by Jade White
He was bringing ultimate pleasure to her two ways at once, both by drilling like a madman and sending his blunt head reaching for her womb, and grinding against the control switch of her womanly bliss. Going at her this way, he was propelling her to the ultimate destination. She almost howled, “Don’t stop…don’t stop…”
He answered only with incoherent, sex-drunk groans and banged and screwed away at her with relentless force. She clenched her body around him and he sensed her reaching the finish line. She howled out one more last, long howl, and he sensed a lightning bolt strike inside her. Tara’s wet inner passage throbbed against the throbbing of his shaft, and her body spasmed under him.
He had done it—climaxed her, created an upheaval of ecstasy in Tara’s body. Now he slammed himself into her one more time with all his might. Tara’s body shuddered and she nearly sobbed out loud; the bed shook, and Brenton let himself go. A massive surge of creamy whiteness surged from the tip of his man-club and flooded her womb. It felt to Brenton as if it would pour out of him forever.
When he was spent, he practically crashed on top of her and she whimpered one last time from the weight of his muscles hitting her. They stayed that way, Tara delirious under him, Brenton delirious on top, and did not move for a long while. At some point Brenton rolled off her and to one side of the bed and they lay silently beside each other for a time, naked and spent—for the time being.
Brenton was the first to find his voice. “Damn, that was a good lay.”
Tara only sighed. The way Brenton talked about sex would have turned her off, coming from any other man. From him, for some reason, it gave her a feeling like lightning flashing inside a cloud; she felt lit up inside. She did not even want to move, as if she could preserve the post-coital feeling in her body forever.
He looked over at her and played at her nipple with his knuckles, feeling it start to harden at his touch. “You okay?”
It took her a second to answer. “I’m wonderful.”
He shifted on the bed, lying on his side now, still rolling his knuckles over her nipple. “That lay was wonderful,” he said. He leaned over and kissed his way along her shoulder. His lips on her skin made her feel as if little sparks were going off inside her. “I knew you’d be good to screw.” The flash of lightning inside Tara went off again. But Tara’s silence began to concern him. He lifted his head and looked into her dreamy expression. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I really am,” Tara said softly. “It’s just…like I said before. It’s been a long time. And that was really intense for my first time after…you know.”
The name George hung unspoken in the air. Brenton did not want to speak the name of Tara’s late husband. Somehow he feared it would break the spell, and he most definitely did not want the spell broken. He had not even gotten started on her yet, and he wanted nothing, not even the ghost of the man she married, to get in the way of all the sex he had in store for her. He simply replied, “I understand. Come here.”
Brenton pulled her into an embrace and a long, lingering wet kiss. She returned the kiss and they wrapped themselves up in each other’s nakedness. He slid his hands down her back and squeezed at her bottom. She gave herself into his kiss, sucking on his tongue, for a long time.
Slipping his lips away but keeping her close, Brenton said, “I want you a lot more, Tara. I want to do it a hell of a lot more.” He pecked at her lips for emphasis. “I want to be on top of you and in and out of you all night. Longer, even.”
“We’re both supposed to be checking out tomorrow,” she reminded him.
“And you’ve got another week before you go back to work, right?”
“I do. I wanted to spend it at home, settling in and getting used to being back before going back to work.”
“I want you to change your mind about that,” he said.
“Just like that?”
“Tara,” said Brenton, stroking her hair, “I want to spend tonight changing your mind. I want to be so damn good banging you tonight that you couldn’t possibly say no to coming back with me to the place I was telling you about, and staying with me—under me, in my bed. Say yes; that’s all you’ve got to do. You thought I banged the hell out of you just now? Just say yes and let me take you to my place. I’ll give you whole days and nights of what I gave you just now. You’ll see.”
She eyed him with both desire and amazement. “You can really do that?”
Wickedly, he replied, “My hard-on comes back fast and often, and I don’t get tired. Not from screwing.”
“That’s not what I mean. What about your own work?”
“I’m my own boss, just like you with your partner who’s been taking care of your travel agency for you while you’ve been gone, remember? I make my own hours. I work when I want. I’ve got enough money and enough business, and enough people working for me, that I can do that. I hardly ever blow off work like that, but to get you in bed I will.”
“And this place you want to take me…it’s really nice?”
“So nice, I keep it just for myself instead of selling it. I keep it for family get-togethers—and play time. When I get you there and we’re in bed, where we’re going as soon as we get in the door, I promise it’ll be play time. For days.” And he kissed her again.
“You can really do it that much?” Tara asked.
“The men in my family are like that,” Brenton replied. “A whole family of the hottest, horniest bastards. Stay with me tonight; leave with me tomorrow. I’ll take care of transportation, food, everything. You won’t have to do a thing—well, almost.” He grinned lustily and irresistibly at her. “What do you say?”
