by Jade White
She grinned, almost laughing again. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I found that out,” she said.
Brenton looked off into space again, thinking. “Well, let’s see, when I’ve got time for nothing but that, my average is about eight times a day, maybe nine, not counting times waking up with a boner in the middle of the night, and you’ll remember there were a few of those, and whole days of not getting out of bed…”
Tara took her hand away, crossed her legs, and covered her mouth, her eyes darting nervously around the airport again. Brenton went on, “…and times when I get so worked up that I don’t even get soft after shooting the wad, so I just go from one time to the next. So…multiply that by how many days…?”
Now she squeezed his arm, embarrassed but squirming inside from something other than embarrassment. “Ssshhh!” Tara whispered sharply at him. “People can hear!”
He gave her a rakish look. “So, let ‘em hear. That’s another problem with people; they’re too damn scared of…”
Squeezing his arm again, Tara chided him, “Brenton, please!”
Brenton relented. “Okay, I’m sorry.” He realized he truly should not talk about how sexually prolific he was, anyway. He was fortunate that she did not question it, but only enjoyed it; that she accepted him as just a very hot and freakishly sexual man, and that except for that one time at the hot tub, he had never given her any reason to suspect he was anything else.
But remembering that time at the hot tub put him onto remembering how his pouring out of his heart changed his pouring out of his sex, and the way they were from that time to this morning. After so many years he had spent screwing women’s brains out for pure pleasure, his time with Tara had turned to something else, something that he’d never had before. And the more he thought of it, the more Brenton wondered how he could possibly let her get aboard a plane back to Chicago, leaving him—and leaving his bed where he still wanted her.
“I want you to do your campaign,” said Tara. “I want you to go out and tell people how you feel and what you want to do, and ask for their vote, and keep asking ‘til you get it, and not stop ‘til you’re elected. I want to read someday about you being elected to the California State Senate, and being governor, and going to Washington. I think the country needs people like you. I believe in you, Brenton. I do.”
Brenton was speechless now. He looked at her and had no words to say. Any words he might have tried to say were drowned in a melting feeling he suddenly had deep inside. So many females in his life had told him so many things, but never from any of them had he ever heard the words that Tara had just said to him: I believe in you. So any words now just utterly failed him. He did not even want to reply to her in words. He wanted simply to carry her out of this airport, back to his car, back to his house, and back to his bed; to tear off their clothing and plunge himself into her and let her know that he would never, ever let her go. Her business be damned, his business and his political ambitions be damned; he wanted to keep her in his bed forever.
But instead, he only said, with considerable effort, “Thank you, Tara. That means a lot. It really does.”
And then over the airport speakers came the announcement of her flight.
Her melancholy starting to creep in on her again, Tara stood up. “Well, that’s me, I guess,” she said.
He stood up with her. “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied, sounding every bit as sad as she.
As one, they called each other’s name:
“Brenton…”
“Tara…”
So many words welled up in each of them, too many to say. They just stood there, looking at each other, until Brenton broke the sudden silence: “To hell with all the other people. It’s a f…ing airport; this is what people do at airports.” And he grabbed Tara and sizzled his mouth onto hers with a kiss so torrid that they could both imagine it being felt clear across the Napa Valley.
He locked one arm around the small of her back and the other around her shoulders, and she threw her arms around his neck, and the power of their kiss roared in their ears like the engines of a jet. They kissed as if they would kiss for a thousand years, until the announcement of her flight repeated, and they slowly, slowly pulled apart.
“Come back to Napa. Any time,” Brenton said.
“Come to Chicago. I’ll be there,” Tara answered.
Reluctantly she stepped back and picked up her carry-on bag from the floor beside her seat. Walking backwards at first so as not to let him out of her sight, then walking forwards while looking at him over her shoulder, Tara made her way over to the metal detector where he could not follow. Soon she was on the other side of it, heading for the gate of her flight. When she looked over her shoulder again, he was still standing there. He had not even moved. He had not taken his eyes off her.
With a final wave, she stepped through the gate, just catching sight of him waving back.
Brenton stayed in the airport waiting area and walked to the windows. He picked out her plane and stood transfixed, watching it. He watched it pull away from the gate and taxi down the runway. He watched it lift off and disappear into the blue California sky.
And something happened inside Brenton, a feeling such as he had never imagined having in his life. If he could have described it, he would have compared it to a long, deep crack opening up in his heart; a crack from top to bottom that would never close up again.
_______________
And so, after a year abroad and a week in Brenton Morgan’s bed, Tara Phillips’s life returned to something like its normal shape. She went back to work and resumed her routine, and enjoyed it. She was happy to be with Felicia again. The two of them had a sleepover and talked about everything—especially Brenton. Felicia’s eyes lit up with wonder and a bit of sisterly envy at Tara’s story of the uncannily beautiful and perpetually aroused man who invited himself to her table at the hotel cafe and had whisked her off for a fantasy beyond anything that Tara had ever imagined.
