Alexis laughed but felt the rise of heat in her cheeks. Cat must have said something to him. “I’m not a prude.” Being married to a man like Logan, she most definitely was not a prude. If Drew and Cat had any idea...
It was just that Cat was tall and slender, whereas Alexis was fairly short at five-three and her curves were a lot more...generous. Not to mention that Cat was five years younger. Where Alexis’s breasts were large, Cat’s were perky. Alexis would choose perky anytime.
“The word prude has a negative connotation. I’ve never thought of you negatively.” Drew held out the salad bowl for Alexis to scoop in the diced tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and mushrooms. “I just want you to feel comfortable. The same way you worried that I was only going fishing because Logan was pushing me into it.”
She and Drew were the kind of people who were always wanting to make sure everyone else was okay. She liked him for it, but sometimes she wanted to say the hell with it all and do what she wanted without caring about someone else’s needs.
With that in mind, she said, “Have no fear, I’m fine, too.” Then she held up her wineglass. “I’m ready for that refill.”
What the hell. She’d skinny dip in the hot tub. And as Cat stepped down into the water, Alexis wouldn’t look at her long enough to make any negative comparisons.
Chapter Three
The sun had finally set on the sweet July day. The hot tub was on the side of the patio next to the fence, which was high and provided plenty of seclusion for naked hot-tubbing. Besides, when they’d arrived, there’d been a painting crew working on the house next door, and it appeared to be unoccupied for the maintenance period.
Drew tried not to look as Alexis climbed into the bubbling water. She was nervous about being naked with everyone, but hell, he was a red-blooded male, and Alexis was hot; it was hard to keep his eyes anywhere except on her sexy curves. Logan hadn’t been reticent about watching Cat, that’s for sure. But Cat didn’t have a nervous bone in her body. She understood her power over men.
Add to that the fantasies Cat had been spinning since the Harts first accepted the invitation, he was hard. Thank God the tub’s jets made sure the water covered his indiscretion. But Cat knew. She’d draped her leg over his lap and was gently rubbing him with her calf, a self-satisfied smile on her lips. She grinned widely, knowing exactly what he was thinking. Damn her.
“Here’s to a fantastic dinner,” she said, toasting them all with her glass of pinot. None of them were drunk, or even tipsy. Just feeling pretty darn good.
“The steaks were perfection, Logan.” Alexis raised her glass to her husband.
“Thank you, dear.” Logan dipped beneath the water and his light reddish hair became streaks of dark copper in the patio lights as he rose. For a moment, Cat seemed mesmerized by the water streaming down his broad, hairless chest.
Alexis sipped, settled back on the seat, then gasped as the water rose to her chin. “Hey, it’s deeper over here. And I’m the shortest.”
Sure enough, the tub was on a slight slope, the water on one side sloshing close to the edge.
“Switch with me, Logan.” She pouted prettily.
Drew tried to imagine her using that expression on an accounting subordinate. Nope. She probably used something more like a schoolmarm glare.
Logan dragged her to his side of the bench seat. “You can sit here with me, honey.”
Watching them, Cat poked Drew’s thigh beneath the water. “What are you smiling about?” She leaned in close, puffed a breath against his ear. “Dirty thoughts?”
He laughed out loud. “Far from it.”
But all Cat’s fantasies of the past few weeks had brought carnal thoughts of Alexis to his mind. In the kitchen earlier, he’d honed in on her scent, something fruity, oranges or grapefruit. It had made him notice her body, her full breasts, the flare of her hips. And all those prurient thoughts felt as if he’d committed mental adultery. Which was odd since Cat was the one pushing. Yet the fact remained, he felt guilty about all that noticing. There was just something fundamentally frightening about a married man wanting another woman while his own wife was sitting right next to him.
They passed around compliments for the dinner, the house selection, the good drive, tossed around ideas for things to do during the week. Alexis had maps of the local hiking trails, and they could drive around the lake, do a little gambling on the Nevada side of Stateline.
Then there was Cat’s idea. A little kinky sex. She didn’t waste much time broaching the subject. “All right, let’s play truth or dare without the dare part.”
Alexis laughed. “How can you play without the dare?”
“We ask embarrassing questions and everyone has to answer with the absolute truth.” Cat stroked him high on the thigh, her pinky grazing his balls.
Drew wanted to tell Alexis to watch out. Cat was going to lead her right into...something.
“I’ll go first,” Cat said, “and show you how it’s done.”
Alexis fell for it. “Okay.”
Cat leaned in dramatically, her dark nipples flirting with the surface of the water. “What’s the kinkiest thing you’ve ever done?”
Alexis’s cheeks colored, and it wasn’t from the heat of the water. Against his will, Drew’s interested was piqued. What could Alexis possibly have done that would make her cheeks burn?
“You have to answer,” Cat singsonged.
