Brutally Beautiful

by Lynne Connolly

  “Women like me. I don’t know what it is, but when I found out I could do it, I used it to get what I wanted. I don’t do that anymore.”

  Jesus, she believed him. Was that his allure, that charisma she, and according to him many other women, couldn’t resist? Could she dare plunge in again, forge more than a friendship with a man? She didn’t know; the thought scared her to death. Here in the big city, few people noticed—even fewer cared—what she did. “You’re saying you won’t two-time me?”

  “I won’t deceive you. I’ve never done that with any woman I’ve been involved with.” He paused, and she finished it for him.

  “You’ve never needed to.”

  He laughed, his face relaxing into the smile she remembered from last night. “No, I haven’t. But I don’t do it. Understand? While there’s you, there’s only you. Nobody else unless you want to share.”

  The thought of sharing him made her suck in her breath. “Would you share me?”

  Heat filled his eyes. “If you wanted it.”

  “You’ve done it before?”

  He huffed a laugh, deep and sexy. “I have, yes. Enjoyed it too.” More heat. He stroked her inner wrist with his thumb, and she shivered. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll make it happen.”

  She didn’t know where she had the courage to say it, but it was the bare-naked truth. “I want you.”

  He didn’t hesitate but got smoothly to his feet, pulling her up with him and closer, so her breasts skimmed his chest. “Then you shall have me. It goes both ways. I want you too.” Taking one step back, he tugged her hand, and she went with him. Step-by-step, he took her to the end of the row of books. The edge of the bookshelf didn’t quite meet the wall. It was braced against it, top and bottom, with metal struts, leaving an eighteen-inch space. She shook her head. “No.”

  “It’s lunchtime. There’s hardly anyone around. Haven’t you ever done it in public?”

  She heated and the space between her legs grew wet. Moistening her lips, she managed a “No.”

  “It’s about time you did, then. Kiss me. Trust me. Do you?” He kept his voice soft and low, mesmerizing in its intensity. Tugging her closer, he swept his arms around her. She went, and when he lowered his head, she tilted hers to one side, rested it against his shoulder, and let him kiss her.

  She wore a skirt today, and he slid one hand up her leg, farther up her thigh, until he met the barrier of her panty hose. He didn’t stop. The soft tearing sound told her he was working his way through to her, and when he nudged the fabric of her underwear aside, he almost gasped in relief. She wanted him to fill her again as he had last night. She wanted that sensation again so badly. He touched her pussy, explored her with two fingers, pushing into her a short way and then sliding along her crease to find her clit and tweak it. She made a small sound, and he purred into their kiss.

  Curving his free hand around her waist, he lifted her off her feet and turned her around a full one-eighty degrees so her back was against the cement wall. The window next to them had a drape, so if they stayed here nobody from outside would see them. In any case, they were ten floors up and not overlooked. He ended the kiss slowly, his lips easing away from hers. “I’ll do it to you. You keep a lookout.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  He tweaked her clit. “My name isn’t McEnroe. I’m perfectly serious. I can’t wait, Gen. I want you. If you’d expected me to wait, maybe you should have run while you had the chance.”

  “But if they catch you, you could lose your place here.”

  He kissed her. “That’s what makes it so exciting. All we have to do is take care. I’ve been taking calculated risks all my life, and I’m not stopping now.”

  “You’re a gambler?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She couldn’t say any more because he kissed her again, long and luscious, exploring her mouth with lips, tongue, and teeth, inviting her to explore him, without words. They didn’t need any at this point. He tasted so good, kissed so well, as if he’d studied how to please her. They explored each other, and she tasted him, sucked gently on his tongue, opened her mouth for him.

  He removed his hand from her pussy, and she heard the rasp of a zipper. She knew his skill with condoms, but she hadn’t expected him to return to her within seconds with what was unmistakably his cock nudging her pussy. Her skirt was squashed between them. He’d torn so much of her panty hose that they almost weren’t there, and his hands felt bare against her ass when he cupped it and lifted her, impaled her.

