“Lola Folana.”
“Your first time was with Lola Folana?”
“Do you really want to talk about this now?” She smoothly replaced his hand with hers, copying his technique. Chancing a glance at his face, she was pleased to see the battle waging there. His mouth would stiffen then relax, his lips parted. His eyes drowsed shut after he peered at her with something akin to wariness in them. His jaw clenched and relaxed, until finally his head fell back and his hips scooted forward in a mute invitation for her to go further.
Her fingers loosely laced around him, she stroked him, twisting her hands upward, meeting them with her lips at his tip. His abdomen jumped and he emitted a tiny grunt of surprise and satisfaction when his swollen cap glided against the hot, wet cushion of her tongue.
“Ahh, God…Faith,” he groaned when she guided him deeper, his girth almost overfilling her mouth.
His legs opened wider and his hands went to her shoulders. His grip was too firm, and Faith thought he would push her away. She took him deeper, coordinating her breathing with the up and down movements of her head along the stiff length of his flesh while she busied her hands anew with the firm, warm weights at its base.
Zander’s hands glided over the silky skin of her neck and shoulders, his fingers moved into the curls just behind her ears. He cupped her head but did nothing to interfere with her work between his legs, and sooner than he anticipated, he found himself near his breaking point, at that place where pleasure was almost painful. Acting automatically, he held onto handfuls of her curls and thrust forward again and again. Faith took all that she could, answering his deepest thrusts with a swallowing technique that created a vacuum the likes of which he had never experienced.
Faith was keenly aware of his readiness when she felt his twins crowding upward. She pried his hands from her hair, pulled her head from his lap and quickly mounted him, shuddering in pleasure as she fully enrobed him. Beneath Zander’s hands, her thigh muscles worked as she raised and lowered herself upon him, arching her back and curling her hips forward to generate friction just as pleasing to her as it was to Zander.
Cradling his head to her bosom, she fed him her left nipple. Hungrily, he took it, instantly triggering a response that locked her around him, the constrictions of her intimate chamber initiating Zander’s release.
His nails cut into Faith’s skin, his abdominal muscles bunched and hardened, his toes curled. His head flew forward, the cords and veins in his neck standing out as he shouted his surrender. He gave her everything she had wanted, and a little extra, and she thanked him with tender kisses and caresses meant to bring him even closer to her.
Shaking in Faith’s arms, Zander held her so tightly, he compressed her shoulder blades and interfered with her breathing. Faith returned his embrace, her arms wrapped around his head, her hands stroking his hair. He had given her the confirmation she had needed.
“I love you, Alex.”
Faith’s whispered words, the heat of them at his ear, started his heart pounding so hard he was certain she could feel it beating against her breast. He adjusted his hold on her, loosening it so he could see her face.
“You don’t have to say it,” she tenderly assured him. “I know you love me. You show it every second I’m with you. I wanted to know if you could accept it.”
“I don’t have a problem taking—”
She pressed her fingers to his lips. “Taking isn’t the same thing as accepting. You know that.”
He sat up straighter with her, allowing her to wrap her legs around his middle, allowing him to seal her body to his. He’d been with a lot of women, too many. Some for survival, some for base relief. But none of them had touched him, not like Faith. Her touch, back in Dorothy and now, were the only times he had been touched by someone who loved him.
The realization weakened him as it washed through him, and it took all of his remaining strength to hold onto Faith, his Faith, who knew all along what he had only just discovered.
Having never received healthy doses of affection, he’d never learned how to accept love. His parents had ignored him when they weren’t abusing or stealing from him. He’d learned to take intimacy as it had been offered, but as Faith told him—that wasn’t the same as accepting it.
He’d accepted it tonight, when Faith showed him the most important thing he’d never learned when he was young: that he was worth loving.
Faith hoped it was the last step he needed to take to accept everything else, especially the fact that he was Alexander Brannon, her Alex, the love of her life.
