by Alison Kent
or undressed, as it were.
Besides, she had her own mind wrapped around a few fantasies where clothing would only be in the way. “Do you really think they’re married? Putting on a show for our benefit?”
Sebastian sipped, paused, sipped again then downed nearly half the contents of his flute. He didn’t answer Erin’s question directly, but poured himself another drink, turning on one hip to better face her.
“Their show isn’t for our benefit, Erin.” He ran his finger around the flute’s fragile rim. Around and around, hypnotically. “It’s for their own. It’s what turns them on, knowing people are watching. It gets him hard. It makes her wet. They use the knowledge of being watched the same way you might use a vibrator.” He looked up then, his gaze heated and compelling. “Or the same way I might use a hot shower.”
Erin didn’t even know what to say. She wasn’t sure she could breathe. She remembered too well his hot shower and the memory of the way she’d watched, the way he’d taken himself in his hand and stroked to completion, the way she’d wanted to wrap her mouth around the plum-ripe and plump head and enjoy his taste as much as give him pleasure.
But she wasn’t going to talk about her vibrator because more often than not her fantasies were lived with only her hands. And, lately, she’d imagined her hands to be his. But she did want to understand about his shower. The decadence of space and design, the potential for hedonistic indulgence, had not been lost on her. Had, in fact, been demonstrated quite clearly.
So…why?
“Tell me about your hot showers. About that space. The benches. The showerheads. That’s not…” She fluttered one hand, reaching for her flute. “That’s not the bathroom of a man who only showers to wash his body. It intrigues me.” She lifted the flute to her lips and, before she sipped she added, “You intrigue me.”
She watched as emotion flickered through his eyes, truth battling fiction, real involvement fighting the tempting attraction of a casual affair.
And she knew whatever he told her, if he told her anything at all, that she would never know with any certainty if he’d chosen to let honesty win the war with the fantasy of a provocatively spun yarn.
Or if he’d only told her what he wanted her to believe in order to keep them wrapped up in this sensual spell.
He inched his way closer, his thigh and hip brushing hers. He draped an arm on the curve of the seat back and toyed with strands of her hair. His gaze was wickedly sharp as it snagged hers and held. “I shower to think.”
Erin’s pulse jumped at the contact. If he moved any closer, if his touch grew more intimate… She might as well give up now on any sort of coherent thought. “You told me you walked to think.”
“I do both.”
“Depending on what you need to think about?” she asked and sipped at her champagne.
He nodded, fingering the fragile stem of his own half-filled flute. “Depending on what I need to work out in my mind. Walking is about fresh thinking. Getting the blood to flow to my brain.”
“And the hot showers? That amazing piece of real estate you call a bathroom?”
She would get to the bottom of this if it killed her. Or if it took her all night—even though she was quite certain all that heat and water was about blood flowing to other parts of his body.
He took the flute from her hand and set it on the table. “The showers should be obvious. The steam straightens out the wrinkles the walking puts in my brain.”
That caught her off guard and she chuckled, then reached for her flute again but he took hold of her hand and stopped her. She stared at his much larger hand covering hers that was so much smaller. “I never realized certain thinking was done better under certain conditions.”
“But you do it all the same.” He laced their fingers together, studied her short, practical nails.
“No. I don’t have that luxury.” Though even as she refuted his claim she realized she thought more about her issues with Paddington’s while at the bar, thought more about the missing needs of her personal life while at home.
“It’s not a luxury. It’s what I do.” He reached for her other hand, holding both of hers in both of his, and she shifted on the bench to better face him. “You do it more than you realize. I’m just more conscious of where I need to be, what I need to be doing in order to get my head on straight.”
Her head would never be on straight. Not when he was making love to her hands, massaging her fingers and the base of her thumbs, her palms, her knuckles, the pads at the tips of her fingers. His touch seduced her and made concentrating on this strange conversation more than difficult.
Nearer to impossible. As was any cognizant reply. “You think too much about thinking.”
“Thinking’s what I do.”
That was the second time he’d said that and she knew the remark was worth pursuing. But, at the moment, she wasn’t able to pursue anything at all. She was relaxed and hypnotized by what he was doing to her hands.
Maybe he was a street magician, a magic man like David Blaine, the legal pad filled with notes on the tricks of the trade, all that thinking he did part of the process of working out the subtleties of deception.
It all made sense, she supposed, except she wasn’t supposed to be wondering about who he was and what he did because she was only here for his body, not his mind. Or so she continually worked to convince herself wondering if she’d ever succeed.
So when he took her hands he was holding, cupped her palms and covered her breasts with their joined hands, she forgot all about his shower and his thinking because the lantern light had turned his eyes to a compelling contrast of light green and dark desire from which she couldn’t pull her gaze.
