With the last of my strength, I forced my legs to take a regretful step back. I extricated myself from his arms. "Your breath still smells awful," I told him, saying the first non-sexy thing that didn't come to mind. "You probably ought to go brush your teeth."
Richard lifted up one hand to cup around his mouth; he exhaled into it, sniffed it, and then winced. "You're right. In fact, I probably ought to just take a shower, wash all of last night off of me."
"What happened to you last night, anyway?" I asked, more so that I could keep on distracting myself from thoughts of the mistake that I'd nearly made – and that my body kept on insisting that I attempt once again.
He shook his head. "One mistake after another, fueled by stupidity," he said. "Something that I'm not intending to repeat, not again. Not if I can get past these voices by talking to you, instead of drinking myself into unconsciousness."
"And think of the benefits for your liver, too!" I pointed out.
He nodded. "Another good point," he agreed. He kept looking at me, however, his head slightly tilted to one side, as if he'd been just struck by a realization.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." That slow, seductive smile of his came creeping back. "It's just that I'm pretty sure you're the smartest woman I've ever wanted to carry off to bed."
Oh god. Another rush of heat shot through me, from my head all the way down to bury itself delightfully in my loins. "Not happening," I told him, as the rest of my body shouted at my brain to go and jump into his arms and wrap myself around him like an octopus.
"Right. So why don't you head out, and I'll go take a shower and get myself cleaned up." Richard stepped past me, back towards the front door. "Here, I'll walk you back to the entrance."
I followed him, torn between my insistence that I was doing the right thing, contrasted against my wickedly sinful desire to yank his pants off his body and command him to make love to me until we both passed out from exhaustion. I reached into my purse, still hanging off my shoulder, and tugged out my keys. I gripped them tightly in my hand until the metal edges threatened to cut into my palm, trying to keep myself from slipping into the temptations of fantasy.
"So, here you are," Richard said, when we reached the front door of the house. He didn't open it for me, pausing a couple steps back. I guessed that, once I left, he would probably head back upstairs to shower.
"Here we are," I echoed, feeling ridiculously silly but somehow not wanting to leave. It felt, strangely, like the end of a first date, one on which I hadn't yet received a goodnight kiss, and still held out hope. "So, I'll see you on Wednesday for our next session? And this time, you'll actually make it to the office?"
"I promise that I'll be there," Richard assured me. And then, as I watched, his hands went to the buttons of his shirt, opening them up one by one!
I stopped, shocked, for a second. "What are you doing?" I asked in surprise.
"Getting ready to go take a shower." Richard finished undoing his buttons, peeled the shirt back off of his body and let it fall casually to the floor. "You know," he commented as his hands went to the button at the top of his jeans, "you're welcome to stick around, if you'd like. I'm sure that you can find out all sorts of personal things about me by examining me really closely, making sure that you don't miss anything."
I couldn't pull my eyes away. Surely, he wouldn't actually go ahead and take off his pants, not right in front of me in the open like this-
He did. I stared in shock and frustrated, helpless desire as his jeans slipped down off of that great, well-shaped ass of his, revealing the hefty bulge in his tight black boxer briefs. Richard, far from showing any trace of embarrassment, just grinned at me.
"Like something you see?" he asked, stepping out of the jeans as they lay crumpled on the floor, next to the discarded dress shirt.
"I, um..." I didn't have any words for this. I couldn't pull my eyes away from that bulge, remembering its girth and hardness from that morning. Then, it had been hard because he'd been asleep; now, was it hard because something about me was turning him on? What in the world did this billionaire find attractive about me?
Richard's hands drifted up to the waistband of his boxer briefs. "Interesting that you're sticking around for the full show," he remarked, still grinning so seductively at me as his thumbs hooked into the elastic at the top of the boxer briefs. "Ready for the next big reveal?"
