by Ann Jacobs
He knew he’d seen a chapter on verbal seduction somewhere. He skimmed the topic headings. “What do you have on?” he asked when the silence started getting to him.
“Sweats. How about you?”
“I’m naked. Why don’t you take off your clothes?”
More silence. Then the rustling noise hinted that she was doing what he suggested. His balls ached, and his palms grew damp.
“Okay. I’m naked too,” she said. “What now?”
“Touch your face. Stroke your cheek the way I’d do if I were there. Let your hand slide through your hair, softly, like you do to me when you’re dragging my lips down to yours for a kiss.”
“Imagine I’m touching you, too. Your shoulders. Now I’m rubbing my thumbs across your nipples. Does that feel good?” Casey’s voice poured over him like honey, soft and sweet and incredibly arousing.
Craig lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Run your fingers over your breasts. Feel how soft they are. Lick your lips. Pretend you’re licking me. Imagine how hard my cock is now. It’s throbbing. Wanting you.”
That was no lie. Craig followed his own advice and encircled the base of his cock with his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m going to put on a condom. Pretend it’s a cherry-flavored one. Imagine eating a cherry lollipop. Licking and sucking until the flavor’s all gone. Until all that’s left is me. Me hot and hard for your wet, tight pussy.”
He opened a little foil pack and rolled a non-flavored rubber into place. It went on easier this time.
Her breathy groan made him wonder if his words had nudged her close to the edge. Painfully hard himself, he wanted to echo her needy sound. But he didn’t. Instead he lowered his voice to little more than a hoarse whisper. “I’ll lick you, too. Your pretty pink nipples. Your belly. I’ll nip at the sensitive spots on the insides of your thighs and behind your knees, and lap up the slick juice from your pussy. I’ll taste you all over.”
When he paused and listened to her ragged breathing, he got a rush from the effects of his sex talk. “Think about hot wet velvet. That’s how my tongue will feel in your mouth. On your pretty breasts. Your fingers and toes and pussy and everywhere in between.”
Casey gave out a little moan, then caught her breath. “I love feeling your hands on me, too,” she told him.
“There’s not a place on your beautiful body I’m not gonna make love to. You know, you smell like the purple flowers on my grandma’s backyard arbor every spring. I like the contrast. Incredibly sexy woman and sweet old-fashioned smell.”
“You like old-fashioned?”
Craig liked Casey. Everything about her. But he wasn’t about to come across like a wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy. After all, the article said phone sex should be explicit. “I like you hot, wet, and wanting me as much as I want you. Are you?”
“Uh-huh. And I like you hard. Are you hard now?”
“Hard isn’t the word.” He was about to burst out of the condom.
“Craig?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Tell me how we’ll make love.”
Lightning quick came to mind, especially when he recalled what she’d done to him with her mouth and tongue. “Maybe I’ll tie you up and have my wicked way with you. Does that turn you on?”
“Could you be a little more…uh, specific?”
“I’ll taste every inch of your luscious body. Make you come and come and come before I slip my cock inside you and take us both to heaven.” In his dreams. More likely, he’d push inside her and explode faster than a speeding bullet. Casey’s ragged breathing punctuated the silence. So did his when he used his own hand on his cock the way she’d used hers last night.
Maybe if he came now, he’d be able to hold out longer tomorrow. Craig tried to hold back the primal sound that came out a few seconds later when he let himself go. But he couldn’t.
“Hey, are you okay?” Casey asked, her voice a little shaky.
“I’m fine,” he croaked between waves of pleasure far more intense than he’d felt when he gave himself hand jobs without Casey on the phone and on his mind.
Then it hit him. She sounded as though she didn’t realize he’d just climaxed. But she had to know. She was the one with all the sex savvy.
“Just thinking about you made me come. I bet I can make you come, too. Are you hot?”
“On fire.”
He pulled off the condom and tossed it in the trash before going on. “Touch yourself.”
