly at his pants. Finally she managed to free him. She gripped him and drew him to her. He obliged, pausing only momentarily to apply protection.
With slow, deep thrusts he filled her, made her gasp for breath. She leaned back onto the table and wrapped her legs around him, holding him to her, wanting him to never leave. She peered into the darkness but saw only the outline of his back as he drove into her faster now, the quick rising and falling of his body pushing her to the brink of pleasure.
Then she was over the edge, releasing all her tension, all the need she hadn’t realized she had for him, giving herself fully to him. He stiffened and groaned out his own release seconds later. They lay entwined in the darkness, panting and gripping each other, melting until she no longer knew where he ended and she began.
The vibration of his laugh tickled her cheek. “Sally.” That was all he said, but it was enough.
She lifted her fingers, finding his lips in the darkness. “I never knew wine cellars could be so hot,” she whispered.
He smiled against her fingers, kissing them lightly. “We should go back. Dinner’s probably starting.”
She reached higher to clutch his thick hair in her fingers. “I don’t want dinner, and my hair is probably a mess.”
“That’s fine with me. I want everyone to know what I just did to you.”
“No. Let’s go home. To my house.”
He moved his mouth down to her wrist and nipped her skin. A sting of pleasure shot through her. “I don’t want you to be home alone tonight.”
She smiled as he kissed his way up her arm. “Good,” she whispered. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Chapter 10
They ordered pizza and ate it in Sally’s bed. Greasy pizza with a doughy crust and pepperoni, and she didn’t give a thought to her eight-hundred-fifty-thread-count sheets or the fact that she had a kitchen table that was perfectly suited for such meals. Ben ate the pizza without his shirt on, his broad chest on full display. Sally liked that he had dark hair there that she could rake her fingers through.
“This is my favorite pizza,” she confessed through a mouthful. “I haven’t had it in months, though.”
“It’s great pizza,” he agreed.
“Sometimes I miss New York style. You know, the thin crust and large triangular slices. But this is what I grew up on—small, square pizza slices.”
“And pizza corners.” He lifted a little triangle of crust. “Me, too. As far as I’m concerned, there’s enough room in the world for square pizza.”
She laughed and tucked her legs beneath her. “It’s weird, I guess. Pizza corners. I don’t know why they cut it that way.”
He bit into the piece and chewed thoughtfully before delivering his verdict. “Best part of the pie.”
She couldn’t remember ever eating pizza in bed with another man, but being with Ben this way felt oddly comfortable. She could tell by the curve of his shoulders that he was relaxed and enjoying himself, too. They’d shared a delicious tryst at the wedding reception, and now they were sharing a delicious pizza. The progression was natural.
“I keep forgetting that you grew up around here,” she said.
“That’s right. Just outside of Bedford, not too far from the reception.”
Sally flushed at the memory, then lifted a clump of melted cheese to her mouth. “This is so much better than the fish dinner that was going to be waiting for me,” she mused. “But maybe not better than your steak.”
“Maybe not,” he said with a half grin. “But then again, everything tastes better when you’re eating it in a beautiful woman’s bed.”
She sighed at the slice she held in her fingers. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
His tone took on a more serious note. “Just the ones I like.”
If he was waiting for a response, she resolved to disappoint him. The man was such a flirt. All of this was for fun, she reminded herself. Not for keeps. Last time, she’d thought it was for keeps, and that had landed her with a broken heart and a boatload of humiliation. This time it was strictly recreational, and that was fine with her. He was sure to head for the hills once he found out about the baby.
She took a sip of her water, not wanting to dwell on the inevitable. She felt beautiful at the moment, and wasn’t that worth savoring? “This is better than butternut squash ravioli with my parents, admit it. Or dinner in a stuffy restaurant. My idea of a dinner date is much better than yours.”
He held up his palms in surrender. “You got me there. I never would’ve guessed you were a pepperoni pizza in bed kind of girl. I’d pegged you for an escargot and fois gras type.”
She wrinkled her nose and pinched a piece of melted cheese between her fingers. “Gross. You must think I grew up at the yacht club or something. My childhood was pretty normal.”
“I find that hard to believe. You had cocktail hour every night with your parents.”
She shrugged and waved a hand dismissively. “They wanted us to grow up to be comfortable in social situations, that’s all. It was part of teaching me manners.” The irony wasn’t lost on her as she popped her fingertips into her mouth one at a time. “And see? I’m charming and full of class.”
Actually, she’d never done anything like this before. Pizza in bed. Without plates. Without napkins. In shorts and a T-shirt. With a hot, shirtless man. Every element about this was new, and she was fairly certain that she’d never relive this experience with anyone else, either. Sometimes people were just right to do wrong things with. Ben was right for a lot of wrong things, and as she licked her fingertips, she hoped he wasn’t about to get serious on her and demand she find a napkin. That would pretty much end the party right there.
Handing her a napkin appeared to be the furthest thing from his mind. He was watching her with a look of pain, as if she’d just tortured him by cleaning off her fingers like that. “What?”
