Lowdown Dirty

by Holley Trent

  “I don’t want to say no to you, pretty girl, but”—he thrust so hard that she saw stars—“you have a knack for not always knowing what you need. Right now, I’m giving you what you want.”

  Well, fuck me, then.

  Of course, he didn’t need to be told that. He was a master fucker, instinctive and primal, and he hit all the right spots.

  “You’re wet, baby. All over your thighs and mine. You like what I’m doing to you? You like being so stuffed that you can hardly talk?”

  Biting down her bottom lip, she nodded, because she couldn’t talk. Not in any language any person on Earth knew. She kept trying to chase that consciousness-stealing euphoria back, but the tingles were already dancing over her face and down her neck. Her body was shaking, and her core was tightening. Her pussy gripped him tight trying to keep him inside in spite of the intrusion to her ass. It was greedy and wanted to milk him dry, and the thought sent a hard shudder through her body. Him—bare.

  She wadded up some of the covers and stuffed them into her mouth to tamp down her screams as the orgasm overtook her, but she stayed present—adored every contraction and release. She breathed through all the tiny explosions and writhed as the pressure throughout dissipated one muscle at a time.

  “Breathe.” He drew in a sharp intake of breath of his own and slipped out of her, gently working out the plug as he went.

  He kissed up her spine to the base of her neck, breathing heavily. The sweat on his chest reminded her of his good work.

  He moved her arms from her back, stretched them gently and rubbed her numb shoulders before kissing her cheek. Then he laid her flat. “Stay right there. If I were evil, I’d make you get into the shower with me.”

  She whimpered.

  “Did I do too good of a job?”

  She whimpered again.

  “How about a bath?”

  “No funny stuff?”

  “None, I swear it. I might be raring to go again in fifteen minutes, but I won’t make you sit on my cock. Now, if you just so happen to—”

  “Nope. Not gonna happen. I can’t even feel my crotch right now. It’s all burning tingles of the bad, bad girl variety. God forbid I clench anything.”

  “That’s just ’cause it misses me already.”

  “Dear lord, don’t tell me you’re insatiable.”

  “There’s no such thing as being too perfect, is there?”

  She laughed. “Jackass.”

  “I think you may be the only person in my life who could say that and have it sound like a term of endearment. If that ain’t love, I don’t know what is.”

  He eased away from the bed, and her smile went along with him.

  Love.

  It seemed trite to even think it after having sex. A lot of people probably thought they were in love after a good fuck, Valerie knew herself well enough to know the difference between post-coital euphoria and true entanglement.

  She did love him and had known that before she’d stepped onto the boat. And maybe that was the biggest problem of all. She’d been at a place in her life where she could keep her emotions uninvolved in sexual encounters because she wasn’t looking for an attachment. But, the thing about love was that it happened whether people wanted it to or not. It was the same kind of magic that made magnets stick and little kids always drip red Popsicle juice onto white shirts.

  In the right circumstances, they were unavoidable things.

  She’d tried to avoid it, but just like that annoying kid in grade school she always tried to hide from, it found her anyway and wanted to drag her outside to play.

  “You’re a monkey wrench, Tim,” she muttered.

  “I’m a what?” he called out from the bathroom.

  “Nothing. I’m just talking shit.”

  “Does talking shit to a dom usually go the way you expect?”

  “You said you were retiring. I can talk all the shit I want.”

  “I said I was limiting my performances to private arenas.”

  “Timm-y-y-y,” she whined.

  He let out a chuckle—a low, warm, sound that seemed to hold some magic that made her nipples tingle and sex clench. “I like it when you call me Timmy.” He turned the water off and poked his head into the bedroom, grinning.

  He’s happy. Content.

  She’d made him that way and she didn’t think his good mood was entirely due to sex. It was because of what she’d given him—her trust.

  Fuck. What am I going to do with him?

  “Can you walk, or do I have to carry you?” he asked.

  “I’d like it if you carry me,” she said quietly.

  “You got it.”

  She wasn’t going to do anything with him but wait. She wouldn’t hear anything about that job until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest, and she didn’t want to waste a moment on worrying. He was offering her love, and even if she were only going to be around to feel it for a few days or weeks, she didn’t want to leave it on the table.

  For all she knew, she’d never get it from anyone else again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “She made her choice,” Tim said flatly to Heidi the following week. He flicked on the controls of the yacht-in-progress to test the electronics so the painting and upholstery crews got in to do their part. “She took the West Coast job. There’s nothing else I can do. She’s a grown woman with her own life. There’s nothing I could give her that would be incentive enough to keep her here.”

  Heidi leaned into the doorway and worked her jaw side-to-side.

  “Don’t give me that scolding look. I’m in a shitty enough mood as it is.”

  “I was really looking forward to having that office baby.”

  “We could always get a puppy.”

  “Not the same thing and you know it.”

  Tim shrugged and laced his fingers behind his head, staring through the window at a couple of members of his staff putting together machinery at one of the worktables.

  “I feel awful for you,” Heidi said in a soft voice, gentle enough to be a lullaby. “I really do, Tim. I wanted things to work for you.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “You gonna keep trying? With someone else, I mean.”

