Sweet Liar

by Jude Deveraux

  “You don’t just turn me down, you turn down all men.”

  “I’d rather be safe than—” She stopped talking because she was now up against the east wall of the living room.

  Standing very close in front of her and not allowing her to get around him, Mike leaned closer. “Why did you divorce your husband?”

  “I hardly think that’s any of your business.” When she tried to move away from him, he put one hand on the wall on each side of her head.

  “Why, Sam?”

  “It’s not—”

  “Maybe it’s not any of my business, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

  “Incompatibility,” she said quickly, but was not able to meet his eyes.

  “You’re a bad liar.”

  “Unlike you. You can lie—”

  “Why, Sam?”

  “He…”

  “He what?”

  “He had another woman!” she flared at him.

  “Then he was a fool,” Mike said softly. “Why would he want another woman when he could have you?”

  She looked away from him, but there was gratitude for his words in her eyes. “I’ve told you, so please move your hands.”

  “Yes, I’ll move my hands,” he answered as he grabbed her into his arms and began kissing her. Using all her strength, she tried to get away from him, but he held her to him. “What happened to you, Sam?”

  “Leave me alone, please,” she whispered, not looking at him.

  “Did you turn to him in the night, but he wanted nothing to do with you?” As he spoke, she still struggled against him. “The bastard. He was all worn out from someone else, wasn’t he?”

  Ceasing her struggles, she glared up at him. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Is that what you wanted to hear? He slept with her twice a day, but he never touched me. Me, the sexless one. I’m the cook, the cleaner, the little money-maker, but I’m not—” When she couldn’t continue, Mike kissed her. “No, please let me go.”

  “Why should I let you go?”

  “Because I don’t want—”

  “Don’t want to make love with me? Like hell you don’t. You’ve wanted me from the first day we met, but you’ve acted as though you hated me. I didn’t—”

  His words were silenced as his hands roamed over her body, over her breasts, down her thighs, her throat, her arms, between her legs. But Samantha stood still, rigid, unmoving, willing herself not to respond to him.

  “How long can you hold out against me, Sam? If I do this?” Bending his head, he kissed the top of her breasts, and it was no difficult matter to pull the stretchy fabric down over one breast as he gently took the peak in his mouth. “Or this?” Moving his mouth downward, he caressed her breast with his thumb.

  “Please…” she whispered, eyes closed, head back against the wall.

  “Please what? Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, anything.”

  “Then let me go.”

  “Anything but that.” His lips moved down her body, down to her waist, then back up to her face while his hand moved under her top, his long fingers on the skin of her stomach. “Please, Sam. Don’t hold back.”

  “I can’t.”

  Kissing her ear, one hand on her breast, the other inching up her thigh, his hand slowly moved up under her skirt. “What do you want? Tell me. Gentle? Sweet?”

  Suddenly, he pulled away from her and looked at her face, at her closed eyes, at the expression of control she was wearing, as though she was determined to contain herself.

  “No,” he said. “You want what I want: Sam, I need you.”

  At that he grabbed the front of her panty hose and pulled at the same time that he somehow managed to unfasten his trousers and drop them to the floor.

  It was at the feel of Mike’s hands on her bare flesh that made Sam’s years of pent-up desire come to the surface. One moment she was standing still, unresponsive, self-contained, and the next her hands and mouth seemed to be everywhere on him, tasting his skin, licking, sucking, clawing.

  For just a moment, he was startled by her, startled by her sheer hunger, then his mouth was on hers, his hands grabbing at her, responding to her with the same need that she was exhibiting.

  Abruptly, Samantha stopped moving as a sense of déjà vu overtook her. Looking up at Mike, she half expected him to be Richard and to be wearing that bored look, that half-asleep look, that Richard had always worn when they were in bed together. But he wasn’t her ex-husband, this man was Michael, and the expression on his face was of desire and longing and need and…caring, caring that she receive as well as give. He looked like she felt.

