Technically Faking

by Robin Hale

  “Spice Girl most closely related to your sexual awakening?” Amber asked brightly, a mischievous glint in her eye.

  “Has there ever,” I began seriously. “Been a woman more compelling than Mel B in 1996?”

  Rain laughed and let out a cheer for the group on stage.

  “I was always a Baby Spice girl,” Amber mused, settling back against my side.

  I noted she’d picked the blonde and let the confirmation of her preferences settle satisfaction under my skin.

  “Dave,” Rain said as the cheering died down. “Be the Elton John to my Kiki Dee?” She held out a hand and hopped down from her stool.

  “Always,” Dave agreed with a winning smile.

  They headed off toward the DJ’s table, arm in arm, and I nuzzled against Amber’s neck in their wake. The whole evening had been intoxicating. Not chemically. Not from the same beer I’d been nursing — tipping for five, since I knew my habits — but from the feeling of having my hands on Amber. Being able to touch her when she was nearby. Being able to put my hands, my lips on her and know that she’d melt further into me every time I did. Getting to do it where other people could see, could understand what I meant when I touched her. Being allowed to claim her.

  Dave and Rain knew who I was. It’d been on their faces the instant they saw me. They’d probably heard most of the same media rumors that would’ve plagued Amber at the beginning, but it hadn’t touched the evening at all. They didn’t care. They didn’t care how well my company was doing. They weren’t asking for help with their startup or looking for the inside track on getting a job. What mattered to them was that Amber smiled when she saw me. That I was willing to sing to her, to let Amber show the entire internet that I was singing to her. They cared that I belonged to her and that I wanted her to belong to me.

  It was utterly addicting. Spending time with Amber around her roommates was rapidly eroding the idea that everything we were doing was a ruse, a ploy to keep me at the top of my company, fending off all comers.

  Amber hummed contentedly at the brush of my lips against the hot skin of her neck.

  “Come home with me,” I whispered.

  “Hmm?” She cocked her head, letting me get closer.

  “Come home with me.” The words were still soft, still imperceptible beyond the circle my arms made around her body. But the heat that rose in Amber’s face told me she knew exactly what I was saying.

  “Sure,” she said at last. “I guess people would expect —”

  I shook my head, cutting off the flow of her words as surely as covering her mouth would have. “No,” I said. I slid my hand from her hip to her jaw, cradling that beautiful face and tilting it toward me.

  It felt like the first time. The brush of her lips, the taste of her mouth — salty peanuts and cola and dark rum — the way she breathed against me like I was welcome there. I dipped my tongue past the soft barrier of her lips and traced along the inside where she was soft and sensitive, where I could taste her better.

  It wasn’t anything like pretend. I had her in my arms and I kissed her because I knew my heart would stop if I didn’t.

  “Come home with me,” I said again, once I was sure she’d understood.

  Her eyelids fluttered back open and Amber swallowed hard as she nodded.

  * * *

  THE TRIP back to my apartment — ‘home’ only in the sense that it was where I wanted Amber to spend the night with me — was strangely short. I’d raised the privacy screen between us and the driver and spent the drive with my hands on Amber’s hips, her waist. My mouth on hers.

  There were sounds of traffic outside the windows, the smell of subtle air freshener through the ventilation system in the car, but as far as I was concerned, nothing existed more than three inches in any direction from Amber Kowalczyk.

  My bones were on fire.

  Every inch of my skin ached. It was like thirst, like Amber was water and I’d been dying in the desert without her. My fingers were restless as they stroked over her skin. My mouth was relentless, coaxing and plundering in unpredictable cycles. I had a sudden, inane rush of gratitude for my constant cardiovascular workouts as my heart thudded against the cage of my chest. I couldn’t imagine what my body would be doing if I biked fewer miles.

  The car stopped and we stepped out in a reluctant fugue state, something about parting enough to move making the rest of the world fuzzy and gray. I murmured a greeting to the man at the door, pulled Amber into the elevator, and managed not to maul her only because I knew where the cameras were and there wasn’t anywhere to hide.

