She closed them. He stroked her more and moved beneath her shirt, his calluses rasping along her stomach. His thumb passed under her breasts and she hissed. It was a wholly involuntary sound, coaxed from her by this long teasing. Fighting with herself not to part her legs, where she had gone from a steam to a boil, she arched her back as he drew his fingers along.
When his finger passed suddenly over her nipple, she moaned. He slipped away and she could have screamed from frustration. Against her flank, she could feel his erection. The breeze rustled the leaves frantically against the window as she pulsed her hips up to his hand, which had come to her abdomen. He was beneath her pajama bottoms and she could feel every millimeter he advanced.
“Be still,” Wyatt commanded.
She whimpered as she obeyed. “Shouldn’t I get a reward for behaving?” she blurted.
“You aren’t behaving. I told you to roll on your back, not roll on your back and squirm around beside me. If you want this . . .” His hand shot down to her pussy, where he forced his fingers between her thighs and cupped her most intimate parts. She cried out in ecstasy and agony, battling to keep her legs together. “Then you have to give me what I want first.”
“Anything,” she whispered.
“That’s better,” he said as she stilled. “Now, you can have my hand there, or you can have my tongue. Those are your choices, nothing more. What do you want?”
“Your tongue.”
“Take off your pants and come back to the same position.”
Her fingers trembled as she pulled them down and dropped them over the side of the bed. Wyatt got on top of her but did not lower. To not seize him and drag him down, to not spread her legs wide took more self-control than she thought she had in her. He moved down her body, taking the blanket with him and baring her to the cool air.
Lips touched her pubic hair. She shook from holding back as he kissed and kissed there, his tongue touching the top of her cleft. The sheet bunched up in her fists, Wyatt shoving his tongue down as far as her closed legs would permit. His breathing was heavier, erratic with lust, and she prayed that he was going to forget about the choices he’d offered and pump his hard cock inside her.
“Open your legs and draw them up,” he ordered.
She did it. He settled down there and licked her with the flat of his tongue. She was so oversensitive that she screamed and grabbed his head to push him away. Catching her wrists, he shoved them down to the bed and held her there. After that, she was at his mercy.
All she could do was give in to him. He circled around her clitoris and lapped at it, left her aching to lick her lower down. She was mad to be penetrated but all he did was slip his tongue between her lips, the nerve endings going wild as all of her internal muscles seized to hold on to what wasn’t there. She had never felt so hollow, so desperate to be filled, and she sobbed at how he was sating her yet stoking a deeper hunger at the same time. His slick tongue ran up to her clitoris and bathed it, Aviana struggling to free her hands and his grip tightening further.
He brought her to the brink of an orgasm, Aviana on edge that he was going to stop and leave her hanging, and when his tongue only increased its tempo, it pushed her into a shattering climax. Radiating through her entire body, it left her quivering as it ebbed.
Only then did he release her wrists. She pulled away to rub at them as he kissed her in a straight line from her mound to her navel. Her shirt crept up farther and farther, Wyatt continuing up her body until he was at her breasts. A flicker of his tongue on her nipple brought her hands involuntarily to his head, and then she was captured again. He pushed her arms up over her body and said, “Hold onto the bars.”
She wrapped her fingers around the bars of the headboard. As he returned to her breasts, she groaned from the stimulation. Her orgasm had been profound and relaxing, but already her arousal was reawakening for more. His tongue made tantalizing little flutters on her nipple and she almost let go to clutch him. Clenching the bars, she writhed. When he switched to the other nipple to make those same flutters, she lost the battle and gripped his shoulders.
He pounced on her without a word. She squirmed and thrashed as his full weight came down on her torso. He was reaching for something in the darkness, something off the bed. “No!” she gasped. “I’ll keep them on the bars from now on!”
“Too late.” Catching her left arm, he slid a cuff around her wrist. The lining was soft but the grip firm. She pulled at it, not attached to the headboard but to a strap that went under the bed. Her right arm was done up in an identical fashion. Now on all fours on top of her, Wyatt said, “Do you need your ankles restrained as well?”
