by Holley Trent
Now she wanted to know what his fetish was. She couldn’t even begin to guess.
He handed her a full wine glass and moved to the padded bench beneath the window and behind the table. He draped his forearms over his knees, eying her. “I’m not so hard to read. You’ll know exactly what I want just from the way I shift my gaze. From the way I smile.”
She took a long sip of wine and considered that smile he was talking about. Half a smile, really. Just the slightest pull of one corner of his lips, and it said almost as much as his filthy tongue did. That smile said, “Come sit here,” and like hell if she didn’t find her feet moving toward him.
Valerie set her glass on the counter and left the food behind.
He leaned back against the padded backrest and spread his legs wider.
She stepped between them, unquestioning for once, as he skimmed his hands up the back of her dress and lifted the skirt.
“Six months,” he whispered. “You’ve been here for six months and didn’t let me see you.”
“I wasn’t aware anyone was looking.”
“Well, I’m looking now. I’m gonna look until I’ve had my fill, and you’re gonna let me, aren’t you, pretty girl?”
At the sharp plunge of his fingertips into the meat of her ass, she gripped his shoulders firmly and tried to mouth some complaint. She couldn’t get it out, because he was kneading her, and she liked it. She liked that he did what he wanted—she liked not being the one in control at the moment and was so damned curious about what he’d do next.
“These are in the way,” he said.
She felt the rip as much as heard it, but her processing speed was slow, and it didn’t register to her that the tearing sound was her pantyhose. He’d made a hole and pulled it apart without once taking his gaze from hers. “I—”
“I’m not going to promise to replace them, so don’t ask. Jesus, your skin is so fucking soft.” He slid his thumbs along the insides of her upper thighs, so close to her pussy, but just barely avoiding the crotch of her panties. “It’s like satin.”
“Uh…thank you?” For some reason, that seemed to be the wrong response. Obviously, he’d paid her a compliment, but what she should have been doing—if she were really going to play the part of the clueless prude—was slapping his hands away and scowling at him. The ship had sailed on playing that role the moment she’d stepped between his legs.
She was up on her toes, stretching away from the fingers he was dragging up to her panty elastic, and not because she wanted to shun his touch, but because it felt too good.
“Flat on your feet, pretty girl.”
And just like that, she came down off her toes and landed atop his knuckles. He caught her tender clit on a downstroke, making her drive her fingertips deep into the flesh of his shoulders. “Oh God,” she gasped.
“Usually, I buy a lady dinner and a drink before I get into her pants.”
“You don’t see me as a lady. Is that what it is?” She spread her legs a bit farther to make room for his probing finger. He tucked it inside her panties and between her folds, and she let out the moan she couldn’t stop.
“I do see you as one, but I’m setting aside my own rules tonight.”
“What are your rules?” Frustrated, she grabbed his wrist and guided his finger deeper inside her.
He pulled it back out and gave her ass a punishing squeeze.
She growled.
Okay, I get it.
If he wanted to be the captain, she’d let him be the captain, but he’d better either steer the fucking boat or let her off it.
“I like to think I’m retired from the scene.” He scissored two fingers inside her, filling her sheath while stroking, and keeping that intense, pale gaze locked on her face. “I don’t trawl for partners anymore. More often than not when I show up at Clay’s or places like his, I’m ready to go home within an hour. It takes some doing to keep my attention.”
His voice was a practically a purr—that of a cat far too comfortable with his circumstances, but at the moment she had no real drive to shake him up.
He pulled his fingers free of her and slipped them between his lips, licking them clean like a starving man being served scraps instead of an entire feast.
He grabbed her by the thighs and lifted her. She could hardly tell which end was up when he spun her and deposited her on the bench he relinquished. He gave the heavy table a forceful push back, and it swung away on an arm she hadn’t noticed, giving him plenty of room to get close. Leaning over her, he forced his knee between her thighs and parted her legs again.
“You’re interesting, Valerie. You’re hitting my radar pretty damn strong. Why is that?”
“I-I don’t know?”
Maybe she was like a microchipped pet and all he had to do to find out that she was a sexual submissive was to flick her little button. She’d come along so nicely for him.
He inched her dress up to her hips and stroked the wet silk over her cleft and she writhed beneath him.
“So, you’re leaving in a month, huh?”
“Y-yes.” She couldn’t help herself. She rocked her hips up to meet his hand, and he pulled it away.
Fuck.
“Do you want to come, pretty girl?” He pushed his fingers into her again, and roughly—just the way she liked.
Her toes curled and her breath hissed through her teeth.
He was fucking her with his fingers so good, and she wanted more. Wanted to see what Tim Dowd was capable of.
She grabbed his wrist, but this time it wasn’t to make him plunder her deeper but to still his hand.
He narrowed his eyes in a warning, and maybe he didn’t know it, but she understood. She was out of line, but she had to ask. “You won’t tell anyone where I was, will you? It’s important. My job…I can’t—”
“Shhh, pretty girl.” His features softened and the scowl melted away. “You’re in good hands. I’m not going to tell a soul.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Damn it.
