by Terra Little
“Not really. A few blips on her credit report, a teenage arrest for shoplifting and a brother who’s serving time for grand theft auto. She has a lengthy adult arrest history for petty theft and she’s been under a psychiatrist’s care for a personality disorder, with a secondary borderline psychosis diagnosis, since she was thirteen. Therapy, medications, the whole shebang. If you ask me, it looks like Cannon got spooked for no reason.”
“That’s good news, at least.”
“At least,” Eli agreed, spinning in his chair to face her. The expression on his face was grim. “Now on to the bad news. I agree with Olivia. There is no way in hell that you can keep seeing Cannon’s brother.”
* * *
Dinner, Netflix and chill. Those were Elise’s plans for the rest of the evening. After meeting with Eli, she took her Jaguar in for servicing and to have the hairline scratch across the rear bumper repaired. While she waited, she borrowed a car from the dealership and crossed off a few of the other errands on her to-do list. Now that she was finally home, ordering in pizza and drowning herself in gooey cheese, extra sauce and her own private misery were next—and last—on her agenda for the day.
She hadn’t heard from Broderick in two days, and that bothered her way more than it should have, considering. They barely knew each other, and they didn’t owe each other anything—had never agreed to anything more than sex. But she’d been secretly hoping that he would call or text or...something. In the aftermath of their short-lived fling, her body was screaming for his touch and her vibrator was just about worn out, trying to compensate for the lack of it. It was silly to be so hung up on one man, especially at her age, but, damn, the man had given her something that no man had ever given her before—stunningly intense orgasms that somehow managed to touch every nerve ending in her body at the same glorious time.
When she looked at it like that—and she had looked at it precisely like that several times over the last forty-eight hours—the unfairness of it all was worthy of nothing less than greasy, fattening pizza, a truckload of chick flicks and, for dessert, the rest of the Rocky Road ice cream that she’d hidden in the back of the freezer.
She parked her Jaguar in the garage next to Olivia’s Audi convertible and entered the house through the mudroom. In the kitchen, she set the bags in her hands on a countertop and draped her dry cleaning across the back of a chair at the kitchen table, wondering where everyone was. When she’d left this morning, both Harriet and Olivia were there. Now, even though there were still a few hours left in the workday, the house was still and quiet. She and Olivia weren’t quite on speaking terms these days but if there had been a major change in plans, she would’ve at least sent Elise a text to let her know. Or left a—
“Note,” Elise murmured to herself as her gaze landed on the handwritten note stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet. She took it down and read Olivia’s loopy text.
Sis,
A package came for you today. It looked very important and it’s marked time sensitive, so, as soon as you get home and find this, go up to your room and check it out, please. That’s where I put it—in your room.
In other news, I gave Harriet the rest of the day off and decided to meet a friend downtown for dinner. Be home soon.
Liv
A package? She didn’t have any cases lined up that she knew of, and she hadn’t ordered anything online or otherwise recently. It’s probably something from my parents, she thought as she noted the time scrawled in a corner of the paper, then took the note with her through the house and up the stairs to the second floor. Olivia had left the note for her at three thirty and it was just a few minutes past four now.
Curious to see what it could possibly be and who could’ve possibly sent it, Elise walked into her bedroom suite, saw the package awaiting her attention in the center of her bed and froze. Speechless, she stared at it as if in a trance, her body going hot and liquid inside and her nipples tightening. Her clit slipped out of its velvet hood to push against the silk of her panties insistently and her sex was suddenly engorged.
“What are you doing here?” she asked Broderick breathlessly. Where was her voice?
Naked and sprawled out in the center of Elise’s bed, with one arm folded behind his head and the other extended down the length of his muscle-riddled torso, Broderick watched Elise lazily while he massaged his erect penis rhythmically, his fingers gripping his shaft and pumping it in perfect time with his rocking hips.
“Close the door and lock it,” he ordered in a strained voice. Still watching him pleasure himself, she took slow steps backward and did as she was told, returning to the foot of the bed just in time to see his mouth drop open and a bead of pre-cum appear on the tip of his sex.
They groaned simultaneously.
“What am I doing here? That’s a good question,” he countered huskily. “I’m supposed to be on a red-eye to Argentina right now but the funniest thing happened when I was headed to the airport.” The tip of his tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Somehow, I ended up here instead. Strip for me.”
Elise’s hands immediately went to the buttons on her blouse and began undoing them slowly. It didn’t matter why he was there. Now that he was, she intended to accept every bit of the satisfaction that he was clearly offering. She needed him inside her as soon as possible. Her blouse fell away from her shoulders, quickly followed by her bra and the few pieces of jewelry that she wore, all of it landing in a heap on the carpet at her feet. She stepped out of her pumps, and added her slacks and hair clip to the pile, staring at him the whole time. He stroked himself and stared right back.
“Two days is a long time,” he said when she rolled her damp panties down her thighs and stepped out of them. “I had to see you again before I left. I’m sorry, I should’ve called first.”
Elise climbed onto the mattress, creeping toward him on her knees. “I’m glad you came.”
“Are you? Why?”
