The Dating Game

by Avril Tremayne

  She nodded, too full of heightened expectation to speak. And then David shifted, his hands tightening, mouth touching her cheek for a long, lingering moment. Moving to her mouth, staying there for one, two … three … four … five … Oohhhhhh.

  He eased back, looked down at her. ‘So … Did you like that, Sarah?’

  ‘It was …’ Beautiful. Intense. Amazing. More, I want more, I want— No! That wasn’t the deal. She had to stop this now. She cleared her throat. ‘Okay.’

  Silence, deep and heavy, as a shiver trembled through her. He touched her hot cheek, as though he were testing the blush she knew was there. Lying—he knew she was lying.

  ‘Just okay?’ he asked softly, and something flared in his eyes that was completely different from his usual slightly bored amusement. ‘Then I think we’d better analyse it.’

  ‘I don’t unders—’

  ‘What was wrong with it?’

  ‘N-nothing.’

  ‘But nothing was especially right with it, either. Was it too wet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too dry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too tentative?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was I too aggressive?’

  Sarah licked her lips as though recalling the kiss—saw his eyes zoom in on her mouth, and found herself licking her lips again. ‘No.’

  ‘Taste bad?’

  ‘Wh—? No! You tasted like … like wine. At least … Did you? I don’t know. That was a closed-mouth kiss.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘And seriously, there was nothing wrong with it. I just … it just … was okay.’ Blushing hard. ‘Same as Craig.’ Blushing harder.

  ‘Same as Craig,’ he repeated, and there was that flare in his eyes again. Danger. ‘I think you know I can’t leave that comparison unchallenged, Sarah,’ he said, and then he smiled—minus any hint of a dimple. ‘So brace yourself.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  As David stared down into Sarah’s big blue eyes, common sense nudged at his frontal lobe, telling him he was making a mistake. But it was no match for the roar of blood in his veins urging him to prove he was nothing like that anaemic fedora-wearing fucker Craig.

  David had the moves, he had the technique, and he had the control to employ both with clinical accuracy. He could get a woman halfway to orgasm from one kiss if he chose to. And at that moment, he chose to, goddammit.

  He wrapped his hands around Sarah’s upper arms, and the frailty of her, the ease with which he could circle her arms with a hand apiece, sent the warning whispering through his head again: mistake. For a split-second he hesitated—but then Sarah swayed towards him, her eyelids fluttered closed … and taking her mouth became his sole focus. Her breath hitched, and he fucking loved that sound, the vulnerable anticipation of it. When her teeth bit and released her bottom lip, it was the final trigger; he might slow things down, but he wasn’t going to stop.

  He drew her in so their chests were just touching, just—God, the torture—and put his mouth on hers for a long, long moment as he absorbed the feeling of having her there. Half of him wanted to slam her against his body and go for broke—the crazy half. The other half, the part of him that was still sane, was scared he’d hurt her if he let himself lose it; she was so damn small.

  So he reined himself in hard, comforting himself with the knowledge that there was no need to rush, that it would go further when the time was right, that he could take the time to savour this first real taste of her. He rubbed his mouth softly, inexorably, against hers, waiting for a sign that she was ready for him to go deeper.

  It came, the sign, almost immediately. A soft hum that had her lips puffing open. David sucked her top lip into his mouth, using lips and teeth and tongue to explore and taste. She moved impatiently against him, trying to get closer than he would allow, nudging her mouth against his, urging him on, urging him … in? Yes, in. Ahhh, God, yes. He wanted in. In the next second, his tongue was inside her mouth, licking deep and sure, and she was curling her own tongue around his, and it was thrilling the hell out of him. Harsh breaths mingling, bodies twisting, her hands gripping the sides of his T-shirt in greedy fistfuls.