* * *
“I did the Farmer’s Market this weekend,” Daiyu said in response to Faith’s inquiry regarding her weekend. “What’d you do? Or should I say ‘who?’ ”
Faith swiveled from side to side in her chair, her legs outstretched. Her feet bumped a side of her cozy cubicle with each turn. “I spent some time near Big Bear Lake.”
“With Zan—”
“Yes,” Faith spoke over her. “We had a really good time.”
Peering at Faith over the tops of her narrow black glasses, Daiyu folded her arms over her chest, carefully, so as to avoid puncturing herself with any of the jagged cloisonné anime characters pinned to the straps of her stretchy black paperbag overalls.
Faith stopped swiveling. “What’s that look for?”
Daiyu shrugged a shoulder. “What look? I don’t have a look.”
“I thought I saw a look, but if there was no look…”
“There was no look,” Daiyu sweetly assured her.
“Would you two knock it off?” directed a male voice from the neighboring cubicle. “You guys sound like a female Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza.”
“Are you on deadline, Vivian?” Daiyu called without leaving her perch on one edge of Faith’s cluttered desk.
“Yes,” he growled. “And I’m not even sure the piece is gonna run.”
“Why’s that?” Faith asked.
“No photo, no go,” came Vivian’s slow, deep drawl, which always put Faith in the mind of John Wayne.
Daiyu and Faith knew exactly what that meant. Personality! was a photo-driven magazine. Stories without suitable pictures didn’t run, plain and simple.
“Who do you need?” Daiyu asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Vivian said. “You ain’t got him.”
“Try me,” Daiyu challenged.
Vivian’s ancient leather and oak office chair creaked as he lifted his weight from it to lean over the cork divider. With his straight white teeth exposed in a neighborly grin, his jet-black hair neatly combed with a precise side part and his tanned forearms bared in a dark green polo shirt, Vivian looked more like a professional golf commentator than Personality!’s most senior entertainment news reporter. For fifteen years, Vivian had written a column titled After Hours, reporting on the antics famous folk got up to at some of the trendiest nightspots in Los Angeles. Vivian had stumbled into the gossip beat, after being assigned to the department by a former Personality! editor who hadn’t known that he was a man.
“I’ve got a bit on Joaquin Phoenix.”
“What flavor?” Faith asked. Joaquin Phoenix was one of her favorite actors, and Vivian’s After Hours vignettes typically came in three flavors: Dumbsel-in-Distress, Knight-in-Whining-Armor and the much rarer My Hero!
“Phoenix bought himself a My Hero blurb last night when he stopped to help a Dumbsel-in-Distress outside Catch, that new place on Sunset. The guy’s a class act,” Vivian went on. “He was leaving a restaurant, saw the girl being manhandled by some big dope and intervened.”
“Any punches thrown?” Faith asked, tantalized by the image of “her” Joaquin going medieval on a bully.
“He didn’t have to,” Vivian chuckled. “Phoenix has one of those faces. You don’t know if he’s going to ask you the time or go for your throat with his teeth bared.”
“He’s my hero,” Faith cooed.
“But the guy is a vampire,” Vivian said. “Three ph
otographers thought they got him last night, but he turns transparent on film.”
“I got him,” Daiyu said confidently. “He must have just been leaving the scene outside Catch. He looked all moody and windblown.”
“He always looks like that,” Vivian said.
“You want the pics or not?” Daiyu asked.
“What’s it gonna cost me?” Vivian asked, his blue eyes sparkling.
“A post-awards ceremony shindig to be determined at a later date,” Daiyu said. “Anything but the Daytime Emmys and the Country Music Awards.”
“Done.” Vivian shoved a hand at her.
“I’ll e-mail the shots to production right now,” Daiyu said, cementing the deal with a handshake.
“You’re amazing, kiddo,” Vivian said with a wink before sinking back into his chair, which answered with a loud creak.
“Who did you get at the Farmer’s Market?” Faith asked, making room to allow Daiyu to slip a zip disk into Faith’s computer.
“Pretty much everybody, but nobody good,” Daiyu answered, making quick work of e-mailing the Phoenix shots to production. “You know who I’d really like to shoot?”
