by BETH KERY
“Better than good,” Kendra said resolutely. “The guy’s a genius. Don’t get me wrong, his stuff isn’t a frolic in the park. His plays are gritty and intense, volatile, thought-provoking, but very . . . erotic, too.” Kendra shook her head and laughed sheepishly. “Tons of restrained lust is a Savian key ingredient. It’s what makes his plays so unpredictable and exciting. Hey, Niall?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you blushing?” Kendra asked with a fascinated expression on her round, earnest face.
Niall rolled her eyes and resumed walking to her office. “I am not blushing.”
“Sure looked like you were,” she heard Kendra say thoughtfully before Niall shut the door to her office.
She glanced into an antique mirror mounted on the wall. Kendra had been right. Her cheeks were bright red. In fact, the utterly foreign thought struck Niall at that moment that she looked like a very sexy, desirable woman.
All that, merely because when Kendra had talked about Vic’s plays, it had occurred to Niall that he wrote the way he made love.
Vic called her a few minutes after eight and said that he was running behind.
“Would it be all right with you if we just met downstairs at Louie’s, say at around nine thirty?” he asked.
“Of course,” Niall agreed as she eyed the outfit she’d laid out on the bed to wear on their date. “I’m actually relieved. I can just throw on some jeans.”
“I was going to be wearing jeans whether we went to Louie’s or Everest,” he said under his breath, humor lacing his tone as he referred to the famous Chicago restaurant.
Niall laughed. “I’m sure Everest would be happy to have your business, jeans or no. Everest caters to the pretheater crowd, you know. It’d be a feather in their cap if you showed up in swim trunks and a T-shirt, no doubt.”
“You know what I do for a living?” he asked.
“Oh . . . yes. My friend Anne—the woman I was with last night in the restaurant—told me that you’re a playwright.”
He laughed shortly. “Well, I know for a fact that Louie couldn’t give a shit about what I’m wearing as long as my ass is covered, so let’s stick with that. Besides, I hate French food.”
Niall smiled. His proclamation hadn’t particularly surprised her.
When she arrived at Louie’s, she immediately saw Vic in a booth near the bar, chatting with Louie himself. He was wearing a fitted, dark blue, Western-style shirt that accentuated his long, lean torso and broad shoulders. The shadow of a beard darkened his jaw. Heat flooded Niall’s lower belly when she recalled how his whiskers had erotically abraded her sensitive skin during their lovemaking.
Vic looked up and held her gaze as she approached, even though he continued to chat with Louie. His eyes lowered over her in leisurely appreciation before he stood as she greeted both men.
Vic caught her hand when she began to move to the opposite side of the booth from where he’d been sitting.
“Sit here.”
Louie grinned broadly as he watched the exchange. He nodded his head once in obvious approval when Niall assented to Vic’s terse request and slid into the seat before he sat down next to her.
“Let me see here—a glass of chardonnay and the salmon for the lady, and a beer and a medium-rare steak for the gentleman. Am I right?” Louie asked, amusement and his rich Chicago South Side accent flavoring his tone.
“On the nose for me.” Niall grinned. Her eyes widened when she realized that Vic had turned and was looking at her.
“Sounds good, Louie,” Vic murmured, never taking his eyes off Niall.
“I guess neither one of us has to worry about cleaning our ovens when we’ve got Louie downstairs,” she teased. Her breath stuck painfully in her lungs when Vic reached up and grabbed a wavy tendril of her hair between his thumb and first two fingers.
“Do you like to cook?” he asked absentmindedly as he rubbed the golden curl between his fingers.
“Yes,” Niall replied. She inhaled unsteadily and caught a whiff of Vic’s clean, spicy cologne. It brought back myriad sensations and images from the night in his apartment, increasing her sense of mixed anxiety and excitement. “But not here at Riverview Towers. All of my cooking utensils are packed away. I can’t wait to get them all out for my new kitchen. What about you? Do you like to cook?”