“No, Wyatt.”
“We’ll see.” He fluttered his tongue on her nipples as much as he pleased, Aviana twisting from pleasure and tugging futilely at her cuffs.
At last he released them and pulled back. His cock nudged against her cleft, and he slid in. A cry tore from her throat and filled the bedroom, her internal muscles going into spasm as he pushed himself inside. Pulling out, he thrust in again.
He took her with quick, hard strokes. When she closed her legs over his back, he stopped and got up to kneel with her legs hiked up his chest and over his shoulders. His grip was unforgiving, as implacable as the cuffs, and he pumped at her even harder. The headboard was striking the wall; their bodies were coming together in rhythmic slaps; his moans and her cries overlapped.
Letting go of her ankles, he spread her legs wide and drove into her. The battering of his loins to hers made a sharp shiver go through her and then she was coming again, her hands closed into fists around the pillow since she could move them no closer, his cock going in and in and in as her thighs tightened around him. Her body wanted to close in completely around this ecstatic feeling but couldn’t. Wyatt was keeping her open to him and to cede the control, to have to cede it, made her orgasm even more intense than the first. She lost herself within it, screaming and shaking in her surrender.
Plunging in to his root and seizing her around the thighs, he moaned and came. Warm spurts filled her as he shuddered, and then he withdrew. The restraint on her right wrist was undone and tucked away. After that he freed her left, and lay down beside her to tuck the blankets around them.
“Go to sleep, Avvie,” he commanded lovingly, and she did.
Chapter Nine
In the morning, she woke up to Wyatt already out of bed, showered and shaven, and with a dark look on his handsome face as he dressed in crisp, annoyed movements. “I have to go in,” he said.
Aviana blinked in the light. “To Luxure? They can’t give you just a couple of lousy vacation days? You work like a dog for them.”
“There are five frantic messages on my phone that can’t be ignored. I’m going to clean up this mess and hopefully continue my vacation. What are you doing today?”
“I have to buy clothes for work, so I’ll be going to the mall.”
“Do you need money?”
“No. I have more than enough.”
“If the total runs over, call me. I’ll cover the rest.” He slipped into his jacket and came to the bed, where he leaned over and picked up her pajama bottoms from the floor. “I believe you dropped these.”
She took them with a blush. “Do you want any breakfast before you go?”
“I’ll buy something from the cafeteria at work.” His finger traced along her bottom lip, which made her heart skip a beat. “Be home by six, if that’s possible. I would like to take you out to dinner.”
“I will be.” Aviana didn’t mind browsing through the racks, but she was no marathon shopper. She hoped to be done well before the end of the day. His finger dropped from her lip and he left.
What would Hollis say if he saw her coming out of Wyatt’s room? She hadn’t done anything wrong, but it was going to be awkward. Going to the windows, she peered through the thick greenery for the Phemus. Hollis was already gone, or had never returned home from last night’s escapades. Slipping on her pants, s
he went to her room to dress and made the mistake of laying on the bed for another minute or two to adjust to the morning. Instead, she fell fast asleep and woke up much later.
It was past eleven when she arrived at the mall. Though it was not the weekend, it was fairly crowded. Past three miniature carousels packed with excited toddlers was a shoe store. She emerged from it an hour later with a good pair of flats that had been on sale. Taking herself to the department stores, she canvassed them. Nice khakis were not hard to find, but tops were impossible. Everything was too young and skimpy, too old and boxy, fit for a cocktail party or far too casual. Giving up at the third department store, she had a bite to eat at the food court and proceeded to hunt through the smaller stores. Her finds took painstaking effort, and she left the umpteenth store determined to find one more shirt before she called it quits and went home. Standing against the wall as a large family group went by, she put down her bags and stretched her arms behind her back.
