Coin Operated
Page 6
Her hair hung in thick auburn waves that grazed the cool enamel of the washer. He rolled up his sleeve, closing the remaining space between them.
“How long have you worked with me, Bea?”
“Years, Eli.”
“You will address me as Mr. Elliot. Is that clear?”
Her audible intake of breath shuddered into his soul, more potent than any of his fantasies. He waited, rolling up his second sleeve, his knees touching the backs of her thighs. He looked past the crown of her bowed head to her slim hands spread on the washer. His cock swelled harder and he reached, curling one hand into the waist of her shorts.
“Yes,” she finally answered, and when he didn’t continue, she ventured softly, “Yes, Mr. Elliot.”
He swore he could feel the burn of her skin through his slacks, and he wanted more than the lengths of those perfect legs to be bare for him.
“How many of those years have you wanted me?” he asked.
“All of them,” she admitted without hesitation, the words expelled on a suddenly hitched breath.
Triumph and the sweetest, headiest rush of desire he’d ever felt rose in him. His cock pulsed, his gut clenching with a swift, feral need for release. Authority surged, mixed with a weighty tenderness that nearly stole his breath.
Eli jerked downward, ripping her shorts raggedly down the side seam. She stumbled and he steadied her, sliding a palm up the outside of one leg to graze a thumb across the curve where her leg met her body. He gave a hard pull to the other side of her shorts, and the material gave that final inch so that he could pull it free of her and toss it aside. Eli reached for her T-shirt. His hands went everywhere; he couldn’t force them to the sole task of baring her. The heavy scent of lavender cut right through him. His pulse raged, overcome with urgency.
“I think, after all this time together, Bea, after all these months, I think you got too damned comfortable.”
She was nearly panting. Her skin ran with tremors. “No, Mr. Elliot—”
“You’re making mistakes. Precision is key in business.”
He yanked and watched as the force split her shirt raggedly. He separated the sides of the cloth so that the long, curved expanse of her back was bare to the lacy surprise of her baby-yellow bra and bikini panties. He opened his hands against her skin, smoothed them over the curves he’d exposed. “You made a mistake on that account. Say it.”
Say it so I can know that this is mutual. Say it and I will worship every inch of you.
Eli traced his index finger down over the small of her back, outlining an invisible heart into the smooth skin there. Bending, he skated his lips over the spot. The muscle under his lips tensed.
“I made a mistake, Mr. Elliot.”
Certainty lent him all the confidence he needed. Eli reached over to the empty washer frothing with hot water beside them. He scooped a hand into the steaming contents and stirred the quarters at the bottom. He was out of his mind, past caring about propriety or shame, and to hell with guilt. This was who he was with this woman, and he wouldn’t go another day without seeing if it could last past the afterglow.
“So did I, Bea. I made a mistake, holding back on you.”
She nodded and he cupped her chin, turning her face up to find her eyes glossy with gathering tears. Eli kissed the corner of her mouth.
“I’m going to teach you about precision, Beatrix. Say yes.” He asked for permission, asked her to comply, to submit to something that meant far more than a tumble in a laundry room.
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from hers. She reached up with a single finger and traced an invisible heart against his cheek.
“Yes, Mr. Elliot.”
Chapter Seven
Eli was trying to drive her insane. She’d not been prepared for the urgency from him, the echoes of her own hunger on the lips of the man she had lusted after since the day she’d met him. Now all the dark looks and all the hot possibilities she saw in his eyes, the ones she almost thought she had imagined, were manifesting in breath-stealing, shocking, vividly tinged reality.
“Put your hands back.”
She planed her palms against the washer top. A sharp, hot edge of metal flavored her next inhalation as he disturbed the mass of coins in the washer. She didn’t know what he had planned, but impatience made her squirm. This morning she had been a restrained, polite answer to his every professional whim, but now restraint was out the window. What was Eli waiting for? Here she was, bent at the waist, nearly naked in front of him, and he was busy stirring quarters?