As Tim lashed his tongue between her thighs and carefully pulled her clit between his fingers, she made all the right sounds and writhed when she should have.
He should have been focused on nothing but her pleasure, but his mind was a raging battle between take everything she’s offering and don’t go too far. Normally, he could control his dominant tendencies the same way he could stop himself from overeating or smoking too many cigars. He could turn them on and off depending on what a situation required, and lately, they’d been on ice. He hadn’t quit BDSM cold turkey, exactly. He simply hadn’t wanted to play. He’d been burned too many times since he and Heidi divorced, but fuck, he wanted to play, and Valerie was stunning.
He bared her a little more, pulling the crotch of her panties farther away and lashing his tongue between her dripping slit and tighter hole. He flicked his tongue between her folds, spearing her hungry pussy again and again while increasing pressure on her clit.
“God. Put your fingers in me,” she demanded.
“No.” If she was going come, she’d have to take what he was willing to give, and he wasn’t feeling generous at the moment. Still, he pressed his tongue flat against her nub and massaged it, pulling a moan from her as her thighs tightened around his head.
He liked that. If he’d meant to keep her, he’d use that as a cue that he was giving his woman what she needed. But, for a number of reasons, women didn’t want Tim long-term, so now he wasn’t looking for long-term, either. It suited him just fine that Valerie was going to be gone in a month, but he didn’t want to scare her off from seeing him again. He had a reputation for being intense—a deserved one.
She swiveled her hips and increased the friction, grinding herself on his tongue and the scruff of his chin.
Her thighs began to quiver then, so he stiffened his tongue and worked it into her deep, kissing her down below as he would that smart mouth of hers.
“God! I’m gonna—I’m gonna—”
This time, he didn’t pull away.
He caught every drop of her cream on his tongue and stayed down low until her body was still and she’d caught her breath.
“Damn,” she whispered.
He eased away and put his back against the cushioned wall, staring down at her.
She looked somewhat debauched, but he could do better. Her hair bun was a bit crooked, and of course, she wouldn’t be recycling her pantyhose, but he could have had her hair standing on end, dress ripped down the front, and love bites all over her breasts for him to inspect the next day. He was being generous in letting her walk away still mostly put together.
“Payment rendered,” he said dryly. “I think you owe me a consultation.”
“Uh. Right. Give me a minute to…” She swallowed and dragged her tongue across her lips. “To reboot my brain. Wow, you’re good at that.”
He’d been married to a good teacher. Of course, he couldn’t tell Valerie that. According to Carine, he was supposed to be keeping his baggage hidden away. The exes that weren’t turned off by the fact he was still friendly with his ex-wife called it quits over Tim’s supposed inability to get his eighteen-year-old son Kevin in check. They figured if Tim couldn’t control the one, how good of a father could he possibly be to their kids?
Tim didn’t see where it mattered if he told or not, though. He wasn’t trying to turn Valerie into a girlfriend. She was just company.
Really fucking sexy company.
God.
He raked a hand through his hair. “You want your wine?”
“Yeah, I think that’d help speed the recovery along.”
“No hurry.” He reached toward the counter for the glass as she sat up. “You can sit there and bask in the glow for as long as you like. You don’t have anywhere else you need to be right now, do you?”
“I’m off until Monday, so no, I’m not exactly on curfew.” She nodded her head in thanks at the wine glass her offered, and he stayed still long enough to watch her purse her lips and sip.
Jesus. The things he could have her do with those lips… That was third or fourth date stuff, though.
Standing, he discretely adjusted his cock and walked to his neglected poster tube. He’d been toiling over those plans for a couple of years and just hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. He figured it was time to get a third opinion.
Valerie had her dress smoothed and hair straightened by the time he returned to the table and pushed it back into place.
“Is that a standard feature in all your boats?”
“What, the retracting table?”
“Yes. It’s ingenious.”
“Well, I don’t know about ingenious, but you sort of develop a knack for accommodations when you spend a lot of time on boats.”
“And I imagine you did before you started building them.”
“Not as much as you’d think.” He left the rolled plans on the table and searched the cabinets for some heavy mugs to hold down the corners. “I went to work right out of high school. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to the school I actually wanted to go to, so I guess I was playing the part of the martyr by not picking a cheaper second-choice.”
“Sounds like a typical eighteen-year-old.”
Tim was glad he had his back turned so she couldn’t see him cringe. The way he was twenty-five years ago was exactly the way his son was now. Actually, Kevin might have actually been better at being eighteen than even Tim had been. Having all that money probably didn’t help.
Heidi hadn’t liked the idea of making Kevin wait until twenty-five to access his trust fund, and now they both wished Tim had been a little more aggressive at making it happen. They never knew where or when Kevin would pop up. Tim had to take his house keys away the last time he’d come home. Kevin had walked in to find a lady in a ball gag handcuffed to the kitchen table, thanks to Clay. It’d been her idea, Clay had just made the “gift” possible.
Tim had to do a lot of lying about why the lady was there, and he wasn’t sure how much of it Kevin bought.
