For Love of Passion (Stone Brothers Book 4)

by Samantha Westlake

  For a moment, all my nervousness and anxiety returned up, paralyzing me. Standing there, in the dimness and long shadows of my grand entrance area, I froze. I still heard a little voice inside my head whispering that I didn't deserve this, that I had already lost my one shot at happiness. Why should I experience anything with Tanner that could come close to the love I'd already had – and lost?

  "Hey," Tanner said softly, the dark, broad-shouldered shape of his body moving closer to me in the darkness. "Are you okay?"

  I realized that, instead of keeping silent, I'd let out a stifled little sob. "I'm okay," I answered, although my voice sounded small and unsure.

  His arms slid around my waist, drawing me in against his comforting strength. "You sound upset. Not okay."

  "I..." I took a deep breath. "I know that we had sex last week, but that was an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment thing that I didn't anticipate. I guess it's just been a long time for me, and I'm not sure I'm ready to go diving into this. It's hard for me to just tell myself that this is nothing but a fling."

  "Is that all you think this is?" His hands tightened, and I knew that he was bending down to kiss me. His lips were soft and gentle, not demanding more.

  "How would you label it?"

  He paused, pulling back barely an inch from my face. I felt his breath, warm against my cheeks and lips. "I think it's still early, but this feels like it could be the start of something bigger. Not putting any labels on it, but not belittling it either."

  I smiled, even though he couldn't see it in the darkness. "I like that."

  "Good." Another kiss, this one stronger, making little bolts of tingling static electricity run over my limbs, making my toes curl inside my shoes. "Now, if you want to take things slow, and for me to leave you here, I can do that."

  I laughed, reached up to grab his plaid shirt in one hand. "Not happening. Don't make me drag you upstairs to my bedroom."

  He laughed, kissed me again, swept me up into his arms and off my feet. We hurried up the stairs like love-struck teenagers, giggling to each other even as our hands roamed over each other's bodies. My shimmering, crystal-encrusted belt fell of somewhere around the second-floor landing, and I didn't bother attempting to locate or retrieve it.

  Just as I'd hoped, the shadows of my bedroom hid most of the clothes that had still lain on the floor when I left. We added to those piles, dropping Tanner's shirt and my shoes among them.

  Tanner landed on my bed before me, turning around and pulling me close so that I stood at the edge of the space, in between his thighs. The moonlight shone in through the open curtains on a tall bay window, painting me from chin to knee. I hesitated, aware of how pale my skin looked against the cold light, knowing that my thin limbs probably made me look awkward and gangly.

  "Stop it," Tanner said.

  I blinked. "What?"

  "You're thinking small thoughts. You're putting yourself down. I can see it. Stop it." He slipped his hands up my sides, teasing the straps of my dress off my shoulders. "You're my muse, and the most beautiful woman I've ever met. And the strongest." The straps of my dress dangled against my upper arms. He moved his fingers to the little zipper in between my shoulder blades. They found the little pull and slowly drew it down. "You're stronger than anyone I've ever met. You should be proud. The only one who could cut you down is yourself. Don't do it to yourself."

  Free of anything holding it up, loosened by the removal of the zipper, the dress slid down to puddle around my ankles. My bare body stood in front of Tanner, illuminated by the moonlight. He could see every little flaw and imperfection, every little mark that made me anything less than perfect.

  "My muse," he whispered.

  Those words broke my dam of indecision. I came forward, climbing atop him even as he kissed at my skin, his hands grabbing me and drawing me closer. He reached up to cup one small breast in his big hand, his fingers sliding over my nipple and making my skin pebble. His mouth followed after his fingers, and my breath caught in my throat as his tongue brushed against me, lighting a fuse that ran down to between my thighs.

  Pressing down against him, I knew he was hard, felt his erection throbbing inside those jeans. Still, he held off on going for the finale, instead torturing me with exquisite little surges of pleasure as he carefully and meticulously explored each inch of my body. I groaned as he moved from my breasts to my mouth to my thighs and then back up, never lingering long enough for me to feel satisfaction.

