Striptease Page 19

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She moved her fingertips to his lips, remembering the bookstore kisses, one soft and tender, one demanding and bold. She loved them both and didn’t know which she wanted. “At least not far.”

  “Only as far as the bed,” he said, before catching the tip of her index finger with his teeth, sucking the plump pad of flesh into his mouth and soothing it with his tongue.

  She thought the pleasure would cause her to die. Her body flamed, there from the end of her finger to the tips of her breasts and down to the core of her sex buried deep between her legs. Arousal was a powerful thing; the potential for raw and savage beauty equaled by nothing else.

  Pulling her finger away from his lips, she used both hands to push his shirt from his shoulders, completely baring the upper half of his body, with which he’d teased her since she’d walked in to find him asleep. He was a feast, and she wasn’t sure where to start.

  So she started where she could best reach, the center of his chest. Holding his arms captured in his shirt-sleeves at the wrists, she returned her lips to his body. This time, however, she allowed her exploration to drift until she found his nipple hidden in a swirl of soft brown hair.

  Dragging the flat of her tongue over the tip, she pressed down into the resilient flesh surrounding the sensitive disk. Aiden groaned and pushed his body against her, asking for more of the same. Oh, gladly, she thought, moving to the other, knowing as she did that her strength was no match for his.

  He had the ability to free himself from her hold at his wrists on a whim. She wondered how long he’d wait, how strong his willpower might be, how badly he actually wanted her, and she increased the pressure of her mouth, wanting to take him to that brink.

  His pulse beat in his wrists held in the incomplete circle of her fingers. It wasn’t that her hands were tiny; it was just that his were the size a man’s hands needed to be. She couldn’t wait to feel them on her body. She longed for the pleasure of his touch.

  When she instructed him, “Don’t move,” he uttered his agreement with a rough sound that wasn’t a word but a growl. She released him, moved her hands to his torso, where she placed her palms flat on his abs and trailed a line of kisses from his breastbone to the button fly of his jeans.

  Once there, she went to work on his belt buckle with nimble fingers, backing up to sit on the edge of the bed, giving herself a better position and a much better view. His erection pressed fully, impressively along the ridge of his jeans, and she wasn’t sure how long she was going to be able to wait to take him into her body.

  But neither did she want his help, and she pushed his hands away when he impatiently tried to offer. “I want to do this.”

  “You’re taking too damn long,” he muttered.

  “Careful, cowboy, or I’ll take a whole lot longer.” She loved the freedom she’d finally given herself to tease him mercilessly.

  “Give me one thing at least.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If you’re not going to let me get my hands on you, at least let me lose the shirt.”

  Her hands hovering at his fly, she pretended to consider. “Okay. But no touching. I’ve wanted this for too long to rush it.”

  He had one arm out and then the other and had tossed his shirt to the floor before he said, “I’m not sure what you’re planning down there, but there’s a good chance I’ll be the one rushing here if you’re not careful.”

  “Oh, I plan to be very careful,” she said.

  As if she had a clue what she was talking about! As hard as he was, she was correspondingly wet. Careful was barely a consideration. All that mattered was getting him out of his jeans so she could see him and taste him, so she could take him into her mouth and learn what he liked.

  A very practical part of her wanted to get this fumbling first time out of the way so they could linger through a second. But she wasn’t here to be practical. And she was going to hang on to the fantasy of a perfect first time as long as she possibly could.

  Because for some reason, a reason she’d yet to examine too closely, this particular first time meant more than had any before.

  She finished with his belt buckle and went to work on the row of copper buttons. Each movement of her hands brought a low moan to his mouth. One button, then two, and the waistband of his cotton boxers came into view. With the third button freed, his boxers took on a new dimension, a full dimension, and at the fourth button, then the fifth, she found herself in awe.

  That awe refused to wait any longer. Seeing his bare belly, his abs so tight, rippled, the dusting of light brown hair, wasn’t enough. She wanted more. And so she carefully, very carefully, tugged both jeans and shorts down his thighs. His beautiful erection sprang free.

  Aiden kicked out of the rest of his clothing while she took him in her hand. He was so incredibly warm, hot even. So solid and so firm. The male body inspired such feelings of wonder and amazement and, in her, a truly intense need to love. She’d never been able to separate sex from emotional involvement, which made this encounter all the more frightening.

  For the first time in her life she was going to sleep with a man before she’d made an emotional commitment. She smiled. Who was she trying to convince? She and Aiden might not have spoken of a future, but she wouldn’t have come here if her heart hadn’t been involved. And she knew by the way he wanted her that, if he wasn’t there yet, he was close.

  She took him in her hands, feeling the skin of his penis, so soft even stretched to such lengths as it was. She moved one hand to cup his balls, held his shaft in the other. With the heel of her palm pressed to the base rigid with veins, she slid her thumb along the underside to the crevice of the head.

  And then she leaned forward and wrapped her lips around him, sucking him into her mouth until the vibrations from his groan tickled her tongue. Inwardly, she smiled, loving that she so easily drew him into that response as much as she loved his taste and his feel.

