Attraction

by Linn Young

  Hearing Heron laugh for the first time, and seeing a genuine smile on his striking face made Riley catch her breath, caught all over again by how attractive he was, even more so when his face relaxed into a smile. She was consumed with the need for him all over again. She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and kissed him.

  Joe and the other bartenders stopped making their orders to watch their boss being carried away by the tall, dark-haired man, who by now was familiar to them.

  “Wow,” said a young bartender. His name was Tom, twenty-one, almost twenty-two, and a college student, who had been working at the bar for close a year. “This guy, whoever he is, sure can tie our boss up, can’t he?”

  “It looks that way,” Joe said, his eyes a little wary as he watched them. “She’d better be careful with herself with that one.”

  “Why?” Tom asked. “Our boss knows how to handle men.”

  “Yes, but this one just might prove to be out of her league.”

  “For sure, man. His looks and money’s got every woman looking his way the instant he comes in here, and he’s gone out with women far more beautiful than boss lady. But that might not mean anything when it comes to her.”

  Joe looked at the young man. “Why do you say that?”

  Tom shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just the way he looks at her every time he comes around.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Tom frowned, not really experienced in life enough to be able to articulate what he knows instinctively. “Well, there’s something in his eyes every time he looks at her. And she’s all who he sees when he’s in here. You notice that he never looks at any other woman in here, and yet, they all look at him? That’s because he only comes in here for one reason. And that’s her.”

  “That’s probably because he’s a player,” Joe said dismissively.

  “Sure, he’s a player. But the look in his eyes when he watches her says that he’s doing anything but playing.”

  Joe looked at Tom for a moment, then began to nod, beginning to understand what he was saying. He tousled Tom’s hair. For some reason, his concern about Riley not weighing so heavily on his mind. “You know something, kid, you’re pretty smart for a snot-nosed college rat.”

  For the next few weeks, Riley let herself be involved in an affair with Heron Wait, an affair that involved little else but their intense physical attraction for each other. But, because of the distance of their residences and their work, and their work schedules, there was very little time to see each other. At most, they were able to see one another once per week. And this was only because Heron would drive up to Santa Rosa on a week night, late, and spend the night at Riley’s place. They would have sex most of the night until both were exhausted, and he would not be driving back to San Francisco the next morning until mid morning.

  Sometimes, Riley would not see Heron for over a month, because he was abroad on a business trip for his family corporation. While he was away, he would rarely call her, and when he did, their conversation was very short, consisting of mostly he asking how she was, she telling him that she was fine, and then she asking him how his trip was going, and him saying that it was going as well as expected and offering nothing more. Then he’d tell her that he expected to be home in a few days and that he would call her when was and then end the call.

  For a few weeks now, Heron had been in Asia, and he took his brother, Tanner, with him, in order to meet with the Chinese government. They were representing the United States on the purchase of government bonds that the Chine wanted to buy. He had told Riley that he didn’t expect to be back in the states for at least six weeks.

  On a Saturday evening, with the crowd already getting thick before nine o’clock, Riley was assisting at the bar because they were short staffed. She was trying to remember how to mix a Cosmopolitan when Joe nudged her arm.

  “What?” Then looked in the direction that Joe pointing.

  He was standing amidst the crowd, still wearing his suit and overcoat, incongruously carrying his briefcase while in a bar.

  “Heron!”

  Caught off guard, Riley’s face broke out with joy and excitement at seeing him. But her delight quickly turned to concern when she saw that he was almost ready to collapse on his feet, his striking face pale and drawn severely with exhaustion. He could barely keep his eyes open. “My God! Are you alright?”

  “I just got off from a twenty-hour flight from Beijing,” he said, his words slow and slurring. He weaved on his a feet for a moment. “I think I haven’t slept for three days. I drove over here straight from the airport.”

