[Kate's Boys 04] - Travis's Appeal

by Marie Ferrarella

  Clothes continued raining down, hers mingling with his in a silent, impromptu game of strip poker where the stakes were higher than just money.

  And once there wasn’t a stitch of material left between the two of them, their limbs tangled as closely as their lips did.

  Travis kissed her over and over again, grazing every part of her body, destroying all sense of time and space and launching her into a nether world of glorious sensations.

  It was only through supreme effort that she managed to hold on to her being enough to return the favor, pulling him into the same vortex. Every pass of his hand drew one from her in kind.

  Her fingers feathered along his heated skin, forcing him to rein in what he so badly wanted to explode. But Travis refused to place his own pleasure above hers, couldn’t allow himself to reach or indulge in that ultimate of sensations before he knew that she was there, as well. More than that, he wanted her to sample its fruits and pleasures before his own became a reality.

  Gently pushing Shana back onto the sofa, he proceeded to pleasure them both by feasting on her body. His lips, teeth and tongue tantalized and teased her, each working their magic as they reduced her to a mass of moist, palpitating, wanting flesh.

  Shana suddenly arched and cried out his name when the first crescendo grabbed her up, holding her a prisoner in its grasp.

  Stunned, awed, she wasn’t completely certain what it was that he had done, only that she’d never felt something of that magnitude before. Moreover, she was almost desperate to feel it again.

  Sweet exhaustion wrapped itself around her even as she arched against his mouth, silently supplicating for one more sample, one more explosion to cherish before she woke up from the dream.

  As she arched, she could feel Travis’s lips form a smile against her stomach. Before she could ask if he was laughing at her, the question faded from her brain. Because she felt him begin to slowly, then swiftly fulfill her unspoken request. Felt the nerve endings within her scrambling for higher ground as his tongue dipped further into her, teasing the most tender of areas, making it come alive with sensations.

  The second climax came more swiftly than the first, knowing which trail to follow. Everything within her quickened.

  Her heart pounding wildly, Shana tried to focus as Travis slid his slick body over hers, all parts touching, branding her.

  She felt exquisitely alive from the tips of her hair to the bottom of her toes.

  His face level with hers, she still could only see him through a cloudy haze. And then his hands were laced through hers even as he raised himself up for leverage.

  The next moment, he was joining his body to hers. They fit like two halves of a whole, coming together for the first time since the dawn of creation. And then, his eyes on hers, Travis began to rhythmically move.

  Shana matched him, her own desire getting the better of her. She thought her heart would explode in her chest as they went faster, scaling the high plateau. And then, a moan echoed in her throat and she just barely managed to keep it from surfacing. Arching her body so hard, she thought she had sealed herself to him, her backbone fusing with his.

  They were one.

  Just as powerfully as it had begun, the sensation began to recede.

  The inferno became a manageable fire and the pounding of her heart softened into a quiet, fading drum roll.

  He rolled off her and for a long moment that seemed almost endless, there was nothing but silence and the sound of their labored breathing.

  Because she couldn’t steady it, Shana began to think her breath would never become manageable again. But then it did, ushering in reality. And with it an odd sadness that it was over.

  And she wanted more.

  Shana pressed her lips together and forced herself to turn her face toward his.

  “Just what did your mother put into that cake?” she asked.

  He was busy watching the way her chest rose and fell with each breath. And how each breath she took made him want her again that much more. When he heard her voice, he roused himself, trying to focus on what she was saying. He failed.

  “Excuse me?”

  She lifted one indifferent shoulder and let it fall again, doing her best to seem nonchalant.

  “Poor attempt at humor,” Shana confessed. And then she added, because even though she silently insisted that there were to be no strings, no relationship in the offing, she still found that she needed him to know this about her. “I’ve never gone to bed with someone I hardly knew before.”

  His eyes dipped to the cushion she was lying on and he smiled. “Well, technically, we haven’t gone to bed yet.”

  Was he playing with words? Why didn’t he feel as disoriented, as dazed and as wondrous as she did? Exasperation rang in her voice as she corrected, “Okay, I’ve never gone to sofa with a man I hardly know.”

  Travis raised himself up on his elbow to see her expression. As he spoke, he trailed his fingertips along her skin, skimming the area between her breasts. He watched her flesh quiver slightly. The sight excited him all over again.

  “Is that a compliment?” he asked.

  She hadn’t meant it to be, at least, not consciously. But now that he asked, who knew? Certainly no other man had ever made her want to become this wanton creature she’d just glimpsed, even if she was cocooning herself in excuses.

  “That’s a confession,” she finally answered.

  “Confessions are for the guilty,” he told her softly. He caressed her face, exciting them both. “Don’t feel guilty, Shana.”

  I feel guilty enough for both of us, he added silently before he succeeded in blocking out his thoughts again.

  “There’s nothing to feel guilty about,” he assured her.

  “I don’t feel guilty,” she protested and then realized that, oddly enough, she didn’t, even though she’d expected to. With effort, she tried to keep the mood light. “I just don’t want you thinking that I do this with every man who takes me to a family celebration.”

