“So,” she asked, her gray eyes twinkling with mischief. “How are we going to get in?”
“Don’t you have a key? Aren’t you like a trustee or something?”
“Oh, come on,” she cajoled. “What’s the fun in going in the proper way? Besides—” she held her hands out wide “—I don’t exactly have excessive room for keys and pass codes.”
“It’s alarmed now?”
Her smile told him she meant for this to be a challenge.
He could only imagine his uncle’s lined face if he got a call now, ten years after graduation, explaining how his nephew once again needed to be bailed out of trouble. Judging by her lack of fear, though, he suspected she was more than up to the task of talking them out of an arrest should they get caught.
He grabbed her hand. “This way.”
Rip jogged down the stairs and scanned the brick wall, both surprised and pleased that the school hadn’t changed the light fixtures since graduation. They were still old and rusted, still hinged in a way that made them excellent for hiding things. He counted two over from the center, then unscrewed the base and retrieved the spiny skeleton key.
“Why am I not surprised that you know where Mr. Foster hid that?” she asked.
“This school didn’t have many secrets from me,” he replied.
“Least of all secret passageways where you could lure your willing, female classmates.”
He tugged her behind the row of thick yew bushes that blocked the entrance to the storage space tucked beneath the porch. “This place was too grimy for chicks, though I did duck in here to read my most subversive materials.”
The key worked. He opened the door and waited for a beep, screech or wail that would mean they’d been busted, but Erica boldly brushed by him.
“It’s not wired,” she said. “I had to come down here last week to retrieve our old class banner for the party tonight. I just wanted to see if you’d lost your nerve.”
He jogged back outside to replace the key, then came back in and locked the door. “You’re full of surprises, Erica Holt.”
From underneath the single bulb light fixture, she gave him a saucy wink. “So are you. But you’re right. This place is too grimy for a rendezvous. And here I had all these fantasies about where you’d go when you didn’t show up for class.”
He tried not to let her confession boost his ego. He had been popular with his female classmates, but only because he put a little more effort than his male counterparts into making sure he wasn’t the only one getting a thrill out of a make-out session.
He leaned his shoulder against a rusted metal shelving unit and shoved it aside. A bucket filled with musty rags toppled off and the stacks of boxes jostled a layer of dust into the air that made them both cough.
Behind the shelf, a sliver of a window shined down just enough natural light onto an old broken desktop. Man, he’d spent hours down here, hiding from the dean of students and soaking up his real education from sources as diverse as Popular Mechanics and Food & Wine magazine.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but this wasn’t my romantic rendezvous spot. This was my private haven. The headmaster never could figure out where I’d disappear to when I was supposed to be in chemistry.”
“Or how you snuck into the building after hours to change the combinations on the freshmen lockers?”
He turned, ready to insist that he’d never copped to that prank, not even to her, when he watched her disappear behind a stack of crates lined up against the interior wall. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who was privy to the school’s “alternate” entrances. By the time he put the storeroom back in order, she’d pried open the rusty door that led first into the maintenance closet and then into the school.
His eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness and his ears reverberated with the sound of her sexy boots marching without hesitation down the empty hall. The Erica Holt he’d resisted back in high school would never have bent a blade of grass on school grounds without written permission from the headmaster and board of governors. That she was now breaking and entering without a hint of fear fired his imagination to dangerous levels.
He’d never thought he’d see her like this. He never thought he’d want to. When she’d tried to kiss him at the pizza parlor their senior year, he’d called on every ounce of his self-control to resist her. He was a player, but a girl like Erica Holt wasn’t a plaything. She was the kind of girl you brought home to meet your parents—if you had them. He hadn’t wanted to sully her reputation with gossip and whispers and ultimately, heartbreak.
Instead, he limited himself to girls who didn’t care what other people thought about them and who wouldn’t be surprised when he moved on.
If there was one thing everyone knew about Rip, it was that he wasn’t the stick-around type.
Even though he’d changed his life drastically over the past decade, that part of him hadn’t. His relationships never lasted more than a month or two. He steered clear of women who had their sights set on something more.
But Erica wasn’t one of those women—not anymore. She wanted a fling. A well-deserved weekend of fun. Over the past ten years, he’d learned how to resist a lot of temptations—but a good girl gone bad?
He was putty in her hands.
He followed her scent into the gleaming halls of St. Aloysius High School.
The place hadn’t changed. Same polished marble floors. Same soaring high ceilings. Same metal lockers built stylishly into the walls, painted a matte, muted navy, the only sparkle the polished brass numbers and the occasional plate acknowledging an alumni donation. The hairs on the back of his neck spiked. It took a mental shake and a prolonged look at Erica’s sweetly swinging backside to rid himself of the instinct to get the hell out of here while he still could.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” he shouted.
Her laughter echoed though the vacant hallway. “I figured we’d hit all the hot spots.”
“In this joint? We’re not exactly rolling down Rush Street.”
“The party isn’t in the location, it’s in the people. Besides, I don’t think you ever truly appreciated the opportunities St. Aloysius had to offer,” she said once he’d matched her stride.