“I think I’d rather play truth or dare and take the dare.”
Drew snorted. “Trust me, you really wouldn’t want to risk one of her dares.” God only knew what Cat would suggest. She was a woman on a mission. He wished he’d asked her to wait at least a couple of days so they could settle in, Alexis wouldn’t feel pressured.
Alexis grinned. “You’re right. The dare would definitely be worse than the question.”
“So come on, tell.” Cat flicked a spray of water. “Or I’ll ask Logan, and you know he’ll tell.”
Logan winked at them. “Cat, we are not kinky people. Strictly vanilla.”
In all their weekend get-togethers, when they were drinking beer and tending the barbecue while the girls were making appetizers in the kitchen, they didn’t talk explicitly about sex and their wives. That was disrespectful. Though they made their share of bawdy remarks. But now, there was a hint in Logan’s wink.
Cat batted her eyelashes. “Then it’s no big deal to tell us the kinkiest thing, right?”
“I didn’t close the bedroom curtains once when I was undressing,” Alexis said quickly.
Cat blew a raspberry. “I do that all the time.”
“I never saw,” Logan said.
“The trees are in the way.” Then Cat turned back to Alexis. “At least make up a lie that’s better than that one.”
Logan nudged Alexis’s shoulder. “Go ahead, honey, shock the hell out of them.”
She leaned to the side and gave him a stern you-want-me-to-do-what look. Logan merely smiled at her. When her lips curved with a coy smile, it made Drew hot with anticipation. For one long second, as he hung on the edge, he forgot about Logan, forgot about Cat.
“We went to a sex party up in the city.”
Holy shit.
She could have been making it up, telling a good lie the way Cat had wanted.
In his gut, though, he knew it was true. And the images in his head electrified him.
Chapter Four
Cat had told her to make up a lie. Telling the truth when they didn’t know for sure made it so much better. Alexis didn’t have to feel embarrassed. It was a story, after all. She didn’t even feel self-conscious about her nakedness. Once she sank beneath the surface, the water frothing just below her chin, she was fine. And, without clothes, Cat wasn’t completely perfect. Everyone had some flaws.
Logan wrapped his arm around her shoulder and yanked her closer against his side. “Tell them everything, sweetheart,” he whispered against her ear.
Alexis wondered if she should embellish just to make th
e story better.
“Come on. Tell all.” Cat’s eyes deepened to dark chocolate with excitement. “How long ago?”
“A couple of years. It was a private party, held in one of those luxury hotels on Union Square.”
Cat stuck out a toe and tapped Alexis’s knee. “How’d you get an invitation?”
Alexis tipped her head back, resting on Logan’s arm, and just looked at him.
“Oh, you dirty man,” Cat burst out. Her features were brightly lit, avid.
Logan didn’t say a word, merely smiled with that signature smug smile of his.
Cat shot a finger at him. “We’ll talk about the invitation later,” she promised. Cat never forgot anything. Alexis could tell her a funny work story, and months later, it would come up as an apropos correlation to another conversation. That’s probably why she was such a successful interior designer. She never missed a detail. “What was it like?” Cat prodded. “Sleazy?”
Alexis closed her eyes a moment, thinking, which could have been attributed to remembering. Or making up a good story. “It was pretty classy. They’d rented a five-bedroom suite with a sitting room and a baby grand. They even hired a pianist for the evening.”
“Did they have food?” Drew asked.
She laughed. “Trust you to think about the food.”
She’d glanced at Drew as he’d slid down into the water. She couldn’t help herself. Without clothes, he was actually quite magnificent. But she wasn’t going to dwell on that, honestly.
She thought about the food instead. “It was magnificent.” The word she’d supplied for his body just slipped out. “Gourmet all the way, shrimp and crab. They had some caviar, but ick.”
“The caviar was excellent,” Logan added.
Cat flapped at Drew. “I don’t care about the food. What did you do?”
Drew held Alexis’s gaze. “Let her tell it her way. She’s got to set the scene.”
He got it. If she was going to reveal secrets, she’d at least make them really good. “The food was scrumptious, and the suite was opulent. The pianist was into the classics, Chopin and stuff, and everyone was dressed to the nines. Even Logan”—she elbowed him—“wore his tux.”
Cat gaped comically. Logan wore suit and tie for work, but Cat saw him primarily in jeans and polo shirts.
Alexis sipped her wine. She was overheating in the water, but she didn’t want to sit naked on the edge to cool off. “There was a lot of chitchat, some people were even slow dancing. Then we went down the hall.” She paused to heighten her audience’s tension.
Cat fell right into it. “And?”
Alexis almost felt Drew holding his breath as he waited for her to go on. Next to her, Logan waited, too, probably wondering exactly how far she’d go.
“Rampant sex,” she mouthed with plenty of enunciation.
