Always Box Set

by Ward, Susan

  “You don’t have to do this alone. I can help you.”

  “I don’t need help. Not now. I’ve done what I set out to do, Jack. I’ve found my father and I’m not letting Brian Cray take one more thing from me.”

  “Maybe this time he didn’t take from you. Maybe he gave. You found me.”

  Oh god, I have to get out of here, out of here quickly or I will walk out on my scholarship to USC just to stay here with this man.

  As wonderful as Jack is, it will end the same as all my relationships do; It will end badly with him moving on to the next girl. That’s what always happens.

  Be smart, Linda. For once, be the girl who walks away.

  My legs feel weak and shaky as I step closer to the door and away from him. “I had a wonderful time with you, but I’m going home. We’re over.”

  Jack starts to quietly laugh and he closes the space between us. He takes my face in the cradle of his palms. “Oh no, Linda. We’re not over. I’m a guy who knows when he’s met forever.”

  I stare up at him, my heart in my throat, and I don’t know how to answer that.

  Jack surrounds me with his body, his arms braced on the door, his scent sending my senses into a frenzy as slowly he starts the dangerous decent of his mouth to mine. “One last kiss, Linda. Then tell me you’re going to walk away.”

  Our passion ignites at the first touch of our lips and every part of me is instantly lost in him. My legs and arms lose their strength and I can feel myself in a fast free-fall, losing my power to leave him.

  I twist out of his arms and step back quickly. I feel a stinging burn on my cheeks and realize my tears are flowing from my eyes in fierce currents.

  “I can’t stay, Jack. If I do it means I’ve learned nothing from watching my mother. And I don’t think I can live with that.”

  He brushes away my tears with both his lips and his thumbs. Then, he gives back the space between us.

  “Leaving won’t make a difference about anything. It won’t make you a smarter woman and it won’t make us over. It’ll only make you gone. We are far from over, Linda, and we both know it.”

  I stare at the pretty bright foil Back Street shopping bags and fumble to open the bedroom door. I feel the truth of his words in my core. By the time I reach the front porch, I’m breathing like I’ve just run a marathon and my arms and legs have lost all sensation.

  The driver sprints around the black Town car and opens the door for me. Frantically, I look over my shoulder toward the heavy wooden front door I left open. I’m relieved that Jack didn’t follow. I don’t know if I’d have the will to climb into the car if he did.

  I duck as I settle into the plush leather backseat. I look at the front door one last time. How easy it would be to step back into the house and run down the hall to Jack.

  The slam of the car door makes me jump, and a few moments later my numb senses grow aware we are moving. I stare out the tinted passenger window, my teary eyes blurring and distorting the gorgeous, peaceful view.

