The Sweetest Taboo

by Alison Kent

  But she doubted they’d ever be able to take their time coming together because of this combustible fire between them. He tore into the condom packet and rolled the sheath the length of his erection. Erin didn’t even ask. She slid off the table and into his lap, her hand between their bodies to guide him to her center.

  He filled her, and it was like finding a part of herself that had been missing. The fit was snug and perfect. She gripped him with muscles still sore from last night. With her hands braced on his shoulders, his hands on her waist, she rode him hard. Her breasts swayed and he pressed his forehead against her chest, panting hot ragged breaths there in the valley between.

  Her thigh muscles burned from exertion. Her pulse raced, the blood in her veins fairly sang. She was raw from the friction of his late evening beard, raw from the flat of his tongue, raw from the thick scraping slide of his cock and she didn’t even care. This was what she’d wanted. This aching, bursting, joyous connection of bodies in need.

  Sebastian spread his legs wider, slumped down onto his spine and drove himself upward, his head pressed back into the padded booth, the tendons in his neck drawn taut. She wanted to ease his torture, his agony, but the strain on his gorgeous face only incited her further.

  She came again, his thrusts wild and urgent, spurring her over the edge. Guttural groans of release ripped from his throat as he joined her. She collapsed against his chest, tremors shuddering through her. She missed the feel of his bare skin against hers. But urgency hadn’t given him time to undress beyond exposing his sharply cut abs when he’d shoved his pants down his hips.

  His heart thudded with hers in a matching beat. Her heated breath condensed on his neck where she’d rested her head and she inhaled the scent of his skin the way she inhaled the aroma of coffee in the morning. A necessity to her very existence. She doubted she could ever get enough of breathing him in.

  Or a more fulfilling sense of her world being right as she rested against him, his arms around her back holding her close, his body buried in hers still pulsing in response to her last lingering quakes.

  This was the high she’d been physically craving, this sated sense of exhaustion on the heels of mind-blowing sex. She didn’t think she’d ever known such satisfaction of body.

  It was the satisfaction of soul that she wasn’t sure she could bear.

  CALI CROSSED HER LEGS AND scooted closer to the coffee table. She sat on the floor in front of Will’s futon, digging into the huge banana split they shared. Will sat similarly on the other side. Their knees bumped beneath the low table.

  They both wore white T-shirts, gray sweatpants and thick athletic socks, compliments of Will’s wardrobe. The ice cream was a middle of the night feast celebrating his new job at Paddington’s and the last two hours they’d spent in bed.

  Cali wasn’t sure she’d ever spent a more perfect Friday night in her life.

  He’d been such a great sport and so much fun to work with while they’d helped Erin close up for the night. When he’d suggested they eat a late dinner and had even volunteered to cook, she’d jumped at the chance. This girl wasn’t no fool. By the time they reached his apartment, of course, neither one of them was in the mood for food.

  She figured the ice cream would sate the hunger in her empty tummy until they got around to something more substantial after sleeping off the sugar and the sex. Ah, yes. And what sex it was. Her body sang with satisfaction, thanking her for the dual indulgence. So what if she got up off the floor having gained five pounds?

  Will didn’t seem to care that she was curvy rather than willowy and gaunt. Seemed, in fact, to totally enjoy the fact that she didn’t gouge him with fashionably protruding hipbones. A good thing, too, because she really liked the way his body felt cradled on top of hers. And she loved that he wanted to be there…though maybe love wasn’t the best word to use.

  Sighing, she turned her spoon over onto her tongue and licked it clean of caramel and chocolate sauce then used the bowled end as a pointer. “You know I’m going to have to totally cram tomorrow to catch up before Monday’s class.”

  “You mean you’re going to totally have to cram today. ” Will scooped up a huge bite of mostly whipped cream and maraschino cherry bits.

  Cali groaned. “It is today, isn’t it? Saturday already. How come when I’m with you I totally lose track of time?”

  Will pulled his spoon from his mouth, slowly shoveled it into the mountain of Blue Bell Homemade vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s chocolate syrup and about a dozen other toppings from M&M’s to chopped pecans.

  He left the spoon standing upright, braced his elbows on the table and leaned forward into Cali’s space. His eyes twinkled like snifters of brandy in firelight. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  She considered for only half a minute or so whether she’d consumed enough energy-laden carbs to have another go in the bedroom, or if the sugar would knock her out before she could get his clothes off, not to mention her own.

  Then she decided she’d been far too easy every time they’d been naked and this time, if there was going to be a this time here in the middle of their ice cream feast, she was going to make Will work a little bit harder.

  Even with the extra five pounds added onto her original extra fifteen, she was worth the effort. She really wasn’t as easy as the last two days made her out to be. And she didn’t want him to think she’d desperately been waiting around for him to take an interest and notice her. Or to find out he’d taken pity on her after seeing her heart on her sleeve—an accusation Erin leveled way too often.