  Understanding her thoughts, Mike said, “It’s me, Michael Taggert,” as he grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her head back to apply his teeth and lips to her throat. “And I’m a different man.”

  When he picked her up to set her down on his manhood, Samantha nearly cried out, but she wrapped her legs about his waist, locked her ankles, and hung on as he pounded into her, her back against the wall. Stroke after deep, deep stroke, she held on, her nails biting into the skin of his back, her mouth sucking on whatever part of him she could reach.

  When he finished and gave her one last thrust before limply collapsing against her, his head on her shoulder, she almost screamed in frustration, but she kept her noises to herself and hugged him to her.

  Pulling away from her, Mike looked into her face as though searching for an answer. “Sorry, baby, I wanted you too much. The next one is yours.”

  Although she had absolutely no idea what he meant, she liked it when he kicked his trousers off and carried her up to the bedroom to stand her by the side of the bed. She liked it when he undressed her and kissed her breasts. When he removed his shirt and held her, skin to skin, he kept looking at her, as though he expected something from her.

  At last, frustrated because she had no idea what he wanted, she said, “Michael, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how.”

  “Baby, there is no how. There’s no right or wrong, except maybe making your partner feel bad.”

  “I don’t want to displease you. I want—”

  Very gently, he kissed her breast. “You like that?”

  “Yes. Yes, very much.”

  “Tell me if I do something you don’t like.”

  Kissing her all the while, he ran his hands over her thighs, but he still seemed to want answers that she didn’t have. “But I like all of it,” she said at last.

  Halting, hands on her hips, Mike looked at her in disbelief. “You’re afraid you’ll do something to me that I won’t like?” His incredulousness sounded in his voice. “Okay, try me. Start touching, start kissing. Whatever you want to do to me, you may. I’m yours.”

  Anyone else might have laughed at his words, but not Sam. Years of Richard saying, “Not there. Men don’t like to be touched there.” Or, “That’s not the way to touch a man, don’t you know anything? Most women your age know this stuff. Why don’t you?” had made her wary. Her ex-husband had made her shy and uncertain from years of trying to remember his rules.

  “I…I guess I would like to touch you.” When Mike just stood there staring at her, she said, “Is that all right?”

  Mike kissed her softly. “And people doubt if there’s a heaven. There is and it’s here in this room. I’m yours, baby.”

  Holding her hand while she remained standing, he stretched out on the bed, but Samantha couldn’t look at him. The front of him was too…too intimate, too private, and his eyes kept watching her. Seeming to read her mind, he turned over, face down, so she could look at him in comfort.

  Tentatively reaching out, she ran her hand over his shoulder. There was one dim lamp on in the room, and it made Mike’s honey-colored skin glow. With his face turned away from her she could look at him to her heart’s content, look at and touch the full, long, nude, muscular length of him.

  He was the most perfectly formed man she’d ever imagined. He was movie stars, men in underwear commercials, guys
at the gym, the construction worker in the red T-shirt who’d whistled at her but she’d pretended she hadn’t heard; he was the men in three-piece suits whose brains were as sexy as their bodies; he was lazy, insolent seventeen-year-old boys whose muscles bulged out of their clothes, rodeo stars, and those smooth-cheeked, eyeglassed men who held their children tenderly. He was all of them.

  Running her hands over his body while he lay still, so still he might have been asleep, she began to kiss the back of him. When her lips had kissed him from the nape of his neck to the soles of his feet, she straddled his legs and began rubbing her hair over his skin. Stretching out on top of him so she could feel her breasts on his skin, she fit her torso into the hills and valleys of his body.

  Somewhere along the way she stopped thinking about him as a person, even about whether she pleased him or not, and began to think only of herself. Remembering seeing that soft bit of skin where his legs joined his buttocks, that hairless, enticing little patch that she’d once seen in the mirror when he’d walked away from her, she hadn’t realized then that she’d wanted to kiss that bit of skin. So now she did kiss it: kissed it, sucked on it, ran her tongue over it while Michael lay absolutely still.