“Where?” She sounded as though she didn’t know. As though she were still a virgin.
Craig figured he’d play along, let her pretend she really didn’t have a clue. “Spread your legs, the way you’re going to spread them for me. Use one finger and slide it along your pussy. Feel how wet you are. Then find your clit—that little nub of nerves above your vagina—and concentrate on it.”
“Ooh. I’m wet and slick down there. And I think I’ve found it. What now?” she asked.
Imagining Casey fingering herself was getting Craig hard again. “Rub round and round in a circle. Feel your clit getting hard. And wetter. Are you getting wetter, baby?”
Her heavy breathing hinted she was getting close. “Sopping,” she hissed, and then she moaned again.
“Okay. Pinch your nipples with your other hand. Tug at them. Pretend it’s me licking and nipping at them while I’m pumping my cock into your pretty little pussy. I’m ready, too, you know. It hasn’t been ten minutes since I came and you’ve got me ready to come again.”
“Oh, yesss,” she hissed. “Come for me. And make me come. Oooh, it feels so good.”
“Rub your clit a little harder. Feel good?”
Chapter Seven
“Oh, yes. Yessss. Craig, I’m coming. It feels so-oo…” Her voice trailed off as waves of sensation kept coming one after the other. “Thank you,” she told him when the tremors finally slowed to a gentle purring deep in her belly.
“Go to sleep now. Dream about me. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at five-thirty.”
Craig’s soft chuckle brought Casey back from a world devoid of everything but the tempest that had just claimed her. A storm like nothing she’d experienced before. Sensations churned inside her, then slowed to a languid rolling simmer. Fiery heat gave way to a soft, warm afterglow.
She’d just had her first climax with Craig.
And he’d done it for her from a distance with that deep, mesmerizing voice and some sexy suggestions. To be more accurate, he’d made her do it to herself.
She couldn’t wait to come again. With Craig, next time in the flesh instead of on the phone. Only with him. Next time they’d do it all. Tomorrow night she was going to make love with a man so skilled at sex that he’d made her come just by talking to her. On the phone, yet.
He’d seduced her completely with his voice. No visuals. No smells or tastes or touches. Just erotic suggestions made in the sexiest ways Casey could imagine.
She could hardly wait for him to make love to her for real.
* * * * *
He’d talked her into coming, on the phone. Seduced her with words.
And that terrified him.
Craig should have expected it. After all, he made his living persuading juries that defendants needed to be in jail. He had a knack for talking. Everybody said so, from Wells down to the reporters and court groupies who showed up whenever he took a case to trial.
He’d talked a good seduction. Too good, he thought when he imagined the main event scheduled for tomorrow night. Casey would be expecting fireworks, and he was afraid he was going to be a dud.
After all, she’d almost certainly been with men who knew their way around a woman a hell of a lot better than he did, even after all the reading he’d done.
Talking couldn’t hold a candle to action. And reading couldn’t substitute for experience.
Damn it, he should have picked a virgin to seduce. Preferably one who’d never been on a date before. An innocent who didn’t have the moxie to realiz
e he didn’t know one end of a woman from the other.
Well, he wasn’t quite that ignorant. Still he should have hit on a woman who was clueless.
But he wanted Casey. She’d burrowed her way under his skin. And not just because he was hot to fuck her. He was afraid he’d gone and fallen in love. No way would he tell her, though. Not when he knew she might laugh him out of bed after they made love.
The light from across the courtyard cast light through his kitchen window. For a long time he sat and stared at it. Then he glanced at the stack of books on the table and mentally consigned his brother to hell.
If Alan had waited a couple more months before knocking Lurleen up, Craig wouldn’t be a twenty-seven-year-old virgin, scared shitless of messing up his first sexual experience. He’d have sampled sex with his high school girlfriend—probably plural girlfriends. He’d have been oblivious to the risks involved.
Of course he probably would have kept on the fast track toward self-destruction in other ways if it hadn’t been for his brother’s fate. He’d most likely have found himself in courtrooms several times by now, only as a defendant instead of a prosecuting attorney.
