Striptease Read online

  He couldn’t take it anymore. She was just too much, holding the pole, her feet spread wide, her sex vividly exposed where he could once again see everything going on—his cock sliding in and out, her pink flesh so swollen and wet and stretched wide to accommodate his girth.

  Her lower body ground wildly against his. How was any guy supposed to hold out?

  And then she came, crying out and grabbing hold of his hand there between her legs, using his fingers the way she wanted, pressing them on either side of her clitoris before sliding them down with her own to wrap around the base of his shaft.

  Unbelievable. She was fuckin’ unbelievable. And he was in deeper than he’d ever thought possible. A depth that had nothing to do with how far into Melanie he’d buried his cock, but was all about the sensations flooding through him.

  And then his balls drew up and he was done. He unloaded hard and fast, unable to focus on anything but the burst of pleasure taking him apart. She took him in and took it all until he had nothing left to give.

  And when he was empty and spent, he held her to him, sinking down to the floor, keeping their bodies joined. He wasn’t ready to let her go. Not yet. Not yet. He held her there in his lap, wrapped his arms around her waist even as she continued to face away from him, her forehead braced against the hands she’d stacked on the pole.

  When she lifted her hips slowly and eased him from her body, he moved back far enough to pull off the condom. But then he reached for her again and drew her close, settling her into the “V” of his spread legs.

  Neither spoke, as if what had happened between them was far beyond explanation, too important or enigmatic to be put into words. Words. Jacob’s worst enemy.

  He wasn’t even going to try.

  7

  MELANIE SHOVED ANOTHER forkful of lemongrass chicken into her mouth, giving no more than a passing thought to what her fellow diners might think of her manners.

  She was starving, and the only person in Mai’s Restaurant she would ever see again already knew the truth about her unlady-like appetites.

  Besides, Jacob was sitting across the table shoveling down his own food just as fast and as furiously. Or he had been last time she’d stopped eating long enough to look away from her plate.

  She did so again and saw that he was simply staring at her while she fed her ravenous gut.

  Oh, yeah. Definitely unlady-like.

  “What are you looking at?” she finally asked, once she realized he wasn’t going to go away or stop staring.

  Forearms propped on the table, he gestured toward her with the tines of his fork. “You. I’m sorta getting off here watching you eat.”

  Lame, she thought, though the response was admittedly more automatic than heartfelt. “I don’t see what you find so fascinating. It’s fork to mouth, wash, rinse and repeat, just like it is for everyone here.”

  “Well, not exactly.” Jacob cast several bold glances around the Asian restaurant, where the placement of the tables left little room for privacy and even less for the servers to squeeze between. “You’re the only one eating with such…gusto.”

  She finished chewing the bite of food in her mouth, then laid her fork along the edge of her plate and laced her fingers over the napkin in her lap. Arching her eyebrows, she pressed her lips together for a moment, trying to work out whether he was teasing her for a reaction or just because he was who he was.

  And, in reality, weren’t they one and the same thing?

  Finally, she queried, “Gusto?”

  He nodded and wiggled both brows. “Yep. Gusto.”

  “I see.” Lifting her napkin, she dabbed at one corner of her mouth, hoping to hide what felt like a smile. “Well, any gusto I may exhibit is solely because of you.”

  His responding grin was devilishly rapacious. “I’ll gladly take full credit.”

  “As well you should. You caused me to miss out on the burgers at Chloe’s cookout,” she said, enjoying herself even more than the flush of perceived insult showing in his face.

  He snorted, then leaned forward and growled, “Burgers my ass. Sure. I’ll take responsibility for you running out on the food. But you ran because you couldn’t wait to get home and show me your pole.”

  If she’d been drinking, she would’ve choked. As it was, she covered her laugh with the napkin and pretended to cough. “The culprit here is your pole. Not mine.” She paused, wondered how ready either of them was for honesty, and forged gamely ahead.

  “Still, I doubt I’ll ever be able to exercise in that room again without…”

  “Without thinking about me?”

  That much of a confession she wasn’t ready to make—not to herself, and certainly not to him. “Without thinking about sex, at least,” she admitted, toying with the last bite of chicken on her plate.

  “Good. That means I’m doing my job here well.”

  Her fork stilled. “And your job would be?”

  Jacob chewed a mouthful of lettuce-wrapped spring roll, washed it down with a swallow of green tea. “To inject a bit of fun into your life. You need to think about sex more often. And now you will.”

  “Inject, huh?” Keeping a straight face around this man was growing increasingly difficult, even as she felt an odd relief that he wasn’t going anywhere just yet. “And since when are you an expert on how often I think about sex?”

  “Not an expert.” He peered into his teapot and gestured to the server for a refill. “More like a trained observer. A good cameraman sees things not everyone sees, remember?”

  Ah, yes. They’d had a similar conversation that day in the church. About how his profession had changed the way he looked at life. The peek at his hidden depths still intrigued her to this day. “Well, then. What exactly do you see that leads you to believe I don’t think about sex often enough?”

