She shook her head as if to clear it of an illusion. Of him. “It’s in the shop. The one you saw outside is a loaner.”
A loaner Bentley. Impressive. Her new man (or was he an old one?) must be rolling in the dough.
“I didn’t know you worked here,” he said.
“I don’t. Epoch belongs to a friend of mine. I’m minding the store until she gets back to town.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything, merely watched her as she walked to the front door to lock it but not before peering into the street, first in one direction and then another.
“Expecting someone?”
“No, just checking for customers.”
“I thought this place was closed.”
“It is.”
She turned to face him. “How did you find me here?”
“By accident,” Ian said. “I was heading to Bangkok House when I stopped by to check out some of your work. The paper said you and a few other artists had work showing here.”
“Oh.”
“Why did you ask me how I found you?” He raised an eyebrow. “Did you think I was stalking you? Or that I found out something you didn’t want me to know?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, but her look didn’t affect him like before. The cracks in her facade were laughably apparent, especially from this distance.
“Like what?”
“Don’t be coy, Tam. Like your other lover. The guy whose dick I saw you practically sucking in front of everybody in this damn gallery two hours ago. I didn’t know you had another toy on the side.” He circled her, coming gradually closer. Her arms shifted over her chest, but otherwise she didn’t move. Her expressionless face made his anger flare even higher.
“So this guy I saw you with, what’s his name?”
“Garrett.” She sighed and half-turned away from him. “His name is Garrett.”
Ian nodded as though giving thoughtful consideration to the name of the guy she’d been fucking the whole time they were together.
“Is he the ‘friend’ who owns the property you took me to that first time?”
Her cheeks darkened, but she didn’t drop her gaze. “Ian, don’t make a big deal—”
“Is he?”
She sighed again. “Yes.”
“Was he watching us have sex the whole time? Did it turn him on to know that my dick was inside your pussy, the same pussy he was going to be drinking from later that day?”
She flinched. “No. I’m not sure what he saw, but…but I really do feel for you, Ian.”
“Feel what? Feel your pussy get wet every time you see me? I already know that. And you and I both know that’s nothing special.”
She had the nerve to look hurt.
“Don’t goddamn get that look on your face.” The look pierced him and made him regret his hard words, but she was just playing him. Again. Ian moved toward her anyway, touching her face and bringing her close.
“Shit.” She kissed him. “Shit.”
He tasted tears in her open mouth. She held his cheeks tight between her flattened palms.
“I’m sorry,” she said between their kisses. “I am. I’m sorry.”
What the fuck did that mean? That she was sorry he found out and put an end to her playtime? Ian tried to pull gently away, but she slipped her hands behind his head and held him close. Her teeth scraped against his closed lips, nibbling, biting, hurting.
He wrenched himself away. “Stop it.”
She came toward him again, and he had to grab her shoulders to hold her back. “Stop fucking with me, Tam. I think you’ve had your fun. We’re finished.”
She wriggled and flailed in his grip.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked. “Isn’t this what all your advance-and-retreat bullshit was about? You wanted to fuck me but not get too involved? Well, you’ve already had your fuck, and I’m leaving. All you had to say was ‘it’s over.’ What’s so fucking hard about that?”
“This is not over,” she hissed.
“Just because you say so?” He laughed. “You’re a fucking—”
She twisted from his grip and spun close, slamming into his chest. “You know it’s not over between us, Ian. You know it.” She pressed her hand against his chest. “This doesn’t lie. Neither does this.” Her other hand on his dick froze him. It wasn’t her boldness that held him immobile. No, it was because his dick, like an obedient dog, rose on command for her, stiffening behind the thin cotton of his slacks and pushing back against her hand. Ian swallowed.
“Stop it,” he hissed again.
But she didn’t stop. Instead, she stepped closer, pushing at him, assaulting his senses with her body’s perfume and the intoxicating pressure of her hand against his dick. Her touch grew more certain the longer he stood there, unmoving. He could never say no to her. And a part of him asked now, why should he have to? She pressed back at him until his back was to the wall and his dick was throbbing just for her and his heart was a jackhammer in his chest. Did she even realize how far gone he was?
