“Except Michael maybe,” he said with a laugh.
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw how he treated most of the women he’s ever been with.”
Evan had been worried maybe Andrea was a little in love with his brother. Her tone took care of that. Nobody was a hero to their own valet, or some shit like that. He didn’t like to think maybe Andrea didn’t even like Michael, though. His big brother was a pompous tight-ass most of the time, but at heart he was a good guy.
“The Reynolds men are notoriously hard on their women. It runs in the family.”
She stiffened. “Except when they’re in bed with them, I suppose.”
He knew when not to step into a minefield. “At least Michael seems to have found his match in this Vanny.”
“Yes, she’s a strong girl. She’ll be good for your brother.”
He got up to take a sip of his half-finished beer. “Why don’t you drink?” he asked casually.
“I don’t like what it does to people.”
“Relaxes them?”
“Makes them numb to things they should feel.”
When he looked back at her, he saw she had retrieved her phone and was playing with it, presumably switching the ringer back on. He peeled the condom off, though he was by no means done with Andrea Prentiss. “Do you want to order dinner?”
Her phone rang and without hesitation she picked it up and conversed, buck-naked. This time it was French and he did know a smattering of that thanks to his mother’s tendency to drag him along with her on shopping trips to France when he was a boy. She was always looking for that perfect little black dress, tantalizingly out of reach in some wildly expensive hole-in-the-wall shop off the Champs-Élysées.
Andrea seemed to be talking to one of the foreign offices of Reynolds Industries, not Paris since it was too early for it there, but someplace with a colonial legacy where they still spoke French. Indonesia maybe. Who the hell knew? She was assuring them that “Monsieur Reynolds n’est pas mort,” but instead would be just fine. It took a good five minutes but he supposed the entire Reynolds empire had to be assured that the crown prince was still hale and hearty and up to shepherding them all through their profitable throes.
He shouldn’t be so cavalier but he had never been a fan of the family business. He only got involved when Michael or his father wanted an environmental consultation, which was what he had studied at Yale. Even when they were ostensibly consulting him, he tried to keep his distance, sensing they were just trying to involve him for the sake of it rather than genuinely wanting his opinion anyway.
Andrea stood up when her call was done and looked around distractedly.
“Where did you learn to speak so many languages?”
“Languages come easily to me. If I’m exposed to them for any period of time, I tend to pick them up and don’t seem to lose them. Unlike my bra,” she muttered. She bent down to look under the bed and gave him a fetching view of her bare ass, and he pulled her up to lie beside him again, throwing one leg over hers to keep her there.
“Don’t get dressed yet. My vigor comes back pretty quickly. Give me a minute.”
She smiled slightly and he traced it with his forefinger on her very soft pink lips, kissed clean. “You are interesting, Andrea. Where are you from?”
She stiffened, then said casually, “Why? Did someone say I wasn’t interesting?”
“Not at all. My brother Chris just tried to warn me off you. Said you shot everybody down, even him.”
She laughed. “That sounds like that particular brother of yours, I must admit. None of the Reynolds brothers lack confidence, but I believe Christopher got an extra dose somewhere.”
Now that they’d had fantastic sex with him knowing who she was, Evan felt that must count for something, confidence or no confidence. “What are you doing working as a secretary?”
“Earning a living.”
“No, as a secretary, I mean. To hear Chris talk, you run Reynolds Industries.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Where were you educated?”
“Why all these questions about me, Evan?”
“I want to get to know you.”
“Why?”
Good question actually. Usually he couldn’t get away from a girl fast enough once he was done in bed with her.
“Fine, then you get to know me.”
“I already know everything about you. I know everything about all of the members of the Reynolds family. It’s my business to.”
He fought down the umbrage he always felt being considered just one of Damien Reynolds’ sons. Michael Reynolds’ youngest brother. “My life doesn’t revolve around Reynolds Industries. I don’t have much to do with the rest of them.”
“Or anyone else, to hear the others talk about you.”
“I suppose that’s because I’m the only one of my father’s children he didn’t get to ‘keep’ in the divorce.”
“Yes, I know. Your mother had money of her own.”
“It wasn’t as easy to push her around as it was his other wives.”
“Is that why you’re such an isolationist?”
“I don’t know. What’s your excuse?”
“I’d hardly compare us. You live on a one-man island and I live in the middle of Manhattan.”
“Sometimes it can feel the same.”
“Yes. I suppose it can.” She wound a lock of his hair around one finger and he kissed her palm, lightly, pushing her back to the pillows.
“You don’t talk much during sex,” he observed.
“Why? Do you go for that kind of thing? I don’t recall you asking for much conversation the other night.”
Grinning, he palmed one of her soft breasts, bringing the nipple to attention, and she arched her back. “You’re never getting your bra back, Miss Sassy Pants.”
When he dipped his head to suck, she squirmed beneath him as he skimmed one hand down her thigh to the inside, rubbing her clit before sliding inside. “I could fuck you all day,” he murmured. “With my fingers, my tongue…”
She hummed, smiling. “If your penis gets involved, I’m on board.”
