Start Me Up

by Victoria Dahl

  Lori yelped and tried to figure out if she liked it. Was he going to spank her? Oh, my God, did she want him to? What if she hated it? It could ruin everything.

  But when his hands touched her again, they curved over her hips and pulled her up. “Put your hands on the headboard.” His voice had lost any amusement. The words seemed to rumble through the room and trace over her skin.

  Lori put her hands on the headboard.

  The electric slide of his hand down the small of her back made her shiver. “Good girl.”

  A jolt of lust swept through her belly, to her absolute mortification. You do not have daddy issues, she told her body in her best feminist voice. Her body responded by arching back in a blatant effort to please him. Hussy, the stern voice hissed, but hussy was no insult to her greedy body.

  Quinn’s hands stroked down her arched back and over her ass. She braced herself for a more intimate touch, but when he stroked his fingertips into her wetness, she still gasped.

  And then he was pushing back into her body, and how could she have forgotten that feeling in the space of a few moments?

  The polished edge of the wood bit into her palms as she squeezed tight, but the fierceness she was ready for didn’t come. He was slower, gentler. Lori squirmed.

  “Something wrong, Lori?”

  “Mmm,” she complained, pushing back to meet his thrust.

  He leaned over her, braced his hands on either side of hers. His tongue drew fire over her neck, and all the while he was stretching and stroking inside her.

  Strangely, a soft beeping sound drifted to her ears. “Quinn?”

  “Hmm?” He kept moving, moving, too slow and so beautiful.

  “I think your phone’s ringing.”

  He murmured, “I don’t think so.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” One hand disappeared from the headboard and curved over her breast, then snaked down her stomach and lower still. The ringing continued, but when he touched her clit, Lori let her thoughts go.

  “Ah!” she cried, as Quinn surged deep and rolled small circles over the perfect spot. “Oh, God. Oh, Quinn.”

  There was no way she could come again so fast and she should tell him not to bother, but Lori’s tongue refused to form the words. He was taking her harder again. Harder. Harder.

  Lori straightened her arms and pushed back, taking more of him. “Oh, God,” she groaned, concentration pinging back and forth between his lovely fingers and his lovely cock. And before she knew it, the impossible happened. She came again. Screaming.

  When her screams died to whimpers, Quinn gave up all pretense of finesse. He grabbed her hips in a brutal grip and fucked her hard. As his hips spasmed against her and Quinn groaned, muscles stiffening, Lori let her forehead fall to the pillow.

  She’d done it.

  She’d had dirty, meaningless, mindless sex. And she’d done it really, really well.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HER SWEAT-SLICK BODY was pressed against his side when he came back to life. She lay facedown on her pillow. Quinn was flat on his back, panting. His body felt strange. Wrung out with physical exhaustion, yet buoyed by the remnants of brilliant pleasure. He let his heavy gaze wander, amazed that after all that joy, it wasn’t even fully dark yet.

  His eyes caught on something disturbing. Quinn blinked and shook his head. “What the hell is that?”

  Her body jerked against his. “I…Huh?”

  “My God,” he murmured, staring at the bathroom just across the hall.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Quinn sat up, swinging his feet to the floor. “I think there’s gold flocking in there!”

  “Huh?”

  Totally energized now, he stood and moved toward the half-closed door. No way. “Are those gold flecks in the pink countertops? Mother of…”

  “Quinn!” she growled from the bed. “What are you talking about?”

  He stared for a long, stunned moment at the horrible glory of her pink-and-gold bathroom before he stumbled back to the bed. Pink tile, white cabinets, and the wallpaper decorated with pink flowers with fuzzy gold leaves. “I’m sorry. I need a minute. I can’t believe that gold flocking was staring at my ass the whole time we were having sex.”

  In response, Lori mumbled something that sounded irritated, but the effect was muffled by her pillow. He collapsed into bed with a groan, and his hand found a very comfortable spot on the curve of her ass. She looked sweet and tousled in the faint late light slanting through the blinds. Really sweet. And really tousled. “What’d you say?”

