Enticement

by Madelynn Ellis

  “It’s real. Say the word, Evie and I’ll give you what you’ve been thinking about all day.”

  Pinned, by both his body and his words, Evie kept absolutely still. She had thought of him. Not willingly, but her mind had wandered. Snapshots of him in sultry repose masturbating in the spare room, and of him and Ross in the tent with the girl had troubled her ever since she’d left Rose Cottage that morning.

  “He won’t wake, Evie,” Kit coaxed, his voice whisper soft against her ear.

  “We can’t. We can’t do this,” she protested. Fear coupled with anticipation roused every nerve in her body as her denial rang hollow. The tiniest shift in his position sent shivers chasing across her skin. Moisture bathed her skin, and between her thighs the lips of her vulva plumped, ready for his assault. The mere thought of him sliding his cock home only further opened her up to him, and another gush of moisture bathed her opening. Her hips lifted in urgent need, so that his erection nudged between her labia.

  “Oh, god! We can’t.” She glanced warily at Ross again, so blissfully unaware of her duplicity. Everything. Absolutely everything about this moment was wrong. Dreadfully, horribly wrong. If Ross woke now, the hurt and betrayal he’d feel would crush any spark of love he bore for her completely. Kit surely wasn’t worth that. So why did she feel so excited by his presence?

  His cock pressed tight to her cunt, rubbing against her in an alluring simulation of sex. Not entering her, and not directly stimulating her clit, but arousing her all the same. “Say the word, Evie, and I’m all yours.”

  “He’ll be so hurt.”

  So why did she feel so excited? Why instead of screaming and fighting Kit off with every available object was she raising her hips in time with the roll of his body? She looked up into his eyes and caught only a glimpse of darkness before a kiss swallowed her remaining whimper of denial. The truth was, despite how she felt about Ross, she wanted Kit exactly where he was: poised to enter her, on the verge of fucking her into oblivion.

  His tongue traced one puckered nipple, setting her squirming again. Three fingers struck gold between her legs, pushing into her with embarrassing ease. She was so wet and eager, his fingers met with no resistance and she cried out when he withdrew them. The cry transformed into a whimper as his cock replaced the digits, and their bodies slammed together.

  So hot. Too hot.

  Evie wanted to squeal. She had to bite down on her tongue to stop herself from screaming out his name. Countless emotions ricocheted inside her head, but she kept all the accompanying sounds she wanted to make locked up tight inside her. Only when he touched her clit as he fucked her with perfect ease did a hiss escape through her teeth. She gripped Kit’s bottom hard, digging in her fingertips until he slowed the rhythm of their loving. Then they rocked, so, so, smoothly, gliding, while staying absolutely silent.

  It couldn’t last. It didn’t last.

  Slowly, steadily the tempo built again, until the headboard thudded against the wall and Ross stirred beside them, rolling over to paw at her shoulder. “Hush, you’re dreaming. Hush, Evie. It’s okay. Wake up.”

  The weight of Kit’s body still pressed down upon her. Evie tentatively opened her eyes to find Ross staring at her, not in open-mouthed disgust, but in concern. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Huh!” she choked. She pulled her arms down from above her head, where she had them wedged under the bottom of the headboard and patted the duvet, still curiously aware of the fading heat of Kit’s presence. “You were dreaming, Evie. I’m not sure if it was good or bad. You were moaning quite a bit and thrashing about.”

  The lingering trace of Kit’s cologne clung to the sheets and her skin. He hadn’t been here. It had been just a dream.

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “No.” She blinked a few times trying to wake up. “No, it was nothing. Bad dream.”

  “Sure you don’t need a hug?” He cast his arm over her stomach and snuggled up, placing a kiss upon her shoulder.

  “Kit,” she said sleepily. “He didn’t actually work in a bar, did he?”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “’Course. He didn’t really answer.”

  She sensed Ross’s smile. He continued to nibble at her skin, his lips moving up towards the sensitive skin of her neck. “He worked as a host, Evie.”

  Suddenly, she was awake. Wide-awake. “You mean like a gigolo?”

