Attraction

by Linn Young

  “That sounds revolting,” Heron said with disgust.

  Riley gave a very mischievous smile. “It sure was a lot of fun, though.”

  A man sitting behind them leaned forward and hissed, “Do you mind? It’s hard to hear the bids with you chattering away like that.”

  Riley turned to the man and gave him a cool look and went back to reading her program.

  Heron looked a little stunned, and a little mortified, realizing that he was failing to observe social decorum while in public. He had acted no less like a school boy talking in class, disrupting the lesson. He looked over at Riley and studied her bent head, seeing her profile calm, unperturbed. It was her, he thought with some resentment. When he was with Riley, she made him act in ways that he had never acted before, such as forgetting polite consideration of others while in public and not paying attention in boardroom meetings because he was fascinated by a linen handkerchief that had her lipstick on it. Masturbating her in a public bar. Heron closed his eyes as he remembered.

  When he was with Riley, she made him forget who he was, and where he was. Or, maybe he was just slipping, he thought grimly. He was letting her get him under his skin. But there was no reason to think that it wasn’t anything he could control. Riley was just a woman with whom he was currently having an affair. She was no different from all the other women he saw in the past. Maybe a bit more cocky, much more sly in a woman than he was used to. But nothing that he couldn’t handle. He just had to watch himself more carefully, then, when he was around her. Resolute, he turned his head to the stage where the bid was currently on a Whistler’s painting.

  For the next ten minutes or so, Heron followed the auction with little interest, wondering when it would be polite to leave. When a pair of combs came up, his interest was pricked a little.

  “Right, now here is a one of a kind,” the auctioneer waved his hand at the display. “It was given to Wallace Simpson, before she became Duchess of Yorkshire, by the very Duke himself, crafted by Faberge.”

  As with all Faberge creations, the combs were elaborate, colorful, stunning, with excellent craftsmanship, with peacocks carved out of iridescent aqua-green opal to mimic the dense fine feathers, the tail fan exploding with colors of gems and different colored enamels as well as mother-of-pearl and moonstones. The tips of the feathers were topped with diamonds.

  The auctioneer detailed out the combs. “Each comb is encrusted with three carats of diamond, as well as tanzanite, Australian opals, citrine, peridot. You name it, all the colors of the rainbow.”

  Heron gave the combs a long look. They were so beautiful, and so feminine, and he could clearly see them holding back the thick curls of Riley’s long black hair, the combs bursting with vibrant colors amongst the thick, dense black. He wanted to bid on them, rather badly, because he wanted to be able to put them in her hair tonight, once they were at home, and then take her to bed while she wore them.

  He turned and found himself staring at Riley’s profile again, her head bent as she read the program. She was chewing absently on a thumb nail, a habit Heron had come to recognize as a sign of concentration. Her thick black curls were piled on top of her head with pins and clips, leaving her nape exposed, wispy tendril curls escaping. The wide diamond collar caught his eyes, and for the first time that evening, he examined it. It was quite dazzling. It was something that an elder woman, a matriarch of a wealthy family, would have worn, to show off her family jewels as well as to symbolize wealth and power. On an aged and scrawny neck of an elder woman, the collar would still have appeared impressive, dramatic.

  But on the neck of a much younger woman, one who was the mistress of a wealthy man, the collar revealed her to be a plaything for the man. The one long train of diamond links with its large teardrop end that hung down her deliberately naked back added even more to that allusion, suggestive of a leash. Anyone with even just a simple imagination could easily picture the man taking old of that leash once they were in the privacy of his penthouse and using it to pull his plaything to him, and then wrapping that leash around his fist so that he could hold her fast to him as he devoured her mouth. And her grayish, kittenish eyes would be partly submissive, partly sulky, partly defiant, partly wicked. But in their depths would be lurking a hint of her demand.

  Heron mentally shook the image out of his head, and he realized that he had been imagining himself as that man pulling on the diamond leash and the woman with those sinful eyes was Riley. Feeling his penis swollen once again, almost painfully hard this time, he shifted in his seat. He was determined to look away, and this time for rest of the auction, remembering his earlier promise to regain his control.