  He shrugged again. “If it happens, it happens. I’m not gonna go looking for it. I don’t even want to think right now, truth be told. I guess the same way you had your mind set on that office baby, I had convinced myself that everything was going to shake out the way I wanted. But, alas, you can’t dom your way through real life.”

  A knock on the hull on the boat made Heidi look outside and down. “Hi, Kevin.”

  “Are you taking me to work, or…”

  “Is Frank not picking you up today?”

  “I mean, I figured if you wanted to, or…Dad…”

  Heidi turned back to Tim and raised an eyebrow.

  Tim raised one as well. He couldn’t remember the last time Kevin had actually volunteered to be in the same space as him.

  “I mean, you don’t have to,” Kevin said. “It might be my last day on probation so I could start carpooling with the other guys. I figured you could buy me a jug of coffee. I’m broke.”

  “Ahh, always a rub,” Heidi said.

  Tim rolled his eyes. “You can have all the coffee you want, Kevin. You don’t need to endure the thirty-minute drive with a parent to get it.”

  Silence.

  Heidi looked down at Kevin, and then back to Tim. She made a come on gesture, so he got up and followed her down the temporary staircase to the factory floor.

  Kevin, dressed for the day in faded jeans, work boots, and a bleached-out baseball cap, stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  “You ride in the backseat,” Tim said. “I’m not riding in the back of my own truck.”

  Heidi draped an arm around Kevin’s shoulders and got him moving. “I could tell you some stories about being in the back of your father’s truck.”

  “Heidi,
” he warned.

  “What? I was talking about that time at the beach when we all piled in and had that bonfire.

  “Oh.”

  Kevin made a sound of disgust but kept on walking.

  Tim grinned. Regular teenage revulsion, he could stomach. He knew what to do with that and how it sorted itself out.

  Normal felt nice.

  He wondered if it’d hold out. He couldn’t deal with any more disappointments just yet.

  ___

  As Kevin hurried off with his giant Thermos of coffee to join the crew at Shora, Tim idled his truck near the office. Heidi said he wasn’t allowed to speed away like a coward, but given that Valerie was embroiled in what seemed to be a very intense conversation with a blustering stranger, he didn’t want to interrupt.

  “She’s so stinkin’ calm,” Heidi said quietly. “The guy is screaming and she’s acting like she’s not even there.”

  “I guess subs use certain compartmentalization skills outside the bedroom, too.”

  Heidi motored down her window and brazenly decreased the radio volume. “Oh. He’s not yelling at her, he’s just yelling in general. Still. What a dirtbag.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sit here and watch. She doesn’t deserve coming to work and dealing with shit like this.” He pulled up the parking brake and left Heidi to continue her eavesdropping.

  As he approached the pair, he could tell that Heidi had been right and that the guy wasn’t yelling at his girl, just venting to the universe. Tim was close enough to see that nervous tic in Valerie’s cheek that clued him in that she was uncomfortable, though. He’d made the right choice in deciding to intervene.

  Still, he kept a little distance. The last thing she needed was for him to swoop in and play protector when she already had a struggle getting men in her business to respect her. She didn’t need a man fighting her battles.

  When the guy paused to draw in a breath, Tim said, “Sorry to interrupt, Val, but I wanted to see if you had time for lunch.”

  “How could she possibly have time for lunch?” the guy said, waving his arms wildly. “She’s got a huge backlog of shit to do before she clears out of here. I’m trying to throw money at her to stay, but she’s intent on going!”

  Valerie took a deep breath and let it out. “I gave the company a chance to make things right.”

  She may have been talking to the screaming guy, but her gaze was on Tim.

  I see you, pretty girl.

  “And I tried to make a meeting with you,” the guy said. “I agreed with you that we had some wiggle room to do make the houses in this community more suitable. I read every single report you sent in and approved all the plans.”

  “That wasn’t what I was told,” she said, turning to him. “Actually, I wasn’t told much of anything.”

  “Ted was supposed to make a meeting with you. He told me you wouldn’t cooperate. That’s why I’m down here in this stifling swamp heat now.”

  Valerie smoothed a hand down her tired-looking face and let her lips sputter. “Well, I guess you’re in a bit of a pickle.”

  “Give me the number of your new boss. Let me talk to her.”

  “For what?”

  “Let me try to make this right. This community wasn’t supposed to be a moneymaker project for Lipton. My mother owns Lot Number One.” He pointed, probably in the general direction of said lot. “The bulk of this was her land. She sold it to the company for cheap in exchange for us putting up a development around her that she could retire in. She wanted kids and stuff around her, not like where she is now. This was supposed to be her riverfront wonderland. She liked your plans. She… Wait. Hold on.” He bent and rooted through the leather briefcase at his feet.

  Valerie looked at Tim and shrugged.

  He rubbed his chin. Well, well, what do we have here?

  Shark that he was, he could smell the blood in the water. There was opportunity beckoning. Lipton’s fuckup could somehow work in Tim’s favor.

  The guy thrust some papers at her and pointed to the one on top. “See. That’s what she wanted. She said if we were going to do custom stuff, she wanted one just like that.”