“What’s that mean?” Cat whispered, her eyes burning brightly.
“There were couples everywhere in all states of undress. Right there in the hall, some woman was down on her knees doing—” She glanced at Drew and felt a bubble of nerves. Sure they’d joked about sex, but it was all fairly innocuous, no dirty or explicit words.
“She was sucking the guy’s cock,” Logan said for her.
“Oh my God.” Cat pushed away from the bench, and hovered in the center of the tub, hanging onto Drew’s leg to balance herself. “What did you do?”
“Just walked by them”—Alexis tried to sound aloof—“so we could enter the first room.”
Her breasts bobbing on the surface of the water, Cat’s nipples were hard pebbles. Logan’s body tensed. If she hadn’t been practically plastered to his side, Alexis wouldn’t have known. She wanted to glance at him to see if he was looking...oh hell, of course he was. He was a guy. It was okay. She’d looked at Drew.
Except that she was avoiding him now, in case it sounded as if she were coming on to him. But his wife brought the subject up. She rushed on, nervous. “There was an orgy in the first room. I swear I counted six couples at least.” Everyone had been touching everyone, a hand on a breast, another between someone else’s legs, mouths, and cocks and spread legs, and it wasn’t all female to male either.
“What shocked you the most?” Cat wanted to know.
“The men,” she blurted, because it was the image that had just come to her. “They were touching each other as well as the women.”
“You mean there were men sucking cock, too?” Cat’s voice was low, soft, mesmerized.
“And other stuff.”
Cat puffed out a breath, though whether it was horror or fascination, Alexis couldn’t tell. The look on Drew’s face, though, was definitely wide-eyed terror.
“What was going on in the other rooms?” Cat wafted her hand back and forth in the water.
The bubbles shut off suddenly, the twenty-minute timer up. Alexis clearly saw Drew. He was hard. And, even distorted slightly by the water, he was large. She felt her breath catch in her throat. Then Logan pushed the button on the side of the tub, and the water frothed once more.
Alexis couldn’t remember Cat’s question. “What did you want to know?”
“The other rooms.”
“Funnily enough, they were more tame.” You would have thought the activity would get kinkier the deeper you went into the suite. Not so. “Mostly it was pretty normal sex, although there was usually more than one couple in a room. And there were people watching like us.”
Cat arched one plucked eyebrow. “Is that all you did, just watch?”
“Of course.”
Cat blinked, smiled. “How did it make you feel?” She didn’t include Logan in the question. It was only for Alexis.
Suddenly it all felt too personal, because she’d been incredibly hot, so turned on that if Logan had pressed her, really worked on her, she would have dropped to her knees and sucked him. She might even have let him lift her dress and take her up against the wall.
A prude? No, definitely not. But Logan hadn’t pushed hard enough.
If she said anything, though, Cat and Drew would realize this was no fictional tale. Logan had heard about the party from a work associate. Alexis had been shocked—what if his coworker saw them?—but Logan assured her the guy would never expect him to take his wife. And it had been god-awful expensive, too, but in the end, she was so intrigued, she couldn’t resist agreeing.
Then Cat was whispering at her. “Were you tempted to do something while other people watched you?”
She didn’t dare glance at Drew. She could only look at Cat, the glint in her eyes, her red lips, her bright cheeks.
“I wanted her to suck me,” Logan said softly, his words like a caress along her skin.
“Did you want to, Alexis?” Cat persisted.
She felt seduced, hot, wet, almost dizzy with desire. Just the way she’d felt that night.
“I thought about it,” she said, the words making barely a sound.
“But you were afraid. there were all those strangers.” Cat described the feelings exactly.
“Yes.” It had been sexy, exciting, but terrifying. What if her picture appeared on the Internet? “I didn’t know those people.” But God, she wanted to do it. They’d had sex in the stairwell afterward. She’d dragged Logan in there moments after leaving the party. They’d both come quickly and explosively.
“There aren’t any strangers here.”
For a moment, Cat’s meaning didn’t penetrate. Alexis stole a glance at Drew. The lines of his face were stark, his eyes hooded. Then Logan touched her thigh, and she understood.
“You want me to do it now?”
“You’re among friends.” Cat’s voice was still low, and she rode higher in the water, the water lapping the undersides of her breast, her nipples large, dark, hard. And there was a scent, like sex, something the chlorine should have drowned out, but it was there, hypnotically tantalizing.
“That was just a story. I made it up,” Alexis insisted.
Logan trailed his fingers higher
on her thigh, grazing her pubic hair, parting her legs. Nestled against him as she was, her forearm on his leg, his cock bobbed against her. He was hard.
“It’ll be like the party, but non-threatening.” Then Cat raised her gaze to Logan’s face. “He wants it bad, Alexis.”
Kinky Neighbors Page 2