Ian grasped her shoulders again to hold her back from him. Her eyes were certain of his surrender, on her terms. Fuck that. Ian leaned in and kissed her like this was the last time he was ever going to taste her lips. He devoured their pouty curve, their damp insides, and sucked hard on the tongue that flickered and writhed against his. She moaned and pressed her body to him. They were in a duel of wills, each wanting to dominate the other, each expressing it in the same way, but Ian was fueled by anger and lust and frustration.
He lifted her, draped her pliant body over one of the exhibition pieces, a hip-high wooden carving with a dipped curve that fit her back perfectly. It was just long enough to fit her hips and back while her head dangled over the edge. She lay on it, trying to find purchase with her hands, but the wood was too smooth and her body was just beginning to sweat. He tore away her skirt and underwear, leaving her lower body completely exposed and her bare, damp pussy gleaming in the gallery lights. With one quick movement of his hand, her camisole was on the floor. The dark tips of her breasts jumped with each quick breath.
Tam fumbled for Ian’s belt, but he pushed her and her hands back, still kissing her mouth, her chin, her jawline, biting her smooth skin until she flinched with pain and pleasure, her body floating up and down with each touch of his teeth. He combed his fingers through her pussy lips, coating them with her slickness. This was going to be the last time for them. This was it. His chest tightened, and his heart raced faster. Ian slid his fingers against her clit, massaging her pussy until she gasped and moaned, a surging symphony of sex that reminded him too much of this morning’s pleasure. He tasted her with his fingers and found she was wet inside, drenched and ready for him.
Tam surged up again, still trying for his belt and his stiff cock that begged shamelessly for her touch. Ian pushed her back but didn’t stop there. She obviously wanted something. He was going to give it to her. The belt left their loops with an audible slide. He loosened the top button of his pants and pulled down the zipper but that was all. When Tam reared up again, he captured her hands in the noose of his belt, pulling the leather through the buckle until her wrists were snared together. He fit his hips into the V of her thighs.
“What—what are you—uh!”
He surged into her. She fit around him like hot, molten molasses, thick and engulfing, swallowing up all his senses. This time he wasn’t worried about the buildup, he wasn’t worried about her orgasm, only that she felt his need, all his desperation for her that had come to nothing.
“What does he do for you that I can’t?” He fucked her. “Is it the money? Is it that overpriced car? Or is it the way he treats you like shit because you always come back for his scraps?”
He fucked her hard against the sculpture. Her body slid back and forth across the smooth surface, but only as far as his pounding hips and the tightened belt held in his fisted hand would allow. Her body was an erotic arc of leaping breasts, liquid cunt
, and heaving belly. A Venus hewn in onyx and stretched to its very limits under the gallery’s soft lights.
His mouth opened in that sweltering O of desire. His hips pistoned, his body tightened. All his muscles leaped toward Tam and her weeping pussy, toward her writhing body and the siren call of her wails under him.
“Does that feel good?” He gasped the question, although the liquid slide of his dick and her gasping cries made it moot.
As she gasped a “yes,” he twisted his hips, changed the angle until she was crying out. He grabbed her thigh and threw her leg over his shoulder. Everything bubbled up inside him then, his stupid love for her, his tattered pride. It didn’t matter who saw them through the gallery’s clear glass windows—all that mattered was her, under him, telling him yes.
She panted. “Harder. Please… Ian!”
He gave her everything she asked for and more. Winding his hips, twisting her nipple, sweating above her until a high, keening wail announced the beginning of her come.
“Oh, God! Don’t—don’t stop!”
He didn’t stop. He could never stop. Even after her body shuddered and clutched at him—once, twice, three times—Ian kept on going. He pounded away at her until he was coming, too, throwing his head back and thrusting into her, jerking her sweat-slick body across the sculpture.
