King of Hearts

by Stevenson, Jennifer

  “You have petunias!” she said, looking at the baskets of pink flowers hanging on the porch.

  “Lawn service brings ’em.” He tossed his keys on the hall table and moved through the front two rooms, turning on lights.

  It felt funny letting a woman into his house. It occurred to him that this was the first time in the two years he’d owned it that he’d brought a woman home. Tammy had the McMansion in Naperville and the waitresses all had apartments. That was why you went home with waitresses. They lived near your jobsite. You might as well sleep in your car, which he frequently did.

  She followed, holding her purse like a fig leaf.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Um,” she said, turning to him, standing so close that the move rubbed her tits against him. “I was thinking.”

  He looked down into her face. Her eyes glowed. Her lips were parted and her breath was sweet and hot.

  His heart raced its engine. “Yeah?”

  “If there was something you would rather have,” she said in a little squeaky voice.

  He swallowed. “I’d love it if....”

  Her face tipped up. “If?”

  His pulse took off, zero to sixty. “If you would take down your hair.” Where the hell had that come from? He cleared his throat. “It looked so beautiful that time in the piston room.”

  Her eyes gleamed. “But that was by candlelight.”

  Go for broke. “There’s candles in my bedroom.”

  She smiled in a trembly way that said, Help me get there.

  So he kissed her.

  Hot. Sweet. Soft. Deep. Her purse fell on his foot.

  He waited for her to touch him first, her hands on his arms, and when he bent his elbows she slid her hands up his shoulders, over his chest, around his back. “Come with me,” he said into her mouth. “I want to see your hair by candlelight again.”

  They sort of waltzed to the bedroom, a step this way, a step that way, kissing, and King Dave had another dumb thought: This is so good, I don’t want it to end. He didn’t want to stop kissing her. Couldn’t be bothered to get her dress off. Just stand here and kiss, and turn another step toward the bedroom, stop in the doorway, and lean against it, so she could get medieval on his mouth, oh, man.

  In the doorway, she leaned hard against him. “I’ve been thinking about this for weeks.” She pushed him hard against the doorway with her strong hips and ran her hands up over his tee-shirted belly and chest and shoulders and neck and face and dug her fingers into his hair and kissed his throat and then ran her hands back down over him and he clutched the doorway to stop himself from tearing her dress off with one hand.

  What the hell. He grabbed with both hands. Under the dress, her thighs were cool, though her lips burned on his face.

  “Take it off,” he begged.

  She backed into the bedroom. “Light the candles?”

  He stood there shuddering like a car with fuel pump problems. His heart staggered back down to a fast idle.

  She was unspeakably gorgeous. The late afternoon sun poked in one corner of the bedroom window, brightening a strip of blue dress on her shoulder, making a streak of white skin on her throat light up, setting a narrow band of her hair on fire.

  “Candles, huh?” he panted. “They won’t look like much. The sun’s still out.”

  Her eyes glittered. “It’ll go down.”

  Breathless, he went to the dresser for matches and started lighting candles in front of the Virgin Mother.

  A sound made his head whip around. She’d slipped out of the room. In the next three heartbeats, he felt the world rock around him. “Nadine?”

  Not again.

  He remembered his keys lying right there on the front hall table. Oh, shit, not again.

  But then she was back in the doorway, holding her purse.

  “What’s in it?” he said, his voice harsh. “A gun?”

  “Look out, you’ll burn yourself.”

  His fingers scorched and he yelped and shook out the match.

  “I stole these from your glove box.” She pulled a fistful of condoms out of her purse.

  His heart jump-started. Relief made him too weak to move. Then, groping behind him with one hand, he turned the wooden painting of the Virgin Mother to the wall. “Come over here.”