  “Not exactly. No. Leastways, I haven’t asked if he had sex for money. He entertained women in the bar, talked shop and relationships and poured drinks for them. If it went beyond that…well…let’s just say it wouldn’t surprise me.” Ross fell silent.

  “It isn’t important,” Evie provided. Whatever Kit had done in his past didn’t affect them now. It sure explained a lot about him though. Like why he’d seemed so at ease with her watching him.

  Ross rolled onto his back again and his jaw stretched into a yawn. “Knackered,” he mumbled.

  “Ross. One other thing, did you ever have a threesome involving Kit?”

  The tense jerk of his shoulders answered the question more succinctly than any amount of words. “What has he been telling you?”

  “All your dirty secrets, I guess. It’s true, then?”

  Propped on one elbow, Ross met her gaze. He chewed his lip a moment and his brows furrowed. “I’m not sure I’d call it a threesome as such. That kind of implies we all got it on.” His frown deepened. “It just happened sometimes. Kit and I were mates. Sometimes we shared the same girl.”

  “You mean it happened more than once?”

  Ross shiftily glanced at the headboard. “Yeah. More than once. Jeezus, what the hell have you two been talking about to bring that up anyway? I thought you went grocery shopping.”

  “We did.” Evie sucked her tongue as jealousy stirred inside her stomach again, despite her best efforts to quell such nonsense. What Ross had done before they met hardly mattered and had no bearing on the present. Besides, she wasn’t sure what about it rattled her so much. The fact that he’d obviously liked threesomes, that he’d engaged in them with Kit, or hadn’t engaged in one with her. “Ever have one that didn’t involve Kit?”

  “No.”

  She nearly pressed to see if he was up for involving her. They could creep into Kit’s room right now and pin him down on the narrow bed. Then maybe she could straddle him, while Ross watched, although the thought of being watched still unnerved her. Still, the notion of sharing brought back her earlier conversation with Kit, tucked up together on the sofa at Rose Cottage. Nothing he’d said then had been straightforward. There’d been a stonking great subtext to it from the outset. Kit had deliberately flirted with her, and given himself a hard on like a blooming torpedo. Far from sharing a few memories, he’d deliberately opened up a can of worms.

  “You know you’re really hot,” Ross remarked as his lips continued to skim over the pulse point in her neck. His hand drifted down over her stomach and slipped between her thighs to find her dripping wet. “Oh, that sort of dream was it?” He laughed. “Am I not giving you enough?” He rolled onto his back, pulling her on top, so she straddled his thighs.

  “I thought you were knackered.”

  “Only certain bits of me. My elbow.” He pointed and she bestowed a kiss there. “My right knee.” Another kiss, though that one involved some wriggling. “My nose, my left nipple.”

  “Let me guess, your cock?”

  Laughter rumbled through his chest again. “No, I think that bit’s definitely wide awake.”

  “Then we’d best make sure he stays that way.” She closed her mouth over the head of his erection.

  “Oh, god, Evie. You have the mouth of a fucking angel.” And he lapsed into a string of sighs.

  That’s right Ross. Drive away the images of the past by fucking me. He did taste good. The sexual tension remaining from her dream tingled with renewed interest. She left off sucking just as soon as Ross was really hard and meandered up his body until their li
ps met and their bodies joined.

  Still, no matter how hard she rode him, or how powerfully he thrust into her, she never quite dislodged the impish version of Kit sitting on her shoulder.

  “Shit!” she cursed as she came, wondering if even now, Kit was lying in bed listening to them and driving his cock through the ring of his fingers.

  Chapter Five

  The weekend soon passed, Sunday bleeding into Monday and so on. Both Ross and Evie fell into their normal patterns of work and play, while Kit made a start on transforming Rose Cottage. By Friday, he’d started disappearing before dawn and not returning until late in the evening. “Keeping busy and keeping out of the way,” he’d told Ross that morning when he’d challenged Kit on the front drive before they went their separate ways. “Figure I came on a bit strong and rattled Evie’s cage, so I’m downplaying my presence.” Although Ross had accepted the explanation, he suspected there was more to Kit’s prolonged absences than lulling Evie into a false sense of security. More likely, he’d been holing himself up in the cottage hoping the village wouldn’t notice him. Curiously, the ploy appeared to be working. Despite Doris’s less than subtle greeting in the pub, no one else had commented on his friend’s return.