  But he couldn’t take his eyes off the diamond chain that fell down Riley’s back. Without thinking, he reached out and touched the chain with this fingertips, his eyes on her bent head.

  Riley turned her head and saw the heat in Heron’s dark eyes as he lightly stroked the diamond chain. A warmth spread inside her, her body answering to the silent demand in his eyes that he was not in a position to enforce on her. She shuddered a little when she felt his long fingers trailing the chain down her spine, like a man lovingly stroking the leash on a favorite pet. She stiffened when his hand stopped at the diamond teardrop which was barely an inch from the crack of her buttocks, holding her breath as she waited to see if he would be so daring as to linger further down.

  Heron did slip his hand just beneath the folds of the back line of the dress that barely covered her crack. Riley gasped and instinctively arched her back. Then she felt his finger between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she closed her eyes, her thighs clenching as heat spread and tightened in her loins.

  She opened her eyes when she felt Heron press his open mouth on her bare shoulder. Without knowing it, she lifted a hand and thrust it into his hair, turning her head to press her lips against his temple. Heron lifted his head and their lips met hungrily. He slipped his hand around her waist and pulled her closer to him.

  “Excuse me,” a cold male voice said. “EXCUSE ME.”

  The curt indignant demand penetrated the fog of passion that Riley and Heron were wrapped in. Both turned their head and met the coldly disapproving gaze of the man who had told them to be quiet earlier.

  “I so sorry to interrupt,” the man said, his voice dripping with heavy sarcasm. “But would you like them to turn the lights off for you?”

  Heron thrust Riley from him and turned right about face in his seat and locked his eyes to the stage, a deep red creeping up his face. Next to him, Riley’s body shook as she muffled her laughter with a hand pressed over her mouth.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next morning, Heron attended the weekly meeting with his father, brother, and company’s vice president. As was his usual participation in such meetings, he mostly listened to the presentation and discussion of the current issues that were presented by the various vice presidents of their own department, once or twice interjecting with a pointed question, often jotting down on his notepad.

  Two and a half hours later, the meeting adjourned, and most of the vice presidents instantly flipped opened their cell phones to listen to their voicemails.

  Tanner stepped closer to Heron as he gathered his papers into his briefcase. “Uh…Heron?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I better tell you…”

  “Heron, if you have a moment, I’d like to speak to you privately,” Roy said gruffly.

  Heron looked at his father, then at his brother, who gave a shrug, gathered his briefcase and left the conference room. Heron looked at his watch.

  “Actually, father, I’m late for a lunch meeting with Judge Winnaker.”

  “Then Winnaker will have to wait a few minutes, won’t he?”

  Heron carefully shut his briefcase. “Alright. What is it then?”

  Roy slapped down on the table in front of Heron a folded newspaper. Heron recognized the photograph of himself kissing Riley’s bare shoulder, his hand caressing her naked bac
k. The picture revealed in detail the sexual passion between them, the touch of his long male fingers on her spine, his closed eyes as he pressed his mouth against her skin, Riley’s parted lips as if to gasp with pleasure, and the droop of her eyes laden with passion.

  “Since when did my personal life become a discussion for business,” Heron said coldly.

  “That won’t work, son. Not this time. Your mother and I have been perfectly content to leave your personal affairs completely to you. Until now, when the woman in that picture is your sister-in-law’s sister. We have been hearing that you were seeing a new woman of late, someone quite unknown in the city, and that you were quite smitten with her. But we had no idea that it was Riley Calderon.”

  “I’m not smitten,” Heron denied coldly.

  Roy pointed at the newspaper. “The man in that picture hardly wants to play tiddlywinks with the woman.”

  “What’s the difference that it’s her?”

  “You almost married her sister, and your brother did marry her sister. That makes Riley Calderon practically family. That means your mother and I expect you to treat her differently than you would your other mistresses.”

  “My affair with Riley has nothing to do with the family.”