  She gasped at the impact but clamped her mouth shut, then pressed her lips against his shoulder, the rough cloth of his shirt rubbing against the sensitized skin erotically. “So fucking good,” she murmured, careful to keep her voice low.

  He murmured against her ear, his breath hot. “Remember, keep your eyes open. Keep watching.”

  She could see into the bay opposite, empty like theirs apart from the detritus of their belongings scattered on the chairs and table. His laptop flickered, the only movement apart from them. If anyone passed them now…

  A surge of heat almost blinded her vision, and she bit down, heedless of his grunt of pain and then his laugh, so soft it was almost not there. “That’s it, sweetheart. Does it turn you on? Thinking of someone coming and finding us? Would they watch for a while? Or scream and fetch everyone in the library to come and see us? What would you do then, eh? You feel amazing. All over me. Oh yes, baby, brace yourself because I’m coming back.”

  Gen could only moan. He hitched her higher and plunged deeper. She lifted her legs, found purchase for the bend of her knees around his waist, pressed her legs from knee to ankle against the metal bookcase for some kind of support while he fucked her senseless. Or almost senseless, because she watched, kept her vision trained on that space, wondering if anyone would come, if he’d realize what they were doing, or just assume they were engaged in a heavy necking session. Nick hadn’t lowered his pants, so all anyone could see for sure was their clothed bodies pressed close together, her skirt rucked up around her thighs, the longer jacket of her suit draped haphazardly around her.

  The thought of anyone finding them had a bizarre effect on her libido. It grew higher, the heat and sensitivity increasing until every nerve tingled, like her body had turned into some kind of champagne, bubbling over with exuberance. She wanted to laugh, but didn’t dare. The way he was driving into her with a single-minded relentlessness, his cock hot and hard, channeling its way into her pussy, told her this situation turned him on as much as it did her.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she pressed her mouth against his shirt, afraid to draw away until he murmured to her again. “Kiss me but don’t close your eyes.”

  She met his lips with a gasp of relief, knowing she was close. How did he fuck her so well, finding her most sensitive spots every time? Nick seemed to know what she wanted before she did, and he moved to allow for it. Now their kiss sent her up and up, to that plateau from which there was only one escape. The dive down to earth, but the journey… Oh, the journey!

  She launched and flew, soaring high and free for that short time as her body melted against his and they became one. He moaned into her mouth, low, just a vibration in his throat, and she drank in the sound like a tribute. She didn’t know if she made a noise. He finished the kiss, then instigated another, gentler before he lifted her away and lowered her to the floor. Her shoes had little ankle straps, so they’d stayed on. She could have driven the sharp heels into him, marked him for her own, but she didn’t. Hadn’t thought of it, concentrated on keeping lookout.

  “Did you enjoy that?” he murmured against her ear.

  “Yes.”

  He lowered her skirt. Her panty hose must be a mess. Now his smile was caring, all soft. “Okay?”

  “Yes, I think so.” She glanced around wildly. “Where’s the condom?” she whispered. For answer, he opened his hand and showed her a scrunched handful of tissues.

  “I’ll dump it
in the bathroom,” he said. “Did you think I’d use it as a bookmark?”

  The reminder of where they were made her look around wildly. But nobody had arrived; nobody had seen them. “Do you do this often?”

  “First time.” He moved away, giving her space to clean herself up as best she could. She took off her shoes long enough to dispose of her wrecked panty hose and then put them on again. She had a spare pair of pantyhose in her desk drawer at work, although she’d never have guessed she’d have to use them in circumstances like this.

  Her mind dotted between practicalities and the reality of what they’d just done. Fucked in the stacks. Shit, they’d actually done it. And she’d come. Wildly, gripping him until he’d come too. He seemed the same. The look he affected for work didn’t seem much different with a few extra creases. He held out his hand, and she went to him. “Have you had lunch?” he said, as if they’d merely been discussing the poetry of—who was it? Tennyson. She nodded dumbly. She hadn’t, but she wanted time to think, time on her own.

