He played beautifully. Exquisitely. Incredibly. I was lost in the sound. Lost in the movement. It occurred to me he was telling me more about himself without words during the course of playing that song than he had the entire time I’d known him.
When he finished with the movement, he shut the cover to the piano and stood up.
I followed him to a standing position. “Show’s over, I guess.”
“Yeah. Show’s over.” He stepped away from the bench and turned away from me as he shook out his hands, and I wondered what it was that he was hiding from me. What he didn’t want me to see on his face.
It wasn’t my place to pry. But maybe he wanted me to ask, just as I’d wanted him to ask. I opened my mouth to do that, not quite sure what I’d say, when I heard a noise coming from the far side of the meeting room. Or more accurately, on the other side of the wall on the far side of the room.
JC cocked his head. “It’s the cleaning crew,” he said. “They vacuum on Thursdays for the weekend.”
“That’s our cue to go.”
I started toward the door, but when I turned back to see if JC was following, I found he hadn’t moved. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before we’re caught.”
He took a step in my direction, his head cocked. “I don’t think so.”
“What? You’re joking. We have to go.” I laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. He was teasing me. I was sure of it. And I didn’t like to be teased.
He met my giggle with a somber expression. “I think, Gwen, that this is a perfect opportunity to try something else. Push your boundaries, as you said earlier.”
“JC, I’m serious.” But the shiver that ran through me was as much excited as scared.
“So am I. Come here.”
I went to him because, hell, that’s what I did. I came when I was called. When I was close enough, he reached out, wrapped his hands in my robe and tugged me up against him. Hovering his mouth above mine, he whispered, “How quiet can you be?”
After he’d taught me to be loud? “Not that quiet,” I whispered back. “Besides, if you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, I’m not interested.”
“I haven’t suggested anything yet. And I think that you’re wrong. I think you’ll be very interested.” He licked my lower lip, teasing me with his tongue.
Suddenly, he drew back and picked me up. He carried me over to the piano and set me down on the closed lid. “Lean back,” he said, at the same time pushing me gently until I lay flat on the piano. The instrument was solid and cold, even through my robe. It was a stark contrast to my jittery nerves and the heat that pulsed through my veins. I knew where this was going. I knew I’d soon be stripped and fondled. I knew that we could be caught.
Yet, I did nothing to stop him.
I didn’t protest as he pulled my panties down and dropped them on the bench behind him. I let him pull me forward so my ass was directly at the edge of the instrument. When he bent my legs to prop my feet on either side of me, I didn’t fight. I was opened wide for him, my pussy exposed. And I did nothing to cover myself.
JC sat on the bench. I could feel his scorching gaze on my sex. “Perfect height,” he said, his tone coarse and strained.
The vacuum started up in the next room, reminding me we weren’t alone. I panicked and sat up enough to prop myself on my elbows.
“No, Gwen. Lay still.” His voice was hot and chocolaty. It melted over my apprehension, covering it in sweet luxury that made it almost impossible to remember what I’d been concerned about to begin with.
Almost.
I didn’t lie back down, but I stopped trying to get up.
“They make you nervous.” JC nodded toward the cleaning crew. Then he trailed a finger down the seam of my sex. “But let me worry about them. Let me worry about you.”
“And what will I worry about?”
“You’ll worry about trying not to scream.” He bent forward and swiped his tongue across my clit.
I bit my lip trying not to cry out.
Even with all the nights we’d spent together, JC had never once gone down on me. He’d mentioned it that first day in the hotel room, said that one day he’d suck me off, but after that, he seemed to lose interest. It was the same with blowjobs. Once, when I’d moved to put his cock in my mouth, he’d subtly directed me elsewhere. I’d gotten the hint. Oral was out, for whatever reason. I’d assumed it was too intimate. Or maybe it just wasn’t his thing.
Tonight, he’d changed his mind. Tonight, he seemed to want to make due on his promise.