  Maybe Jack is right: I don’t know how to let a man be good to me.

  ~~~The End~~~

  One More Kiss

  I never intended to become a famous man’s lover. I know damn well Jack never intended that for me. And somehow that’s what I became. ~ Linda Cray

  One

  1981…

  I step into the hotel room and freeze.

  Jack is sitting in a chair in the far side of the room. The sheer under-drape of the curtains mutes the Southern California sun’s brightness into a warm glow surrounding and caressing him. The sight of him takes my breath away. Golden hair. Piercing blue eyes. Strong and tender lines of face. Erotic mouth, lax now, but quick to smile. Bathed in a golden glow of light. Larger than life. Perfect. Beautiful. Jack.

  In an indiscernible instant, this is reality, the only part of my life to hold the feel of realness, and everything beyond these impersonal four walls is the dream, without feeling, holding no claim on any part of me.

  I stare at Jack. He stares at me. I don’t move. He doesn’t move. OK, what game are we playing this time? I fight to hold back my smile. The bags start to feel heavy in my hands, but I don’t put them down. I just stand and wait and meet his smoky stare. I can see it in his eyes. He’s pleased with himself. He’s thinking something. He wants to be playful Jack today. My heart increases in tempo. Or maybe naughty Jack. I can’t tell. Not yet. Both are fine with me. It’s been too long, six weeks this last time since we’ve been together. Too long. Always too long…

  “Close your eyes,” comes his husky command.

  I can’t fight my smile any longer. I feel it claiming my lips even as I obey his order. I know what these little games of Jack’s are about. He’s so obvious and I love that he thinks I don’t get it. Close my eyes. A trust ritual, or as Jack would call it, claiming payment on one of our bets. God I love our bets. His way of slowly reconnecting us after the long absences. Body, heart, and soul. I feel the muscles in my lower parts clench…I trust you, Jack. I wouldn’t keep coming to you if I didn’t. You are the best man I’ve ever known…

  I feel the air close to me stir. Aha, he’s moved from the chair and is near me. The warmth of his body brushes my senses. Close but not touching, and yet I can feel him all through me.

  More movement. He has eased into me, his cheek close to mine, his lips near my ear. “So how does it feel to be a graduate, Mrs. Robinson?”

  I laugh. God, he’s a corny man at times. “Do you save all your cheesy lines for me?”

  His husky laugh mixes with mine. “I save all my lines for you, cheesy and otherwise.”

  I try to lift a brow, but I can’t with my eyes closed. That was Jack’s way of telling me he’s been a good boy, faithful, while we were apart. He doesn’t need to reassure me. I figured out on our first day together that, as complicated as Jack is, he isn’t and would never be that kind of man. The kind of musicians I’d always been with. Assholes. Users. Man-whores. Nope, Jack is a square in a world of round man-whores. He just doesn’t know he’s a square. It’s part of what I love about this man. He’s very not cool and doesn’t know it, enough so that it makes him extremely cool and sexy.

  He makes a light nip on my ear, then moves away.

  “What’s in the bags?”

  My smile grows larger. “Something for your pleasure.”

  He takes the bags from my hands. I hear paper rustling. “Oh, definitely pleasure,” he whispers. More rustling sound. “You made me a sandwich. You packed me a lunch.”

  He says it as if it’s somewhat remarkable. I laugh and I try to arrange my features into something indignant. “That’s not the bag I’m talking about, and don’t eat that. I didn’t pack lunch. I packed us a picnic.”

  “Ah. A woman after my own heart.” A light kiss touches my cheek. “Where are we having our picnic?”

  I bite my lower lip. “How does here on the carpet sound.”

  “Getting better and better. I’ve missed you, baby.”

  I feel him move in the room, stopping when he’s behind me. His fingers go to the zipper of my dress. His other hand eases slowly over my shoulder, his long fingers resting on my collar bone. His face is close to my neck. His steady breaths tease my flesh. My head tilts to one side and then back after the zipper is lowered.

  I breathe in his scent. “I’ve missed you, too.” He moves forward into me and I move back until my head rests on his chest.

  Into my ear, he whispers, “Don’t open your eyes.”

  He starts to ease my black sundress down my arms, over my hands, then with a tug across my hips to the floor. His warm fingers close around my ankle. A gentle lift. Then the other leg and a swoosh, and I laugh. Did he throw the dress? Oh shit, Jeanette will have a fit if its ruined when I return it.

  “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” I playfully accuse.

  “Oh definitely.” He starts to gently guide me forward. “I love our bets, Linda.” />