  Leaning over her, his hand resting on the hollow of her waist, he lightly brushed his lips over hers. “I don’t,” he assured her.

  She caught her breath. There went her heart again, beating out a drum solo that throbbed its rhythm through all her pulse points. “No strings,” she managed to say to him.

  Travis wasn’t thinking about the existence of strings. He was thinking about losing himself in her all over again.

  “No strings,” he echoed, not even sure what he was saying. All he knew was that he wanted her just as fiercely as he had the first time. With a wild desire that shook him to the very foundation of his being.

  Chapter 11

  “A nything wrong?” Bryan put the question to his son almost two months later after silently debating whether or not to intrude.

  It was approximately an hour before regular office hours and Bryan had come in to look over a brief. Expecting to be the only one in the office at this time, he was surprised to see Travis’s door open and more surprised to see Travis. Curious, he approached the office and found his son sitting at his desk. But rather than working, Travis appeared to be staring off into space, a pensive frown on his lips.

  Travis seemed oblivious to his surroundings until Bryan asked the question. When his son raised his eyes to look at him, Bryan thought Travis seemed troubled. If something was bothering him, why hadn’t his son come to him?

  When Travis made no reply, Bryan prodded a little. “Anything I can help with?”

  Travis blinked, and gave a slight shake of his head, not in response to the question, but as if to shake off the mood he’d sank into. “Excuse me?”

  Bryan took that as an unspoken invitation and crossed the threshold. He also closed the door behind him, just in case Travis needed to share something in confidence.

  “I’m not nearly as good as Kate is at this,” Bryan began, picking his way carefully through the conversation, “but I have noticed that you’ve been a lot quieter lately than normal. Your workloa
d hasn’t changed, so I’m thinking that maybe something else is going on.”

  Bryan paused, waiting. Knowing how, when he was Travis’s age, or actually, up to and including the point when he had first met Kate, he’d hated anyone poking around in his life. Feelings had always been private and off-limits as far as he’d been concerned. It took Kate to teach him otherwise. She’d taught him that to be part of a family, to love and be loved, meant that you shared not just the good times but the pain as well.

  “Is it that girl you brought to the house for Mike and Miranda’s party?” Bryan guessed.

  “Shana.”

  “Shana,” Bryan repeated, nodding his head. “Is it her?”

  By nature, Travis wasn’t defensive, but he felt himself becoming just that. “Why would you ask me that, Dad?”

  The very question—as well as Travis’s tone—told Bryan that he’d guessed right.

  “Because, for most of your life, you haven’t exactly been auditioning for the part of Casanova. You’re more private than your brothers. We didn’t even meet Adrianne until you were briefly engaged to her. So naturally, when you brought Shana to the house, we thought…” Bryan stopped his line of thought and shifted gears. He was relatively new at this. Kate handled all the heavy-duty emotional stuff. But Kate wasn’t here right now, so he did the best he could. “Anything wrong between the two of you?”

  “Wrong?” Travis echoed.

  It was a blatant stall tactic as Travis tried to frame his thoughts. The answer was yes—and no. No because for the last two months, they’d seen each other almost every evening, if for only a little while. And most evenings turned into a perfect slice of heaven that found them in each other’s arms, making love or just simply enjoying the moment with one another.

  Perfect, except for the hot bullet of guilt that kept digging its way further into his gut.

  Shawn hadn’t told Shana, the way he’d initially suggested, that she was his granddaughter and not his daughter. Hadn’t prepared her for the shock that lay in wait for her. It seemed somehow inevitable to him that Shana would eventually find out, one way or another, that Susan was her mother, not her sister. The truth always had a way of surfacing, usually at the most inconvenient time—and sooner rather than later.

  He’d prodded Shawn once more, but then Shana had entered the room and any conversation on the topic was suspended.

  Permanently, if he was any judge of the situation.

  Compounding the problem, even though Shawn refused to stay away from his beloved restaurant, the man seemed to be growing paler, his gait heavier, his breathing more audible and even labored at times. Travis couldn’t divorce himself from the uneasy feeling that time was running out. For all of them, not just for Shawn O’Reilly.

  Sitting there beneath his father’s scrutiny, Travis blew out a breath. He needed help. Advice. At the very least, he needed to have a lifeline of some sort thrown to him. Because as it stood now, he couldn’t seem to navigate these waters on his own.

  Taking another breath, Travis dove in. “Dad, did you ever break a confidence?”

  Bryan slowly crossed over to the desk now and took a seat in front of it.

  “Professionally or privately?” He studied Travis’s face as he asked his question.

  “Both,” Travis responded, then gave a vague shrug of his shoulders. This was definitely complicated. “I guess professionally to start with.”

  “No, but I’ve been tempted more than once,” Bryan confessed honestly. “Ultimately, you have to do what you feel is morally right. Clients trust us to keep their secrets. If that trust is gone, sacrificed for whatever reason, we’ll only get half the picture from them. It ties our hands and keeps us from rendering the proper kind of service to our clients.”

  “What if keeping that confidence is morally wrong?” Travis pressed.

