Wicked Pleasures

by Tori Carrington

  She felt a hot, meandering hand on her inner thigh and moved her head to watch as Will inched his way toward her throbbing sex.

  “I can’t believe you. Aren’t you tired? You already admitted you haven’t gotten any sleep since knocking off work this morning.” She glanced at the slender watch still on her wrist, the only thing that remained from what she’d had on an hour earlier. “Seeing as you have to be back at work in four hours…”

  “Are you saying you’d rather sleep?”

  His fingers reached her swollen womanhood, the tips following the folds of closed flesh then coaxing them open. A shiver worked its way up from Renae’s toes, hitting every spot in between. “I’m saying that maybe you should think about getting some sleep.” She swallowed hard as he drew his fingers through her slick channel. “I mean, if I foul up on the job, someone gets a wrong size robe. You screw up, a scalpel shows up on X-ray the next day.”

  He lightly pinched her hooded flesh. “Very funny.”

  Renae giggled and moved out of reach, suddenly feeling the desire to talk to him. Just talk. She propped her head on her hand and handed him a pillow, which he took and put under his head. “Did something happen that you want to talk about?”

  His brows rose high on his forehead, drawing her attention to his sexily disheveled hair, his naughty eyes. “What makes you ask something like that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem…a little distracted today, that’s all.”

  He lifted up onto his elbows. “Are you implying that I’ve been derelict in my sexual duties?”

  “No. That’s not what I mean at all.”

  He made a sound of satisfaction. “That’s what I thought.”

  Renae lay back and stared at the ceiling. “Conceited. Definitely conceited.”

  “Confident. There’s a difference, you know.”

  He reached for her again and she laughed and moved out of touching distance. “You can’t possibly want to have sex again.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Well, for one, I think we finished plowing through every last chapter in the Kama Sutra sometime yesterday.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is…”

  What was her point?

  For a moment there, Renae had mistaken Will as someone who was interested in more than sex from her.

  And for a moment there, she’d made the mistake of thinking she was interested in more than sex from him.

  He rolled to his side. “Uh-oh. What’s going on in that pretty little head of yours?”

  Renae opened her mouth then snapped it back closed. She realized with a start that she was a breath away from sharing her plans for Women Only with him. Telling him how frustrating it was that she hadn’t yet been able to catch up with Ginger. About how Lucky had made her see the light yesterday and she was planning on calling Ginger later that day to make an actual lunch date so she could pitch her proposal to her flat out. Tell him that spread out upstairs on the kitchen table were her scribbled ideas and plans and all she had to do was put them into some comprehensible order.

  “Actually you’re right,” she said. “I don’t have a point.”

  She began getting up and he curved his fingers around her bare ankle and tugged. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to my place. You need some sleep.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  He pulled her until she lay alongside him then he pinned her to the bed, hovering above her like some sort of sexy British god. She tried to keep her smile from showing but failed.

  “Get off of me right now. You’re smooshing me.”

  He waggled his brows. “You’ve never complained about my smooshing you before.”

  “That’s because I wanted you to smoosh me then.”

  “And you don’t now?”

  Renae caught her bottom lip between her teeth and bit down, his skin against hers making her remember how very much she loved having sex with him. “No.”

  His expression went suddenly serious. “No?”

  He began releasing her.

  Renae took the opportunity to trade positions with him and pin him to the bed.

  “All that so you could be on top?” he asked as she straddled his hips, putting her sex in direct contact with his. “Completely unnecessary. All you had to do was ask.”

  Renae leaned in to kiss him.

  “Now that’s more like it,” he said.

  The telephone on the bedside table chirped.

  They ignored it.

  Renae reached toward the opposite bedside table and fished a fresh condom out of the drawer. She ripped it open then held it up above Will’s eyes like bait. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “Give me that rubber.”

  The telephone continued to ring even as Will grabbed the condom from her fingers.

  “Persistent,” Renae said, gasping when he sucked on one of her nipples.

  “Rejection. They’ll get used to it.”

  The telephone finally stopped its incessant ringing and Renae relaxed, scooting back so Will could put on the condom.

  “Now, where were we?”

  The telephone instantly began ringing again.

  “Bugger,” Will cursed.

  Renae rolled off him and he took that to mean he should get it.

  “Maybe they need you at the hospital,” she suggested.

  “I have a beeper for that.”

  “Oh.”

  Very definitely “oh,” Will thought as he sat on the side of the bed and snatched up the receiver.

  “This had bloody well better be good,” he said into the receiver.

  “Will? I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  He shot from the bed so fast you would have thought he’d been catapulted.

  Janet.

  Jesus Christ and all his Apostles.

  “I figured you’d probably be up by now and I had a break between seminars and thought I’d call, you know, to see how you’re doing.”

  He listened to Janet apologize for waking him when he’d been nowhere near asleep but rather about to continue banging the hell out of his upstairs neighbor. Will stared at where Renae lay across his bed like a siren waiting for him to respond to her tempting song.

