by BETH KERY
Mario opened his mouth to protest, but seemed to think better of it under the influence of Vanni’s glare. He turned and disappeared into the crowd.
“Take your winnings,” Vanni directed again gently. “We’re leaving.”
Emma scooped up her chips and followed Vanni through the crowded casino. This time, when people tried to stop him to talk, he politely put them off.
“Do you want me to cash them for you?” Vanni asked her a moment later when they approached a desk that looked like it might be casino services.
“Are you sure we should?” she asked doubtfully, handing him the chips. “Mario seems pretty drunk. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“He didn’t realize he’d given you such a big chip,” Vanni said succinctly. Emma blinked in surprise. “He gets sloppy when he drinks. Trust me, I’ve seen it before. And if you think I’m going to feel sorry for that idiot for propositioning you right in front of my face, you’re sorely mistaken. You do realize he was trying to buy you for the night—or an hour or two—with that chip?”
“Yes,” Emma admitted.
“And you’re still defending him?”
She sighed. “No. I guess he got what he deserved. I just feel bad that I’m the one to benefit from his stupidity.”
“Who else should? You were the one he insulted. I’ll be right back,” he told her, turning to the desk. A minute later, he returned and handed her a receipt.
“I had them convert it into American dollars. They’ll be sending the check to your address at home,” he said, grabbing her hand. Completely undone by the strange turn of events, Emma just followed him out of the casino and hotel lobby. As the doorman opened the gilded doors for them, however, she glanced down at the receipt. Stunned, she stopped dead in her tracks at the top of the marble stairs. Vanni looked back at her when she broke his hold, his brow furrowed.
“Vanni . . . this says that they’ll be sending a check for one hundred forty-one thousand seven hundred and fifty-one dollars to my apartment in Evanston,” Emma said, shock making her voice sound hollow.
Vanni gave her a bland glance and took her hand again.
“Mario has never been one to bet small. I’m sure he’s bet a king’s ransom in the casinos that he’ll win the Montand cup on Sunday, for instance. Maybe this will teach that stupid sod not to bet on what isn’t his.”
Look for THE AFFAIR Week Seven, on sale October 28, 2014.
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No one in their right mind would want to visit him, so the sound of knocking at his front door took him by surprise.
Maybe it was Sherona Legion? But he’d warned the only viable candidate for visitation for miles on end—curvy, kind Sherona—about visiting him on this godforsaken hilltop. Who knew what he’d do to her, the state he’d put himself in? Of course, Sherona’d taken Rill at his word for a year and a half, so he couldn’t imagine who was trying to barge in on his drunken, morose solitude now.
He was so caught off guard by the phenomenon of someone visiting that he briefly reverted to his old self—his civilized self—hastening to answer the door.
He was a big man, so when he tripped on the useless little rug in the entryway, he crashed to the wood floor with the impact of an ax-felled oak.
He rolled over and sat up, curses blistering his tongue, the savage Rill Pierce once again fully in evidence.
“My, my. How the mighty have fallen,” she said from above him.
He glanced up in midprocess of ripping the frilly rug in half, his blurry-eyed gaze encountering long legs and curving hips. Nope, this was definitely not Sherona Legion. His eyes lingered in a lap he’d like to spend the next twenty-four hours in without pause.
He grinned.
There was good reason he’d warned away Sherona Legion. In his drunken state, his usual tight controls on his baser nature had evaporated. It was precisely why he’d made a vow long ago not to drink to excess around women.
No real woman existed like the one in front of him in Vulture’s Canyon, Illinois. Rill was left with the intoxicated conclusion that a sex angel had been dropped on his doorstep, and God had packaged her in a tight tank top and even tighter jeans. If there was a deity looking out for him—something Rill seriously doubted, considering he was sin personified—then said omniscient being would know how he loved nothing more than a woman in jeans that hugged every tight curve.
He unglued his eyes from the tempting juncture of shapely thighs and looked up. He grinned like the town idiot when he saw a glorious spill of brown and gold-streaked hair and thrusting breasts pressed snugly against white cotton.
