Outfox

by Sandra Brown

  Dazed, she nodded.

  He gave himself a fifteen-second rinse, turned off the taps, and helped her out of the stall. He yanked a towel off the bar and handed it to her, then took one for himself. They haphazardly dried themselves as they stumbled into one of the bedrooms. His, he thought, although he didn’t know for sure and didn’t care. It had a bed.

  He flung back the covers, then sat down on the edge, placed his hands on her bottom, and pulled her between his spread legs. Leaning into her, he rubbed his face against her breasts, touched his tongue to her nipples, flicked it over the occasional freckle and imagined it melting in his mouth like a speck of raw sugar. He nuzzled her middle and swirled his tongue over her navel. Moving lower, he breathed out through his lips into the damp curls.

  She spoke his name in a husky whisper.

  He turned her and guided her down until she was lying on her back, arms at her sides, hands at shoulder level, palms up. Taking her up on the invitation he saw in the unresisting pose, as well as the look in her smoky eyes, he knelt, opened her thighs, and kissed her with utmost intimacy, his tongue doing as his fingers had minutes earlier. He took tender love bites, applied gentle suction, tantalized her with erotic play, and only then exposed that most vulnerable spot.

  Her body jerked in reaction to the first sweep of his tongue, then she began moving in response to and in anticipation of each fluid caress. They increased in frequency, the carnal friction intensifying with each one until she was arching up for more, then more, and more, until an orgasm seized her. He stayed with her, whisking his lips against her, murmuring her name, until the final aftershock shuddered through her and she lay still.

  He levered himself up and above her—and was shocked to see tears sliding down her temples into her hair. She reached for him, grabbing at him until their mouths were melded and he had pushed into her.

  But he went only far enough to secure himself just inside. There he waited, wanting to commit to memory this moment of feeling her around him for the first time. Then he continued pressing into her until he was solidly imbedded.

  She hugged him to her tightly, and it was fantastic, but he had to move or he was going to die. He buried his face in her hair. “If I get too rough, slow me, stop me. I want…I want…Oh, God…”

  The mating instinct took over. In spite of his best intentions, his strokes became faster and stronger. A slight shift in his position enabled him to reach deeper, and he did. God, did he.

  “Don’t hold back,” Talia said on a near sob, lifting his head from the crook of her neck so she could look into his face.

  He kissed her again and continued kissing her until he couldn’t focus on anything except the orgasm that rocked her and caused her to bow her back and clench around him. That was his undoing. Grafted to her, he came in a burst of light.

  Drowsily she said, “Moving to the bed was a good idea.”

  “One the best I’ve had lately. I might have irreparably injured us in that shower stall.”

  “It would have been worth it.”

  He hitched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “Hmm,” she said, stretching luxuriantly.

  She lay on her back but was angled slightly toward him. He was lying on his side, propped on one elbow, extremely attentive to her nakedness, but seemingly blasé toward his own.

  Of course he had no call to be self-conscious. He was lean and long limbed, muscled but not bulky, clouded with lovely brown hair in all the right places.

  Against her, it all felt wonderful.

  “Can you get drunk on sex?” she asked.

  “I could get drunk on you.”

  “I feel as though I’m on display.”

  Drex gave her a lazy smile. “I’m feasting my eyes, all right.”

  “Your tiger eyes.”

  “Tiger eyes?”

  “That’s what they remind me of.”

  He leaned down and licked the slope of her breast. “Hear me purring?”

  She laughed and sank her fingers into his unruly hair. “I heard you growling. Several times.” She pulled him toward her for a kiss. It was lazy, unhurried, and delicious.

  When they finally broke apart, he resumed his position and continued his survey of her terrain by touching her nipple with his fingertip. “I’m going to have to coin some new adjectives to describe color.…” His caress had caused her nipple to tighten. “…and texture.”

  His hand moved down the center of her torso, his fingers barely grazing her skin. When he reached her mound, he feathered the hair. “But some things defy description.”

  “You don’t need descriptive words. You’re not a writer.”

  “Hmm.” Preoccupied with what his fingers were doing, he said, “I may take it up just for the research.” He angled his head back and took her in, his gaze moving from her tousled hair to the tips of her toes. “You are gorgeous, Talia Shafer.”

  “I was going to say the same about you.” She scrubbed his bristly jaw line with her knuckles, smoothed his sun-glinted eyebrows with her index finger, then trailed it down his cheek and dipped it into his dimple. He deepened it for her by smiling, and she laughed lightly.

  It felt so good, so right to be with him like this, she was reluctant to bring into the open something that had been needling her. She reached for his hand and drew it up to the center of her chest, holding it between her breasts, but not provocatively. She traced the network of veins on the back of it. “Drex, what we just did was amazing.”

  “On a scale of one to ten?”

  She smiled, but he must have sensed that she wasn’t teasing, that what she had to say was serious, because he pulled the covers up over them before resettling beside her and intertwining their legs.

  “I don’t want to spoil this,” she said. “But I must ask.”

  He brows drew together. “What?”

  “You talked tonight about Jasper playing an inside joke on you.”

