Maybe he does. He watched me on the deck earlier . . .
She fell into his kisses, one after the other, while he worked her. She tried to keep touching him through his pants, to explore every inch of that hard, throbbing need, but she couldn’t focus enough to keep at it. She abandoned his girth with a piteous wail, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades while he pleasured her. Not once did he slide his fingers into her. His focus was 100 percent on her clit, his pace set by her breathing pattern. What had started as a steady, slow pant and thus steady, slow strokes escalated quickly to frantic puffs of air and equally as frantic frigging. She thought her knees would collapse the higher she climbed, but he was so tall, so solid, and he was pressed so close, that he held her up.
“Come for me, sweetheart. Come for me,” he rasped against her mouth.
Gladly, she thought, but she couldn’t articulate it. She was too far gone—too close to going over. He was staring at her, that beautiful face intent, his eyes pinning her to the spot. He didn’t want her pleasure alone; he wanted her soul, too, and in that moment, with his nimble fingers pummeling her sweet spot, back and forth, back and forth, she was more than willing to give it to him.
The orgasm crashed hard. Her eyes rolled up, her body shook. Wave after wave of pleasure exploded out from her clit to ricochet through her body. She slurped air, hungry for it, lost in a vortex of sensation. Darren crooned her name as she writhed against him. It was one of life’s rare perfect moments, and her head sagged forward, her face pressing to the base of a throat that smelled like deep, spicy cologne. She nuzzled at him as she struggled for equilibrium, the foot she’d looped around the back of his leg easing to the floor and going flat in a futile attempt to stand. She would have collapsed without his body pressed to hers, his slinged arm cradled against her stomach.
“I got you, babe. I got you,” he whispered.
And then he paused.
“Dun dun-na-na-na-na, I got you babe. Dun dun-na-na-na-na, I got you babe.”
Oh, Jesus.
“No. No, stop. Anything but that. You’re horribly off-key,” she managed before dissolving into giggles because her perfect moment had deteriorated into a shitty seventies musical sketch. Darren chuckled into her hair, his hand no longer tangled in her panties but resting atop them, on her ass, and stroking from left cheek to right. She peppered his throat with kisses, and then his shoulder over his T-shirt. He sighed contentedly.
“You have a small—not small, very large—pants problem, I see,” she whispered, going onto tiptoe to nibble on his ear. “Would you like help with that?”
“Nah. I’ve got lumpy mayo.”
What?
She pulled back to eye him. “Excuse me?”
“I said I’ve got lumpy mayo. Trust me, it’s a good thing. This is an appetizer. There’s plenty of time for other stuff later.”
“Like lumpy mayo?” she asked, confused.
“Exactly. Let’s finish our tour.”
She didn’t understand, but she didn’t have to. He gently disengaged, stooped to press a kiss to her forehead, and waited for her to don her discarded skirt and flip-flops before slinging his arm over her shoulders and guiding her back up the stairs.
“There’s a function room, too?” Darren said between mouthfuls of seafood casserole. Tobin liked him; Maddy could tell, because there was a small mountain of food on Darren’s plate, and Tobin expressed his admiration in portions. One time, a particularly gassy New York billionaire had been aboard for reasons Maddy couldn’t recall, and Tobin had given him dinner in a teacup, insisting it was the new French fashion. In reality, it was Tobin’s way of telling the guy to go fuck himself.
Said billionaire was too stupid to complain. He went home hungry that night.
“Mmm. The second deck from the bottom. It’s a ballroom. Fits about three hundred, I think?” Maddy sucked her fork clean and dropped her chin into her palm so she could gaze at her pretty company. The afterglow was still going strong—she was convinced his beautiful face and beautiful dick were gifts from heaven. He smiled back at her, but his attention was elsewhere, mostly on the dining room. She couldn’t blame him for that. It was the architectural gem of the ship, situated as it was on the top deck, the walls all glass so passengers had an unhindered view of the water. On a clear night, the Capulet’s lights looked like silky white ribbons reflecting across the waves. Tonight was no exception—the play of light was suitably impressive for her guest.
