by Anne Calhoun
“Want to sit down?” she offered.
His parents raised him with a firm hand and an eye toward manners, habits not yet broken by his new personality, so he said, “Sure,” and followed her into the living room to settle at one end of the sofa while she curled up at the other. They both had another swallow of beer while he looked around. The kitchen was at the north end of the house, with the dining and living rooms sharing the same large, rectangular space. A rug under the dining room table delineated the dining space from the living room. A sofa and two armchairs clustered around a large stone fireplace, and big sliding glass doors opened to the backyard. Pale cream walls were covered with black-framed photographs of her family, and the bright red and orange throw pillows added color to the dark brown leather sofa.
“Nice house.” And he shouldn’t have come, because every passing moment confirmed his opinion that Lauren wasn’t the kind of woman he usually hooked up with the first night off the rig.
“Thanks,” she said, and he could hear the pleasure in her voice. “I bought it a couple of years after I got the job with Gulf Independent. I was straight out of college and needed to save up the down payment. It was a real fixer-upper. The kitchen hadn’t been renovated since 1957, and the whole house had to be rewired to bring it up to code. I did some of the work myself…”
He was looking at her, just looking, sprawled out at the opposite end of her sofa, and her words trailed off into silence. His hair, still damp from a shower, slid forward to lie against his cheekbones. “I’m not here to talk about your house, Lauren.”
The words were intended to reestablish boundaries, focus on the chemistry crackling between them. She cocked her head and looked at him, a mysterious little smile on her face. “So that means you don’t want to talk about the driller job, or what you were doing at the business park today.”
He shrugged, then finished the bottle of beer and set it on the floor beside him. “I’m not taking the driller job,” he said. “A friend, a fellow Marine, has a security business. I work for him when I’m not on the rig. Taking the driller job would end that.”
“Post–nine-eleven, the security business has been growing,” she said. At his sharp glance, she added, “My dad was in Army intelligence. I know what kinds of work sharp former military types go into. Is your friend’s business doing well?”
“Real well,” he said. “We were supposed to go into business together, but plans change. He still wants me to buy in.”
“Sounds like it would be interesting work,” she said. “More interesting than running pipe on the T-22.”
“I sat on a park bench for six hours today, and when I wasn’t sitting on the park bench I was sitting in a truck,” he said dismissively.
“You have a degree?”
He did. It took him five years of online classes and campus courses when he was stateside, but he’d gotten the degree. It was nobody’s business but his if he wasn’t using it. “International relations.”
“And field experience in two of the world’s biggest hot spots. Partner work wouldn’t involve sitting on a bench for hours a day. Planning ops, maybe. Sales meetings. Strategic thinking and planning related to your client’s industry or political situation.”
She was too fucking curious. Seven years ago, when he started college, that had been his goal. Now he had no goals other than getting a second beer and getting laid, so this trip to her house wasn’t a total waste. “Don’t waste the energy wondering about me. I work, I sleep, I eat, and I’m off the rig, so I want to fuck as much as possible. Then I’ll leave. Next time I’m in town, I won’t call. Still curious?”
She considered him for a few seconds, his brusque words hanging in the air. “Yes, I’m still curious,” she said.
The curiosity was going to burn her eventually, because she wasn’t the type to keep emotions from the questions she asked. God knew his answers were nothing but the emotions he’d learned to loathe. Time stretched as raw, edgy energy poured from him, then he got to his feet, using movement to push away feelings he couldn’t bear.
“Now’s good.”
Chapter Six
She led the edgy, wound-up former Marine down the hall to her bedroom. He stood just inside the doorway, hands on hips, eyes ticking off the details of the room while she drew the sheer curtains. It was an old-fashioned room, pretty bare, but she’d left it that way to show the bones of the house, the light against the hardwood floors and original trim around the doors. A chenille spread covered the oak spindle bed, and a cheval glass mirror stood in the corner. The oak dresser across from the foot of the bed matched. The set looked old but was new; she was too tall to sleep easily in an antique bed. She had braided rugs on either side of the bed, but otherwise the polished wood gleamed in the moonlight.