Bea’s legs trembled, her pussy wet with a searing, empty ache. His cock branded the seam of her ass, the cloth that remained between them little barrier to the thick imprint of him. She struggled not to turn and strip him as bare as her heart felt—naked, stricken, utterly vulnerable. She wanted his hands on her again.
“I want you to realize how important it is that the accounts be recorded correctly. All mistakes reflect on us. Every number missed makes us look ten times the fool.”
She wanted to move, to kiss him, to touch him, hell, to touch herself. She was soaking wet and each passing second only made her wetter. He was what she wanted. Now.
“Do you want to know how others will see this mistake?” Eli lifted his right hand, the one not occupied in the steaming water, and ran it up the slope of her hip. He spoke at the juncture of her ear and neck, his breath warm.
“Each cent,” he said, “is a weight against us, a mark of incompetence in the eyes of the clients we serve.”
Bea heard him lift the fingers of his left hand from the water, heard the wet slide of metal over metal as he removed one of the coins.
“I’ve worked hard for my business.”
She was trembling, close to begging, confused and aroused and in awe of how she could acquiesce so readily to him. In the world outside this steamy laundry, she was autonomous and her will was her own, but here, now…she was his. She would do anything to have him ease the fiery need that he had kindled inside her.
Just touch me, damn you, she wanted to scream.
He flattened a quarter to the small of her back. Heat bit into her skin and she arched, crying out. Before she could process the small pain, he whisked it away. The hard-edged burn of the coin was replaced with the erotic slide of his firm, expert lips and the wet, rough rasp of his tongue. The echo of the coin’s fire was deeper than skin. It seared into her soul. The soft precision of his lips was a quelling balm.
Bea’s knees went weak so fast that she nearly fell. Eli caught her with an arm around her waist. His mouth made amends for the hurt he had caused before he moved away momentarily. His free hand dipped into the water again. She braced against the washer and at the burn of the second coin, bit back on her cry and refined it into a soft, breathy exhalation that was part prayer and part plea.
“What was that?” Eli traced his tongue over the small red circle she knew must mark her skin.
Bea hissed as he lined a series of five, six more coins in quick succession up her spine, and her eyes watered with the sting. She gasped for breath, and he swept the cooling quarters from the bowed curve of her back. The scrape of his teeth and more feathery sweeps of his tongue ramped up her arousal to a point of near delirium.
Her thighs ran with the slippery evidence of how violently she was reacting to his touch. Her nipples were painfully tight against the cool surface of the washer, and her remaining clothes chafed against her ultra-sensitive skin.
“Eli, please,” she begged.
“Please, what?”
If she gave him the words, he would touch her again. He would ease her out of the greedy mania of want and into the all-consuming perfection of pleasure at his hands.
“Mr. Elliot, please.”
Bea didn’t know the extent of what she was asking. She had the briefest thought that she should ask him what the hell he was thinking, what all of this was really about, if he planned on reverting to the ice prince come Monday morning. The thought was pitifu
lly brief, however, because Eli deftly unhooked her bra. A fiery, rapid new round of monetary adornment crossed her shoulders, into the dip between her shoulder blades. He raked his hand down the line, and the coins scattered, some spinning violently on the washer’s top, some bouncing to the linoleum at their feet.
“Please, what?” he demanded again, scooping his fingers over her hip and into the edge of her panties, his thumb digging just under her hipbone to urge her back against him. The ridge of his erection was unmistakable as her ass met him, flush. Bea ground back against him.
“I’m waiting, Bea.”
Lord, that voice. The same timbre and tilt, as forceful as she’d imagined in her fantasies. She couldn’t find words.
You.
Now. Now. Now.
Eli leaned away. The ragged, scalding edge to his voice matched the temperature of the next coin that he rolled along the side of her neck. He pressed it flat behind her ear.
She moaned, bucked, and ejected through clenched teeth, “I…I don’t know what I want.”
