Getting Even

by Avril Tremayne

  “Rafael,” she said. “Pleeeease, I’m so close. Please hold on.”

  He shifted her, just a fraction, brought her thigh a little higher.

  “Yes,” she said, on fire. “Oh yes, yes.”

  He was gasping, struggling for breath, shuddering, shuddering, shuddering, as he slowed down, holding back for her. “Verónica, mi amor, dime cuándo. Say when, tell me when.”

  One thrust, two, and she felt it. Racing, bursting. “Now!” she screamed. “Now, now.”

  He cried out and let go, three hard thrusts, and the shock of his sudden explosion as she came with him stole her breath. She slumped against the door, a shaking mess, as he pulled out of her for the last time, as he lowered her thigh from his hip, as he rested his forehead against the door above her head, his body twitching, his breathing erratic.

  A moment, two, and then somehow she wasn’t slumped against the door anymore but in his arms. “Shh, mi vida. Don’t, please don’t,” he said.

  She realized that her breaths were heaving like wrenching sobs, even though her eyes were dry; there were no tears, there could be none.

  And that, she reminded herself, was why she hated him. Because he could make her want to cry for him and yet he’d stolen her ability to do it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MI VIDA, HE’D called her. “My life.” His fucking life.

  And it was true.

  His life had been shaped by her from the moment he’d first seen her, his heart swelling with a hopeless, helpless longing to give her whatever it was she was looking for, to be what she was looking for. He’d wanted her to the point of madness. Wanted her so much he’d almost lost himself for her. So much, he’d have gone straight back to her the day after he’d left her if she’d so much as crooked a finger, because that first night without her was hell.

  And even by not crooking that finger, she’d continued to shape him. Her first marriage was responsible for turning Catch, Tag, Release from the overly sentimental love story it had started out as into an annihilating bestseller—wedding present, courtesy of his scorching jealousy. Her second wedding present was Liar, Liar—an ice-cold excoriation of loveless marriages.

  And now, with Stomp...?

  Well, Stomp was the jewel in the crown. A vicious tale about what the churn of old love and new hate could do to a person. A story of obsession and revenge. A story about what she’d done to him. Proof that she was still shaping his life—but also that he intended to finally kill her power over him. And because he wanted an unsubtle symbolism for that killing, he’d written a death for the ironically named heroine, Hope. Ringing the death knell over the hope he’d cherished that he would one day get Veronica back.

  Good plan. Except it had taken only one thrust inside her to make him realize he wasn’t ready to ring the death knell. And he had no idea what he was going to do about that, other than keep reminding himself this was not a romance they were indulging in. The intention was to overdose on her—the sexual equivalent of smoking a million cigarettes—so he could stop craving her.

  She pulled suddenly out of his arms. “Esto es una locura,” she said.

  “Crazy, yes,” he said. He swooped to pick up her purse off the floor—and as what she’d said registered, he straightened slowly. “You speak Spanish now?”

  “Words, phrases, that’s all,” she said.

  And then she blushed—which she almost never did—and he felt something unfurl in his chest. She’d learned Spanish. For him. Had to be. But why, when she’d never intended to see him again?

  He unsnapped her purse, lost in that question, and blinked stupidly at the contents, wondering why he’d opened it. Then he saw the flash of pale pink and remembered. She always carried a silk square; she seemed to think it passed for a handkerchief. He took it out. “Here,” he said gruffly, holding it out.

  She tugged the skirt of her dress down to cover herself, then whipped the handkerchief from his hand and tore it in two. “I don’t need it,” she said—and he saw that she was right: there were no tears.

  She grabbed her purse from his other hand, stuffed the two halves of silk in it, and threw the purse back onto the floor, as though giving her assertion an exclamation point. “What happens now?” she asked coolly.

  Okay, no tears and apparently no explanation for what the non-tears actually were. He looked for a clue on her. Found nothing. And then he realized he was really finding nothing—no remnant of himself on her. He looked harder, needing a sign, however minor, that what they’d done had had an impact on her aside from the actual orgasm. Infuriating that she could look perfectly restored before the sweat on him was dry, leaving him nothing but the memory of those sobbing breaths and a line of Spanish.

  He was going to have to up his game, obviously.

  “Now you put your hands on me,” he said.

  “Where do you want them?”

  “Do you really need suggestions?”

  “Anywhere I want?”

  “Choice is yours.”

  “Good,” she said and raised both hands to cup his face.

  His heart lurched in his chest—unfair—and he snapped his head back so that her hands dropped. “Not like that.”

  “You said anywhere I wanted.”

  “This is about sex.”

  “I think about sex when I touch your face.”

  Oh God, she knew how to get to him! “Think a little lower,” he said and one of his hands moved to stroke his cock through his jeans.

  Her eyes dropped, exactly as he’d intended. She licked her lips and he thought he might explode at the thought of them wrapped around his cock.

  “You zipped yourself up prematurely if that’s what you want,” she said, reading his mind effortlessly. “So should I unzip you or do you want to do it?”