“I wanted to see you again, too.” Braced on her hands and knees in the V of his thighs, she surveyed the scene before her appreciatively. He lay before her, hers for the taking, and she couldn’t make up her mind about where or what to start taking first. Eventually her gaze landed on the object of her fascination—his throbbing penis—and lingered. Her mouth watered and her vision blurred. She’d had dreams about tasting him, sucking him deeply into her mouth and swallowing his cum. It was another first that she wanted to experience with him while she could. “What can I do to help?” she murmured, transfixed by the sight of his slowly pumping hand and the sound of his ragged breathing.
“Anything,” he growled. “Just...please...hurry up and do it.”
The bead of pre-cum on the tip of his penis swelled and then rolled sideways across the smooth flesh of his glans, creating a milky trail down the side of his shaft. The tip of Elise’s tongue darted out to chase the creamy droplet back the way it had come.
“Ahhhh...” Broderick cried when her flickering tongue lit on his flesh. “Ssssss...”
His sighs and moans were like an incantation to Elise, putting her under a hedonistic spell that completely erased her inhibitions, replacing them with wants and needs and desires that overshadowed reasoning. Emboldened by his hoarse moans, she looked up, saw his hooded gaze watching her, and let her eyes slide closed on an airy sigh as her lips closed around the head of his shaft and slowly descended down its thick length.
* * *
Through hooded eyes, Broderick watched Elise’s plump, glistening lips bob up and down on his cock and willed himself not to explode in her mouth.
Not yet, he told himself as his hips pumped in time with her wet mouth. Not yet. God, not yet.
He loved oral sex, both giving and receiving it. As if it turned her on just as much, she hummed deep in her throat as she sucked him greedily, her eyes half-closed in visible ecstasy. He was mesmerized by th
e sight of her swaying breasts and her round, full butt tooted up in the air at the foot of the bed.
She took more of his length down her throat and his hips bucked off the mattress. “Oooh, baby, you’ll make me cum,” he whispered on a shuddering breath. He lifted a hand from the mattress and framed her jaw, gently holding her hair back from her face and feeding himself to her at the same time. “You’ll make me...ahhhh!”
He came suddenly, violently, every muscle in his body stiffening as she swallowed his squirting essence greedily. When the sensations shooting through him became too raw to bear another second of her generous mouth, he pulled away and reached for her. Dragging her up the length of his shuddering body, he brought them face-to-face and stared up into her wide, golden eyes. She looked just as stunned as he felt.
“Hi,” she whispered against his lips.
“Hi,” he whispered back. “I missed you.” She giggled and he thought, I missed that sound, too.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said, realizing in that very moment that it was the truth.
“I missed you, too,” Elise admitted softly, color staining her cheeks. “I was thinking about you when I walked in here and suddenly—” she paused to swipe her tongue across the seam of his lips “—there you were.”
He ran his hands up the slope of her warm back and pushed his fingers into the midst of her silky hair, cupping the back of her head gently. His eyes steady on hers, he sucked her bottom lip inside his mouth and released it slowly, rocking his hips against hers down below. He was hard again. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Broderick rolled them over on the mattress and pinned Elise underneath him. Slipping a foil packet from underneath a pillow on the bed, he tore it open and quickly sheathed himself. Then he drove his cock so deeply into her slick tunnel that she cried out. “Damn, you feel good,” he said through gritted teeth, holding himself completely still. She was as tight as a fist, spasming around him like a live wire as he stretched her wider and wider. “Am I hurting you?”
She shook her head and dug her fingernails into his butt cheeks, crying out again when he titled his pelvis into hers. “Oh, God, no,” she panted up into his face. “More... I want more...please.”
“Your wish is my command.” Bracing himself on his hands at either side of her head, his hips began moving against hers in an uncoordinated rhythm that shook the bed with its intensity. Without breaking stride, he dipped his head, sucked one of her juicy nipples inside his mouth and took her on the ride of a lifetime.
Chapter 14
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”
Buried underneath a pile of sheets, covers and pillows, Elise stirred at the sound of Broderick’s deep voice. Her eyes opened one at a time and slowly came into focus as she stretched and yawned until every muscle in her body went limp. Somewhere in the room, Broderick chuckled and the sound was like a direct hit to her clitoris.
Fighting her way out of her cave, she pushed her hair out of her face, rolled over and ran right into his hard chest. “Oh.” His face was inches from hers. “Is it morning already?”
“It is somewhere. Here, it’s almost midnight and I’m starving. I ordered pizza a few minutes ago, so it should be arriving soon. Are you hungry?”
“A little.” She wiggled around in the cocoon of sheets that she’d somehow wrapped herself in and succeeded in freeing her legs and feet. “What time do you have to leave?”
“Eight.” He dropped a soft kiss on her lips and pushed his nose into the warm spot in the crook of her neck. “Why?” he wondered, inhaling deeply. “Are you coming with me?”
“To Argentina? Please. As tempting as that sounds, unless there’s a new luxury resort there that I don’t know about—and, trust me, I know about all of them—I’m going to have to pass.” Oh, but boy, was she tempted.