  A tall brunette with long, long legs, an exquisite face that rivaled Grace Kelly with sharp blue eyes, and a body that was made specifically to be in the porn movies or a strip joint, sidled up to Heron.

  “Hey, Big Boy, you look as if you’re in need of some tender loving care,” she said huskily, throwing her head back and running her greedy blue eyes over him. “Can I get you a drink? Or me?”

  Heron looked at her blankly for a moment. He looked as if he were trying to focus his eyes in order to see her. He was so tired that he thought she was a waitress taking his drink order. “A scotch would be great. Make it a double scotch neat.”

  The brunette ran a finger down his face. “Coming right up, honey. And then some. Now you stay right here, and don’t move, while Mandy gets you your order.”

  Riley came around from the bar and stood in front of him, her eyes running anxiously over his exhausted face. “I think what you need is to lie down, Heron, before you fall on your face.”

  “A bed sounds really good. Best offer I’ve had in days.”

  “Then why don’t you go on up to the room upstairs and lie down.”

  “Come on up with me,” Heron murmured, his eyes drooping further and further downward.

  “I’ll take you up there but I have to come back here and help out at the bar. –Come on, let me get your out of here before I have to have my guys carry you up there.” Riley took acquiescent Heron and led him up the stairs.

  The tall brunette came back from the bar holding two double scotches. She was just in time to see Riley leading Heron up the stairs.

  “Hey!”

  She was about to go after that midget-sized barracuda and pry what she considered to be her hand-picked prize from those dainty hands when an steely hand on her arm halted her. It was one of the waitresses. She tried to wrench her arm free but the waitress easily kept her grip. The brunette sized up her opponent, who was as tall as she and with the same solid frame. But it was obvious that the waitress worked out regularly at the gym, where the brunette mostly got her exercise from her numerous sexual encounters, which hardly allowed working of the upper torso.

  The waitress said in a friendly voice, “Why don’t we let those two be alone, shall we?”

  “She’s stealing my boyfriend,” the brunette said.

  “He’s nothing of the kind, because this was the first time you saw the guy.”

  The brunette reluctantly relaxed. “Does he belong to her?”

  “I’m not quite sure he belongs to anyone. But I do know that he came here for one purpose and one purpose only, and that was to see her. Tell you what, sugar plumb, as a consolation prize, those two drinks you’re holding in your hands are on the house.”

  The brunette gave a sulky grimace but sipped at one of the scotches.

  It was a new experience for Riley to be leading a docile Heron to bed, when it was usually him who pulled her, or, more likely, hefted her onto the bed. And it was strange but oddly comforting to be coddling him when his natural cool aloofness prevented such closeness.

  She opened the door and led Heron into the room. “Here we go.”

  When it appeared that he was going to just stand there until he fell over, Riley began to undress him.

  “Why didn’t you just go to your apartment and sleep,” she asked as she pulled off his overcoat which was impeccably tailored from England and of fine
Italian wool.

  He began to assist her in undoing his shirt. “I don’t know. I needed to see you.”

  Riley looked up at him, but she realized by the almost vacant stare of his eyes that he didn’t really know what he was saying.

  After she managed to undress Heron down to his snug boxer briefs, she gently pushed him onto the bed. She hung up his suit, shirt, and overcoat in the small closet. When she turned back to him, he was staring at her from his heavy eyelids. Beneath his briefs, his cock was rock hard and bulging rampantly. Suddenly her mouth went dry and her body tightened with hard hunger.

  Unable to help herself, almost in a trance her eyes were so focused on the tremendous bulge, Riley walked to the bed and sat next to him. Slowly, savoring every inch of him, she ran her eyes down his half-naked body, her eyes lovingly caressing every hard, muscled contour of him, the broad shoulders, the thickly muscled arms, the solid twin bulge of his chest, and the flat board of his stomach. Then her hands, even more slowly, followed the path of her eyes, and she did, she let out a long, “Hmmmmm.” And all mine, she thought possessively. For now. She bent her head and trailed with her lips and tongue a wet path after her hands.