He swirled his tongue again around my nub, massaging it with light strokes followed by a long, lush lick. He repeated his pattern, his tongue seeming to move in the opposite direction—I couldn’t be sure. I was too consumed with how good he was making me feel to really be able to discern.
Besides being overwhelmed by the physical sensation, I was also lost in the visual one. I was enrapt. Watching him like this, with his head between my legs, his eyes glued to mine as he cherished my most private parts with his tongue—it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
He glided his tongue down farther this time, playing at my entrance. “Do you like watching?” He grazed his teeth across my sensitive flesh.
“Yes,” I said on an inhale.
“I’ve been saving this, did you know?”
I shook my head. I had no words.
“I’ve wanted to please you like this for so long.” He was so close to my cunt, I could feel his breath skate across my moist flesh. “Wanted to suck on you and lick you. Wanted to taste you. Do you know why?”
“Why?” I wanted to know if he’d confirm my silent guess. But I also wanted him to stop talking altogether and return to what he’d been doing.
“Because you’ve never asked. I told you I wanted you to ask.”
Oh. That. He had said that, hadn’t he? Maybe I was the one who had avoided it because of the intimacy level.
“But now I can’t wait any longer. So I’m giving you a pass.”
I started to say thank you, but was distracted by another lick. Then he spread my folds with his fingers and sucked at my clit.
Fuck, it felt insane. So fucking good. Like a fire had been set directly to my nerve center and now I was aflame.
I fell back on the piano, unable to stay up any longer. I gasped and moaned and wriggled. When I tried to push back, to get some relief from the overwhelming sensation of pleasure, he gripped my hips and held me closer. A storm gathered underneath his lips. I grew wetter with each pass of his tongue and the muscles of my thighs tightened as my climax made its impending arrival known.
My foot slipped off the piano, and JC threw it over his shoulder. He drew back to speak again, but this time he replaced his mouth with the expert attention of his thumb. “With as vocal as you’ve become while being fucked, I’m sure this is very hard for you right now.” He spoke evenly and controlled, the exact opposite of how I felt. “But now that you have to work to be quiet, you’re going to be surprised at how amazing it’s going to feel when you come.”
It was hard. I was already struggling with it, my moans having turned into soft, jagged cries.
“If you need to,” he suggested as a finger now dipped lower to circle my rim, “bite down on these.” He dangled my panties in the air. Still holding my underwear up, he bent back down to suck on my, clit simultaneously plunging several fingers inside of me.
I snatched the panties from his grip and stuffed them into my mouth to stifle my scream.
I was vaguely aware of the vacuum in the next room turning off. But it was background noise. Irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the growing ball of tension inside of me. It tightened as JC stroked and licked me. Tightened and stretched until there was nothing for it to do but burst.
My back arched and rose off the piano as the release slammed through my body, shaking my very core, igniting every cell in my being. My jaw clenched around the muzzle in my mouth as my pussy clenched around JC
’s fingers. I was spinning, dizzy. Overwhelmed.
Even as I came, JC didn’t relent. He continued to fuck me with his mouth, with his hand, and while my first climax hadn’t quite ended, I could already feel another building. It was too much. I wanted it to end. Wanted to cry out and beg for him to stop.
And I wanted him to never stop. Wanted to die in the exquisite pleasure of this moment. Felt sure that when he let me finish, I’d be reborn as something new and wild and strong.
Stars burst across my vision as my next orgasm took hold.
Then the whole room flooded with light.
It took a second to register what was happening, especially since my head wasn’t exactly in a place where thought came easily. But JC made it clear. “Shit. We have to go.”
Disoriented, I sat up and, after blinking a few times, realized that the brightness wasn’t from my orgasm but from all the lights being turned on. I spun toward the doors we’d come in through. They were open. A woman dressed in the uniform of the hotel’s cleaning crew was pushing a vacuum through it. She saw us immediately. “Hey, what’s going on over there?”
