The Contract

by Avril Tremayne

  Once, Lane pulled back, murmuring something about his mouth injury.

  “It doesn’t matter. Mark me any way you want,” he growled as her fingertips touched his mouth. He pushed her up against the wall, reaching up under her dress, thankful for the shortened front skirt.

  Frantically, she pulled at his tie, shoved at his jacket, started unbuttoning his shirt. Then, with a huff of frustrated impatience, she seemed to give up, and instead grappled with the fly of his trousers, pushing his pants down just far enough.

  He yanked her underwear aside, not bothering to remove it.

  She wrapped herself around him, and without further preliminaries, he thrust into her. He could feel her teeth pressing into the skin of his shoulder, hear the almost sobbing breaths that burst through her lips. Smell that musky perfume. Then she was begging again, begging, and he thrust harder, if that was even possible.

  They climaxed together. Fast. Strong. Shuddering.

  For a long moment, they stayed as they were. Lane pinned to the wall by Adam’s big body, her legs wrapped around his waist, her head on his shoulder.

  Adam felt a sense of sweeping relief. She still wanted him. Was still as wild for him as he was for her. He couldn’t believe she could burn like this for someone else. Hadn’t believed it. Wouldn’t believe it.

  He took a step, her legs still around him, then dipped suddenly.

  “Adam!”

  “I was just getting this,” he said, and dropped the velvet pouch between them, their bodies providing a cradle for it.

  “What is it?”

  Adam nuzzled her ear. “A gift. It fell out of my pocket while we were…engaged.”

  Lane closed her eyes. “I need to talk to you.”

  He kissed her neck.

  “About David,” she said desperately.

  Adam froze. Let her legs slide down from around him. Pulled slowly out of her, stepped back, looked at her as he hitched up his pants.

  “What about him?”

  “I think—I think I should make some coffee,” Lane said, and took off for the kitchen.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Adam stalked after her, watching her with an almost manic intensity as she clattered nervously around the kitchen, spilling things, and breaking a saucer.

  He tossed the leather pouch onto the counter, and the slight noise it made as it slid against the bottle of whisky—his whisky—made her flinch. Adam had brought over the whisky, a toothbrush, some shirts, jeans; one thing at a time.

  He’d discarded his jacket and tie on the way. His shirt was still unbuttoned. The button of his pants was undone. He looked so sexy Lane itched to touch him.

  When she held out a brimming cup of coffee to Adam, he ignored it, and poured himself a scotch.

  Lane, taking one of those deep breaths, leaned against the counter and fixed calm eyes on him over the rim of her coffee cup. “What did you think? Of David?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “It does in terms of… Well, he looks like he’d be good in bed, right? You asked me if I had a photo, remember? But I thought real life would be more…more…true. So, do you think I’m…ready? You know, skills-wise? For him?”

  Adam took a quick swig of his drink. “The invitation to the gallery tonight was nothing to do with introducing me to your colleagues.” It was a statement, not a question. “Only to him.”

  “But he is a colleague,” Lane said then winced. “Sorry—that was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Are you in love with him, Lane?”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “He was looking at you tonight like you were his favorite dessert.” He took another swallow of whisky. “You could have experimented with him and saved yourself a lot of money.”

  “I didn’t want to fail with him. It was too important.”

  “Didn’t? Was?”

  She jerked, slopping coffee over the rim of her cup. “Don’t. Is,” she corrected. “He’s very experienced. And I…I didn’t want to fail.”

  “You just said that.”

  “Well, you’re making me nervous.”

  He looked at her hands. “Yes, I can see that. The same way I can tell when you’re lying. Go on, lie to me, Lane. Tell me you’re in love with him.”

  “I’m not in love with anyone.”

  “And there it is. The little eye flick to the left. Lying. So—you’re in love. With him.” Adam threw back the last of his whisky then put the glass on the bench. “Flattering,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I must be pretty damned good. If you can respond to me the way you do when you’re in love with someone else.”

