by Mia Madison
And though I barely remembered my name and had to try five times to get the door to unlock, I was fairly certain I would enjoy myself tonight.
Owen
Yep… I was definitely going to hell. Seducing a coworker. Who was twenty-one. And the daughter of my oldest friend and current enemy. Any one of those things was enough to send me to hell. All of them combined was quite possibly a recipe for eternal damnation.
But shit, I hadn’t felt this way about anyone in forever. She was so… fresh. Not like in a sexual way, but in every other way. Becca made me see the world through new eyes. She looked on the bright side of everything. She saw the best in everyone, whether it was a cynical old surgeon or an obsessed young bride-to-be.
She believed in possibilities, and she made me believe in them, too. That is, at least when she wasn’t being stifled by her asshole father. While I still had some fond memories of Greg-the-Friend whom I’d grown up with, I didn’t have much respect for Greg-the-Father.
How dare he try to squash such a budding talent? She had the exact right temperament for a doctor. She was warm and funny. Intelligent and curious. Organized and efficient—something that many doctors didn’t manage to be.
And he was willing to waste all that potential on a business degree when what he should’ve been doing was welcoming her into the medical field with open arms. It would be a real boon for both her and our field.
But the other reason I was currently fuming at Greg was more personal. It was preemptive anger because I knew he’d go ballistic if he knew I was interested in his daughter. Or even worse, that she was interested in me.
On the one hand, I didn’t blame him entirely. Fathers were supposed to hate the men their little girls dated. But I knew that I was quite possibly the last man on earth he’d want to see by her side. Shit, he’d probably rather she dated a serial killer than me.
But the joke was on him because it was clear she wanted me. Or at least she enjoyed playing naughty games with me.
Games that were due to start any minute now.
That thought drove most of the rage from my mind. In fact, the thought of her down the hall in her room, running her hands over that amazing body drove all the blood right out of my head, straight down to a lower, more centrally-located spot.
I could be pissed off at Greg anytime, but how often did I know the exact moment a gorgeous young woman was touching herself and thinking about me? Thus far in my four decades, it had only happened once. Tonight.
Turning out the lights, I stripped and climbed into bed, enjoying the way the cool sheets felt against my skin. It wasn’t as good as Becca would have felt against me, but it wasn’t bad.
I set the phone down next to me so I wouldn’t miss her text, and pictured what she might be doing now. Was she under the covers or on top of them? Definitely under them, or at least under the sheet. God, what I’d give to be standing at the foot of her bed, watching her hands move under the sheet.
Was she cupping her breasts? Tweaking her nipples? Letting one hand stray lower? Maybe right now, she was tracing the outside of her warm seam, teasing herself with anticipation.
My hand was moving under the sheet, too, fisting my rock-hard cock as I thought about her. Was she touching her clit now? Circling her entrance with her index finger? Maybe she was pushing one of her slim fingers inside her tight channel. That thought made my cock jolt in my hand.
When I was close, my phone chimed, and I flipped it open eagerly. My own orgasm would feel better once I read about hers.
I did it, her text said.
Good girl, I wrote back, my cock growing even harder. How was it?
Amazing.
Now that’s what I liked the hear. What did you think about?
You.
Doing what?
Touching me. Teasing me. Making me beg. Such seductive words from a seemingly innocent young lady!
I’d do all that and more if I were there. Pausing to correct an error, I scowled at the screen. My fingers were clumsy on the tiny keyboard. Did you come hard?
Oh yes.
That made my cock twitch again. I wish I could’ve heard you moo.
What?
Shit. Fucking autocorrect! Sorry. That was supposed to be moan. I hate texting. My fingers are too big.
There was a pause, and then: Sometimes that’s a good thing.
I chuckled. She was definitely getting braver. If I were there, what would you like these big, strong, long fingers to be doing?
There was a pause, and then she responded. Cupping my breasts. Making my nipples hard. Teasing me.
I’d do all of that and more, bagel. Shit! I meant baby.
More what, croissant?
Ha ha. But if you really want to know, you have to pretend your hands are mine again. So that you can play along at home, so to sleep. I meant so to squeak.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Glaring, I hit the phone icon on the screen. A moment later, I heard her timid voice.
“Hello?”
“I hate texting.”
“I can see why,” she said, amusement in her voice.
“Who wants to text at a time like this, anyway? Back in my day, we had more fun if our hands were free. Or at least one of them.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really. Want me to prove it to you?” There was a long pause. “Becca?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Sorry… it’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a man naked before. Me naked, I mean.”
“Both of us naked, actually.”
“Really?” Her sharp intake of air seemed like a good sign.
“Really. I was thinking about you touching yourself… thinking about you stroking that beautiful body… thinking about you making yourself scream my name. Did you?”
She paused, and I could hear her slightly accelerated breathing. “I—well, I cried out. I’m usually pretty quiet.”
“You won’t be in the future. Not if we keep playing this way.”
“What way?”
“This way. Fold your hands together and rest them on your stomach. I should’ve put ‘as needed’ on the prescription—because I’m pretty sure you’re ready for a second dose.”