  In the midst of it all, he became aware of her thigh sliding up his own, like she was climbing him. Climbing, Jesus God! Well, he could help her with that. He pulled her closer, plastering her against him at last, keeping her right there as he battled to control himself … But it was a lost cause; he was going to explode if he didn’t get her edged into a more strategic position. He slid his arms around her, held her closer still, closer dammit, for a red-hot minute, then slid his hands down to grip her bottom. He lifted her against him until the juncture of her thighs was right there, where he needed it, where he was aching, throbbing for her.

  Her hands were in his hair now. He wanted to rip the dress off her, tumble her to the couch, shove himself so deep inside her she’d never forget it. He hitched her again, rubbed against her to the point of lunacy, took a hurried step towards the couch. He was going to have her, take her, right now.

  A bump, a clatter, and the warning leapt into his head: You are not in control any more. No, he wasn’t going to hear it, wasn’t going to stop, didn’t want to stop. One more step, and his foot slipped on something. What was—? Ah, the sketchbook. But … how …?

  Crystal-sharp image of the two of them. Stumbling for the couch, mouths fused together. Sarah, one leg hitched on his hip, her other foot dangling. Her other foot dangling … having hit the coffee table and knocked the sketchbook to the floor without either of them noticing.

  You are not in control.

  He raised his mouth from hers, lowered her until her feet were on the floor, released her, drawing in lungfuls of head-clearing air, struggling against the need to reach for her again as he saw her chest rising and falling in dramatic surges like his, her bead-hard nipples pushing against her bodice.

  One of her hands came up; a trembling finger traced her darkly swollen top lip. And then her eyes dropped to the front of his jeans where he wouldn’t have been surprised to see his zip exploding from the pressure of his epic hard-on. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about that, short of excusing himself to jack off. Given she’d felt his erection two weeks in a row now, she was probably starting to think it was his natural state.

  Which was better than the alternative—that it was specifically her he wanted, to the point of bursting. A truth he didn’t like, didn’t want, wouldn’t acknowledge.

  ‘So, Sarah,’ he said, and welcomed the chill he could hear in his voice. ‘Are you going to tell me that was “okay”?’

  ‘That was a little bit more than okay,’ she said shakily, and smiled.

  The smile. Her mouth. So sweet and pliant. Almost too perfect to be real. He wanted to touch it, touch her. God, this was bad.

  ‘Rulebook moment,’ he said, very deliberately not smiling back at her.

  ‘Rulebook?’ she asked, and something flickered and died in her eyes as a frown slowly replaced the smile. ‘I see.’ She patted the flared skirt of her sexy scarlet dress into place, smoothed a hand over her hair, made a small adjustment to one shoulder strap. And then she smiled again. She’d pulled herself together, it seemed—which irritated David almost enough to kiss her again, because she should not be able to pull herself together like that, not when he was still having trouble keeping his hands off her.

  ‘Rulebook,’ she said again. ‘So what’s the takeout? Okay is not okay? Something like that?’

  ‘Nothing like that!’ he snapped. And then, more temperate, ‘I mean … yes.’

  ‘I see. Not!’

  ‘Look, the thing is, you’ll know when it’s time to have sex, and it’s not when a kiss is just “okay”, the way it was with Craig. Not even when it’s “a little bit more than okay” either, like it was just then.’ Liar. ‘You wait. Until it’s tense and electric, and your insides are clenching, and your blood is boiling, and yo
ur skin is tingling …’ He was going to fucking die in a minute. ‘And then you’ll know it’s time. Whether it’s the first date or the fiftieth.’ He bent down to sweep the sketchbook up off the floor, then inclined his head towards the French doors. ‘Now, let’s keep going.’

  ***

  Let’s keep going?

  How was a girl was expected to ‘keep going’ when her body was screaming for an orgasm? As in screaming for it! If he could get her that far with one kiss, Sarah didn’t want to think what she would have been reduced to if he’d actually got his hands on the good stuff. A begging, mewling, grovelling mess, no doubt!

  Let’s keep going?!?!?!

  Easy for him to say.

  Which of course was the crux of the problem. It had been easy for him to say.