  So, when he broke his promise not to touch, she found no reason to argue. His hands went to her shoulders where he pushed his fingers beneath her cardigan to the straps of her silk camisole. His frustration wasn’t long in coming; he wanted her out of her clothes and couldn’t get to her, considering the way she was sitting.

  As much as she hated to do so, she released him and got to her feet, kicking out of her flats as she stood. He was so much taller than she was, his chest so broad, his legs so long, the way a man’s should be. And, like a man, he didn’t argue when she went to work on the more intricate fastenings holding her clothing together.

  Her skirt dropped to her ankles and her cardigan followed, and soon she stood in nothing but her camisole and lacy bikinis. But when she reached for the hem to pull off her top, Aiden stopped her.

  “My turn,” he said, trading places. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her between his spread legs.

  Her hands went to his shoulders, her gaze to his thick penis jutting upward so urgently. When he made no move to speak or to say another word, she returned her gaze to his face.

  His eyes were so solemn and his expression intense with so much of what he seemed desperate to say. “Do you know how beautiful you are?”

  She shook her head; her hair tumbled around her shoulders. “Not half as beautiful as you.”

  His laugh was a scoff. “I’m scraped and scarred and held together by pins in one ankle and a rod in one hip. Hardly much to look at.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you know,” she said, and slid her hands from his shoulders to cup his face. If he was scraped and scarred, she’d never even noticed. All she cared about seeing was his soul in his eyes.

  He closed his eyes then, moved his hands from her waist up her rib cage and brushed his thumbs over her nipples, which were straining beneath the silk. And then one thumb was gone and, in its placed, his tongue. He lapped and suckled and drew her into his mouth, silk camisole and all.

  Sensation descended, as if a line ran from his mouth to the
core of her sex, as if his lips tugged there between her legs at the same time. She wiggled because she couldn’t help it. And he moved his hands to her back, slid them down to her bottom and into her panties—panties that quickly found their way to the floor.

  She whimpered, wanting his touch, wanting him to finish stripping her. But he simply moved to her other nipple, leaving the cool air to blow on the wet silk covering the one he’d so thoroughly aroused. This time her whimper came with a shiver, and the shiver only worsened when Aiden’s hands made their way up the backs of her thighs.

  He reached the cleft of her bottom and urged her legs apart. She clenched her belly and opened, and he slipped his fingers between, seeking her moisture and growling in approval at the dampness he found. Dampness, ha! She was so incredibly wet and so incredibly ready, and she wanted out of the rest of her clothing now.

  “Please, Aiden,” she begged, her hands moving to the camisole’s hem. “Let me get this off.”

  With his tongue still circling her nipple, he looked up at her with a wild sense of discovery in his eyes. And looking down at him there, his mouth still on her breast, was almost more than she could take. She shoved him away and whipped off her top.

  Before she even had a chance to look at him again, he’d grabbed her up by the waist and tossed her none too gently to the bed.

  She bounced, and scrambled to the center, and barely a second passed before he’d covered her body with his. Her legs parted automatically; her arms went around his neck, and without asking for permission she brought his mouth to hers. His tongue slid over hers as he rolled on a condom and entered her. When she gasped, he swallowed her cry.

  He moved his hands to cradle her head, and loved her with his beautiful mouth and body. She surged upward to meet each of his smooth, easy strokes, clutching him tightly, fearing to let him go and never again know such pleasure. Her body glowed with a heat that turned her inside out.

  She wasn’t going to be able to wait. As much as she wanted to, as bitterly as she fought to hold off her completion, she failed. But the success that followed was worth letting herself go. She pulled her mouth free from Aiden’s and cried out, her arms around his back holding him pressed to her.

  She wanted him there, needed him there, his solid strength grounding her as she shuddered through her release. He waited until she was done, kept up the rhythm she needed until she was splintered and exhausted and spent.

  Only then did he drive himself downward with furious strokes, taking her apart a second shattering time as his orgasm ripped through his body. He continued to thrust, and she kept her legs wrapped around the backs of his thighs, her hands pressed there to the sensitive small of his back.

  When he finished, when he slowed and shuddered, when he sighed and finally collapsed, only then did she let him go, moving her hands up and down his back in a soothing, loving caress. She whispered into his ear words that made no sense, that were sounds more than decipherable, intelligible avowals of what this moment meant.

  In a language of her own making, she told him all the things that would come with time.

  For now, however, this was enough.

  13

  SITTING IN HER OFFICE late that evening, Melanie turned her chair to face the windows, and ignored the work on her desk. Except for the tech guys who always pulled strange hours, the place was empty. Her partners had long since gone home to their men.

  Even Kinsey, another remaining holdout in the permanent mating game, was out to dinner and a movie with Doug Storey, Anton Neville’s business partner. Melanie didn’t know about Poe; the other woman’s private life was still an enigma.

  Melanie’s wasn’t much better because…oh, wait. She didn’t have one. She had work and she had sex and she had exercise and she had sex. She had a man, one she could probably even go home to if she wanted, but she’d be going home to him solely for sex.