“You do know. You’re lying. You’re just adding to the trouble you’re in.”
Bea wanted him to give up this rough, teasing stretch of what was amounting to pure erotic torture and just get inside her. She didn’t care how it changed things, didn’t care to think of how she would live afterward if he used her and tossed her aside.
“I want…” You, forever, just like this.
“Say it,” he growled.
Bea was in a freefall. She had nothing to cling to but her love for Eli, and if she gave him that, it could become more vapor than substance. Was passion all he was offering?
“I want you inside of me.”
And then he was gone, the imposing press of his body rocking away to leave her exposed in the humid air of the laundry. She almost turned.
“Spread your legs.”
Pulsing, blind with need, she obeyed. Another coin bit, unexpected, into the soft curve of her ass. She moaned.
“Stay still.”
Three more coins followed, each nip of heat sending streaking spasms to her still-empty pussy. He hadn’t given her what she’d asked for. Just when she thought she would expire in a massive puddle of want, she felt the first glide of his fingers over her swollen slit. Eli’s voice came from below her. He had knelt.
“Inside you how?”
He had touched her like this in his office. She had gone mad for him, wild, but it wasn’t enough. Not now.
“Not like that.”
He paused. “No? Why?”
“Not enough.”
“Not enough?” His laugh was sultry and mischievous. “Sweet, hot little Bea. I’ll give you more.”
Bea shivered when she felt his mouth at the base of her spine, gliding over the upper curve of her ass. The last four coins still clung there as he gripped her hips in his palms and raked his teeth down the arch of her left cheek. She cried out. Eli flattened his tongue wetly over her, deftly lifting the cooled quarters from her skin. His fingertips skimmed between her legs, finding her aching clit and circling it softly. Not enough.
She heard him spit the coins out. He would stand now and he’d give her what she wanted. Every hot, hard inch, as roughly as she’d imagined.
He didn’t stand.
“What if I told you this is all you got, Bea? What if you weren’t allowed any more?”
“Please.”
He circled, still too gently. She tried to press her hips forward to increase the pressure, but he pulled away.
“What if I made you stand here and I touched your pussy for hours, until you couldn’t bear it?”
“Eli, please,” she nearly sobbed.
He grabbed her roughly, forced her thighs wider. He yanked the fabric of her panties aside.
“What if all you got were my fingers, my mouth?” He bit the inside of her leg.
She writhed back at him. Oh, his mouth. That would be better. That would be… “Yes, yes, your mouth.”
He opened his lips over her from behind, swiped his tongue upward and forced her hips backward, hard. She fisted her hands against the washer, all the breath leaving her body. Eli growled against her and started her rocking against his tongue.
“Oh. God.”
It was all she could say, over and over as he nearly lifted her, wedging his shoulders between her thighs, making wet, animalistic sounds as he licked and burrowed and sucked at her. She rode his mouth shamelessly, too far gone to care. She didn’t care if anyone walked in. They could be standing in the middle of the Georgia Dome with the whole city watching and she still wouldn’t care.
On tiptoes, she bore back as much as he would let her, wanting the swift, abrasive ferocity of his tongue on her clit. If this was all she could have, she could die a happy woman. She climbed steadily higher, her hips jerking as Eli buried a thumb in her drenched folds and pressed in swift, hard circles over just the right spot.
Almost there.
She chanted his name, she bucked and moaned and thrashed. He swept a hand up the cleft of her ass to rim that taboo spot, the tight passage he’d promised to take. Tauntingly, he circled and she froze.
Would he…?
He slid sharply upward and caught her clit between his teeth, suckling hard as he slipped that finger, slick from her own wetness, inside.
She came too hard to scream, the ripping orgasm seizing her violently enough that she could only gasp and claw for air. There was no oxygen left for sound; it was burned up on inhale and used to keep her from fragmenting into a million permanently shattered bits of glory.
She floated down slowly, weak. Eli held her so hard, she knew she’d have bruises tomorrow.
