One Hot Second

by Stacy Gail

  “Orgasmer is not a word, Mr. Editor, and is that a complaint that I’m too loud?”

  “A compliment. Never a complaint.” The last thing he’d tell her, at least in a text message surrounded by a cartoony talk-bubble was that the sound of her losing herself to the pleasure he gave her was the most addictive rush he’d ever known. God help him, just thinking about it got him hard in one hot second. He couldn’t get enough of it.

  “Glad to hear it. Because you still haven’t correctly guessed where I am.”

  He was still typing a response when a picture of the rain-washed glass front doors of the Herald appeared on his screen.

  “Let me in. I’m getting wet.”

  Chandler wasn’t sure how he got to the front doors. Ran, flew, teleported...it didn’t matter. Why would it? She was there as soon as he opened the door, waiting to flow into his arms like a dream. He didn’t need to know anything else.

  Her hair was damp and smelled like rain and flowers as he fisted his hands in it. If he could drown in that scent, he would. Gladly. The intoxicating aroma was pure Parker. Even if he were in a coma, he’d be able to recognize her from this scent alone. Simply breathing it in had him wanting her with a desire that made madmen seem rational.

  He didn’t separate his mouth from hers as he lifted her a few inches off the floor and headed back to the privacy of his office. He couldn’t. Her mouth was a fantasy he didn’t even know he’d woven. When it moved under his as though she knew it belonged to him, he wallowed in the sensation and demanded more. Somewhere along the way, her kiss had become his idea of what perfect should be.

  The computer’s wireless keyboard sat on an old-fashioned blotter, along with a full inbox and pen holder. All of it went flying in the vague direction of his chair as he swept the area clean and pushed back the monitor.

  Something clattered to the floor. Something broke. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he got inside her where he belonged.

  “I’m so glad you’re here alone.” As he eased her backward until her ass met the desk’s edge, her lips wandered away from his to trace his jawline. Her hands at his nape threaded through his hair until he was half-convinced his bones were melting. “This wouldn’t be nearly as much fun with an audience.”

  “Luckily we have the place to ourselves.” He ran his hands down her back before zeroing in on the coat’s belt. “We can be just as nasty as we want.”

  “Then I’m glad I came dressed for the occasion.” With a wicked smile that turned him inside out, she helped him with the coat’s fastenings and shrugged it off her shoulders.

  With the exception of her black heels, she stood before him completely naked.

  “Oh...damn.” The air left his lungs in a rush. All thought ground to a jarring halt. A surreal, almost out-of-body experience hit him like a ton of bricks when it dawned on him that the reality of this woman surpassed any hopes or dreams he could ever imagine. And that, for this moment, there wasn’t a luckier son of a bitch on the planet than him.

  “The time capsule history inspired me to make some memories of our own.” Before her coat slid to the floor, she fished her hand into a pocket and produced a familiar foil square from the Nooner’s Honeymoon Suite courtesy basket. “Though I’m sure you won’t want to place this in the capsule once we’ve rebuilt the cornerstone.”

  “Not after I’m done with it.” Plucking the condom from her fingers, he captured her mouth once more. Pushing a thigh between hers, his hands slid down the silken skin of her back to the ripe swell of her ass. Lord help him, she had a body he’d hunger for when he was an old, old man who no longer had recreational use for his dick. “No one gets a chance to even glimpse what we do together. I’m not willing to share you with anyone, not even my descendants. For the time that you’re here, you’re mine.”

  * * *

  If anyone had told Parker that she’d voluntarily drive through the pouring rain at midnight while wearing a flasher’s costume just to have sex, she’d have thought they were off their medication. But the silence of the motel room had been intolerable, when silence had never been a problem for her before. Alone in the room where she and Chandler had created her idea of heaven, however, it had become too much to bear. Without him there by her side, it might as well have been a jail cell. Four blank walls. No excitement, no interest.

  Chandler had a way of making the world come alive.