  Rulebook moment. A splash of cold water on a hotplate. The coolness of him, when everything inside her had felt so indescribably hot. At least it had stopped her from flinging herself at him and demanding he not only keep kissing her, but put that supersized erection of his where it could do them both some good! How embarrassing would that have been?

  And how … how traitorous, to not even think of the after-effects, of how she’d face Lane, face Adam, if things had gone any further. All things considered she should be thanking David for stopping when he did, not resenting him for it. And she would be thankful, just as soon as her hormone levels returned to an acceptable level.

  Everything aside, though, that zinger of a kiss proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that David was the right man to break her curse. Boy, oh boy, did he know women! He was so far above Craig as to be in a different stratosphere. He was the apex, the apogee, the pinnacle. The zenith of men. The final frontier. The summit, the high point, the capstone, the climax.

  No! Not the climax.

  She refused to even think of the word ‘climax’ in association with David Bennett, who definitely wasn’t thinking in those terms in relation to her, or he could have had her, right there on the couch.

  The only conclusion she could draw was that his kissing her had nothing to do with him wanting to have sex with her. It probably had precious little to do with the rulebook either. Nope, her best guess was that David had wanted to teach her a lesson because he hadn’t liked being lumped in with Craig as an ‘okay’ kisser. He’d decided to demonstrate his mastery with disinterested precision—warning her to brace herself, positioning her as he’d wanted her, coaxing her to set the pace, bringing the kiss to an end the moment he’d fulfilled his goal.

  A salutary reminder to use him, not fall for him. In fact, she was going to look on it as a bonus lesson.

  But lesson time now appeared to be well and truly over for the evening, because since they’d taken up their respective positions, not a word had been spoken between them.

  Sarah had been consumed with the memory of that spectacular kiss, which explained her contribution to the heavy silence, but what was David’s story?

  He seemed to be in his own world, scowling as he drew. Was his morose silence a temperamental artist thing? If so, she hoped it wasn’t going to be the pattern for the next five weeks. Excessive silence was always so oppressive.

  ‘The Langman Portrait Prize,’ she said, latching on to the least controversial subject she could think of, just to hear a voice in the gloom. ‘Have you entered it before?’

  No answer. David simply kept sketching, and brooding.

  She cleared her throat and tried again. ‘I guess you must have. Who did you paint last time?’

  He stopped, then. No, it wasn’t so much a stop as a start—an almost violent one—as he stared down at his sketch. ‘No,’ he said, but it had to be to himself because that was so far from an answer to her question as to be classified a non sequitur. Unless he was a question behind …?

  Sarah was about to ask for clarification when David’s pencil slipped from his fingers and pinged off the coffee table onto the floor. He made no move to pick it up; he didn’t even seem to notice he’d dropped it. Instead, he transferred his troubled gaze from the page to her.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Have you entered it before?’ she asked, figuring patience was obviously required when addressing artists absorbed in their work.

  ‘Entered what?’

  ‘The Langman Portrait Prize?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘But you’ve painted portraits before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyone famous? You know, like they do for the Archibald Prize?’

  ‘No.’

  And he’d talked about getting blood from a stone? ‘So who, then?’

  ‘I …’ He stopped, took a breath. ‘I haven’t painted for a while.’ He blinked, then blinked again. ‘In fact, I’m pretty rusty, so let’s call it quits for tonight and start again next week.’

  ‘Can I see?’ she asked, moving towards him.

  He closed the sketchbook. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not happy with it. Maybe next time.’

  He checked his wristwatch, and Sarah noticed that as he did that, he slid the sketchbook behind a cushion on the couch. The move had all the hallmarks of sleight of hand. So! He was definitely in temperamental artist mode; he seriously didn’t want to show her. And now of course she really wanted to sneak a look. Could she, somehow …? She changed direction, heading for the couch, and David shifted with her, blocking her line of sight to the cushion.

  ‘You didn’t drive, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t have a car.’

  ‘Then I’ll call you a cab while you change. Leave the dress here for next time. Hang it in the bathroom and I’ll look after it for you.’