  A knock on the surgery door disturbed his thoughts. “Are you free? Oh, yes, you’re free. Wonderful.” The owner of the chirpy voice waddled into the surgery, arm aloft, trailing a small dog on a lead.

  “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Hawes, and Hamish, of course. What can I do for you today?”

  “Just his nails, please, Ross. I know I could get Margery to do it in her mobile unit, but between you and me, I’m not so sure she does quite as good a job.”

  “Nails, right,” said Ross, his head going down as he looked around for the clippers. Scratch the lack of gossip. There was one reason behind this impromptu pet pedicure and one only. Sheila Hawes relished gossip in much the same way other folks loved chocolate, and was never more satisfied than when presented with a nice juicy morsel. The bigger the scandal, the greater the delight in her beetle-black eyes, and the more stops on her busy social calendar.

  “I saw Doris yesterday. Went to her knitting circle, not that she knits much now with her arthritis crippling her joints, but she does still like to chat.”

  Yes, here it was, thought Ross. Wait for it… Wait for it.

  “She said she’d run into you in the Boar. Think Doris half thought you might show up and surprise us all. Silly bleeder,” she added with a cackle.

  “Surgery,” muttered Ross. He found just the implication of a sick animal on the operating table generally derailed too much digging into his actual doings and whereabouts. Folk didn’t like to think too hard about sick pets, and he didn’t like to tax himself too hard with the village’s peculiar brand of social chess. “Afternoons are never a good time. We’ve been booked up pretty solid all week.”

  “I suppose it’s the season. Cold affects the poor mites, same as it does us. You wouldn’t believe how much my joints ache first thing.”

  “Bitterly cold this morning,” he said, hoping to further sidetrack her digging long enough to finish off Hamish’s nails, so he could shoo her out before she got her teeth into anything meaty. As it was the cry of a distinctive baritone proved to be a far more diverting distraction that grilling him.

  “Is that… Is that him?” she cried. Her beady eyes lit with excitement.

  “Who?”

  “Is he here? In the surgery!”

  “I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t mock me, Ross Hatton. That fiend you call a friend. Christopher Skye.”

  Denying Kit’s presence seemed rather pointless since he could clearly hear Kit shouting his name. A devil of a ruckus seemed to have begun in the waiting room. Mrs. Hawes began waggling her finger at him, but Ross released the now yapping Hamish into her arms and swiftly opened the door.

  “Well, how rude…” Her words faded as Iris ushered Kit through the open doorway, with a tea towel clamped to his head.

  Time froze and then split apart. Ross’s heart clenched tight at the sight of his friend’s ashen face. Blood coated the cuff of his jacket and had already seeped through the Working Dogs of Great Britain tea towel, turning the Border collie ox-brown. Iris bundled Kit into a seat and nudged the wide-eyed, slack-jawed Mrs. Hawes out of the door, shutting it firmly behind them.

  “Lock it.” Kit’s words burst from his mouth as a snarl. Unquestioningly, Ross turned the bolt.

  “What it god’s name happened? Kit!”

  Kit pulled the cloth away from his face, causing a trickle of blood to roll down the side of his face and drip into the open neck of his jacket. “Get this off me.” He switched hands and pressed the cloth back to his brow before shaking his left arm so that his hand disappeared inside the sleeve. Ross grasped the soiled cuff and pulled. Beneath the jacket Kit wore a soot-black T-shirt, the collar of which was slashed open on the same side as his wound.

  “Who did this? Jesus, we need to get you to A&E.”

  “I’m not going. I’ve already had that out with Iris.”

  “Is that what the shouting was about?”

  “That and she said I was upsetting the animals.”

  Pleased to find Kit his normal argumentative and masochistic self, Ross slapped him across the back. “Let me.” He poked tentatively at the cloth. The blood flow seemed to be slowing. The gash itself lay straight across the top of Kit’s eyebrow, virtually parallel to the silvered remains of a previous wound. It was straight and a good few centimetres long. “Come on, I’ll drive you.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “What, you’re just going to sit there? It’ll leave a bloody enormous scar.”

