by Andrews, Amy
He didn’t move for a beat or two but when he did he stripped them down his legs in record time, taking his underwear down too, kicking them both away. And oh-dear-good-fucking-Christ he was art bought to life. A study in male beauty, laid out before her.
Naked and exposed for her viewing pleasure.
Pillows of muscle, hardness of bone. Planes and dips and ridges from the dark, stubbly stretch of his neck to the sturdiness of his clavicles. To the solid slabs of his quads and the prominence of his hip bones.
And that v, of course. That fascinating v of muscle slung between those two pelvic ridges, funnelling down to his groin and a part of his anatomy that widened Kelsey’s eyes.
His cock was all the things.
Sprouting hard and rampant from the thatch of dark hair at his groin. Poised for action. Long. Thick. Taut. Perfectly veined. The crown engorged, flushed purple. The slipperiness between her legs kicked up a notch. Her clit throbbed.
A woman could become a slave to that thing. Owned by it - whiling away her days screwing it, sucking it, writing poetry about it.
It was the kind of cock that inspired literature.
“Your turn.”
She dragged her gaze back to his face. Back to that mouth and those eyes watching her so intently. She was surprised her clothes hadn’t just melted right off under his blatant eye-fucking.
Disrobing in front of a guy for the first time was always confronting – even when there was an existing relationship. But the way he was looking at her, the way his dick surged against his belly and his chest rose and fell in a heavy, uneven rhythm, emboldened Kelsey.
In a flash, her shirt was over her head, her bra was unclasped and falling down her arms and she was wiggling out of her skirt at the same time she was kicking off her heels.
Kelsey knew she was perky and pretty. She’d been told that by guys ever since she’d lost her virginity at seventeen. But, at five two and a size twelve she wasn’t exactly supermodel skinny. Her stomach wasn’t dead flat. There was some cellulite going on with her thighs.
He didn’t seem to care.
“Theé,” he muttered, deep and ragged as his gaze zeroed in on her breasts like they were all the things.
She moved then, taking two steps and climbing on the bed, climbing on him, straddling his hips, settling the slickness between her legs over the hardness between his. His hands slid to her thighs and she rubbed against his dick eliciting a groan that filled the charged air with a cocktail of pheromones.
He vaulted up then, an arm snaking around her waist, pulling her in tight and close as his mouth claimed first one nipple then the other. Kelsey’s gasp soon turned to a moan, her arms circling his head as his mouth set up a lick, swirl, suck pattern that had stars bursting behind her eyelids.
If this had been his job she’d have awarded him employee of the month.
But it still wasn’t enough...A wild kind of hunger roared in her blood, beating like a drum at her pulse points and rushing like Niagara Falls through her ears. Kelsey needed more, she needed all of him.
She ground the heavy, aching lips of her sex along the hard ridge of his shaft. It was so damn good it sucked her breath away and he groaned against her nipple, bucking his hips to meet the reckless demands of her body.
His hand slid between them and Kelsey gasped as his finger found the tight knot of nerves and stroked it over and over as he licked his way up her neck. Oh man! It’d been a long time between orgasms and she was going to come embarrassingly quickly if he kept that up.
“Fuuuck,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut as the cabin seemed to tilt.
She whimpered as his fingers slid lower and his mouth worked higher. His tongue was hot and wet at her ear lobe, somehow opening up a sensory pathway straight to her clit, stimulating it with every flick of his tongue. Kelsey moaned and ground against him again as Ari guided his cock, thick and ready, to her entrance.
Thankfully it was enough to rouse her from the stupor drugging her sensibilities. “No wait...stop.” She was breathing hard as she grabbed hold of his wrist. “Condom.”
He stared blankly for a beat or two then pressed his forehead between her breasts. “Christe...” His breathing was laboured as he lifted his head, his gaze finding hers. “I don’t have a condom.”
Kelsey gave a half laugh. “Yes you do. You have two in your wallet.”