On balance, he guessed he should thank his brother. If he were a criminal and not a lawyer, Casey wouldn’t give him the time of day. Still, nothing had scared him this much since the day a year ago when he had to stand in front of a jury and deliver his first opening argument.
Then he’d had to persuade twelve men and women to convict a repeat wife abuser the defense claimed had acted in self-defense. Losing that case could have meant being relegated to arraignments and legal research for the next six months or so. Winning had set him on the fast track toward achieving his own professional goals.
Craig would approach this weekend the same way he had that trial—he’d give it his best shot. Surely a guy who could make a woman come over the phone could have sex with her in person without turning it into a complete disaster.
And if he believed that, he figured he might as well make an offer for that piece of prime Everglades real estate that half the lawyers in his office were always trying to sell each other.
* * * * *
Early the next morning Craig shoved his insecurities aside, went to work, and started putting together his case for Ranger’s prosecution.
“Want to work out together on the bikes this weekend?”
Craig looked up at Dwayne Cramer, the other triathlon participant for the state attorney’s team at the upcoming games. “I can’t.” The last thing he wanted to think about now was that damn triathlon and what participating in it was likely to do to his bum leg.
“Can’t?” Dwayne sounded incredulous. “The race is only a week away.”
“I know. But I’m spending the weekend down on Sanibel.” Besides, there was no way Craig was going to climb on a bike or subject his body to the impact of an all-out run before he had to.
“Planning to do some open water swimming?”
More like he had a closed-door disaster on the docket. Unfortunately Craig couldn’t talk himself out of embarking upon the debacle that was practically certain to happen. But Dwayne didn’t need to know that.
“I’m planning to get in a swim or two. But I’m taking my girlfriend,” Craig mentioned in case his colleague took it in his head to pack up his family and tag along.
“Girlfriend, huh? I just bet you’re gonna hit the surf. Didn’t your coaches in college tell you too much sex before a race saps a guy’s strength?”
“Probably.” They might have said that if Craig had ever asked. “But I’ll take my chances.”
Dwayne grinned. “Want some company?”
“No.” An audience with a big mouth was the last thing Craig needed.
“Sounds serious.”
“Could be.”
“Have fun.” Dwayne glanced down at Craig’s notes and snickered.
“Better not get addicted to a woman the way Ranger says he did. You wouldn’t want to go bonkers and start ramming cars on the Interstate when the lady gets smart and dumps you.”
“Don’t you have work you need to do?”
“Yeah. As I said, have fun.”
“I will.” Craig wished. He also wished to hell he could get his cock off his mind long enough to prepare for Ranger’s trial.
Too bad that sex—or the lack thereof—was the cornerstone of the accused’s defense.
* * * * *
Four more hours. Casey mopped sweat off her brow at the end of the lunch-hour aerobics class she taught and leaned heavily against the front desk at the gym. It was a good thing she didn’t have anything scheduled for today that required serious thought, because Craig had been on her mind ever since he made her come last night. She conjured up a smile and a friendly wave for Todd when he waddled out of the locker room.
“So who’s the lucky guy?” Todd slapped the medical release Casey had requested onto the counter at the gym.
“What guy?” As if she could get Craig off her mind even for a second.
“The one you said yes to after you told me no.” He smiled, but his jowls quivered more than usual.
“What makes you think I said yes to anyone?” Surely she wasn’t that transparent.
“I came by yesterday and heard you asking Russ for some time off. And you’re marked off the schedule earlier than usual today. It makes sense that you’d have someplace to go and somebody to do it with.”
Casey shrugged.
“Earth to Casey.”
“Sorry, Todd.”
“I just said to have fun. Whoever you’re doing it with.” Todd backed away from the desk and headed for the sauna.
Casey stared at the medical release he’d given her, then filed it away and tried to banish this weekend from her mind.
