Kara liked Detroit! Her family was here and she didn’t want to move half a continent away from them. She wished she’d said some of this to Ron last night instead of pretending she had an upset stomach and hanging up the phone. Problems didn’t get resolved by avoiding them, but neither, she decided, did they get fixed by leaving voicemail messages.
She put the phone away and hoped Ron would call her before his big dinner.
Chapter Eleven
Dancing
Thea
Nick had two left feet.
This really surprised Thea considering how much rhythm he displayed in other, more intimate parts of their relationship. But on the dance floor he simply couldn’t get two steps in a row in time to the music, and the one step he occasionally got right was probably more by accident than by design.
“I’m really sorry!” Nick told her for what must have been the fourteenth time. He was sweating profusely and his pale face was red with exertion—much more so than Thea felt the dancing should have caused him.
“It’s okay,” she assured him yet again. “We’re having fun, aren’t we? Your parents aren’t around, my mother isn’t here, Jim is actually doing his job at the bar, and we’re enjoying ourselves together.”
Nick looked around longingly at the other couples dancing away on the floor. A lot of them were really bad at this—some even worse than Nick himself was—but Thea suspected he didn’t see that. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “it’s just I pictured us doing what they’re doing, and I just can’t get any of the steps right.”
Thea took his flushed face in her small brown hands. “Listen to me, Nick! What matters is you cared enough to come out and try this tonight. So what if we don’t catch all the beats. I’m enjoying myself. And I’d be really enjoying myself if you’d stop apologizing, relax a little, and let yourself have fun with me.”
Relaxing was probably impossible for Nick tonight, but he looked determined to give it a try. He took a deep breath and willed himself to appear less tense. It didn’t work, of course, but Thea loved him for trying.
“You want to try it again?” he asked.
Thea considered that for a moment. “No,” she finally decided. “What I want is for you to go to the bar and get the bartender to make us each a cranberry juice and vodka. Then we’re going to sit down at one of those tables over there and drink our drinks while you tell me everything you’re going to do to my pussy tonight after you take a second look at my new tattoo.”
Nick had finally started to relax a little.
She’d poured three of the little cranberry and vodka drinks into him and he was finally starting to lose just a bit of that self-conscious tension that was destroying his efforts on the dance floor. Of course his coordination was shot to hell, but he’d been so bad at finding the rhythm to begin with that Thea definitely thought that being a little drunk was an improvement.
Step, step, turn, place his hand on her waist, kick the toe…they were far from perfect, but it was really starting to be fun.
Step, step, turn…
The kiss caught Thea by surprise, throwing her off her rhythm even as Nick finally found one he liked better than the music.
Couples stumbled past them, but Thea didn’t mind.
“You want to get out of here?” Nick asked. “Or should we keep giving vertical dancing a try?”
It didn’t take a lot of thought on Thea’s part.
Five minutes later they were climbing into Nick’s truck which, for the very first time, she was going to try driving.
Thea spread her legs wider as she leaned back, mostly naked on the bed that pulled out from Nick’s couch. She was almost sitting against the back of the sofa with one pillow under her ass to give it some height. Nick was stretched out in front of her on his stomach, just as naked as she was. His fingers pressed against the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs while his tongue worked its magic on the moist folds of flesh that guarded the entrance to her vagina. She’d already come once tonight and she felt very confident that in another minute or two she was going to enjoy an even harder orgasm.
Her chest rose and fell with exaggerated movements keeping the cold apartment air circulating in her lungs. Her dark ebony nipples stood forth proudly from the soft curve of her breasts. Her fingertips scratched at the surface of the couch whenever Nick found a particularly sensitive spot in his exploration.
“You know, Liz tells me,” Thea volunteered, “that she and Travis use honey when they do this.”
Nick stopped licking her for a moment as he looked up in surprise. “Honey?”
Thea used one of her hands to guide his head back against her labia and waited for him to start licking again. His tongue wormed its way between her lower lips and lapped at the juices this released. “That’s what she says. I gather, if we try it, we’ll never think of food quite the same way again.”
Nick stopped ministering to her again. “You want me to see if I have any? I don’t really use honey so I don’t know what we’ll find.”
Thea pulled his mouth back onto her pussy. “No,” she told him firmly. “I want you to keep licking and sucking on me! I was thinking more about whether or not we could work the honey into one of our games.”
Nick had just returned to sucking lightly on her lower lips, pulling one into his mouth and playing with it. Now, annoyingly, he let it drop free again so he could keep talking. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said. “Honest to God, I don’t know what we’d do with it! I mean, I thought we’ve been getting pretty creative with some of the scenarios you’ve come up with, but honey? I’ve never even thought of using honey with sex before this conversation. I mean, who would we be pretending to be?”
“Travis and Liz?” Thea suggested before she burst out laughing. It really did seem ridiculous to her. The things you learned about your cousins in unguarded moments.
“That’s too close to home,” Nick told her. His expression was very serious. “We’ve never pretended to be real people before. I don’t want to go there. No matter what game we’re playing, no matter who we’re pretending to be—doctor, artist, cop—I’m still making love to you, Thea Clark. Besides, Liz really doesn’t do it for me at all.”
