by Alison Kent
Macy kind of liked him better in the altogether. He had an awesome body. Not that he was built differently than her previous lovers. But he was built better. From her female perspective, anyway. Thick where thickness counted. Tilted and angled where tilt and angle made a difference. But more than anything, it was his sensitivity that set him apart.
And not in the way he saw to her comfort and her pleasure—though both, she’d learned, he considered high priority. No, this was about the way he jumped at her touch. The way he twitched from the pressure of her fingers, shuddered from the light butterfly flicks of her tongue.
Not to mention the way he’d nearly torn the arms from his office chair when she’d explored between his legs, zeroing in on the strip of skin where thigh met groin. When she’d scraped a blunt nail over the spot, when she’d drawn on the skin with her lips and lightly nipped, his groans had deepened, rolling up from his belly in a visceral wave.
She’d liked the response so much that she tried it again now, with Leo flat on his back, knees raised and spread. She pushed against the back of his thighs and opened his legs wider. It spoke of his level of trust that he allowed her free access to his most intimate and tender and awe-inspiring body parts.
She never wanted another woman to know what she knew about Leo. She wanted him for herself. A playground designed for her recreation. A treasure chest fulfilling her fantasies. A prized possession procured for her pleasure. Except Leo Redding was not a boy toy. And the fun and games were no longer quite so free of care and consequence.
“Uh, Macy?”
“Hmm?” Her mouth was too busy to do any real talking.
“It’s probably a good idea if you stop.” Leo sucked in a long hissing breath.
She hated to, truly she did. She enjoyed making him squirm. Raising her head bare inches, she asked, “You sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure. Oh. Good. Stop. Now. Macy.”
The next best thing to rendering him speechless, his short, choppy, breathless words were their own reward. Besides, she wasn’t quite ready to finish him yet.
Leaving him thoroughly and intimately kissed, she bounced around in the bed and ended up sitting crossed-legged near the end. “Your wish is my command.”
“Thank you,” he choked out, levering himself up farther against the headboard.
“You’re welcome.” Macy slid off the foot of the bed, wrapping up toga-style in the sheet and leaving Leo bare. She couldn’t think of anything she’d rather see than Leo bare. “The popcorn’s getting cold.”
She reached for the bag she’d popped earlier and, at the end of Leo’s grand tour, set on the Swedish armoire. The tour had stopped in the bedroom, where they’d both agreed that the presence of a bed demanded total nudity and more sex.
And, well, she wasn’t to be held solely responsible for the turn things had taken from there.
Plopping back onto the bed, she lost her grip on the sheet and decided to hell with it. If Leo could boldly lounge in all his naked glory, she wasn’t going to go virginal over showing a bit of pink skin.
“Now. Back to the scavenger hunt.” She settled the bag of popcorn in the bowl of her crossed legs. Leo would have to come close if he wanted to snack. “I still have most of my list left and it’s barely a week until game night.”
She didn’t mention that she hadn’t started planning for the next gIRL gAMES column. Inspiration was sure to strike in the next few days. Then again…inspiration was striking now.
She had both prime man and prime opportunity, and surely she could come up with something kinky and fun. Leo’s breathing had calmed and his erection had moved from the batter’s box back to the on-deck circle. A lick of her lips and he’d be ready to swing. Naked bedroom baseball. Sydney would croak.
Leo scooted down to lie flat on his back, using half of the sheet Macy had dropped to cover his lap. Then he crossed both arms behind his head and studied her from the comfort of his makeshift throne.
“So, what do you need to know?”
Mouth full of popcorn, she mumbled, “About baseball?”
“Baseball? No. Earth to Macy. What’s left on your scavenger hunt list?”
Wow. “Just like that?”
“Why not? I don’t think I have a lot left to hide.” His quick glance swept the length of his prone body, then her naked top half.