“Nope. But I like to eat, which means that I do it. We usually take turns cooking whenever I’m on the farm.” He studied her face before he released her hair. “You’re nervous, aren’t you? There’s no need to be.”
Laughter burst out of her throat. “Easy for you to say.”
She paused when that dead-sexy grin abruptly curved his lips. Jeez, talk about an unfair advantage. A woman couldn’t think straight when Vic resorted to using that weapon. The deep lines around his mouth said that despite his typical stony expression, he did his fair share of grinning. He could probably turn a woman to sex jelly at a distance of fifty feet with that smile. Never mind what it could do to you when you sat so close to him that you could breathe his rich, male scent and he casually reached behind you to stroke your shoulder with his long fingers.
“It is pretty easy for me to say. Why should you be nervous? It’s not like we haven’t already had sex.”
Her mouth gaped open at his calm statement. Luckily, Louie chose that moment to interrupt as he set down their drinks.
“What’s wrong?” Vic asked once Louie had left. He took a sip of his beer with the hand that wasn’t stroking her shoulder. His touch on her was seemingly casual enough, but Niall felt like every fiber of her consciousness was focused on the tiny patch of her body where he gently molded and massaged her muscle. “You didn’t forget about us having sex together, did you?”
Heat flooded her cheeks. “Hardly,” she answered drolly, borrowing his habit of charged laconism.
His gray eyes locked on hers. He started to laugh, low and heartfelt. Niall found that she couldn’t remain anxious in the presence of his deep laughter. She shook her head in mock exasperation before she started to laugh right along with him.
The magic of their combined laughter seemed to melt away her nervousness, leaving only excitement and growing desire in its wake.
Niall had a wonderful time at dinner. True, she spoke three words for every one of Vic’s. He was adept at keeping her talking with just a few terse prompts. He was actually quite easy to talk to, once one got over the fact that he was not only a gorgeous hunk of man but a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Although he never gushed or rambled on any topic, he was surprisingly forthcoming about his work. She found herself truly relaxing as she listened to him describe in his succinct, spare language the challenges involved in getting his latest play ready for opening night. When he mentioned his leading lady’s first name, Niall tapped her forehead in recognition.
“Right! Eileen Moore. She used to be on that sit-com, Different Wavelengths. I thought she looked familiar when I saw her last night with you at The Art.”
Niall recalled the pointedly furious look the attractive actress had thrown her way and wondered once again if she and Vic were involved or if Eileen just wished they were.
“She’s too talented a stage actress to have been doing that crap in Hollywood,” Vic said as he set down his knife. “This is the third play of mine that she’s done.”
“Oh?”
His eyes flickered over to her face when he heard the tone of her voice. “Are you wondering if I’ve slept with her?” he asked bluntly.
For a few seconds Niall floundered for an answer. Nothing would come to her except the truth.
“Yes.”
Vic considered her for a second, his angular jaw making that increasingly familiar subtle rolling motion. “Yeah, I have,” he finally said.
Niall glanced down at her plate. She was embarrassed by how much his admission hurt. She clearly was losing her mind. Vic Savian had likely slept with hundreds of women before that moment and would sleep with hundreds more before his life was over. Niall was just one
more name on a list of casual conquests. If she’d had to say whether or not he’d slept with Eileen Moore before he’d made his admission, she would have bet that he had. The flaming darts that the actress had thrown at Niall convinced her of that.
So why did hearing him say it out loud hurt so much?
She shook her head and laughed at her naïveté. “It’s really none of my business,” she said softly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Vic didn’t respond because a busboy arrived to clear the table. After the busboy left, Niall asked him about his farm in downstate Illinois, desperate to change the subject.
He explained that he’d inherited the farm from his mother’s brother over a year ago. Vic still couldn’t figure out why in the world his uncle Manny had made a specific point of leaving him the enormous farm while Meg, Vic’s sister, was designated as the beneficiary of Manny Padilla’s financial estate. It wasn’t that both inheritances weren’t generous far beyond expectation, of course; it was just that Vic clearly wasn’t a farmer. He’d thought about selling it, not having the time or interest for running a large farm since he already owned a ranch in Montana. But his sister, Meg, and her husband had said they would like to manage the extensive property.