It would have been nice to shop with her mother. They had never gotten the chance to do that. Maybe they would have had such different styles that it would have been an ordeal, but maybe . . . Aviana wouldn’t ever know. She had only ever known the void that her mother left behind. Watching with envy as a mom called in exasperation to three redheaded teenaged girls to keep up, Aviana retrieved her purchases and hitched the handles of the bags up her wrist. The family group went to the escalator to ride down as Aviana looked over the balcony to the stores on the far side. She had been there already, and needed to go down to the ground floor. But first she had to stand aside for another group to go by. This was a pack of older people, all dressed in athletic clothes and hiking up their arms as they walked briskly and talked about how many calories one turn around the mall burned off.
A baby wailed. Aviana glanced over to the bench across from the card store. A woman lifted the child out of a stroller and placed him on her lap. Pulling a bottle from a diaper bag, she popped the nipple in his mouth. The wails ceased and she shook her head to a four-year-old who ran over from the store and whined that he was bored. Beyond them was another woman with a child. The little one was in a dirty stroller and concealed by a ragged blanket slung over the canopy and extending down and over the seat. The woman was looking away from Aviana, her eyes shielded in sunglasses. Slouching against the railing, her tall height was not much diminished by her tired posture. Her clothes were layered to shapelessness upon her heavy frame, so tattered and stained that she appeared to be homeless.
A man came out of the card store and the four-year-old ran to him, crying, “Mommy said candy!”
“Mommy said no!” the first mother exclaimed at her devious young son.
Aviana laughed at the scene and went to the escalator. As she rode down, a cute guy riding up threw her a smile. She returned it, though only politely. Dinner with Wyatt . . . she was looking forward to it. And whatever happened afterwards, she was looking forward to that even more.
Once off the escalator, she resumed her search and at last acquired a final top. The cashier pushed the bag over the counter and Aviana was done. It was only four. She had plenty of time to get ready for her dinner date.
The mall had only grown more crowded. People surged into and out of stores; they circled the kiosks and queued at a counter for warm pretzels. The exercising seniors blazed past; children laughed and cried; a man pushed a dolly packed with boxes through an employees only door and a security guard squatted down to help a woman pick up packages that she had dropped. The tall, overweight woman with the covered stroller was at a kiosk of custom license plate holders, her hair falling in tangled, dull gray curls over her back. Two teenaged boys skirted Aviana as she stepped out of the store, music booming from their earphones.
She got her bearings and turned left. The car was parked in the lot at the far end. Her bags thumped against her outer thigh as she walked, dodging this way and that around people headed in the opposite direction. A dress upon a mannequin got her attention and she stopped at a store window to peek in. It was the veritable Little Black Thing that all women were supposed to have in their closets, sassy and cute and with a price tag that Aviana didn’t want to learn. When her bank account was in a healthier place, she wanted a dress like this.
“Oh, sorry,” a man mumbled, swerving around her as he stared at his cell phone.
“It’s okay,” Aviana said to his back. The homeless woman was pushing her stroller along two stores away. Her sunglasses were so massive that they swallowed half of her face, and her chin was lost in a bundle of scarves. The weather was too warm to dress like that. The second that Aviana turned, the woman jerked the stroller to go inside the candle store. The abrupt movement was odd, not to mention that she presumably had a kid taking a ride under that blanket.
Aviana gave one more longing look to the perfect black dress and walked away. Ramona would have just charged it to whatever credit card she hadn’t yet maxed out. Vaguely curious if she had moved in with Dad, Aviana wondered what her mother had seen in him long ago. She was a confident, no-nonsense woman, according to Aviana’s late grandmother. Perhaps it was that she had heart problems and tired easily, and Dad would have adored running to the rescue. Now he went for the emotionally fragile instead of the physically compromised.
When people cut in front of her to enter a store, she looked over her shoulder. The woman with the stroller was there again. She had been moving along at a normal speed, but slowed as her attention turned to the kiosks. Women walked past her, all a head shorter. She was as tall as a man.
