by Cara McKenna
Sam laughed, then took a sip of her wine, savoring the taste, watching the garnet liquid swirl in her glass before she raised her chin to look him in the eyes. “What about you? What do you do, Bern Davies?”
“I’m an electrician.”
She blinked. “Really?”
He nodded. “Large-scale commercial stuff. I work for a contracting outfit that does office and retail renovations and refurbs.”
“Well, you’re in the right city for that. And I guess that means I can’t ask you to come over to fix how the lights go dim in my apartment when the microwave’s on high.”
He licked his lower lip. “I’d prefer to be asked over to tend to more interesting tasks. Though while I’m there, I guess I could take a look.”
Just then, the man seated next to Sam was greeted by a friend or date. “Here,” Sam said, and offered her stool. It was a perfect opportunity to move their talk a bit farther from the crowd at the bar. To remind herself how tall Bern was, and to give Mike a better view of that fact.
They relocated, and she leaned against the wall beside the jukebox. She forced her eyes not to seek Mike, though her peripheral vision told her exactly where he was and how perfect a vantage point he had. Bern took her cue, standing close enough for the toes of their shoes to touch, his black leather ones flirting with her pointy-toed heels. She imagined the items jumbled together on the bedroom carpet, her and Bern jumbled together across the comforter.
“You know, you never answered my question from the first e-mail,” he murmured.
She dredged the memory but came up short. “Which question was that?”
“About what your husband gets out of this whole… arrangement.”
“Oh, right.”
Again, that mischievous smile curled his lips. His head dipped only a few centimeters, yet the move seemed to cast her in a shadow, a similar darkness passing over his expression. “So what’s in it for him?”
“Well, I honestly can’t explain it much better than he could. He’s not a weak man at all, and he’s really assertive in every other aspect of his life. But he’s got an incredibly high-pressure job, and for some reason, the fantasies seem to take him out of all that. I think deep down, his worst fear is that he’s going to fail, that he’s not man enough. He’s going to find out he’s not the alpha dog and then he’ll get torn apart by the rest of the pack. So when we pretend he’s not capable of keeping me faithful or pleasing me in bed, that’s him confronting his deepest fear. But also living through it, so it loses its power over him. And for whatever reason, it turns his crank.”
“Wow.” Bern blinked, staring at the wall above her shoulder. “That’s fucking interesting.”
She smiled. “Isn’t it? Took me ages to feel like I understood it. And he doesn’t really feel like he understands it at all. But it resets something in him when he’s feeling really stressed from work, and it turns him on like nothing else does. Like it opens up some vein of naturally occurring Ecstasy in his brain.”
“Can’t argue with that. That’s what the idea of having someone watch does to me.”
“And I think… I dunno, I think there’s another side to it. A way different side, where he’s actually really smug and full of himself.”
“Oh?”
Sam felt herself blushing, unsure about sharing the thought, as she had no clue how attracted to her Bern might really be. But she decided to trust all the cues his body was offering hers. “Yeah. He thinks I’m… He thinks I’m really sexy, so there’s some part of him that likes the idea of another guy getting to enjoy me for an evening, all the while knowing that he’s the one who gets to keep me.”
After a thoughtful pause, Bern grinned. “That may be the sweetest, filthiest, most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
Sam laughed. “That’s my husband. Sweet and filthy. I think also… You know when you first meet a girl, but she’s not your girlfriend yet? There’s some kind of competitive drive, keeping you on edge. Whatever chemical’s happening there, I think that’s part of it, too. If he pretends other men still have a chance with me, or could take me away, he gets a hit of some aggressive male hormone.”
“Nice that he doesn’t take you for granted, I guess.”
“No, definitely not.”
“And he’s watching us right now, right?” She could tell from Bern’s tone, the idea excited him. His voice had the nervous, giddy edge of a kid hoping they were getting away with something.
“He is. But I’m not supposed to ‘spot’ him. Though if he weren’t liking what he saw, he’d have let me know by now.”
“Well.” Bern was dying to crane his neck and find out who the mystery voyeur was, she could sense it.
“Don’t look,” she warned. “We’re doing such a convincing job so far.”
He leaned a little closer and there was that smell again – that personal scent more alluring than any clandestine cologne sample. He might only be coming so close to be compliant, following her and Mike’s script, but she felt a selfish thrill from his mere proximity. She reveled in the heat coming off his big body, could practically feel his weight on top of her.
“So what’s in it for you?” he asked.
She sipped her drink, stumped by the question. She’d never bothered posing it to herself. “Well, it’s his kink more than mine. So the first reason is to treat him. But he’s never pressured me to take it this far – I was the one who proposed all this. I guess what I get out of it is the pleasure of blowing his mind.”
“Wow.”
“It took a while for us to wind up here, believe me. Took a long time to trust that it really was something my husband wanted, that he wouldn’t regret it and end up resenting me, or that I’d end up feeling guilty, worried I’d done something I could never take back. Or resenting him for getting me to do something I never really wanted for myself.”