“Why not?” Thea asked. She was genuinely curious to hear what he would say. She’d always held a grudging respect for Liz. While she may not agree with the morality that led Liz to run through her long string of boyfriends over the last fifteen or twenty years, she’d admired the poise and self-confidence that let her do it.
Nick shuddered. “Do we really have to talk about this? I’m trying to stay hard here while I get you ready for me.”
Thea ran her hands through his hair, tangling her fingers in the long silky strands. “I’ll keep you hard,” she promised as she pulled on the hair to encourage him to abandon her pussy and crawl up beside her on the bed. Despite his complaints, Nick’s cock was still pretty hard—not hard enough to fuck but at least three-quarters mast. It flopped onto her groin, head resting on the bare skin where her bush used to be, just a couple of inches shy of her new tattoo.
She covered it with her small brown hand. “Tell me!” she demanded.
“Look, she’s your cousin. I don’t want to make you mad,” Nick protested.
“Just say it!” Thea ordered him. Her hand wrapped around his cock in what she imagined was an authoritative grip, but which honestly was probably only turning him on.
“Okay,” Nick conceded. “The first thing is that I don’t like the way she treats guys. I don’t know her all that well, but she tends to order them around too much for my tastes and she’s always trying to get beneath peoples’ skin and get a rise out of them.”
Thea could see Nick’s point. Liz really could be abrasive, even if you knew her well. She just liked to poke reactions out of people. But before she could share any of this with Nick, he added another point.
“Add to that that I think she’d be way too demanding in bed.”
“What?” T
hea asked. His answer absolutely astounded her.
“You’ve seen the way she speaks to—”
“Not that part,” Thea said. “Everyone knows that Liz can be a shit to the guys she dates. And if you think she’s bad to Travis, what you see is nothing compared to how she treated the last eight or ten of them.”
From the look on Nick’s face, she thought he found her assertion hard to believe, but it was true enough. Liz wasn’t nasty like Thea’s cousin, Ruth, could be, but she was hard to get along with when the mood struck her.
“What I want to know,” Thea finished, “is what you mean by too demanding. I always thought Liz was pretty sexy—and, you know, aggressive in a good way. I would have thought guys go for that. I mean, they do, obviously. Don’t they? She’s always had a boyfriend after all.”
“Liz is pretty,” Nick conceded, “and she can be a good tease when she wants to. But she can be a nasty tease too and I don’t go for that.”
“But that’s not what you said,” Thea reminded him. “You said she was too demanding,” Thea reminded him.
“Well I don’t really know, obviously,” Nick explained, “but I think a woman who spends so much time jerking her boyfriends’ chains would be really selfish in bed. I really like turning you on, and I love it when you tell me what you need, but I also want you to want to do the same things for me.”
Nick had not gotten any harder as they spoke, so Thea figured he was telling the truth—not that she thought he was right. She’d heard enough of Liz’s stories to think Nick had absolutely misjudged her here. But then, she didn’t really see any reason to encourage Nick to think about Liz along these lines. That meant it was time to change the topic of conversation. “Is this your subtle way of telling me you’re ready to switch places and have me go down on you?” she asked.
“Actually, it’s not,” Nick assured her. “I was really getting off on eating you, and I haven’t gotten to play enough with your new tattoo yet, either.”
When he finished speaking, he began to slide back down her body, pausing to kiss her breasts and lick at the swelling curves that formed her cleavage. His dick immediately began to stiffen against her thigh. He started to go lower but the siren call of Thea’s nipples won out over that of her pussy and pulled him back up again. He chastely kissed the very tip of her right tit, then bit the puckered flesh with his lips and playfully flicked the sharp end of his tongue back and forth across the trapped flesh.
Thea felt her eyes rolling heavenward even as she wrapped her arms around Nick’s head and encouraged him to take more of her into his mouth. He resisted her, insisting on playing with the absolute tip of her nipple as if he thought there was some secret catch in the flesh that he could find if he jiggled it with his tongue in just the right way.
Maybe there was!
As Nick played, Thea’s body continued to tense beneath him, practically humming with pent up sexual energy. His cock thumped hotly against her thigh, a sure sign that he was just as excited as she was. Juices flowed freely from her pussy as her back arched of its own accord. She began to wonder if it was possible to come without anyone touching her pussy or clitoris.
The pleasure was too intense. She couldn’t wait to find out.
She somehow disentangled her left hand from Nick’s hair and tried to touch herself, but Nick’s hand intercepted hers.
He sucked harder, still not letting the whole nipple into his mouth, putting all the pressure his lips and tongue could bring to bear on the very tip of her tit.
She tried to push her hand down between her legs again, but Nick proved too strong for her efforts. He brought her hand up to her left breast and encouraged her to latch on to that nipple, pinching and twisting it with her thumb and forefinger.
Her body’s excitement ratcheted up another few degrees.
Nick’s hand slipped down her stomach until his fingers touched the smooth shaved flesh of her mons veneris. She thought that he was going for her clitoris, but she misjudged him.