  She raised her face a half inch from the pillow. “I said my dad remodeled it for my mom in 1979.”

  “Wow. Do you mind if I come back and take a few pictures?”

  “What, do you and your architect friends get together and exchange horror stories?”

  Quinn couldn’t help the flush that gave him away, but he tried his best to mediate it. “This is a legitimate design era. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s part of our history.”

  “I’m not embarrassed! Jeez, you’re a freak.”

  Even past the tangled curls that hung over her face, Quinn could see her skin turn pink, reminding him of just how he’d repaid her sassiness last time. Damn, that had been hot as hell, taking her from behind. He stroked her ass in fond memory.

  “You owe me an apology,” he prompted.

  Surprisingly, she smiled and brushed the hair from her eyes as she turned slightly toward him. “You’re right. I apologize. Your heart was definitely in it.”

  His heart twisted to hear itself spoken of. A disturbing response. Hmm.

  “In fact, I think you’re a genius, Quinn. And I think I’m a genius for picking you.”

  “Revisionist history. You didn’t pick me. I inserted myself into your sordid plan.”

  Lori grinned. “Right again. You are a genius at inserting yourself, Quinn Jennings.”

  “Ha!” He closed his eyes and let his head sink into the pillow. “I think I’ll put that on my business cards. Along with ‘big’ and ‘good’ and ‘gorgeous.’”

  “Hey, what’s with the photographic memory?” He could hear the blush in her words.

  “Wouldn’t that be audio-graphic?”

  “Whatever it is, you usually remember very little of any conversation, as far as I can tell. Kind of inconvenient that you remember what I say in the throes of passion.”

  Chuckling, Quinn patted blindly around until he found her hand, then curled his fingers into hers. “I remember everything when I’m concentrating. A lecture on Syrian arches, a discussion about architectural ostentation in the sixteenth-century, or…” He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. “Sex with you. All very worthy of intense concentration.”

  “Wow. Me and sixteenth-century architectural ostentation? I’m kind of flattered.” The word broke on a yawn.

  “Go to sleep,” Quinn whispered, turning toward her to kiss her hair. She smelled sleepy, warmth spiced with sex. He didn’t bother moving away. Breathing her in made him feel he was exposed to some sort of drugged smoke. Opium maybe.

  Still, he wasn’t tired. He normally didn’t go to bed until one. But he was as relaxed as a man who’d just had the best sex of his life, so he didn’t bother getting up to find his clothes. Hell, he didn’t have the least urge to leave.

  Sex with Lori had been unbelievably erotic. A strange combination of feeling free to do exactly what he wanted and knowing he was engaged in seriously dirty behavior with a nice girl he’d known all his life. The knowledge that in the thousands of times he’d said hi or passed her in a hall or waved from his car…that whole time she’d had small nipples blushing pale pink. And tight dark curls that hid her wet and eager pussy. He hadn’t known that she would clench her fingers each and every time he brushed her clit, or that she’d mewl like a kitten when she got close to her peak.

  And he definitely hadn’t known that ordering her to her knees would cause power to explode through
his body, as if someone had just shocked his muscles with pure electricity.

  Wow.

  Her hand squeezed his. “Don’t forget your phone,” she mumbled.

  “What?” Crap, was she asking him to leave? He didn’t want to leave.

  “Your phone. It rang.”

  “When?” Glancing over to her face, he found she’d opened one eye.

  “It rang while we were having sex. You really didn’t notice? I thought you were kidding.”

  “I was concentrating, remember?” Now that she mentioned it, he could hear the occasional beep of the message reminder. “You know I can’t hear anything when I’m working.”

  “Working?” she sputtered.

  Quinn frowned. “You know what I mean.”

  When she laughed, his body registered warm pleasure. The husky sound swept over him and the bed shook just a little, physically pulling him into her amusement. His heart responded by beating louder. Not that his pulse sped up, it just grew more…forceful. Odd.

