by Saxon, K. E.
It took quite a bit of wrestling with tangled skirts and half-drowned woman, but Sam managed to drag her through the frigid water and up onto the deck. Then, lifting her into his arms, he took her directly to the bathroom. Her lips were the color of raw oysters and she still hadn’t stopped gagging and coughing, although it was less frequent now. As he waited for the shower water to heat, he toweled her off and, unable to undo the fastenings on the drenched gown, took his knife from his back pocket and used it to slit it from breast to waist.
“M-m-m-y—m-m-y—”
“I know, I know. It’s some fabulously famous designer’s rag, right? Well, it was ruined by the sea water anyway.”
He picked her up and walked into the shower with her. When, after a full minute of steam and hot water, she was still quaking and chattering, Sam decided he’d better try rubbing her down as well.
He was merciless, scrubbing his palm over her arms, her legs, her belly, until they were warm to the touch, no matter how loud her squeals of protest grew. Afterward, he angled her around and started on her shoulders and back. It was then that he noticed the tattoo on her bottom. Right where the birth control patch had been before it dropped to the floor of the shower a moment ago.
It was the frogman tattoo. The one he’d tried, and failed, to talk her into getting along with him, after their first diving experience together in Hawaii. And after she’d agreed to become his wife. The one that he’d said would be a symbol of their commitment to each other. Of their love.
“Iz?” he said softly as he ran the pad of his finger over it. “What’s this?”
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Isadora squeezed her eyes shut. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
Isadora shrugged. “Yes.”
Sam melded himself against her and whispered in her ear. “I don’t think so. I think it’s something. Something world-changingly important.” He turned her around to face him and tipped her head back with his knuckle under her chin, forcing her to look him in the eye. “You do love me, don’t you Izzy?”
She shook her head.
He grinned at her. “Yes. You do.”
She blinked away the sudden sting in her eyes. Her larynx felt swollen. She swallowed hard. “So? So what if I do? It doesn’t signify. I can never marry a scuba diving vagabond marine biologist.”
“But Izzy—Iz, I’m doing what I want to do. Living the way I choose. You aren’t. You’re living according to your mother’s dictates.”
“She’s all I have.”
“You have me.”
“I’m all she has.”
“She has Delilah and Chas. She’ll survive.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can.”
“No! I can’t! I’m not brave like you! I can’t just walk away from everything. I can’t.”
Sam fanned his hands over the sides of her face, closed his eyes tight and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Okay. Okay. But give me tonight. One night with you—the real you. No lies, just truth. Hearts wide open. Allow me that much at least.”
“And then we say goodbye? We move on with our lives? No bitterness? No regrets?”
“Yes,” he breathed against her ear.
“Okay then. I’ll stay.”
* * *
Sam rolled Izzy over onto her belly and traced the tattoo with the tip of his tongue. “Okay. I’ll allow you one lie: Tell me you’ll always keep this as a memory of us.”
Izzy giggled but her eyes misted. “I’ll always keep my frogman tattoo as a memory of us.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Sam?”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you write that memoir?”
His eyes tracked up to her face, but his finger wandered into the cleft between her legs.
She sucked in a breath.
“You like that, huh?”
“Oh yes.”
He gave the tattoo a suctioning kiss and then said, “I needed the money to help pay for my research. It’s a pet project of mine that I couldn’t get completely funded through traditional avenues. But it’s important. Or, I believe it will be.”
“Oh.” His finger dipped into her vagina and then slid over her clitoris. “Oh—Ooohh!”
He rolled her onto her back and continued his exploration from that angle as he nipped and sucked the tender skin of her breasts.
As he nuzzled one of her nipples with the end of his nose, he said, “The memoir is going to fly to the best seller lists. Or, at least that’s what my editor says. They gave me a sizeable advance to prove it. The book’s just the kind of titillating fodder that people love to devour.”
Then he devoured her. Bit and tasted her chin and neck, her shoulders and arms, her breasts and belly.
Isadora couldn’t take in a full breath. Suddenly, there were too many barriers between them. She ripped at his towel and his erection sprung into her hand. Hot and alive.
He flung his head back. “Ah! God, Iz!”
“You like that, huh?” she repeated his words of a moment ago.
He fisted his hands in her hair and captured her mouth. Soon his pelvis was rocking to the beat of her loving strokes.
“I want to taste you,” she said between kisses.
“I want to taste you, too.”
“All right.”
“In tandem or simultaneously?”
“Ahh. A true scientist, I see.”
He grinned and kissed her again. “Well?”
She chuckled. “Simultaneously. Definitely.”
“Excellent choice.” Changing position so that his head was on level with her sex, he hoisted one of her bent knees to rest on his neck and shoulder. Then he spread her labia lips and pressed a soft kiss to the center of her.
She was much more impatient, however. She stroked the length of him with her hand from base to top and sucked the pearl of liquid desire from its tip into her mouth.
The muscles of his buttocks flinched, nearly yanking him from her grasp.
He bent his head then and trailed the tip of his tongue around the circumference of her opening, making her tummy tremble.