I didn’t look to see if she came after us. I was too busy hopping off the piano and running with JC out the door closest to us. We fumbled blindly through The Boardroom and out into the corridor, where we sprinted to the elevators.
JC pressed the call button repeatedly, as if it would make the doors open any faster, while I kept glancing behind me, sure that we’d been followed.
But the doors opened and we slipped in before anyone came after us. Inside the car, we looked at each other. Then burst into laughter.
“Sorry,” I said, when I realized we weren’t alone in the car. That was also the moment I realized I had left my panties behind. I tugged my robe tighter around myself and elbowed JC.
He peered over at the couple sharing our ride. Then angled back toward me. He pulled me close—so close that I could feel the ridge of his hard cock through his jeans—and spoke low at my ear. “You were such a good girl. I promise I’ll finish you off in the room. In fact, now that I’ve tasted you, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my mouth off you, whether you ask for it or not.”
Though his voice was quiet, I felt certain the others could hear him.
I didn’t care one bit.
I grinned, leaning in to nuzzle his neck. Immediately, he stiffened. I pulled away, puzzled. I’d just let him bring me to climax with his tongue and his lips, yet he couldn’t let me caress him? Couldn’t handle the intimacy of my hug?
I studied him, looking for an answer, but he turned away, suddenly intrigued by the changing numbers on the elevator panel. When the door opened on our floor, he took my hand and pulled me out behind him without looking at me.
I tried not to let his demeanor disappoint me. It wasn’t what we were to each other, I reminded myself. We weren’t intimate like that. We weren’t personal. I knew what I’d signed up for.
The problem was, I was changing. JC was changing me. Little by little, he’d been tearing down my walls, letting me out.
But his walls stood just as tall and strong as ever.
Chapter Ten
I didn’t fall asleep with JC again until more than a month later.
This time it wasn’t a little catnap, either. I’d dozed off somewhere around two or three, and when I woke up, the sun was streaming in brightly from the terrace.
I sat up with a panicked feeling similar to sleeping through an alarm. “Oh¸ shit.”
JC bolted upright beside me, his hair messy and eyes seemingly bleary. “What is it?” He’d obviously been sleeping, too, which was almost stranger than me having nodded off. One thing I’d learned in our weeks together—the man hadn’t been lying when he said he never slept. Even though he was on a different schedule than me, he always managed to make it through our time together without a hint of tiredness.
I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Nine-oh-seven. This was the time we usually parted. I’d get dressed, not bothering to shower, then take a cab back to my apartment where I’d fall into bed, exhausted, until it was time to wake for work on Thursday night.
This change in our well-established routine was awkward.
It was also overwhelming. Because despite everything we had done with each other over the last several weeks, waking up together in the morning was at the top of the intimate list. I didn’t smell good and my mouth felt gross. It was too intimate. JC had trained me well that intimate was not in the contract. I pulled the sheet up over my naked body.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
JC rubbed his eyes then stretched his arms over his head while he yawned. “About what?”
God, he still looked delicious in the morning. He could throw on some clothes and walk out of the hotel and look fine.
It pissed me off. Especially since I never woke up well without coffee.
“What are you sorry about?” he asked again, clasping his hands behind his head.
He even smelled good. Musky and manly. Not fair.
“Sleeping,” I said with a sigh. “Dammit. I wasted our whole night.” I fell back on the bed and covered my eyes with my arm. “And now my schedule’s going to be screwed.” I was scheduled to be at work at ten that night, and I wouldn’t get home until six the next morning. It was going to be a long shift.
Plus, I really did feel bad about wasting our night. I enjoyed our time together way too much to not treasure every minute. And I’d slept through practically four hundred and twenty of those minutes.
Dammit!
I groaned at the lost opportunity as I turned to bury my head in the pillow.