  Quinn puzzled over that for a few minutes before he realized Lori was asleep. She made an occasional soft huffing sound that wasn’t a snore, but he’d characterize it as snoring later just to goad her. Later, like when they went on another date before he brought her home to—

  A loud growl from his stomach distracted him from further planning, so he slipped from her bed and pulled on his boxers to head for the kitchen. Surely Lori Love kept bologna around. Or peanut butter.

  The phone beeped again, so he grabbed it on the way out and glanced down. His dad’s name was on the caller ID, which meant his mother had called. His dad never talked on the phone. Ever. The man considered emergency calls to be the only acceptably masculine use of a home phone. Sighing, Quinn called up the message and leaned against the kitchen island.

  “Quinn, it’s your mother. I hope everything’s good. We haven’t heard from you in weeks, and it’s awfully lonely out here lately. Your father and I wish you’d think about coming to visit over Labor Day, but I know you’ve been busy with your work, and we’re so proud of you. Call us!”

  A perfectly benign, loving message by anyone’s standards. And yet it raised Quinn’s hackles. She wouldn’t be so damn lonely if she weren’t still ignoring Molly. Ever since they’d found out about Molly’s career, his mother had been playing the wounded party, put upon by the stigma of an immoral daughter, and further put upon by Quinn’s defense of his sister.

  He deleted the message and stared at the phone. Yes, his parents were proud of him. They’d always been proud. Unfortunately their approval was like a pie: the more pieces they gave to Quinn, the fewer they had left for Molly. And they had always—always—been spectacularly generous with Quinn.

  His habit of getting lost in work had started way back in elementary school, when report cards meant it was time for their dad to say something cruelly dismissive about Molly. Better be glad you’re a girl, Molly, or you’d have to worry about filling some pretty big shoes. Or Look, Molly managed to get a check plus in art!

  God, he’d hated that. As a child, his parents had managed to turn their approval into something he wanted to retreat from, and so he had. He’d read and studied and spent days in his room, building models and projects. He’d learned to tune out and lose himself in work.

  Maybe he should call his mom back to thank her for that. After all, if he were less involved with work and more involved in a successful relationship, he’d never have been able to help Lori with her sex adventure. This short-term relationship seemed poised to make up for all the long-term ones he’d missed out on.

  “Damn straight,” he muttered, heading toward the fridge for a Coke.

  It turned out she had not only cold Coke, but also an unopened pack of Hebrew National hot dogs just waiting to be eaten. “Amazing woman.” Quinn sighed when he tracked down the buns. He scarfed down two hot dogs and a Coke, then threw together one more dog and wandered into the living room, wondering if he should leave even if he really wanted to stay the night.

  The sight of her living room chased away his idle thoughts.

  What the hell was a vibrant woman like Lori doing in this house? Did she keep the trophies and the old furniture and the bad paintings as a way to honor her father? Or did she simply not care enough to change it?

  Regardless of whether she was wearing a dress or jeans, Lori was bright and funny and young. She needed light around her, and color.

  Sighing, Quinn shook his head and turned back toward the kitchen, but a quiver of blue light from the second floor caught his eye. He froze and watched the wall at the top of the stairwell. Another flicker of aqua blue. It looked like the light of a television. He jogged up the steps.

  There were three doors here, but only one was open. It looked like a teenager’s bedroom, and Quinn immediately guessed that it must have been Lori’s. The room she was in now had belonged to her father at some point, and this room with the dark pink bedspread and poster-covered walls had been hers. He flipped on the light.

  Though his mind was insisting on images of boy bands and Madonna, his eyes were sending him different signals about the posters. Strange. They seemed to be travel posters.

  “Huh.” Some of them were retro thirties ads, but most were just the typical pictures you saw in travel agencies. Rome. Paris. Turkey. Greece. Ireland. Amsterdam. Bavaria. London. The Alps. There were a few more exotic locales like St. Petersburg and Cairo and Madagascar.

  Stunned, he spun in a slow circle, as if the motion would somehow create sense from it. A packed bookcase was wedged into the far corner, so Quinn edged between the TV and the bed and scanned the titles. Travel guides and travelogues, every one. Hundreds of them, and more stacked on the floor.