Eating lasagna with Todd wouldn’t have left her with her brain fried and her libido in shaky control. But she had something much, much more appetizing on her menu for tonight.
She could hardly wait.
* * * * *
Control. That’s what he needed. Self-control. Unfortunately it had flown out the window the first time Casey had touched his thigh. And he hadn’t managed to get it back.
Craig checked his duffel bag again. Swim suit. Check. Shorts and T-shirts. Check.
He tossed in a pair of casual slacks. They might come in handy if she wanted to go somewhere halfway dressy to eat.
Oops. Better not forget the shaving kit. According to the experts, five o’clock shadow might be sexy to look at, but women didn’t much like the feel of it against their silky skin. Craig unzipped the kit and stashed a box of condoms inside. He stuffed another box of them into the plain brown paper bag that held his sex toys.
Fat chance he’d dredge up the guts to try any of them. Still, the idea of teasing Casey with that vibrator got him hard. So hard his cock throbbed. But he didn’t have time to take the edge off. He had to pick her up in fifteen minutes.
It was going to be a long, long two hours until they got to Sanibel.
* * * * *
Long, but not long enough. Casey didn’t know whether she wanted to fall into Craig’s arms or run as fast as she could in the opposite direction. He looked so good, so confident, so downright sexy as he filled the gas tank at the entrance to the Interstate. A shiver ran down her spine despite the ninety-degree day.
“Want the top down?” he asked.
“Sure.” She dug in her bag and found a headband while he pulled back the convertible top and let the late afternoon sun bear down on them.
At least she wouldn’t feel as though she had to carry on a conversation—she’d be free to look at him and fantasize. And ignore the fear that he might laugh her right out of bed.
He slid under the wheel and pushed his dark aviator glasses onto his forehead, giving her a glimpse of those gorgeous clear-blue eyes. “You okay?” he asked, as if he’d read her mind.
“Oh, yeah. I’m ready.”
He pulled the shades over his eyes and gunned the engine
, then put the car in gear. A warm breeze grew stronger as they sped along I-75 toward Fort Myers.
Urban sprawl soon gave way to flatlands populated mostly by cattle and citrus trees. An occasional long-legged crane fished for its supper in the canals that led out to the Gulf.
The flatness of the land reminded Casey of the high plateaus of northwest Texas where she’d grown up. But it was different. Tropical and lush. Elemental and focused.
Like the way Craig made her feel. She’d taken off on a sensual journey that had only one destination.
When she laid her hand on his khaki-clad thigh, his muscles contracted. The way he had that first night, he caught her hand. But this time he didn’t push it away.
He circled the back of her hand with one finger. Sensation spread up, then down.
Casey’s cheeks grew hot despite the wind on her face. Muscles in her lower abdomen clenched, then mellowed to a liquid sort of glow.
He shuddered as if in pain. In slow motion he dragged her hand up. Her fingertips grazed taut, male flesh. His swollen cock felt rock-hard beneath her fingers when he squeezed them closed around the throbbing shaft. The teeth of his zipper dug into her palm.
Being hard like that had to hurt him.
You can do him in the car. Get him primed for later.
Lisa’s words echoed in Casey’s ear. She found his zipper tab.
Swearing, he grasped the wheel with both hands.
Her confidence soared.
His knuckles whitened, and he held onto the steering wheel as though he was barely in control. He kept both eyes glued to the road as they sped down the nearly deserted highway.
“Casey, damn it, stop or I’ll…”
“What, Craig?” She liked testing his control.
She dragged his zipper down, found the placket in his boxer shorts. Freed his cock and balls. When she ran a finger along the throbbing vein that ran the length of his rigid shaft, he shuddered.
Her pussy wept hot, slick honey, making her wish she could climb onto his lap and fill the aching emptiness that had suddenly become unbearable.
She thought he said something when she massaged the base of his cock with a slow, steady rhythm, but the words blew away on an arid wind faintly tinged with salt from the Gulf.