  Trusting him at last, Nadine tossed the condoms on the bed, dropped the purse in the doorway, and floated happily toward him. She reached for the back of her head. The room glowed with fading sunset and candlelight. The high four-poster bed, king-sized of course, was covered with a shiny gold coverlet and lots of puffy white pillows, kind of like her bust pushing up out of this ridiculous dress. She had a confused fantasy of lying on the pillows holding King Dave’s face between her breasts. A streak of heat lightning shot up the center of her body, making her stumble, making her hands tremble among the bobby pins.

  “Would you—” She felt like a fool for asking. “Would you talk to me? Kind of explain—”

  “So you like talking.” He smiled. “Your hair should be registered as a weapon, girl. Is that why you put it up?” With one hand he drew her close. With the other he stroked her hair, lifting a hunk of it and letting it slide through his fingers.

  She swallowed. “I always have.”

  His hands shook. She felt an answering shiver in the long bones of her legs.

  “King Dave,” she said tremulously. They stood in front of his dresser with the candles burning on one side and on the other side the bed glowing like a monster bar of gold. Surely he knew she was burning up inside. Why didn’t he grab her, the way he did that night in the piston room? “What do I do?”

  His eyes were full of understanding. “Leave it all to me.”

  The weight of her virginity rolled off her shoulders. “Thank you.”

  “Now I’m gonna get you naked.” He slid one hand around her back and the other hand up under her dress, light but firm, hot and sure, and she melted against him, and he proved his journeyman standing by getting her naked in about four seconds flat. She didn’t even notice how he got the dress over her head.

  He kissed her throat until she was dizzy. He bit the back of her neck behind her earlobe and, voila, no underpants. He placed her hands on his Levi’d butt and she leaned against him, naked now, thrilling to the feel of the rough denim on her skin between her hip and her belly, and while she felt that, he peeled off his shirt and the sight of his naked chest rocked her backward.

  “I love your skin,” he murmured. “Thank God you have so much of it.” She closed her eyes and pressed her face into his chest. “Lean against me. Mm, like that. Oh, this hair.” Her skin was burning up. Under her fall of hair, his hands stroked between the backs of her knees and the backs of her ears.

  She needed something and she needed it now. She grabbed a double handful of his jeans and pulled him hard against her.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Let me. I talk, you listen.”

  A noise broke from her throat. “Please.”

  “Shh.” He moved her hands up over his chest to his shoulders, pecked her on the mouth, then opened his mouth and took control. She clung to his shoulders. He bent over for a moment, thrashing around somewhere below the kiss, and when at last he closed the vast distance between their bodies she felt something bang against her belly, hot and confusing.

  She broke the kiss and looked. Good gracious. It looked a lot bigger than it had through a window, across an alley, sprayed Day-Glo orange. “Oh, I don’t think I can—”

  “Princess, you have no idea how powerful you are. You can. Wait. Let me.” He waltzed her around one swinging step and then she felt the bed against the backs of her thighs. “Ready?”

  He put his hand under the small of her back.

  “It’s like a tango,” she said, getting it.

  “Exactly,” he said, and bent her backward over the bed. Her body shouted, Yes, NOW!

  He bent over with her, chest to chest. He spread her arms ou
t on the bed, leaning firmly against her so she wouldn’t slide down that slippery gold coverlet. He sifted her hair over the coverlet by her head, over her shoulders and arms. His gaze flickered up and down her body, hot and concentrated, as if he couldn’t wait to see everything at once. She lifted her shoulders, offering him her breasts. He pushed his knees forward a bit and her knees parted, and she slid backward onto the bed on that slippery coverlet and her bare heels left the floor.

  He lifted himself off her body and looked at her face, then down, down, and it felt as if he was pulling another, invisible layer of clothes off her, leaving her more naked under the stroke of his look. She heard his breath catch.

  “Okay,” he said in a cracked voice. “We have to go slow. That night at the Opera House, we rushed. So. Now we go slow.”

  She couldn’t think about anything but the force of his thighs parting hers, leaning against her, pushing her slowly by inches up onto the bed away from the solid ground, spreading her legs farther apart and making something inside her holler, Yes!