In answer, she ran her own tongue around the head of his penis, then flicked the line of skin on the bottom side of it.
He jerked.
She did it again.
He groaned.
Then he laved her clitoris until she arched into him and moaned.
She filled her mouth with him and he suckled her clit until her muscles tensed and her thighs quivered.
She wrapped her hands around his erection and sucked on him in the same fashion. He rocked his pelvis, stroking himself between her hands, between her lips, across her tongue.
He sent his middle finger into her and caressed the sweet spot inside of her. Her hips rocked against his mouth. He lifted her knee so that she was spread wide as he suckled her, teased her clitoris with his tongue in ever faster beats. She flung her head back and felt the first tight spasms of release. And then she shattered. “Sam! Oh-oh-ahh!”
When she settled, fell back with her legs limply spread, Sam raised up and reached for a condom out of the drawer of his nightstand.
“Now for the crescendo.”
She laughed, but it came out as a sort of wheeze. “That wasn’t a crescendo?”
“No. More a mezzo-forte. Not near loud enough.”
“Oh, goody.”
It warmed her heart in a way she wasn’t prepared to examine when that got a laugh out of him.
* * *
Sam strained and bucked. He couldn’t get enough of her. They’d started this with her on top, but somewhere after her second orgasm, a primal need to dominate made him roll her to her back and take control. She didn’t seem to mind. Damp strands of glorious red hair clung to her flushed cheeks, swept over the bottom lip of her parted mouth as she moaned and twisted beneath him.
“Do you know how many nights I lay awake that autumn after we met, imagining how you’d look w
ith no clothes on? How you’d feel beneath me? How it would feel to be deep inside you?”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, then stroked her fingers through his hair. “Oh, Sam.”
He bent his head and gave her a hard kiss, then he said, “I love you, Izzy.”
“I love you, too, Sam.”
He lifted her leg over his shoulder and slid further into her.
She cried out.
“Too much?” he said.
“No! God no!”
With short, shallow thrusts he rocked into her, watching the bloom on her cheeks glow ever more brightly, feeling her vagina clasp and unclasp, clasp and unclasp, clasp and unclasp. He began a new rhythm then: three shallow, one deep, three shallow, one deep until her breathing grew labored and she began to whimper.
“Come with me, Izzy.” He felt his scrotum tighten, felt his semen rise. His muscles grew rigid. He shouted.
Grasping hold of her hips, he rammed into her, hard and fast.
“Yes! Oh, God, yes!” she cried.
He felt the walls of her canal spasm around him and in the next instant, he vaulted over the peak as well.
* * *
“I don’t want to close my eyes,” Sam said.
“You don’t want to go to sleep?”
“I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Wait. Isn’t that a song?”
“I’m serious.”
Isadora sighed. “I know. I know you are. I—I don’t want to sleep tonight either. I just want to be with you. In this moment.” She rolled over, turning her back to him. “I’ve been with you only in my dreams for long enough.”
Sam raised up on one elbow and placed his hand on her shoulder. For a long moment, all he could do was absorb the pained expression on her face. “Why Izzy? Why did you ruin it? Sleep with Chas that night? And why did you make damned sure I’d walk in on it?” He forced her to her back. “Why? If you loved me, why?”
She lifted her palm to his cheek and gazed into his eyes. She didn’t say a word.
“Why?” he whispered.
“Because of my mother.”
He gripped her shoulders. “Are you saying your mother made you sleep with Chas?”
“Yes—no, not exactly. She wanted—demanded that I help our family out of its crisis.” She pushed Sam away and sat up. “You remember. My father. The fraudulent investment scheme. The trial.” A heavy pause and then: “The imprisonment.”
Sam took hold of her hand and gave it a squeeze.
She looked at him then. “It was the only way. We were social pariahs. Censured and snubbed.” Her brow crinkled. “Don’t you see? I couldn’t run off and marry just anyone I chose—and certainly not a scuba-diving renegade from his family’s fortune.”
Sam flung the sheet off his hips and swung his feet to the floor. “And yet, nearly eight years later, your big sacrifice has gotten your family exactly nowhere.” He stood up and pulled on his boxers. “I need a drink.”
* * *
Isadora wandered into the living room a few minutes later. Sam was sprawled on the sofa with what looked like a tumbler of whiskey in his hand.
He lifted it up toward her. “Scotch?”
“No—no, thanks.”
He looked into the amber liquid a moment. “Did you know that I had to take two shots of this stuff before I could get up the courage to ask you to marry me that night?”
A knife point of pain went straight through her heart. “No. No, I didn’t.” She looked down at her clasped hands. “Your proposal was one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. You swept me off my feet—made me forget—made me accept when I knew, deep down, I shouldn’t.”
He didn’t respond, just pierced her with his pain-filled glare and took another long pull on his scotch before placing it on the end table.
She sat down in the chair next to him. “We’ve got tonight. All of it. Let’s not waste it with bitterness and regret. Okay?”
He sighed and sat up. “You’re right. We made a bargain and I didn’t keep it, did I?” A huff of a laugh exploded from his throat. “I did say I wanted truth tonight.” He looked her in the eye then. “I guess I just didn’t realize how much more sad—and painful—it would be to hear than the lies you told.”