“Well, well, well . . . what have we here,” he mumbled thickly. He reached and ran his hands over the back of the woman’s thighs. His cock lurched when he encountered her tightly encased buttocks.
He’d finally gotten drunk enough to hallucinate. He was getting good at this wastrel business.
“Rill, what are you—”
She abruptly stopped talking when he kneaded her two round ass cheeks in his palms. His face hovered next to paradise. It was amazing what a guy who had no future and who daily tried to forget his past might consider heaven, but there you had it. He closed his eyes and inhaled, catching the scent of cotton mixing with the subtle spice of woman.
No, it wasn’t just his whiskey-soaked brain. It wasn’t just the fact that he hadn’t inhaled the scent of pussy in his nose in a god-awful long time. Drunken hallucination or not, his angel was sweet.
He kissed her with an open mouth at the bottom of her zipper.
She gasped.
“And here that doctor was preaching to me about rehab,” he mumbled. “You’re just what the doctor ordered—least you would be if I didn’t have a wanker with a rod up his ass takin’ care of me. Come ’ere.”
He spread his hands on her hips, liking the way he encompassed all those tight curves in his grip. He pulled. She fell onto his lap and thighs with a cock-tugging thud. He buried his face in fragrant hair and soft, firm breasts and nuzzled. Inhaling her scent was like breathing in a potent opiate. He could get lost in this unexplored territory—
Lost . . .
“Rill . . . what the hell are you doing?”
Did angels stun, because that was exactly how his sounded. He turned his head, drowning in the arousing sensation of wedging his face in the valley of delicious breasts.
“I’m enjoying my hallucination to its fullest,” he mumbled as his hands came up to cradle those firm breasts. He held her against his face and twisted his nose in a fleshy nirvana.
His angel snorted.
“You’re not hallucinating. You’re hammered. There’s a difference.”
She’d sounded derisive, but he’d heard the telling tremble in her voice when he pressed his lips against a distended nipple.
“One and the same, if you can get drunk enough,” he muttered.
He cupped one ass cheek and rode her jeans-covered pussy against the ridge of his cock. She inhaled sharply and froze. He knew why. A powerful jolt of lust had torn through him as well. He’d thought his cock had been tamed with a combination of whiskey and his own hand for the past eighteen months, but he’d thought wrong.
It had just awakened, and not with a whimper but with a bang. In a matter of seconds he’d been transformed by the power of volatile need.
His thumb stroked the peak of a breast. He grunted appreciatively when he felt the button tighten. He wasn’t surprised she wore such a flimsy bra. She was supposed to be his fantasy, after all, and Lord knew he preferred women wearing very little, if anything, over their breasts. At least in the privacy of his mind that was his preference. In real life, he’d prefer they covered up and kept the beast in him from rearing its head.
Drunken delirium or not, he was going to love ev
ery minute of letting the beast out of its cage. Tomorrow would come soon enough, and he’d be plunged into the abyss once again. But that moment wasn’t now, thanks to this hallucinatory, blessed angel. He moved his head and slipped a stiffened nipple between his grinning lips. His smile faded at the sensation of turgid flesh against his laving tongue.
“You’re stiff as a bullet,” he muttered a moment later. He wanted that flesh served up raw on his tongue. Nevertheless, he forced himself to still, his nose pressed against supple, fragrant flesh. “Do you want me to do this more?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to stop, or do you want me to see to the other one?” he clarified in a tight voice.
Her breathy whisper felt like a caress along his cock. “I don’t want you to stop.”
He moved hastily.
“Rill!” she cried out when he suddenly shoved her tank top over her head. She sputtered against cloth, and he jerked the garment off her. He whisked aside the flimsy satin of her white bra, unveiling bountiful pale flesh capped by a fat, erect nipple. He paused, recognizing true beauty even with the feeble tool of his whiskey-pickled brain.