  She wondered if he could feel the thump of her heart against his chest as he maneuvered her off her feet to fully seat her on the cold surface of his desk. It had been trying to knock its way out of her body since she arrived outside the paper and she’d seen the faint glow of light through the blind-covered windows of his office. After all the excitement of the day, she’d known he’d be working, and a part of her felt guilty for interrupting his latest project. If he hadn’t answered with such heartening eagerness, she would have been happy to curl up somewhere and wait for him to get to a stopping point. As a creative person herself, she never enjoyed interruptions when inspiration was clicking along. But much to her delight, patiently waiting to receive his full attention hadn’t been necessary.

  He wanted her, just as ravenously as she wanted him.

  The second his mouth greeted hers, a wave of something she couldn’t easily define flooded through her all the way to her soul. It was like joy, a heartfelt welcoming to a place where she belonged. An illusion, since she’d never belonged anywhere, but for tonight she was more than willing to believe it.

  “I think you’re giving me a twisted kind of shoe fetish.” His hands felt impossibly hot against her chilled, rain-wet skin. He scorched a trail over the tops of her thighs, his fingers spreading wide as if he wanted to be sure he covered every inch of her with his branding touch. The searching slide didn’t stop until he cupped the backs of her knees, where he pulled her legs wide apart and coaxed her to link her ankles behind him. “I’ve never seen anything sexier than you wearing nothing but those shoes. You make me so hard it’s painful.”

  “If I’m responsible for that pain, it’s only fair that I take it away.” Smiling against his lips, she turned her foot and gently poked him in his butt with a heel, then arched when he palmed a breast. The restless caress of his thumb teasing the nipple to a straining bud made her breath catch, a sound no louder than the muffled drumming of the rain against the window. He made quick work of loosening the buttons of his shirt before coaxing her down until her back was flat against the desk. “Ahh...cold.”

  “Not for long,” he promised and guided her to his belt. “I need help getting out of these clothes. My hands are full.” And with that he closed his palm over her breast and squeezed the rounded flesh until he once again wrung a sound of pleasure from her.

  It was almost miraculous, how her nerve endings worked together to pinpoint all the places he touched. Her mouth. Her breasts. Her thighs. Everywhere her body came into contact with his, her flesh seemed to sizzle in the most wanton way. She yearned to feel that intoxicating sizzle. On her skin, and deep inside. Never before had she wanted so intensely to be burned alive from within.

  Yet there he stood, mostly clothed while she’d had the common courtesy to show up naked. Good manners insisted she level the playing field, just to make him feel comfortable.

  That was her in a nutshell—Ms. Manners, for the win.

  The front of his pants parted after she fumbled over the fastenings in her haste. Her motions alone were enough to make his breathing ragged, and each gasp notched her excitement higher. Even through the veil of his boxer briefs she could feel how ready he was; the thick thrust of his penis throbbed with his desire, and it never failed to fill her with a heady mix of delight and gratitude that she aroused him so deeply. Somehow, she’d managed to stumble across a man who reacted the same way to her that she did to him. It was better than winning the lottery.

  “You’r
e playing with fire, lady.” The words were growled out from between his clenched teeth in response to the faint scrape of her fingernails over the cotton barrier keeping her from the yearned-for flesh-on-flesh sensation. “Do that again and I’ll fucking lose it right here and now. Not much fun for you.”

  “I beg to differ. You’d be surprised how much fun this is.” With the cadence of her breath shallowing out to match his, she dived her fingers past the waistband of his underwear and lovingly wrapped them around his white-hot stiffness. “To know that this is because of me thrills me beyond words.”

  “It’s mutual. More than mutual.” Though it looked as though he were suffering torture on the level of the Spanish Inquisition, he reached down to capture her wrist, then pinned it to the desk over her head. “So much so that I can’t allow myself to get off without you being right there with me. I need to know you’re desperate to have my hands on you, to have you crave me in a way that no one else could ever satisfy you. Watching you as you give yourself over to ecstasy is my definition of beautiful. So, no. I won’t allow you to deprive me of my greatest pleasure—specifically, yours.”