He blinked. “I...do?”
She nodded. “I saw them there.”
“It must have been Theo,” he said, almost to himself. “My brother.”
“Does it matter?” she asked, conscious of his cock still thick and hard between her legs.
“Hell no.”
He kissed her again – brief and cataclysmic - before they disengaged, half crawling, half wriggling up the bed in a tangle of arms and legs and sheets. Kelsey didn’t notice the crisp freshness of the linen or the fat comfort of the pillows, just Ari rolling on his side, grabbing his wallet, riffling through it and pulling out a foil packet.
Kelsey watched, her entire body flushed with arousal and anticipation as he tore it open and sheathed his cock. Then he was reaching for her, rolling on top of her, his hips aligning with hers, his cock dragging through the slick furrow of her sex, spiking her pulse and hitching her breath. He stared at her intently as he slowly ground his cock against her aching core shooting a hot streak of lust up her spine.
Kelsey clutched his shoulders and arched into him, locking her legs around the backs of his thighs. He ground again taking full advantage of their horizontal position.
“Yes,” she whispered into his neck as the thick crown notched full against her entrance. “There, right there.”
He thrust, groaning something deep and guttural and definitely not English into her ear as he slid into her thick and solid and good.
So. Damn. Good.
Kelsey cried out, sliding her hands down his back to grasp his clenched ass cheeks, holding him there. They both stilled for a moment, their breathing thick and loud.
Kelsey was the first to recover. “More,” she whispered.
He raised his head, their gazes locking and Kelsey’s breath caught at the undiluted lust she saw in Ari’s eyes, at the tightly leashed power. His body was trembling and she knew he was holding himself in check.
“All of it,” she muttered before raising her head off the bed and kissing him.
He met her halfway, swooping down to claim her mouth, to plunder it with his tongue, to dominate it, to own it with every twist of his head. Kelsey’s world turned molten, her veins lava tubes coursing through her body as she clung to him, taking and giving with equal ferocity.
His hips moved too. Slow and steady, but fuck that. She didn’t want slow and steady, she wanted pure uninhibited man. She wanted him to fuck her the way he was kissing her – deep and dirty. She was committing an act that was, in essence, a sackable offence.
For damn sure, it had better blow her freaking mind.
She shifted, arched, squirmed, opened her hips a little further and cried out when he slid in higher and harder on a low, guttural groan. And it was like the chains that were leashing him suddenly broke, the shackles falling away and he plundered her pussy like he was plundering her mouth – relentlessly.
His hips were a piston, rocking her closer and closer. Rocking him closer and closer. His ass tightening, his back bowing, his mouth tearing from hers, his lips pressing behind her ear as he groaned and panted and called out to god.
“Theé, mou.”
And then he slipped his hands between them, his fingers deftly finding her hair-trigger state, causing Kelsey to also call out to god.
In a much less poetic way.
“Jesus...fuck! Christ! I‘m coming.”
And she was. One stroke of his finger – two - and a violent flare of sensation burst out from the taut bundle of nerves, strangling her breath in her throat. Her body bucked and bowed, subsumed by the tremors of her release, her legs locking tight around his waist as her pu
ssy clamped tight around his cock.
He came too, gasping his release right into her ear with another string of words in his mother tongue that somehow managed to sound like ancient Greek literature and pornography all at once. They spun her higher and faster, pushing her into another realm, a dizzying aphrodisiac as he chased her into the thick fugue of bliss.
Kelsey lost all touch with time and space for what seemed like hours but what was, in actuality, only a few minutes. When she came back to herself, Ari was easing himself off, rolling onto his back.
Neither said anything for long moments as he removed the condom and disposed of it in the bin. Kelsey was just content to lie in the bliss. Not psychoanalyse what had just happened. Not worry about the potential for career and therefore financial disaster.
Frankly, it didn’t feel like a disaster. There was no sense of doom lying here next to him, just the feeling that it’d been worth the risk.