He crossed the room to her nightstand and glanced at it. “Twenty-first-century woman, right? What’s in the drawer?”
She added the occasional moments of humor to her growing list of things she liked about him. “Help yourself,” she said, because questions of trust seemed key to Ty Hendricks. He told her not to trust him, then looked almost hurt when Gretchen recoiled. Definitely a hot-button issue.
He pulled out her red leather restraints, tossed them to her, then strode back down the hall. Pure sexual heat blended with a sense of freedom. The unassuming way he chose the cuffs from the modest assortment of toys in her nightstand told her he was comfortable with sex outside the realm of plain vanilla. More to the point, he didn’t shy away from having her under his control. He hadn’t missed her body’s shuddering, female response when she’d struggled between him and the door at the hotel. That visceral flash of memory, and the way he moved across the helipad, so completely self-assured and all man, surfaced as he walked out of the room, and her blood heated and thickened to molten lava.
When he returned he held one of the chairs from her dining room table. He set it down in front of the oval mirror, eased into it, and gestured her to stand between his knees. When she did he held up his hand and beckoned for her to give him the restraints.
She dropped them in his hand and felt her heart start to pound hard against her breastbone, slow, sledgehammer-like thuds. She watched him turn the cuffs over, examining them, getting familiar with them.
“Red?” he asked as he deftly unfastened the snap hook hanging from one D-ring. “Really?”
“I like color in my accessories,” she said.
A wry smile. “I noticed. Wrist.”
She held out her right wrist, then the left, waiting docilely as he slid the leather over her hand and drew the loose end tight before fastening it in the buckle. There were two ways this could go down. He could fasten the cuffs in front of her, turning the scenario playful and giving her some measure of independence. Or he could fasten them behind her, placing her completely at his mercy.
Hands on her hips, he turned her to face the mirror and then fastened the cuffs behind her back. Even without removing a stitch of clothing, vulnerability washed over her in waves. He peered up at her through the hair tumbled in his eyes, and for a charged moment the carefully indifferent facade faltered. Without thinking she bent her head. He reached up to release the clip holding her hair in a floppy updo. The strands slid forward, into her face, and his hand followed, long fingers caressing her cheek before his thumb brushed over her mouth.
His rapt attention on her mouth made her think she was about to end up on her knees, but he turned her and seated her facing forward on his lap. She let her legs drop to the outside of his. Her ass rested directly against the thick erection, her hands wedged against his hard abdomen. The short-shorts exposed her leg from inner thigh to the arch of her foot, and her breasts pressed against the T-shirt’s thin fabric, nipples erect.
He stroked the backs of his hands down her bare arm, sending shivers down her spine. She shifted a little, his body hard and strong under hers. Then he tucked his bristly chin into her shoulder and slowly tugged up her shirt, exposing belly then bare bre
asts, his movements smooth, unhurried, his gaze focused on her.
“No bra?”
“I’d given up on you,” she admitted. “This is what I sleep in.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” he said, almost to himself.
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer, stroking the sides of her breasts with the backs of his curled fingers. The promise of his touch hardened her nipples, as did his focused gaze.
“What’s with the mirror?” she asked, her voice soft, high-pitched as she sank into the scenario.
“I’m a man,” he said absently. “We like to watch.”
He lifted her shirt over her head to catch at her elbows, then flattened his palms on her collarbone and swept them down, rasping her nipples, her abdomen, again, again, again, until she was arching into each stroke, desperate for the rough contact. Her breasts heated, grew heavy at the rough touch of his palms, and when he pinched her nipples, her bones seemed to dissolve into her blood, running as thick and lazy as warm honey. Sensation pooled between her thighs, turned her hot and liquid.
