His head tilted and his palm curled around the back of my neck, pulling me closer and then I felt the caress of his tongue and sighed, giving him the chance to take things a little deeper.
My hands rested on his shoulders, making a slow climb to his ears, where my fingers could reach the soft hair at the back of his head. So soft. He deepened the kiss but kept it gentle. My breasts grew heavy as hands glided down my back and rested on my ass. It amazed me how perfectly my butt fit into hands as large as Hale’s.
When he squeezed, I moaned into his mouth, and his grip tightened. Little thrills of excitement chased up my spine as I scooted closer, cupping his jaw and anchoring my body onto his. The friction of my clothes against my sex was divine as I slowly started to rock.
Why had I forgotten kisses could be this good? Maybe because it had never been this enjoyable with anyone else. I seriously didn’t remember making out to ever be this satisfying. It wasn’t like this with other kissers.
Maybe, like wine, kissing got better with age. Or maybe this was all Hale.
When his fingers brushed the skin of my back just under the hem of my shirt, I sucked in a breath. His palm slithered beneath the material and rode the line of my spine until it rested over the strap of my bra. The next thing I knew the hook was undone and he was rounding my ribs toward my chest.
I didn’t care if we should slow things down or maybe take a breather, because I was too preoccupied with willing his fingers to my nipples. Cupping the weight of my breast, he grazed the tip with his thumb and I whimpered. The slightly rough pad of his fingers met the ruched tip like waves meet the shore, perfectly suited and meant to move against one another.
His lips worked to the corner of my mouth and down my throat as that tricky little thumb of his continued to tread over my sensitive nipple. Sweet Jesus, what was he doing to me? My head tipped back as he kissed my neck, but he never tried to remove my shirt or do more than gently fondle my breast.
For all of my distasteful memories about being poked and prodded in sexual encounters, my body was begging for him to do more. I wanted him to cup me, pull me, suck me, and maybe even bite me. I needed him to touch me lower, take my clothes off, and put something inside of me. I didn’t care what it was. I just needed some form of relief.
When his mouth returned to mine, I was riding him like Sea Biscuit. Things were feeling really good until he winced and caught my hips.
Breaking the kiss, I saw the flash of pain in his eyes. “Oh my God, did I hurt you?”
“It’s okay.” He closed his eyes and shook it off then adjusted my position.
My eyes went wide when I noticed his erection pressing beneath his pants. “That’s a penis,” I blurted and grimaced, not expecting to actually say the words out loud.
His chuckle wasn’t at all self-conscious, but rather relaxed.
Ah, men and their penis pride. What would the world be like if women took as much pride in their vaginas as men took in their dicks? Would we walk around bragging about the size of our labia and boast about how deep things could go? That would be weird.
“You still with me?” His fingers brushed my heated cheek.
“I’m here. Just thinking.”
His mouth curled in a half grin. “What are you thinking about?”
“Vagina bragging rights.” Yeah, in hindsight I probably should’ve lied and said something a tad classier.
He laughed, maybe a bit nervously. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t want to know the things that go through my head. Trust me, it’s Crazyland up there.”
His half-grin turned to a full smile. “I can only imagine.”
A vibration shot down my hips and I shivered in pleasure until I realized the tremor wasn’t coming from him. “Oh, crap. That’s the bat phone.”
“The what?”
“The bat phone.”
I shifted, trying to wedge the oversized thing out of my pocket, and accidentally hit his sensitive parts again. Hale stiffened and winced.
“Sorry!” Sliding off his lap, I stood and removed the phone from my pocket. “See? Bat phone. This thing’s way more sophisticated than my other phone. It’s your dad.” I held my finger to my lips. “Yes, Remington.”
“Is anyone going to come get me or am I expected to sleep on the couch tonight? My show’s been over for forty minutes.”
“I’ll be right down.” I ended the call.
“Do you have to go?” Hale asked, standing.