  “It will anyway.”

  “It needs stitching,” he snapped back. Of all the crazy stunts he’d known Kit to pull, this had to be the most stupid and annoying. “Hospital. Police station. In that order.” He wasn’t being fobbed off over this. They could tell Evie later that he’d whipped himself with a yard of electricity cable to stop her worrying, meanwhile the bastard who was actually responsible wasn’t getting away with it.

  “No.” Two big unblinking, dark eyes bored into him. Hell, the heat in that gaze. It was as if he were being sucked in, tempted, offered hell knows what if he’d just back down.

  “You’re not—” He meant to say pulling your Mephistopheles act on me today, but the hot sparks had already started running up and down his neck, making the underside of his chin prickle. Kit was far too accustomed to being in control and manipulating moods to suit his purpose. Though how he could turn on the old sexual fire while sporting a head wound was utterly perplexing.

  “You fix it.” Kit’s voice dropped to a husky whisper as he made the suggestion. For a moment, it even sounded reasonable. More than that, it felt like a blooming caress. Ross pulled back. He let the reality of their location sink in, cut Kit out of the picture and acknowledged the turmoil still raging in the waiting room. Snatches of the speculative conversation leeched through the walls, Mrs. Hawes loudest of all.

  “Shit in hell, Kit!” Ross swore, snapping back to reality. “I’m a vet not a fucking doctor. Who was it? Tony? One of the Bryant boys?”

  “Didn’t see,” he said, succumbing to an obvious snit. “If you won’t do it, give me some glue and I’ll fix it myself. You know that’s all they’re going to do at A&E.”

  Ross got right up close and growled in his face. “I’ll do it, if you report it.”

  “It’s not happening, Ross. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Probably just make things worse.” Kit gave him an angry grin and kissed him, the shock of which sent Ross scuttling away again, so that he backed into the examination table. “Shit!” He rubbed frantically at his violated lips. “Shit! Don’t do that.”

  Kit rose somewhat shakily and took a step forward, his intent written clear in his expression. Hot sparks flared within the depths of his eyes. The slender high curve of his cheekbones alo
ng with those sexy hooded eyes and the streaks of blood across his cheek made him a hundred percent drop-dead irresistible.

  “Shit!” Ross snarled again. He half turned, not taking his eyes off Kit and tugged a pair of latex gloves out of box. “I’ll do it, all right, I’ll do it.”

  Kit shrugged and sagged back into the chair. He pulled his hair back off his forehead and waited patiently as Ross cleaned up the wound and applied a layer of Vetbond. “Don’t come crying to me when it starts itching like hell, okay.”

  “Whatever you say, honey.” Kit released his hair so that it flopped back over his forehead and shrouded his eyes. He leaned into Ross, pressing his face to the hard plane of his stomach. “Mind if I engage in a sniffle or two now? It bloody hurts.”

  It wasn’t quite so easy to shrug away the intimacy when he put it like that. Ross cupped the back of Kit’s head and tried not to react to the rasp of Kit’s breath against his stomach. “Really, Kit, who was it? What happened?”

  Kit simply pressed his face more firmly to Ross’s stomach. He wound his arms around Ross’s hips and squeezed him tight. Next minute he was kneading Ross’s arse and his lips were drawing shifting circles across Ross’s abs.

  Ross stopped stroking his hair and tried to back step, but Kit clung on tight. He should have known this was coming from his experiences of old. Kit only had one avenue of expression—sex. It didn’t matter if he was miserable, in pain or delirious, everything sparked the same reaction. “Kit.” Ross wedged a hand between them and pushed. “I’m at work. We can’t do this.”

  What he should have said was, “I’m not ever doing this”. He wasn’t. He had Evie. His relationship with Kit was remaining completely platonic. Unfortunately, his body didn’t agree with his brain. Just as they had that first night in the kitchen, Ross’s senses reeled and reared. His loins grew heavy and arousal danced up and down the length of his stiffening cock.

  “No one’s going to come in,” Kit coaxed as he mouthed along the obvious swell in Ross’s trousers. “You’ve already bolted the door and I need the comfort.”