  "You're killing me," I moaned as, once again, his fingers brushed lightly against my warm and throbbing wetness between my legs, pressing in just enough to tingle without staying long enough to grant me any sort of real and lasting pleasure.

  "Took you long enough to notice." His voice was gently mocking. "What are you going to do about it?"

  I nearly tackled him down to the bed to take him – but then had a better, more evil idea. My fingers fumbled in the darkness to strip off his pants, but I only lightly grazed my fingertips against the length of his throbbing hardness. I felt it twitch in my hands, eager to fill me and make me scream with need.

  As Tanner tortured me, I did the same to him. I lowered my mouth to him as he spread my thighs and kissed inside them, breathing against his shaft, feeling it stiffen even from the warmth of my air. He might be punishing me, but I'd return the favor. I had decades of training in hardening my mental fortitude, practicing with little verbal duels against other members of the privileged, wealthy elite. I wasn't going to be the first to beg for release.

  Ten minutes later, I broke down and did exactly that.

  Tanner laughed, but he finally drew his mouth away from where he'd brought about my recent orgasm, his tongue giving my warm, wet center a brief respite. "I could make you keep begging," he mused as he drew me to him, pulled my face up so that he could clasp it between both his hands, bring my eager lips to his. "It's a nice sound."

  "I'll get you back for it." The threat had no teeth, and we both knew it.

  He just smiled, slipped his tongue into my mouth to tangle against my own. I pushed back eagerly, my body moving of its own accord to grind against his crotch. He was there, wet from my kisses, hard from the thrill of arousal, quivering with eagerness. Just a little closer, a little push at the right angle...

  With my wetness, thanks both to his oral appreciations and to my own burning lust, he slid easily inside me. I gasped, but didn't let my eyes pull away from his as he filled me to bursting, almost to the point of pain.

  We both tried to control ourselves at first, to stretch things out and make them last. It was a useless effort, but we did it anyway. We tried to prolong the moment, as if we didn't have all night to get lost in the curves of each other's bodies, in his muscles and my yielding softness.

  After we'd both finished, as we lay panting side by side in bed amid the tangled wreckage of my sheets, Tanner suggested that we move things to the bathroom. "I'm feeling pretty dirty," he said, as his fingers traced a maddening little curve around one of my still-erect areolas, circling where it popped up from the surrounding skin in a sea of little goosebumps. "I think I need to get clean."

  "Need me to show you how to work the controls?" I asked, my voice still a little unsteady from crying out his name as he brought me to climax only a few minutes earlier.

  "And to help scrub me down. I've always wanted a beautiful billionaire heiress to give me a sponge bath."

  "You're awful," I told him, raising my hand to smack him lightly – but instead, I reached down to curl my fingers around the best handle that I could spot. "I'm going to punish you for that."

  "Ooh. How?"

  "I'll squirt some soap in your eyes," I decided, standing up from the bed, not bothering with a robe or any other covering. Still guiding him with my ever-so-useful handhold, I tugged him up, bringing him along to the bathroom with me. "That way, you won't be able to see. You'll have to keep those eyes shut and act like you're blind, relying only on hearing and touch."

  "You're going
to cripple me?" he gasped, even as he pulsed against my palm, eager already to go again. "That's so... evil! Just like your nickname!"

  This time, laughing, I did smack him. He caught my hand as I brought it up a second time, instead using it to pull me in against him. His hard, muscled, powerful body met my own thinness, and his mouth, his touch, his sheer force of will swept me away into a pink-tinted land of happiness and sensation and bliss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  TANNER

  *

  The next morning, incredibly, I woke up before Helen. I sat up, trying not to disturb her as she lay beside me. Inside my head, a three-way battle of emotion warred, between shame in lying to her, regret in not telling her the truth – and, strangely, a contented warmth that surged inside my chest each time I glanced over at her sleeping figure.

  Helen was, in a word, amazing. I felt a bit like a man waking up beside an angel. It was like I'd scored a supermodel, had been visited by God himself and told that I'd just bedded my soulmate. Even now, knowing that I ought to get out of here, pausing only to tell her the truth about who I really was, I still wanted to just lay back down beside her, slide my arms around her body, draw her in close in the nest of sheets and kiss her awake.

