She wasn’t normally this bossy. She didn’t normally drag men into her bedroom to have her way with them the first time they’d met. She wouldn’t expect the common stranger off the street to comply with a short, unassuming redhead who ordered them around for sexual purposes. But Spencer complied, scooping his long, lean fingers down to her hips.
“Up. Quick.”
He was bossy, too. That was okay. They didn’t even really need to talk. Jo bowed away from him and unhooked her bra, tossing it away. He skimmed off her cutoffs and her panties with an efficient tug. Before she could reseat herself, he was lifting her, turning them, tumbling her back onto the bed and reclining on his side next to her.
“Put your hands over your head.” His voice deepened to the same deliciously urgent gravel that she’d heard on their one phone call. Jo felt a blush creep up her neck at the memory, or maybe it was the soft, long sweeps of his fingertips over her skin.
He started at her ankles, running his hands up her calves, over her knees, smoothing both thumbs over the slight swell of her stomach. She was too aroused to be self-conscious, heating up too fast to care that he should notice the difference between her and a lithe Nordic blonde.
One hand continued up, relearning the curves of her breasts, tweaking her nipples to aching points before moving to her neck. He followed his fingers with his lips, there, kissing and nipping as he brushed a hand over her eyes. She let her lids flutter closed, and he traced her brow, her cheekbones, her chin.
“I haven’t had my full vision since I woke up,” he explained, and she tried to concentrate on his voice, rather than his other hand, which was drawing methodical circles on her thigh. “But I’ve seen your photo so much that I know you by heart already.” His breath was hot at her ear. “Open your legs for me.”
God help her, she couldn’t resist. Letting her knees fall open, she pressed her lips tightly together and tensed for the first touch, afraid she might explode if it didn’t come soon. Instead, Spencer’s hand slipped over hers. He slid their entwined fingers over her stomach, draping his leg over her splayed one, holding her open.
“I want you to show me.”
She balked, pulling at his grip. “I don’t—”
His quiet laughter was rich and husky, sent a tremor coursing through her. “Yes, you do. You’ve done it for me before. I’ve done it for you. Not just that once, but many, many times.”
“Really?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
He nodded. “I imagined you here, doing the same. Clutching one of my letters in your hand while the other hand worked between your legs, while you shivered and tensed and came thinking about me.”
Jo turned her face into the taut junction between his neck and shoulder, the blush returning.
“I can’t see you, baby. I want to feel you. I want to hear you again.”
Jo nodded and willed herself to relax. Skating their entwined hands lower and lower on her stomach, she turned her face away from him to draw a much-needed breath.
The first touch of their entwined fingers was tentative. Jo dipped softly into her own wetness, and then, at his whispered encouragement, grew bolder and bolder, until her hips were lifting, until she was mindlessly unaware of anything but where the two of them touched, until he didn’t need her to show him anymore. Then, she used her hands to bring his mouth back to hers.
He was a quick learner, this reporter. As they kissed, she felt herself climbing dizzyingly toward climax. His fingers found a slick rhythm against her clit and kept time with the breaths that passed between them. His arm slid under her shoulder and his words spurred her on.
“That’s it, almost there. Come for me, I want to hear it again.”
“Spencer.” His name was a deep, lengthy moan. She couldn’t control the warm, tingling waves of tension that built in her muscles, that made her clutch for the hand that curled behind her head. Her legs moved restlessly, and she bucked against the restriction of his leg, still trapping one of hers.
Spencer leaned in, lavished her nipples with wide, hot sweeps of his tongue and slipped his fingers down, burying two of them inside her while grinding the heel of his hand against her aching sex.
“Oh, my God. Oh, don’t sto—”
Spencer sucked at her ear, bit at the line of her jaw. “What’s your real name?” His whisper ran through her, knotted her gut, brought her eyes to his in a panic. She was too close to the edge, and Spencer was relentless, never ceasing his deliberate caresses, bringing her up, up, up.