His gaze followed his hands as he cupped her breasts and plucked at the nipples, stroked down to the edge of her shorts. Her lips parted, and she arched into his hands. She whimpered, and he slid his hand under the elastic waist of her shorts to circle her clit with the tip of his middle finger. The movements were obscured by the fabric, but glowed on her mental map of her body. The touch was rhythmic, light, close enough to the bundle of nerves to make her thigh muscles tremble and her eyes drop closed, but not close enough to do more than maintain her on a simmer.
Her leg rose as she sought a way to shift into his hand, but he followed the movements with ease, and the hot snares of frustrated desire tightened around her. The hand not occupied with her clit rose back to her breasts, where he stroked the soft underswell of one, plucked at the nipple, pinched it before repeating the pattern at her other breast.
She arched away from him, then sank back against his hard body, unthinkingly jerking at the restraints. The soft leather, warmed from their shared body heat, gave not an inch as the snap hook held firm.
“Want more?”
“Yes,” she whimpered.
“Too bad.”
She let her head drop back against his shoulder and pressed down hard against his erection.
“It really works for me when you squirm like that,” he said. He lightly bit down on the curve where her shoulder met her neck. “It works for you, too, doesn’t it? You like not being in control.”
She tried to sit up, even get her feet flat on the floor to get some leverage, but he just widened his stance. “A gentleman wouldn’t mention that,” she gasped.
“You sized me up for four days, Lauren. You knew what you were getting.”
Another firmer bite on her neck, then he set his teeth and tongue to work on the nape, ratcheting up the tantalizing pressure between her legs. Shivers raced down her back, counterpoint to the heat building in her breasts. A gasp slipped from her throat.
She felt his bared teeth against her nape. “So fucking hot.”
The tilted angle of his head sent his blond hair tumbling into his face, but she could see his eyes plain as day when he looked up from her body and met her gaze in the mirror. Tiny, secret, electric movements around her clit, sometimes closing the circle and drawing a pleading gasp from her throat, always widening again while she arched and writhed. A fine sweat gleamed on her face and body, her hair clinging to her mouth and collarbone as he drew the tension out into sexual torture.
“Please, oh please,” she whispered.
“I’m gonna get mine, right?”
Electric shock straight to the brain. “Yes,” she said. Anything. She’d promise anything.
With the pad of his middle finger he stroked her swollen clit, the pressure firm, relentless. She let her head fall back against his shoulder, her body drawing into a taut bow anchored by her head against his shoulder and her ass grinding into the cradle of his hips. The build was as hot and fiery as the burnoff from a runaway well and narrowed her focus to his finger against her clit until the tension exploded into blackness. Shudders wracked her, easing slightly with each subsequent pulse until she lay limp against his hard body.
Opening her eyes just a little she saw her breasts quivering with her rapid pulse, her abdomen rising and falling under Ty’s arm. Ribbons of electric heat fluttered along her nerves; her nipples throbbed in the cool, dark air of the bedroom. Her clit fluttered under his motionless finger, and her thighs trembled from exertion.
She opened her eyes a little wider and met his gaze in the mirror. Pure male satisfaction simmered behind those dark eyes, but then his cock pulsed and shifted under her ass.
“Time to get mine.”
* * *
The sight of Lauren Kincaid sprawled on his lap, gleaming and disheveled after a breathlessly powerful orgasm, sent a disquieting mix of emotions cascading through Ty. He liked watching this confident, assured, collected woman splinter into shards under his hands, but that felt too much like a connection, so he pushed it aside for a simple, base dilemma. Should he continue this torturously arousing game, or situate her on her knees on the bed with her face in the sheets, and fuck her until he exploded deep inside her?
This wouldn’t last more than the next couple of weeks. There would be plenty of time for quick, anonymous fucks when this was over.
He reached up and smoothed her hair back from her face, then laid his palm flat between her shoulder blades and pushed her to her feet. “I thought these shorts all came with PINK on the ass,” he said as he pushed them down her long legs.