He disentangled himself from under her and the room was thickly silent.
“Turn around.”
Bea obeyed, and her stomach hollowed and then filled with flame at the sight of the dark, wild man who she found in place of the normally straight-laced Eli. There wouldn’t be any stopping now. She pulled at the shreds of her shirt, dropping the tatters to the floor. She lifted her hands to wrench his shirt from his waistband as he went for his own belt. The sound of their breathing was the only thing that broke the silence as they worked to bare him.
He fumbled in his back pocket, and there was the sound of tearing foil as Bea popped the button at his waist. When his slacks dropped, his shirttails dangling loose, his boxers the only thing left between her hands and his skin, she stopped. He looked at her from under hooded eyes, waiting, daring her to take away the last barrier between them.
Instead of relieving him of that last stitch, she wiggled back and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her own panties, shimmying out of them and stepping free.
He went incredibly still, and his eyes swept her slowly. Her stomach did a nervous flip.
“Undress me.”
When she hesitated, he caught her hand and lifted it to his lips.
“You are unbelievably beautiful,” he said, soft and reverent. Bea grasped at his words, bolstered by them, emboldened. “And I want your hands on me. Stroke my cock. Now.”
She worked his boxers off his hips and tossed them aside when he stepped back. She knelt in front of him and took the condom from his fingers, closing her eyes to try and rein in her racing heart.
He was scalding and stiff under her fingers as she wrapped a hand around him. He wasn’t fearfully large, but he was impressively thick, and the dusk of his skin contrasted with the paler tone of her fingers.
Bea nibbled up from the base of his cock to the tip, laving him softly with her lips and tongue in between love bites. He growled and lanced a hand into her hair. When she got to the tip, she hesitated and he tightened his hand at the back of her head.
“I should make you beg to suck me.”
Bea raised her eyes to his and smiled slowly, licking her lips. She ran her hands up his thighs and leaned in. “Mr. Elliot, please let me…”
He swore and drew her hands away. “Okay, maybe not such a good idea right
now.”
Eli’s skin was velvet-smooth under her lips as she planted a kiss where his leg met his hip. She raked her teeth against his hipbone as she rolled the condom on.
He pulled her up and sat her firmly on the washer’s top.
“I’m going to want to call you Eli again very soon.” She parted her knees and lifted her heels to brace against the washer’s edge.
Eli cursed under his breath as he moved toward her, his palms cupping her upper thighs. The head of his cock nudged against her slit; a heat that rivaled the coins that swirled, forgotten, nearby.
“Bea,” he said, again so worshipfully that she melted.
“Eli.” She cupped the back of his neck, pulling him in and lifting her mouth to his.
He smiled and slid the blunt head of his cock down her belly, teasing her. “How do you want me inside of you, Bea?”
“Slow,” she said tremulously, “at first. Slow.”
Eli pushed inside her in a long, easy slide that faltered the breath trapped between them. The crisp starched fabric of his shirt brushed her belly, strangely exciting her. Bea lurched against him. Nothing in the world could be as hotly sweet, as perfect as this.
Eli came unhinged, his limbs loosening at the joints, any handhold in rational thought gone somewhere beyond his reach. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Bea’s long, slender legs wrapped around his waist, from the erotic curve of the undersides of her arms as she clutched the washer’s edge behind her head. The heated, clenching walls of her pussy clamping around his cock milked him of all reason. There was only Bea and his need for her.
His eyes closed at the thought of the perfect small red circles that dotted her skin, marking her for him. She was flame-hot inside, and snug. He shuddered and, after a moment, started slowly, afraid that he would spill himself like a teenager if he moved too quickly. She bowed upward beneath him, her lips parting.
“No noise.” He pressed his fingers over her mouth. Her eyes clouded in question and he thrust sharply, bending to bite at one of her nipples. The quizzical look sank beneath one of glazed need. “I don’t want to hear a sound out of you unless you’re saying you belong to me.”