“Sorry, but I won’t be looking for resorts while I’m there,” Broderick said, pressing a wet kiss to the sweet spot just behind her ear and pulling back to look down into her eyes. “What about after I return, though? You think you might be up for another road trip with me then?”
Surprised into speechlessness, Elise’s mouth worked for several seconds but no sound emerged. “Um...” She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m not sure I understand the q-question,” she finally managed. “Are you asking me to go away with you?”
“Elise, I just bought a little villa in the South of France that I’ve been meaning to visit. I have a beach house down in Key West, and a yacht that we could live on for months at a time, without ever having to come ashore. All you have to do is say yes.”
He was so down-to-earth and unpretentious that it was easy to forget that he was a very wealthy man. A multimillionaire, if Google could be trusted. “What about work? We can’t just drop everything and run off together.”
“Can’t we?” He cocked a brow, searching her eyes. “I’ll take some time off. You’ll take some time off. And we’ll go somewhere together and figure out exactly what the hell this is that we’re doing, because I think we both know that there’s more here than just a fling. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in doing?”
“Yes,” Elise said without hesitation. “Yes, I’d like to but...” But I know where your sister is and why you haven’t been able to find her, and I can’t tell you. Right now, right this very second, she’s living in an apartment in Dayton, Ohio, and calling herself Emma Deloch, and I can’t tell you. And if you knew that I knew and kept it from you anyway, you might feel very differently.
“But?”
“But... I need to think about it,” she said, stalling, her heart thumping in her chest. “This is kind of a big step for me.” That, at least, was the truth.
“For me, too,” Broderick admitted, flashing her a lopsided grin that was almost bashful. “The last time I went away for any length of time with a woman, I was twenty-four and that woman was my sister. Technically, she doesn’t count so you’d be my first.” He kissed her. “Just something to think about. Now, come on, let’s eat.”
Forty-five minutes later, Elise scooped up a third slice of pepperoni pizza, bit into its cheesy goodness and chewed thoughtfully. Setting the slice down inside the greasy box, she wiped her mouth and fingers with a paper napkin and leaned across the bed to grab her wineglass from the nightstand. “Where did you go?” she asked, sipping.
Broderick, who’d already eaten three slices of pizza in the time that it’d taken her to get halfway through her second slice, looked up from typing on his laptop and stared at her over the rim of the dork glasses that he’d magically produced from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. He looked like such a geek that Elise wanted to jump his bones all over again. “Where did I go when?”
“You said that the last time you went away with a woman, it was with your sister. Where did you two go?”
“We went to Hawaii. Her husband had beaten her pretty badly again and she wanted to get away for a while. We were there for a week and as soon as we got back, she went back to him.” He turned his attention back to his laptop.
“You didn’t like her husband.”
“He beat my sister senseless and nothing I said to her or did to him was enough to make her leave him. So, no, I didn’t like him very much and, as you might expect, the feeling was entirely mutual. She made me promise not to kill him. That’s the only reason he died in a car accident, instead of with my fingers wrapped around his throat. I detest men who abuse women.”
“Good to know,” Elise said, stretching out on the mattress in nothing but Broderick’s giant dress shirt and a thong. They were the only things she’d bothered to put on after showering. As soon as the pizza was delivered, they brought it and a bottle of Chianti up to her room to pig out. Now they were camped out in the middle of her bed, with a greasy pizza box and his laptop between them, and she cou
ldn’t have imagined a better way to spend her evening if she’d tried. “What about your sister?”
His eyes found hers again. “What about her?”
“Were the two of you close?”
“Not really. She was already ten years old when I was born, so a sibling connection between us never really happened, especially since we only shared a father and she hated my mother. As a teenager, she was cunning and conniving, always in trouble with the local police for one reason or another, and she lied constantly. We hardly spoke after she left home for college. My parents were killed in a drunk-driving accident the year after I graduated from Brown. After that, I joined the navy and applied to the SEALs program. She chose to wander around from place to place, squandering her share of the inheritance on frivolous things. Then she met her dick of a husband and went over to the dark side completely. We’ve always kept in touch or at least known how to get in contact with each other, if necessary, but there wasn’t a lot of love lost between us back then and there still isn’t now.”
Elise couldn’t help comparing the relationship that he described having with his sister to her relationship with Olivia and feeling sorry for him. She couldn’t imagine not having her sister up close and personal in her life. “That’s sad,” she said after a few seconds. “Really sad. What kinds of things did she do on the dark side?”
“She and her husband stole money from a Russian mobster and landed themselves on his hit list. But, unlike her idiot husband, she managed to disappear before she was killed because of it. Frankly, I wasn’t very surprised by what she did. I was just glad my parents weren’t alive to witness the fallout from it.”
“Is she still on his hit list?”
“It’s possible but highly unlikely. I’ve had previous dealings with Borya Maysak and he’s an animal, but he isn’t a liar.”
“You’ve spoken to him about your sister?”
“Of course. Like I said, we’ve had dealings before. If my sister was dead and he had anything to do with it, he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell me. We’re not friends and we never have been. He stays out of my way and I try to return the courtesy. That’s the extent of our relationship.”
