Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

He shifted and let her lean back into the sofa, bracing himself over her for a kiss. But changed his mind. He wanted to spoil her.

  “Sit up,” he said.

  She smiled at him and leaned back into the cushions, tucking her legs up under herself. “Like this? You wanna watch TV?”

  “No, I don’t.” He stood in front of her and bent over, kissing her again, really kissing her, feeling every way her mouth was soft against his. When she moved to suck in his top lip, he nearly grabbed his cock in response because she managed to run her tongue over the newly tender skin exposed by his barbering and the feeling was unbearable, really. Well. Except that he would bear it, manfully.

  He pulled away, slowly, and sat next to her, just admiring her.

  She reached out and ran her hand over his shoulder, his arm, his upper chest. He closed his eyes. It felt so good, just her simple touch over his skin.

  “Here,” she said.

  He opened his eyes and watched as she grabbed the hem of her tee and pulled it over her head. And then he closed his eyes again. “You’re not wearing a bra.”

  “I don’t always. I don’t really have a lot to bra.”

  “I just need a minute because I was working myself up, slowly you see, and the look of you halfway-naked is moving up my schedule.”

  She laughed, and he opened his eyes again. She’d taken out whatever had been holding her hair up, and all that bright, silky hair was against her freckled shoulders and neck, her eyes bright, her nipples bunched and so pretty against her skin.

  He reached over and ran his hand over her shoulder, her arm, her chest.

  He let a single finger travel down over the softness of her breast and winced as the tender skin of her areola seemed to catch on his rough callus. But she grabbed his hand before he could pull it away.

  “That feels good.”

  He looked up at her, her lips swollen from his and kissed her again. “Your freckles are everywhere.” He followed the ones on her breast with his finger, like drawing dot to dot.

  She laughed. “I think you’ve been the most appreciative by far.”

  “There are actually some right on your nipple, just here.” He rubbed through the tightening skin of her areola. She took his face in her hands again and kissed him tongue first. Her hands on his chest, through the trail of hair on his belly made him so hard he shifted her onto his lap so that part of her, any part of her, pressed against him there. She helped by straddling him fully, and when he realized that he could just feel the softness of her spreading over his erection, through their clothes, he bent his head and took her nipple in his mouth almost desperately—definitely desperately.

  She arched, she moaned, she held his head against her and bucked in short jerks.

  “Take your pants off,” she breathed.

  But she bucked a little more, holding him close.

  “Here,” he said. He gently sat her on back on the sofa and hovered over the button on the waistband of her trousers. “Is this okay?”

  “God, yes.”

  He unfastened her trousers and she lifted her hips so he could wriggle them down. Her panties were small flowered things, and she surprised him by shucking right out of them. He wasn’t ready for the flash of pink, the nakedness of that. “Destiny?”

  She laughed. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t know what I was going to say.” He couldn’t decide what he wanted to look at.

  She put her knees together and twisted them to the side so that she was a double curve of warm skin. “Okay, so I’m naked.”

  “You’re gorgeous.”

  “Thank you. Could you?”

  “Right.” He kept his eyes on her while he unfastened his belt. She was watching his hands and that was so hot, he had to close his eyes again. His jeans dropped, and he kicked out of them, toeing off his shoes and yanking off his socks, but keeping his briefs on. Instead of joining her back on the sofa, he knelt in front of her.

  “Watcha doin’?”

  He rested his forehead against her knee and privately gave himself a good hard stroke over the knit of his briefs, suppressing a shudder. “Thinking.”

  “Interesting moment for that.” She reached down and sifted through his newly short hair and he gave himself a not-so-private stroke because it just felt so fantastic.

  “I’m a bit of a brooder.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I just can’t think of what I’d like to do first.”

  “Well, you’re on your knees in front of me.”

  “I am, that.” He drew his hands over her shins to grasp her knees.

  “This suggests intent of a certain sort of industry.”

  “I think I’d like to industriously give you an orgasm.” He looked up at her, so glad to see her smiling, a real smile, and opened her knees, smoothing his hands down over the shocking softness of her inner thighs. She leaned back and put her arms over her head. “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  She laughed, a real laugh that brought roses up on her chest. “Oh Hefin. God. No. I’m …” She looked at the ceiling, grinning. “Awesome. But not comfortable. Not even a little. I think that means this is going well.”

  He kissed a particularly pretty smatter of freckles on the inside of her thigh. He did this for some time, tasting the salt frosted on her skin from the long day in warm weather. He put pressure on her knee so she would lift it up and lean her leg against the arm of the sofa, opening her to him.

  He rubbed his hands over her skin, kissed her, licked her skin, but only touched her sex with his eyes. Brushed over her hair, there, with his fingertips.

  When he would look up at her, she would smile at him, her cheeks red, her hands restless over his hair.

  When she sighed, he repeated how he kissed her. He got to know what it was just to kiss and taste her skin, what this was about. Between them.

  When he got to the shell of skin at the top of her inner thigh her legs were getting restless, and when he licked inside that curve, biting the tendon, looking at the sleek ginger hair over her sex, already wet, a hand in his hair pulled and another reached for his mouth like she needed to feel how it shaped against her body.