  He quickly turned from Renae and the bed and paced toward the nearby bathroom.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  He heard the cradle of the telephone hit the floor, having inadvertently pulled it from the night table.

  “Will? What was that?”

  He picked up the cradle, tugged on the line to make sure he had enough give, then headed into the bathroom. “I dropped the phone.”

  “Hard night?”

  Will closed his eyes tightly, remembering that Renae had pretty much asked him the same question a few minutes ago. “No…no, it was fine. I was just a little late getting to sleep after I knocked off this morning, that’s all.”

  “Because you missed me?”

  Will met Renae’s curious gaze from the bed as if she’d heard the question Janet had asked.

  He closed the bathroom door and leaned against it. “Yeah…that must be it.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet. I miss you, too.”

  How much? was on the tip of his tongue. Where, thankfully, the words stayed.

  “Are you still coming to pick me up from the airport this Sunday?” Janet asked.

  Sunday. It loomed so far away yet somehow seemed too soon. “Sure, yes.”

  There was a long pause as Will tried to listen through the wood for what Renae might be doing in the other room.

  “Will? Is everything all right?” Janet asked.

  He was everything but. “Fine, fine,” he said instead. “I just need to hit the toilet and catch a shower is all.”

  “Okay. I won’t keep you then. My seminar starts in a couple of minutes anyway and I want to get a good seat up front.”

  Good ole Janet, half a country away in California with nothing more serious on he
r mind than getting a front row seat.

  He really was a cad.

  “Okay. Have a good seminar, then.”

  “I will, thanks. Goodbye.”

  “Bye.”

  Will began to put the receiver into the cradle of the phone he held in his other hand, then lifted it back to his ear only to change his mind again and finally hang it up.

  Well, wasn’t that just peachy?

  He usually remembered to forward all his calls to voice mail when Renae was over, and if he’d needed a reminder of why, this was it. He’d been hoping to avoid this very incident.

  But today he’d forgotten and he’d been caught smack-dab with his pants around his ankles.

  He stared at his ankles. Worse, he wasn’t even wearing pants. And pretty much hadn’t been for the past five days.

  He heard a soft knock on the other side of the bathroom door. He stepped away and opened it. There Renae stood wearing the same clothes she’d had on when he’d gone up to her place to tempt her down here an hour ago. The pink and white striped capris and white tank shouldn’t have looked as sexy as they did but, well, there you had it.

  “Was it something I said?” he asked, clutching the phone in front of him.

  Renae smiled. “I’ve got to get back to my place.”

  “Yeah, right. I see.”

  But did he?

  No, he realized, he didn’t.

  A man who had a firm grip on reality didn’t date one woman and not have sex with her, and not date another while having the most incredible sex he’d ever had.

  “Would you like me to see you out?”

  Renae shook her head as she put on her other sandal, drawing his attention to her incredibly sexy, tanned foot with the neon-pink toenail polish. “Nope. I know the way.”

  “About tomorrow morning…”

  She leaned in and kissed him, then worked her index finger between their lips in order to hold his closed presumably to keep him from finishing his sentence. “Tomorrow morning is tomorrow morning. Let’s wait and see what happens then.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  He seemed to be saying those inane words a lot lately. But for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to rattle another response out of his shell-shocked brain.

  And somehow he got the impression that it wasn’t going to get any better from there. He’d made—or unmade—his damn bed, and he was just going to have to find a way to either lie in it or get rid of it altogether.

  10

  RENAE LET HERSELF BACK into her condo, puzzled that even though she’d had a great orgasm a few minutes ago, her body was restless, her mind preoccupied with Will and what had just happened.

  For a moment there, she had been jealous.

  A moment? The instant Will had leapt from the bed, pulled the phone off the nightstand, then disappeared in all his butt-naked glory into the bathroom so he might speak to the resident without Renae overhearing, she’d known an envy so strong it had taken her breath away.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  Renae closed the door after herself and put her keys on the hall table, looking for a measure of comfort from the familiarity of the condo she’d lived in with Tabitha for the past six months, but oddly not finding it. Part of the reason might have been Nina’s having redecorated the entire place. The soothing earth tones had been “spiced up,” as Nina put it, with garish neon-orange pillows and lime-colored throws, making Renae blanch whenever she took a look around the place. But since Tabitha didn’t seem to mind the changes, and when all was said and done the condo was hers, Renae had kept her tongue firmly in her mouth.

  “Tabby?”

  While there was no reason to expect her friend to be home from work yet, she always called out to let whomever was in the apartment know she was there. Since Nina had been laid off a month back, she was the one usually home, but somehow Renae had never warmed to the idea of calling out her name. There was no reason to pretend she liked the other woman. She wasn’t sleeping with her.

  Then again, her own judgment when it came to bed partners might also be a little off-center.