“But now you think maybe you might want it? For yourself?”
She studied him openly, her gaze skimming from his eyes to his throat, down his torso, and back up his gorgeous arms. Her logical brain didn’t have a ready answer to that question, but her body chimed in. “Yes, I think I just might.”
Mike’s head was so flooded with conflicting chemicals, he feared he might actually pass out.
Adrenaline, as his possessive instincts begged him to cross the floor and staple the guy’s throat to the wall with his hand. It blended with some secretion from his kink gland to create the most violent, maddening testosterone, the stuff snaking like lava through his veins, sending blood to his cock and heat to his chest. All the primal male switches inside him were flipped on, all the valves open. Made him want to fight and fuck and scream and come, all at once.
His brain and body were on fire, and it felt fucking phenomenal.
He sipped his beer, breathing deeply, trying to get used to the scene. It was what he’d been wanting in theory for months, and the pleasure was brutal. The jealousy was different with an actual, real man triggering it, and with his wife allowing the kind of contact he’d only ever fantasized about. Because he’d always trusted her implicitly.
He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t angry at her, standing so close to this other man, smiling and laughing, acting as though she weren’t married. His rational brain reminded his primitive one that she was doing this for him, and after ten minutes or more, the truth of it solidified and he felt the aggression disperse, eaten up by the excitement.
The reality of this situation turned him on more than he’d even hoped it might, and that frightened him.
It was his kink, not Sam’s, so if he felt this conflicted, how must this feel to her?
She didn’t look conflicted. If her piqued reception to that man’s flirting was merely an act, she’d sweep the Oscars.
Jealousy stirred his cock, to see her looking at another man that way. Those wry smiles had been his for the past five years, only his. That lip bite. That focused attention. The instincts kept flip-flopping in his head, but one thing wa
s constant – the pounding erection between his thighs.
The guy was perfect. Tall, handsome, easygoing. His hair was dark, his face unshaven. Anything that created a contrast between him and Mike was a plus. Though the sentiment caught like a splinter in his heart, Mike hoped the attraction Sam was exhibiting was a hundred percent real.
But Jesus, he was in over his head, treading water to keep from drowning in all these feelings. Jealousy, rage, fear.
But no, don’t focus on the bad stuff. Surrender to the physical sensations, and never mind labeling them. She was doing all this for him, and it’d be a waste to everyone involved if he held himself back from enjoying it.
So when the waitress came around, Mike ordered a whiskey on the rocks and settled into the warmth it opened in him, settled into the buzz of the bar. Settled into the fire pumping through his veins at the sight of his wife laughing at another man’s joke, the casual touch of familiar fingers on a stranger’s arm.
I want to kill that cocksucker, Mike thought.
But I want to watch him fuck Sam about ten times worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
S
amira couldn’t say which was more drunk-making – the wine or Bern.
Or the fact that Mike hadn’t given her the signal, implying that he must be cool with what was happening.
Sam was cool with it. Hell, she was hot from it.
She hadn’t expected that. She’d come here hoping for a signal that she could do this, for Mike, expecting the pleasure she might take from the experiment would come mainly from blowing his mind. Before finding herself at this moment, she’d been hoping to maybe feel intrigued by Bern, or at least receptive to the idea of sleeping with him. She’d been hoping for a lack of misgiving. Never had she thought she’d get this turned on. Yet here she was, a little weak and a little warm from this new man.
They were still standing by the wall, and no one was near enough to overhear what they said. Still Bern leaned close, speaking in private tones that made even mundane facts sound like seduction. He told her about his dog; his work-in-progress Colonial in Carrick that he was fixing up; how he liked to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity a couple of times a year, wiring new and repurposed homes for low-income families. Between that hushed, deep voice, that sweet-dirty accent, and those penetrating eyes, the words streamed into Sam’s ears and her overheated brain translated them through the filter of his body language.
I can’t wait to fuck you.
You won’t believe how thick my cock is.
I’m gonna make you scream my name in your husband’s bed.
“But it could be worse,” he was saying, and Sam had completely lost the thread of the conversation. Her gaze had dropped to his arm, flexed from holding his beer. This must be the inverted version of the hazard men ran into all the time, trying to speak to women with deep cleavage.
She nodded, hauling her attention a couple of feet higher, to his face.
He laughed. “I’m totally boring you, aren’t I?”
“No, no. Sorry.”
“Tired?”
She smiled. “I was thinking about sex, actually. Wine does that to me.” So do tall strangers with pleasantly shaped shoulders, it would seem.
Was that a blush behind his stubble? “Well.”
She sipped her drink, trying to hide her persistent smile.
“Does that mean I stand a chance?” he asked.
The question had her standing up straighter, the knowledge that he must be as into this as she was flooding her equally with pride and nerves. “I wasn’t sure what to expect when I met you. I didn’t know if I’d be a little attracted to you and maybe willing to round it up for the sake of the mission… but even if I’d gotten my hopes way up, you’d have surpassed them.”