  Heron let out a low half growl, half moan, his hands thrusting into Riley’s hair and clenched tightly at her curls.

  She pulled down his briefs and discarded them. At the sight of his swollen and much oversized dick, she breathed in slowly, almost dizzy with the need to have that cock inside her, anywhere, weather it was in her pussy or in her mouth. She took the penis in her hands and fondled it, and her eyes met his. As they stared at one another, their mirrored the same thoughts and needs. Heron smiled, lazily, his eyes almost closed.

  Riley bent her head again and took the bulbous tip into her mouth and suckled gently at it. Heron moaned low and tortuously, his body arching.

  Reluctantly, she took her mouth away from him. She gave him one last kiss. “Welcome home, Big Guy.”

  After tucking him under the covers, she turned the lights down, and went back down to the bar.

  Joe watched her for a moment as she haphazardly put together some of the orders. There was a silly grin on her face, and she looked as if she had found Nirvana, and was planning on going back to it after work.

  “The guy must have some cock to put a smile like that on a woman like you,” he said.

  Riley smiled. “A nice cock on a man does help.”

  “So, is he it?”

  She looked at Joe, puzzled. “It? What’s it?”

  “The man who makes you think of the L word.”

  “Lesbian?”

  Joe’s eyebrows lowered like a thundercloud. “Love, you moron. The word is love.”

  Riley put a hand to her stomach to settle the butterflies that were fluttering in there. “I don’t know, Joe. I’ve never felt like this with any man. What do you do with it, though?”

  “I married it,” Joe said. He turned away to take the orders of the customers who were crowding at each other, waving their money at him.

  Several hours later, tired after closing down the bar, Riley went up to her room. By the sound of the heavy, even breathing, she knew that Heron was deep in his sleep. In dark, she undressed and slid under the covers, sighing with a gut-wrenching pleasure and contentment at the sensation of her naked body brushing up against his warm, hard one. As she snuggled closer to him, her hand crept down his body and closed over his cock, finding it still swollen.

  Then she thought of what Joe had said to her. The L word. Somehow, it made her shiver, where down at the bar, the word made her feel scared but excited, and she didn’t know why. Needing comfort, she climbed on top of Heron, straddling him hips. Gingerly, positioned his penis at her opening and slowly slid down on it until she had fully enclosed him in her velvet glove.

  Heron gave a low moan and his body shuddered but he did not wake up. With the cock inside her, Riley felt warm and contented again. She laid her head on his chest, closed her eyes, and let herself drift to sleep, her arms wrapped around his neck.

  An hour later, she woke up, still impaled on Heron, still lying upon him. She realized that the warm sensation of his hand caressingly and slowly running up and down her back awoke her. She sighed and went back to sleep.

  The next morning, it was Riley who lying naked in bed, exhausted, as Heron let himself out of the bar. Under the covers, she stretched like a cat who was luxuriating in the sun, completely satisfied with itself and with life. Somewhere in the early morning, Heron had found his energy and had shown his appreciation to her at waking up that she had already accomplished half the deep of sex, and proceeded to plunge over and over inside her.

  As she laid in the rumpled bed, the lights from outside faintly filtering into the room, she basked in the afterglow of the few hours of sex they managed to squeeze in before the full morning despite their exhaustion. It was something she rarely indulged in with Heron. But, somehow, this morning, she couldn’t help herself.

  Riley’s thoughts drifted back to the first two times she and Heron had sex. The intensity of the sex still could make her shiver and renew heat in her loins. It still shocked her that she was capable of playing the role of somewhat of a submissive, and revel so erotically at Heron’s heavy-handedness, that she could be so aroused by him, so much so that him forcing her to endure his masturbating her in public only increased her pleasure, or that she could find such frank sexual enjoyment in being punished by a domineering man.