“Aw, baby,” he whispered. His cock throbbed hard enough to make him wince when he saw how his whisking breath made her nipple peak beneath it. “You’re so pretty.”
Something between a whimper and a moan leaked out of her throat when he wrapped his lips around her nipple. His tongue moved like the fingertips of a blind man reading the secrets of the universe in Braille. He learned every tiny bump with fascination. He coaxed the center nubbin until it pressed like a hard little dart against his laving tongue.
When he drew on her, it was as if he had also drawn that sexy, surprised cry from her lungs. Power and lust stabbed at him. Heat rushed into his prick, and he once again rocked her against his straining erection. Her ass cheek filled his palm. He was inundated with the scents of sex and flowers and the sensation of ripe, soft flesh. Heat penetrated her clothing and his own, resonating from her pussy to his cock.
He ground her down on him and rotated his hips, grunting when she gyrated against him in return.
Arousal reared up, a beast about to pounce. The feeling was so powerful, it sobered him for a very brief moment. He’d long ago schooled himself against the charms of nubile flesh and inviting smiles. Lord knew he’d been offered more of that fare than a normal man.
Rill hadn’t been a normal man, though. He’d made a point of that.
He blinked and a dark pink nipple came into focus. It was a rose-tipped delicacy, glistening wetly atop soft curves of mouthwatering flesh. A snarl shaped his lips. A need to mate, hard and fast, swelled dangerously in his blood. He leaned down and latched onto the nipple. Distantly, he recalled her other sweet breast, and he couldn’t resist the temptation.
Her fingers clawed into his hair when he shoved aside her bra and sucked on her other nipple.
“You let your hair grow,” he heard her say through his haze of greedy lust.
He continued to feast on firm, responsive flesh. Did she know him? Was that how she knew that he’d shaved his head for the past couple years? He doubted it. As a film director—an ex-director—plenty of people had seen him on television and in entertainment magazines.
Besides, if he’d ever come face-to-face with a woman like this, he would have remembered. She was too sweet to be real. She melted on his tongue. He drowned in her scent and flavor. His balls pinched tight. He reluctantly withdrew his mouth from her breast.
The necessity for haste jolted through him like an electrical shock. He jerked up his hips and she fell off him, long hair spilling over her face.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he mumbled as he rolled on his hip and came up on his hands and knees. When he got there, he paused for a few seconds, willing his world to stop spinning.
“Rill . . . are you all right?”
“No worries,” he mumbled as he slowly, carefully stood, putting his hands out for a balance as though he were on a lurching ship. “I may be shit-faced as an Irish sailor on payday, but I’m in fine fucking form.”
“Charming,” he heard her say dryly when he grabbed his cock through his jeans and grimaced. He could tell by the tone of her voice that his angel thought he was being crude, but in reality, he’d been trying to alleviate the stab of lust that went through it when he noticed her shapely legs encased in tight denim and supple, calf-length leather boots.
His vision blurred as he held out his hand to her. She got up on her own, however, which indicated he’d hallucinated some brains along with all that firm, ripe beauty. Most likely, he would have stumbled and brought both of them down on the hard wood floor. She stood, her hair falling in a riot of waves and curls around her shoulders—a fucking glorious display. The tendrils reached her waist. He stretched his hand farther, longing to touch the burnished strands.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing his hand firmly in her own instead. “I’m taking you to bed.”
“Now you’re talking,” he agreed with drunken earnestness. He staggered after her down the hallway to his bedroom, his eyes glued to the beguiling curve that led from her waist to her hip. He couldn’t wait to peel those jeans off and expose the rest of that golden apricot-hued, juicy flesh.
In his drunken state, fantasy and reality melded. One second, he’d been in the hallway leching over his angel’s ass, and the next, he was in the bedroom pulling her back in his arms and nibbling at her neck, the fragrance of her hair and skin deepening his intoxication. He bent and pressed her ass against his erection. She squirmed.
“Rill Pierce, behave.”