  Parker’s eyes stung, though she couldn’t fathom why. All she knew was that each word somehow peeled away a little more of who she was inside, until she was nothing but a raw nerve left naked and helpless and utterly at his mercy. And God help her, she was fine with that. Despite living a life of self-reliance and being a mistress of her own fate, there was no hesitation in giving herself over to him. He’d take care of her, just as she would go to hell and back to take care of him.

  At the moment she had every intention of taking care of him in ways that melted his bones.

  Together they shoved his pants and briefs down, freeing the heavy thrust of his penis. It was dark with his arousal and so full it curved toward his stomach. The mere sight of it filled her with such breathless excitement her hands shook as she helped him slide the condom in place. The intimate flesh between her thighs throbbed with an urgent rhythm of need, aching with a molten heat that made her squirm. Her hips twitched, beckoning him to fill her in a wordless language as old as time. A broken groan rumbled from deep in his chest in response before he pulled her feet from around his waist to drape them over his shoulders.

  “You want to make memories?” Shudders rippled through him, his muscles standing out starkly as he strained to hold himself in check. “I’ll make memories so hot they’ll burn brain cells.”

  She was beyond any verbal response when he slid the tip of his hardness just inside her threshold while bending to capture her nipple with the hungry suction of his mouth. He let her get used to the barely there invasion a moment before he undulated his hips so that his shaft slid over her hypersensitized pleasure center to spark a wildfire of fleeting bliss.

  “Please.” God, he was trying to kill her, she just knew it. The suction of his mouth coupled with the negligent penetration that rubbed her most sensitive nub was going to finish her. No doubt the tension coiling deep inside would crush her if he kept this up much longer. She couldn’t hold still under its weight, her breathing backing up in her lungs at the almost excruciating frustration of glimpsing feverish euphoria, only to have it ebb away. In a heartbeat, her sole purpose narrowed down to riding his flesh so fiercely the friction would make them spontaneously combust.

  But the position he had her in made it almost impossible to force him closer and give her the immediate fulfillment she craved. Then her fingers found the edge of the desk. Waiting for the right moment when he again pushed just past her entrance, she pulled herself into him until her buttocks hit his hips.

  The sudden, surging fullness inside her at last snapped the piano-wire tight pressure. An explosion of ecstasy went off like a bomb in her every cell, and her cries of triumph mingled with his as he, too, let go of all semblance of control. With her heels digging into his back to ensure he sank himself into her as deeply as possible, Chandler pressed his face in the valley of her breasts and plunged into her in a frenzy of sensation. His pleasure was like her own, giving her a synchronized oneness she’d never felt before, and it heightened her own rapture until she lost herself in another wave of it. But even as she let it take her, something inside recognized that this synchronization was new. Not just between Chandler and herself, but a completely alien feeling she’d never encountered before.

  This, she knew beyond all doubt, was what it meant to be complete.

  Chapter Twelve

  Patricia Weems, clutching a cup of coffee with Pauline’s logo on it, was the last person Chandler expected to see when he rolled into the Herald’s parking area early the next morning. Though “early” was pretty much a judgment call. Usually he liked to get in before everyone else arrived at nine, but after his late night with Parker, he’d only had enough energy to drive to the Nooner and crash in her bed. That meant getting up with the sun to go back to his place to shower and change. He didn’t help matters when he took the time to wake her up with an intimate massage that turned into in a sleepy bout of lovemaking that still had him buzzing. He wouldn’t mind waking up every morning like that.

  Too bad that wasn’t in the cards when it came to Parker.

  “Good morning, Mayor.” It took most of his will to push back the sudden darkness the errant thought spawned. But he wouldn’t be able to dodge that bullet entirely. The fact was Parker was the human equivalent of a shooting star—spectacular and brilliant, and destined to be gone from his sky forever. “To what do I owe this very early pleasure?” He nodded at the cup she held. “You didn’t bring me coffee, by any chance?”