His fingers skimmed into the goo that covered her new tattoo and gently explored the raw flesh. Had he done this forty minutes ago, Thea might have felt mild discomfort. But now, with her body made ultra sensitive by his kisses and caresses, the line between mild pain and intense pleasure was irrevocably blurred.
Her hips bucked like an unbroken mare, bouncing his hand up and down on her flesh so that the edge of Nick’s little finger brushed her clitoris.
That was all the further help she needed to start coming again.
Suddenly Nick was rearing up above her, his thick erection held in his fist. A long sticky strand of precum stretched from the eye of his penis to the spot where it had pressed against Thea’s dark thigh moments before. She wanted to grab and pull it down between her legs, but just seeing was difficult in the midst of her orgasm much less coordinated movements like grasping or pulling.
Fortunately, Nick had exactly the same idea in mind. Without wasting any more time on foreplay, he got the bulbous head of his cock down between Thea’s legs, rubbed it around down there to make certain he had lined it up correctly, and shoved it deep inside her body.
She was so wet that he had absolutely no difficulty penetrating her. Her mouth opened in that moment of joyful pleasure as her lover drove his red-hot meat inside of her. He caught one leg by the underside of the kneecap and shoved it back up toward her ear. Then his hips found a rhythm and he thrust and ground them both into ecstasy.
“Whew!” Nick breathed as he settled down beside Thea on the mattress. His half-hard cock lay against her hip, still oozing ejaculate onto her dark flesh. “That was…wow! I think I really like this tattoo.”
To emphasize his point, he let his fingers lightly caress the spot on Thea’s mound where the design had been inked.
She rolled on her side and snuggled up against him. “You know,” she said, “you may not have the best rhythm on the dance floor, but you’ve still got the moves where it matters.”
Nick let his fingers slip lazily down between her legs were he could lightly begin to play with her again. “Give me a couple minutes to catch my breath and we’ll see if we can invent a few new steps.”
Chapter Twelve
Bad Connections
Kara
Kara sat straight up in bed looking around her in confusion before she realized that what had woken her was the sound of her cell phone ringing on the nightstand. It played Independent Woman. She’d been meaning to change it for months now but she liked the song and she wasn’t always good about changes.
Still half asleep, she fumbled to the phone and brought it to her ear without checking the Caller ID. She hoped it was Ron, of course, but with her luck lately it would probably be Mama.
“Hello?”
“Hey, beautiful, I-” crackle, crackle, crackle, “-you. Hope I didn’t wake you.”
The static on the line was terrible, but there was no mistaking the sound of Ron’s voice. “Ron? I can’t hear you! Where are you calling from?”
Crackle, “-connection,” Ron responded through the static. “The city’s snowed-” crackle, crackle, “-airport,” crackle, crackle, crackle.
Kara didn’t understand nearly any of that. It sounded like he had said he was at the airport, but his flight wasn’t due out until tomorrow and nothing would be moving in this weather anyway.
She raised her voice as if she could speak over the sound of static. She knew it didn’t actually work that way, but it felt like the right thing to do. “I can’t hear you!”
Crackle, crackle, “-terrible.” Crackle, crackle, crackle, crackle, crackle, “-you.”
The phone went dead in Kara’s hand.
She looked at it for a long moment through bleary eyes wondering if she was still asleep and dreaming all of this.
Then she forced herself to concentrate and redial Ron’s cell phone. The call went directly to voice mail. She disconnected without leaving a message and waited to see if he was trying to call her back.
; Three minutes later she was forced to concede that he probably wasn’t.
She put the phone back on her nightstand and lay down again, frustrated that she still didn’t know what was happening with the job negotiations. She briefly considered getting up and putting on the news to find the latest weather forecast, but pulled her covers up around her instead.
It was nighttime. She’d try and talk to him again in the morning.
Chapter Thirteen
Travis’ Surprise
Liz
“Knock, knock.”
Startled, Liz looked up from her desk to find her boyfriend standing in the open door of her office looking absolutely delicious in a very atypical fashion. Gone was the ski jacket and blue jeans he favored in the winter, replaced by a full length black overcoat, stylish gray scarf, and what looked to Liz like a suspiciously expensive black suit with matching wingtip shoes. Her young high school teacher boyfriend had even done something to his short black hair to give himself a more suave and sophisticated appearance. Looking at him made Liz’s whole body tingle, right down to the tips of her toes.
“Travis!” she exclaimed, making no effort to keep the delight from her voice. “What are you doing here? It’s only Wednesday! And what’s with that scrumptious suit?”
Travis’ tall athletic body filled the doorframe for a moment. Then he stepped deeper into the office, letting the door swing closed behind him so that it cut off the curious stare of Jeanine, the office receptionist. “I’ve come to take you away from all this, of course. Do you have time for dinner?”
Liz took advantage of the sudden privacy to rise and sashay around her desk so that she could greet him properly. “I think I might be able to manage that,” she told him. Taking hold of the lapels of his overcoat she pulled him close for a kiss. “Mmmmm, I like the fancy clothes,” she told him when they parted for air. “I don’t see you in them often enough. What’s the occasion?”
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