  But Heron was not naturally experimental when it came to sex and had never been really curious enough to explore in the past. Perhaps that was why he seemed to have taken a step back from the dominant/submissive sexual interchange of the their first two times, and, now, sex between them was not as…inventive as it had been. Riley had yet to decide whether or not she missed the powerfully domineering Heron, the way he so masterfully parted her thighs.

  But none of the raw intensity and all consuming seemed to have diminished in any way. Nor was Heron any less ruthless or savage when he put his hands on her, his lips and his eyes any less demanding or hungry as they had been the first time he touched her. And he still made her shiver when his eyes were on her, already seeing her naked beneath her clothes.

  Now, whatever it is that she and Heron have, it seemed that their arrangement was more in the traditional style of a rich, prominent man and his latest mistress. And, as it was turning out, the man was rather demanding of his mistress, that is, when he himself managed to grab some time from his own all-consuming work

  Heron tried many times to persuade Riley to take off a night from her work to spend a few days with him. He would attempt to cajole her into allowing Joe Monterey to run her bar for a few nights without her.

  “He seems to have a good head on his shoulders, and demonstrates to very capable,” Heron would insist. “Surely it wouldn’t hurt to lend the management in his hands for a few nights, now would it?”

  But Riley would shake her head. The last thing she needed to do, she privately thought, was to start neglecting her bar by putting primary importance on a man she was sleeping with ahead of her work. If she lost any sense of self-preservation in diving into an affair with Heron, she, at least, needed to keep in mind that when the affair ended, she would still need to earn a living.

  Then Heron tried to persuade her to let him buy her a house closer to him, preferably in San Francisco, maybe in Marin County, so that the distance between them would not be so arduous. He offered to buy her a small cottage that overlooked the town of Sausalito, near where her sister and Tanner lived, or a condominium on Nob Hill. And her new home would come complete with luxurious furnishing, a new car, and any other items she needed or wanted, such as new clothes and jewelry.

  “What would you do with all that when this ends between us?” she asked with some humor.

  “I’d do nothing. It’s yours to keep.”

  Riley looked at him. “So, in the end, you’d let your mistress keep a house that cost you nearly a million dollar
s, all the furniture, a luxury car, expensive clothes, and diamonds, as a token of your appreciation for letting you fuck her?”

  Heron gave a cool look. “You seem to forget that a few million dollars is nothing to me.”

  Riley blinked her eyes, trying to take in all the money he could offer a woman. “I’m sorry, but this is all new to me. I’m not used to a man setting me up, like this. I know you’re used it…”

  “I’ve never, as you call it, set up a woman in my life,” he said on a peevish note.

  “You mean you’ve never offered a house, cars, jewelry, clothes to your mistresses before?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “I find that a little hard to believe.”

  Heron shrugged. “Before you and your sister, I mostly went with women who were rich themselves. They already had the expensive houses, cars, and jewelry. Your sister, as you know, wasn’t a gold digger, and wasn’t into material things, and, plus, she walked out on me and our wedding.”

  “And you think I care about money?”

  Heron thought for a moment, studying her. “Frankly, I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “So, why are you trying to set me up?”

  Heron’s eyelids lowered over his dark eyes. “I want you nearer to me. I want to see you more than I’m able to.”

  Riley shook her head. “I may be your mistress, your flavor of the month, but I’m not ready to be a kept woman.”

  “Is that your pride talking?”

  Riley gave a cool little smile that had Heron narrowing his eyes with displeasure. “Much more than that. It’s called self-preservation.”

  If Heron managed to lure Riley to his penthouse on a weeknight, which was often quite late since she drove to San Francisco late at night, they would engage in hard, passionate sex for several hours. In the morning, Heron would manage to get into his office by nine o’clock, leaving Riley to sleep in his bed. But around lunchtime, he would rush back to his penthouse hoping to find her still asleep. If he did, he’d wake her out of her slumber and pull her into another hour or two of sex.