  “You do it.”

  “All right then—”

  “After you take off your dress.”

  Unhesitatingly, she turned her back to him, wordlessly offering him access, no hint of shyness, no uncertainty. Never. He slipped the tiny button at the nape of her neck from its loop then slid her zipper slowly down—but when she started to turn toward him he stopped her and leaned down to kiss the back of her neck, once, twice, thrice. Payback for the way she’d touched his face. But although she drew in a too-careful breath, she didn’t flinch—of course she didn’t; she’d never flinched, no matter what.

  After only the slightest of pauses, she turned, shrugging out of her bodice then pushing the dress down, over her hips, off.

  “Wait,” he said as she stepped out of it, testing his own restraint.

  She was as beautiful to him as she’d always been. Small and slender. Stylish and classy. Nothing about her screamed, everything whispered—the only color coming from her were her turquoise eyes. Her bra was nude-colored and so were her high heels and her barely-there stockings, which were held up by lace bands at the top of her thighs.

  She shifted slightly, and at last he saw evidence that he had indeed been there. Those lace bands of her stockings were stained with his cum.

  She saw where his eyes were and moved again, smiling as she opened her legs—evil queen peeping out from behind the princess. Her stockings weren’t the only cum-soaked things on her body, the very tops of her inner thighs were gleaming with it. Evidence he’d been there with his cock. That he’d be there again, and again, during the night.

  His...cum...

  He drew in a sharp breath. Okay, they had a problem.

  “The pill,” he said. “Are you taking it?”

  “Yes,” she said and then her eyes went wide. “Oh.”

  “Did your husbands wear condoms?”

  “No. But we had blood tests.”

  “Were they faithful?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I
know them.”

  “You know me, too. Know I always was.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you were, only what you are. So this...tonight...what we did...no condom...? It can’t happen again like that.”

  “And if I tell you the only person I’ve ever had my naked cock near was you? Because if it will make a difference, let’s go find the Bible they always have tucked in a drawer somewhere in these places and I’ll swear my Catholic soul away on it.”

  She looked at him, one heartbeat, two, assessing. Then, “Not on a Bible,” she said. “For all I know, you’ve become an atheist.”

  “I haven’t changed.”

  She shook her head, laughed. “Swear on your mother’s life and I might believe you.”

  Without hesitation he grabbed her hand, placed it over his heart, laid his palm over it to keep it there, and looked directly into her eyes. “I swear on my mother’s life.”

  “I’d accept that,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “I’d accept it if you hadn’t told me you’d love me forever five minutes before you walked out on me.” She pulled her hand free. “So what I require is either an all-clear STD test result or condoms, or you’ll be getting hand jobs for the next two weeks and not much else. So see if you can find a condom, and I’ll wait for you in the bedroom.”

  With that, she turned on her high heels and ascended the stairs, regal as an unfucked monarch despite the fact she was practically naked. Even the squeaky fourth step didn’t faze her.

  Rafael’s instant reaction was to stride over there and yank her the hell back down. He even took a hasty step toward her. But then he saw an imperfection that stopped him. A very minor imperfection: a fine ladder down the back of her left stocking, almost imperceptible except as a faint silvery sliver of a line as the light hit it. And even though he hadn’t caused it, it suddenly made her more real to him. Less...untouchable. More his.

  “Veronica,” he called out as she reached the top of the stairs.

  She stopped but didn’t deign to look back at him.

  “I’ll find a condom if you keep the stockings on.”

  * * *

  He waited as long as his dick would allow—three whole minutes.

  She’d left the bedroom door ajar but not open. There was some kind of symbolism in that, but it was as much as he could do to control his body let alone his thought processes, so he wasn’t going to try to figure out what it meant.

  “Rafael?” she called from inside, letting him know she knew he was there.

  He pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  She was standing in the middle of the room. She’d taken down her hair and it was gleaming, as beautiful as he remembered. And then he thought it was bizarre, and maybe even a little concerning, that her hair should have been the first thing he wanted to touch, because the second thing he noticed was that she’d taken off her bra and was now naked except for those stockings.

  Her breasts were small and round and perfect, her nipples the delicate shade of coral pink he’d lodged in his brain like a Pantone chip, jutting out like bullets. His mouth dried. His cock went diamond-hard. He knew he would have triple-sheathed himself for her if that’s what she demanded.

  He ripped off his T-shirt, his hands going to his jeans to start the shedding process as he hurried to the bathroom. Condoms. He knew he had them. He dropped his jeans, kicked them away, fumbled in his shaving kit for a condom, put it on faster than he’d ever done in his life. Grabbing a handful of spares—and he wasn’t being ambitious, he was going to use every damn one—he went back into the bedroom.

  He thought, belatedly, he should have checked what he looked like in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, but maybe it was just as well he hadn’t—if he looked as wild as he felt, he’d probably have tried to reorder his features into something less threatening and that would have delayed him when he didn’t want to be delayed.

  It didn’t matter, anyway. Whatever he looked like, it didn’t seem to worry Veronica, who came striding fearlessly toward him.