“There’s not much I can say to that,” she replied.
“How about, ‘Yes, Brenton, I’ll go with you to your place, and we’ll get into your bed and your shower and your hot tub and your swimming pool and lie out on your lawn and do all kinds of hot, nasty, sexy things to each other for days and days. Please say yes, because it feels like it’s going to come shooting off me like a rocket down there.”
Tara peeked down the musculature of his body and found him as hard and thick and stiff as a totem pole. She rolled her eyes back up into his. She wanted to ask him to let her sleep on it—but it was clear that it would be a very long time before getting to sleep tonight. The only possible answer passed her lips: “Yes.”
He smiled broadly, a positively electric smile on a face so unspeakably handsome. He pulled her close and planted a long, hard kiss on her, and they rolled back and forth on the bed, clutching at each other’s body, and the huge pleasure pole between Brenton’s legs pressed urgently against her stomach. She was sure he was about to pin her down on the bed for another round. Instead, he pulled out of the kiss and said, “Hold that thought.”
Tara blinked, mildly confused. “What…?”
“It’s no problem. It’s just I get so hot and worked up, I have to pace myself a little. I’m going to duck into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face, and I’ll be right back.”
She sighed and nodded. Perhaps a few minutes more of anticipation—but just a few—would not be so bad.
Brenton climbed from the bed and stalked his way towards the bathroom. He turned and showed himself to her in all his naked male glory, and she rose up on her elbows to admire him again. “Don’t expect to get to sleep for a long time,” he told her, echoing what she had just told herself. He pointed at the totem pole between his legs, then pointed directly at the place on her where he would soon plant it. They exchanged sexy grins across the space between them, and Brenton turned around and hurried into the bathroom.
Once behind the bathroom door with the light on, Brenton hunched over the sink and studied himself in the mirror. He felt his features shift and flow, and the reflection looking back at him changed. The eyes became greener; the pupils turned to slits. The nose and mouth turned to a furry snout, and long whiskers grew from it. The ears grew pointed; the long hair turned to a longer, thicker mane.
He shook his head hard, as if to shake out cobwebs from his brain, and his features and hair morphed back to the way they were. That’s more like it. He ran some water into his cupped hands and splashed it onto his face, then dried himself with a washcloth. His pole throbbed and nagged at him from his loins, urging him to finish this business and return to the business he wanted.
In a moment, Brenton was on his way back across the suite to the bed, where he found Tara again sitting up against the headboard, this time tucked under the sheets. Only her breasts were showing, and he wanted them well enough—but under those sheets lay what he wanted more. With quick strides he reached the bed and slipped beneath the covers with her. He pulled Tara to him again and kissed her fiercely. He moved her hand down between his legs to let her grasp the throbbing, demanding erection there.
“Feel that? You’re getting it all damn night long,” Brenton said. “Lie back and open those beautiful legs.”
Powerless against her desire and not wanting to resist, Tara did as he said. At once he was on top of her and slipped it back into her, and the air was filled with her moans and his curses, and the bed shook with the force of Brenton’s continued humping, pounding conquest.
CHAPTER TWO
The first tinge of light outside the window of the suite told Tara that it was nearing dawn when Brenton finally rolled off her one last time and fell asleep. After the hours of mad, pounding, delicious sex he’d given her, Tara was too wired to sleep just yet. Her entire body felt like a mass of post-coital tingles. The sheet under her was damp and her inner thighs felt coated with warm syrup—which, in fact, they were. His syrup. The wonderful stickiness of an incredibly hot, unimaginably beautiful, phenomenally horny man. Tara could not sleep just yet. In the dimmed light of the suite and the first faint light of approaching morning, she needed to lie beside him and look at him, and wonder how it was possible for any living creature to be so beautiful.
He could have been a model for one of the brochures at her travel agency. He was actually more stunning than any model Tara had ever seen in any photograph or commercial. He could have easily modeled for a living. The camera would have loved him almost as much as her body did. In fact, when she first saw him, she actually took him for a model. Her memory rolled back over the hours to late in the afternoon of the previous day, when she sat alone in the outdoor cafe of the hotel. That was when she first spotted Brenton—and he first spotted her.
After the collision with the drunk driver that took George from her, Tara had, in her own thinking, put herself away on a shelf. She took a little time off from work, but then she went back just to fill the days with something besides the memory of George, the years they’d had together, and the years they’d looked forward to having. The trouble was that her memory of George was intertwined with her business, and there was one simple reason why. It went back to the time they were dating and very serious about each other. It went back to a question that George asked her early on. It kept reverberating in her brain:
“Do you ever go to any of the places you send other people to?”