Tim cleared his throat and carried the cups to the table. He put one on each corner of the plans. “Anyway, I went to work for a local boat builder after high school. He manufactured motorboats and the occasional sailboat. No-frills kind of stuff. It was either I work there or get my ass on a tractor.”
“Your parents were farmers?”
“Yep.”
“My grandmother’s family did some farming as well. They all moved up north during the Great Migration, though.”
“Where from?”
“Actually, not too far from Shora, if my geography memory serves me well. My grandmother hasn’t yet had a chance to point the exact area out to me. I don’t even know if she’d remember it. She moved when she was so young and hasn’t had a reason to come back except for family reunions. She tends to skip them. She’s a cranky old broad.” Valerie’s smile was soft. She obviously had warm feelings for the woman.
“Well, we have something in common, then. We’re both descended from salt of the earth-type folks.”
“Well, at least on one side of my family.” She shrugged. “I can’t say much about the other.
He opened his mouth to follow up on that statement, but before he could get out the words, she asked, “So, what did your folks grow? I think my grandmother said her family grew peanuts.”
“Ah, my family never got into peanuts. Cotton, corn, and sorghum, up until about ten years ago. Hard to turn a profit anymore, and Dad was getting too far up there in age to think about switching to some other crops. Plus, the house was in shambles and he and Mom just didn’t want to live in it anymore. It was too much work for them.”
“You mean, Clay’s house?”
Tim grunted and pulled the chain on the lighting fixture over the table. “Old-assed thing. Our family had been on that property since around seventeen-eighty. If Clay hadn’t taken it on, they probably would have had to sell it. He couldn’t really afford the upkeep, either, and at the time, neither could I. My business didn’t really take off until a couple of years later, and Clay was only here about two months out of the year. I don’t even want to think about what kind of hustling he did to get the money together to pay the taxes. Nothing is beneath him.”
She pressed a hand over her heart and grinned at him.
So pretty.
“Is that a bit of reverence I detect in your tone, Mr. Dowd?”
“Hell, no. I may be a degenerate, but my brother is a ruthless deviant. When folks start talking about him, I cut them off at the pass.”
“How did two respectable farmers end up with sons like you and Clay?”
Tim leaned his palms onto the table and watched again as she pursed her lips and drew some of that luscious liquid between them.
If she liked red wines, he’d have her sample everything he had in that drawer. He’d supervise every sip and hold the cup up to her lips. He’d make her keep her hands primly on her lap, and if she spilled a single drop, he’d give her something else to drink—something she’d have to work her jaws hard to get out.
Clean it up, Dowd.
He groaned and closed his eyes against the sight of her beckoning mouth.
“I think they tried hard to make us respectable,” he said, “and it backfired on them. But as far as they know, though, we’re perfectly upright citizens. Not too much word of the trouble we get into makes it down to them. They retired to Florida after Clay took the farm off their hands.”
“What are Clay’s ultimate plans for the property? He doesn’t strike me as the farmer type.”
He opened his eyes, saw the curious furrowing of her brow, and shrugged. “Well, you’re right about that. He’s not going to farm it, but if you’re asking if he plans to continue hosting sinful debauchery after he gets the house fully restored—I don’t know the answer. Our parents think he’s just growing grapes and writing a book, and to them, that’s bad enough. It’s true that’s what he’s doing, but…”
“It’s not all he’s doing.” She grinned a wide, t
oothy smile that reached her eyes and colored her cheeks.
There it was.
That spark of compatibility he’d thought was there. She wasn’t a woman who’d be so easy to debauch if he was reading her right. And if he was, that made her reluctance to visit Clay’s all the more befuddling.
“You think our dysfunction is amusing?” he asked.
“Of course I do. Who would have thought there’d be so many skeletons in the closet of one of the east coast’s preeminent luxury boat builders?”
Oh, you have no idea just how many skeletons.
“Quit heckling your host and take a gander at the plans I just paid you so well to critique.”
With her cheeks glowing as red as any wine in his drawer, she stood and then leaned onto the table. “What am I looking at, exactly?”
“It’s my house.” Tim stepped into the nearby master bedroom and left the door open while he brushed his teeth. “Or rather, what’s supposed to be my house. I’ve been chewing on that expansion idea for about five years.” Since right before he and Heidi separated. “The house as-is is an okay size, but the layout is kind of fucked up.”
“How old is the house?”
“Eighty this year.”
“That explains it. I’ve done a lot of study on that period of architecture. People lived differently then.”
Smart lady. Carine had been right about that…and he’d forgotten how sexy smart was.
He spat and rinsed. “That wasn’t the house’s original position. Everything on that stretch of water is new construction. Condos and whatnot. I didn’t want that, but at the same time, I couldn’t pass up the location. It had a private dock on water deep enough for the boat I had at the time.”
“Got ya. Comparing the new plan with the original footprint, it seems your architect suggested bumping out the existing rooms without changing the actual layout of the house.”
“Yeah, that’s basically what he did. Believe it or not, I paid him a lot of money for that.” He returned to the kitchen, but instead of going straight to the table, grabbed a couple of plates from the cupboard. She’d been hungry. He figured she’d forgotten, so he made her a plate with the odds and ends on the counter and added a few crackers to it.