  Cali pulled up the boot straps of her self-esteem, aware that she’d picked a strange time to get prickly over her sexuality and desire for Will. Especially coming on the tail end of her reminiscing. “No, I don’t need to hear your man-sex answer. I can answer perfectly well for myself.”

  Chuckling under his breath, Will shook his head and retrieved his spoon and a mouthful of banana. “This I gotta hear.”

  Deep breath, Cali. Take a deep breath. This was not the time to get all teary-eyed and emotional which, for an inexplicably hormonal reason, she felt ready to do. That meant she needed to turn the conversation in a new direction. And she knew exactly where to go. “The time we’re together passes quickly because all you want to do is argue down every one of my ideas for Jason’s role in the screenplay.”

  Will’s easy smile vanished, replaced by stoicism and that stubborn male need to always be right. “That’s bull, Cali. I’m not arguing down anything. I know as well as you do that without Jason we don’t have a screenplay. It’s his story.”

  At least they agreed on that one unarguable point. Now to get Will to understand how and where the rest of his story logic didn’t hold water. “Exactly. Which is why our obsession with the external action is diluting the focus.”

  “This isn’t some trendy art house idea.” He attacked the ice cream with a vengeance, jabbing his spoon repeatedly into the same crevice. “Didn’t we agree on that early on? That we’re writing for the big screen? Which means, duh, we need action?”

  Cali really hated to pull out the big guns but it was the discussion they’d had the first day of their screenwriting class that had gotten them here in the first place.

  Each class member had been asked by the professor to name the one screenwriter or screenplay that most impacted his or her decision to study the craft. The discussion that followed had sealed the fate she now shared with Will.

  And so she prodded him with a gentle reminder. “Christopher McQuarrie. The Usual Suspects. Nineteen-ninety-five Academy Award for Best Writing of a Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.”

  Will shook his head, glanced up at her from beneath his long lashes, unable to hold back a twist of a smile. “The sucker was brilliant. Totally brilliant.”

  Yes! Now they were getting somewhere. “The movie or the writer?”

  “Both. Same thing. And you know that’s what I want to do,” he said, abandoning the spoon he’d
been stabbing hard down into the bowl.

  “Well it’s not going to happen if you don’t do for our Jason Coker what Christopher McQuarrie did with Keyser Soze.”

  Will’s smile froze, then faded. “And you don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”

  “I

  know that’s not what you’re doing,” she said quickly before she stopped to think about Will’s feelings, or anything but the honesty of her answer.

  A look of defeat clouded his expression. “So, what do I do? Start at the beginning? Analyze this beast one element at a time and see what I’m missing?”

  Cali spoke hurriedly again, same reason, same possible regrets. Hoping he didn’t come totally unglued when he heard her off-the-wall proposal, one that had started as a niggling itch last night. “You know, I have an idea. I really can’t say why I think this makes sense, just that it does.”

  “Well, what? Speak up, woman.”

  She placed her hands palms down against the table on either side of the huge crystal bowl, wishing she had a better surface into which she could wrap her fingers and hold on. “This is totally out of left field, I know, but why don’t we give a rundown of our idea to Sebastian and see what he has to say.”

  Will blinked, frowned, frowned harder. “Sebastian? Gallo? Why do you think he’d have any valuable input?”

  “Something.” She shrugged, toying with her spoon, pulling it slowly through the ice cream mountain in an effort to dig a deep enough trench to use for her grave. She had a feeling she was going to need it. “I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

  “Well, yeah, then. I can see how that would make sense,” Will huffed, pushing up from his crossed feet to stand. He began to pace in short jagged turns.

  Cali pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them in a tight hug and leaned back against the futon. “Before you got to Paddington’s tonight? Erin and I were telling Sebastian about The Daring Duo. You know, the couple in that booth?”

  “Yeah.” Will snorted, shoving an agitated hand back over his hair. “The ones you and Erin are always talking about.”

  Cali frowned at that. “Actually, they’re not the only ones we talk about and, no, it’s not a stellar quality we share. More like a big fat personality flaw. But there are just some people who tend to rev up the ol’ curiosity, ya know? And so we make up stories.”

  “I see,” he said with a roll of his eyes to go with the rest of his high-handedness.

  Uh-uh. She wasn’t going to put up with this crap. Not from him. Not ever from him. “Oh, get over yourself already, Will. I’ve heard what you’ve said about more than a few of our fellow students, not to mention a professor or two.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He remained frowning but it was almost an expression of being taken aback. And his tone had softened. “So, what’s this deal about Sebastian. What do you know about him anyway?”

  Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Okay, she’d yelled and he hadn’t run off—or anything worse. This was a good thing. “Not much, really. Erin’s only been seeing him a few days, though he’s lived in her building since she moved in.”