  “Something to let me know that he’d gotten the best of me.”

  She shifted her gaze back to his hand and ran her finger along the ridge of his knuckles. “Did you sleep with his wife to get the best of him?”

  He became so still that she feared she had ruined something precious, and that the memory she would be left with was of him being highly offended and storming from the bed, the suite, her life.

  But after a ponderous silence, he said, “Look at me.” She did. He said, “No. Believe me, wanting you in my bed has been no joke, inside or otherwise. Mike, Gif, and I had words. They lectured me like maiden aunts about letting my dick do my thinking. They cited the conflict of interest this—” he said, sawing his hand between them, “—would create. You see the effect of all their wise counsel.”

  He turned the hand she held against her chest and linked their fingers. “If I had wanted to use you to taunt Jasper, that’s what I would have done. Taunted. I would have let him think that we had slept together or planned to at our first opportunity.”

  He studied their clasped hands. “You probably won’t believe me, but I swear, for all my tomcatting, I’ve never been with a married woman. You’re my first adultery, and I wouldn’t break my personal moral code just to score points against Jasper.”

  “But you were unfaithful to your wife.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You told Jasper—”

  “I’ve never had a wife to cheat on.”

  Her head went back an inch. “What?”

  “I’ve never been married.”

  She was stunned by the joy that spread through her from knowing that. “No one special enough to make you stop tomcatting?”

  “No time or inclination to let anything special develop. Besides, I wouldn’t drag a good woman into my particular hell.”

  “Into that dark place you have to go?”

  He nodded. “Hazard of the trade.”

  “You didn’t drag me into it this afternoon. In fact you shut me out.”

  “Because it’s hardly conducive to
foreplay, and I was hoping to get lucky.”

  She smiled, but didn’t let him flirt her away from the subject. “Mike and I talked.”

  “Oh, great. Did he go into his maiden aunt persona?”

  “A little. Dr. Easton.”

  She recapped her conversation with Mike. When she finished, Drex said, “I started looking for Weston Graham long before I earned my doctorate.”

  “When you learned he had killed your mother? How did that come about?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear that?”

  “Yes. I’d like to know.”

  “You accept that Weston Graham and Jasper Ford are one and the same?”

  “You’ve convinced me. No, actually, he’s convinced me with his actions over the past two days.”

  He reflected for a moment, then said, “Although I’m not certain he launched his career with my mother, I suspect it. Maybe he hadn’t consciously mapped out woman killing as a career path. But after he’d rid himself of her and walked away unscathed, he recognized his talent and saw a future in exploiting it.”

  She scooted closer to him and laid her hand on his chest. “I saw her picture in your files. She was lovely.”

  “I have no memory of her.”

  “How old were you when she went missing?”

  “Around ten, I think. But my dad had moved the two of us to Alaska years before that.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He took a deep breath, rubbed his legs against hers, readjusted his head on the pillow. “A lot of it I’ve had to piece together because Dad wouldn’t talk about it. Never. But what I gather is that she abandoned us to be with Weston Graham.”

  “She abandoned you, too?”

  “I don’t know if she did so without a second thought, or if Dad was unbending on keeping me with him. He cut me off from her. Completely.” He told her about the name change. “That’s why I wasn’t afraid to use my name with Jasper. I knew he wouldn’t recognize it.”

  “Wasn’t that a rather spiteful thing for your dad to do?”

  “No doubt spite was his motivation. He made it impossible for her to find us. But it was fortuitous, because it also prevented Weston from locating us after he’d disposed of her. We might have been two of those loose threads you referred to earlier.

  “I knew none of this at the time, understand,” he said. “My first clear recollections are of living in Alaska, and it was always just Dad and me.”

  “What you described to me, all the moving around, et cetera?”

  “All true.”

  “It must’ve been a lonely life for you.”

  He admitted as much by giving her a rueful smile. “On the other hand, I didn’t know anything different. Not until I got older and saw that other dads actually talked over mealtimes. They laughed and joshed with their kids. They had male buddies they hung out with to drink beer and watch ball games. They had women they slept with. Our house was devoid of anything feminine. I began to notice the touches that my friends’ houses had that ours didn’t. It was the…the appealing something that a woman emanates.”

  He fell silent for a moment, then said, “My mother’s desertion robbed Dad of all that enjoyment, of all joy. She stole his soul. Then Weston stole from her.”

  “She had money?”

  “What seemed like a lot at the time. It was modest by today’s standards. After her, Weston, with a new identity, set his sights much higher. But when she went missing, and investigators began digging into her life, it was discovered that all her assets, which she’d inherited from her parents, had miraculously disappeared along with her.”

  “How did your father learn of it?”

  “It made the newspapers. I didn’t know he’d saved them until later. But I remember when the change came over him. He’d never been a hard drinker, but he started drinking heavily at night, every night, long into the night. He became even more taciturn than normal. I didn’t ask him what the matter was, I think out of fear of what he would tell me. But even if I had asked, he wouldn’t have told me. She had been eradicated from my life.”