  She headed for the kitchen. At least her proposal for Women Only would get her mind off everything. Will, Nina, Tabitha, the fact that if things continued on the way they were she would have to look for a place of her own whether or not Tabby needed financial help. The simple fact was, she felt like a stranger in her own apartment. And that wasn’t a good place to be no matter how you viewed it.

  Since the afternoon sun had arced to the other side of the building, she had to switch on the overhead light in the kitchen. And the instant she did, she became aware of something amiss.

  The kitchen table was empty, nothing but a fresh bowl of fruit where her notes had been.

  Renae’s heart did a little flip in her chest.

  She rushed to the table, looked around the chairs, then opened the drawer from which she’d gotten the pad and pen. The pad and pen were there, neatly tucked away, as if she’d never used them, the pad not even showing the indents from her words on the top page.

  “Nina?” she called out.

  As she pulled out the garbage can that held that morning’s empty orange juice container and butter wrapper she listened to the silence that greeted her in the condo.

  She closed the cabinet door. This wasn’t happening.

  She turned and took in the room, then systematically made her way through the apartment, beginning with her bedroom where she hoped against hope that Nina had placed her notes on her dresser or bed, somewhere where she might find them. Nothing. She moved on through the dining and living rooms with the same result.

  Outside the closed door to Tabitha and Nina’s room, she paused. She’d never invaded Tabitha’s privacy. If at night the door was open, and Tabitha invited her in, she went without hesitation, often stretching out on the bed next to her friend to catch an episode of Northern Exposure or American Idol. Of course, that had been before Nina moved in. After that…

  Well, after that, Renae barely dared even to look through the open doorway for fear of what she might find. A rational fear since Nina seemed to get a great deal of joy out of moving about the place sans clothes, sometimes with no apparent reason at all. Being comfortable with one’s body was one thing. Being an exhibitionist was quite another. And Nina fell solidly in the latter category.

  And unfortunately she’d just added thief to the growing list of other names Renae had for her.

  Bypassing Tabitha’s bedroom, she stepped back into the kitchen and stood there staring at nothing and everything. She gathered the pad and pen from the cabinet drawer, backtracked to her own bedroom, then closed the door, vowing to be more careful about where she placed her things from here on out.

  TWO DAYS LATER Renae sat across from Lucky at Coney Island Hot Dog on North Superior—the oldest restaurant in downtown Toledo if you were to believe the words on the window—picking at the contents of her plate, her mind a million miles away. She hadn’t seen Will since the phone call incident at his place. Which probably had a lot to do with her going out of her way to avoid him. And his going out of his way to avoid her. Just this morning she’d been at the top of the third-floor stairs and stopped when she’d heard him enter. She’d listened to him check his mailbox—though there would be no mail that early—then climb the steps to his condo. But he must have lingered there in the hall after unlocking his door because she hadn’t heard it close. Out of curiosity, she’d backtracked to her condo door, opened it, then shut it. A split second later she’d heard his door close, and he’d been nowhere to be seen when she’d descended the stairs. Obviously he’d wanted no chance meeting.

  What had she been thinking, getting involved with someone who lived in the same building?

  Correction. She and Will were not involved. They’d had sex. And so long as she could continue to avoid him, and him her, well, there was no worry about any awkward moments.

  She caught herself scratching her arm where it was left bare by her bla
ck tank top then caught sight of a spot of chili sauce on her white pants. She grimaced. Great, just great.

  “You’re awfully quiet today,” Lucky said, her appetite apparently healthy as ever as she bit into her hot dog with gusto.

  Renae had made an inventory delivery to Lucky’s blossoming shop a short ways away an hour ago and after spending some time going over other needs, Lucky had suggested they lunch at the popular hot dog place that, interestingly enough, sat smack-dab next to the swankiest restaurant Toledo had to offer.

  “He’s Georgio’s and I’m Coney Island.”

  Lucky blinked at her and said around a full mouth, “What?”

  Renae hadn’t realized she’d said the words aloud until that moment. She waved her hand, picked up one of her own hot dogs, then chose a side and took a bite. “Will and I,” she said, the food muffling her words. “He’s Georgio’s and I’m this hot dog place.”

  Lucky choked on a laugh and reached for her glass of soda. “You are not a hot dog place.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m a high school dropout who never even thought about getting her GED much less considered going on to college.”

  “And that makes you a hot dog place?”

  She nodded and pointed her thumb in the direction of the wall that separated the two restaurants. “And Will’s the gourmet place next door.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Renae gave an eye roll and leaned forward. “Come on, Lucky, surely I don’t have to spell it out to you.”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Fine. Will is a fancy restaurant because not only has he finished high school and college and med school, he’s a friggin’ doctor—a surgeon—for cripe’s sake.”

  Lucky continued eating her hot dog as if they were discussing nothing more important than the weather, which currently happened to be hazy and hot, the restaurant’s air-conditioning a draw for those looking to escape the August heat.