“You have heard of Stockholm syndrome, right? I know someone you can talk to about that.”
She snorted with a surprising amount of class.
“As if I haven’t already spent thousands on therapy.”
Rip rubbed his hand over his face, trying to hide the expression of shock that had lifted his eyebrows and dropped his jaw. Seeing Erica dressed like a biker chick was one thing—hearing the bitter undertone was something else.
She caught his shocked expression in her sideways glance.
“Oh, come on. You can’t be surprised that a pampered princess like me has been to a psychologist or two.”
“I guess I’d be more surprised if you hadn’t.”
“Because I have so much to be depressed about? Poor little rich girl.”
Rip stopped walking. Half of her tone was self-deprecating, but the other half slid under his skin like a splinter. He prided himself on being a nonjudgmental guy and suddenly, this little excursion with the class Goody Two-shoes turned vixen suddenly didn’t feel so much like a spontaneous lark.
“Maybe this isn’t just about having some fun,” he said.
She laughed, grabbed his hand and tugged him forward. “Aw, don’t worry, Rip. I’m not getting all serious on you. Once we get back to Celebrations, the reunion is going to be nothing but fun and games for you, but for me, it’s going to be all work and no play. Don’t I deserve a little wild time now?”
She sped up, practically skipping as she dashed forward, her hand skimming along an uninterrupted expanse of brick between what used to be the library and the classroom designated for detentions—a room he knew entirely too well.
At his burst of energy, she laughed. The sound flooded the empty hallways, prompting him to catch up to her
and cup his hand over her mouth.
She licked the inside of his palm. He released her.
“You need to quiet down or we’re going to get caught.”
She arched a brow.
He laughed. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
She frowned prettily. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone all upstanding and law-abiding now. That wouldn’t be any fun at all.”
She jumped forward, kissed him on the chin, then dashed farther down the hall. When she reached the south staircase, she grabbed the worn, round finial and swung her hips in a provocative pose that dispersed the tension in his shoulders and pushed it farther down so that the crotch of his jeans suddenly felt very confining.
“Here I am running around a large, deserted space in nothing but a bra and the baddest bad boy in the senior class doesn’t even try to cop a feel.”
Her saucy retort caught him up short. “Maybe I’m not the baddest bad boy anymore.”
She twisted her body so that her sweet ass swung in his direction. “Maybe not, but I’m not interested in being the best little good girl, so come over here and show me exactly what you used to do underneath these stairs.”
So she did know his hot spots. Before he changed his mind, he tugged her into the shadowy spot beneath the stairs where he’d spent a lot of his time between classes—only here, he was rarely alone.
Like the hideout they’d used to sneak into the school, the area was cramped and shadowed, a slanted space with plenty of room for storage and some good, old-fashioned messing around.
Erica flattened herself into the farthest corner and leaned provocatively against her hands. With her arms tucked behind her, her barely contained breasts arched against the cups of her dark, satin bra.
“Did you have sex underneath here?”
“What do you think?”
“No,” she answered matter-of-factly, her gaze assessing him while she chewed on the corner of her bottom lip. “I always suspected some seriously heavy petting, though.”
“You had a very naughty mind.”
Her gaze flared. “A naughty mind was all I could have. Though you know,” she said, locking her hands onto the underside of the step above her. “There’s an echo. Screams of ecstasy should have been heard all the way down the hall if you were doing it right.”
“Maybe I wasn’t doing it right,” he teased.
“If you hadn’t been, girls wouldn’t have spent so much time trying to get you to take them to second base and beyond back here.”
He clucked his tongue in mock disapproval. “I never figured you for the type who listened to gossip.”
“You never figured me for a lot of things,” she corrected.
“My mistake.” He shrugged out of his jacket and joined her against the wall where the rising stairs gave him just enough head room to trap her in the tight space. “I don’t have a lot of regrets about high school. Can’t afford them. But turning you down? I’m suddenly realizing that was a huge error on my part.”
His confession brightened her eyes so that the thunderous gray took on an irresistible silver gleam. “Now you can make it right,” she taunted. “I promise to be quiet.”
Rip slid his hand into the tight space between them and hooked his finger beneath the strap of her bra. He hadn’t come back to Chicago to undo his past mistakes, but now that he was here with a warm and willing woman, he had no means to resist.
“I don’t think so. Now that I’ve got you under this stairwell, I want you to make as much noise as possible.”
4
SHE THOUGHT SHE WOULD lose her mind.
Rip’s lazy trail up from her waist to the underside of her breasts turned his touch into concentrated torture. Finger by finger, inch by inch, he blazed a path over her nerve endings until each fired the neurons in her brain to cry for more, more, more. When he unhooked her bra and touched the lower crescent of her areola, she hissed at the burst of pleasure.
“See,” he said, circling the dark oval with the calloused tip of his thumb. “That’s the kind of sound, back in high school, I would have muffled with a kiss.”