  She stared at him as if he spoke in tongues. “Coffee? Why would I bring you coffee?”

  “Just wishful thinking on my part. It’s conceivable you’re here to offer an olive branch after attacking me, my position as editor-in-chief, my staff’s continued employment and the Herald in general yesterday. Coffee would have been a nice way to do it.”

  Her indignant intake of air almost whistled through her pursed lips as he unlocked the front door. “How dare you claim I attacked you? I’m the mayor, for heaven’s sake. I don’t attack anyone. I have people for that.”

  “Well, at least you admit it. Don’t worry, I’m still waking up, so everything you say while I’m in zombie mode is off the record,” he added when she seemed shocked her mouth had gotten the better of her. Then he looked at her more closely and saw that beneath her usual thick mask of makeup, she looked haggard. “Are you all right? You’re not usually so...honest.”

  In a blink, the steel magnolia was back in fine form. “Mock the dutiful politician all you want, you’ll never leave a mark. My one and only goal for this visit this morning is to talk some sense into that thick Thorne skull of yours.”

  “You don’t say.” Biting back a sigh at the way she spat out his surname, he got the coffeemaker in the front room going, all the while wondering if the Hatfields and the McCoys ever got sick of hating each other. “What sense do I seem to be lacking today, Madam Mayor?”

  “For a year now, I’ve been patient with your obsession to recapture your ancestors’ glory days by reconstructing that...that eyesore,” she began, and ignored the genuine scoff of incredulity her words inspired. “But it’s gone far enough. That time capsule you found—and the hullaballoo it’s causing amongst the citizenry—is the last straw.”

  “Hullaballoo? What hullaballoo?” Whatever it was, he couldn’t wait to use that word in the special edition.

  Weems’s hard eyes glittered. “You should have heard the uproar over at The Dirty Duck last night. People are betting money on what you found in the box, can you imagine? I had to make a public statement right then that I’d have to call in Sheriff Berry to crack down on any gambling within this town’s limits if they didn’t keep calm.”

  “Oh no, were the townspeople having fun? No wonder you’re upset.”

  “Gamblin
g is illegal in this county!”

  “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks it goes on every day without anyone noticing. I’m kidding,” he hastened to add when she looked like she was about to explode. He held up a pacifying hand, not sure if he should be alarmed by the way her free hand had clenched into a fist. “I don’t know why you’re getting so upset over a trivial matter. There was a time capsule in Thorne Mansion. So what?”

  She gave him a meaningful look he couldn’t decipher. “At this point, what good does it do to resurrect the past?”

  “I’m not resurrecting anything, Mayor Weems. I’m just reporting the news as it is.”

  “Don’t you mean your version of it?”

  He kept his temper in check, barely. “Not that I’d do it, but if I ever did lose my mind and let how I feel slant the Herald, you would be the first to know. Trust me on this.”

  “This might be difficult for you to acknowledge, but I’ve devoted my entire adult life to bringing this town I love so much into the future.” Her lips were so taut and dour they almost disappeared, and her helmet-styled hair all but quivered in her agitation. “The electric company leasing our land for their wind-turbine farms? I made that happen. The cell phone towers that would have been constructed miles out of range for our town to use? I made sure we were covered. From stop signs to garbage pickup schedules to potholes—they’re all my responsibility.”

  “You’ve done a lot for this town, most definitely. That’s why I think it’s somewhat ridiculous for you to get into such a twist over a trivial little time capsule.”

  “It’s the future I’m thinking about. A future where this town would be much better served if all of this money and effort were spent on better roads and supporting our community services. We need to hire another deputy, get a new fire truck, build a brand-new animal shelter with air-conditioning that doesn’t break down every other week and a dozen other things that need to happen now. Yet, while far more important things fall into disrepair, all anyone talks about is that stupid building and that stupid box.”