  Adam watched as Lane’s eyes widened, as her face turned even paler than usual.

  “Or is it a case of you thinking of him when I’m making love to you?”

  “Why would you care?” Lane asked.

  Adam raised one mocking eyebrow. One corner of his mouth lifted. “An odd quirk of mine. Call me old-fashioned, but I figure if you’re stupid enough to make a commitment to someone—and loving someone is a commitment in my book—you don’t have sex with someone else. Even my parents figured that out, hence all those divorces. So much more honorable than adultery, you understand.”

  “But it’s different in our case. And you know I needed—”

  He cut her off. “Don’t even. Just look at the facts. You like facts. You are in love with this Bennett guy, but in bed, when you’re under me, hot and—”

  Lane covered her ears with her hands. “Don’t. Please.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll still teach you. I’ll just have to keep reminding myself, when you’re moaning in my ear, that the woman I’m inside is in love with someone else. And thanks, incidentally. Always nice to have my views confirmed. Commitment—what a joke.”

  Adam reached again for the whisky. Poured some. Then stood there. “You’re sure, Lane?” he said, looking at her suddenly. “Sure you want him?”

  She was trying to word a response when Adam laughed and said, “No, don’t bother answering. I know he’s been in the picture since the beginning. I just didn’t know…” He took a quick swig of his scotch instead of finishing the sentence. “Answer, instead, why you bothered to show him off to me tonight in particular.”

  Lane started. She hadn’t expected that question. “Well, we’ve only got four and a half weeks left. And I—I think our lessons need to h-have a firmer p-purpose,” she said, thinking quickly. “I mean, I don’t want to waste time with you doing everything to me.” Oh, that’s right, punish yourself while you’re at it!

  Adam out his whisky down started buttoning his shirt. “You mean you want me to stop giving you pleasure and show you how to do the work.”

  “Yes. I-I want to be good. I—I need to know what gives you—I mean, a man—pleasure.”

  He watched her closely for a long moment. Then he shrugged. “Let me give it some thought. Are you free on Tuesday?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, we’ll make a start then. And Lane?”

  “Yes?”

  “Remember, we have a fidelity clause. You’re mine for the next four and a half weeks.”

  * * *

  You’re mine.

  Those two words had caused goose bumps to rise all over Lane’s flesh.

  Even when he’d gone and she was alone in the kitchen, doing something as mundane as washing her coffee cup, the memory of them thrilled her.

  She reached for Adam’s discarded whisky. Raised the glass to her mouth. Rubbed her lips over the rim where his mouth had been. Took a tiny sip.

  You’re mine. Oh, God. She was. She was his. His. The glass slipped from her hand and smashed on the kitchen floor.

  That sobered her. You’re his—for the grand total of four and a half more weeks.

  Had she done the right thing, laboring the David dynamic? It had seemed logical: she would tell Adam, he would be either relieved or mutinous, and—whichever his r
eaction—she would know where she stood.

  Except that Adam had been neither relieved nor mutinous. Just scathing. And she still didn’t know what to think. Or feel. Or do.

  Her brain clearly wasn’t in working order, because despite everything that had gone on tonight, she couldn’t seem to accept that Adam would leave her. She was, in fact, already plotting to use this new series of lessons on how to please Adam in bed to her advantage. Working out how she could be such a good student, so fantastically, phenomenally good at pleasing Adam, he wouldn’t want to leave her.

  Lane sighed. Much good it would do her. She could still feel his disillusionment. He’d said—sneered—that if you committed yourself to loving someone, you didn’t have sex with someone else. All she’d managed to do with her talk about David Bennett was give Adam definitive proof that romantic commitments were worthless. She should have seen that coming. But too late now—she’d trapped herself.

  As she turned to leave the kitchen, her eyes lit on the present Adam had brought her, tossed carelessly on the kitchen counter.