He didn’t reply. Instead he placed his pizza into the box before sliding it off the bed and onto an end table. “You know what,” he said as he crept toward her, his muscular body inching up between her legs. “You drive me crazy, and you know it. You always have.”
When he brought his lips down to hers, she surrendered to his touch, easing herself back against the bed as he pulled her knees apart. She closed her eyes and sighed at the feel of him, the weight and warmth of his body. A chill shot down her side as she felt his lips trace the sensitive skin of her jawline, the delicious thrill of his breath in her ear. “Sally. All these years apart, and all of my best intentions, and here I am, right here at your mercy. Why can’t I get you out of my head?”
Those were her thoughts exactly, but she couldn’t respond as he pressed his warm lips against the spot beneath her earlobe. He wasn’t waiting for a response to his question, and she no longer had one to give, other than to tug at the steel muscles of his arms, pulling him closer.
He ran his hands along her sides, shifting her shorts down in one quick motion. Sally brought her hands up across his back and closed her eyes to exper
ience him better: his taste, his moans, the feel of his skin against hers. She heard the sound of a wrapper as he opened a condom. At some point he’d removed the rest of his clothing, and when he entered her, she was nearly aching with need for him.
He was slower this time, his thrusts hard, deep and controlled, his breath steady in her ear. She wrapped her legs behind his back and clutched at his shoulders, slippery with a sheen of light sweat. He felt perfect. They felt perfect together, and as she shuddered with the force of her climax, she tried to bury the very real fear in the back of her mind: that this was Ben, and all these feelings were nothing but an illusion.
* * *
They slept in the nude, her back snuggled up against his front, his arm draped over her side. Her hair tickled his nose. He brought his hand up to brush it away from his face. She sighed and shifted in her sleep at the contact, pressing her perfect little bottom against his pelvis.
He lay in her bed, in her expensive pink sheets, listening to her breath and feeling the heat from her body. Sally was every bit the sweet, smart girl he’d once pretended she wasn’t. She was exactly who he’d hoped she was. The only difference was that now he was mature enough to appreciate her. Lying next to her, he felt larger than himself, as if she was the better part of him.
He stroked his fingertips up the length of her arm and across the slope of her shoulder. Even her skin felt expensive, as if she’d bathed in exotic oils. He pressed his lips to a spot at the back of her neck, beneath her earlobe, and heard her sigh. Seconds later, she glanced over her shoulder and gave him a smile. “Morning,” she said.
“Good morning.” Though it was almost afternoon.
She tensed her body as she stretched and yawned, then rolled over onto her back to stare up at him. Ben positioned himself on one arm, staring down at her brown eyes and bow-shaped lips. He could get used to waking up like this every morning.
“I’ll make breakfast,” she said. “Eggs and bacon okay with you?”
“Perfect.”
She smiled and slipped out from between the sheets, darting quickly to a bathrobe slung over a chair beside her bed. She shrugged into the pink robe and cinched it tight at the waist, tying a double knot. Then she left the room without another word, closing the door behind her.
Ben yawned and sat up. His clothes were scattered around the room. He reached for his boxer shorts and T-shirt and pulled them on. The old Ben wouldn’t have stayed the night. That Ben would have left after pizza, promised to call in the morning and promptly forgotten about it. He felt different now. He wanted to stay, and he wanted to tread lightly. He wanted to do whatever was right to avoid hurting Sally again or sending her the wrong message. He liked her a whole hell of a lot more than he’d expected.
But how to act now? What was this, exactly? It felt like more than a one-night stand to him, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Ass backward, he thought wryly, running a hand through his hair. He’d slept with her first, and now he had to find a thread to follow, to figure out how to get back to where they should have been. They should’ve had a proper dinner, not pizza in bed. Pizza in bed was too damn casual, and nothing about what he was feeling was casual. His feelings were more in line with an expensive meal at a restaurant he could barely afford that served foods in languages he could barely understand. An impressive meal, to match his impressive feelings.
She was phenomenal. She laughed easily and said the right things. She worried too much about his feelings and didn’t pass judgment for his mistakes. She’d held his hand at the wedding. She’d held his hand, and that just about killed him, right there. That after he’d been pretty much the worst person he could be to her, she’d cared enough to reach out and hold his hand, and to worry that he was hurting. No, he owed her a real date, with flowers and dinner at a table in a restaurant. He wanted to take care of her, to make her as happy as she’d made him. Because he was happy, as if he’d been freed of some burden. If Sally could forgive him, then maybe he could forgive himself.
He walked into the kitchen and paused in the doorway, taking in her home. The back of the kitchen was composed almost entirely of windows that overlooked Avon Lake. The water was glassy and reflected the vibrant autumn leaves that surrounded the lake. The house itself was more simple than he’d anticipated. Small, intimate spaces that contrasted with her family’s austere mansion. Sally had preserved certain details, such as a wooden door on the wall that had once opened onto an icebox, and a deep, white ceramic kitchen sink. But the house wasn’t dated or musty. She’d placed mirrors strategically to bring more light to the small kitchen, and she’d set a small bouquet of flowers in a blue glass vase in the middle of the wide kitchen table. Her home was bright and cheerful. Optimistic, even—something classic dressed up with modern flair.