And surely a one-off could be contained?
“My name is Ari George,” he said suddenly, his voice a low rasp into the quiet of the room.
Kelsey lifted her head, their eyes meeting. A slight smile played on his mouth as if he was as bemused as her by what had just occurred. “Kelsey Armitage.”
And they both laughed.
Ari stared at the ceiling as Kelsey, curled into his side, drew patterns on his chest. He should be chilled out considering the orgasm he’d just experienced but there was a wildly emotional tug-of-war going on inside his chest right now.
He felt...good. Alive.
Not dead and cold and desolate like he had for so long. But warm and breathing, his pulse flowing through his temples and thumping in his groin. There was a lightness in his chest he’d forgotten used to be normal.
And that was utterly terrifying.
What the fuck? How could three years of darkness just suddenly break into light? He didn’t know how to exist in the light anymore. He liked the dark.
He knew his way around there.
He didn’t know who this person was who smiled at cocktail umbrellas and kissed a woman he barely knew – fucked a woman he barely knew.
Why didn’t he feel terrible? And disloyal. And disrespectful. To Talia. To her memory. Why hadn’t he thought about her even once? When had he stopped thinking about her every second of the day?
Why did he feel good?
The only thing that made any sense of it was what his therapist had been fond of repeating. About grief not having a smooth trajectory. That there’d be ups and downs and backward slips and Ari clung to the thought that this was some weird kind of up. That wouldn’t last.
Some kind of aberration before he slid back into the familiar folds of darkness. That had to be it.
“Is Ari your proper name?”
The enquiry yanked him out of his psychoanalysis like a tug to his hair. Her enquiry was soft and low, not accusatory or suspicious, but Ari was already tense enough without Kelsey digging into his background.
“I mean, is it just Ari, or is it short for something?”
Relief, cool and fresh flowed through Ari’s body – the enquiry had been innocent. Still...he’d just had sex with a woman whilst pretending to be someone else. Sex with a woman who wasn’t Talia.
Guilt layered on top of guilt.
“It’s short for Aristotle.”
“So...no pressure then,” she said and laughed.
Despite his inner turmoil, Ari laughed, too. What was it about Kelsey that put him so damn at ease? “I don’t think my parents thought I’d follow in the great philosopher’s footsteps or anything. It’s just a common Greek name.”
“You sound very English for a Greek guy. Were you born there?”
“No. I was born in Athens.” Being dragged out of his head into normal, everyday conversation was helping with the tight knots of tension in Ari’s muscles. It felt good to be able to tell some truths right now. And Theo always insisted the best way to execute a lie was to stick to the truth as much as possible. “But I lived in the UK for a long time.”
“Oh? Whereabouts?”
“London.”
Ari waited for the familiar stab of pain, the feeling of loss that came every time he thought about his decade in London. But it didn’t. There was just an odd kind of ache that felt like something akin to nostalgia.
And that was terrifying too. The stab was always wrenching but it was familiar. The kind of pain that kept his love and his memories alive.
The knots tightened again.
“London is amazing,” she said, her voice rich with affection. “Did you work there?”
“Yes. For ten years.”
She rolled up onto her elbow and looked down at him, her hair falling around her face and brushing her shoulders, her cupid’s bow pursing a little. She was so lovely Ari’s heart skipped a beat. “And what do you do, Aristotle George?”
“I’m an accountant.”
That was the truth. He was an accountant. He just happened to be the chief accountant of a billion dollar business.
“Really?” She raised an eyebrow clearly surprised. “And here I thought all accountants were boring guys with glasses who were wizards with numbers and tax law not –” She stroked her index finger along his bottom lip, “making women come.”
For a moment, Ari let her compliment go to his head. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be flattered by a woman. “You should never judge a book by its cover.”
“Oh trust me. I’m never going to look at another accountant the same ever again.”
The thought of Kelsey looking at other accountants, looking at other men for that matter, was disconcerting. Which was confusing as fuck. Why should he care who she looked at?