The glass and chrome dinner table accommodated twenty, but with only the two of them, they’d taken seats at one end—Maddy at the head, Darren to her left. The chairs were tufted brown leather with comfortable armrests, the rug beneath their feet hand-knotted red, black, and gold and imported from Afghanistan. Twin crystal chandeliers provided the light; a small bar ensured Darren always had a cold beer when he wanted it. At the far end of the room was a grand piano and a half dozen swivel chairs. Sometimes when she had large groups of guests on board, Maddy hired pianists to add atmosphere.
Darren lifted his head from his food to look out at the black water.
“This is beautiful. When do we get to New Orleans?”
“Late afternoon tomorrow. I figured we’d stay at The Seaside—Sol’s place. You’ll have your own room, of course.” He looked surprised, and she smiled at him. “It’s only three hundred and fifty miles between Galveston and New Orleans, dove. I told them to take it easy on the pace. We could have been there in fourteen or fifteen hours, but I figured a full night at sea would be good.”
“That’s fine! Just thought it’d take longer.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No, not at all. I needed a vacation, and so far this one has been pretty perfect in spite of the, you know, gunshot thing.” He waved his slinged hand at her while the other scraped his fork over his plate to gather every last bit of Tobin’s masterpiece. His eyes were all over the place, skipping from the Capulet’s bow to the ocean and then to the piano. He nodded his head at it. “Alex said you played.”
A long time ago.
The warm, fuzzy feelings from the hall didn’t exactly fade, but they were joined by more complicated feelings—of loss and nostalgia and unease. She sipped her wine, a dry yet fruity thing she couldn’t name but probably cost a lot. “I wanted to be a professional pianist once upon a time, yes. Then life happened and here we are.”
Darren wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood from his chair, moseying over to the keys and sliding his big body onto the bench. He lifted the fallboard and exposed the ivory. A not-so-rousing rendition of “Frère Jacques” ensued, with Darren plunking out the notes like a drunken toddler. “I took trumpet a single year before the trumpet went ‘missing.’ I’m pretty sure my mama threw it onto the interstate. I was awful. Music and art are two of my great loves, but I’m terrible at making both of them.”
Maddy eyed him and the piano. There was an expectation there, even if Darren didn’t realize it, and she shifted in her seat, trying to figure out what she wanted to do. The piano had been a joyful thing when her family had been a family—her father would sit and listen to her for hours. She’d give full jazz concerts because that was the music he’d loved. Her love of the greats came from him: Count Basie, Ella, Billie. After his death, the piano had become a reminder of everything she’d lost. It was a ghost of happier days gone by.
It always required a gut check to approach one. If she’d thought for one second Darren was trying to manipulate her with his tinkling, she’d have declined, but he was so guileless—so sweet—she got up to join him, sliding in beside him on the bench and sweeping his fingers aside. Her fingertips touched the cold keys, her foot hovered above the pedals.
“You’re going to play?” he asked, surprised. “I didn’t mean—”
She broke into “My Funny Valentine.”
For you, yes. I’ll play for you.
TWELVE
MADDY WASN’T A good pianist. Maddy was a great pianist.
Darren sat beside her on the bench, watching her long, elegant fingers gliding over the keys, caressing each one like a lover lost. She never missed a beat. She needed no sheet music. She just played and played. Four songs total, all old standards, all beautifully performed. She never said a word. She never smiled.
He worried he’d committed a faux pas venturing to the piano at all, but when she closed her eyes, he could see it was more that she was into the music—feeling it. Her head swayed like she was in a trance. She was a part of the song. The music resonated with her on a level beyond his basic appreciation.