  He laid a hand on her left breast. “First we find out what you like.” She groaned. The wicked grin flashed. “You like talking.”

  Her lips were dry. She licked them. His thighs twitched between hers, shooting sparks up into her belly.

  “I can see,” he said, looking at her breast under his hand, “why you guard these things. They’re perfect.”

  “How?” she gasped out.

  “Well,” he said, and his thumb rubbed across the tip of her nipple. She threw her head back and grabbed the coverlet with both hands. “They’re certainly wide awake.”

  “King Dave,” she said, exasperated, “my whole body is awake. I don’t know what you think you’re doing but I wish you’d do it.”

  “Don’t interrupt. Where was I? Oh yeah,” he said, moving his evil seducer look to her breast again. “Perfect. White and round and big enough for a guy with big hands. We need a lot of tit, us big-hand guys,” he said seriously, spreading his other hand to show her. He rubbed her nipple again and her back arched. “And we like when you do that.”

  Her hand came up and slapped on his. “You’re teasing,” she accused.

  He grinned. “You’re catching on.”

  “It’s making me crazy.”

  “Well, good, right?”

  Her mouth opened. Was that good? “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, country girl like you?”

  “We are not beasts in the field,” she said, though she felt fairly bestial at the moment.

  “Man,” he said, “those Texas boys must be lousy lovers.” He ran his thumb over her left nipple again, though she pressed her hand hard down on top of his to stop the feeling so she wouldn’t spaz out again, oh, again please? He put two fingers of his other hand on her right nipple and her body jumped again. He kept looking at her face. Like he knew what she felt.

  He probably does, you dummy. She let go of his hand because there was no point trying to stop him, he would do it anyway.

  “King Dave? Can I touch you?”

  He studied her nipples, tweaking them as if they were dials on a radio, making waves crash through her. “Why would you want to do that?” he said absently.

  “You—you look nice.” It was so hard to say things.

  “You can touch me if you can tell me exactly what you want to touch.”

  She groaned. “I—it’s hard to—my words are all-” He tweaked her nipples again, and she moaned.

  “Okay. Maybe you should leave the words to me.” He ran his palms up her breasts to her throat, cupped her face, and then drew his hands down her throat, over her breasts, over her belly, down inside her thighs. Then he gently pressed her knees apart.

  “I—” The word turned into a sigh. She felt his hands bear down, pressing harder as they slid up her thighs.

  A gasp shocked out of her as he did something strong and hard with his thumbs in the very center of her body.

  “It’s—not—fair!” she cried, feeling that moment of silence between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder. The silence mushroomed out of the middle of her body, right where his thumbs were pressing, and then the thunder hit, silently but with a shock that twisted her like a wet sheet flying on a clothesline, flipping her inside out, then back again, in the space between her in-breath and her sigh.

  When the thunder had died away in the distance, she realized he was leaning against the bed between her thighs, watching her with a pleased expression, as if he had just invented her and hadn’t realized until now how darned brilliant he was.

  “Did I die?” she said.

  “Princess, you’ve always been alive.”

  She nodded. “Can I touch you now?”

  “Yes.” After a moment he added, “Please.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  He leaned over her, feeling as if the rest of his life would depend on how well he handled himself in the next few minutes. She’s a waitress, said the voice of doom in his hindbrain. Her hair spread like white gold over the yellow gold of his coverlet and her body glowed like buffed silver. She reached for him. Dime a dozen, said his hindbrain.

  Shut up, he told it.

  She was looking at his dick, which he was trying not to think about, and her hands closed around it. His breath caught.

  “It’s so soft,” she said, sounding surprised.

  “Not exactly,” he said in a tight voice.

  “I’m sorry. It’s only that I’ve—” She stopped.

  Couldn’t even say it, poor preacher’s kid. She’s been lusting for my dick ever since that night in the alley. Her gaze returned to his dick. He arched his back away from her, propping himself up as high as he could.