  He waited for the server to leave before answering. “Sweetheart, look at yourself. You’re too seriously black-and-white. Your clothing, your office, your condo, your car. The frames of your glasses. Even the dance you did for the tape.”

  “The dance?” She smoothed down the knee of her black linen slacks, curious how the striptease factored into his color-coded analysis.

  Jacob dunked his tea bag, frowning as he obviously tried to put his thoughts together. And then he returned the lid to the ceramic pot and looked up with that fascinating darkness flickering in his eyes.

  “As sexy as the dance was—and it was, trust me on that—it was still a shadow. It was flat and it was gray. Like you didn’t want me to see how firecrackerred you really are.”

  God, if he kept looking at her like that she was going to have to throw out her entire wardrobe. “Next time I’ll be sure to colorize the tape.”

  “Don’t do that. Just…loosen up. Wear red.” He leaned forward as if sharing a confidence. “It’s like a trigger, like wearing sexy lingerie next to your skin. No one else needs to understand the reason you’ve jazzed up your closet. But you’ll know.”

  “And I’ll think about sex.”

  “Sure.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Do it often enough and it’ll be a Pavlovian response.”

  “So…you’ve decided that because I have a preference for simplicity and uncomplicated design instead of wearing fussy accessories and come-fuck-me red pumps, I’m not sexy?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Shit. That’s not what I was trying to say.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It’s not about whether or not you’re sexy, because you’re spicy as hell. This is more about the way you see yourself, whatever the reason is that you pretend you’re not a chili pepper.”

  Spicy or not, she tossed her napkin to the center of her plate and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m sure you know you’re digging yourself one hell of a deep grave here.”

  “Uh, yeah. I figured that.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay. Here. The day of the wedding. The first day I saw you. You were wearing yellow. It was soft and sheer and all marshmallow-bunny pastel.”

  An ey
ebrow went up. “Marshmallow-bunny pastel?”

  “Wait for it.” He picked up his knife and fork as if his motor skills drove his thought processes. His voice dropped to just above a whisper. “You were hot. Sizzling beyond belief. You have no idea how hard it was not to drag you out to the van, strip you out of all that yellow and screw your brains out.”

  “I see,” she said, marginally alarmed by the hint of a tremor in her voice, soundly aroused by the idea that he had wanted her that much, absolutely fascinated by how appealing she found the idea of being ravished. “So, what you’re saying is that marshmallow-bunny-pastel yellow turns you on.”

  “No, Melanie. You turn me on. I don’t care if you’re wearing yellow or black or khaki or white.” He returned his flatware to the table and sat back, staring at her with an intensity that had her reaching up to push her glasses solidly up the bridge of her nose.

  The nervous gesture gave her away. She saw realization dawn in the gentle shake of his head. “Making that outtake video backfired on me, big time.”

  “I don’t understand.” The rapid-fire beat of her heart demanded he be clear.

  He dragged both hands down his face before looking at her through a veil of frustration. “I meant to show you how out of line you were in trying to tell me how to do my job. But all I did was remind myself how sexy you are.”

  Enchanted, she forced herself to snort. “Next you’ll give me a big cliché about how beautiful I look when I’m angry.”

  “Not beautiful. That’s too tame a word for what I saw. You were…mesmerizing.” He noted her gape and shrugged. “I forgot that you won’t ever see what I see when I look through a camera’s view finder.”

  Finally! Another glimpse into Jacob’s mind, a glimpse of what he thought of her. Mesmerising. The revelation thrilled her in unimaginable ways. “But isn’t that basic psychology? Men are more visually inclined? Women communicate on a different level?”

  He looked incredibly tired. “I guess I should’ve added a voiceover to the outtakes.”

  Not quite an apology, but a decent enough explanation. “I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if you had.”

  “True,” he said with a laugh. “But then I would’ve missed out on your retaliatory striptease.”

  “And we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “I’m not so sure.”

  Her ears perked up, along with the beat of her heart. “Why not?”

  This time his mouth quirked in that way he had that made her want to kiss him. That cute sort of lift to the left corner, and that plump little pout beneath. She wanted so badly to kiss him.

  Sleeping with him was all about pleasure, but kissing him? No. Kissing was personal in a way that involved more emotion than required by straight unattached sex. The very same emotion that had brought her to the edge of tears and reason when he’d held her in his lap not an hour ago.

  Never in her life had she felt more cherished than when she’d been sitting naked on the hardwood floor in the circle of his arms. How twisted was that, that Jacob Faulkner would be the one to show her the tenderness she’d longed for desperately in the relationships she’d had?

  “Uh, Melanie?”

  “I’m sorry.” She shook off the dangerously distracting thoughts. “What did you say?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I said that I’ve watched every frame of footage I’ve shot for the documentary. And I know I’m not imagining that you like what you see when you look at me.”

  Conceited bastard. “What if I do? I’m sure you walk past the occasional mirror. You’re not exactly Yoda.”

  He arched a wicked brow. “More like Han Solo?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Damn.”

