Sex & Sensibility

by Shannon Hollis

  Don’t listen to her. He focused on the middle of Jay’s forehead and sent a silent command. Mandy should go. Mandy. Mandy.

  “All right. Griffin and Tessa,” Jay finally said, and Griffin felt his gut sink. “But I want to be updated the minute you see her.”

  “Sure.”

  Shit.

  18

  “SO, WHERE’S THE BEACH HOUSE?” Tessa tossed her purse onto the seat and climbed into the truck. She’d barely restrained herself from doing the happy dance in Jay’s office when he’d agreed with her about who was going on this little jaunt. A couple of hours alone with Griffin should turn him around; after all, a guy could only run for so long before he came back to where he started.

  “At the beach.” He wheeled the truck out onto the highway with a little more weight on the accelerator than was strictly necessary, given the lack of traffic.

  Okay. So he was going to do this the hard way.

  “At the low-rent end, where the canneries are, or at the high-rent end, where you can buy a mailbox and maybe a shrub for half a million?”

  “What do you think?”

  Tessa had always thought sex was supposed to make you happy and relaxed. Maybe someone should tell that to Mr. Grumpy, here. Or maybe he was still feeling embarrassed for having overlooked an obvious love nest while he was chasing around after bouncers, hairdressers and executives’ houses.

  “Well, that depends.” She kept her tone light and oblivious. “If the house was in the prenup and Mandy owned it before she married Jay, then I would say it would be in the middle, maybe with a view of the cannery end but not actually there. If they bought it after the wedding, then of course it would be at the other end. Possibly with a couple of acres and maybe a yacht parked at the bottom of the garden.”

  “Yachts are moored. And she owned it before she met him.”

  “Aha. Why doesn’t she have it rented? How come it’s standing empty, waiting for teenaged girls to use it for a love nest?”

  Griffin slanted a glance at her, then returned his gaze to the highway. “Do the Singletons strike you as the type to need the rental income?”

  “They strike me as the type to leave no method of making money unturned.”

  He huffed a short breath that Tessa assumed was the hardboiled guy’s way of indicating laughter. Geesh. She’d thought they were so past this. She wanted back the guy who fantasized about what her breasts looked like.

  Hmm.

  She’d changed out of her purple concert T-shirt before they left and, obeying orders, had pulled on Christina’s blue sweater. But, with a shameless ulterior motive, she’d replaced the T-shirt with a bra that was nearly sheer and a sleeveless gauze top that not only turned transparent in the right light, but fastened with three strategically placed bows down the front instead of buttons. It made her look like a bad girl in virgin’s clothing. She’d caught a client once leaning sideways, trying to see skin between the bows. Maybe it would have the same effect on Griffin.

  She pulled the sweater off over her head and straightened her spine. A girl had to be aware of good posture at all times. Plus it really made the bows pop.

  “We should talk about what we’ll say to Chris—” Griffin glanced at her and stopped, his mouth hanging open on the forgotten word.

  “Look out!” Tessa grabbed the wheel. The truck swerved toward the shoulder, Griffin grabbed it back and they sailed the other way, into the fast lane. He swore and corrected, settling into the middle of the right lane once more.

  The corners of Tessa’s lips twitched. Tessa one. Griffin zero. “You were saying?” she asked sweetly.

  His struggle to get the defensive shields back up was practically visible. “I was saying that we need to figure out how we’re going to convince Christina to come home.”

  “I don’t think we should.”

  He stared at her, then jerked his gaze back to the road as if it wasn’t safe to look at her. Which, at the moment, it probably wasn’t.

  “What are you talking about? That’s what we’re being paid for.”

  She turned toward him in the seat, offering him a frontal view of the bows, and bit her lip, trying not to smile when he kept his gaze resolutely on the highway ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate his desire to avoid a traffic accident. She just hoped his peripheral vision was good.

  “She’s eighteen, Griffin. She’s making choices on her own. Maybe not the greatest ones, but she’s in love. Her brain is malfunctioning.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  She hadn’t meant it seriously, but it seemed he was determined to consider any form of attraction a malfunction. Her task today was clear.

  “I think we should just let her know that Jay and Mandy are deeply concerned and would appreciate a phone call. If she’s in no physical danger, we should leave it at that. Strong-arm tactics are just going to alienate her and dump us in her dad’s camp, if we’re not there already.”

  “I disagree. Jay sent me up here to bring her home, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Are you going to bind and gag the poor girl?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “Ooh,” she said, her tone soft and teasing. “How exciting. Do you carry cuffs?”

  Another glare flashed across the width of the cab like lightning. “I’m being serious. Stop turning everything into a joke.”

  “I don’t consider cuffs a joke. Not at all.”

  “Stop it. We agreed. This is inappropriate.”

  They turned off the highway and took the avenue to the beach, which was shaded by tall palms that leaned over the road. All very picturesque, but she’d bet the town council worried about their tendency to send heavy fronds crashing down on unwary passersby.

  “You might have agreed, but I didn’t. Besides, how could it be inappropriate after last night?” she asked.

  “Last night is not going to happen again.”