Macy suffered an unexpected twinge of self-consciousness. Unexpected because together they’d taken their sex play where she’d never taken any relationship that had yet to be defined. And nervousness had chosen now to lift its head?
“Okay, then.” She hitched up the edge of the sheet and tucked it beneath both armpits. Then, tossing back a handful of popcorn, she considered her subject material from all available angles while she munched.
The corner of the sheet at Leo’s hip drew her attention. “How’d you get that scar?”
Leo tucked his chin to his chest and looked at the faded railroad of stitching making tracks down his hip. “Adolescent immortality.”
“Hmm. A bicycle. No, a skateboard. You seem more the skateboarding type.” Macy reached out and measured the scar with the span of her fingers. Then she chugged her fingertips down the length, making “choochoo” noises along the way.
“What exactly is the skateboarding type?”
“Willing to risk life and limb for fun.”
Leo arched an arrogant brow, which only encouraged Macy’s playful nature. She caught the edge of the sheet in the crook of an index finger caboose and tugged until she exposed his thatch of dark hair and a tempting hint of the loose skin that would tighten so easily at her touch.
She loved the way a man’s skin could be as soft and pink as a woman’s. The way it took no more than a kiss, or a light brush of hand or breast, to stir his interest and his blood. And then, oh, but she loved the differences.
“Are you having fun down there?”
Macy smiled at Leo’s interruption of what was a curiously distracting exploration. “When was the first time you had sex?”
“Alone or with a woman?”
She flung the sheet back up over his lap, then gave him her best imitation of holier-than-thou. “Very funny.”
Leo considered her intently, his eyes, free from the barrier of lenses and frames, bright on her face. She felt the heat of a rising blush and decided enough was enough. She didn’t like the fact that, with only a look, he made her squirm.
And so she backhanded him. Only lightly and only on the thigh. “Stop doing that.”
“What? Looking at you?”
“It’s the way you look at me. It’s too…I don’t know. Intense.” Too searching and serious and frighteningly close to seeing beneath her skin. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
He shoved another pillow between his back and the headboard and settled in to get serious. “You don’t want intense? We’re naked, in bed, and you don’t want intense?”
What should she tell him?
That intense resonated with the suggestion of commitment? That she was having too much fun to analyze where this thing was going? That the contract of a relationship scared her to death?
She wasn’t ready. Didn’t know if she’d ever be ready. Not for the stress of balancing two careers. For the battle of quality versus quantity time with family. For the struggle of making ends meet when ends had been at polar opposites for longer than either partner could remember.
“Macy?”
Leo’s tone was soft, but it brought her attention up sharply. Oh, good melancholy grief. Zoning out over unrealized fears when she had a gorgeous naked man waiting for her to pounce? What was she thinking?
Lifting a saucy brow, she gave three quick tugs to the corner of the sheet. She liked it a lot that he didn’t stop her. “I want intense. Just not when you look at me.”
“So…I can touch, but I can’t look? Is that it?”
She pretended to contemplate his question, when all she wanted to do was get out from under his scrutiny and back to the f
un and sex games. This business of being grown-up was way too much pressure.
Leo continued to stare, then shook his head as if ridding himself of a daze. “You have to be the most contradictory woman I’ve ever known.”
“Glad you noticed.” She reached for another piece of popcorn. “The woman part, anyway.”
“Why wouldn’t I notice? I do have two working eyes.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from calling me a child.”
“I don’t remember calling you a child.”
“You’ve accused me of playing around too much.”
He shifted his hips beneath what was left of the sheet. “And here I was thinking you’re not playing around enough.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say.”
“Well,” she began, picking through the popped corn for the few barely burst kernels. “Playing around is a lot more fun when I have something to play with.”
Leo flexed mysterious male muscles so that the sheet in his lap popped up and down and did his talking for him.
“Very cute. You and your built-in plaything.” She tossed a single piece of popcorn toward his face.
He caught it, chameleonlike. “Glad you enjoyed it.”