  It was some time later when Samantha lay beside him, her body vibrating, her breath short and shallow. She wanted him, wanted him inside her, but she was afraid to tell him so. Once, after she and her ex-husband were first married, she’d asked, “Could we do that again?” Instantly he had become furious, telling her that she was saying he was a bad lover. “Don’t you know anything? Men can’t right away. It’s physically impossible.”

  Now, she was timid with Michael, not wanting to insult him or make him angry. “Michael,” she said softly, but it was difficult to control her voice. “I was wondering if maybe, we could, well, possibly, do that again—if you can, that is.”

  With the fury of a storm at sea, Mike roused from his seeming acquiescence to jump on her, his hands on her hips, fingers digging into muscle and skin, as he slammed into her so hard she was sure he’d loosened a couple of back teeth. Samantha saw stars.

  Mike halted instantly, hovering over her, looking as though he was afraid he’d killed her. “Sam, baby, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

  Samantha blinked up at him in surprise. “Golly, Michael, I think you can.”

  “Imp,” he said as he stretched out on his back and pulled her on top of him.

  In the manuals she’d been given, Samantha had read about different positions, but missionary was the sum total of her experience. Sitting on Mike, she looked down at him with an expression of, Now what do I do?

  Lacing his fingers, Mike put his hands behind his head and gave her a look of, You figure it out.

  Samantha did.

  Lying still beside Mike, her skin sweaty, every muscle in her body limp, Samantha smiled dreamily. “What was that?”

  There was a little smugness in Mike’s voice when he spoke. “Sam, my dear, you have just experienced what is commonly known as an orgasm. Like it?”

  She chuckled. “Michael, had I known you were capable of producing such an effect, on the first day I met you I would have grabbed you by the neck, pulled you into the house, and had my way with you on the foyer floor.”

  “Then we would have been in perfect accord, because that’s just what I had in mind for you.”

  “Ahhh, but would you have respected me in the morning?”

  “Speaking of respect, we have two alternatives now: One, we can snuggle together and go to sleep or, two, we can fill the tub with hot water, put in some of your smelly stuff, wash every nook and cranny of each other’s bodies, get out, dry each other off, come back in here and I can give you what I think will probably be your very first lesson in oral sex.”

  Opening her eyes just a bit, Samantha gave a jaw-cracking yawn and said, “I’m awfully tired, Mike. Maybe we should sleep.” His face fell, making him look like a boy who’d just been told that he wouldn’t get to go to the circus after all. Yawning again, she scratched her ribs. “On the other hand, I could use a bath.”

  He had her in the bathroom before she could say another word.

  24

  It was in the bathtub that Mike asked her why she’d waited so long before going to bed with him. He tried to make his question sound as though the answer didn’t matter to him, but she wasn’t fooled by his tone.

  “Richard told me I wasn’t any good at sex and that’s why he had to go to another woman.”

  “And you believed him?” Mike sounded as though he thought she were the dumbest person in the world.

  “How the hell was I to know that he wasn’t telling me the truth?” she fairly shouted at him. “He’d been to bed with lots of women; I’d been to bed with him and only him. What was I supposed to do, get a second opinion? Was I supposed to go to a bar or somewhere, pick up a man, go to bed with him, and find out whether I was actually bad in bed or not? Let me tell you something, Mr. Confidence, when you believe you’re not desirable to men, you bloody well aren’t desirable.”

  It was later, after the extraordinary success of Mike’s very special lesson, that he asked her more questions about her ex-husband. Now, rather like boxers resting between rounds, Samantha snuggled her cheek on Mike’s bare chest.

  “You want to tell me about your ex-husband?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I’ve never yet met a woman who could resist telling anyone who’d listen what a jerk her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband was.”