“How did I guess you weren’t pleasant in the morning?” JC was as mellow as ever.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m never very pleasant.” The weight of the bed shifted as he got up. I peeked to find him heading to the bathroom, completely confident in his nudity. He kept the door open, which was also too intimate, even though he wasn’t visible from my place on the bed. Even though I’d seen and touched his cock plenty of times now.
When he finished, he stood in the doorframe and looked at me. “I don’t think that’s true.” Before I had a chance to form a comeback, he added, “But I’ll order coffee if you’d like.”
“God, yes.”
“I didn’t realize it was so easy to elicit that expression from you. I’ve been doing it wrong.”
I chuckled. “You haven’t been doing anything wrong. Trust me.” Even my aching thigh muscles praised JC’s techniques.
He sat next to me on the bed to dial room service. I forced myself to not freak out. It was…nice, I told myself, having him sit so near, chatting about mundane things, doing ordinary tasks that weren’t at all related to foreplay or midway-through-play.
But it was also unnerving. Confusing. I didn’t know how to react to him. My body was aroused, as it always was when I was near him, yet my desire was background noise rather than the only sound I could hear. The music in the foreground was something new and strange and a little bit wonderful.
JC ordered breakfast along with the coffee then shifted down so he was lying on the bed between the edge and me. He propped his head up with his elbow and brushed my sex-snarled hair out of my face.
Way too intimate.
With as standoffish as he’d always been, why was he letting this cozy morning happen after all these weeks? Was it a test? Or a change of heart? Or was I simply reading things wrong?
“So what will you do for the rest of the day?” he asked. “Stay up?”
I couldn’t think about the rest of my day—I could barely figure out what I’d do now. I turned so I was facing the ceiling, which helped me gain a smidgeon of personal space. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Honestly, I needed to get up, get dressed and get home. Same as always. I’d figure out what next from there.
But now he’d ordered breakfast…
“Take advantage of your morning and maybe just get a quick nap in before yo
u have to go to work,” JC suggested. “Is there anything you were needing to get done?”
No coffee, awkward situation, naked guy next to me—did he really expect me to be able to answer his questions thoughtfully?
Okay, I can do this. I closed my eyes and pinched at the bridge of my nose. So, my day. I’d eat breakfast with him since that’s what he expected. Then do something with my morning. Take a nap later. Go to work.
I opened my eyes again. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea.”
I scooted up so that I was leaning against the headboard and thought out loud. “Tomorrow’s Norma’s birthday. I was thinking it would be nice to make her breakfast before she goes to work. I should go to the Greenmarket and get some fresh veggies to make her an omelet.”
“Who’s Norma?”
“My sister.” I still hadn’t decided what I should give her for a gift. Norma so efficiently took care of herself—it was hard to get her anything she actually wanted.
I’d had one idea that had a low likelihood of coming through. Knowing that any messages I wanted to send to Ben at the hospital had to go through Norma, I’d had to find other methods of reaching him. Fortunately, she’d left his boyfriend’s number on the counter. I’d texted him, told him her birthday was coming up, and let him know how great a present it would be for her to hear from Ben.
It was a selfish present. One I wanted for myself as much as I wanted it for my sister.
But since I’d heard nothing from Eric but a confirmation that he’d received my message, it was looking like I needed something else. So I added, “And I need to get her a present of some sort.”
He nodded, his eyes narrowed as if deciding something. Finally he said, “Sounds boring. I’ll go with you.” Then he stood up and went to the dresser.
I sat up with as much shock as when I’d awoken to sunlight. “You will? You just said it was boring.”
“If I’m there, it won’t be boring. So yes, I’ll go.”
“You really don’t have to.” Then, because that might have sounded rude, I corrected myself. “I mean, don’t you have to work or get a flight back to L.A.?” Immediately, I worried about how that sounded too. Did it seem like I wanted him not to go? Because it wasn’t that. It was just…we’d never done anything together outside of the hotel room, minus the adventure to the piano in the Madison Suite.
Free Me Page 14