“Spencer, I…my—”
He added a third finger, the movement seductively aggressive.
“What is your name?” The growl undid her.
“Josephine,” she nearly sobbed. “Please, my name is Jo.”
His thumb swept up, pressed and swirled in some mind-boggling, deft way that finally, finally pushed her over. Jo’s head snapped back, and it seemed her only anchor point to earth was where her leg twined with his, where her hand threaded with his.
She came in deceptively small spasms, her muscles clenching around his fingers, the focused, internal waves of pleasure blooming into wild fireworks behind her eyelids. He captured her mouth, moved her through her orgasm, brought her down as if she were breakable.
Their kisses turned slow, sweet. Jo struggled against her post-orgasmic lassitude. There were butterflies in her stomach that were throwing up with nerves. When he pulled back, stroking along her body, Jo twisted her face away, feeling it heat.
Spencer cupped her cheek, turned her back to face him. His eyes darted over her face, and she felt her own eyes well up with tears. The striking green of his irises stunned her. She felt a deep, wrenching regret for the lies she’d told him. Lies that were obvious even to this sightless man.
But could she have kept him, otherwise? She was a mid-range, middle-class, average-figured, ice-cream-after-dinner kind of a girl. She wasn’t even particularly…
“You’re beautiful.”
Jo shook her head, and her tears spilled over. “I lied. I lied about my name, the traveling, all of the stories.”
He pulled her close, nodded and peppered her hair with kisses. “I’m kind of familiar with the art of the lie, Jo.”
“The picture was fake.”
He stilled, seemed to be considering this. “Well, doll, you don’t feel like a rail-thin European model, if that’s what you mean.”
Jo sat up, scrubbed both hands over her eyes. “Stop it! Just stop it! You’re supposed to be mad, you’re supposed to get up and storm out. You’re supposed to say you never want to speak to me again.”
Spencer sat up, too, his hair rumpled and his expression exasperated. “I might have, if I wasn’t in love with you.”
She punched the mattress for emphasis, huffing. “You don’t even know me. Everything was fabricated!”
Spencer smiled slyly, raised his fingers to his lips and sucked them into his mouth. Jo’s jaw fell slack when he pulled them loose, grinned and licked his lips. Her pulse thrummed at the erotic dart of his tongue. “I know you pretty damned well, darling, and you feel and taste amazing.”
“You’re in love with a fictional character.”
“I’m in love with Josephine Grace Tate, 549 East Lochatong Drive, Trenton, New Jersey. Parents: Joseph and Evangeline Tate, lately of Boca Raton, Florida. Miss Tate is something of a local art sensation, with her first solo exhibition opening in a small but respectable gallery in the city later this year. Miss Tate is active in the community, volunteers at the food bank, was mentioned in the paper for her free children’s art classes, and had a small scuffle with security at some place called Club Limits a few months ago, which resulted in her being hauled to the police station but subsequently released without charges.”
“It was a bachelorette party dare.”
“See? You do have interesting stories. Real ones.” His smile was warm, his hands warmer as he reached for hers. She pulled her hand away, and winced when he ran his hand over the comforter, momentarily
thrown off.
“So you stalked me?”
“I’m a reporter, Jo. It’s called research. My first clue was that this address, the address from all our letters, was not owned by a woman named Ginger.”
Jo dropped her head, took a few deep, steadying breaths. “So you came here anyway, even though you knew?”
Spencer scooted across the comforter, lifted her face for a kiss.
“It could have been a nickname. You are a ginger.” He grinned and it did funny things to her insides. “Besides, any woman who takes the time to make up such fantastic stories to impress a complete stranger deserves a chance to tell him her real ones.”
“I can’t believe you’re not mad. I was furious with you when I found out who you were.”
“I was mad at first, but I realized something that made it all clear. You and I have known each other for two years. I lost touch with a lot of people over the course of this assignment, and none of the losses bothered me. When I woke up, all I could think about was whether or not you showed up at the opera, what you were thinking, how I could get to you. You and I were connected, Jo, and I wanted to find out if it was real.”