  The hallway was interminable. The key to my door rebelled, fighting the lock as if it fancied itself our chaperone and it had clocked the look in my eyes.

  Despite everything, I finally had Amber in my bedroom. I finally had her where I’d longed to bring her since the first time she’d smiled at me.

  My fingers plunged into Amber’s hair, tangling in the short waves with shameful desperation. I’d been dying to touch her. Dying to feel her hair under my skin, to tip her head back and get my mouth beneath the line of her jaw.

  She tasted like all the best pieces of a night out — like moonrise and music and the sharp bite of alcohol. The skin of her neck grew wet and slick beneath my tongue and my ears filled with the sounds of her half-hitched gasps and aborted moans.

  I pushed forward, crowding her back against the wall, pinning her hips with mine. Hands fluttered at my hips, my back telegraphing that she wasn’t sure where she should touch me, where she had permission.

  “Anywhere,” I growled when I’d pulled my mouth away from her skin long enough to speak. “You can touch me anywhere.”

  Amber whimpered as if the words had been a slow stroke over desperate flesh.

  The cups of her palms were fitting themselves over my hips, fingers digging into the muscle, and she dragged me closer. She wouldn’t be satisfied until we were occupying the same space.

  “Tell me,” I whispered in between nips along that damned distracting neck. Pink and red blooms rose along the column, tracing trails of passion that marked where I’d been and made me want to get beneath her clothes, get at the skin I hadn’t yet touched.

  “Want you,” she whispered.

  I caught the lobe of her ear between my teeth and drank down the sound of her shocked moan. I swept the tip of my tongue over it, loving the softness, the yield.

  I was on fire.

  Every nerve in my body was on high alert to carry only the feeling of her body, the sensation of touching her, hearing her, moving against her and tasting her. My body was keyed directly into Amber Kowalczyk and nowhere else.

  Fuck, I wanted her. Wanted to bend her in half and rut against her until we both shook apart. Wanted to taste her, feel her come around my tongue. Wanted to stroke and touch and tease until she was a sobbing wreck in my bed sheets.

  I wanted to get my hands on her thighs, see how far apart I could spread them, how long she’d let me look at her before she’d squirm.

  Fuck, I was an idiot for thinking I could get through this farce without touching her. I’d been lost from that first moment in my office, from that elevator ride when she’d let me taste her, just for a moment.

  “Legs around my waist,” I said.

  “I’m — heavier than you are,” she said. It was a protest.

  Reluctantly, I let go of her hair and slipped my hands down along her curves to fit behind her thighs. “Did I stutter?”

  The heat of her blush rolled beneath my lips on her neck. How did that feel on the rest of her?

  After a moment, Amber accepted I was serious and she hopped up, wrapping her legs around my waist and giving me room to get my hands on her perfect ass.

  I turned us away from the wall and her back and legs tensed. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders with all the nervousness of a new rider on the back of someone else’s motorcycle.

  She was heavier than I was, but I could’ve lifted a car with all the lust and adrenali
ne fueling my system. It wasn’t a struggle to get her from the wall to my bed. If anything, we floated.

  I hefted her higher into my grasp and tossed her easily onto the bed, delighting in the surprised look on her face, the way her breasts followed the movement of the collision. She was gorgeous. She was sweet. And for the next eight hours, she belonged to no one but me.

  “If you tell me to stop, I will,” I promised her. “But if you don’t, I’m going to strip you down and have you until you’re a trembling wreck.”

  That lovely face went bright red and a startled laugh forced its way between her lips. “That’s —” She shook already, waiting in my bed for me, not yet under my hands. “That’s good to know.”

  12

  AMBER

  Oh, God. I was not at all certain that I was going to live through a night in Iris Spark’s bed.

  Iris’s bed. I was in Iris’s bed.

  It was a fever dream. Maybe too much tequila and daydreaming had me passing out after Dave’s birthday celebration: alone at home and careening straight into a hangover while my subconscious let me pretend that Iris wanted me as much as I wanted her.