Somehow, by some miracle, I managed to snap out of my trance. "See you on Wednesday!" I burst out, spinning around, my hand flying out wildly to grab onto the handle of the front door. I yanked it open and darted out, slamming it shut behind me, my breath coming quickly and shallowly in my chest.
I dashed out from under the covered entranceway, out to my little hatchback. I piled into the front seat and, hands wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel that my knuckles were almost pure white, I tried to catch my breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Don't think about the fact that you nearly saw your patient's hard-on, that he nearly exposed himself to you.
Especially don't think, I added, about how much you wanted to see it, and explore every single inch of it with hands, lips, other body parts...
Even though there was still a chill hanging in the air, I turned on my car and cranked the air conditioning up as high as it would go. As the vents of my car blasted cold air at me, I just sat there and kept on focusing on breathing.
I started to reach for my phone to text Callie, but stopped with it out in my fingers. I couldn't tell her about this. I couldn't risk sharing this with anyone.
What if Sebastian had come back into the front hall and seen Richard naked, attempting to seduce me? I felt my blood go cold in my veins at the thought. He seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't think twice about telling everyone.
And poof, there would go my career as a psychiatrist, my solo practice, any chance I had of turning my shabby little office into something more comfortable.
No. I'd made the right choice, walking away from Richard. I'd continue seeing him for the next two sessions that he'd already scheduled (and paid for), doing my best to help him with his PTSD, but I couldn't agree to anything else beyond that. It held too much danger, too much risk that I'd slip and, in a moment of weakness, step over that line.
A little voice in my head pointed out that, after these next couple sessions, Richard would no longer be my client, and thus those rules of appropriate vs. inappropriate contact would no longer apply. That voice was dangerous, however, and I squashed it.
Finally, I put my car into drive and headed away from the Stone mansion, back to my more mundane life. I needed a shower of my own.
Chapter Twelve
RICHARD
*
God dammit, I thought to myself as I stood in the shower, hot water sluicing down over my body. What had gotten into me?
These last twelve hours or so had proved interesting, for both good and bad reasons. Mainly bad ones, I considered as another stab of pain pierced my skull, making me wince as I reached up to press a hand against my head. After the coffee, followed by giving my mouth a brisk scrubbing with a toothbrush, I felt a little better, but some symptoms of the hangover still persisted. The shower was also helping me feel a little better – but as my head cleared, I found myself thinking more about Linda - Dr. Bisson.
She'd come to my house, concerned about me. I missed our appointment, but I hadn't expected to wake up and find her here, peering down at me with concern.
And then... In the shower, I had to put one hand up over my face as I winced at the memory. She'd seen me naked and puking into the toilet. If there was a less attractive sight, I couldn't imagine it. Maybe if I'd been shitting myself at the same time.
But despite all of that, she'd stuck around.
No, more than that, I considered a second later as I picked up a bar of soap, worked it between my fingers to build up a lather. She kept on looking at me as I got changed, as she made coffee, in a way that somehow turned me on. I didn't know
what about her made her seem attractive, especially compared to the combined attentions of Sally and Leann from the night before, but there was some unknown, unnamed, intrinsic quality about Linda. Something about her kept slipping into my thoughts and making me reach out for her, test the limits of how far she'd let me push our interactions.
I'd finally spilled part of my secret, confessed that I heard the voices of my dead squad mates at night, talking to me and accusing me of being responsible for their deaths. I'd almost thought that she would flee, literally get up and run away when she heard that.
She hadn't moved an inch. She'd come closer to me, in fact, and reassured me that it was okay. She'd told me that she understood, that she was happy that I'd been willing to open up to her.
And then, scarcely a minute later, she confessed that she imagined how it would feel for the two of us to sleep together.
I paused for a minute, soap suds running down over my chest and abs, down to nestle into the trimmed hair around my hard cock. Even just remembering that moment gave me a hard-on. I asked her again about that drink, just teasing, seeing if I could get under her skin – and she'd answered that she was already thinking about how it would be if the two of us slept together!