Oh, no.
Some women were very tall. There had been a few girls at her college who were six feet or a little more, one a female giant at six-five. And it didn’t mean anything that someone was shopping in Aviana’s wake. Still . . . she hadn’t seen Milan at the party when he took pictures of her. He had been disguised so that her eyes would slip past him.
The last of the people went into the store and she walked quickly past it. Making it to the middle of the mall, she looked down the avenue to the outer doors. She could go along the outside walkway to the correct side of the parking lot. But there wouldn’t be as many people as there were in here. Now going almost at a jog, she pushed through a crowd to the stores past a line of vending machines.
A jewelry store with twinkling necklaces and rings in display cases. A clothing store for teens with girls crowded around the racks. She looked behind her and blanched to see the woman shoving the stroller through the throngs.
It was him. God above, it was him.
Aviana couldn’t see Milan under those clothes, gigantic sunglasses, and wig. He looked like nothing more than a tall, obese older woman with a child. But she recognized his body language, and a shock of terror stabbed through her.
She was freezing. It was what Hollis had told her not to do. She had to do anything but freeze.
“Hey!” a man yelled as Milan barreled through heedlessly, nailing people with the stroller. The blanket was torn away, revealing a naked doll strapped into the seat underneath. It was something taken out of a dumpster or a horror movie, bald and filthy with one arm missing. On one foot was a red shoe.
“Aviana!”
The sound of his enraged voice made her shake. Adrenaline took over and she fled. It wasn’t that far to her new car . . . but then he would know what she was driving, if he didn’t already. How the hell had he found her?
It would wait. Right now, she had to get out of sight. Darting through two kiosks, she sprinted past a children’s play area and charged for the escalators where people were bottlenecked to ride. Aviana ran around them.
“Bitch, you come here now!”
To her side was an arcade. The relative darkness drew her in. Slowing to get past a bunch of kids, she penetrated to the back and crouched down behind the blocky machines. No one was playing the games around her.
She got to her knees and leaned over to see if Milan was coming in. Two women, real women, were passing the arcade. Beyond that, al
l she could see was the white slant of the escalator and potted plants beneath it.
He appeared. The scarves were sagging, and bared a masculine chin. Going at an excruciatingly slow pace past the arcade, he lowered the sunglasses to peer in. Then he turned to look up to the escalator, shouting, “Aviana, goddammit!”
He hadn’t seen her come in. His bellowed obscenity made heads crane in his direction. Dropping his gaze from the escalator, he parked the stroller between two of the potted plants. He lifted the scarves and went to the department store.
Did she double back to the avenue with the carousels and flee for her car? Was he actually searching the department store or just hanging around at the entrance to see if she emerged from the stores around it? Instinct told her to stay put. He didn’t know where she was, giving her that small advantage. If she left the arcade, she lost it.
Several minutes dragged by. A teenager came to the back to play a game and she pretended to be tying her shoe. Then she relocated to the dark place behind an out-of-order pinball game along the wall. Searching through her purse, she took out her cell phone.
The police hadn’t taken her seriously about Milan. But Wyatt would. She called him, anxiety filling her when he didn’t answer. It went to voicemail and she whispered, “Wyatt? Please pick up. I need help.”
Milan reappeared and she hung up hastily. The sunglasses perched on the bridge of his nose, he stared piercingly into the arcade. She flattened herself against the wall and counted to twenty before she looked out. Now he was staring up to the escalator.
Call me, she begged her phone. It stayed silent.
She needed to call the police. Let them laugh or call her crazy, but they would have to respond. She pressed her recent contacts by mistake and saw Hollis’ name there. Her finger went down instinctively and touched his name.
It rang and rang and rang. She hung up as it went to voicemail. Just as she pulled up the keypad to dial 911, a text came through. It was from Hollis. In a meeting. Will call later.
Stepbrother Romance: The Complete Box Set Page 14