  She opened the pouch almost fearfully and found the strand of amber. Her breath caught in her throat as she ran the beads through her fingers. Beautiful. Perfect. She slipped the beads over her head, feeling the warmth of them against her skin, imagining Adam’s hands smoothing there, and wasn’t surprised to find that she was crying.

  * * *

  It was becoming a habit, Adam reflected. Sitting in the jeep outside Lane’s house thinking about her.

  So. She was expecting him to come up with a series of lessons that would have her driving him absolutely freaking crazy, was she? Crazy—partly from lust and partly from the knowledge that she would soon be using those lessons on another man. Not some nebulous lover of the distant future he hadn’t quite believed in (hadn’t wanted to believe in), but one very specific man, whom she loved, and whom he had now met.

  Life basically sucked. And love sure was a pain in the ass.

  Women had been chasing him for years, but he’d been running too fast; and now that he didn’t want to run, the woman he wanted didn’t want to catch him.

  He’d always thought the commitment gene was not in his DNA, but tonight he’d discovered it bloody well was! He didn’t want someone else to have her, couldn’t bear someone else to have her…because he wanted her.

  With Lane he wanted…everything. He wanted the way she cared about his godawful parade of stepparents. He wanted the clumsy tumbles, the nerdy brain, the didactic concentrated arguments and the embarrassment over naming body parts and sex acts. He wanted the wounded, valiant, classy, infuriating core of her.

  But she was only using him for sex.

  Way to get your comeuppance in life.

  So…what to do?

  Fall out of love seemed the obvious answer. But since he had no idea how he’d fallen in it, he wasn’t convinced figuring out how to fall out of it was a valid plan.

  Falling out of love could happen quite naturally, he reasoned. Spontaneously. As it seemed to happen to just about everyone he knew. He hadn’t declared anything stupid. To Lane, he was a bed partner and nothing more. He could bide his time and see if he would run true to Quinn form, and just wake up one day not loving her any more. Like, a month from now.

  Not likely.

  He started the engine and pulled away from the curb. There was no hope, clearly, that she would realize she was making a mistake with David and that it was really him, Adam, she was in love with. If she didn’t love him by now, the sensible thing to do would be to stop seeing her. But he’d signed on the dotted line and that option was denied him. Anyway, he didn’t want to let her go. It was almost like he was addicted to her; he was so scared of what would happen if—when—she was out of his life.

  He couldn’t face cutting her out of his life yet, but maybe he could try distancing himself from her. Wean himself off her. Maybe if he could do that, he would hang on to a little of what was left of his heart.

  It was a ray of hope, and he warmed to it. He could start by restricting their times together to the minimum two times a week. And he could concentrate on sex and sex alone, as per her original plan.

  He sighed, thinking about that pathetic speech he’d made about commitment, about not sleeping with one man while you loved another. He was such a fraud. Because he didn’t want Lane to be faithful, if it was to someone else. If the only way for Adam to have her was for her to betray David, so be it.

  He checked the rearview mirror before turning a corner. Caught sight of his ravaged face.

  This was going to be an epic four and a half weeks.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Over the next two weeks, Lane and Adam saw each other four times. Each time, they made love as though the demons of hell were after them, with Lane now the aggressor—urged on by Adam who reminded her this was the way she’d wanted it. No talk, just sex. So she dragged him to bed the moment he was in the door, threw herself at him and kissed him as though she would absorb him through her mouth right into her hungry soul.

  But as their lovemaking grew more desperate, as Lane grew more desperate trying to make herself indispensable to Adam in the bedroom, she felt him withdrawing from her on every other level.

  They just made love and then he left.

  Two days a week.

  For the other five days, Lane was lonely. And miserable. And confused.

  * * *

  Adam was so wretched after four bouts of sex-only-sex, he was on the verge of asking Sarah—or even bloody Erica—for advice.

  He longed for Lane to stop him in his aloof tracks and demand to have things back the way they’d been before he’d met David. At least then he would know she felt something. He could build on “something.” The way things were, he had nothing to build on.