“Nope. Who?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You.” Daiyu peered over the top of her glasses as she slipped her zip disk back into the case hanging from the silver chain around her neck. “And Zander Baron.”
“I can see why you’d want to shoot Zander, but why on earth would you want to shoot me?”
“Here’s the thing,” Daiyu said, “you’re pretty, he’s prettier—”
“Thanks,” Faith deadpanned.
“But the two of you together…it’s magic. It’s real. It’s gorgeous.”
Vivian reappeared over the cubicle wall. “You’re dating Zander Baron?”
“No,” Daiyu and Faith answered as one.
“This is so good,” Vivian chuckled, settling once more on his side of the wall. “Scoops never just fall into my lap like this.”
“What I wouldn’t give for real walls,” Faith muttered.
She smoothed her short, leather skirt around her hips as she exited her workspace, Daiyu right behind her. They wove their way through the maze of cubicles, hopped into an elevator, and took it to the lobby. They left the building and went straight to the one place they knew they could speak openly without being overheard.
“Could you at least turn on the air conditioning?” Daiyu asked as she settled into the passenger seat of Faith’s old Camry.
“It’s not hot,” Faith protested.
“It’s not hot outside,” Daiyu disagreed, propping her booted feet on the dashboard. “It’s plenty hot fastened up in this car.”
Faith started the engine and turned on the air conditioner. A blast of chilled air rushed in with a loud, rattling wheeze.
“Do cars get emphysema?” Daiyu wondered aloud.
Faith got right to the reason for their escape from the news floor. “Why do you want to photograph me with Zander Baron?”
“Why are you trying to hide that you’re seeing him?” Daiyu countered.
“It’s an invasion of privacy,” Faith contended. “I don’t want people in my business.”
“Invading people’s privacy is our job. It’s what we do for a living, it’s what Personality! is. Why should we be exempt?”
“Who’s ‘we?’ ” Faith scoffed. “I don’t see you taking pictures of you and your cowboy and plastering them all over the place.”
“Justin is a civilian. Zander’s in the biz. His photos are a bigger commodity.”
“I’ll ask him if he’ll sit for you, but I can’t be seen in a photo with him.”
“I can’t help being intrigued by your adamant refusal to sit for a pic with your man friend,” Daiyu said suspiciously. “If I were a reporter, I’d probably dig a lot deeper into that.”
“Leave it alone, Daiyu. Please.”
“Look, it’s not for the mag,” Daiyu said. “It’s for my book. Ever since I saw you and Baron makin’ out at the Wilshire, I’ve wanted to shoot you two. You guys have something that oozes.”
“We do not,” Faith said emphatically, grimacing.
“I don’t mean in a gross way. It’s artistic. It’s…emotional.” Daiyu turned to face Faith. “You know that photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the one where he’s naked and clinging to her like a monkey on the trunk of a palm tree?”
“I always thought of it as more like a kid clinging to a parent,” Faith said.
“Then you know what I’m talking about. That photo is iconic because of the emotion it captured. Some people love it, others are creeped out by it. The point is that it makes you feel something. I think I can create something just as timeless and beautiful with you and Zander.”
“I appreciate the compliment, Daiyu, and I know how talented you are. If anyone could capture whatever it is that Zander Baron and I ooze, it’s you. I just don’t think it would be a good idea, at least not right now.”
“I can wait.”
“Okay, then.”
Faith drummed the steering wheel, her hands further worrying the existing worn patches at ten and two o’clock.
“Since this thing is fired up, why don’t you give me a lift to In-N-Out Burger,” Daiyu suggested.
“I could go for an early lunch,” Faith agreed, easing the car into first gear.
Daiyu gave Faith a full account of her weekend photo hunting, but Faith’s mind remained elsewhere. As much as she would have liked to have a photo of herself with Zander, shot by someone as talented as Daiyu, no less, she knew that it would be that much easier for someone back home to make the connection that she already had between Alex Brannon and Zander Baron. As much as she wanted Alex back, she wouldn’t force him out. The decision to reveal himself had to be his or it wouldn’t mean anything to either of them.