Warmth suffused her chest. She tightened her fingers in his. “I’m sorry.” It was all she could say, and she hoped he would stick around for her to prove it to him.
“I’m sorry, too. For New York, and for not coming clean on who I was.”
Jo nestled into his offering of strong, open arms. A huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Spencer’s fingers traced the slope of her arm, up and back, up and back, hypnotically.
Jo raised her face. “Make-up kiss?”
Spencer’s rich chuckle swirled into her mouth, along with his tongue. The kiss started sweet and then deepened. Lord, the man could kiss. Jo felt a familiar ache come to life, thrumming heavily between her thighs. She twisted, rose up on her knees in front of him.
“Take off your pants.”
Spencer shook his head, caught her mouth with his again, took handfuls of her hips and urged her up to straddle him.
“Oh, I don’t put out on the first date, lady. What kind of a man do you take me for?”
“The kind who rock climbs and skydives and goes adventuring in exotic countries and gives explosive orgasms to women who make up fake personalities to impress him. The kind who looks like a playboy but writes like a love-struck schoolboy. The kind who calls himself a geek, but probably only likes the original Star Wars trilogy.”
The sound of his zipper rasped loudly in the quiet room.
“Hmm. You do have me pegged. The second trilogy really went off the rail—oh, God.”
Reaching between them, she curled her hand around his length and pulled his cock free of his boxers. Spencer lifted his hips slightly, his thighs flexing between hers when she started to caress him. He muttered something under his breath, and Jo grinned, knowing it was most likely something none too polite.
*
Spencer had one foot in heaven and one in hell. More specifically, he wanted her hands and mouth all over him, but he felt pretty damned sure that he didn’t have the willpower to hold out for much longer. Her climax might have taken the edge off her libido, but his was on a hair trigger and she had her hand wrapped around the gunstock.
The relief he felt from their confessions was short-lived. Another kind of restlessness was causing him major trouble. Her fingers were so soft that it was making his eyes roll back. That overwhelming delight battled with a pang of self-consciousness—her clever hands were a tad too close to the scarring on his hip for his comfort.
“Jo.” He gritted his teeth. “I don’t know if too much foreplay is a great idea. Two years is plenty for me.”
She laughed and swept her fingers through his pubic hair, tugging gently as she used her other hand to squeeze the head of his cock. He thrust into the pressure, moaning.
“Skip the foreplay? Seriously?” Jo knew she sounded incredulous.
“Seriously.” He, on the other hand, sounded very intent.
A slow smile tugged at her lips. “I’d feel like I was missing out.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” he growled.
“I think it’s my turn to make it up to you.”
She scooted away from him, toward the edge of the bed.
“Come back. Make it up to me while I’m inside you.”
She didn’t respond to his plea. His sex-clouded brain didn’t register her intent until she bent forward and engulfed him in scalding-hot suction. Then, of course, her intent not only registered, but shut his brain down completely. His hands came up to drag through her hair, and what he meant to be a gentle tug to pull her away turned into a near death grip on her scalp as he pumped into her mouth, thrusting against the wet velvet of her tongue.
She drew him deep, cupped his balls and pulled slowly away until his head was barely between her lips. She took him in again, starting a slower rhythm that his hips mimicked. Every nerve along the length of his cock went on hyper-alert. He was damned near hypnotized by the steady magic of her hot, skillful mouth. He didn’t give a shit about his scars anymore.
“God, Jo, that feels amazing.”
She hummed in response, which made everything in him tighten. As he rocked to the pace she set, he was thinking ahead, his eyelashes fluttering and his eyes rolling back at the thought of her rising up, her knees on either side of him, sinking down onto him.
“Jo, baby, you gotta stop.”