  Did Lori travel? She must. And yet a vague conversation floated up from the foggy pool of Quinn’s memory banks. Molly had mentioned something once about Lori giving up her dreams to care for her father. Something about Europe and international business.

  “Shit,” he breathed, heart sinking to press itself against his stomach. He stroked a finger along the spine of one book and then another. The Single Girl’s Guide to France. England on Fifty Dollars a Day. Hundreds of them.

  This room. This was Lori Love’s place in this house. And maybe it wasn’t as heartbreaking as it seemed. Maybe it was just a simple hobby.

  But when he turned to leave, the view of the far wall stopped him in his tracks. On this wall she’d hung a giant map of the world, at least five feet wide. Bright colors were concentrated within the boundaries of Europe before spreading out like tendrils into Asia and Africa and the rest of the map. When he stepped closer, he could see that the jumbles of color were made up of thumbtacks. Hundreds of them. Different shapes and sizes so that it looked as if someone had thrown sticky confetti against the paper in celebration.

  But this wasn’t a celebration. There were no thumbtacks pushed into Colorado. There wasn’t a single thumbtack in the whole of the United States. This wasn’t a map of places she’d been. This was a map of where Lori dreamed of going.

  He stopped three feet away and refused to look closer. This was private. Not meant for him or anyone else to see.

  Turning back toward the television, Quinn made himself stop thinking about the map. He glanced only briefly at the muted pictures of Venice on the screen before he switched off the DVD player and the screen. Then he descended the stairs and turned off the rest of the lights in the house. As he lay back down on Lori’s bed, he tried very hard not to indulge in that fantasy of saving the damsel in distress.

  This was a short-term fling, and he wasn’t a prince sent to save a beautiful princess.

  Still, the idea burned like phosphorous in his tight chest.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A SHOUTED, “Oh, shit!” woke Lori from a deep sleep. She bolted upright in her bed, assaulted by too many strange images flying at her, like a scene from that movie The Birds. Daylight. The blankets sailing past her face, a naked man jumping from the bed. A naked Quinn yankin
g on underwear to cover his tight ass.

  Lori shoved wild curls from her eyes and glanced down at her own naked body. “Oh, my.” She pulled up the blanket.

  “I’m sorry.” Quinn zipped his pants and reached for his cell phone to stuff it into a pocket. “I overslept and I’ve got a meeting at eight-thirty.”

  Still trying to process that they’d really slept together, Lori turned toward the clock—7:00 a.m.

  “I’ve got to get home and shower and change.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll call you.” Quinn stopped buttoning his wrinkled shirt for a moment to look up at her. “I mean I’ll really call you later today. Not ‘Thanks for the good time, maybe I’ll call you sometime.’”

  “I get that. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

  He hurriedly tucked in his shirt and flashed her a smile, rocking her sleepy little world. “Oh, you’ll see me.” Then, like a sexy whirlwind, he grabbed his coat, crossed the room to give her a quick peck on the mouth and stole the book from her bedside table before heading for the door. “Homework!” he called, waving the book. “Have a good day, Lori Love.”

  And just like that, the Quinn tornado was gone, leaving Lori alone with her shock and awe.

  “Ho-ly smokes.” She’d really done it. And the doin’ it had been So. Damn. Good. She lifted the blanket to look down at her body. Same body she saw in the mirror every single day, and yet now it was imprinted with dirty memories of Quinn, like invisible tattoos. She hoped they weren’t those press-on tattoos that would wash off in the shower.

  She settled back under the covers just so she could lie there and grin at the ceiling. It might have been awkward if he’d stayed. It might have been weird. But now she could just wallow in her self-satisfaction.

  Funny, how horny a girl could get while wallowing. And she didn’t quite have to be up yet, so Lori thought about Quinn ordering her around in bed and touched herself. It didn’t take long. A quick replay of him holding her wrists down and Lori was biting her lip and shaking against her own hand. God, the man was magic even when he wasn’t here.