“You’re the doctor.” Her voice was two thirds enthusiasm and one third fear. I was pretty sure I could improve upon that ratio, given the chance.
“That’s right, I am… but not right now. Right now, I’m just a man who thinks you’re an incredibly beautiful woman. Close your eyes, Becca, and imagine me sitting on the bed next to you.”
“Okay.”
“Keep your eyes closed, but I want you to use your hands to do what I’m describing. Are you under the sheet?”
“Yes, I am.”
I knew it. “Why don’t you pull it down to your waist.”
“Okay.” I could almost hear her gulp through the phone.
“God, I bet your breasts are gorgeous. Cup them for me. Squeeze them together. I bet that makes some pretty impressive cleavage.”
There was a soft moan at the other end of the phone.
“That’s it, baby, squeeze them. Now run your thumbs over your nipples. Pretend it’s my hands.”
“I wish it were.”
So did I. With every fiber of my being. But she wasn’t ready yet. If I thought she were, I’d be knocking on the door to her room two seconds from now. But she wasn’t ready, and truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I was, either. Becca was such a sweet young woman. I sensed a great deal of potential between us, and I didn’t want to fuck it up, by, well, fucking. At least not too soon.
“How does that feel?”
“Really good.”
“Good girl. Pinch your nipples for me now, Becca.”
“Okay.” Her voice was breathy, but it was normal—which meant she wasn’t doing it hard enough.
“Do it harder. Now.”
This time, I heard a small squeal, and the sound went straight to my cock. I fisted it as I pictured her fingers on h
er breasts. “Good girl. With you left hand, keep squeezing your breast. Press it against your chest. Move your right hand down to your stomach.”
“Mmm, okay.”
“Good. Are your legs spread, baby?”
“A little.”
“Then spread them wider.” I waited a beat. “Wider than that. It makes me so hard picturing you like that, Becca.”
“Does it? Are you—?”
“Yes, I’m stroking my cock. I can’t help it—you’ve made me so damn hard.”
“I’m glad.” Her voice was small but I could hear the mixture of embarrassment and pride.
“Run your fingers under the sheet now. Across your mound. Is your skin hot?”
“Scorching.”
“Good. Slide your finger up and down your slit. Keep your touch light and teasing, like my tongue would be if I were there.”
She moaned again, and I stroked my cock harder. “Now circle your clit but don’t touch it. Just make circles, first one way, then the other.”
“It feels really good.”
“I bet it looks really good, too. Can you imagine if I were there, on the side of the bed, watching you? Can you picture the hungry look on my face as I watch you stroke your own beautiful body?”
Her breathing sped up.
“Dip your finger inside yourself. Do it now.”
She gasped, and then a second later, let out a deep moan.
“Are you wet for me, Becca?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Rub that moisture on your clit.”
She was whimpering now.
“Rub faster, and keep your eyes closed, because I’m there. I’m watching you. I’m watching you mash your gorgeous tit against your chest, watching you fingering yourself. And I’m stroking my cock and it’s so fucking hard because of you, Becca. Because you turn me on so much. Flick your finger back and forth across your clit and let me hear how turned on you are.”
Her moans were louder now, her breathing frantic.
“Stroke your clit and don’t you dare stop until you come, you hear me? Because I’m watching you, and I’m so close, you’re driving me wild, you’re so fucking sexy when you touch yourself like that… do it harder, and come for me. Come hard. Right fucking now.”
There was a gasp and then a sharp cry, followed by another and then my name escaped her lips in breathy rush of air. The sound of her release triggered my own, and I came hard, panting as much as she was. “Don’t stop,” I ordered, even as my own hand stilled.
Becca gasped again, then gave another cry. Shit, I think I would’ve given a limb at that moment if I could’ve been magically transported to her room to see the look on her face.
She was breathing heavily, coming down from what had sounded like one hell of an orgasm. Mine certainly had been. “Are you still alive, sweetheart?”
At first, I only heard the tantalizing sounds of her trying to catch her breath. But then: “I think so.”
I chuckled. “Me too. Think you’ll sleep well tonight?”
“God, yes.” Her voice already sounded a bit sleepy.
“Me too. Good night, Becca. Sleep well—and nakedly.”
She giggled. “You too, Dr. Hottie.”
This time, it was my turn to be embarrassed. “Did I live up to the name?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” she said, making me laugh. “Good night.”
“Good night, baby.”
I was more than ready to drift into a deep sleep, but after we hung up, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The way she’d trusted me and done as I’d asked. The way she’d shared this experience with me. The way she was willing and eager and open to new things.
I hadn’t met a lot of women like that.
As far as I could tell, Becca was one of a kind.
Becca
“You’re kidding! Then what happened?”
It was Friday afternoon, and we were making the long drive back to Taylorsville. But this time I was in the front seat, and there wasn’t a Bridenesia in the back, chatting on her phone.
Owen was driving while he regaled me with amazing anecdotes from his time with DBW. “Well, all the water had to be boiled, and we only had a little firewood. We didn’t have any food except for this old can of cocktail weenies, plus this massive block of cheese.”