  Even fighting against both the regret and the shame, that aroused, passionate desire was winning the fight. I forced myself up from the bed, more to get away from the temptation of Helen than for any other real reason.

  I pulled on my boxers and jeans, stepping out from the bedroom into the rest of the huge mansion. My shirt was lost, probably somewhere in the tangle of sheets, and I didn't want to risk waking Helen by searching for it. The mansion was cold, but it wasn't anything I hadn't trained myself to handle; Richard Stone also had the annoying habit of forgetting to turn up the thermostat on his old pile in the mornings.

  I made my way downstairs. My hand slid over the railing, but I pulled it back and frowned at the dirt and dust clinging to my fingers. This place really needed a good dusting.

  In fact... I paused at the bottom of the stairs, lifting one of my bare feet to look at the underside. Sure enough, my foot was covered in a layer of dirt, just from trekking over the carpet. Add vacuuming to the list.

  I considered heading for the kitchen, but I didn't yet feel really hungry. More than anything else, I wanted to go back upstairs and crawl back into bed with Helen, but I needed to resist that urge. More to provide myself with a distraction than for any other reason, I started opening the other doors in the hallway, peering inside and searching vaguely for some sort of cleaning closet.

  I located one after half a dozen false starts, and glanced between the vacuum and the extendable dusting pole. The vacuum cleaner might wake Helen, I thought, instead grabbing the dusting pole and pulling it out. It came with a few replacement heads, and I stuck one into the back pocket of my jeans. Pole in hand, I returned to the main staircase, figuring that I'd at least wipe down the wooden railing and banisters.

  "Ehx-cuse me!"

  Thankfully, I'd made it almost all the way down the stairs in my cleanup, so I didn't risk falling too far as I was caught off balance. I jumped at the sudden voice, turning around to see who'd caught me. I found myself looking into the squinting, slightly nearsighted gaze of a white-haired man in a rather wrinkled tuxedo. He had his hands tucked behind him, but I didn't miss the frown on his face as he peered at me.

  Helen had a butler, didn't she? She'd said something about him, a couple of times before. He had a name, something to do with oranges... "Julius!" I recalled, it suddenly clicking inside my head. "The butler!"

  Julius gave me a very slight incline of his head, which I took to mean that, while I was correct in naming him, this didn't change anything about how he viewed me. "You seem to have the advantage of me," he murmured.

  It took me a minute to decipher this. "Oh, right." I held out my hand to him, only to belatedly notice that it was filthy from the cleaning. I wiped it on my jeans, succeeding only in averaging the dust between my skin and the fabric. "I'm Tanner McCallister. I'm, uh, a friend of Helen's."

  "A friend," Julius repeated, his tone making it abundantly clear that he knew exactly what Helen and I had been doing last night. He sounded like he had a better title for me, but he was too polite to speak it out loud. "And hwat do you think you're doing?"

  He even had the perfect upper-crust English accent! "I'm cleaning," I answered, hoping that this didn't sound too flippant. "I woke up early, and, well, the place was pretty dirty. Not that I'm blaming you for it at all," I hastened to add, suddenly realizing that this could be taken as a slight. "It's a really big house, isn't it? I just wanted to help out, that's all."

  For a moment, the butler still appeared as though he was trying to decide whether to chastise me or to sweep me out with the rest of the dust and dirt in the floors. But either my earnest expression or the gift of free labor won him over. Julius gave me one last sniff, but at least lowered his nose after that.

  "Thank you," the man said stiffly. I suspected that Julius did just about everything stiffly. "While I do my best to keep the house clean for Mrs. O'Callahan, I'm regrettably shorthanded, and can't manage to attend to everything."

  "Hey, it's no trouble at all." I considered making my retreat at this point, while I was still ahead and had all my fingers and toes, but what the hell. Might as well press my luck. "You don't have any Windex, do you? Some of these windows look like they haven't really been cleaned in ages, and it would probably let some more light into this place."