  Our bets… I start to tingle in my lower parts. I don’t know how the bets started. They just did. I try to keep from my mind how it felt that night I saw Jack on TV sitting courtside at a Lakers game, realizing he’d been in LA and hadn’t called me. Of course, our relationship is such that we both live freely, a no-strings-attached unspoken understanding, but still it had hurt. He’d had a free night. He’d been in LA. He hadn’t called me.

  My flippant remark about the game, somehow, has evolved into us betting on sports and now it is a silly part of our encounters. The bets. The payments: dares and sex acts. Oh, the payments….The tingling grows stronger.

  “It’s a good thing I don’t know anything about sports or you’d be in big trouble,” I say laughingly, as he eases me atop the bed and then turns me face up.

  He kisses my navel. “I love it when you win.” His lips trail downward to my pelvis. “And I definitely love it when I win. When I win, I win. And when I lose, I win. My kind of bet.”

  “You have the advantage in everything. Always.” His teeth close lightly on my thigh. I suck my breath in. “I want to open my eyes.”

  His mouth closes over mine. His tongue is in my mouth, teasing and possessing me, his challenge intrinsic in his kiss. I revel in the feel of his body close to me. Even after eight months, it’s still mind-blowing that he wants me. This amazing man wants me. And the passion. It just keeps getting hotter between us; it’s not cooling with time. It’s burning right now with the delicious things knowing he wants me does to my body. He stops kissing me and eases back.

  “Are you going to pay the bet?” he breathes.

  I nod, my eyes tightly shut and my heart bouncing within my breasts. My blood is thundering through my body and Jack hasn’t even started.

  He takes one of my hands in his and uncurls my fingers to press a kiss on the palm. His lips tender against my flesh move up my arm and I hear the squeak of the bed as he adjusts his body with the trek of his mouth. I’m a tight coil of sexual urgency and he’s chosen leisurely seduction, a sweetly gentle awakening of the senses. Too late. My senses are fully awake and my body is screaming for him to be inside of me.

  As if he can read my thoughts, he slips his fingers beneath the lace of my panties and starts to tease me with a long index finger, at the entry to my sex, a feather-light and expert flutter across my nerves there. His mouth closes over a breast and his tongue lightly flicks at my nipple.

  My hips do a slight lift and tilt toward him, and his mouth lifts from its light play on my breast to press against my mound, pushing me flush atop the bed again.

  “Keep still,” he orders and I can feel the silent vibration of laughter within him as his lips, unhurried, glide back upward across my stomach to the underside of my breasts.

  Without warning, he flips me over on the bed, onto my stomach. I tense, though I’m still excited, and can feel myself pulsing stronger and growing more wet there. There are some things I don’t do. Some things even I haven’t done with a man. Some things I won’t do even with Jack.

  His fingers run down my spine, my flesh quivering beneath the light touch of his calloused tips, and then they make a seductive circle at the base and lightly tease around my entry there. Oh crap. He kisses me there, his tongue making little pushes in and around, heating the lace of my panties, and though I’m starting to panic just a touch, my lower lips clench even tighter. He kisses my back cheeks. Then moves there again to trail down to the underside of my thighs.

  He does another tantalizing kiss at my entry there. I gasp.

  “You are so beautiful,” he whispers from behind me. “But always too eager.”

  His fingers slip into my panties to stroke me where I pulse and it feels like I’m about to climax.

  “I want to touch you. Kiss you. Taste you everywhere,” he breathes.

  He gently inserts a finger, teasing the melting flesh inside me as his kisses work with the circle of his tongue at my other entry.

  He brings me to the brink and then pulls back, over and over again. The entire surface of my flesh is feverish with heat, and I am helpless, lying helpless, in the burn of being touched by Jack. I don’t care what he does. I just want him in me now. I want this delicious torment over now.

  “For god’s sake, Jack, hurry.”

  He laughs. “This is my bet. I get to do with you what I want.”

  My body starts to quiver more strongly. He withdraws his hand and mouth and moves off the bed. I listen… he’s undressing. The sound of his clothes being dropped on the floor. Then, my panties are carefully eased off me.

  “How do you want me to make love to you?”

  “I don’t care. Just do it,” I beseech.

  “Anything I want?” His voice is husky and salaciously suggestive. I lift my cheek from the pillow and start to turn my head to see what’s taking him so long. He stops me. “No. Lie still. Keep those gorgeous eyes closed.”

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Staring at you. Touching myself.”

  Fuck. How is it possible for that to get me so hot? My sexual want has just turned into a fierce ball of sexual need.

  “If that’s true, you’re a cruel man. Touch me.”