“It’s worked out okay,” Vic said as he accepted the bill from a smiling Louie. “Maybe Uncle Manny knew something I didn’t. I’d already been in talks with the Hesse Theater when I inherited the farm. I guess it’s no secret how much I hate living in the city. They were willing to negotiate the actual amount of time that I spend in Chicago. I brought out some of my horses from my ranch in Montana. Meg and Tom live up at the big house and I live in a cottage that was built for a farmhand and his family years ago. We get along, but if we get sick of each other, we can hightail it to our respective houses and lock the doors. My contract with the Hesse is for only two years, anyway.”
Niall’s eyes crept up to study his face while he was focused on leaving a tip and signing his name to the bill. “Do you have other brothers or sisters besides Meg?”
“Nah, just Meg and me.”
His eyes abruptly leapt to her face, catching her skittish gaze and holding tight.
“I slept with Eileen Moore years ago, Niall. It was after I went through an ugly breakup with a woman I was supposed to marry. I was dead drunk for almost six months after the fact. If you want to know the truth, Eileen probably thought of it as a series of pity fucks. I was damned pitiful, that’s for sure,” he said with a wry twist of his handsome mouth.
Niall just stared at him for a long moment. His stark honesty always took her off guard, but she was undoubtedly drawn to it. She had no doubt that he stated things the way he saw them. He either hadn’t noticed or chose to ignore the fact that Eileen Moore still carried a blazing torch for him. And after having sex with Vic, Niall sincerely doubted that Eileen’s motivation for sleeping with him was pity. But Niall kept that to herself.
Vic surprised her a few seconds later when he reached for the hand that she wasn’t using to sip her coffee.
“I see that you were married before.”
Niall froze in the action of setting her cup back on the saucer.
“What?” she asked.
He lifted her hand. Before she could guess what he was about, he gripped her first two fingers in his right hand and pushed back her ring finger with the other. His thumb made tiny little circles at the tender apex, making Niall shiver with pleasure.
“I can see the outline of a ring here,” he said gruffly, referring to where his thumb rubbed.
“Oh . . . yes, I was.”
“How long ago did you two split?”
“Three years ago.”
The sound of Niall’s husky, low voice caused a burning, tingling sensation of excitement to pass from Vic’s tailbone to the root of his cock. He wondered idly if he could come just from the sound of her voice alone.
Still, it had been strange that she’d said she and her husband split three years ago. The imprint on her ring finger, the paleness where the sun never shone, would have argued for something more recent. Maybe she’d worn her wedding ring for years after they’d divorced, hoping that one day they’d get back together.
That would be something he and Niall had in common. Didn’t the psychotherapist that he saw for a year after he broke up with Jenny always tell him that his actions, more so than his words, were those of a man who was holding out hope for lost love?
Yeah, right.
As if Jenny would ever think of leaving Mr. Smooth Hollywood Producer for a man who would rather eat his dinner in the saddle than at a restaurant like the nauseatingly trendy one that Mr. Smooth owned—among myriad other properties and businesses—in Los Angeles.
Who fucking cared about Jenny anyway, when such a beautiful woman stared up at him with phenomenally sexy eyes?
Vic felt Niall’s indrawn breath on his knuckle when he reached up and pressed a thumb to her lush lower lip. Her mouth was the same color as her nipples—a lush, dark pink that became red under the ministrations of his teeth and tongue. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d jerked off in the past twelve days while he pictured her pointed, rosy nipples trembling slightly as he’d pounded into her tight little body.
“I want you again, Niall. I have every second since you walked out my front door the other day,” he admitted quietly.