A breath of a laugh huffed from her. “I am not the kind of woman who goes around with derogatory slang for female genitalia on my butt.”
She wasn’t. There was nothing little girl-ish about her sexuality, what she wanted, how she responded, and that was part of the problem, but his cock had more pressing needs than labeling Lauren Kincaid or the way possibilities opened up around her. He wanted her completely naked, so he unclipped the snap hook, pulled her top to the floor, then refastened it. His gaze leisurely examined her body, the sexily toned curve of breast and hip, the trimmed thatch of hair between her thighs, the lean muscles of her legs. His fingertips trailed down her abdomen, brushed her damp curls, then traced the line of her right quad. She looked down, away, then back at him, as if she’d never watched arousal build in her body, watched it shimmer and dance between her and the man in her bed. Her hesitation made him want to take his time. Show her something about herself.
“You a runner?” She nodded, her cheeks flushed, her mouth swollen, lips parted. He looked at it and mentally added another possibility to his list: a slow, thorough blow job with Lauren in the cuffs. Tempting.
Very tempting. It was exactly what he should do, avoid the connection of being inside her, feeling her open to him in every sense of the word. But he wanted the visceral satisfaction of feeling her hot and wet, quivering around him, so he lifted his hips to extract his wallet from his pocket, then opened it and pulled out a condom. “Let’s test your endurance.”
She waited docilely, watching in the mirror as he unbuckled his belt, popped open the button fly on his cargo pants, and pushed them down his hips. He rucked up his shirt and smoothed the condom down his shaft.
He’d undressed the bare minimum to get serviced while she stood stark naked except for red leather cuffs and her hair, and it didn’t feel right. After a moment he pulled his shirt over his head, watched her mouth slacken a little, her gaze soften.
“Turn around.” She did, waited again while he looked up and down the length of her back. “Look over your shoulder.”
Again, she obeyed, eyelids fluttering when she did. Her shoulder blades jutted like bird wings over the length of her spine, the column of muscle, bone, and flesh broken only by the bright red and silver restraints holding her wrists folded one atop the other at the small of her back. Then he put his hands, tanned dark and work-r
ough, on her ass and guided her to straddle his hips.
“Keep watching.” When she shifted, losing her balance as she focused over her shoulder at the darkly erotic sight of her body spread open for his, he added, “I won’t let you fall.”
Something in his tone caught her attention, turned her face to his. “Look,” he said brusquely, with a firm squeeze to her ass to reinforce the command.
She did as he ordered, strands of hair catching on her damp mouth and cheek as she did.
“Good,” he praised, his grip firm on the cradle of her hips. A little nudging, then the jolt of pressure as the tip of his cock pushed into wet heat, demanding entrance. When he was sure she had her balance, feet flat on the floor, poised above him, he gripped her restrained wrists and used the leverage to pull her down.
They both watched the straining shaft disappear into her body, the walls of her pussy tight, pulsing a little as she stretched to accommodate him. Her head tipped back as a low moan drifted from her throat. “Slow,” he said. “So slow I feel you ripple around me every time.”
His words bound her as effectively as the leather, weaving a spell that wound around her nerves, up her spine, into her brain. She moved as he demanded, rising and falling on his cock, and he could indeed feel the spasms each time she came to rest against his widespread thighs. All too quickly the sensation built, tension and need seething in the tip of his cock. He let his head drop back, surrendering to the slick tug and glide of her tight sheath. His heart pounded against his sternum, making him light-headed, so he lifted his head.
Her mouth was right there. He could have kissed her, because her mouth was right fucking there, lips soft and hot and moist, and fuck, he was drowning in the sensation of her, but he wouldn’t give in to that need. He clamped one hand on her hip to control her movements and fisted the other in her hair to tip her head back and ravage her throat. She gave a trembling little moan when he tugged on her hair, but she never stopped moving.