“Happy to be addressing stereotypes,” he said, to cover his confusion.
She laughed and Ari’s lungs felt too big for his chest as she laid her head on his shoulder again and went back to swirling patterns on his chest.
Her fingers stopped after a minute and he started to wonder if she was asleep. A trickle of adrenaline kicked in, stirring uneasily through his gut. This was all too much. Too fast. He hadn’t slept with a woman since Talia and that would be plain...weird, right?
Spending all night in bed with someone other than his wife?
But he needn’t have worried, Kelsey didn’t linger for long, rolling into a sitting position a minute later, her feet landing on the floor. “I have to go.”
Ari didn’t stop her. He didn’t protest. He didn’t ask her to stay. Even though, perversely, he didn’t want her to go. Or that part of him that had gone gaga over cocktail umbrellas and insisted on feeling so fucking good, did anyway.
She padded to the end of the bed and picked up her clothes, suddenly business like as she looked at him and said, “You know we can’t do this again, right?”
Ari nodded, the adrenaline in his system ebbing. Yes. Fuck yes. It had been a crazy kind of interlude, a...moment of weakness, a reaction to three long, dark years of heartache and sorrow. Or something. He didn’t know exactly. He’d figure out how it fit into the jigsaw of his grief – because what other explanation was there? - later, after the cruise was done.
For now it was done.
“Yeah. I know.”
She disappeared into the bathroom but kept the door open. “Just to clarify,” she said, her voice floating out to him, “that means no flirting with me in the dining room or trying to monopolise my time at the bar, or asking other staff about me.”
“I know.” Ari didn’t need any clarification. He wanted exactly the same thing.
“I don’t want anyone guessing something happened between us.”
“They won’t.”
His response must have been a touch too flippant for her because she stepped out the bathroom looking at him like he didn’t fully appreciate the stakes. She was in her skirt and bra which was seriously hot and made him realise his head and his body were in two different places.
The thought was slightly mollifying. Phys
ical attraction was easier to dismiss.
“I’m not kidding around.” Her gaze nailed him to the bed as she stuck her hands into her blouse and pulled it over her head. “I could lose my job.”
Ari fixed her with a steady gaze as her head reappeared from the fabric. “I don’t kiss and tell.”
What had happened in this room with Kelsey would stay in this room. And hopefully not accompany him all around the goddamn ship. Replaying in his brain.
“Good.” She nodded, as she smoothed her shirt at the waist. “But to clarify even further, a one-and-done thing includes not getting in touch after the cruise, as well. No exchanging emails. No Facebook requests or dirty DM’s.”
If Ari had been in a different emotional place he might have been insulted by how completely Kelsey wanted to severe their connection. But the implications of what they’d done weighed on him too, even if it was for totally different reasons. “Not on Facebook.”
Most people usually looked at him strangely when he said that but Kelsey didn’t bat an eyelid, she just kept right on going. “I know we’ll probably run into each other around the ship from time to time - that’s unavoidable. But the second this ship docks in Venice, its goodbye forever.”
The thought of never seeing Kelsey again should have cheered him and Ari nodded and said, “Absolutely,” but there was an unexpected hitch right in the centre of his chest which was utter madness.
Kelsey was a...one night stand. It was preposterous to feel anything.
“Okay then.” She stepped into her shoes, her height rising by two inches. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
Ari nodded. “Kalinita, Kelsey.”
She didn’t return his goodnight just turned and strode to the door, paused briefly to listen for noise in the passageway, then opened it and slipped out.
The door clicked shut two seconds later. Ari couldn’t decide if he was relieved or bereft...
CHAPTER FOUR
At eleven thirty the next morning, Kelsey was out the back of the pool deck bar cutting up fruit during a lull in customers trying not to think about last night. She’d managed to slice three oranges when her partner for the shift, Rasheesh – one of the beverage managers who often did a shift to keep his skills up - called out, “Service, please.”