“Penis,” he mocked gently, looking up over her plump tit, laving it with his tongue. “Say something dirty to me in a different language.”
Laughing, she tossed out a phrase that sort of sounded like spaghetti and meatballs.
“That’s not very sexy,” he admitted. “What does it mean?”
When she told him, in English, he sighed. “Now that’s sexy. Say it again. In English,” he added hastily.
“I want you to slide your cock in my cunt,” she whispered and he almost thought he detected a faint blush on her cheeks as she did. “That’s the literal translation, just about the same level of vulgarity.”
He smiled. “Does it embarrass you to say that?”
She nodded. “I’m a wimp on the dirty-talking front, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t suspect that of such an accomplished linguist.” He moved his attentions to her other breast. “Did you mean it, though? What you said.”
“Oh yes,” she breathed. “Vulgar as it was.”
“When you say it, it doesn’t sound vulgar. Just sexy. What’s the sexiest language you know?”
“Sanskrit, I suppose. The Kama Sutra in its original language is,” she hesitated, “hot.”
He transitioned up from her breasts to her lips and said against them, “And you, Miss Prentiss, are the very definition of hot, whether you open your mouth or not.”
But he did open her mouth, with his lips, his tongue, nipping at her, tasting her as he reached for a condom, pulling away only to rip it open and roll it on.
“Say it again,” he urged as he came down over her.
“The, ah, the sliding your ah, into my…”
“Yeah.”
Opening her thighs wide, she said, “Why don’t you just do it?”
“Okay.” With a grin, he slid his cock into her soft, wet depths. Wow. That still felt so very good, t
hird time being the charm and all, although the first two were pretty spectacular as well.
She moved underneath him, slowly, naturally, and he savored the unbelievable chemistry he knew he had with this woman, even when he thought she was being paid to sleep with him. Pushing her hair away from her eyes, he kissed her temple and then, with a spine-numbing friction, slid out, or almost out.
One fuck tonight had taken the edge off and he intended to make this one slow and savor every second. With that intent, he rolled over onto his back, keeping inside her, bringing her on top of him, her hair falling around her in a dark curtain.
The change in position felt wonderful to him, but it seemed to stall her and she came up a little on her knees, her palms on his chest, looking down at him, almost in confusion.
Rubbing the small of her silky back, he moved his hands around and up to take one handful of perfect tit in each of his palms, rubbing, caressing. His cock throbbed but he stayed still, wanting her to set the pace.
“Do you like to be on top?” he asked, and it came out lower and hoarser than he would have thought for such a relatively innocent question.
“I—” She swayed slightly on top of him, his cock registering it with every nerve. “I guess I do.”
The swaying was slow and mesmerizing at first and then faster as she found her rhythm, circular, giving him intense pleasure but not enough to come. He slid his finger to her clit, rubbing as she moved.
“Oh yeah,” he encouraged softly. “Just like that.”
He wished he’d put some music on in the background, if she didn’t want to talk while they made love.
“What kind of music do you like?” he asked.
She tightened her knees around his hips, bearing down, and began to drop light, feathery kisses along his neck, his jaw, his ear.
“Because I could get up for a minute and—”
She nipped his earlobe playfully and he brought both hands around to her ass.
“Or not,” he amended. Her skin was incredibly soft as he rubbed the firm cheeks lightly, still not controlling, and enjoyed the mellow feel of her riding him.
When she moaned, her eyes falling shut, and shuddered, he could feel her climax with every inch of him.
But it wasn’t enough to bring him with her. He pulled her head down and kissed her, burying his tongue in her mouth and, almost involuntarily, lunged up into her still-spasming cunt.
With a grunt, he immediately forgot his vow to take it slower and allow her to set the pace. He fucked her from below, moving her, moving his ass, trying to get closer, harder, until she broke away from his kiss and cried out and he came, shivering with it.
It felt as if it took him longer than usual to recover, mentally that is, as if he was in a daze or something. One minute he was beneath her, boneless—his cock soft and satiated, but not quite slipping out of her yet—and the next minute he was stretched out on the bed, alone, listening to her take a quick shower.
If he’d been on his game, he would have been in there with her.
She came out quickly nonetheless, wrapped in a towel more modest than most cocktail dresses these days, and proceeded to look around for that damn bra.
He came up on his elbows. “So you want to get some room service?”
“No, thank you. I must be going.”
As if she’d simply stopped by for tea. She located the bra beneath one of the chairs.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my apartment.”
“Why?” He ignored the unusual sensation of feeling like a whiner. “Can’t you stay longer?”
“I’m afraid not. I have to go to work tomorrow.”
He smiled, still not getting out of the bed, as if that possibly could entice her back into it. When she dropped the towel, he was heartened. “You’re going to work?”
“It’s sort of a habit of mine, Evan. I do it most every morning.”
“I don’t know why you bother,” he pointed out. “It seems like you bring your work wherever you go. Who needs an office?”