  He reached down and squeezed his cock tight. He couldn’t resist another hard, slow stroke, pulling down his foreskin to brush his thumb over the head, so sensitive the feel of his rough fingertips shot pleasure right through so sharply, sweat broke over his body.

  “Hefin?” Her voice was cracked, urging.

  He brought both hands in and used his thumbs to open her. She put her arms back over her head, then ran them down to her own breasts, brushing her palms over her nipples.

  The look of that was impossibly good. It was how everything should look in the entirety of the world—warm, focused, unself-conscious.

  Her inner lips were so tender, he worried about the sharpness of his new stubble until she pushed his head closer and put a bare foot on his shoulder when his chin scraped her, so then he got serious, licking firmly, slowly, waiting to end every stroke of his tongue with pressure against her clitoris until her hips shook and bumped against his arms.

  He had all night. He’d do this all night, her body tangled with his, her wet and yielding softness against his face, the sound of their breath. He would come in his briefs shaking and bucking, but he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t ever stop.

  He used his fingertip to stroke around her entrance and looked up at her, and she was flushed, breathing hard. “I want to,” he said, and pushed a little inside so she’d know he wanted to feel her there, too.

  “Yeah. Please, inside me.” She slumped closer to the edge of the sofa and he could now see where her pinkened and swollen lips curved into the crease of her bottom, so he kissed and licked those boundaries as he pushed in a finger, then two, and his cock jerked, jealous. She breathed out something that sounded almost like a word and her fingers came down and felt where he was inside her, pressed her ring finger against her hood softly.

  He backed off his licking
a bit, letting her adjust until she moaned, long and sweet, fucking onto his fingers, then he drew her into his mouth, moving her finger away and holding her hand, adoring her more for the weight of her thighs pushing into his shoulders, the taste of her, the mystery of how Destiny came as she unraveled around them both.

  She sighed and pulled her legs away from his body, tipped her knees together to one side again. “Come up here with me,” she said.

  He sat next to her, spooning behind her on the sofa.

  He kissed her nape where it was sweaty and grabbed the afghan on the back of the sofa to pull over them. He eased his hips just a bit away from hers breathing out through his nose at how aching and heavy and thick he felt. Surely he would live. Probably.

  “So that was awesome.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Remember when you told me you wanted to be my sex god?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well. I think you just leveled up, right there.”

  He laughed into her neck.

  “No, really. I’ve always liked oral, but I’ve never all the way come from it, either.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. I always got caught up in the idea it was taking too long, which is dumb, right? Because everybody’s doing something fun, so who cares how long it takes, but I’d start feeling all polite or something. Like, ‘Oh, you’ve done so well, no worries, we’ll finish up the other way.’ But with you, I just felt like it was where you wanted to be. Like I’d be rude to interrupt, or like I was clearing away your dessert right after you’d eaten around everything but the very best part that you were saving for your last bite.”

  The laugh came out of Hefin so fast, he choked.

  She laughed too, but in a lazier way. “Yeah, how did I manage to make that sound all gross? Anyway, it was perfect.”

  “It is where I wanted to be.” He reached around her to put his palm over her breast—her nipple had softened in the wake of her orgasm—and he idly explored the texture, unable to help the intimate contact when he was still so hard and so restless.

  Suddenly, she turned in his arms. Her eyes were dark. She pushed back on his shoulders until his upper back was resting against the sofa arm.

  She trailed her hand over his chest and rubbed the fingertips of both hands under the broad elastic band of his briefs, pulling them up against his bollocks, his erection until he couldn’t breathe it was so fucking painful, and sweet.

  “Here, I’ll help you.”

  She eased his briefs down, still rubbing whatever strip of skin met her fingers under the band as she went. When they eased off his ass, so slowly, he spilled precome and it was nearly as if he could cry he was so turned on, as if he was losing control of every emotional impulse at once.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  Her arms braced around his upper thighs, her cheek, its freckles mixed up in her blush and the sheen of sweat, right against his cock. Her hair was pushed behind her ears, streaky with gold through the red. And Christ, her ass was curved up in the air, freckled, too.

  He met her eyes and she smiled. Reached her tongue out just as he felt her hand curve around him.

  Then her mouth, soft. She didn’t look away from him, and didn’t do much more than hold him, purse her mouth gently around him.

  He put a hand in her hair, feeling where it was damp against her scalp.

  She closed her eyes then, drew him in slowly, and put an urgent edge on his ache.

  He closed his eyes too. Found her other hand. Held it so she would know she had him.

  Would always have him.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  She left Hefin in her bed with a little note on her pillow that she was going to check in on Sarah and would call him.

  Call him, because her Welshman got her a phone, which she wouldn’t accept through all his arguments for almost an hour as he tried to show her its features, while they sat in bed, eating the chicken and noodles she had discovered that Betty had left her in the fridge.

  Then after impressing upon her that it truly wasn’t something he could just take back, he came at her with the idea that he was, in fact, investing in her new business venture because she would have to call clients and be able to retrieve their emails wherever she went, and that there must certainly be a whole host of applications she could use, that she needed to use to be better at her job, and that while she had all the brains in the world to start her business, unfortunately, she required a least a meager material infrastructure, plus, look, she could take pictures with it.