  En garde. Don’t be too sure about that. “That would be a shame. I haven’t had an orgasm like that in months. Somehow it’s just not the same by myself.”

  His eyes widened a little at what she suspected he was seeing in his mind’s eye. She bit her lip so she wouldn’t grin.

  “Okay,” he said at last, “I have to admit, I haven’t, either. But that doesn’t make it right.”

  The King of Swords was good. Parry and riposte.

  “It felt right,” she suggested.

  “Fortunately I don’t base my definition of right on how it feels.”

  “Why not? When it comes to sex, it’s a pretty good indicator.”

  “Not for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But he flipped on his turn signal and turned onto one of the streets fronting the beach. “Here we are.”

  It was impossible to spar with someone who put up his sword and refused to play. But that was okay. She had all day for round two.

  Mandy’s beach house was not the ramshackle place that Tessa had imagined. A riot of dry-climate plants and shrubs crowded the path that led around to the front, facing the beach, and a couple of bushy dwarf cedars sheltered the door. The house was sided in scented redwood that had aged gracefully to silver by the action of wind and spray, and its trim was painted white. Above her, a dozen windows precisely shaped to form a huge trapezoid of light faced the ocean and made the view part of the living space.

  Tessa couldn’t even imagine the kind of rent a place like this would bring. Five grand a month?

  The door was painted white, too. Griffin lifted a brass knocker shaped like an arched fish tail and let it fall a couple of times.

  “No one’s there,” Tessa said. The place was empty, with none of the usual waves and currents of life that she could sense when there were people about.

  “We’ll wait a second. The bedrooms are in the back.”

  “There’s no point. No one is here. Did you bring a key?”

  But of course he had to go into cop mode and wait for the evidence o
f continuing silence to tell him there was no one home. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He pulled a key out of his pocket and let them both in, then tapped a number into the pad set on the wall inside the door to disable the alarm.

  And there they were in the living room of her vision, complete with rubber plant and striped cushions on the couch in front of the window. A frieze of Greek keys had been painted on the walls just below the ceiling. She’d missed that in her vision, she supposed. She wandered into the kitchen, expecting to find coffee grounds in the coffeemaker, spoons in the sink, maybe a wadded-up paper napkin or two, but there was nothing.

  She wasn’t much of a cook, but even she could tell that Mandy had poured a whole bunch of money into this custom kitchen. The sinks were color-coordinated with the granite counters, and a huge copper oven hood covered the cooktop. Implements and a string of what Tessa hoped was fake garlic hung from a rack suspended from the ceiling. The place was so clean it practically squeaked.

  Either the runaways were excellent housekeepers or her vision of them in the room behind her had been of a time other than last night.

  She hoped she was wrong.

  She followed Griffin down the hallway with its cool floors—maple, not washed pine—to the bedrooms. Man, what she wouldn’t give to live in a place like this. Mandy had fabulous taste. The bedrooms were like something out of a Greek idyll, all blue and white with warm touches of peach and yellow in pillows and chairs. Two smaller bedrooms contained queen-size beds and pine dressers, and the friezes painted on the walls were of shells and seaweed. Then Griffin stopped in the doorway of the master bedroom.

  A mermaid flipped her tail at them from a huge mural painted on the wall behind the bed. Fish and kelp surrounded her in a joyous circle, and shells and starfish formed a garland at the bottom.

  “Wow,” Tessa said. “Who did that?”

  “Mandy. There’s one similar in her and Jay’s bedroom. Some Greek goddess whose name I forget.”

  “Aphrodite?” Tessa guessed aloud. “Think Jay gets the hint?”

  “He won’t let her paint anywhere else, but I think she’s getting ready to do something in the kitchen. He never goes in there, and she’s been staring at the walls a lot lately.”

  Tessa had a feeling that Mandy would find a lot in common with Gaia Tillman, her footloose artist mother. And Jay was obviously pulling his control tactics again, the big philistine. Mandy should be able to paint wherever she pleased.

  Of course, the mural over the bed brought one’s attention to the bed, with its vast expanse of warm yellow coverlet on which squares of sunlight fell through the mosaic of shaped windows.

  Griffin’s attention fell on it at the same time.

  Round two, she thought gleefully. Let the games begin.

  Pretending to be searching for clues or whatever detectives did, she moved into the bedroom and made a show of looking into the empty walk-in closet.

  “It doesn’t look as if anyone has been here in a while,” she said helpfully.

  “I’m going to check around downstairs,” Griffin said, and took a step back, away from the door.

  “Oh, wait, what’s this?” Deliberately, she moved into the path of the sunlight in front of the windows and gave him her body’s profile under the pretext of checking the empty wastebasket.

  He stepped back into the bedroom, looking mesmerized.

  “Nope, nothing in the trash.” She extended her arms over her head and stretched luxuriously. “Ooh, that sun feels so good.” The bow that held her blouse together at nipple level popped erect as she put tension on the fabric.

  Tessa let her arms fall. A huge pine table stood under the windows, piled with books, pillows, and a vase of sea grasses. She turned her back to him, both hands flat on the table, and lifted her face to the sun. She could feel an answering heat in the gaze that tracked down her body. When it reached her backside in its short denim skirt, she heard him suck in a breath.