“Then kiss me,” she said, groaning when he added his forefinger to the mix and plucked her nipple tight.
“Oh, no. We’re not kids anymore and no one’s around to catch us. You make all the noise you want.”
With a loud and hungry growl, he grabbed her ass and lifted her so that he could take her freed nipple into his mouth.
Erica did as she was told, growling out a whimper of pleasure that shattered the silence. She hadn’t expected him to go so far so fast—or that she’d melt into him with such complete surrender. She pressed her body hard against the wall and locked her hands behind his neck, grateful he had the power to hold her while the bursts of pleasure stole the strength from her limbs.
“This…isn’t…second…base,” she protested, her breath shallow as pure bliss ping-ponged from nerve pleasure point to pleasure point.
“It is in the big leagues,” he murmured before switching sides and invoking the same incredible sensations on her other breast.
Erica laughed, losing herself in the sensations. Yes, this little corner of St. Aloysius was practically the Wrigley Field of sexual encounters—and Rip was an all-star. And though she’d never done anything so bold or brazen, she wasn’t exactly a little leaguer. He might have caught her off guard, but she was in this to win it.
She grasped his T-shirt, bunching the material in her hands as he increased the pleasurable pain he inflicted on her breasts. When he broke away to kiss a path up her neck, she ripped his shirt off and tossed it to the floor. He unwound the satiny straps of her bra off her body, and then lifted her higher so she could wrap her legs around his waist. Together, they fell back against the wall, their mouths fused while their hands groped and grabbed, pleasured and explored.
“God, you’re hot,” he groaned, his breath steamy against the tendons of her neck.
“Pot, meet kettle,” she replied.
His muscles were rock-hard, his skin smooth except for the hair on his chest that she followed like a trail with her touch, tracing the downward line to where it disappeared in the waistband of his jeans. She unclipped his belt and popped the button, and impatiently ran her hand down his erection through the denim, her body thrumming as her brain made the intimate calculations about his size and level of hardness.
Her sex throbbed and ached. He was perfect. Or he would be, once she got his jeans off.
The sound of his zipper rasped in harmony with the huff and puff of heavy breathing and smack and suckle of hungry, wet kisses. When she wrapped her hand around his sex, his groan merged with her squeal of pleasure.
“Erica,” he begged.
His skin was silky, hot and rock-solid. She ran her hand up and down, loving how each stroke turned his erection to steel even as it loosened the muscles in his shoulders. He set her down and braced his hands on the wall on either side of her to keep himself upright while she gave him her full attention.
“Mmm,” she said, humming her appreciation against his neck. “Now I have you right where I want you.”
“At this point, sweetheart, you can have me wherever you want me.”
Trouble was, she wanted him everywhere. She wanted his hands on her body, his mouth on her nipples and his erection between her legs, sliding into her hot, wet flesh. But this space was too confined, too cramped. Luckily, they had the whole school at their disposal and despite her claims otherwise, she did indeed know of several ways to get into places where they could finish what they’d started.
Maybe the teacher’s lounge?
The library?
“Who’s in here?”
The voice boomed across the empty halls, freezing them both in place.
Shocked, Erica tightened her grip until he grunted. Finger by finger, she released him, trying not to rustle the fabric of his jeans or even breathe too loudly.
“I know I heard something,” the voice muttered.
“Security guard,” he whispered.
Erica squeezed her eyes shut tight. Mr. Abernathy had been working the grounds of St. Aloysius for nearly fifty years, a fact she knew because she was on the alumni committee planning to honor him at the beginning of the next school year. If he caught her here, she’d never be able to look him in the eye, much less present him with an engraved watch in front of the entire student body.
“Oh, God,” she whimpered.
Rip, however, was grinning from ear to ear.
Again, the keys jangled. Again, the boots shuffled over the marble. This time, they heard the punching in of an electronic code. He was either going into the library or the front office, the only two rooms on this floor that were wired for security.
Rip grabbed his jacket. “This is our chance, bad girl. Ready to make a break for it?”
“What?”
He didn’t give her time to think or plan or strategize. He yanked her out of their hiding place then led her as quietly and quickly as possible up to the second floor.
“We’ll never get out this way,” she admonished once she was certain they were out of earshot. At least the second floor had carpeting in the halls, muffling the sound of their shoes.
He stopped long enough to flash a cocky grin. “Are you seriously doubting my knowledge of this building?”
“You haven’t been here for ten years!” she reminded him, her exasperation crisp even if her voice was hushed.
“Nothing changes in this place. Come on.”
To her shock and consternation, he was right. He dragged her to the fire exit and disengaged the alarm with four flicks from his pocketknife. They hurried down the stairs and waited in the musty darkness for Mr. Abernathy to exit the main office before they made a beeline for the library. Once he was inside, they dashed across the hall and left the way they’d come in, though they huddled behind the yew bushes to catch their breaths and make sure they weren’t spotted before dashing across the lawn.
The Guy Most Likely To...: Underneath It AllCan't Get You Out of My HeadA Moment Like This Page 15