  “Bed,” he said, stopping her with that one word, and she nodded and changed course. Clearly she wasn’t going to waste time talking, either.

  They reached the bed simultaneously. He used one hand on her hip to keep her where she was as he tossed the condoms in his other hand onto the mattress, and leaned in for a brief, hard kiss. And then he sat on the edge of the bed, both his hands on her hips now.

  She prepared to straddle him but he said, “No.”

  She blinked at him. “No?”

  “Not yet,” he clarified and pulled her between his thighs. “Put your hands on my shoulders and lift your left foot onto the bed beside me.”

  She did as he asked, and the smell of sex and vanilla slid into his nostrils and he wanted to lick her, fuck her, suck her, mark her—everything all at once.

  “If this is about taking off my stocking, just tear it off, I don’t care about it,” she said urgently, dragging him out of the black hole of desire he was swirling in.

  Tear it off—yes!

  He toyed with the idea of doing that then flipping her onto her back on the bed and sinking his cock straight into her. But if he did that he’d be the animal and she’d still be the princess. And it was her turn to be desperate.

  His slid his hand down her hip to the top of her stocking, fingers sliding beneath the band on the outside of her thigh. Next, his other hand...to her moist inner thigh. Slowly he eased the stocking down, down, down. He reached her foot, worked the stocking over it and off, then gripped her toes, circling each one between finger and thumb before stroking his hand back up her leg, enjoying the goose bumps prickling her skin in his fingers’ wake. He squeezed her thigh—a signal to her to change legs—and as she did so, she leaned toward him.

  He breathed in as the scent of her intensified for that moment, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d hooked a finger in the nylon of her other stocking and was tearing it all the way down and off her as he took the tip of her breast into his mouth and sucked.

  She whimpered and he moved his mouth from her nipple. “Too hard?”

  “No. Perfect.”

  “Tell me what you want,” he said and then he licked her nipple, kissed it, licked again, sucked more gently now.

  “I want you to keep doing that. Sucking my nipple until it hurts. And then I want your cock inside me.”

  “Good answer,” he said against her tight nipple as he grabbed her hips to pull her down as he thrust up just far enough to sink his cock halfway into her, giving her nipple a long, hard suck.

  “Oh my God,” she panted, and then she let out a long, low groan as he caught her thigh to stop her moving off him and sucked her nipple again.

  She mewled something indecipherable in the back of her throat, and then, more clearly, through a series of gasps, “Please...let’s just do it...now, now, now... God, Rafael!”

  He pulled out and then thrust into her again, to the hilt this time. Stop.

  She cried out and he jackknifed as the fuck of what he was doing, the unadulterated fuck of it—lust and punishment—had him so breathless he had to release her nipple from his mouth to take in air.

  He gasped against her breast, fighting for control as she did her best to move on him. “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” she pleaded.

  “I said no!”

  It took superhuman willpower to lift her off his dick, and although he did it, he couldn’t quash an agonized groan at the separation. Half crippled, he got off the bed and grabbed the stocking he’d removed from her. Before he could think twice, he looped it around her wrists, tying them together, and then turned her toward the bed and knotted the stocking around one of the end posts.

  Leaving her there, he strode to the bathroom.

  * * *

  Veronica’s heart was pou
nding, her nerves thrumming—lust and excitement.

  This was new territory, to be helpless, to wonder what he had planned.

  He could only have been gone for a few seconds, but every one of them was a torture of anticipation, so that when he returned carrying the giant jar of vanilla oil she took wherever she went, she actually twitched.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked—and she could hear both excitement and a tiny thrill of something that wasn’t quite fear in her voice.

  “I’m going to work as much of my cum out of you as I can, and then I’m going to suck your pussy,” he said, grabbing her other discarded stocking and soaking it with the oil. “I seem to be saying this a lot tonight, but open your legs.”

  She shivered deliciously as she obeyed him and, as he dabbed the scrunched-up stocking between her thighs, her hips flexed, relaxed, flexed, in a wordless fuck-me routine that she could not control.

  He edged up close behind her. “Every time you wear stockings for some other man, I want you to remember that I had you like this, tied up for me and hot as hell.” He licked her neck as he kept up the pressure between her legs, dabbing at her opening, then stroking the length of her, then circling her clit.

  The slight crunch of nylon again her intimate flesh had her gritting her teeth against a wanton moan. She was so close to ordering him to drop to his knees and lick into her right that second. She felt him push inside her, using a section of her nylon stocking. He kept it there, fingers twisting against that heavenly spot that always brought her climax on fast, while the fingers of his other hand returned to her clit and circled there. He kept at it, until she could barely tell the touches apart—the stocking, his slippery fingers, inside, outside, everywhere, working her fast then slow then fast, relentless. She could feel the orgasm coming, desperately tried to slow it so she could have more, but it hit her hard and sent her rigid. Rigid...then limp, sagging against the laddered stocking that tethered her to the bed as she tried to catch her breath.