* * *
Faith had almost given up on him when he called to tell her that he had just found a parking spot and was walking back to her building. Standing at her living room window, she scoured the sidewalk far below for him. It was late, and while her neighborhood wasn’t the worst, neither was it the best, and the last thing she wanted was for him to fall victim to a mugging on his first visit to her apartment.
“Are you wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and a plaid shirt?” Faith asked, spotting a figure clutching a cell phone to his ear, his free hand in his pocket.
“Yeah, I’m in disguise,” he laughed.
“Some disguise,” Faith snickered. “You look like you were born here in east Los Angeles.”
“Good. That’s what I was going for.”
Faith buzzed him in the second he set foot on the front step of her building. He bypassed the slow-moving elevator to sprint up four flights of stairs to get to her.
Wearing only a sheer white nightshirt and white bikini briefs, Faith welcomed him to her little apartment with a big kiss.
“It’s been so long,” she murmured, running her hands along his arms.
“Too long,” he chuckled. “What, about thirty-six hours?”
“It seems longer. Fawnskin seems like a whole different time and place compared to now.”
“You could always relocate, you know.”
Faith’s first impulse would have been to fly into her bedroom, pack whatever would fit into her largest suitcase and hop into her old car for a one-way trip to Fawnskin. But common sense prevailed, and she responded to his suggestion with a playful question.
“What would I do out there in the middle of nowhere while you were on location?” she asked. “I can’t sing and play like Grover, and I don’t think I’m cut out for waitressing at He’s Not Here.”
Faith’s furnishings were clean and comfortable, and possessed a shabby elegance that Zander appreciated. He sincerely respected and admired the fact that she proudly lived within her means rather than dipping into the deep pockets of her parents to live in the style she’d enjoyed as a kid back in Booger Hollow.
/> “Fawnskin’s got a great, colorful history,” Zander told her. “There’s hundreds of good stories you could write. The town’s Gold Rush history alone could keep you busy for—”
“I don’t want to be a human interest or entertainment writer for the rest of my life,” Faith said, cutting him off. “I want to write impact pieces that matter.”
“What’s an impact piece?”
Faith retrieved a thick manilla folder from the low beachhouse desk that seemed to double as a dining room table. She led Zander to her overstuffed sofa, sitting beside him with her legs across his lap. He caressed their silken lengths from hip to ankle as she showed him the contents of the folder.
“This is a story about an allergen detection device developed by Westcott Technologies in Maryland,” Faith said, handing him an article she’d torn from a scientific journal Zander had never heard of. “The head researcher is the founder of the company. He had a son with a severe allergy to peanuts, and the kid died after sampling food at a chili cook-off. One of the cooks didn’t want her secret thickening agent known, so she didn’t declare peanut butter on her ingredient list. The kid went into anaphylactic shock. He was in a coma for a week before his parents took him off life support.”
“This is depressing,” Zander said. “And this is the kind of thing you want to write?”
Faith showed him the next story. “This is the kind of thing I want to write. The Westcott story is only a small piece of this bigger story.”
His interest piqued, Zander scanned the pages of the second article. “Cady Winters-Bailey,” he said, reading the author’s name. “I remember this scandal. It broke right before I started filming Burn with her sister, Kyla Randall. The story gave me the creeps.”
“Doesn’t it, though?” Faith said. “It just confirmed something that most of us have suspected all along.”
“That computer companies can access our hard drives through the software they sell us?”
“Exactly. Emmitt Grayson, the CEO and founder of U.S. IntelTech software, just happened to get caught, thanks to two of his employees. Chiara Winters and John Mahoney used Westcott Technologies as bait to catch Grayson spying on the companies that bought his software programs. The story is incredible. I wish I’d been the one to expose it. Cady Winters-Bailey was nominated for so many awards for this story. Can you imagine? Having your own sister involved in exposing corporate espionage and living to talk about it?”
Tempting Faith (Indigo Love Spectrum) Page 18