  Lifting her head, Sam glared at him, but he pushed her head back down. For a moment her pride and her wish to talk warred with one another. She didn’t want to tell him about her marriage or her divorce because they both made her feel like a failure, but at the same time she’d like to tell someone the truth—not the sugar-coated version she’d told her father, but the truth. Spilling her guts won out over pride.

  “The first two years my marriage was all right, I guess. We never had any great passionate affair, but we learned to adjust to each other. Richard had a partnership with two other men in a CPA firm, and I worked at ComputerLand.

  “Everything was fine, I thought, but one day he came home and told me he was profoundly unhappy. Profoundly. Not very unhappy or extraordinarily unhappy but profoundly unhappy. He went on to say that the reason he was unhappy was because he had always wanted to write the Great American Novel, and he knew he wasn’t going to get to because he had to spend all his time earning a living.”

  She shook her head. “I was shocked. It was the first time I’d heard of this great ambition of his, and I felt guilty because I’d lived with the man for two whole years and had no idea he wanted to do anything except calculate people’s taxes. We sat up all that night and talked.”

  Pausing, she thought about that night. “I think that night was the closest we ever were before or at any time afterward. We made a bargain that night that for one year I was to support the two of us while he devoted his time to writing. Part of the bargain was that he was to take care of the house since I’d be holding down two jobs.”

  She couldn’t seem to keep her anger from rising. “I don’t know what happened. It started out all right, but then I’d come home from work and the kitchen would still be a mess from breakfast, so I’d clean it up before going to my evening job at the spa, then the laundry would pile up so I’d wash it on Sunday. By the end of a year I was doing everything—housework, earning the living, everything. But I didn’t mind because every Sunday afternoon Richard would read me descriptive passages from the marvelous book he was constantly working on. He’d never tell me the plot, he’d just read me those elegant, isolated paragraphs.”

  She had to take a breath before going on. “We used to talk about what we were going to buy and where we were going to go when he received his multimillion-dollar advance for the book. Planning our future helped make me feel less tired so that I didn’t mind doi
ng housework and earning the living.”

  As Mike stroked her hair, she realized that the time with Richard was beginning to fade in her mind. “But the agreed-upon year turned into eighteen months, then into two years, and by the end of two years I was so tired I’m not sure I was even alive.”

  Mike felt her body tense as she continued speaking. “But then one day I was at the store and received a call from my father’s neighbor.”

  Mike didn’t say anything, but he had been with Dave then. He was the one who had persuaded Dave to allow the neighbor to call Sam.

  “The neighbor told me my father was dying, and when I heard, I just wanted to go home to Richard and have him hold me.” She gave a little snort of derision. “When I heard the news of my father’s impending death, I thought I’d reached my breaking point.

  “Anyway, when I got home Richard wasn’t there. I must have been a little frantic because I began searching through his desk looking for something that might tell me where he’d gone. When that turned up nothing, I went to his bookshelves. Looking back on it, I think Richard must have thought I wouldn’t dare look at his books because he hadn’t gone to a lot of trouble to hide his conspiracy. The books had markers in them and passages highlighted. One by one I read all the passages he’d read to me during the Sunday afternoons. Not one of them had been written by him, all of them were by other writers.”

  She took a breath. “By the time I figured out that he hadn’t been writing, I wanted to know what he had been doing for those two years, so I looked at his computer. One of the first things he’d asked me to do when I’d set it up for him was to show him how to encode his files so a person had to know a password to read them. It took me only seven words to find his password—the name of a dog he’d had when he was a boy—and I looked to see what he’d been writing.”

  She took a while before going on, and Mike didn’t say a word, just waited patiently for her to continue. “On the screen was a detailed diary of his sexual liaisons with the woman who used to be his secretary. To this day, Mike, I don’t understand why he chose her over me. I don’t want to sound vain, but I’m better looking than she is and a great deal more intelligent, and I have a sense of humor whereas she has none. I still don’t understand it. I tried very, very hard to please Richard. I tried to give him whatever he wanted. Where did I fail?”