  Shit, she’d done it with a poetry professor in the library. Well, a near professor.

  That still boggled her mind most of all. The poetry bit.

  Chapter Six

  While he found it hard to resist Gen, Nick had other reasons for fucking her brains out: to stop her thinking and to find out if she enjoyed what he did. It had been insane, what they’d just done. He wasn’t kidding when he’d told her anyone could have come and seen them. If anyone had realized what they’d been doing, he’d only have had his ability to fast-talk to get out of the situation. If he lost his job, he’d lose his application for citizenship, because the promise of the professorship and his work here kept him legitimately in this country. Well, almost legitimately. Nobody had noticed that he hadn’t obtained his documents and passport through the usual channels.

  One thing nagged him, something he needed to work out. How had she known to find him here? Had Odell said something? No, that man was so discreet even Nick didn’t know everything about him. It wasn’t him. Nick couldn’t remember saying anything about where he worked either. She’d said she was studying for a degree. Was it here? Coincidence? Over the years Nick had become skeptical of coincidences, but it wasn’t out of the ballpark. A lot of students lived in and around Brooklyn, and she could be one of them. Her little apartment certainly suggested a lack of funds, but it was furnished well, and the clothes she wore weren’t cheap or the kind students went for. A skirt suit suggested a job. Full-time or one of the part-time fillers students took to pay their way? Still, it was a good suit, the creases he’d put in the fabric dropping out already. Nick had an eye for quality. He’d needed it, once upon a time.

  He was looking at it now, and he didn’t mean her clothes. His instincts told him if he explored further, he’d find her honest, but he couldn’t afford to let everything rest on his instincts. He hadn’t survived for the last five years without examining everyone who tried to get close to him or had power in his life. It had hurt to let other people control his fate—and he’d had more of that recently than ever before. His lecturers when he’d first come over here had done it, then the people he did menial jobs for, flying under the radar while he established his credentials, then the head of his department. So often he’d been offered opportunities to slip back to his old ways. So easy to renew contacts, to go back. But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do that and reminded himself that one day he’d get to see Larry again if he didn’t slide back.

  He had to keep her close and do some basic investigation. Keeping her close wouldn’t be a problem. Recalling that, he slid his hand around her waist in a proprietorial gesture. “So are we sorted out?”

  He spotted the confusion in her eyes before she masked it. She had as many worries about him as he did of her. Not quite, of course, with not as much at stake, but he didn’t intend to make things easy for her. If she started digging into his background here, one of the triggers he’d set in place would go off, namely, one of the network of women and men who serviced the place. People ignored them, the personal assistants, the cafeteria workers, the information officers. The infrastructure. Nick never made that mistake. If there was information, they usually had it or knew where to get it. So he drank with them, gave them little treats that came his way, just chatted to them and remembered their names. Someone would tip him off if anyone had made more than usual inquiries.

  And he’d just risked all that for a quick fuck. What was worse, he knew, deep down, that he’d do it again to see that spark in her eyes, the way she responded to him and followed him into the abyss of oblivion. To feel the total abandonment of letting everything go for a brief, blissful moment. The need to have her had shocked him, but he couldn’t fight it. That worried him.

  He dropped a quick kiss on her lips. “Still want to have dinner tonight?”

  “At that restaurant?”

  “Unless you have your heart set on it, I want to change the plans. I want you to myself for a while. Come to my place instead. I’ll make us something. We can eat it naked in bed if you like. Just say the word.” His voice lowered to a purr, and he enjoyed the spark of arousal. She wet her bottom lip, swiped her tongue over it, so he followed suit, tasting where she’d just been. “What do you say?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was hardly audible, but he heard it.