  But the heat of her mouth on my neck was real. Too real to be the product of my imagination. And not even my wildest fantasies had involved the CEO picking me up as if I weighed nothing at all and tossing me onto her bed.

  I was already close to being that trembling wreck she’d mentioned and she’d barely touched me.

  So, no. Survival wasn’t looking at all guaranteed.

  Iris smirked down at me with the least guarded look I’d ever seen on her face. Her blue eyes gleamed in the soft light of her bedroom, the corner of her mouth quirked up, satisfaction and confidence painted over every inch of her. If she’d ever given that look to a subordinate or a rival, they’d have run screaming. Sprawled across her bed, it sent a shiver down my spine, raised goosebumps across my skin, and made my nipples tighten in my bra.

  “These first,” Iris remarked, shucking off my shoes and tossing them carelessly to the floor.

  Her fingers stroked along the shockingly sensitive skin of my ankles as she knelt. She ran her hands up the insides of my calves, my knees, my thighs, stretching over me and tracing fire along my skin.

  My jeans joined the shoes on the floor.

  Blue eyes raked down my exposed skin, pupils blown wide and dark, a groan rising in Iris’s throat — she sounded hungry.

  “You’re so fucking gorgeous,” she said with an intensity approaching anger.

  Any response I might’ve summoned died on my lips, tongue going dry as Iris dipped forward and nuzzled along my panty-clad hip, rubbing her cheek over my skin so close, so damn close to where I’d been dying for her to touch me. Words failed me, but I was humiliated to hear that a whimper had not.

  “Oh, baby,” Iris murmured, smirk sharpening further into something wicked. Something that would slip beneath my skin and destroy me if I didn’t take care. “You need this.”

  It wasn’t a question and that was a damn good thing because my only answer was an unintelligible gasp. Iris’s hands chased the noise up my belly, under the loose drape of my shirt to skim over my chest and paint pleasure up the side of my neck. She shoved the shirt up and ghosted touch across the curves of my breasts, teasing at the edge of my bra, glancing off the insistent peaks of my nipples. Her breath was hot in the curve of my hip and she panted lust and control across my skin in intoxicating waves.

  “These are coming off,” she warned, using her other hand to grip the waistband of my panties. Her fingers closed around the fabric with a gentle scrape of nails.

  I nodded, although I couldn’t have sworn that permission was what she’d been waiting for. I suspected, instead, that she might have been trying not to spook me before we’d gotten started.

  My panties barely had time to wave farewell before Iris was pressing a line of kisses from my navel down to the thatch of curls at the apex of my legs. The kisses cooled as she passed and the contrast with the searing heat of her lips shocked me, made it impossible to settle into the sensation — as if I could ever get used to the feeling of Iris Spark touching me.

  She slid her hand from my hip, dipping questing fingers between my folds to tease me where I was already slick and dripping with anticipation. Another moan, this time from her rather than from me — and that sound was going to feature in every fantasy I had for the rest of my life — followed that first curious touch.

  She didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. She just caught my eyes, held my gaze, and dipped her head until her lips brushed against my clit.

  Oh, fuck.

  Breath came in shards: sharp, brittle things that sliced apart my moans and partial phrases, the ways I begged her to touch me. And she did touch me.

  Iris Spark was a fucking force of nature.

  I was lost instantly. My back arched against the sheets, sweat bloomed across my skin, and the air was filled with the smell of Iris and sex, a combination I couldn’t have imagined a few hours before, now my favorite scent.

  Two fingers dipped inside, thrusting along the front wall of my pussy and stroking in counterpoint to the maddeningly soft touch of her lips around me. I ached. I arched against her, trying to press harder against her mouth, harder against her fingers, but she rode the movement as easily as a sailor on a shifting deck. She was definitely going to kill me.

  Her mouth was the best kind of tease, a glancing, seductive stroke that was whisper-light and gentle, coaxing sharp pleasure in echoes through my body while her fingers held nothing back.