  Roy stared at his son with a stern, patriarchal look. “I can’t believe you’re being unbelievably obtuse about this, Heron, when, normally, you’re such a bright boy about everything else. Your mother and I have a high regard for Lawrence and Caroline. It puts us in quite a damnably uncomfortable position when you parade their daughter around town as if she were your latest light skirt, especially when you had been engaged to their other daughter only recently.”

  “Who ran away and eloped with my brother, leaving me high and dry and looking like the last fool in town,” Heron said with a touch of resentment.

  “Exactly. That emphasizes my point even more so. What happens when this so-called affair ends between you and Riley? You will still have to see each other during family gathering and at holidays.”

  “Riley and I have an understanding. I don’t believe things will get messy when it ends between us.”

  Roy scoffed. “Affairs always end messily. Anyway, your mother and I expect you to bring Riley over tomorrow evening for dinner. Dinner is at seven, cocktails at six. We expect you both to be there no later than six.”

  “Father, what would be the purpose of my bringing Riley over, when both of us don’t expect this to go on much further?”

  “If you’re having an affair with your brother’s sister-in-law, then your mother and I expect you to treat her with utmost respect and consideration as you would treat your own family members. That means we expect you to present her to the family as you would present any respectable woman. Six o’clock sharp. That’s on your mother’s orders.”

  Without giving Heron a chance to say anything more, Roy turned and walked out of the conference room.

  An hour later, Heron called Riley and relayed his parents’ orders. She was just as unenthusiastic as he.

  “Well, surely you can get us out of it,” she said.

  “I tried.”

  “All you have to say is no. What’s so hard about that?”

  “These are my parents. They’re not clients whose appointment I can push off on the calendar for another day. You best better get to my place around five thirty.”

  ‘Well, I’m not going.”

  “Right. Then you can call up my mother and let her know that.” Heron hung up the phone before Riley could reply.

  Before she drove up to San Francisco the next day, she changed outfits at least ten times, trying to decide if she should go for the wholesome girl-next-door look, a carefree gipsy, a dangerous sexpot, or an up and coming sophisticate who was ready to take society by storm. Five minutes before her deadline to drive to the city, she finally on a desperation settled for fitted pink angora sweater, pencil-thin navy pin-striped wool gabardine tailored skirt that reached an inch above her knees, sedate hosiery, and blue suede pumps. She thought the outfit conservative and yet tasteful, stylish, and sophisticated, something that wouldn’t make her feel constricted but gave her some confidence.

  She tried to tell herself numerous times there was no need for her to be so nervous. She had met Heron’s parents before and she had liked them immensely and had felt comfortable and at ease in their company. Tonight was no different, she repeatedly told herself. It wasn’t as if Heron was presenting her as a woman for whom he had any serious thoughts. They were both just doing what his parents had ordered them to do. And that was for her to be presented to the parents as if she were a potential candidate . Obviously Alana and Roy Wait had some old fashioned ideas about how a man should treat a woman. It was quaint, even rather touching. But it was certainly unnerving.

  When she arrived at Heron’s penthouse, he greeted her coldly because she was five minutes late. Riley also saw displeasure in his dark eyes when he saw her sweater. She looked down at herself, and winced a little when she saw how the fluffy sweater hugged her figure, accentuating the large fullness of her breasts even more. She now realized that what she had thought was a casual and relaxed was quite sexy and vixenish.

  She lifted her chin at Heron. “Don’t you like what I’m wearing?”

  “Does everything you wear have to shout out sex,” he bit out before he stalked away.

  Feeling tired of always being at the end of his haughty disapproval, Riley reluctantly followed him to the car.

  As Dustin negotiated the long, black limousine through San Francisco’s clogged rush hour traffic, Riley out of the corner of her eye watched Heron as he opened his briefcase and began to go over some papers.

  So, that was the way it was going to be tonight, she thought, studying his striking profile through narrowed eyes. Put out, wishing she had been more insistent about not going tonight, Riley stretched in her seat. As she did so, she saw from her side view Heron stiffen.