She wasn't my type, I wanted to tell her. I went for young, easy women with curves and big tits and tiny waists and a great sense of style, not for professional, educated women with flat chests and a wardrobe that seemed filled with one bad fashion choice after another. On the surface, on paper, I couldn't put my finger on any one attractive quality about Dr. Linda Bisson.
No, I decided after another second. That wasn't quite accurate.
She listened.
Of course, I added, that was only because I was paying her to do so. Great. The one thing that made her attractive to me, the idea that she understood what I was facing, was only there because I was paying her for it.
But still, when I'd pulled her up close to me, held her pressed against me, there hadn't been anything keeping back the rush of arousal that flowed through me. Suddenly, in that moment, I wanted her more than any bimbo in the club or in my phone.
And for a few seconds, at least, I could have sworn that she wanted me as well, that she was right on the brink of giving in and kissing me, letting me strip off those stupid, ridiculously un-sexy professional clothes and carry her back off to my bedroom.
Even after getting out of the shower, as I headed out so that the maids could tackle cleaning up my disaster area of a room, I kept finding Linda popping into my head at the strangest moments. I drove past The Local, not even thinking about heading in, but I swear that I heard Linda's voice in my head, asking me if that was what I really wanted.
What I wanted, if my dreams that night proved to be any indication, was Linda.
When I fell asleep that night, I didn't find myself haunted by the voices of my old unit, calling me out as a coward, a fool, the one responsible for their deaths. Instead, I dreamed about Linda, about taking her in my bed, on a couch, even in the back of a pickup truck! I woke up several times, sitting up in the darkness, finding my cock rock hard in my lap. I tried jerking it for a few minutes, but it knew the difference between my hand and the woman haunting my mind, and I got nowhere.
God dammit. I was almost bemused; how had this woman wormed her way so fully into my head, without even trading a single kiss?
Somehow, I made it through the next couple of days, until my Wednesday morning appointment with her. I found her waiting for me in her office, once again brisk and sexless in her professional outfit, all business – but when I sat down, I could have sworn that I caught her sending the briefest of glances at my body in the suit that I'd picked out from my closet. Was she imagining how I'd look without it on?
"So, now that you've told me about these voices you hear," Linda began right away, no small talk, "why don't you tell me what they've been saying most recently?"
"Actually, doc, they haven't been saying much of anything," I answered, surprising myself with the realization. "By the way, are we still doing the exchange thing? You ask me something, and then I get to ask you something?"
Glancing across at her, I saw her fiddling with a strand of her hair. She did that when she wasn't fully confident in an answer, I'd noticed. "Of course, we can still do that," she said, not giving away any hint of uncertainty in her tone.
"Great." I leaned forward, thinking of a question. "So, why aren't you dating anyone right now?"
"I'm not-" she paused, frowning at me. "How do you know if I'm dating someone?"
I grinned. "Come on. If you were dating someone, you would have brought it up as an excuse before now, a reason why you couldn't stick around and join me in that shower that I offered you."
Much to my delight, I saw a flush of red creeping up in her cheeks. "I'm not dating anyone right now because I don't have time," she said after another minute. "I'm working very hard to get this psychiatry business off the ground, and I can't afford to take time off for dates."
I started to open my mouth to ask another question, but she cut me off before I could speak. "Back to the actual therapy," she said quickly, adroitly reclaiming control of the conversation. "Why do you think that you've only heard these voices after this latest tour of duty? Surely you lost friends on earlier tours?"
That question came a little close to my darkest secret, the last detail that I hadn't yet shared with her. "I don't know," I hedged. "I've had other guys on my units get hurt before, sometimes killed, but it didn't bother me back then. I think that maybe I still felt like we were working towards a bigger goal, that the cost was worth it."
"Do you still feel that way?"
I stopped short, considering. "I guess that I'm not as confident in it."