  Then he’d accidentally taken a picture of her naked with her mouth full of chicken and noodles, which had horrified him even while he kept looking at it, but it was so funny, she relented, and though she deleted her noodle picture, she did take one of them later, after they had gotten full and taken a nap and made love again, slow and artless.

  She looked at the picture, his arm all the way around her, her quilt pulled up around them. She was grinning at the camera, but he was looking at her, smiling at her smiling.

  Which made her smile, again, heading toward Marvin’s little purple car.

  Betty was leaning against it.

  Hefin’s car was parked behind Marvin’s.

  Ooops.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Lynch.” She went for breezy. Who knows? Maybe it would work.

  “I don’t recognize this car. Did you get a new car? I told you that you could use Marvin’s for as long as you wanted, no need to spend any of your first paychecks from the library.”

  Oh, Betty totally knew that was Hefin’s car.

  “It’s Hefin’s.”

  “He came over for breakfast? Is he doing something for you around the house before he goes because if he needs me to lock up for him, you should tell him.”

  Des made herself meet Betty’s look, right in the eye, and even lifted an eyebrow. She lifted hers, then turned away. It was possible—Des would never, ever be sure, that there was some kind of little smile on Mrs. Lynch’s mouth. Obviously, it was completely delusional to think so, but there it was.

  “Sam told me you were going in this morning to see Sarah, and I wanted to catch you before you left. I have something to talk to you about.”

  “You’ve already seen Sam this morning?”

  “He was coming to see you but I knew you weren’t … up yet so I met him before he got to your door and visited with him for a bit. Made him some coffee and eggs. I don’t think he eats right.”

  Betty had covered for her?

  Des looked around for the flying pigs, but the sky was perfectly clear. Betty narrowed her eyes at Des as if she was daring her to comment, but Des wasn’t a middle child for nothing. She knew when to keep her mouth shut.

  “What did you want to talk about, Mrs. Lynch?”

  “It’s about Paddy’s limo.”

  “Oh my God. You and Rennie busted it.”

  Mrs. Lynch crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t swear. Of course we didn’t bust it. We’re almost finished, actually, and it looks like it’s going to run great.”

  “Oh. So what about the limo?”

  Suddenly Betty looked uncertain, and she never looked uncertain. She hugged her arms around herself tighter and gave Des a little smile. “I know you had to pull the limo out of storage because you didn’t have a choice, but I admit it’s been nice to see it around. A lot of folks have said the same. I think it’s been real good, too, that you’ve given rides to people in the neighborhood that have needed them. Like Rennie and his friends, and some of the older people. I just think all of that is … Good.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Lynch. I think so, too. I’ll try to keep that going once the limo’s done. I think I could, too. Not so much as I work at the library, but my hope is that my developer business will get enough clients that I’ll be working from home. Maybe I can arrange my schedule to offer rides.”

  “No. I don’t think you should do that, Destiny.”

  Des tried to stay on top of this conversatio
n but it was impossible. “Okay. What do you think I should do?”

  “I think I should drive folks around.” Betty tipped her chin up and dropped her arms away from her chest.

  “In the limo?”

  “That’s right. In the limo.”

  “So you want to borrow the limo to drive Mrs. Layton to her colonoscopy?”

  Mrs. Lynch shook her had and smiled at Des. “No dear. I want to buy Paddy’s limo from you. I want to start a free dispatch service for the neighborhood, probably through the church, and have a regular schedule. I’ve worked it all out, on paper, I mean. Now that the limo’s converted, my fuel costs will be almost nil. I know what that limo means to you kids, but I think Paddy would have liked this idea. It’s something like what he thought he would do when he retired.”

  “You want to buy the limo?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “And drive people in the neighborhood around all day?”

  “That’s right. I’ve priced out similar models, and it’s a little hard to come to a perfect price because your dad had the custom Ford inline 6 diesel engine installed, which is why Rennie was able to convert it at all, and a diesel in a Town Car is rare. But with its miles and body condition, I think fifty-five hundred is fair. I’ll pay for the conversion costs that Rennie incurred, of course. Now, if you want to do a straight trade and take Marvin’s car, we can talk about that, but I think you should consider taking the money and thinking about your transportation needs. I’ll let you rent Marvin’s car in exchange for maintenance and a full detail upon return. Maintenance means a complete oil and fluid change every three thousand miles on the dot, Destiny Marie.”

  Destiny just looked at Betty, her mind blank. Then her brain latched onto one thing.

  You should consider taking the money and thinking about your transportation needs.

  “You think I should go to Wales.” Des blurted it out without even thinking about how strategic it was to let on to Betty that she knew what she might be thinking.

  Betty’s eye contact faltered, just a little. Barely. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your young man. This is a business deal, between you and me. You don’t have to decide right away, but I think it’s a practical thing to do. I’ve been at loose ends since I retired, and I don’t mind saying that I think I might get the better end of this deal, but it’s you who has to decide.”