I glanced at his pants and laughed. “Yeah, but you better stay here until you’ve come to an understanding with Prince Everhard.”
He glanced at his waist then pegged me with a self-satisfied smirk, such cocky male ego in his gaze. “It was worth it.”
Entranced by his handsomeness—he was totally just making out with me—I smiled. No one ever praised me for my sexy-time exploits, so hearing I didn’t scare him off was great feedback.
“Thanks for dessert.”
“My pleasure.”
Look at me, making sexual innuendoes like a pro. As I walked downstairs, I entered the living room and found a frowning Remington. “Sorry.”
“Left here to rot,” he grumbled, as I wheeled over his scooter.
Honestly, he had every right to bitch. He was overdue for the pill that managed his pain, and he probably was feeling the aches of the day.
“I’ll get your pill, then I’ll get you settled.”
I hurried ahead as he took the scooter down the hall. By the time he made it into the room, I had his bottle of water open and ready.
“Here you go.”
Tossing back the pill and chasing it with some water, he frowned. “You’re flushed, but your face looks better.”
I’d totally forgotten about my allergic reaction. Peeking into the bathroom, I assessed my face. It was way better than the last time I saw my reflection, but not great. Luckily, I could blame the flush on the paprika and not the fact that I’d been making out with his son.
Sometimes Remington was like a cranky toddler, but he worried over the division of the GOP and occasionally smoked Black Russian cigarettes with little gold filters. Like any toddler, he was full steam ahead until he was ready to crash. Then he became a nightmare.
“Don’t put the pillows there, Meyers. How do you expect me to see the damn TV?”
“I thought it might be nice for your foot to be elevated.”
“Oh,” he muttered, allowing me to slide the stack of pillows under his leg.
I realized in the short time I’d been working for Remington that Miles would have never made the cut. There was a distinct difference between the way Remington behaved in front of Eric and the way he carried on when he was alone with me. I partially suspected he hired a woman because he had a boo-boo and wanted a maternal touch. That would also explain why Cadence got the boot. She didn’t have a very nurturing manner.
Drawing the blankets over his legs, I handed him the remote and dimmed the lights. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No.” He pursed his lips then shocked the shit out of me with a mumbled, “Thank you.”
Hiding a smirk, I left his phone by the bed and pulled the door shut. I celebrated the victory of my first thank you all the way down to my room, but my euphoria faded when I found Hale’s door shut and the interior light on. I supposed our goodnight on the sky deck was all I was getting.
After I showered, I gathered up my laundry and left it beside the door. I was limited with clothing, so I needed to do some wash tomorrow.
Hale’s muffled voice carried through the wall and I frowned. Who was he talking to at this hour? Although, he could be talking to someone in a different time zone.
I wanted to listen to his conversation, but I couldn’t make out his words through the wall, and that just pissed me off, so I put music on the iPad and called Elle. I had people that wanted to talk to me too. I was very popular.
Elle answered the phone, proving just how much she’d missed my voice. “Hold on. I’
m watching the finale of Gilmore Girls. Lorelei’s trying to find Luke. She just talked to Sookie.”
Yes, this was a show that ended many years ago and a series we watched countless times from beginning to end, but the whole storyline was one debacle after another that separated Lorelei and Luke. You didn’t talk during a grand finale that took seven painful years to reach.
“I just like to see you happy,” Elle quoted with Luke on screen and we both sighed.
Without watching, I knew the camera was panning away from their final kiss.
“So what’s up, girl? How’s life in the fast lane?”
“It’s fast. I haven’t stopped since morning, but I’m really starting to like it here.”
“Aw. You need some Annie music to go with that positive attitude. I’m glad you’re adjusting. Has The Other One stopped bothering you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Seriously?” She scoffed. “What’s his beef?”
“Well, it turns out you were right, and I was wrong. He was checking me out.”
“Ha! I knew it! You are the absolute worst at reading men.”