  ***

  David expected a sense of relief to flood him once Sarah had left and he was alone in his apartment. Instead, he felt sick.

  It took every ounce of determination he could muster to retrieve the sketchbook from its hiding place and face what he’d done.

  His brand-new sketchbook. For a brand-new painting. A brand-new era.

  He’d told Sarah it had been a while since he’d painted, but that wasn’t true. He’d been painting all along; he’d just been painting badly. And he’d been painting badly because he’d felt nothing. The passion was gone; only the technique remained.

  Nine years was a long time to be barren.

  Barren. Rebel’s word. Those nine barren years he’d transferred to his dying art belonged to Rebel, and he thought he’d never climb out of the slump. But then he’d met Sarah Quinn, and the urge to paint had surged out of nowhere, screaming at him that she was the drought-breaker.

  He opened the book to the first sketch, and started turning pages. As usual, he’d used his pencil to capture single body parts and individual features, like vignettes. Eventually the sketches he’d dashed off would come together in his head, and he’d know he was ready to start drawing the complete picture. He’d experiment with poses, and just keep drawing and drawing until some sixth sense told him it was time to commit his vision to canvas.

  He’d made a good start tonight, the sketches coming effortlessly. Her bright eyes. The angle of her well-defined cheekbones. Her gamine hair with the tiny kiss curls behind her ears and at the base of her hairline. The slender grace of her neck. Her fingers, so small and dainty, around the stem of the wineglass. There was even a drawing of one of her feet, in that sexy red shoe.

  Back to her heart-shaped face. A close-up of her mouth, the prettiest mouth he’d ever seen. The short upper lip, sharply defined philtrum and cupid’s bow, that adorable little tubercle—okay, he was getting anatomical, but he was an artist, it was allowed!

  Another flip of the page, and there was the first coming-together drawing. Sarah, full-length, side-on. Ahead of schedule, but if that was the way it worked out, so be it. One more full-length sketch, front-on. They’d been talking about Craig, about the date, the kiss. He’d been pushing her. How had Craig kissed h
er? Had he said anything? Where had he put his hands? Had he sniffed her? Sniffed her—God help him!

  Things had been spiralling out of control even at that stage. And then … the kiss. Hands and tongues and sighs and gasps. And he’d sniffed her all right.

  He’d retrieved his sketchbook, ordering her to the French doors as though nothing had changed, as though the world hadn’t just shifted on its axis, as though the only thing on his mind was getting one more sketch. He remembered turning to a fresh page and starting to draw. Had they been talking? He couldn’t remember. He’d been so busy trying not to think about how she smelled, how fine the skin of her cheek had felt, how that delicious mouth had clung to his, how right she’d felt in his arms.

  His tiny girl, so perfect it was almost painful to have her there and yet not have her. And it had been in his head that she’d thought about having sex with Craig four nights ago. Craig, whom he’d wanted to strangle, just because Sarah had contemplated letting him touch her. Right after he strangled himself for putting Sarah in that fuckhead’s path.

  Drawing, drawing, drawing …

  The last sketch.

  Time to face it.

  He forced himself to turn the page, and even though he knew what it would be, his breath caught in his throat. There she was. Pencil on paper. Tiny and pretty and perfect …

  And naked.

  A body he hadn’t actually seen, but which he apparently knew well enough to draw anyway. The frail shoulders and collarbones, the slender arms—okay, those things he had seen because they were exposed by the cut of the dress. Fair game. Her narrow waist and hips, which he hadn’t seen but were also fair game, because he knew what they were like from last week’s skin-tight dress. Same with her legs, which were too long for the rest of her—almost coltish in proportion.

  But her breasts? No—the fact that he’d felt them against his chest was no justification for drawing them in such detail. The firm swell, not quite enough to fill his palms. The jut of her nipples, the pale perfect circles of areolae. Her vulva, neat and sweet—and even though he was as certain as he could be that she’d wax the whole package, as every girl seemed to do these days, he’d gone ahead and given her a tidy patch of hair, for no other reason than because that was what he liked.