He was dying. Jesus…
“It’s OK, baby,” she said. “It’s OK.”
His body shuddered and gave up the last of its seed to her, and then he was pulling out of her and turning away. He covered himself with the tail of his shirt and pulled his pants quickly up. With a disgusted sigh at himself, he wiped his hand across his face, and then he reached over Tam to retrieve the belt he’d used to restrain her.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, buckling his belt. He backed away as she sat up. “I’ll see you around.”
“That’s it?” She looked stricken and breathless, like a well-fucked woman who wanted more.
“That’s it.” Ian unlocked the gallery door and walked away from Tam without looking back.
Chapter 9
“I wish things didn’t have to be like this.” Jasmine looked at him with pleading eyes.
“It’s all right, Jasmine.” He tried to smile. “There’s nothing to worry about. Your mother and I are finished.”
The clock above his office door ticked away the eighteenth minute past two, almost half an hour since Jasmine had walked into his office and told Ian she knew what had happened between him and her mother.
“She can be really thoughtless sometimes. I’m sorry about whatever it was that she did. But she misses you, I think. She’s just too stubborn to say it.”
Ian shifted with impatience as each word Jasmine spoke poked at him, made him remember and cringe with disgust at the fool he’d made of himself over Tam. “Whatever your mother and I had is in the past. Let’s just leave it there.”
Jasmine looked down. “Sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry. None of it’s your fault.” But part of him did believe it was her fault. If it weren’t for Jasmine, he wouldn’t have met Tam. Then again, if it hadn’t been for his dick, he wouldn’t have gotten into her car that first day, he wouldn’t have fucked her on the beach, and he wouldn’t be in the frozen hell he was in now. “It’s not your fault,” he said again.
She didn’t come to him in dreams anymore. Ian didn’t know whether to be grateful or pissed off. He did the same things he did before, went to work, ate, slept, saw his friends. But underneath it all lay her nagging absence. Thoughts of Zoë no longer comforted him. He couldn’t even rely on the old pain of missing her to take his mind off Tam. Something inside him had finally put Zoë to rest.
Although it was only a small comfort, he knew that Tam was thinking about him. She tried to call. He saw her name on the caller ID when the phone had rung once and then stopped. But he wasn’t going to call back and make it easy for her. Obviously, whatever she had to say to him she also knew he didn’t want to hear.
“You look like shit,” Derrick said, sitting down next to Ian on the bar stool.
“Thanks,” Ian muttered. He knew his exhaustion-ravaged face and disinterested expression weren’t the sexiest things to bring to the bar, but that was all he had today.
“Did that woman come back to you yet?”
“She’s not coming back, and I don’t want her back.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.” Derrick signaled the bartender and ordered a Corona and lime. “If she walked in here right now and dropped to her hands and knees to beg, you would gladly take that bitch back.” Derrick nodded his thanks to the bartender and passed her his credit card. “Start a tab for me, honey.” He turned back to Ian. “In fact, I can’t think of any circumstances in which you wouldn’t take her back. You’re pussy whipped.”
Ian had told Derrick about Tam weeks ago, even shown his friend a photograph of her. That was before they had stopped seeing each other, when things had been at their most explosive. Derrick was all sympathy and voyeuristic interest. Of all Ian’s friends, he was the one who understood the sheer power of lust and its ability to blast away all reasonable thought. When Ian told him about the other man, Derrick had shrugged philosophically. “A hot woman like that, of course she has some on-the-side dick, which, by the way, might have been you.”
“I was whipped,” Ian said in response to his friend’s earlier comment. “Now I’m over it.”
“Right.” Derrick took a deep drink of his beer. “What would you do if you saw her right now?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Derrick. I’m not in the mood.”
“You better think about it, because your hot piece just walked in here with some other Negro. Don’t turn around. Be cool.”
But Ian was past the point of trying to be cool. He was ice cold. His friends may be able to tell that the woman had taken everything when she left—his heart, his balls, even his libido— but to the rest of the world, he was the same as usual. He watched her in the mirrored wall behind the bar.