  He was so irresistible that, well, she couldn’t resist. “Okay, yes, Han Solo. Rakish and conceited and incredibly beddable.”

  “Hmm. Beddable.”

  She nodded. “I concede the point. We would’ve ended up here together, striptease or not.”

  “Here, literally, as in eating Vietnamese?”

  “As opposed to…?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “The figurative ‘here’ of coming together and dancing naked with your pole.”

  She blinked and stared, wondering if he was as unsure about what was happening between them as she was.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said when she didn’t reply. “I’m not complaining. It’s just that as exceptionally cool as I find the idea of your pole, I would love to get you into bed. A real bed. A padded mattress with soft sheets and pillows.”

  “I see.”

  “No. I don’t think you do.” He glanced around at the closest tables, as if making sure he’d pitched his voice low enough for this particular conversation. “I’m a pig. Selfish and greedy and totally unrepentant. And you’re passionate and uninhibited and confident and daring and creative—”

  “And you want to get into my pants.”

  “Repeatedly.”

  “You’re talking about an affair.”

  “We’ve gotten a pretty nice start on one, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I suppose….”

  “Uh-uh. No supposing. Yes or no. Is what we’ve done together nice?”

  She glanced down, picked at a knotted thread on her coffee-colored, sleeveless linen top. “I’m not sure I’d call it nice.”

  “Then call it not-so-nice. But not-so-nice in a way that knocks you on your ass because it’s so hot, so tight, so—” he clenched one hand into a solid fist “—so genuinely real that even if you do go back to the way things were before, nothing will seem the same. We go ahead with this fling, and we make this documentary shoot memorable in ways neither of us ever counted on.”

  Her heart a captured wild thing trying to beat its way out of her chest, Melanie sat breathless. Looking into his eyes, listening to his voice, loving every second of what he was making her feel. Never in her life had she felt this sort of connection, which went far beyond anything she’d ever thought of as sexual.

  This…this untamed sense of being ruled by her body instead of the mind, the intellect she’d cultivated all of her life. What was wrong with her?

  Who was this masked man, and why was she suddenly so susceptible to his cocky, bad boy charm? At least he was right about one thing. She would never be able to go back to living in her black-and-white world.

  He wanted to continue what they’d started. He wanted to call it an affair.

  She said the only thing she could, a very simple, “Yes.”

  RENATA PICKED the Starbucks in the Galleria Barnes & Noble for the evening’s coffee date with Aiden.

  She’d decided the books would give them something to talk about should they run out of things to say, or should things between them get too intense as they had so unexpectedly, so…effortlessly earlier this afternoon.

  Besides, the distraction of sharing reading tastes and learning Aiden’s preferences would tell her a lot about the man he was—assuming she figured out by then whether or not she wanted to know.

  She was having a lot of trouble resolving how best to handle the attraction. But she did know her level of comfort would be much higher in a crowd than in an intimate one-on-one situation.

  As much as he intrigued her, he also thrilled her in ways that were wildly enticing. And that frightened her on a very personal level.

  She’d always thought herself immune to the sort of intimate temptation he offered; she knew too well the danger in taking that particular emotional risk, in letting herself become involved, grow attached, develop an affection for a man who could fulfill her physically but could not be the partner she needed at this time in her life.

  There were women who could compartmentalize relationships that way, and a very big part of her wished she belonged to that group. She would love to have a strictly sexual, no-strings-attached affair; she missed lying in bed with a man, feeling his skin so warm against her own. Testing the resilience of his muscles beneath exploring fing
ers. Shuddering at that first breach when taking him into her body.

  But her emotions refused to quit the equation.

  Latte in hand, she wandered through the upstairs fiction section, moving from the horror shelves into those housing romance. She had an insatiable love for a happy ending. And the relationships portrayed in the novels showed love the way it was meant to be. Healthy and whole. Two individuals bringing out the best in each other.

  Renata sighed and sipped her latte. She swore she’d have that kind of love for herself one of these days, when she found a man who shared her passions, one who understood the importance of time spent together doing nothing more than enjoying the morning’s first cup of coffee, or the late-night news while spooned together in bed.

  At the sound of a softly cleared throat behind her, she started and pressed her free hand to her chest. And then she hid her grin with another sip of her coffee before glancing back to find the very man she’d been casting in her fantasy leaning one shoulder on the corner of a seven-foot shelf that was eight inches taller than he was.

  Except he looked nothing like she’d expected. He was vibrant and brilliant; he was strong and complete. All those things she knew as well as she knew herself. Yet she shouldn’t know him at all. She’d done nothing but engage him in one long conversation in the middle of a hot afternoon.

  Hands tucked in the front pockets of his jeans, he nodded toward her paper cup. How could she have forgotten in such a few short hours the way he took her breath away?

  “I see you started without me.”

  She turned toward him, but stayed where she was, keeping distance between them. “I’ve been here a while. Browsing. I think if they rented out tables and chairs I could easily make this my office.”

  His mouth lifted in that gorgeously carefree grin he had. “Sounds like the dream of a first-class bibliophile.”