“But why did they send you so much cheese in the first place? It’s not like you had refrigeration.”
“You wouldn’t believe the things we sometimes got. One month, our aid station got a shipment of non-perishable food that included sixty-four cans of black olives.”
That was crazy. “Well, at least you could make martinis.”
“Those are made with green olives.”
“Oh.” I’d never had one. Plus I sometimes got them mixed up with margaritas. “But what happened with the cheese?”
Owen put his blinker on and passed a slow-moving RV on the two-lane highway. “Well, we built up the fire, adding whatever we could to the scant amount of wood. Cardboard, paper, books—whatever we could find, we used.”
“You burned books?”
“Yeah, but not in a Nazi way,” Owen said a bit defensively, and I laughed. He was so good at teasing me that it was fun to turn the tables on him. “Anyway, Carol set all the remaining water in canisters and boiled it. Jack kept feeding the fire with whatever scraps he could find. And me? I made fondue.”
I laughed, trying to picture it. “What’d you do, just hold the cheese over the fire?”
“I put it in a metal cup that used to be a part of a canteen set. I tied a rope around it and dangled it over the fire until the cheese melted.”
“And then what?”
“Then we got sticks and dipped stuff in it. The cocktail weenies. Bites of crackers and bread. Jack was all for trying a cheese-covered cricket, but he couldn’t catch one.”
“Eww, that’s gross.” Owen just shrugged as I struggled to get that visual out of my mind. “Then how long until you got real food?”
“A couple of days. It didn’t go very far, though. There were a lot of hungry people in that village.”
That though pretty effectively killed all the mirth from the fondue story. “Was that the worst place you were at?”
He thought about it for a moment, looking out over the empty road ahead of us. “It was definitely one of the top five worst.” He drove for another mile, and just when I thought he wasn’t going to elaborate, he did. “There were different kinds of bad. Some places were bad because of the lack of supplies. Other places were bad because the people were sick with things we couldn’t cure.”
“That must’ve been the hardest.” My voice had dropped down to a whisper.
“It is. It’s hard every single time we lose someone.”
“Like that girl,” I said, lost in thought. As much as I wanted to become a doctor, there were certain aspects of it I couldn’t even begin to fathom.
“What girl?”
“The one you lost right before you left the hospital. Tracy something.”
Owen glanced over at me. “Is that why people think I left?”
“Yeah.” I’d heard it repeated so often that I’d never questioned it. “Isn’t it true? They all said you were devastated when she died.”
“I was. She was truly special. Bright. Kind. Warm. A bit like you, actually. But Becca, with the combination of illnesses she had—she never really had a chance. She was never going to make it through her teen years. She was never going to live a healthy and productive life. I wish I could’ve given her another year or two, but it was highly unlikely. I knew that going into the surgery. And so did Tracy and her parents.”
I shuddered. I couldn’t even imagine what that was like, knowing that your child wasn’t going to make it. With effort, I refocused on the mystery at hand. “So why did you leave?”
“It was because of her, but not in the way you think. Just a few weeks after that, I read an article in a medical journal about a Doctors Bridging Worlds station in Nigeri
a. One of the doctors had written a paper about a girl who’d had several of the same conditions Tracy did. But the similarities ended with the illnesses. Tracy passed away with her parents by her side in a good hospital, with top-rate doctors. That girl in Nigeria hadn’t had any of those things. She had doctors who were doing what they could with very limited resources. Her parents weren’t by her side because they had jobs, plus they lived over an hour away and didn’t have a car. She didn’t have air conditioning. She didn’t have an adjustable bed or a button she could press to call a nurse. She and Tracy arrived at the same place in the end, but their experiences were completely different on the way there. So I figured that there were enough doctors around to help kids like Tracy. I wanted to help the ones who didn’t have the support and resources Tracy did.”
Wow. He really was a hero. To give up his comfortable and lucrative existence for the conditions he’d described. I reached out and took his free hand in my own, squeezing it.
“It wasn’t all bad,” he said, squeezing back. “I met some amazing people during my years abroad. Both doctors and patients. Quite a few of them taught me lessons I’ll never forget. And there were even some fun times. I was at this one hospital that had a lot of young patients. And almost none of them had ever even heard of baseball, but for some reason, I decided they needed to experience it.”
“I know,” I said, unable to stop my smile. “I saw a video of it online.” I didn’t need to mention to him how often I’d watched the video.
“Why Rebecca Miller,” he said, mock outrage in his voice. “Were you stalking me?”
“I prefer the term researching.”
“It seemed like stalking fits the bill better.”
Hmm. “How about admiring from afar?”
He looked over at me and grinned. “I can live with that.”
Later, when it was dark and we were only thirty minutes from the hospital, soft music played on the radio. We’d both fallen into a comfortable silence a while back after having talked for hours. And every once in a while, when he didn’t need two hands on the wheel, he’d reach over and hold my hand.
“Becca?”
“Yes?”
“There was one more reason I left Hawthorne Memorial.”