“I have been enjoying it. Faking is not a specialty of mine.” She tossed another popped kernel. He missed, and missed the next two as well. “Tongue out of practice?”
“Mine or yours?”
This time she tossed an entire handful, one rapid-fire piece at a time. He dodged and ducked, eyes and mouth both closed. Her one-sided food fight quickly ran its course, though Leo waited a few seconds, peeking out to see if the coast was clear before asking, “Are you finished?”
Her bag was almost empty, and even she didn’t relish the thought of rolling between sheets littered with salt and popcorn tidbits. She glanced from the bag to the mess with twenty-twenty hindsight. “I suppose so.”
“You plan to clean this up, I hope.”
What a crank, she thought, and frowned…though he really was cute, naked, rumpled and now littered with edible munchies. Suddenly, “clean up” sounded like dirty work of the very best kind.
She heaved a sigh, as if falsely put upon. “I guess I’ll have to. I don’t see you doing anything about it.”
Leo did nothing and said nothing. He just sat back, all arrogant, cocky male beast, waiting to be both serviced and served.
Macy refused to analyze why she wanted to do both. It was a purely primal tug—it had to be—pulling at the threads of arousal he tightened with nothing more than a look. Oh, but she was asking for trouble, assuming she had the strength of resolve to keep this casual and all about fun.
Keeping the sheet between male skin and female, she scrambled onto her knees and crawled forward, making a huge production out of an effortless endeavor. Anticipation warmed her belly before drifting lower with breath-stealing heat, tickled her toes before working upward to tease the tender skin between her thighs.
The first piece of popcorn she found lodged in the bend of Leo’s elbow. She kissed it away, making sure not to touch his skin with lips or tongue or even with teeth. The next piece she vacuumed from the center of his chest with her mouth. The third she wet with the tip of her tongue and lifted from the pillow beneath his ear.
When she released her hold on the sheet and let it drop enough to expose her upper body, Leo shifted where he lay beneath her weight. When she brushed the points of her breasts through the swirls of hair on his chest, he growled deep in his throat.
When she moved to straddle him completely, leaned forward and touched her tongue to a flat male nipple in her quest for popcorn, he reached back and slapped her lightly on the rump.
Macy’s tongue stilled where it was on his chest. Resisting a wicked urge to leave him wearing the mark of her teeth, she sat back on his thighs, enjoying the press of his erection to her belly. “No, thanks. I’m not into spanking.”
“Too bad,” he said, and she stuck out her tongue before he added, “How about wearing a lacy apron? Like a sexy French maid?”
“I would not wear a lacy apron even if you beg.”
He let her Dr. Seuss-ish rhyme fly by without comment. “Leather crops and spiked heels out of the question?”
She shook her head. “This is the extent of my domination. Woman on top.”
“Hmm. Let’s see here. Nursery rhymes and jokes. Food fights and scavenger hunts.” Leo pressed his lips into a thoughtful line, lifted a thoughtful brow, made a comment Macy didn’t find thoughtful at all. “I think you’re a fake, Macy Webb. And I think you’re scared.”
Anticipation chugged down the drain as swiftly as it had filled the well of her soul. “What do you mean, a fake? And what do I have to be scared of?”
He lifted his knees behind her, fencing her in between the pickets of his thighs and his arousal. “You might write about adult fun, but for some reason you don’t have it in you to play anything but kid games. You want to tell me why?”
His eyes dared her. His naked eyes, beautifully clear without the obstruction of his glasses, dared her to refute his challenge, to prove him wrong. Prove that playing Peter Pan was not a destructive fantasy, that living in never-never land was not a defense designed to avoid the real world.
Okay. Maybe it was both. So what? It wasn’t like she didn’t have her reasons. Reasons she didn’t have to share with a man who’d made no promises or offers. Who’d never suggested they prolong their scavenger hunt partnership. Who’d had the nerve to call her a kid minutes after calling her a woman.