  Well, well, well, she thought, a little coolly, a little vengefully, not so indifferent, after all, are we. She stretched again and saw his mouth tighten. Wanting to punish him, she slid closer to Heron, and saw him tense up again.

  “Heron, I want a drink,” she said with a pout.

  Heron kept his eyes on his papers. His voice was irritated. “Then make yourself one.” “The bar’s on your side.”

  With ill-humor, he tossed his papers into his briefcase and opened the bar. “Whiskey, please,” Riley said in a low, purring voice.

  He tossed some ice in a tumbler and poured whiskey. He turned to hand the drink to her. He stiffened when he saw that she had moved closer to him.

  “Back off,” he ordered harshly.

  Riley, her eyes drooping a little, leaned closer to him.

  “I said back off,” Heron said, his face hard and dangerous, holding her drink.

  Pouting, she scooted away several inches on the seat. Heron handed her the tumbler and went back to his papers.

  From her seat, as she drank down the whiskey, she watched him, not bothering to pretend that she had backed off, waiting for the right moment. Heron kept his eyes on his papers, his profile grim and determined.

  When Riley emptied her glass, she slid next to him, slowly leaned across him to set her empty glass in the bar, and as she did so, she brushed her breasts against him. As she straightened back in her seat, she pressed her globes deliberately against his chest for a moment.

  Heron didn’t even realize he was no longer holding the papers in his hand, or that his hands were suddenly filled with Riley’s large, pink angora covered breasts. He gave them a gentle squeeze and Riley moaned, thrusting her globes harder into his hands.

  “Riley,” he rasped out as he fondled her, feeling the silky soft fur of the sweater over her large breasts. He shuddered as he felt his loins tighten with growing heat. He finally knew what it was like to be a teenager feeling a girl up through her sexy sweater for the first time in the back seat of a car.

  Riley’s own hand reached out
and covered his crotch and found him hard and swollen beneath the fine material of his suit pants. As her fingers began to fumble with his belt and zipper, her eyes stared into his, both of them drugged and glazed with desire. Half unconsciously, half deliberately, she flicked her tongue over her lips, lips that were heavily coated with matte, dead-red lipstick. She managed to loosen his pants and dipped her hand into the front panel of his boxer briefs.

  Heron’s breath hissed out through clenched teeth when he felt her hand close over his penis.

  Her slitted eyes on his face, Riley filled her palm with one of his testicles and gave it a gentle squeeze, causing him to groan with pleasure.

  “Such a big boy, aren’t you,” she crooned while her hand rolled his balls.

  Heron’s eyes flew open, outrage and sexual arousal warring in his face. “God, that’s tacky, Riley.”

  Riley gave a very feline, very dangerous smile. “But you are a big boy. Even your balls are big. See, I can’t even completely close my hand around you.”

  She pulled his penis free from his briefs to show him. Heron looked down and saw her small, dainty hand holding his penis, her middle and thumb not able to meet completely. It was the most arousing image he had ever seen and he felt himself harden even more, painfully so that he had to stretch his long legs out in front of him, his hips arching, trying ease some of the tension in his loins.

  He became desperate when he felt himself spurting his pre-cum. Riley watched the clear liquid ooze out of the tiny hole at the tip of the bulbous head. Slyly, she brushed her thumb at the teardrop and lightly spread it over the head. She leaned into Heron and lightly captured his lower lip between her teeth and lazily let it go, and did it again. He heard himself moan against his heavy breathing.

  “You were so forceful when you filled my snatch with your big dick, when I was so sure that you couldn’t get it all inside me,” Riley murmured against his lips, between tiny sniping kisses. All the while, her thumb brushing his liquid that dept spurting out of him. “But you did. Every inch of you. And then you took me, filling me up every time, over and over. It felt so good, as you knew it would. That’s why you took me. And you knew I never had a dick so large inside me, didn’t you, big boy? But you know what, Heron, I find that I not only like a big dick inside my snatch, but I also like to know what it feels like to have one in my mouth.”