He stood up. “How about some coffee?”
She smiled. “Sure.” She stood up then, too. “I’ll make it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? I make great coffee.”
“Ha! Hardly.”
“I do! Just watch.” She strode past him into the kitchen, not missing the fact that he was directly on her heels the whole time. What a cynic.
As she scooped the coffee into the filter, Sam came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Let’s stay up all night. Make love. Tell each other our most embarrassing secrets.”
She closed her eyes and leaned into him. “Okay,” she breathed.
“What’s your biggest secret, Iz? The one you’ve never told anyone.”
She felt heat rise to her cheeks, but she’d made a bargain and she intended to keep it. “I—I never had an orgasm before you.”
“I know.”
She tensed and tried to turn in his arms, but he wouldn’t let her. “How did you know? Was that why you—at the gala—about Chas? Oh God. Was it that obvious?”
He nuzzled her neck. “No, not to anyone who isn’t as tuned into you as I am. It was that look of awe you had on your face when I brought you to the edge last night. Here. On the table.”
“Oh.” She pushed the filter tray in and turned on the maker. Change the subject. “So…what’s your big secret, Sam?”
“I lied to you.”
She pulled out of his embrace and faced him. “What do you mean? About what?”
“It’s been longer than two years since I was with someone. A lot longer. More like eight years, two months and”— he glanced at the calendar hanging next to the stove—“four—no, five—days, to be exact.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it. It’s true.”
“Bull. You’re the ‘Harvard Gigolo.’”
The look on his face grew sheepish. “Technically, I wasn’t really a gigolo. Not in the strictest sense. I was a nineteen-year-old guy getting no-strings sex, pretty much as often as I wanted it, from a few older women. Friends of my mother’s who, if truth be told, seduced me. My editor thought up the title. More titillating, so more sales.”
“But—but eight years!”
He shrugged. “After you—well, let’s just say, I decided my energies were better served by work.”
Okay. That hurt. Her eyes grew wide with horror. “What about those condoms? They’d better not be that old.”
One side of his mouth tipped up in a grin. “No worries. I bought them yesterday, when I picked up your clothes.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Come on, Iz. Why would a guy lie about not getting laid in over eight years?”
“To break a woman’s heart and make her want to stay with him forever.”
“Really?” He crowded her against the sink counter. “You want to stay with me now?” He wrapped her legs around his waist and kissed her hard on the mouth. At first, she tried to break away, but when he pressed the length of his erection against the heat of her, dipped his hand inside the chambray shirt she’d put on a few minutes ago, and stroked her breast, her bones melted.
Long minutes later, he broke the kiss and rested his forehead against hers. “I figured you’d laugh your head off. It’s what I was prepared for, anyway.”
“Make love to me again, Sam.”
“As if my life depended on it,” he said and then he lifted her into his arms and carried her back to bed.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sam handed Isadora the fairy phone and then kissed her brow. “Thanks for last night.”
She dropped her eyes to hide the moisture there and cleared her throat.
“Get laid more often, will ya? It’s not good for a guy your age to be celibate. I think it messes with your brainwaves or…or something.”
He cleared his throat, too. “Okay.”
Tugging on the wrinkled chambray shirt she wore, tied at the waist with a length of nautical rope, she looked at the green oversized flip-flops she’d found in his closet. “Just to let you know, I’m burning these rags the minute I get home. Don’t think for a minute that I’m going to keep them as a memento, like some sappy teenager,” she lied.
His chuckle held little humor. “No. I wouldn’t dare think that of you. I know better.”
She turned then and headed toward the dock. He placed his hand at the small of her back and walked along with her.
“Isadora! Isadora Perrault!”
She stopped midstride. “Mother! What are you doing here?”
Her mother stormed toward them in the red Armani suit and five-inch leopard print pumps Delilah had bought for her. How she was managing to miss the separations in the deck planks only God knew. “Be careful, Mother!”
She came to a stop about five paces from them and slammed her hands on her hips. The high color on her cheeks was not a good sign. Nor the fact that her nostrils flared with the exertion of each angered breath she took. “You didn’t return last night.”
“No. I—I fell into the water, Mother. I almost drowned—I would have if Sam hadn’t rescued me.”
Her mother did a quick scan of Isadora’s attire. “I see.”
“I was just leaving.”
Her mother visibly relaxed. “And the phone? Did you find it?”
“Yes.”
Her mother held out her hand. “Give it to me.”
Isadora looked at Sam. He hadn’t shaved and the stubble on his face, along with his morning-mussed hair, gave him the look of a disheveled rake from one of her favorite regency novels. His shirt was opened to just past his belly button and his jeans fit as snug as a pair of pantaloons. All that was missing was a sabre on his hip.
“Isadora! I demand you give me that phone!”
She forced her gaze up to his and in it she saw his love for her, though it was muted by bleak heartache. There was resolve and understanding there, too. She lifted her hand to his cheek, but only for the briefest of moments, then she turned her eye on her mother.