“I didn’t give you the tour last night,” she said with her back to him, as if she could read his thoughts. “This was a vacation cabin, built in the twenties. Two bedrooms, two baths. The kitchen is new.” She gestured to the white cabinets and light brown granite countertops. “My parents just about died when I first brought them here. Some of the walls were moldy, and the back porch... Well, let’s not even talk about the back porch.” She laughed over her shoulder and scooped coffee into a filter. “Mold, wood rot. That was the first thing to go. I took a sledgehammer to it. Very therapeutic, by the way.”
Ben ran his fingers across the smooth, polished wood of the doorway. It looked like oak, a toffee color with the thick rings of an aged tree. “You restored this place yourself?”
He detected a hint of pride in her smile. “Not myself, exactly. I’m not handy with a table saw. But I can design and I can oversee, and I can whip a contractor into shape like that.” She snapped her fingers. “It’s been a labor of love, bringing this old home back to life. My ex never really understood.” She poured water into the coffeemaker in a slow, steady stream. “He didn’t want to live here. It’s too small for a family.”
Ben brought his hand down and leaned one shoulder against the frame. “You wanted a family.”
“Yes.” The answer came quickly. “But I’m glad we didn’t have one together.”
She pressed a little button on the coffeemaker that illuminated a red light, then brushed her palms down the front of her robe. She’d already set a carton of eggs and a package of bacon on the counter, and she had a cast-iron pan heating on the stove. A silver teakettle began to hum.
“How about you, Ben?” she asked as she cracked an egg into the pan. “Are you the family type?”
He came closer to lean across the breakfast counter, eschewing the wooden stools she’d set out. “Never really thought about it,” he confessed. “My dad died when I was fifteen, but before that he didn’t come around much.”
“Your parents were divorced?”
“No, just hated each other.” This wasn’t something he talked about, mostly because hearing those words out loud wrought something inside of him. “The biggest problem was Dad had girlfriends. Lots of them, but I didn’t figure that out until his funeral, when all these strange women showed up, sobbing like they’d lost the love of their lives. Maybe some of them had.”
Sally didn’t turn as she prepared breakfast, but he saw that her face had taken on a pained expression. “I’m sorry.”
“About his extracurricular activities?” He tried to joke about it, but the words fell flat.
“About that, and his death at a young age. All of it. I had no idea.” She looked back at him. “I don’t mean to pry....”
“You want to know how he died.” Everyone Ben told always wanted to know how his father had died. “He took me and my brother camping over the July Fourth holiday, and we went fishing. He’d been drinking a lot, and he wanted us to dare him to touch the bottom of the lake.” Ben shrugged. “We did that all the time. Stupid dares. Just guy stuff. And I agreed that, fine, he should go touch the bo
ttom of the lake and bring up some of the sand to prove he’d been there. I didn’t care about it, but he wanted to do it.”
Ben paused, remembering the shudder of the little boat as his father jumped into the water for the last time. Ben and his brother had looked over the side and watched him sink to the bottom, bubbles gurgling behind him. Then they’d waited. And waited. And eventually they’d realized that too much time had passed. “They didn’t find him for a day,” he said through a painfully tight throat. He shook his head. “I saw his body when they pulled it up. I wasn’t supposed to.”
He looked up. At some point during the story, Sally had turned to face him, leaning her back against the countertop. Her forehead was creased. “That must have been shocking,” she said softly. “Drowning victims, they don’t even look like themselves.”
He’d fought for years to get the image of his father’s bloated body out of his head, and he didn’t want to think about it now. “I got over it,” he said. “But it took a lot of self-medication to get there. I watched my father drown, Sally.” A fist closed over his heart and twisted the organ in place. “I could have jumped in. I should have, but I waited.”
She hesitated, then turned back to the stove to lift the pan from the heat. The kitchen was warm with the smells of bacon and coffee. The teakettle whistled. He waited for her to say the same things everyone always said: that he couldn’t blame himself, he was just a child, his father wouldn’t have wanted him to live with that guilt. But she didn’t say any of it. Instead, she prepared two steaming plates of food and brought them over to him before turning to get coffee and tea. The silence was unexpected, but appreciated.
He sat in one of the stools, and she took the one next to him after handing him a cup of coffee. “You take it black with no sugar,” she said. “I remember that.”
From ten years ago? She had a good memory. He did, too, only when it came to Sally. She took her coffee with milk, and she never drank it when it was hot. She preferred to wait until it was lukewarm, and then she liked to drink it all at once rather than sip it. He’d never met anyone who gulped their coffee. Today, however, she was drinking herbal tea. That was new.
The Burden of Desire Page 15