She finished some minutes later and went very still, her chin down, her fingers tented over the keys but not pressing. Her black hair fell past her pretty face and rained over her chest. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t even know if she was upset or not, but he offered comfort and affection regardless, his arm snaking over her shoulders and gently squeezing. His laughing girl was not laughing, but she did relax at his touch and slump into his side.
She’s talented and lovely and I have no idea what to do with her. I just know that I like her.
“I’ve forgotten so much,” she admitted quietly.
“Then I can’t imagine what you were like before. That was incredible.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek. She answered with a few notes of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
“Ooh, dessert,” she said suddenly. The somber was replaced by exuberance as she slipped from his side and bounded across the room to retrieve two stemmed bowls piled high with fluffy purple mousse. At some point during her performance, someone had snuck in to replace their dinner dishes with sweets and a carafe of coffee.
That someone was magical, in Darren’s opinion.
“Blueberry mousse. My favorite.” She returned to the bench, putting one of the bowls on top of the piano. A spoon dipped into the other, gathering a hefty dollop of whipped cream and diving at his lips. He opened just before impact, sparing himself a purple catastrophe to the face.
“You’re feeding me now? Am I so feeble?” he joked around a mouthful of sweet, tart heaven.
She tittered. “Hardly. I just want to do something nice for you. You did something nice for me before dinner, if you recall.”
“Oh, I recall. I don’t ever want to forget it. Would you like something else nice?”
That got her attention; her eyes narrowed and she peered at him from beneath her fringe of heavy lashes. It was a blatant invitation, and his body definitely took notice, and yet somehow, some way, he still managed to do the thing.
The bad thing.
“What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?” he asked. “A flat minor.”
“Dear Christ.” She couldn’t slap her brow, so she brought the bowl of mousse up to it instead, a snort-giggle escaping as she shook her head. “That’s awful.”
“It is,” he admitted. “I should feel bad.”
“You don’t, though, do you?”
“No, not even a little bit. Like, I could pretend, but that’d be disingenuous.”
She stuffed another spoonful of mousse into his maw. “I’m not the only one who’s weird around here, Mr. Dad Joke.” She continued to feed him, until one bowl of mousse was devoured and the second was laid upon the altar of food sacrifice. “You do realize it’s not my fault that I’m weird? That it’s circumstance?”
He leaned back on the bench, wincing when his elbow struck the keys, resulting in an unmelodious squawk. “I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I’m sorry if it came across that way.”
“No, not at all.” She winked at him. “And you’re not wrong to say it. But I am a product of my upbringing is all.”
“How so?”
“Well, for starters we weren’t rich when I was little. We lived in Fresno, where Daddy was a programmer. The job didn’t pay what it does now, scale-wise. He had his breakthrough when I was . . .” She paused, thinking. “Nine? No, ten. The success was overnight. We went from normal people living in a smallish house with a swing set to not-normal people living in a mansion with a butler. I had to change schools, which wasn’t such a big deal, but my parents—they weren’t equipped for the nouveau riche scene. They didn’t think about things like people trying to get at their money. I was walking home from school one day and one of Mom’s lab assistants kidnapped me so he could ransom me back to her.”
“Seriously?” Her story conjured images of some awful bastard using wire cutters to snip off her toes and mail them back to her parents. He even glanced down at her feet to be sure they were intact.
All there. Okay, good.
“Dead serious. But we were lucky. The police found me two hours after I was pinched, but I was afraid of small spaces for a while after that—being in the trunk of a Buick will do that to a kid.”
He frowned. “Good God. You’ve had no luck at all, have you?”
“Not true! Look around you. I’ve had plenty of luck. Just . . . it’s harrowing at times, mmm? Life is. For everyone.” She took her own bite of dessert. “It was a hard lesson for my parents, though. I’m an only child and they were so paranoid someone would steal me they got overprotective. I was sequestered. Private tutors, a full-time security staff. I had no one my own age around, and my parents weren’t exactly social people. Mom’s a science nerd, Daddy was a computer nerd. Lovely people, they just weren’t all that interested in socializing. I didn’t talk to too many outsiders until I went to college, and even then I was dropped off every day with a security detail outside waiting for me when class was over. I lived in a bubble. It was a gilded bubble, but still a bubble.”