Her eyes cast downward, but almost immediately leapt back up to consider him through thick eyelashes. He’d been in varying states of arousal since Niall first walked into Louie’s tonight, looking fresh and sexy in a pair of jeans and high-heeled boots. But that single, shy, seductive glance made him harden into full, leaden readiness. When she started to speak, Vic transferred his hand from her mouth to the side of her neck, where he refamiliarized himself with the incredible silkiness of her skin.
“You told me to leave. You sounded so . . . hard,” she whispered.
His fingers sank into the soft hair at her nape. His movements were causing the fresh, fruity scent of her shampoo to drift up to his appreciative nose.
“I told you to leave only because all I could think about doing was nailing you down on that hard floor until your ears rang. I figured you’d had enough of that back in my bed.” He watched as her eyes flickered around them and realized that she was checking to make sure they weren’t overheard.
“I liked it,” she finally whispered.
Vic’s eyes narrowed. His stroking fingers stilled. “You liked being taken hard?” His cock swelled uncomfortably behind the fly of his jeans when she just nodded her head, her eyes overtaking half her face. “You weren’t a little scared, Niall?” he goaded her gently.
“No. Not of you.”
“Then what?”
He saw her glance away, sensed her hesitation.
“Of myself, I guess. I’ve never done anything like that. It was impulsive, crazy . . .”
“Fucking great,” he finished succinctly. He cradled her chin in his palm when she glanced down, forcing her to meet his gaze again.
“What do you say, Niall? Do you want to get crazy with me again?”
Her delicious lower lip fell open.
“Yes,” she finally replied.
Vic just smiled and grabbed her hand, helping her out of the booth.
FOUR
“Vic!” Niall admonished a minute later when a harassed-looking man in a suit tried to hurry to get on the elevator with them and Vic blocked the entrance until the doors closed with the man on the other side of them.
Vic chuckled as he turned toward her. He reached under her armpits, lifting her slightly until her ass rested on the brass railing. He had his belly pressed tightly to hers and his considerable erection snuggled between her thighs before Niall could blink. She felt so small in his arms. So good.
“He’ll get another one,” he mumbled as he pressed his mouth to her neck. “This elevator is obviously being used,” he muttered before he dipped his head and took her mouth.
“God, you taste
good,” he said a few seconds later when the doors dinged open on the seventeenth floor. “Do you know how much I wanted to do this on the night we rode the elevator together a month ago?” He nibbled and bit at her damp, upturned lips.
Niall moaned as desire uncoiled powerfully inside of her. She started when he reached back lightning quick and stopped the elevator door from closing.
“Do you, Niall?” he repeated roughly.
“I know.” She wiggled her hips against him insistently until he stepped back, his jaw hanging partially open. She paused in the hallway to consider him. His gray eyes gleamed with desire. His dark brown hair had fallen forward on his forehead when he’d ravaged her mouth. “I wanted the same thing, Vic.”
She unsuccessfully suppressed a smile when the elevator door started to close between them and he pushed it back violently, as though it had personally offended him by having the temerity to separate them. He reached for her hand and hauled her down the hallway.
Vic paused with his keys in the door and glanced down at her. Niall had only the impression of something sparking into his gray eyes before he reached for her. He covered her mouth with his and provided a thirsty suction at the same time that he sank between her lips, thrusting again and again, pausing to sweep her depths and rub against her tongue. When he eventually lifted his head, their breathing had escalated noticeably. He pressed his thumb into her lower lip.
“What was that for?” Niall asked dazedly. Her head spun from the taste and sensation of him.
“You had a witch’s smile on your face,” he said as he drew small circles on her damp lip. Niall stared at his rugged face, thoroughly hypnotized. “Come here.”
She stumbled behind him as he took her hand and entered the apartment, slamming the door loudly behind him. He pulled her into the bedroom. When he dropped her hand, he immediately began to unbutton his jeans.
“You were born on the North Shore and you look pretty damn near perfect in pearls. But when I see your mouth, all I can think about is you on your knees being very unladylike,” he told her.