  She stroked him and made little marveling noises and ran her fingertip around the cap and tapped him right on the end where he was already starting to leak. He twitched like a wild thing.

  “That’s enough,” he squeaked. To her puppy-dog eyes he said, “Touch something else now. Please.”

  Please was coming easier. In a minute he would be begging her on bended knees and licking the soles of her feet.

  She smiled a dirty smile. Now she wanted to touch his arms and shoulders. He lowered himself to his elbows so his dick could touch all that warm, smooth flesh, so rich, so unlike the bony girls he’d dated. It was too much. It was like eating a whole cake in one bite. She stroked his shoulders and plucked at the hairs in his armpits and cupped the muscle on his pecs.

  “You must lift weights.”

  “Twenty-five hundred pounds a day. Not all at once.” He grinned at her expression. She rubbed his nipples with her thumbs and he shuddered. “Gently, babe.”

  “Not like it is for me,” she murmured. “Huh.”

  Her hands stroked down, down, and he lowered himself closer so she could reach his buns, thinking, Not much longer. He groped on the coverlet over her head and found a condom.

  As he got the rip tag on the condom between his teeth, she murmured in his ear, “I’ve always liked your buns the best.” She stroked them up and down, up and down, reaching between his thighs to tickle the backs of his balls, and he jumped.

  “End of the road, babe,” he said, lifting himself up off her a few inches so he could get the condom in position.

  She looked down while he grappled with it. “Can I see?”

  He trembled all over with the effort of holding himself off her skin. “Sure.” What the fuck. Those Texans must be assholes. She’s never seen a condom on before?

  She giggled. “It’s gold!” He saw her reaching and quickly grabbed her finger before she could make contact.

  “I’m trying to go slow, princess. Work with me.” His breath came raggedly. Repartee was beyond him. He propped himself on one hand and stroked her with the other. She curled under his touch. “Now we check for lube,” he panted, touching her pussy lightly and finding it slippery. “Oh, yeah. Oh, baby.”

  He tried one finger, two. Tight but ready. “Nadine?”

 
Her blue eyes were Bambi-wide. “Now?” Her hands closed around his upper arms. “I’m—a little nervous.”

  “You’re a goddess,” he said, swinging his hips into position. “We’ll go slow.”

  And, man, she was tight. He held her shoulders as she held his arms, both squeezing—she, he was guessing, nervous, and he trying with all his strength to keep from plunging in at a single stroke. A high keening noise escaped his throat as he slid in. He stuck, and felt her clench around him.

  “King Dave, I think we’re stuck.”

  “No, no,” he breathed, sounding calm while his body went nuts from holding still. “Relax. Think deep. Think deeeeep. Think about opening very wide.” His brain lost touch with the flow of words out of his mouth. “Think about a waterslide. Think about a waterfall. Falling water splashing, splashing down, falling through, falling.... Let me in, Nadine, for the love of God!”

  The last words choked out of him and she loosened and he slid home as she yelled in his ear. At the very deepest point he paused, shuddered, then shuddered harder as she clenched tight around him again. His brain let go. He dropped onto her breast, feeling boneless. Lost it! His dick swelled in that desperately tight space and hardened again. Mother of God, one stroke and she’d made him come, he was a disgrace to the race of Irishmen.

  His thoughts whirled like crows in the night and slowly he pulled away, feeling her squeeze him, sucking him back in whenever he relaxed. When he could feel the tip of his dick touching her opening he said, “Last call, sweetheart. You okay?”

  In answer she grabbed his shoulders with both hands, digging all her nails into his flesh, and yanked him into her.

  He lost it again. In one swift stroke he slid back inside, and then the two of them banged away, biting each other on the neck, growling like beasts in the field after all, laughing and crying and talking nonsense.

  “Ever seen—an elephant—take—a bath?”

  “I want this! Don’t stop! The thunder’s coming!”

  “I think I love you—”

  “This is a fuck, right? Oh, King Dave, again!”

  “Definitely—defini—love—you—”

  “I love you—”