  Valerie took a cursory glance at it. “It’ll have to be someone else’s task.”

  “No. She wanted you to do it. She had her mind set on it. Oh my God, she’s gonna rip me a new one.” He gave his hair a tug and paced several times past Valerie. “Shit, shit, shit. Come on, give me your boss’s name. Let me see if I can work something out. Delay your start date, or whatever. Come on, throw me a bone here!”

  “I’ve been begging for a chance to fetch my own bone for eight years and I’ve been more or less ignored, so why would I want to do the company any favors now?”

  Damn right, you put your foot down, baby.

  “Okay, truth be told, I don’t keep a close watch on what’s happening on every account. It was my fault for letting this happen in this one. I specifically wanted you here, but apparently, no one communicated why, and I can’t blame anyone but myself for that now. If it’s about money—”

  “It’s not about money,” Valerie said quietly. “It’s about being able to take ownership of my work and put my name on the things I’m proud of. I can do that at my new firm.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while. Just let me talk to her. I promise, I won’t yell.”

  Valerie looked at Tim.

  He didn’t want to lead her, so he kept his expression as neutral as he could and clasped his hands behind his back. There was an opportunity for that compromise she’d said she wanted, and he hoped she hadn’t changed her mind.

  She nodded once. “All right. I’ll get you her card. Come on into the office.”

  She got the blowhard moving toward the door, and turned backward to mouth to Tim, “Stay right there.”

  “Of course.”

  He turned to look at the truck.

  Heidi gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  A couple of minutes later, Valerie stepped outside and let out a deep breath before starting down the short walkway.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said as she walked closer.

  “Me, too,” Heidi shouted from the truck.

  Valerie furrowed her brow and turned toward the truck.

  “Ignore her,” Tim said. “I think the tendency to eavesdrop goes hand-in-hand with being something of a voyeur.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We dropped Kevin off. It was weird that he wanted a ride, but of course we weren’t going to tell him no.”

  “Oh. I guess I finally put the fear of Jesus into him.”

  “What?”

  She shrugged. “I yell at him a lot. At that age, you can’t tell how much of it is going to stick.”

  “What do you tell him?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s a trade secret.”

  “A trade secret?”

  She batted her eyelashes and grinned that coy smile of hers that always made his belly flutter like he was a damn sixteen-year-old. “Okay, maybe not a trade secret, but a cultural one. In my culture, we’re quite fond of telling other people’s kids when they’re being butts. We’re intrusive that way. It’s the takes a community to raise a child principle, I guess, and he is a child. He may have reached the age of majority, Tim, but as far as he’s concerned, he hasn’t signed up for being a full-time adult.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  She shook her head and put up her hands. “It’s not a problem. Realign your expectations. He’s not a confident person, and if he needs two or three years to figure himself out, then let him have it. You can afford to give it to him. He’ll be better for it in the end.”

  “He wasn’t ready to be pushed out of the nest, is what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t think he was.”

  “We never tried to push him out. I mean, we wanted him to go to college, but at no point did we ever say that he couldn’t take more time to launch if he needed to.”

  “Maybe you di
dn’t say that you expected him to shoot straight for the stars, but that’s the expectation put on people of his age. It’s expected that if they graduate from high school or turn eighteen, they suddenly have to be grown-ups.”

  As badly as he wanted to argue with her and stress how capable Kevin was and argue that he wasn’t meeting his potential, he couldn’t. She’d never said he couldn’t do things. She’d said he was simply going to need to take a slower road.

  Slow wasn’t bad. Slow still implied movement.

  “How’d you get so smart?” he asked, in genuine awe of her.

  She grinned. “Born that way. Remember, I had a brilliant mother.”

  “I wish I could have met her.”

  Her smile ebbed a bit and she stared down at her steel-toed boots. “Yeah. I do, too.”

  He wanted to pull her into his arms right then and there and hold her until the sadness drained away, but Valerie’s boss hurtled out of the office holding out the phone. “Okay! Hear me out. We struck a deal.”

  “You’re joking,” Valerie said, brows knit in obvious confusion.

  “No way. She’s giving it to me up the ass with no lube, but I don’t see what choice I have. Dear Lord, just tell her yes.” He thrust the phone at Valerie, who took it gingerly.

  “This is Valerie,” she said into the phone.

  Tim watched her expressions flit from confusion to shock, to some unreadable thing that had her cutting a suspicious sideways look at Tim.

  He couldn’t hear a damn word through the phone. Couldn’t tell if what her new boss was saying was good, bad, or somewhere in between, but he selfishly hoped that whatever she was offering was enough.

  And that he was enough.

  There had to be a god somewhere who’d hear his pathetic prayer to help him root that woman.

  “Let me call you back, Shel,” she said into the phone. “Okay. Bye.”

  She hit the end button and handed the phone back to her boss.

  “Uh…I’m going to go have lunch,” she told him.

  “But what about…”

  “I’m going to go have lunch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  He sighed.

  “Make that two. I need to confer with someone.” She held out her hand to Tim, and he wrapped her arm around his elbow.