  “But your dad still loved her. He was bereaved.”

  “I see that now. I didn’t then. Years later, when I was old enough to read up on her disappearance, I matched the timing of it to that dark period when Dad really shut down.”

  “And you were around ten years old? That must have been an awful time for you.”

  “In one respect, it was beneficial. That’s when I learned to be sociable. I stayed over at friends’ houses a lot. Their parents must’ve felt sorry for me. They took me in, saw that I was well fed. Anyway, over time, Dad stopped drinking and went back to being more himself. Which was still a level of bereavement. He grieved for my mother, for everything about her, until the day he died.”

  “When was that?”

  “I was in my first year of college in Missoula. I was summoned home. He’d had a stroke, which didn’t kill him right away.”

  “Did you make it home in time to be with him?”

  “That’s when he shared the story of my mother. He’d secretly kept all the newspaper write-ups about her disappearance. He told me about Weston Graham, who was sought as the prime suspect but never captured. Her disappearance remains a cold case of the LAPD.”

  He raised his right hand to within inches of her face. “See the scar?” A faint white line bisected his palm. “While my dad lay dying, I cut both our palms, pressed them together, and took a blood oath to get the bastard.” Wryly, he added, “It’s taken one hell of a long time. All my adult life. And I’m still working on it.”

  With gruffness in his voice, he continued. “I wouldn’t trade for those last minutes with Dad, though. When I made that vow, he cried. It was the most naked emotion I’d ever seen from him. Ever. In my life. It was the closest he and I ever came to having a genuine father-son relationship. He died later that day.”

  She took his hand and kissed the palm, openmouthed. “He loved you very much.”

  He looked at her with doubt.

  “Perhaps he took you away to spite or to wound your mother, but maybe he saw Weston for what he was and feared for you.”

  “Maybe,” he said grudgingly. “That has occurred to me.”

  “Drex, if he hadn’t loved you and wanted you with him, he could have dumped you anywhere along the way, and at any time. It couldn’t have been easy for a single man working on the pipeline to rear a child alone.”

  “He felt an obligation to me, maybe. But he had lost the will to live.”

  “Then why didn’t he kill himself and be done with it? Leave you to your own devices?” She raised her eyebrows in question.

  He gave her a hard look, but he didn’t say anything.

  “He loved you. Believe it.” She settled close to him again. “How do you feel toward your mother?”

  “I vacillate between deep resentment over her letting me go and sorrow for the fate she must’ve suffered. Fair to say that I’m conflicted?”

  “Fair to say.”

  They lay quietly for several minutes, then he placed his forearm across his eyes and moaned.

  “What?”

  “I finally got you naked in bed. I should be talking dirty to you, not blathering all this maudlin crap.”

  “You can still talk dirty.” She slid her hand beneath the sheet. It took only one stroke to bring him erect. She laughed. “Well, that didn’t take long.”

  “I told you a sad story. Are you doing this out of pity?”

  “I don’t think anyone would pity a man so well endowed.”

  He flashed a grin that would have done the devil proud.

  “But even if it is out of pity, do you want me to stop?” she teased.

  “Hell, no. Have at it.”

  She rolled onto him and began dropping kisses on his chest.

  “Talia?”

  “Don’t bother me, I’m busy.”

  “I just want to ask—”

  “Later.”

  She
opened her thighs and guided him in. He hissed swear words as she slowly sank down onto him and began rocking. He grunted with pleasure. “And I thought the first time was good.” He angled himself up in order to reach her breasts. His mouth was hot and avid, and left her nipples wet with loving.

  When he lay back, he gripped her hips between his hands and coaxed her, coached her, cajoled her in the raunchiest language. Several minutes later, on short puffs of breath, he said, “Have at it. That’s what I said. But, sweetheart…God a’mighty.”

  He slid his hand between them. His revolving thumb worked its magic, and half a minute later, she lay sated atop his heaving chest.

  When she had regained her breath, she whispered, “You were saying?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Before I had my way with you, you were about to ask me something.”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  “No, ask.”

  He combed his fingers through her hair and rearranged it on her shoulders.

  “I remember you doing that last night when you came up to the guest room.”

  “I couldn’t keep myself from touching you. I’d have rather put my hands inside those ugly pajamas, but I settled for stroking your hair.”

  “It was nice. The kind of touch I needed then. What were you going to ask?”

  He hesitated. “When we were in the shower, you said it was nice to be needed. You practically asked permission to give me the best damn hand job ever.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t get me off the subject. What I’m wondering is…You don’t have to tell me. You owe me no explanation. I just—”

  “Jasper neither invited or welcomed attention like that. He didn’t…He never said, ‘Have at it.’”

  He didn’t respond immediately, and when he did, it wasn’t to pursue the topic of her relationship with Jasper. “I probably could have said something a little more romantic.”

  “It was romantic to me.”

  He tipped her head up. His eyes moved over her face, taking in every feature. He ran his thumb along her lower lip. “Sleepy?”

  “I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open.”

  “Let’s go to sleep.” His reach was long enough to turn off the lamp on the night table.