Somehow, with George gone, that question took on an ever-deepening meaning. It became more than just a question. As with any business, the travel agency that she owned and operated with her friend Felicia Mackey consumed a great deal of time—time to set it up, time to run it, time to care for all the myriad details of it. There had been time in Tara’s life essentially for two things: business and George. And the business side of it was taken up with sending other people on trips, for pleasure or business or both; trips to distant places to see and do and experience beautiful things.
In a way, for years Tara had lived vicariously through her customers, listening to them talk about places they wanted to go, showing them pictures of how it would be when they got there, hearing their accounts of other places they had been and how they looked forward to seeing other places. It was George, a lawyer whose life’s work consisted largely of asking people questions, who put to her the question that would not go away.
She certainly meant to go to many of those places. She had gone into this business because she wanted to see those places herself as well as help other people get to them. But as a business owner she never seemed to have the time. When they began the relationship that would become their marriage, George, a rising associate in a corporate law firm with an eye on a partnership, and Tara, promised themselves that they would find the time to pack up and go, and make their life together an adventure.
They had every intention of doing it. They talked about their itinerary, adding places they would go and revising their route and their schedule. It was their promise to each other, a promise as real as the vows they had made on their wedding day.
All it took was one fool who’d had a few shots too many and had thoughtlessly put himself out on the road to end the promises. And when George was gone, Tara had put her heart away like a plane in a hangar, like a boat in drydock, never to fly and never to sail the way she and George had wanted.
But going back to work, and being surrounded by posters and brochures, and hearing her customers talk about all the places they wanted to go, had made Tara think how wrong it all was. George would not have wanted her to put her heart in the hangar. He would not have wanted her to put their dreams in drydock. George would have wanted her to fly. He would have wanted her to sail. Even if it was without him.
And his question from their earliest times together hovered over her: “Do you ever go to any of the places you send other people to?” Not going to any of those places, or putting off going to them, seemed like a long litany of broken promises. She and George had put off fulfilling those promises. Now George would never have a chance to make good on them. But Tara could still make them good. Tara could still go.
So she had a long talk with Felicia, and laid out all her feelings about her life and her loss and what she thought her future would be. They agreed that Tara would not sell her half of the business; they had worked too hard for it and with the money and insurance that George left her, Tara was basically taken care of and would not suffer from the time off. She would simply go, and when she returned she would find Felicia and the business waiting for her.
With those reassurances, Tara put life as she had come to know it on hold, packed her luggage and her passport, closed up the luxury apartment that she and George owned that was now an empty home without him, and made for the airport. She would be gone for a year. She would spend that time crossing Canada and Europe. And then she would return, full of promises made real.
Tara had just returned to the United States and checked into a hotel in Santa Monica, the next to last leg of her year of journeying. She would spend the night there, then return home for a week of unpacking and unwinding. Then, in the middle of the following week, she would return to the agency and resume her life. Sitting in the outdoor cafe of the hotel in the waning hours of the day, sometime between lunch and dinner, Tara swirled her screwdriver in her glass and looked out across Santa Monica Boulevard to the piers and the beach and the expanse of the Pacific. She contemplated all the places she had been and all the things she had done. She felt contented in a way she had never felt in all her life; a way that she never thought she could feel without George. And she imagined George would have been pleased to know it.
That was when she spotted the incredible-looking man with golden-straw hair down to his shoulders and a tight pullover shirt that left no question as to the muscularity that it covered, sitting across the cafe, sipping on a Bloody Mary.
She actually blinked when she saw him, to convince herself that he was not a hallucination; he was that gorgeous. And she could have sworn that somehow he sensed her reaction to him, for as soon as she stilled the bli
nking of her eyes she found him looking up and over and directly at her. He sent her a smile as warm as the Southern California Sun. And she blinked again, and returned a sheepish smile to him, and turned away, mildly embarrassed, to look at the ocean again.
It had been a year and a half since George died. The first six months were filled with the initial grieving, and the process of sorting through George’s things and deciding what to dispose of and what to give away—this with the help of Felicia and some of the other people at the office—and then going back to work and trying to get on with a semblance of her life. Then came the decision to live the promises she and George had made themselves, which sent Tara on a year abroad. A year of seeing other places where she had never been and the people in them.
A year of seeing so many men -- handsome men, athletic men, exotic men, the men of so many cities and so many countries. She had accepted the invitations of a few of them to have a meal or see a show or visit an interesting place. She had danced with them. She had let them kiss her. She had been tempted more than once to let them do much more than kiss her.
They had certainly wanted to do more, and they were so gorgeous that the temptation was very real. But Tara was a widow and she never felt ready. While she was on her year of excursions she felt as if George were still with her somehow. It would have felt like infidelity in a way. This time was a time meant just for her, and for the spirit of what she and George had and what they’d wanted. So Tara let the temptations remain nothing more than that. She always walked away, always moved on to the next place.