“The worst,” I agreed with a laugh.
“So how did you figure this out, because we all know you wouldn’t recognize a dick if it slapped you in the face.”
“I’m not that bad.” I pouted. “I picked up on it the moment he touched my boob.”
“He touched your boob? Was there kissing or was he reaching for something and accidentally made contact? Because there’s a difference, Ray.”
“Trust me, it was intentional.”
I spent the next thirty minutes catching Elle up to speed on all things Hale. The more I talked about him and reminisced about the way he kissed and touched me, the more my body ached for a repeat episode. I was a little terrified about how much energy I was investing in him, but Elle said I should see where things go and have fun.
Even if men like Hale Davenport didn’t do serious, she thought I should see if he opened any doors for me. Not doors like opportunities to sleep with other men in his circle, but doors as far as my stunted sexuality was concerned.
“Just think, you might actually get an orgasm out of this,” Elle announced, in total support of my sexual renaissance.
I snorted. “That would be impressive.”
I didn’t act like it was impossible, because whenever Hale touched me, it felt better than all the other touches from all the other men times infinity. So if anyone could make me come, I believed it was Hale.
Once we were caught up and my eyes were getting heavy, I said goodnight. I shut the music off and didn’t hear anything from Hale’s room, but that didn’t stop me from imagining him in bed on the other side of the wall.
If I played my cards right, I might find out what that bed was like. For as uninterested in sex as I’d always been, sex with Hale opened up a whole new menu, and I wanted a taste of everything.
Chapter Ten
I Don’t Speak S.W.A.T.
When I was fourteen, I had my first cannoli. Imagine what that does to a person. Fourteen, people. Fourteen. As that creamy filling first touched my tongue, I remember thinking, where have you been all my life? It was like I’d been robbed of a decade and a half of confectionery delight. Truly unfair.
My first experience with unspoken sexual tension was pretty much the same. I felt robbed. Why had I not realized it could be this exhilarating to like someone? Probably because I never liked someone the way I like Hale. Why, I had no clue. He just…did something to me other men didn’t.
Every time Hale entered a room, my stomach got tight, and my heart raced. When he spoke I became hyper-focused on his lips and the sound of his voice, so much so, I didn’t hear a single word he said, but nodded with unreserved agreement.
Sometimes he brushed a finger down my arm when no one was looking and other times he’d look into my eyes as if we shared the biggest secret in the world and no one else would ever have a secret as good as ours.
I felt totally ripped off that I was thirty freaking years old and just discovering such excitement could exist. My receptors to these little thrills were all hands on deck, so I was starting to think my sex problems of the past hadn’t been about me, but, rather, the men I’d dated.
What a lousy batch of below the bar, pre-ejaculating, foreplay-rushing twats. I could have been having these feelings all along if they hadn’t convinced me sex was uncomfortable and anticlimactic.
Of course, I wasn’t actually having sex. I’d made out with Hale once. But look at the Pandora’s Box that one-time opened. I said look at it!
My hormones were everywhere. My thoughts were in the gutter. My panties were wet and I was like a well-oiled fuse on a stick of dynamite ready to blow.
I mean, seriously, I’d even blow him. I’d made up my mind the moment I saw him watching me lick my sorbet spoon at lunch. I didn’t think there was anything sexy about the way I ate my ice cream, but apparently I was wrong. Hale watched me take every last bite and by the time I was done he was breathing heavily, and his pupils were so big his eyes no longer passed as gray. Imagine what he’d look like if I replaced the spoon with his penis!
Late afternoon, I was called up to the sky deck. Remington wanted me to take notes as he made a conference call. I had no experience with shorthand, so this was the first assignment he’d given me that actually made me nervous.
“Just write down anything important and we’ll decipher it later.”
The call started before I was ready and by my eighth page of scribbled notes I was in a sweat and ready to shit myself. Three men were on the other line, and they all sounded the same, so I had no clue who was saying what.