  He laughs. I can feel him staring down at me as his hand runs up the length of my back, measuring my need. He grabs me suddenly and turns me over. It takes me by surprise, his mouth closing over mine as he plunges into me. I cry out, the suddenness of our joining, his filling me so completely without warning. His heated assault makes me come instantly. I am screaming and shuddering, my nails digging into his flesh, holding on as his body pounds on and on inside me.

  Panting and struggling to catch my breath, my flesh slowly uncoils, relaxes into him, his kisses and the moves of his cock in me, gentle, in an agonizing, expert tempo of thrusts, kisses and touches. Tenderly, he consumes me, moving toward his own orgasm. Whispering raspy love words in my ear, his hands stroke my flesh in a manner so glorious my insides begin to shudder again.

  “I love you,” he whispers. A quiet thrust. A gentle kiss on my neck.

  He lifts up my backside, molding me into him, moving himself deeper within me without ever altering the slow and tender moves of his flesh. He turns us until I’m riding him. His hand lifts to my cheek.

  “Open your eyes,” he whispers, his hand on my hips, his body still guiding mine.

  The sight of his face beneath me makes everything come alive within me. The look in his eyes. His expression of loving pleasure. Knowing that both exist there only for me. Oh god, the way he looks at me…I am consumed by my want for him.

  His thumb traces the line of my cheek and my lips. He stills. His hands gently take hold of my face. His glowing eyes are wide with arousal.

  “I want no one else. I never will. I wish you’d start believing that.”

  In that moment, I wish I could believe, and reach out and grab all the things I see in his eyes and face, and feel in his body. Before I can speak, his kiss traps my words inside of me and he is moving inside me in a building tempo. I rage again, meeting his rising want, and I come apart a second time as he lets go inside me. He continues to thrust, kissing me, his hands moving in comforting patterns on my back.

  Our breathing slowly calms. I lift my chin and stare at him. “Why did you have me close my eyes? I thought you were going to do something wicked to me.”

  Jack smiles. His beautiful blue gaze brightens. “I opted for loving. Are you disappointed?”

  I shake my head. How could he even ask that? I lightly kiss him on the lips and curl back onto his chest, wondering how I could have ever been so lucky for Jack to have enter my life and wanting never to let him go.

  Two

  A phone ringing penetrates my scattered senses. I must have fallen asleep. My body is curled atop Jack’s and I lift my face to look at him. He doesn’t stir. I stare at the phone. Nope, not answering it. We don’t have that kind of relationship. I doubt anyone in Jack’s lif
e even knows I exist.

  Thinking of that dims a touch of the magic of being here with him, and sets me a little back into reality again and away from the delusional haze of his love words to me. Everything he says, he means. Jack never says a word he doesn’t mean. The problem is they are not always realistic. I’d be a foolish girl to make more of what he says to me than I should. Oh, he means them when he says those loving things to me, but even a guy as wonderful as Jack will eventually realize it might not be a smart move to bring someone like me into his world, where his daughter exists.

  I am an ex-groupie from the wrong side of the tracks who has fucked more than her share of men, in vile and sometimes humiliating circumstances. I have a reputation, one I used to be proud of, one that made me on the A-list in the LA music scene, but now I wish I could run quickly away from it. Jack has a reputation too, though more of a flaxen glow kind rather than a punch-line of a joke told in a men’s locker-room. Jackson Parker is a beloved American icon. The entire world loves Jack; a living, breathing, and much adored music legend. Nope, Linda Cray from Reseda doesn’t fit long-term in that picture in any way.

  I kiss him and his eyes open. He makes a lazy stretch, raking one hand through his tussled, golden waves, drops a light kiss on my lips and reaches for the phone.

  “Talk to me,” he mumbles and then yawns.

  I try to pull away from him on the bed. His arm behind me curls me into him, easing me back onto his chest. The voice on the other end gets loud enough I can hear it. A thick, gravelly Irish accent. “…where the fuck are you? You better not be in Santa Barbara surfing. You missed the fucking sound check, asshole.”

  Jack laughs, his muscles shimmying beneath me. “Christ, you’re worse than having a wife, Liam.”

  My eyes round. Liam Ferguson is Jack’s oldest friend and bass player. So, Jack blew off sound check before tonight’s concert to be with me.

  Jack looks over top of me to the beside clock. “Crap, it’s seven. I’m in LA. Don’t know where. A car was supposed to pick me up. I’ll be there on time. I don’t know. Somewhere in the downtown area. I’m just where they dropped me.”