  I lifted my head, looking down at her, watching that blonde hair tumbling over my thighs and getting swept impatiently out of her face as she worked. And it did look like work. Iris had the same expression on her face that she’d had in every magazine profile portrait of her — the Silicon Valley wunderkind, bound and determined and three times smarter than she should’ve been. Over her head, over the still-clothed expanse of her shoulders and back, I watched those hips riding the same rhythm as the fingers inside me, rocking forward against the mattress, against nothing while she gave me every stroke like it came from her hips.

  “Iris,” I whimpered, body tensing, coiling. That light, teasing pressure finally painting wash after wash of pleasure over my clit so that my devastating climax was inevitable and I’d barely seen it coming.

  “That’s it,” she whispered against my skin. “First one.” Her lips shaped the words and vibrated against me, tongue flicking out to catch the sensitive bud against her mouth. “Give it to me.”

  And I did. It broke over me in incomprehensible. It broke me apart and left me shaking, clenching around Iris’s fingers until the sensation started to subside.

  Then she started again.

  “Iris,” I whimpered, trying to explain, trying to tell her it was too much. Too soon. I couldn’t take it.

  “Shh,” she soothed and lapped almost apologetically at the wetness sliding down her fingers to her palm. “Relax.”

  I huffed a laugh — or would have if I’d had any breath. But I was orgasm-weak and jelly-limbed. I wanted to touch her. Wanted my hands and mouth on her.

  But Iris wasn’t in a rush. Instead, she slipped a third finger inside me. It was tight, a stretch I hadn’t felt for a long time, and I got lost in the feeling of my body relaxing for her.

  I’d take whatever she gave me.

  “Wanna touch —” I tried again, feeling a bizarre flash of pride that I’d managed more than her name.

  “I know,” Iris said, but made no move to get up, come closer, or slip off any of her clothes. “Soon.”

  As those fingers fucked me open, Iris brought her tongue back to play. She didn’t lap at that tight bundle of nerves this time. She seemed to know I’d be too sensitive there. Instead, she stroked in gentle circles around it, over and over, until I shuddered into release again.

  And again.

  I couldn’t tell if they should be counted separately or if they’d ridden the
same wave of feel-good neurochemicals, but by the time she slipped her fingers from my body and stopped tormenting me, I’d come at least four times.

  My chest heaved, sweat beading on my skin, and my head spun. That was it. That was it. I couldn’t do it again.

  “You’ve killed me,” I whimpered as Iris pressed gentle kisses against my hip, stroked soothing touches down my thighs.

  “Haven’t.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” I sat up halfway, grasping at her shoulders, her sweater, tracing fingertips along her jaw to try to beckon her close enough to kiss.

  Iris leaned forward and gave me the taste of her mouth — the taste of myself on her mouth — and I groaned, limbs still trembling, at the nearness I’d been dying for.

  I reached for her waistband, the button at her fly, but she caught my wrist in deft fingers.

  “You don’t have to —” she began.

  “If you don’t get your ass up here and sit on my face in the next thirty seconds I am going to scream,” I snapped.

  Iris blinked at me and I savored the feeling of having surprised her. To her credit, she rolled with the new developments pretty quickly. She hopped up to shuck her iconic jeans, those brogues and tore her sweater over her head. I promised myself that the next chance I had, I’d take the opportunity to appreciate how her body looked in her underthings. The lace, the silk, the way they clung to her.

  But right then? They were in the way.

  “Off,” I said, glaring at the offending garment, and Iris’s smile went a little soft, a little lopsided as she complied with the order.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she laughed, knee-walking forward on the bed. She hitched a leg over and got that blonde heat between her thighs in licking distance.

  I reached up, steadied her with my hands on her hips as she braced against the headboard, and set about taking my revenge. She wanted a trembling wreck? I’d give her a trembling wreck.

  She tasted incredible. Like every dirty dream or illicit fantasy I’d ever had. Like all my most self-indulgent hopes for what my romantic future might hold. It was so good it sent shivers down my spine that felt close to fear.