“It’s easy to be casual about making a living when you don’t have to.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just I hate New York.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“I mean I can’t stay here and wait for you to get done with work.”
“Who asked you to?” she snapped, surprising him. She was a prickly little thing.
He cut to the chase. “I want to see you again. Come with me back to Maine.”
“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be wise, Mr.—”
“Mister?” he interrupted incredulously.
“All right. Evan then.”
“Why won’t you come to Maine?” It wasn’t just the sex—although he felt a pathetically acute sense of loss as she tucked her pert little tits back into her bra, put on her red panties and then pulled her dress over that lovely sight. He watched as she slipped her black heels back on.
He wanted to show her his house, his island. He had practically rebuilt the whole structure with his own hands, and the wild cliffs and beaches of the island itself were built by some force that never ceased to awe him. He wanted it to awe her. He wanted to awe her.
“I’ve never asked a woman back there,” he blurted out, horrifying himself as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, her hair tumbling around her shoulders until she ruthlessly twisted it into a bun at the base of her neck and reached into her purse to locate a clamp to hold it in place.
Was it her self-possession that somehow seemed to cause him to lose his?
He stumbled on. “The island is isolated. I know it is. But it’s phenomenal too.” He sat up straighter in bed against the headboard. “All my life I’ve been dragged around and shown places and people and things that were supposed to impress me. That impressed everybody. Big office buildings full of people toiling away who did my family’s bidding at the drop of a hat. Big mansions filled with doodads that cost more than most people made in a lifetime. Big…” He paused. This was stupid. He didn’t know what he was trying to say. But she was listening now, looking down at him, and he tried again. “They didn’t impress me. Nothing really impressed me.”
She nodded. “That’s understandable, Evan. You get used to it.”
“Until I made this doghouse.” Talk about blurting out. Doghouse? Christ. If she was as smart as she was reputed to be, Andrea Prentiss would make a quick getaway while she could. Instead she came closer and sat on the side of the bed, waiting.
“My grandfather had bought me this huge dog. It was like a horse it was so big. The thing had bloodlines back to the Russian czars or some crap. God knows how much it probably had cost. But anyway, our estate manager was put in charge of directing a whole construction crew to build this behemoth thing its own digs, out in a corner of our summer estate.”
“Your father’s Long Island estate?”
“No, no, it was an Evans estate, in California. I still own it…” His voice drifted off. “I think.”
“So you helped build the doghouse?”
“Oh no. That wasn’t allowed. I could’ve gotten a splinter, or picked up some bad grammar or something. No, the construction crew built the doghouse, which was more like a dog palace. But I watched.”
She laughed. “A dog palace?”
“Really, it was in Dog Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or something like that. It was opulent, perfect and completely terrifying to this poor dog, who it turned out was like the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. The thing was scared shitless by it. Wouldn’t even go in it. But my grandfather had gone to all this trouble and though he was usually a big softie, he could stick to his guns sometimes and he was mad at the dog for not appreciating all the trouble he, meaning his estate manager and construction crew, had gone to with the doghouse. So Grandpa wouldn’t let the dog sleep in the main house.”
She shrugged. “At least it was California, not some winter wonderland.”
“Maybe, but it was a parti
cularly rainy season that year and, well, I was afraid the poor dog was going to catch pneumonia. So I snuck out one night and borrowed some of the crew’s tools and built this…well, it was really a little shack compared to the dog palace.”
“But it was a hit with your cowardly lion horse-dog?”
“A huge hit.” He grinned. “And for the first time, I was impressed by something. The god-awful little shack I’d built. I was fucking impressed by it and I was hooked.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know.” He did know actually. He was six years old. But he didn’t want to tell her that part for some reason. That wasn’t the point of the story. He didn’t want any oohs and ahhs about how cute he must have been with the oversized hammer, although Andrea Prentiss didn’t strike him as the oohing and ahhing type. But again, that wasn’t the point of the story. The point was… Actually, what the hell was the point? “What I mean is that I discovered with that doghouse that the only thing that impresses me is what I do with my own two hands and what God, or whoever runs the rest of everything—and contrary to popular belief, that’s not either Damien or Michael Reynolds—does with the rest of the planet.”
He was smiling at her, but she wasn’t smiling back, and consequently he lost his own. She watched him, carefully, quietly, and for one hopeful second, he thought she was going to climb back into bed with him, but she only reached one long delicate finger, perfectly manicured, along his jaw, saying nothing.
Finally he said, “Anyway, more information than you needed to know, but what I’m trying to say is I want to bring you back to Maine with me. I want to show you—”
She stood up abruptly. “I can’t. I have work to do.”
“Come on. You get a vacation, don’t you?”
“I don’t believe so.” She reclaimed her purse. “As a matter of fact, no.”
That stopped him.
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, there are times when Mr. Reynolds takes a vacation and I occasionally don’t go into the office then. Is that what you mean?”
She was either playing dumb or his brother was the worst boss since Scrooge.
“Never mind.”
She said nothing until she got to the bedroom door. Then, over her shoulder, she said, “Call me next time you’re in town.”
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