He pressed his forefingers and thumbs to her forefingers and thumbs and worked her hands over her nipples. She gasped, unable to hold back her response because it was the response of her fantasy. This was her fantasy. Her hands that were his hands arousing her darkest desire.
“When I was a boy,” he began, his hands leaving hers and moving to the tiny pearl buttons of her sweater, “I lived on the streets. I never knew anything about my father. All I remember of my mother could be called selective. Only the things I want to recall.”
“Is this true?” she asked, her hands growing still on her breasts as her focus switched from his touch on her body to the touch of his words on her mind.
“Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”
He continued to release her buttons, each tiny seed pearl slipping easily through the grosgrain ribbon facing the cashmere placket. One button, then another, air kissing her skin as the two sides began to part.
Yet, she remained silent, wanting to hear and to feel. Her hands fell to her lap as she concentrated her focus on his voice and his hands.
“I had a toy truck. One wheel was missing, but I didn’t care. I sort of liked that it had to fight against the odds, bumping along the way it did.” He reached the bottom of the unending row of buttons, his knuckles brushing the fabric of her skirt where it covered her belly.
“I rolled it across every inch of the concrete floor in the building where I lived. A building with no glass in the windows. Cardboard didn’t do much against the wind, but that’s all that was left with the plywood having been burned for heat. The ashes made for a great construction site.”
Erin listened to his story, wishing he was doing no more than entertaining her, lulling her with the magic of his words, seducing her with the magic of his hands. But she knew that wasn’t the case, that he was doing much more than that. That what he was telling her wasn’t any sort of tale at all, but the truth she’d been hoping to find.
His timing totally sucked, she grumbled, because how was she supposed to concentrate on what he was saying when he had opened the front of her sweater and was, even now, pushing it back off her shoulders?
His gaze devoured the ecru lace that made up the cups of her bra, lace through which her nipples strained and pouted. He reached for her champag
ne flute and sipped, then rubbed the wet rim beneath her nipple, over and around before he poured champagne over her breast and leaned his head down to drink.
The sensation caught her struggling to breathe. The air on the damp lace was cool, his mouth was hot, his tongue swirling and circling, his lips sucking the peak into an unbearable tightness rivaling that in her chest, making it hard for her to catch her breath.
Harder still for her trembling heart to beat.
When he finally lifted his head, Erin wondered, what next? What now? How would she ever get enough of what he did to her body? And how long was she going to manage to keep her emotions uninvolved when he told her stories of little boys and their trucks?
“I don’t know how old I was when I was finally picked up. My mother had long been gone. When I wanted to try and get a handle on the timing of things, I remembered the birthday cupcake she must have begged from a bakery. I used that and counted forward. She told me we were celebrating the first day of spring and making it through the last five years. So, I must’ve been eleven—or close to it—when the authorities managed to get their hands on me.”
All the while he’d been speaking, he’d worked the straps of her bra off her shoulders, trapping her in sleeves of cashmere and the bra’s ecru lace. Yet it was the bondage of his gaze that kept her still.
He studied her quandary then reached around to free her arms and release the clasp holding her bra in place. The sweater dropped to the seat behind her. The bra fell to her lap, baring her full breasts that ached for his attention.
“Come here,” he ordered and pulled her onto his lap.
The edge of the table gouged into her back but she hardly noticed. She was too aware of his erection solidly pressed between her thighs and his hands and mouth that were everywhere at once. Kneading flesh so incredibly sensitive and dying for his touch.
She held on to his shoulders because it was all she could do, and tossed her head back, feeling like the wanton she knew she had to look. She spread her legs wider, her skirt bunching around her thighs as she ground against him, wanting him there where she was so incredibly wet and ready and open.
He blew a long breath onto her skin between her breasts where his face was buried. And then he moved a hand between his own legs and stroked his erection before reaching deeper and pressing hard to halt what he could of the surging sensation.
He shuddered, and his hand found its way up between her legs, to the very spot where she was naked and waiting. His second breath heated her skin and a string of raw curses followed. In the next moment she found herself filled by the thick length of two fingers.
She arched toward his lower body but all he did was widen the V of his spread legs, forcing her thighs farther open there where she sat on his lap. His thumb circled her clit; his tongue circled her nipple.
She braced her hands on his shoulders and rode his thrusting fingers hard, wanting more, wanting to wait, wanting him now even while wanting to draw out the anticipation until both of them were ready to burst.
And just when she was ready to come, he pulled his hand away, moved his mouth away and sat back, his chest heaving beneath raw and ragged breaths.
“Why did you stop?” she panted.
“I’m not ready for you to come.”
To hell with what he was ready for. She was ready enough to take matters into her own hands, to get herself off to the fantasy she’d grown practiced to using, and groaned when he stopped the downward reach of her fingers.