“No, I don’t want to tell you why. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to tell you anything. Ever. Again.” What a pig, thinking he’d figured her out! And she’d come so close to uttering the dreaded “L” word. She felt as if she’d swallowed a big fat stupid pill.
Grabbing for the edge of the dangling sheet, she wrapped up in a toga-style again and scooted to the edge of the bed. She slid onto her feet and bent down for her bra and panties…and felt a tug on the sheet. And then an even sharper tug. And then heard the sound of fabric ripping. She straightened where she stood, started to turn. The sheet ripped further.
She paused. She turned. Rip!
Paused. Turned. Rip!
She waited…waited…whipped all the way around. “Are you doing that on purpose?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, one bare leg dangling over the side, the other bent at the knee and braced on the mattress, a torn section of sheet held in each hand, he met her gaze.
“You are doing that on purpose!”
His answer echoed through the room, a loud rending of new fabric. The next thing Macy knew, the sheet she held tucked to her breasts dangled waist to floor in a half-dozen strips. She looked down at the shredded sheet, glanced back up. “You’re going to pay for that, I hope?”
He still didn’t answer, didn’t breathe a word or sound. What he did was get to his feet and, in all his naked glory, reach out, pick her up and bodily return her to the bed.
She flopped and bounced against the pillows, still holding the intact portion of the sheet around her upper body, her legs exposed in places, covered in others, a mummy half-unraveled.
And then it came to her what Leo had planned. She saw it in the heat of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the determined set of mouth and jaw. In the way his arousal stiffened and rose as he moved back to sit on the bed.
He took her right ankle in his hand, wrapped one of the sheet strips twice around, then tied the loose end to the footboard railing. Her right wrist was next. He twisted the middle of another white cotton strip like a long gauze bandage just below her forearm, then looped the tail end around a spindle of the headboard and fixed it tight.
Then, getting to his feet, he walked around the foot of the bed, not bothering to look back to see if she stayed where he’d left her, to see if she went to work releasing her bonds. It was as if he knew she wouldn’t move, that she’d do what he wanted because the time had come to play hi
s game, his way.
Another minute and she was spread-eagled and bound without complaint. The unused sheet strips draped in a strangely strategic pattern across her lower body. Her top half remained loosely covered, though the way Leo now stood at the foot of the bed and studied his handiwork led her to believe he was about to adjust the sheet to maximize her exposure.
She was outwardly calm, but inwardly wild to know what he had on his mind. Nerves sizzled where the bindings snugged comfortably to her skin. The air and Leo’s gaze touched flesh so provocatively exposed, teased body parts barely covered.
She wasn’t even thinking of struggling against her bonds. She couldn’t find a single witty remark to make. Or a smart-ass comment to toss his way. All she wanted to do was spread her legs wider and lift her hips. All she could do was wait while her own desire reached unbearable heights. All she regretted was that she’d been about to walk out on this man.
Leo moved onto the foot of the bed. The mattress dipped beneath his weight. The warmth of his body spread to cover her like a blanket of baby-fine wool, and she felt her bonds loosen. Not the bonds tying her to the bed; those she could slip free of with a simple twist of hand or foot.
No. These were the bonds providing a buffer of childlike innocence between her emotions and life’s inevitable ills. She didn’t need them now. Now, when she looked up at Leo, she saw him as she wanted to, through an adult’s eyes. This time when they came together, this time Macy knew would be her defining moment as a woman making love to her man.
Leo had crawled up the length of her body and, when she met his gaze, moisture filled her eyes. She wanted desperately to wrap her arms around his neck, hold him close and whisper into his ear words best left unspoken.
But she couldn’t do either because she was all tied up. By the sheet, and by her certainty that he’d open his smart mouth and ruin her moment of bliss.
He knelt over her, skin brushing lightly on skin, and ran a finger the length of her nose. “I’m not sure I like that look on your face.”