She was in his bar with someone else. Not the one she’d left him for. Tam was all over the guy, leaning into him as they walked around the bar looking for a place to sit. When they sat down on an overstuffed couch in the corner, she tucked herself into the crook of his arm like a child. The man teased her, played with one of her pointy ears, trying to get her to laugh. But he was nothing to worry about. Tam obviously wasn’t his type.
“Oh, honey, please!” the man trilled. “Butch up, and get over it.”
“Never mind,” Derrick said. He went back to his beer.
But Tam was now firmly in Ian’s mind. He watched as Tam’s companion left her to get drinks at the bar near where Derrick and Ian sat. The man’s eyes passed over them with casual interest before leaning in to kiss the bartender on both cheeks. They chatted as the woman made his drinks. He didn’t say anything about Tam. Ian was listening while his eyes stayed firmly locked on Tam in the mirror. Her gay boyfriend went back to her with drinks, and she thanked him with a smile and that familiar coy tilt of her head. Ian knew the exact moment when she saw him.
She froze and almost spilled her drink. He took a large swallow of his beer and watched her in the mirror, daring her to look away. Tam looked tired like she’d been spending some long, hard nights fucking her sugar daddy. But she was still beautiful.
“Hey, sorry we’re late,” Rashawn said, breezing in with Troy. “That traffic from downtown’s a bitch.”
“It’s cool,” Derrick said. “You didn’t miss anything except Ian’s little girlfriend loving on some gay boy over there in the corner.”
“Serious?”
“Not really. I think she’s just trying to take her mind off our boy. Look at her.” Derrick nodded toward Tam. “She can’t keep her damn eyes in her own business.”
“Shit, then let’s give the bitch something to look at.”
Before Ian could tell Rashawn to cool it, his friend wrangled a trio of cuties, what used to be Ian’s t
ype—slim shoulders, big asses, and tiny waists—to entertain the boys for the evening. Although Rashawn’s brawny athlete’s physique and easy charm got them over there, the moment the girls got a good look at Ian, they forgot about everybody else.
“If I wasn’t trying to make this fool feel better, I’d push him out of this bar so the rest of us can get a little piece of the action,” Rashawn said.
“Speak for yourself. I’ve got no problems getting mine,” Derrick said.
“Whatever, man.” Troy laughed. “Don’t work too hard to convince yourself.”
The girls slid up to Ian, each trying to get him to notice her over the others. The winner made herself at home in the V of his spread thighs. Her friends gave up the fight and turned to Derrick, Troy, and Rashawn to make halfhearted conversation.
“Hey,” the bold one purred, rubbing her palms up his thighs, “my name is Tanisha. What’s yours?” Never mind that Rashawn had introduced everyone not five minutes before. Was this girl deaf?
He told her his name, wondering how far she would go with her hands before she struck gold.
“What a coincidence,” she said. “I have I, A, and N in my name, too.” She chuckled and leaned closer. “I’d love to have a little more Ian in me.”
Tanisha laughed at her own joke and brushed her breasts against his chest. Her hands gripped the tops of his thighs, pressing up the material of his pants to emphasize the shape of his dick under the cotton.
“Excuse me.” Ian looked up, surprised, when Tam came over. “Can I talk with you for a minute?” she asked.
“Go find your own man, honey.” Tanisha gave Tam a dismissive once-over. “This one’s taken for the night.”
Ian shook his head and forced a laugh. Tam didn’t look too happy, but it could just have been the inconvenience of having to deal with someone like Tanisha.
“Give me a sec,” he said, pulling away from Tanisha.
She reluctantly released him while keeping a jaundiced eye on Tam who guided him away from the main part of the bar to one of its quieter rear lounges. There were couples seated back there and a few threesomes, too, leaning close and talking intimately together. She sat down on one of the deep purple velvet love seats and invited him to do the same.
Propositioning the Professor (Professional Lovers Series Book 2) Page 8