She shook her head, cupped his ass, pulled back and started sucking the head of his dick like a lollipop, keeping an intense seal of pressure around the most nerve-rich few inches of his length. Spencer’s jaw clenched and he had no more thoughts of stopping her.
He could feel her smile around him. She ringed just below where her mouth hit with two fingers, squeezing tightly, her lips bumping her fingers as she focused her attention.
He left a hand in her hair, but raked the other through his own, feeling like he was about to explode. He drew rapid, shallow breaths, cursing the blurred vision that kept him from seeing this goddess of a woman.
“Sweet fuck, Jo, I’m too close.”
He panted, strained to hold back. From her small moans and the renewed eagerness of her movements, Spencer came to the heart-stopping conclusion that she was trying to suck him off, to get him to lose it as completely as she had lost it for him, moments earlier.
The tingling started in his toes and moved up his legs, sparking at the base of his spine and radiating out to the tip of his cock, where her plush mouth worked with glorious precision. Spencer’s back bowed, and he let go of her hair to support himself, bracing both hands on the mattress as she pulled her tightly ringed fingers away and took his entire length in with a single, fluid move.
He came wildly into her mouth, falling back to the bed, swearing, bucking, jerking. She stayed with him, unerring as she kept hold of him through every spastic move.
When it was over, when he lay gasping for breath, she scraped her teeth lightly against him on the way up. As she reached his head, she twisted her lips around him and drew the very last jolt of orgasm from him. He could feel the reflexive motion of her throat as she swallowed and finally released him, leaving him a crumpled, sweaty disaster, tangled in his jeans.
Then, stillness. It took him a good while until he was sure his heart rate had returned to normal. He struggled out of his shoes, jeans and boxers before collapsing back onto the bed.
“I can’t see you,” he chided, “but I’m pretty sure you look very self-satisfied right now.”
“I do. You look very satisfied.”
“Oh, God, I am. Is it the wrong time to ask you to go make me a sandwich?”
He couldn’t see the pillow coming, but it hit him square in the face. Sitting up, he grabbed for her, and used whatever limbs he captured to haul her close. Her laughing lips were waiting—he didn’t have to find them.
“I love you, Josephine Tate.”
“I love you, Spencer Corwin.”
He grinned at the profession, his eyelids drifting low. When she spoke, her voice was equally sleepy. “Spence?”
“Yes?”
“What would have happened if we had both been there, at the Met that night?”
He snickered. “I don’t know. Maybe not this on a first date, even though I was hot as hell for you from day one.”
“But you would have seen that I wasn’t the blonde.”
He yawned and stretched. “Yeah,” he admitted, “but I researched you a few weeks after the first letter.”
“You did not!”
“Did. The sad part?” He felt her prop up beside him. “I couldn’t find a full-length picture of you anywhere. Just your promo shot for the gallery show.”
“I suppose you’ll just have to use your imagination.” She trailed soft fingers over his chest.
He leaned toward her, wrapped her up and pulled her with him as he settled on his back. “Fine. Next time we do this, you’re going to have to describe yourself. In detail.”
She laughed against his chest. “Deal.”
He lapsed into silence. She rested her cheek on his chest. The moment was perfect, but there was still a niggling little voice in the back of his mind that said, What are you going to do, now, Spence? Hang out on her couch and wait to see if the network calls?
“Jo,” he started, finding the words hard to force out, “I don’t have a plan.” He winced at how awkward and stilted he sounded. “I mean, I didn’t plan past coming here, meeting you. I’m on leave from the network, I…”
Her fingers pressed to his lips. “Shh. No spoiling the afterglow. I never thought I’d meet you, so you’re a step ahead of me.”
He laughed dryly. “Yes, a blind, stumbling step ahead. I don’t even know when my sight will come back.”
Jo yawned, nestled tighter against him. “So we’ll figure it out. You could still write. I read almost all of your archived articles for the Times. Great stuff.”
The voice in the back of his mind quieted slightly. “You think so?”
Love Letters Volume 2: Duty to Please Page 6