Instead of stopping, his mouth grew hungrier on her neck. He felt the vibrations of her soft, helpless moan against his lips.
“You don’t want me to behave,” he growled against her ear before he pressed his mouth to her neck. She shivered in his arms. He could feel her pulse, throbbing quick and strong beneath his lips. “Your heart is racing.”
“That’s because I’m trying to throw a six-foot-three drunk Irishman off me,” she said acerbically. But he heard the tremor in her voice; he knew what it meant. And, no—it wasn’t drunken wishful thinking, either. She’d slowed her wriggling in his embrace. She molded against him like she couldn’t stop herself from feeling his shape.
He opened his hand at her lower belly, his third and fourth fingers spreading down to her mons. He liked how much of her compact body he could encompass with his hand. His actions didn’t strike him as forward or inappropriate, only right and natural—soft woman against hard man. He pulled her closer, holding her hips captive.
She went completely still in his arms.
“I may be drunk, but I’m not an idiot. Don’t tell me you don’t feel that,” he said gruffly, referring to the palpable heat that emanated from both of their groins, daring her to deny the obvious. His voice had gone hoarse with acute desire. Something about her scent and the feeling of her satiny, warm skin beneath his hand was turning him into a horny satyr. Sure, her body was a fine piece of equipment, but he’d thrived in a profession where breathtaking women abounded. It wasn’t her soft skin and lush curves that were making him crazy.
Or at least it wasn’t just that.
“I don’t think . . .”
“Stop thinking. Just feel,” he entreated in a whisper next to her ear. “That’s what I’m doing, and I haven’t let myself feel much of anything for two years now. Have pity, beautiful.”
If he didn’t feel her wet, sleek flesh surrounding his cock very soon, he suddenly doubted for his sanity. Not that doubting his sanity wasn’t a daily occurrence these days, but on this occasion, the possibility of losing his mind felt frighteningly close.
He placed one hand on her chin and pushed it gently, urging her to twist her face toward him. He plucked at her lips. Even though she didn’t kiss him back immediately, she didn’t turn away, either. He closed his ey
es and nibbled at her. It was like trying to coax a flower to open for him. Rill loved the art of kissing—at least, he did when he wasn’t shit-faced with his cock ready to burst.
He reined in his lust, willing her to respond as he shaped their mouths together tenderly, and then with increasing fervor as the sensation of her pervaded his awareness. His brain may be taking a bath in alcohol, but he recognized her premium flavor nonetheless.
Something swooped up from his chest to his neck until it tightened like a clawed hand on his throat. It took him a second to recognize the sensation as blinding need.
“Open up, baby,” he growled. “I’ve waited for this for so damn long.”
When her lips parted, he swept down on her, drinking her nectar thirstily, letting her taste course through his blood and flesh, allowing it to drown out his memories by a means exponentially more effective than whiskey.
She made a sound in her throat that he couldn’t completely identify when he began to unfasten her jeans with fingers that had grown fleet from an onrush of distilled lust. Had it been surprise he’d heard in her tone? Arousal?
Or uncertainty?
He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.
He groaned gutturally as he kissed her—well, ravaged her mouth, in truth—while he shoved down her jeans and one hand rose to caress the smooth skin of her hip and ass. Lust raged in him at the evidence of all that sweet female flesh.
It’d been so long.
The way he felt, he might have been a sixteen-year-old boy first dribbling jeans off the girl of his wet dreams, not a thirty-six-year-old man who had known his share of fame and accolades, the touch and desire of many women, the love of a wife whom he’d failed, in the end . . .
. . . the black void of loss and self-doubt.
Rill was too familiar with all those things.
The flickering thought galvanized him. He shoved her panties down next to her clinging jeans, and then regretfully interrupted their kiss. She wasn’t so hesitant in her response now; she’d been kissing him back with a fervor and heat that nearly equaled his own, tangling her tongue with his, twisting her face farther over her shoulder to get a better angle on his penetration. He ducked his knees and dragged her jeans and panties down to her shins.