And Felicia saw in Tara’s own eyes a faraway look that said that a part of Tara was still at that house in Napa, that some part of her had never left him and perhaps never would. Tara could do nothing but sigh and nod with that distant expression when Felicia told her, “Girl, you’ve got to get that man to come to Chicago.”
Tara found too that she enjoyed her work even better, talking to customers about their dream holidays, their excitement about the places they wanted to go, and the trips they had planned or postponed for years, now that she had taken time out from her regular life to live out the dreams that she and George once had. Tara felt as though she related to them better now, having done as George once suggested and actually gone to some of the places where she sent others for a living. Being better traveled herself made her a better agent.
It was the nights that were difficult. Tara had expected to return home to the apartment where she and George had lived together and settle into the bed they had shared, and have nothing there but her memories of him. She had not counted on returning home after spending a week with a man who was a fantasy made flesh, to a bed where she no longer had a husband and was no longer with her living fantasy.
She had laid her grief for George to rest, but Brenton was fresh in the memory of both her mind and her body, and she had never felt her bed so empty nor felt herself so alone in it as she did now, with Brenton neither beside nor on top of her. She would lie alone in the dark, or in dimmed lighting as she’d been for night after night with Brenton, and she would try everything to get to sleep; but sleep took its sweet time finding her while she craved Brenton’s body.
And crave it she did. She craved his face and the infinitely sexy light in his blue-green eyes. She craved his lips on hers and his tongue in her mouth. She craved the spectacular muscles of his arms and his pecs, his abs and his legs. She craved the roundness and firmness of his buttocks. And she craved the fantastic thing between his legs, which grew hard and stayed hard; the way it tasted and the way it filled her mo
uth, the way it slid between her breasts and in the cleft of her buttocks, and most especially the way it worked in and out of her inner channel so deeply for so long. Tara missed the stickiness he left between her thighs and the moisture that he left on the sheets, and the smell of his perspiration and seed that hung in the air and made such a delicious scent of musk in the lingering hours that they spent tangled in the sheets.
Night after night Tara called the memory of Brenton to her bed, and night after night the memory appeared naked, erect, smiling an effortlessly seductive smile at her bedside. She reached out to him and he took her hand and climbed onto the bed, and onto her. He took command of her body and served up his body to her as he had done for all those days and all those nights.
He gave her the same kisses of moist fire that he had given her for all that time, and caressed and spooned her with the strong, smooth hands with which he had possessed her for so many hours. He whispered and grunted and moaned all the deliciously profane things that he’d said to her for day after day, night after night.
You want my body, don’t you, baby? Tell me how much you love my body. Tell me how you want to touch me and kiss me and lick me and suck me all over. Yeah, sweetheart, you want to put me in your mouth, don’t you? And you want me to put it in you…yeah, you want this thing in you so much. Tell me how much you want me to stick it in you. Tell me you never want me to take it out. Mmm, you want me to do it and come and never stop. You want to own my body, like I want to own yours…
When sleep did come, Brenton was there, doing all the things she wanted, making her do all the things he wanted. In her dreams, she rolled and thrashed with him and bucked and arched her back under him, and felt his entire body become one huge throbbing when he held himself inside her and poured himself into her when he came.
And when she awoke alone, with no Brenton sleeping temporarily spent beside her, a pang of inexpressible longing cut through Tara and made her want to cry. She would lie there in the first light of morning, stroking the pillow and sheets where she wished he was lying, and she would stifle a tear. The only thing worse than missing Brenton, she knew, would be never having had him at all.
A couple of weeks after her return to Chicago, there was one day when something that Tara always expected and always got on a particular day of the month did not arrive. She dismissed it at first. She assumed she was simply late and nothing more. The only trouble was that Tara was never late. She had never been late for one month since she was a teenager. It just never happened. Certain things always happened when they were expected: the chiming of Big Ben, the eruption of Old Faithful—Tara Phillips’s period.
Her immediate reaction to this disruption of her schedule was denial. Since it never happened before, it could not be happening now—except it was. There was no escaping the pure, flat fact that it wasn’t happening. And with it not happening came the further fact of what was most likely to have stopped it. She did not want to put together the words for it, not even in the privacy of her own thoughts. It was something that could not be—or something that must not be.
And yet, sitting in bed alone at night after her scheduled arrival failed to appear like a plane not landing on time or a train not pulling into the station when expected, Tara saw no other choice but to think the unthinkable. When the memory of Brenton came to her, wondrously handsome and muscular and naked and erect as ever, she was sitting up with her knees folded and her arms wrapped around them, as if to make a fortress of her body. And her beautiful Brenton gazed his soulful, sexy gaze at her, and ran his fingers through her hair, and stroked her folded arms and legs, and whispered in her mind, Tara, baby, I want you. What’s wrong?