  He bent to capture her lips just once more. “Bring a change of clothes for the morning. Once we get into bed I don’t want you rushing away.” He wondered at himself for allowing a woman he’d only just met into his private space. But this felt right, better than a meal at a fancy restaurant where they’d have to behave themselves. He didn’t want to behave himself with her.

  When she tried to break away, he pulled her back as if the thought had only just occurred to him. “By the way, I have one more question. How did you know where to find me?”

  She grinned. “You gave me your card, remember?”

  Ah, shit, yes he did. He’d scrawled his cell number on the back of one, hadn’t he? It had his name, and the legend MA, DUNY on it. She studied here, and the university wasn’t huge. She might have decided to trawl the libraries of the six main buildings on the off chance. Still, he didn’t like the coincidence that they were attending one of the smallest universities in New York and they happened to meet in the unlikeliest off-campus venue.

  After she left, he sat down and tapped into his laptop, engaging one of the proxy servers he used when he wanted to go a little deeper. Being inside the university network gave him an advantage, but although his computer skills were better than average, they were limited. He needed someone like Jim Goddard, who worked for Symbiotics, the company Nick’s sister-in-law worked for and now partly owned. At the thought of Yolanda, he grinned. Once he’d seen the blonde Texan beauty, he knew why his brother had risked everything for her. If Nick’d been in the same situation, he’d have done something similar. Perhaps not as risky, but then he wasn’t in love with Yolanda, only in lust with her. He’d have shared her in a heartbeat if his brother had been amenable. Most men would have felt at least uncomfortable, sporting an erection in such close proximity to a blood relative, but not the O’Donnell brothers. They’d spent part of their formative years tag-teaming rich women, trying to make enough money to get ahead. Sexual favors had paid for more meals than honest work, even when they could get the honest work.

  The memory reminded him of two things: how much he missed his brother and what he’d done to survive. When poverty came in the window, morality flew out the door, at least that was what his mother had said, the dimly remembered woman who’d abandoned them without so much as looking back. She’d left only a cheap, thin gold ring as a reminder of her existence.

  All gone, he told himself as he had so often before when the pangs of memory threatened to destroy his focus. Pain like that wasn’t worth dwelling on, because he couldn’t do anything about it now. Done and gone.

  There. He’d drilled into Gen’s department and found record
s of her classes, making a mental note of them in case they proved useful in the future. Gen was telling the truth; she was majoring in sociology. She had credits from her previous university in Idaho and had started the course fast-tracked. She was part-time, so it would take her another two years to complete her studies. She was working somewhere, but he couldn’t discover where. She’d worn office clothes, but that could mean anything. She had a small studio apartment in a not so good part of an area that until recently had a dire reputation for poverty and gang activity. That was why he’d taken notice of the locks. Pretty sure he could get into the public parts of her building without too much trouble, but he’d been glad to see the complex locks on her private door and the alarmed windows. Fairly standard for New York, but some people still lived as if they believed it couldn’t happen to them. The trouble was, “it” often did. Their trouble, not his; although he didn’t take part in such things anymore, he knew about them.

  But now he had a lecture to deliver on the poem he’d tried to teach the girl having what he suspected were fake problems. Only because she touched him a little too often, smiled at him too warmly, came too close. He huffed a laugh. If that was his only concern, he’d be a happy man.

  As it was, he could let everything go for the next hour and immerse himself in two of his greatest pleasures: wallowing in High Victorian poetry and trying to explain it to a class of people who preferred Kanye West to Tennyson. Changing their minds challenged him, gave him intellectual and emotional release when he did so. And he’d never failed in swaying a class to his point of view. When he was a kid, a battered version of the Golden Treasury had given him peace from the grind of daily life, and ever since he’d turned to poetry for solace. Mind, if any of the types he’d tangled with in those days had found out, his cred would have disappeared in a puff of smoke. So it was nice to finally let it out. Better than nice.

  He carefully logged off and disengaged the proxy server before stuffing the laptop in his bag and setting off for his class.