  The butler pursed his lips at me, but finally nodded. "I shall fetch it for you, sir."

  "Sir?" I echoed. "Julius, you don't need to call me..."

  He, however, was already gone, vanishing with surprising speed into the house. Just like the Stone mansion, the O'Callahan mansion probably had its fair share of secret passages. He popped up barely a minute later, once again catching me off-guard with how suddenly he materialized, practically from nowhere.

  "Here you are, sir," he said, holding out a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels. "And some cleaning napkins, as well."

  "Thanks, buddy." I took the objects from him. "Uh, you can help out too, if you want. I've almost finished with wiping down all the railings and banisters."

  "I must prepare the mistress's breakfast," Julius said, but despite this comment, he didn't move. He stood there, his eyes mostly closed. I snuck a few glimpses at him out of the corner of my own eye, but he looked like he was wrestling with something. I'd give him a minute or two longer to work through it on his own, I told myself.

  I'd finished the staircase and moved onto the windows when Julius next made a sound, a rather phlegmatic clearing of his throat. I paused in dousing the panes of glass with Windex, turning to look back at him.

  "This is difficult for me," he began, looking down at where he'd twisted his fingers together against his stomach. "But you and Mrs. O'Callahan..."

  I tensed, waiting for him to tell me not to hurt her, that I was intruding where I didn't belong, that I ought to get out before I broke her heart or did anything else awful, that I didn't deserve her. "Yeah?"

  Julius paused, apparently deciding to start again. "I have faithfully served Mrs. O'Callahan for many years, since before the... incident," he said.

  I guessed that the 'incident' referred to the death of her previous husband. "Good for you," I said, more to fill the pause than for any other reason.

  "Yes, well, I've seen Mrs. O'Callahan experience the grief of loss after... well, after it happened," Julius continued. Clearly, he wasn't thrilled with talking about the death of Mr. O'Callahan either. "And while I fully understand why it has been hard for her, her grief has continued for some time, now. It has made me feel... rather uncertain about her future. If you understand, sir."

  After fighting his way through this tortured sentence, Julius stopped, looking rather plaintively at me. It took me a second to puzzle the comment apart, but when I did, my conclusion surprised even myself.


  "You're worried about her," I said, looking at the old man. "You're concerned that she's not getting over the loss."

  Julius winced, but didn't disagree with me. "Rather crudely put."

  "But not wrong."

  Another wince, but no disagreement. "But since you met her, sir," he continued, still clearly fighting against his own restraint in sharing this, "she seems to have... improved, if I may be so bold."

  I again needed to pause for a moment and work this out. "You're saying that she's gotten happier because of me?" I asked, surprised. Really? Had Helen been looking forward so strongly to seeing me again? The idea gave me a surge of warmth, as if I'd just found my name on a note in her handwriting with a heart drawn around it.

  "It seems that way," Julius said. "And I do hope that her situation will continue to improve in the coming future."

  Aww. The old guy, despite the huge stick up his ass, very clearly cared deeply about Helen. I understood why, of course. She had a way about her that could draw in any man, make him want what was best for her. It was just one more reason why I simultaneously felt awful for deceiving her, but at the same time couldn't bring myself to speak up. If I told her the truth, she surely wouldn't want anything to do with a poor guy like me, and I wouldn't be able to see her again.

  "I hope so, too," I told Julius. "Tell you what – why don't you go off and get to work on her breakfast. I think I can handle cleaning the rest of the windows in this room, at least." And I suddenly didn't want to think about Julius stretching up on his frail toes to clean the window, possibly falling and breaking every bird bone in his thin body inside that wrinkled tuxedo.

  Julius nodded, a rather courtly move that almost turned into a bow. "And shall I fetch you anything, sir?" he asked.

  "You can not call me sir, for one thing," I said without thinking. Only after the words had left my mouth did I realize that, if I wanted to keep up the illusion that I was rich for Helen, I'd probably also want to act the same way around her butler and other servants. "But yeah," I went on quickly, hoping that he wouldn't question my dislike of the formal term, "maybe you could bring me some coffee? And I wouldn't say no to a donut, as well."