“Weren’t you allowed to have friends? Old friends from before you moved?” He ran his fingers over his mouth thoughtfully, his brow creasing. “Play groups or clubs? Anything?”
“It wasn’t like my parents didn’t want me to have friends. It’s just that we’d left Fresno, lived hours away after the move, and I hadn’t been in my new school long enough to connect with anyone before I was withdrawn. I had my parents and the staff. My nanny, my security guards—they were my friends. Richter, Capulet’s keeper? He’s one of my dear ones. When I got Capulet, he came to live with us. I was sixteen. My mother clued in that I might be lonely when I spent ten hours a day playing piano, so she got me a tiger because that’s the normal thing to do, right? And Richter was part of the package. He became a surrogate of sorts when my father died and my mother was institutionalized. He made sure I got good lawyers and a team of competent people around me to protect the family business. He’s a nice man.”
“A nice man who wrestles tigers for a living.”
“We all have our callings.” Maddy grinned at him before inhaling the last bite of mousse, her plush lips closing around the spoon and sucking it dry. Darren idly wondered what other things she could do with her mouth, but then she distracted him by asking, “So what about you? How did you end up so strange?”
Hell. I hate questions like this, but she’s been open with me. Quid pro quo.
“Well, the humor is from my grandfather, like I said, with the Bazooka Joe gum. But I wanted to be funny for my mama.” He motioned vaguely in the air. “My dad took off when I was four and my sister was two. We didn’t have much to start with, so times got hard. Mama worked two jobs to keep us afloat and my grandpa watched us during the day because babysitters were too expensive. My grandma died before I was born, but Gramps was there to help while Mama waitressed at two different diners. She’d come home at night tired and stressed out and all I wanted to do was make her laugh. Like, she looked so sad all the time, but if I saved up my best Bazooka Joe joke for her, she always laughed. I like making people laugh.”
Maddy smiled at him, her hand going to his knee. “You’re great at it. Is your mother all right now? Financially, I mean?” Maddy paused. �
�Indelicate question, I’m sorry. But I’d like to help if I can.”
“Oh! She’s fine. I built her a house two years ago—my team did. As a gift. My business took off and I could do that for her. I was a stripper before that, you know.”
The swerve was so damned obvious. He didn’t like talking about his early years, when they were poor and food wasn’t plentiful and his clothes never fit right. Yeah, he made his mama laugh, but she cried a lot, too, and Gramps drank and it was all depressing shit that he’d put behind him. They were all okay now—Lindy was studying law in Boston, and Mama worked part-time because she liked to get out of the house, and not because she had to. Gramps was soberish and spent a lot of time watching sports on TV while sitting in a comfortable recliner, but that’s not what Maddy had wanted to know.
She’d wanted to know how he got the way he got. The answers weren’t pleasant. Hers hadn’t been, either, but it was a different kind of awful, and not one he liked to revisit.
She was kind enough not to point out his obvious misdirect. She did, however, look like he’d surprised her, her brows lifted so high they nearly touched her hairline. “You were a stripper?”
“Through college. I was good, too. Magic Mike stuff. I’ll have to show you when I have my other arm back. It’d be a little lopsided right now.”
“You’re going to strip for me.”
“Well, you’re going to strip for me, aren’t you?”
He knew she’d be saucy when he flung the comment her way. He counted on it. What he hadn’t counted on was her depositing the second stemmed bowl onto the piano and moving from the bench to stand before him. He was tall enough that even sitting he didn’t have to look too far up to peer into her face. She stepped in close, forcing him to spread to accommodate her. He didn’t mind, nor did he mind when her hands went to his shoulders and kneaded, or when her tits were less than five inches from his face.
The Queen of Dauphine Street Page 9