  Tessa two, Griffin zero.

  SHE WAS DOING THIS on purpose—standing in the sun like some fertility goddess, wearing transparent clothes, looking so touchable and sexy it was guaranteed to drive any man totally insane. Her body was like a magnet, calling out to his and making promises he knew she would take pleasure in keeping. He’d managed to fight her for half a day, but there was only so much provocation a man could take.

  He didn’t care that they were in someone else’s private home. He didn’t care that Christina wasn’t here. All his brain had room for was the way Tessa leaned on that table with her face raised to the sun, her back arched and her derriere tilted up, her whole body an invitation.

  He moved up behind her and bracketed her waist with his hands. His steps had been quiet on the patterned throw rug, but she didn’t even jump. She’d been waiting for him to make a move. This should have annoyed the hell out of him, and if he weren’t in such a state of sexual deprivation and sensual disarray, he might have been. But right now all he heard was that irresistible question posed by her body.

  The one he needed to answer as soon as possible.

  “What are you doing to me?” The words seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, not from his brain.

  “What you want me to do,” she murmured. “Touch me. I want your hands on me.”

  The fragile fabric under his hands was warm from her skin. He moved his feet a little and snugged her bottom against him so that he could look over her shoulder and drop a kiss just below her ear. Hot blood spilled into his erection as he pressed it against the back of her little skirt, and his jeans tightened as the bulge behind them grew.

  “Where do you want my hands?” he whispered. He knew where he wanted them. Right on the twin shadows he could see through the gauzy material. The neckline plunged to a bow that tied between her breasts. He’d wanted to undo it ever since she’d taken off her sweater in the truck.

  “Here.” She took both his hands in hers and cupped them over her breasts so that her nipples poked at his palms through two layers of fabric. He bit back a groan that was half gratitude and half delirium. “I know what you like.”

  White Indian gauze crumpled under his fingers as he lifted and fondled her flesh, brushing his thumbs over her nipples just so he could feel how hard they had become. As he did so, his hips seemed to move of their own volition, grinding his hardness against her soft, peachy bottom.

  “I have to do this.” With infinite slowness, he pulled one of the ties that held her top together, and the bow released. The other two followed more quickly, and he palmed her breasts again. “This isn’t much of a bra,” he noted. It was about as sheer as a garment could get. “Your nipples show through your top.”

  Her chuckle was full of carnal knowledge. “Gosh, I’m so embarrassed.”

  “You should be.” He undid the front clasp and her bra sprang apart. “It plays hell with my concentration.”

  “Depends what you’re concentrating on.” She turned her head to nuzzle the side of his neck.

  “You,” he managed, and filled his hands with her breasts. “God, you drive me nuts.” She was firm and round and heavy and soft at the same time. His hands had never felt anything so good.

  “Up on the table.”

  He turned her around and she hopped up to sit on the worktable, which was built a little higher than normal and had thick turned legs for stability. “Perfect.”

  She drove her fingers through his hair as he cupped a breast in one hand and settled his mouth on her nipple. When he ran his tongue around the circumference of the areola, she squirmed. “I like that.”

  He did, too. He pleasured the other breast, enjoying both the textures of areola and skin under his tongue and the whimpers of desire he could elicit from her throat with a nibble or tug.

  When she reached out and ran her fingers down the bulging ache that was his cock, he jerked and groaned. “If you do that, I’ll come.”

  She ignored him, as he knew she would, and traced his length through his jeans, her
fingers confident and trailing helpless pleasure in their wake. His knees were going weak. He leaned both hands on the edge of the table on either side of her and took her mouth in a punishing kiss.

  She met him with equal force, her tongue promising pleasures that her fingers only hinted at, sliding up and down his with suggestive sensuality.

  He broke the kiss, breathing hard. Her thighs gripped his hips and she undid the top button of his jeans. He lowered his mouth and kissed her more gently, running his tongue along her lower lip as she slid the zipper down its track and plunged her hand inside his jeans to cup him through his shorts.

  “Take these off,” she whispered.

  He toed off his boots, and yanked down his jeans and shorts together. His erection strained toward her as she did some kind of shimmy with her shoulders that shrugged off top and bra, and made her breasts jiggle in a way that was completely feminine and the most erotic thing he could remember seeing in a long time.

  As she tossed her little skirt and panties aside, he saw with a jolt that she had been wearing a thong. A red one. He could have run his hands up under her skirt at any time today and felt nothing but smooth apricot skin. But no, he’d been too busy trying to ward her off, trying not to notice what she clearly wanted him to notice. Had he been insane?

  He could spend his whole life watching her wriggle out of her clothes. Griffin lost all track of resolution and time, and when she kissed him again, he simply offered her his mouth in total bliss.

  19

  TESSA HAD NOT KNOWN there could be pleasure like this, or a man so skilled in the secrets of a woman’s body. His ex-wife, whatever her name was, had to have been crazy for leaving him. And thank God it hadn’t been her fate to hook up with anyone until now, though she’d often been puzzled as to why the cards had always told her to wait.

  Now she knew.