  Nothing except sex, which—damn, damn, damn—seemed to just keep getting better. He remembered the session in Lane’s bedroom last week when she’d decided to recreate a scenario she’d read in one of Erica’s magazines, and had tied him—hard—to a chair she’d dragged in from the dining room. Then she’d proceeded to strip, slowly, until she was naked except for black stay-up stockings. Then came the lap dance—holy hell! No touching, no letting him touch; he’d thought he would go insane. When she’d finally backed up, settling onto his lap, and he’d sheathed himself so gratefully inside her…well, it was the hottest, hottest thing that had ever happened to him. And he was quite sure he would never recover. Wasn’t sure he wanted to.…

  He remembered thinking, the night they’d finally got to Lane’s “consummation,” that familiarity would breed contempt, as it always did in his divorce-laden family. God! What kind of freaking idiot was he, anyway? Did he have any handle on reality, to believe that had ever been a possibility?

  Two and a half weeks of the contract to go, and not only had familiarity not bred contempt, but he was craving her like a junkie.

  It was time to panic. Time to go cold turkey. He had to prove to himself he could keep his hands off her, no matter the provocation. If he couldn’t do that, he might as well start looking into chemical castration.

  He had made arrangements to meet her tonight.

  And tonight he wouldn’t touch her.

  * * *

  When Lane saw the jade apple in the antique store on her lunch break, she wanted it for Adam. An apple for the teacher—but a perfect, beautiful, expensive one, which she hoped would show him how much she valued him.

  Buying the gift had been the only bright spot in an awful day.

  Sarah had been distinctly unfriendly when Lane had called to tell her she was definitely going to Beijing, even tossing out a sniping comment about whether Adam or David would be taking her to the airport. Her slides for the China presentations were a mess. And a phone call to her mother had elicited the news that Brad had dropped out of the course she’d paid for (and even her mother had sounded frustrated over that).

  By the time she got home, she was longing for Adam. She dressed
in one of his shirts, wrapped the present beautifully, and brushed off her finest Japanese cooking skills to prepare a spectacular meal.

  Tonight would find a way to reach him, to heal the fracture in their relationship.

  Tonight would be perfect. She would make it perfect.

  When Adam hadn’t arrived by eight o’clock, Lane felt less positive.

  At nine o’clock, she threw out the dinner, donned a dressing gown over the shirt, and gave herself a stern lecture on why naive, love-starved twenty-four year old economists shouldn’t even look at men.

  At nine forty-five, she only just restrained herself from throwing out the jade apple.

  The righteous anger lasted fifteen minutes, by which time the prospect of Adam lying dead in a ditch had loomed out of nowhere to lodge in her brain.

  Lane worried her hair into knots and paced the room. She couldn’t get the horrific mental picture out of her head. She had to hear Adam’s voice. Had to.

  But what if he was fit and well and just late? Would she seem like a pathetic, nagging wife? She could call Sarah instead…but that felt like being both a sneak and a nag. And Sarah didn’t want to talk to her anyway.

  Lane had chewed three fingernails low enough to make the fingertips ache by the time she decided she really, really had to call him. As she reached for the phone, she heard her front gate squeak.

  The surge of relief almost overwhelmed her as she ran to the door, flung it open and flew down the path. “I’ve been worried sick,” she said, wanting to grab Adam and hug him and beg him to never do that to her again.

  But Adam didn’t stop long enough for her to touch him. He continued up the path, giving her an unconcerned smile. “Why?”

  Lane hurried up the path beside him. “It’s late. I thought—I thought something had happened to you.”

  Lane watched in confusion as he reached the doorway and glanced back at her. His face was blank. Uncaring. Even the smile had gone. “I got caught up, and since we never specified a time, I didn’t think it would matter when I arrived,” he said.

  Caught up with what? With whom? Lane desperately wanted to know, but she strangled the questions before they could rush past her lips. She wasn’t his wife. Wasn’t even his girlfriend. He hated commitment—she wouldn’t endear herself to him by acting like she owned him.