When the call ended I let out a long breath as if I’d run a 5K. My hand was a deformed claw, and my penmanship would have earned a ruler whipping in a nun’s eyes.
“Did you get all that, Meyers?” Remington asked.
I scoffed at the insanity as I tried to remember what my fingers used to feel like. “I got as much as I could, but I probably missed half.”
“Take the laptop and type up what you did get. Email it to me when you’re finished. Then you can be done for the day.”
Wonderful. My typing skills were about as good as a chimp’s. I’d be finishing up sometime around noon tomorrow.
An hour later and I was only on the third page.
“What are you working on?”
And there went my nipples, poking through my bra like two ballistic missiles. At this rate, I’d get no fun make out time.
Growling, I shoved the laptop away. “Typing up these stupid notes for your dad.”
He frowned as he glanced at my notebook. “Who wrote this?”
“I did. There were four people talking at once.”
He paged through the notes. “You have about twenty pages here.”
“I know, and I can only read half of them. I’m going to be here all night.”
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
“Really? I just spent four minutes searching for the letter Q. I’m convinced this laptop doesn’t have one.”
He reached over the laptop and pressed Q on the keyboard.
I pursed my lips. “Smartass.”
Sliding into the chair next to mine, he said, “How about you read and I’ll type? We’ll have it done in no time.”
“Don’t you have things to do?”
“Not really. I came to find you.”
Smiling, because how freaking cute was that, I gave him a bump with my shoulder. I had the mating skills of a ram on the National Geographic channel, but he got the point.
“You’re nice,” I mumbled, just to make sure he didn’t think I was trying to challenge him for a crack at alpha.
He shoulder bumped me back. “So are you.”
“I really should do this myself. Remington asked me to do it.”
“Does he know you can’t type?”
In all fairness, I could text, but that was on a small screen using only m
y thumbs. This was different.
“Your father doesn’t believe in the word can’t. He’d just say something like, Well, Meyers, how do you expect to learn if you don’t try?” My Remington voice was getting really good.
Hale laughed. “Probably. But in all fairness, if I told him a pretty lady blew me off because she had a deadline, he’d call me a short-sighted fool for not helping her so I could eventually have my way with her.”
My heart went a bit spastic as he slipped in that compliment. Not to mention the insinuation that he hoped to have his way with me.
I twisted my lips. “Which one of us do you think he’d be more upset with?”
“Definitely me. My father loves a lot of things, but he never passes up a chance to have his way with a pretty lady.”
That earned him another shoulder bump. “Say pretty lady again.”
He shifted and tipped his face close to mine. “You’re a very pretty lady, Rayne Meyers. And I want to have my way with you.”
My cheeks heated as my insides trembled. “For that, I’ll let you type my homework.”
“Good.”
Reading the notes was a hell of a lot easier than typing one word at a time, finding my place, and typing another word. With Hale helping, we had everything written up in about twenty minutes.
“That’s it,” I said, turning the last page.
“That’s it?” He glanced up from the laptop. “What’s he want you to do with them now?”
“He said to email them to him when—”
“Sent.” He shut the laptop. “Now you’re mine.”
My breath hitched, as he stood. “Oh.”
I’d been looking forward to Hale time since I woke up, but I suddenly felt very unprepared. As he slowly stalked around the table, I backed up until I was against the wall. “I should probably—”
His mouth closed over mine and whatever I’d been about to say flew right out of my head the second his tongue entered my mouth. Ten seconds of kissing Hale and my brain was completely scrambled.
Slowly, he pulled back and looked at me with half lidded eyes. “You were saying?”
Yeah, I had no idea. Launching myself at him I caught the back of his neck and pulled his mouth to mine. He groaned and grabbed onto my ass, which was perfect because I really needed to be in some sort of marsupial hold at the moment.
Calamity Rayne: Gets A Life Page 14