  She just didn’t have the sort of thing going on with Jacob that Chloe did with Eric, or Sydney did with Ray, Macy with Leo, Lauren with Anton, ad nauseum.

  And whose fault was that? Melanie thought, twirling her pencil between her forefingers and thumbs.

  Not that such a relationship was what she wanted. After all, she was the one so very happily married to her career.

  She was also the one coming to realize that none of her worries over where the company was headed mattered to anyone else involved. Her partners were of the “winds of change” attitude, bending and blowing in the breeze.

  Melanie was concerned about the imminent break when the storms got too strong—a situation all too common in the e-tail market. Why was she the only one able to see that? gIRL-gEAR was not an indestructible force.

  What the company was, however, was the investment into which she’d poured her entire life since that senior year at the University of Texas when the partnership inspiration had struck on a cold November night in a new Austin Starbucks.

  Suddenly she was in a very bad mood.

  Feeling betrayed.

  Feeling resentful.

  Feeling as if she was actually the one drifting while the others had dropped anchor in a port foreign to her, a port secure enough that none of them ever again had to worry about swimming in open shark-infested man-waters.

  Fighting a sudden sting of tears, Melanie stared at the traffic sweating along on the Southwest Freeway in the heat and humidity that lingered at day’s end. She felt raw and exposed, but, unlike the earlier interview process, this disclosure of emotion was private, one she’d never thought she would make even to herself.

  All this time she’d so proudly proclaimed her independence, the complete fulfillment she found through her work, when the brutal truth, the unvarnished reality, was that she wanted exactly what her partners had.

  God, but she wanted what they had.

  A reason to go home at the end of the day. To be wanted, cherished, supported, encouraged. To have a best friend who was also her lover. As much as she longed to be the independent woman she’d been brought up to be, she wanted even more to simply be loved.

  She sniffled and blinked, and then she got mad—at her partners and at Jacob and at herself and, oh, too many other things to list. Fine. She’d just call up her man and invite him over for a night of mindless oblivion. That was exactly what she needed, to sex her way into a better mood.

  Lately, though Jacob had been as inspired and inventive as ever, she’d sensed a change in him when they were in bed. The last two nights he’d seemed especially distracted, as if his body was willing but he had too much on his mind.

  The downside of a being workaholic. And the very reason a long, hot night together was just what Dr. Melanie ordered for the both of them.

  She started to reach for her phone, then remembered the URL he’d sent her the day she’d stripped for him in her office, the link broadcasting the feed from the Webcam in his office. She pulled up the e-mail with the link to the page and clicked, tapping her fingers on her mouse as she waited.

  If he was there—and no doubt he was—she’d send a text message to his cell phone and dare him to play the male stripper for her. It was about time turnabout turned into fair play. The stripping around here had not exactly been of the equal opportunity sort.

  Yes! There he was! Sitting in front of his desk in one of the two visitors’ chairs, another man in the one at his side. Hmm. There went the stripping fantasy. Her excitement quickly became resignation. As adventurous as he was, performing for a live male audience would be drifting into territory better left uncharted.

  Both men sat forward in the chairs, Jacob with his elbow propped on the front edge of his desk, their attention riveted to the television sitting on the office’s corner credenza. The Webcam’s fixed angle allowed her to catch only flashes of movement and color—until Jacob’s visitor sat back and out of the way of the screen.

  They were looking at a scene shot in the gIRL-gEAR office. There was no way to mistake that deep purple office decor. It seemed Jacob was sharing do
cumentary footage he’d shot. Asking for input, perhaps? A second professional opinion? She leaned toward her monitor and squinted, adjusting her glasses as if one or the other of the actions might help clarify her voyeuristic curiosity.

  Jacob was gesturing toward the television where—finally!—Melanie caught a glimpse of Chloe in her candy-heart pink office, sitting at her desk with her makeup mirror out and her train case of cosmetics emptied out onto her blotter.

  Hmm. Melanie knew that her partner dolled herself up every night before heading off to meet Eric. And…now that she thought further, Melanie seemed to remember complaining about that very thing to Jacob. A funny feeling had her shifting around in her chair.

  She propped her elbow on her desktop, leaned her chin into the palm of her fist and frowned as she watched Jacob and the other man exchange words before he fast-forwarded through that section of tape to another. In this scene, Lauren lounged in her desk chair, doodling on her desk blotter while chatting.

  An intimate, very unprofessional conversation if her drowsy lids and half smile were any indication. Meanwhile, lights on her phone flashed unnoticed and unattended. Another complaint made in confidence to Jacob…

  Melanie felt as if she’d been hit with a stun gun. She could not believe this was happening. This time the burn of tears was anger-driven, anger over Jacob’s betrayal and at her own naiveté. He’d told her the documentary was his best work ever, that this was the project guaranteed to bring fulfillment of his ambition.

  Right now she was wishing her original character assassination of Jacob as a lazy bum had been dead-on. She didn’t want him to have anything resembling ambition. Not if this was the result.

  He might benefit from what she was seeing, from exposing provocative office scenarios sure to spark questions and prurient interest, but this documentary would never take the company to a higher level. One that would reassure clients and an industry controlled by men.