“Not yet,” he bit off.
“You’re making me crazy.”
“I want you wetter.”
Wetter? Moisture seeped from her sex to run into the crevice of her thigh. She smelled her own musk and saw his nostrils flare. She doubted it was possible to be any wetter. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been this wet.
“I swear, Sebastian. You’re out of your mind. You don’t think this is wet enough?”
“Trust me,” he said moving his hands to her waist and boosting her to sit onto the edge of the table. She pushed herself upward with the heels of her palms. Then he slid his hands up her calves to her knees beneath her skirt. “Lean back.”
She hesitated, but did as he asked, knowing she was putting herself in an incredibly vulnerable position, yet unable to stop the thrilling, edgy flutter of nerves.
Sebastian pulled his hands from under her skirt and settled his palms on her thighs, inching the soft black fabric upward until her skirt rode high. The thought that she was so close to being spread across the table, a feast for his consumption, ripe fruit for his hedonistic indulgence…
She tossed back her head, stopped short of releasing the bubbling laughter, uncertain whether what she was feeling was nervousness, wickedness or total disbelief that she was actually so incredibly bold.
He shimmied her skirt up farther until his thumbs found the skin of her inner thighs. He rubbed there, small circles, inching closer to the crease where leg met hip. If nothing else, he’d certainly mastered a very effective method of torture. She was panting, in pain, and ready to scream.
He leaned forward, kissed her thigh, blew a stream of breath against her skin, ran his tongue along the patch he’d just heated. He repeated the action on the opposite side, only this time he moved closer to her sex. He shifted forward, returned to the leg where he’d started, repeated the process and proved her earlier assumption totally wrong.
She was wetter, more ready, more aroused than she’d been minutes before when he’d made love to her with his fingers. She could not believe the intensity of her own incredible response. The way flames licked through her body’s center. The way her skin sizzled from the inside out.
This time, when he moved closer, he pushed her skirt up over her hips to her belly, completely exposing her nakedness, and leaned in to blow a stream of hot breath from her clitoris down between her legs, blowing directly into the mouth of her sex and then blowing lower still.
The waiting, the Tantric sense of anticipation and denial would’ve been fun if she didn’t ache quite so badly, didn’t yearn quite so wildly to find her completion. She didn’t think she’d ever been so desperate to come. And Sebastian’s obsession with arousing her further, the concentrated sensation of his hands and his mouth…five minutes more and she’d be out of her mind.
And then he returned to his tale. “I spent six years living off the State. We had a locker room set up where we showered. A dorm’s worth of teenage boys all at one time, looking over our shoulders, watching our backs, hoping to make it through those quick fifteen minutes without the need for stitches and our virginity intact.”
Erin pulled in a sharp breath. His shocking words hit her at the same time he gently pressed the knuckle of his thumb into the crevice between her legs and dragged it down. She wanted to think about what he was saying, tried to think about what he was saying, but couldn’t get beyond what he was doing and doing so incredibly, amazingly well.
“I showered like that four times a week for six or seven years. I did okay. I made it out. And I swore whenever I finally got on my feet and could afford a place of my own, I would never again worry about hot water or how long I spent taking a bath.”
All the while he’d been talking, he’d been watching the play of his fingers in and around her sex. Erin could easily have gotten off twice now. But she’d gritted her teeth and listened to his story. Still braced back on her elbows, she’d tucked her chin to her chest and kept her gaze trained on Sebastian’s face.
Never once had he hesitated in the telling of his story and never once had he looked up to see if she was listening or if she’d dissolved into a mass of writhing sexuality which so aptly described the sensations in her belly and below. Twisting, twining, kinky knots and ropes of enflamed nerves.
When at last he sat back, she knew he was ready. Or so she thought until he picked up the champagne bottle and used it to stroke along both her inner thighs. He moved the bottle higher, rubbing the mouth over the lips of her sex and betwe
en, circling her clit, slipping the cool glass along her folds, down one side, up the other, teasing her unmercifully before finally lifting the bottle to drink.
Yet, even as he swallowed, even as Erin waited breathlessly for him to return the bottle to the table, pull a condom from his pocket and set himself free, he drizzled champagne there above her strip of trimmed hair and leaned forward, drinking both the wine and her moisture from between the folds of her sex.
Erin couldn’t take it any longer. She cried out, her body rigid beneath the shattering sensations of orgasm, the rush of pleasure sending her arching upward toward his mouth. Her flesh tingled and burned and throbbed, and still she came because this wasn’t enough. She needed to have him inside her.
She pushed up from her elbows, pushed Sebastian away and against the back of the booth. She reached for the waistband of his pants. He reached into his pocket. She longed to stroke him, to watch his eyes glaze, to draw forth that first bead of moisture telling her he was ready to come.