  “Hmm. I wondered what the connection was,” he said and finally stopped pacing.

  “She didn’t pick him up in the bar or off the street if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Though, Cali decided, choosing Sebastian as a Man To Do made it nothing but a matter of semantics. “It just wasn’t the right time for them to get together. Not until recently.”

  She held her breath, waiting for Will to comment on the coincidence that the two of them had finally gotten together at the very same time. The very same day, in fact, though no way was she going to tell him about the Man To Do article, or how Erin’s decision to go after Sebastian had impacted Cali’s determination to explore her chemistry with Will.

  But he didn’t say anything so she continued to fill the silence. “I’m not sure I know what else to say. He picked right up where we stalled out, making up a story about who they might be and how they got together. It was so cool.”

  Hands at his hips, Will stood on the other side of the table and stared down. “And because of that you want him to advise us on our idea? Don’t you think that’s stretching it a bit, Cali?”

  Her idea had merit; she knew it did. She was not going to let his ego knock it down. “You know, Will, just because he’s not in our class or an expert doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have good instincts about the story.”

  “I have good instincts about the story. And I’m your study and project partner. Not Sebastian Gallo.”

  Argh! Save her from hardheaded men. This one in particular. “I know who you are, Will. And I know Sebastian has nothing to do with our project. It’s just that we’ve been so wrapped up in what we’re doing I’m afraid tunnel vision is setting in. And I don’t see how a fresh pair of eyes could hurt anything. It’s not taking away from any of the work you’ve done, or we’ve done, it’s just…”

  “It’s just that forest for the trees thing, isn’t it?” he asked, circling around to drop onto the futon. He lay back, one knee up, a forearm thrown over his forehead even while he stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.

  Cali swiveled around where she sat on the braided rug covering the hardwood floor. She leaned an elbow on the futon mattress and propped her head in her hand. He looked so exhausted, and it had to be about more than the screenplay. He had just lost his job, after all.

  She had no idea if he was worried about money but she suspected the blow had hit him harder than he intended to let her know, even if the strike was more to his ego than his wallet. She wished she could kiss it and make it all better. Instead she did the next best thing, resting her hand on his chest and rubbing tiny circles with her fingertips.

  He moved his hand to cover hers and sighed. “You’re probably right. We’ve been working on this without a break for two months and I’m getting ragged.” He turned his head and looked, really looked, into her eyes. “How are you?”

  Now that you’re here? I don’t think I’ve ever been so good. She smiled.

  “Exhaustion is my life. But I’ll live.”

  He toyed with one of her curls. “I didn’t thank you for putting in a good word with Erin.”

  Cali beamed. “I hardly put in a word at all. She jumped on you like…well, like I’ve been jumping on you the last couple of days.” Like I could jump on you now, she thought, even though all she wanted to do was jump into his arms and wrap him up tight.

  “And what’s stopping you now?” he asked, his tender smile negating the lecherous waggle of both brows.

  And that was all it took. She climbed up next to him and snuggled into his body. When he wrapped himself around her and pulled her close, breathing deeply as he drifted off to sleep, she knew she was exactly where she was meant to be.

  8

  She’d found him.

  He hadn’t been clever enough or quick enough; he hadn’t even been aware enough of where he was to duck. He had, in fact, seen her coming and all he’d done was sit behind the wheel of his car and watch as she’d walked his way.

  The night had been pitch-black. The hour as late as it got. He’d been parked down the block from the building he’d seen her enter. Not the building his partner still covered from the other side. Not the building where they’d find the dealer scum they’d been after for weeks.

  Raleigh couldn’t believe it but he was so incredibly fucked right now. His career, his life, hell, even his mind. And it was too late to see if he couldn’t get this right the second time around.

  There wasn’t going to be a second time.

  This was it.

  She walked toward him.

  What the hell had he been thinking, blowing off the job he was paid to do? And all because of a distraction that he should have seen coming. That he was trained to see coming. That was coming right toward him.

  Now it was too late.

  She was here and he was done for. Fried up like battered frog legs to t
aste just like chicken. Yum, yum…

  Crap. Pure and total crap.

  Sebastian shoved away from his desk and headed for his bedroom window. His chair rolled backward across the room to bounce off his highboy dresser, sending Redrum skittering and scratching across the hardwood floor.

  What in the hell was wrong with him? He couldn’t even string together a sentence that didn’t sound like…pulp. Garbage. Bird-cage liner. Camp-fire fuel.

  Raleigh wasn’t the only one with a career in the toilet. Sebastian might as well pay back his advance and stake out a prime street corner, a successful panhandler’s first plan of action. One he knew well.

  It was early Saturday morning, not yet dawn. The city was silent without the workday noise to which he usually climbed into bed. The air was cool, crisp and clean but for the bite of diesel from the trucks down the street in the Houston Chronicle loading dock. He stared at the police cruiser rolling by seven stories below.