  “By whose judgment?” Bryan paused, waiting. When Travis didn’t answer immediately, Bryan took the logical guess, “Yours?”

  “Yes.” But this wasn’t just an arbitrary feeling. “There’s more to it than that.”

  Bryan gave him the rules that had always guided his judgment. “We’re custodians for these people who come through our office doors. We give them the benefit of our experience and we advise them. But ultimately, all decisions whether or not to share with the world—or their families—what they have told us in confidence belong to them. We can’t presume to usurp their authority. We certainly can’t force our sense of values on them if they don’t want them.”

  But those were lofty platitudes. Travis, he could see, was obviously in anguish. Though he wasn’t nearly as expressive or sensitive in dealing with his children as his wife was, it still bothered him to see one of his own suffering like this.

  Getting up, he put his hand on Travis’s shoulder. “You want to talk about it?”

  If only he could. But that wasn’t allowed, even between colleagues of the same firm. He adhered to strict observance of the privilege. Travis shook his head. “You know I can’t.”

  “Hypothetically, then,” Bryan suggested.

  Travis eyed him quizzically.

  “I can take a few educated, general guesses,” Bryan explained, “and you can indicate to me if I’m on the right trail.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he began theorizing out loud. “You have a piece of information that you feel will have a large impact on someone’s life if they were privy to it.” It didn’t take too much of a stretch to assume that this had to do with Shana.

  “I think I’d use the word devastating,” Travis told him.

  Bryan nodded as he took in the information. “Seeing as you’re not given to exaggeration, this—whatever it is—must be pretty bad. Because if it was good, then keeping it a secret from that person wouldn’t make you chafe against your oath.” Travis merely nodded in response. The rest was easy, at least in theory, Bryan thought. “And you’re afraid, if she finds out and then learns that you knew this all along and kept it from her, it might cause a rift between the two of you.”

  A rift. What a nice, civilized word for the tearing apart of something unique and precious. Because, despite her protests to the contrary, despite her monologue about “no strings,” he’d become fairly confident that they had something special between them. And that she was falling in love with him—as much as he with her.

  Travis laughed softly under his breath as he looked at his father. “I guess you’re the one who’s given to understatement in the family.”

  Bryan watched him for a long moment. “Just how important is this girl to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Travis answered too quickly. Self-preservation had him making the vague denial. But he needed to be honest here. Honest with his father as well as with himself. And the truth of it was, Shana mattered more to him than any other woman ever had.

  “Very.”

  He raised his eyes to his father’s, waiting for a reaction. Hoping for perhaps a dispensation from the man who’d taught him everything he knew.

  His father’s answer surprised him.

  Kate was right, Bryan thought. This was serious. All four of his boys, gone down like dominoes. At least he still had his daughter. Kelsey, bless her, was as serious about men as a comedy routine.

  “If she is that important to you and she’s worthy of those feelings, then she should understand that you’re not able to violate the oath you took before God and the state of California. Your integrity is at stake. Not to mention that people go to prison to protect the attorney-client privilege. If it’s important enough to stand up to higher authority in order to protect it, she should be able to understand that it has nothing to do with her and everything to do with integrity and the law.”

  Travis laughed shortly as he shook his head. He would have thought his father would have understood the position he found himself in. After all, his father had Kate to set him straight.

  “Dad, women are built different than men,” Travis pointed out tactfully. “And, even though inte
lligence is found on both sides of the gender gap, they do think differently than we do.”

  But some things, Bryan liked to think, were universal. “Not if she loves you. That is what we’re talking about, right? Love.”

  Travis proceeded warily. He would hate to be wrong about Shana and then have it come back to bite him. It was better if he left her side of it vague. “Yes. On my side. I don’t know what it’s like for her. She keeps talking about ‘no strings.’”

  Bryan smiled. Again, he had his answer. “I had the same conversation, years ago, except that was my mantra. Trust me, if ‘no strings’ crops up more than once in the conversation—even the sum total of conversations—the lady doth protest too much.”

  Travis was about to agree but just then, the intercom on his phone buzzed.

  When he picked the receiver up, Bea crisply informed him that “Ms. O’Reilly is on line two for you. She sounds really upset.”

  He told her, Travis immediately thought, feeling both relieved and anxious at the same time. Does she know I knew?

  He looked up at his father. “I’ve got to take this, Dad.” The rest was left unsaid as his finger hovered over the lit button beneath line two.

  Bryan was already on his feet. He only paused to say, “I’m around if you need to talk more,” before he crossed to the door.

  Travis waited until his father closed the door and then got on. “Hello?”

  “Travis, it’s Dad.”

  He could tell by the tone of her voice it had nothing to do with a confession and everything to do with Shawn’s health. Travis was on his feet, ready to take off. “Where are you?”

  “The house. I’m waiting for the paramedics. Travis, he’s barely conscious—” Her voice cracked and he heard a sob.

  “I’ll be right there,” he promised. “Just hang on.”

  “Hurry,” Shana implored before breaking the connection.

  Travis was out the door in less than a heartbeat.

  “Bea, call my appointments for today and reschedule all of them, please,” he instructed as he passed her desk.