His expression brightened. “Really?”
She nodded. “I think you’re very handsome. Even handsomer than the picture you sent. And I spent a lot of time looking at that picture and warning myself not to get my hopes up too high that you’d look like that in person.”
“Well. Good.” He squinted dramatically. “You’re not as out of focus as you’d led me to believe, but you’re still passable.”
She swatted his arm, faking offense. “Wow, thanks.”
His tongue flirted with the corner of his lips just a moment, the heat in his eyes going from warm to downright scorching. “I think you’re incredibly sexy. Way sexier than I’d let myself expect you might be.”
She flushed with relief. “Good. We’re on the same page, then.”
“So you think there’ll be a second date, or whatever this is?”
“That’s entirely up to my husband, but I’d like to.”
Sam took a moment to assess what she was feeling, making sure she was lust-drunk, not plain old wine-drunk. Nope, this high was all Bern. Bern, and Mike’s unseen, watching eyes. She put her hand to his side again, loving the heat of him, the feeling of trim muscle shifting softly under her palm. Again, he laid his own hand over hers, fingers rubbing her knuckles. He tapped her glass with his, a little toast to celebrate that the attraction was mutual, perhaps.
“So if it does happen,” he asked, “it’ll be at your place, right? Or a hotel…?”
“Our place. In our bed.”
“Ah, of course.” She sensed another blush behind that stubble, and if she wasn’t mistaken, his lips were darker, fuller. Her own felt the same. “And when would I actually get introduced to him?” he asked.
“You know, I’m not sure. I’m not actually sure you do, not until he ‘catches’ us. Though if that’s not okay with you, we can figure something out.”
“I think I’m down with whatever you guys have planned. Just curious. Part of me thinks it’s pretty low, getting with some guy’s wife without even shaking his hand… Then another part remembers the whole thing’s sort of fucked, so why worry about the etiquette?”
“He wants realism,” she said. “So the more mysterious and impersonal you stay to him, the better.”
“Sure. You know, for all I know, you’re actually a single woman with a pretty crazy kink of her own.”
Sam laughed. “That’d be a twist, huh? But I assure you my husband’s very real, and very much watching us.”
“Can I ask you some more personal stuff?” Bern leaned in closer as he said it, and Sam suddenly wanted to taste the beer on his lips.
She stroked his side through his shirt, tempted to touch his chest, his belly, but not finding the nerve. “Go right ahead.”
“I’m not real set in my ways, sex-wise. And I know this is like a performance for him, basically. Like live-action, made-to-order, designer pornography.”
She nodded, struck by the aptness of that analogy. “Yes, I’d say that’s exactly what it is.”
“What sort of sex do you think he wants us to have?”
“Well, obscenely hot sex. Sex for an audience.”
“Showmanship?”
She laughed. “That’s a good way to put it. It doesn’t have to be a porno-level performance, completely overdone and corny. But dirty talk, for sure. He’ll want a lot of that. A lot of me talking about how good you are, and how… you know. How big you are, and how much better you are at sex than anyone I’ve ever been with.”
“This is going to be great for my ego.”
“Think you can do that? The talking? Ideally you’d be really smug and kind of a jerk, and make me tell you how much better you are.”
“I bet I could. I’m not inhibited. Not that I’ve ever done it with anybody’s man watching… but yeah. I can be a cocky asshole. Short of actually making you feel, I dunno – demeaned.”
Sam smiled. “A lot of women would feel demeaned by the entire arrangement.”
“But not you?” Worry drew his eyebrows together.
She shook her head. “Like I said, I was the one who offered to make it real. Before now, it’s all been games.”
Concern gave way to curiosity. “Oh? How so?”
“I
go out with a girlfriend after work, come home late, making excuses. That sort of thing. He accuses, I ‘confess.’ ”
“Turbo-charged sex ensues?” Bern supplied.
“Pretty much, and during it I tell him all about the made-up guy. Now, if you become a part of it, he gets to watch it for real, instead of just imagining. So make a big deal of yourself, if that makes sense.”
He smiled, the gesture warm and a touch confounded. “Makes as much sense as anything else about this proposal.”
Neither spoke for a long moment, their gazes flicking across each other’s faces. In that silence, Sam fell into a little trance, awed to realize she might do things with this man. Touch him. Kiss him. Have sex with him and explore the beautiful body promised by his fitted tee. She could imagine so easily having encountered him under innocent circumstances, at this same bar, out with a friend. This tall, handsome man with a low, soft voice and that sinful drawl. He could have offered her a drink, and she’d have told him thanks but no thanks and flashed her wedding ring, and felt all flattery, no regret. And maybe later she’d have remembered him as she walked home, and bitten her lip, indulging in a moment’s guilty pleasure, imagining what he might have been like in bed.