Linda leaned back in her chair, and I felt a rush of gratefulness that she wasn't pushing me further. "Go ahead," she sighed after a minute, crossing her arms.
"Go ahead for what?"
"Ask your question. Come on, what's it going to be? My favorite sex position? Whether I like handcuffs? Strange fetishes about food or men in army fatigues?"
For a second, my mouth hung open as I stared at her. That outburst was the very last thing I'd expected from Linda! How had such dirty words come out of her prim and proper mouth? It was like seeing a squirrel go rabid and attack a grizzly bear.
"I was going to ask about your favorite food," I said rather quietly. "What do you like to eat?"
"Oh." That unexpected question clearly left Linda nonplussed; I saw her blink, uncrossing her arms as some of the aggressive tension left her body. "Okay. Italian."
That's it? "Italian?" I repeated.
"Yeah. Pasta, sauces, meatballs, garlic bread..." The flare of irritation at my personal questions vanished, replaced by longing... and hunger, if I read the glint in her eye correctly. "Why are you looking at me like that? Is that weird?"
"No, no, not weird at all," I stammered out, half a second too late. "I just wouldn't have guessed that you'd pick Italian as your favorite food."
"Why?" Linda asked, raising an eyebrow at me. "Is there something wrong with someone like me enjoying fatty, carb-filled food?"
This time, I was the one who felt a flush creeping up my neck. "No, of course not..." I stopped, seeing that my attempt at evasion wasn't going to succeed. "Fine, I give in. You're surprisingly thin for someone who loves pasta."
"I wish I could credit diet and exercise, but I can't." Linda looked up briefly at the ceiling, remembering. "When I was in medical school, pretty much all I could afford to buy were pasta noodles and sauce. I ate so much spaghetti and marinara sauce that I started needing to take a multivitamin!"
I laughed along with her, picturing Linda shoveling pasta with red sauce into her mouth as she hunched over a medical textbook. "Now, though," she added as the laughter subsided, "I do feel a bit guilty after I've eaten a big Italian meal. Always need to go and squeeze into my exercise outfit afterwards, do my best to burn off some of the calories."
&nb
sp; "Italian food – I'll remember that." I settled back into my chair, waving at her with one hand. "And now, it's your turn to ask another question to me. What's it going to be this time? More about the voices in my head?"
Linda shook her head. "Let's go back to the basics. You've told me stories up through the first two tours of duty – how about we keep working our way through your military past?"
"Third tour of duty?"
She smiled. "Seems like as good a place for us to start today as anything."
I thought back to my third tour. "Well, it was just a few days after my youngest brother, Sebastian, graduated from college," I recalled. "Even back then, he was a party animal. We all thought that he'd grow out of it; none of us could have predicted that he'd get even more involved with that scene, if such a thing was possible. But anyway, I headed off on my third deployment, returning to the hot, sunny deserts halfway around the world, joined by a few friends who also decided to risk their asses in Hell for one more round of fighting for freedom, justice, and the American way."
"The American way?" Linda repeated.
I winked at her. "Never explicitly defined, although in my head, it's the freedom to put as many burger patties on a bun as you want."
She laughed, and I continued telling my tale.
Chapter Thirteen
RICHARD
*
On Friday, Linda met me at the entrance to her office with a gift.
"Thanks," I said in surprise, accepting the cup of Starbucks from her. "Something other than that awful tea of yours! What's the special occasion? What did I do to earn myself a free coffee?"
"You've been my first client," she replied, holding up her own cup to bump the lips together in a mock toast. "And that deserves recognition, even if you've been a royal pain in the ass."
"Aww, come on." I leaned in closer to her, giving her my sexiest, most roguish grin. "Give yourself a little credit, sweetheart."
For a second, I thought the nickname might charm her over, and she wavered ever so slightly as her eyes dipped down towards my lips. She recovered after a second, however, standing back and waving her hand to let me in.
For Love of Valor: A Bad Boy Military Romance Page 8