And Tara, with a tear in her eye, looked into the handsome face that wasn’t really there beside her, and half-whispered and half-sobbed in a painfully real voice, “Brenton…I think you got me pregnant.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pregnant.
There, she had actually said it. Tara had actually, if only in a hushed tone, put out into the air the word for what her every instinct now told her that she now was. Her imagination could not even make Brenton look as shocked as a man must look at hearing such a thing. The image of him popped like a soap bubble in her mind, leaving her alone both in her bed and in her head.
Tara put her forehead on her upright-bent knees around which she had wrapped her arms and took deep breaths, trying to still the racing of her heart. The way she had folded herself up was just like…and the word for that only made her heart race so fast, it felt as though it would trip and tumble over itself. The way she was sitting was so much like…a fetal position.
Oh, wasn’t that just perfect, now? A fetal position for someone who was very likely at this moment the bearer of a fetus.
How could this possibly have happened? Tara felt like a naive fool even for letting the question enter her panicking mind. She was sitting with legs folded up and locked together and arms wrapped around them, and the voices of every older female member of her family now crowded into her mind, intruding into her thoughts. If you’d only kept your legs together back in California, you wouldn’t be in this situation now.
Tara felt a flash of anger at that, and dispelled the intruding voices with another whisper, this time hard and harsh: “Oh, just shut the hell up, all of you!” And in the wake of it came a pang of guilt, for one of those clucking hen voices was that of her own mother.
Keeping one’s legs together and pretending there was nothing between them was not the answer to sexual responsibility, no matter how judgmentally people with their small-minded fear of anything sexual argued that it was. People had bodies and genitals. Sex was natural and pleasurable and nothing to be ashamed of. And damn it all, it was fun. Having fun was nothing to be ashamed of, either. The only “shame,” if that were the word for it, was in not using the readily available means to ward off the consequences. With adult fun came an adult need to anticipate the consequences.
And with that came another question echoing in Tara’s mind: Damnit, Brenton, couldn’t you at least have used a damn condom?
In response to that one, her mind rolled back to that last conversation she had with him when he took her to the airport and they sat waiting for her flight. He had actually started to do the math for all the times he had done it to her from that first night at the hotel to their week together at his house. To cover his seemingly superhuman ability to screw, how many boxes—yes, boxes—of condoms would that have taken? He would have had to take advantage of his fortune and buy condoms by the gross.
He would have needed to keep dresser drawers or closet shelves full of boxes of condoms. The idea of that actually almost made her want to laugh. She could actually picture it, and it was almost funny. It made her breathtakingly beautiful Brenton seem like a caricature of a perpetually horny man. Yes, he could have used condoms—enough condoms for the incredible figure that the math suggested for how many times he’d had her on her back with her now-locked legs folded up around his spectacular male nakedness. But Brenton was too much of a carnal, sexual animal to do it any other way but au naturel, and pump into her every drop of his thick and generous seed.
That left it to Tara herself. She was every bit as responsible for her likely condition as Brenton was, after all. What would it have taken for her to use a diaphragm and some spermicide, or even to have gone back to her prescription and returned to using the pill?
The fact was that after George died she had shut herself down physically as well as emotionally. With the store closed for business, so to speak, there was no need to keep any inventory. Between George and Brenton, there had been opportunities, but she had not pursued any of them. She had never felt a genuine desire until that time at the hotel with Brenton.
Of course, between the hotel and the ride on his chartered plane from the airport, they could have detoured to any drugstore and she could have refilled her prescription. They could even have bought a morning-after pill to cover the previous night. But they h
adn’t done any of that. They had just boarded the plane and she had let Brenton board her. No, this was as much on her as it was on him.
It came to Tara that as shocking and daunting as her predicament was, she did not regret one bit of the way it happened. It was an accident, but it was not a mistake. The mistake would have been not to spend that night at the hotel and the week that followed with Brenton. The mistake would have been not to accept the gift of his phenomenal body and the instrument of rapture that hung between his thighs.
Nothing so astoundingly, beautifully masculine, given to her for hours on end day after day, could possibly have been wrong to enjoy. And enjoy him she did, head to toes and all over, his cascade of hair and his champion muscles and his prodigious prong—she had enjoyed every last inch of him, every last time.
About that there was no mistake. If she’d had that time to live again, Tara would not have changed one single thing. She would have taken and worshipped and satisfied her craving for Brenton’s body every bit as much as she did. She would have done everything to him, and let him do everything to her, just the same. She dismissed out of hand the idea that the virtual two-person, week-long orgy of her time with Brenton was a mistake.
