He pushed me against the wall. Something rattled. Me. I rattled. He yanked my shirt up, getting under my bra and pulling it over my breasts. It happened so fast, his mouth on my nipple, testing its limits, his hands pulling my jeans open.
I whispered his name, and he shushed me by putting his mouth over mine again. I groaned once, and when he put his hand over the crotch of my jeans and pressed it hard, I groaned again.
“I’ve wanted you for weeks,” he said between his teeth. “Now this.” He pressed his fingers against me hard, and I gasped with pleasure. “I’m going to have it.”
His eyes were so blue, so intense, and his voice wasn’t the laid-back party boy I’d met. He was a guy who didn’t take no for an answer, and I was a girl who wanted to say yes.
He picked me up and deposited me on the kitchen table. I wrapped my legs around him, and he pushed me down, grinding his erection into me, mirroring the motions of his tongue in my mouth.
“Yes,” I said. No time for another word. Joined below the waist like magnets, he carried me down the hall, kissing faces and necks, all tongues and lips, my hands under his shirt. He was hard everywhere. Taut. Skin stretched over lean muscle.
He pushed his dick against me and I pushed back. Pure heat. Friction fire. The flame of potential of what was coming. I couldn’t get enough of him in my hands. They were too small, clawing at clothes and skin.
“You ever been eaten out by a southern boy?”
I had to think. There hadn’t been many, but no one from Los Angeles was from Los Angeles.
“Southern England.”
“Doesn’t count.” He hooked his fingers under my jeans and started peeling them off. “You’re in for a treat, sweetheart. Us southern boys eat pussy like pie. And I like pie.”
Yes. Yes and yes. S’il vous pla?t and thank you too. The world could take these last weeks in his employ and shove them right where the sun don’t shine because—
“Daaaaaadddeeeeeee . . .”
“I have no idea how this happened,” Brad said softly. He was lying down in the dark on the other side of his daughter’s sleeping body. I could see him over the edge of her soft round cheek. Her arm was draped over me, and her legs were thrown back to hook his to her.
“You’re spoiling her, that’s how it happened.”
“She’s afraid of having a nightmare. Then she became one.”
I’d never seen him say a negative thing about his daughter or show signs of a short temper. I was glad to see he was finally getting involved enough to get grouchy.
He reached over her and touched my hair.
“You’re real pretty on the kitchen table.”
“We should wait anyway.”
“Not interested.”
“We agreed.”
His voice got sharp with urgency, but not unkind. No. Just ferocious.
“There is no way I can stand seeing you and not fucking you.”
I pointed at Nicole, raising my head a little to make a face, mouthing the word language. Nicole groaned and opened her eyes halfway.
He and I waited in silence for her breathing to get regular again.
“What’s the difference?” he whispered.
What was the difference? People.
“I had lunch with Ray Heywood today,” I said. “There was a dog pack outside Kate Martello’s, and they wanted to know how you kissed. Ray showed me pictures from the party. It was us in the yard. It was dark. It could have been anybody . . . but they all know it’s me. And he knew it too. He was going to offer me my job back but couldn’t because of the pictures.”
“What did you say?”
“I thanked him for not printing them.”
“About how I kissed. What did you say?”
I picked my head up. Nicole didn’t stir.
“Brad, really?”
You’re a challenge to him.
“Well that was a real short one the other night. Just now? Before the little nightmare? I think you got a better sense of what you’re refusing.”
“I’m not refusing. I’m postponing.”
Nicole scooted down in sleep, nuzzling her head into my neck and her body into her father. She wasn’t between our faces anymore, and I could see him in the half light. I could have leaned up and kissed him with the slightest effort, except for what that would have led to.
He reached for me, touching my cheek. I couldn’t breathe when his finger moved to my chin and stroked my lower lip. My mouth went dry.
“Did you always play it so safe?” he asked.
“Yes.” I answered too quickly. “No, actually.” He smiled when I changed my mind, pulling my bottom lip a little. It would take the slightest movement to take his finger in my mouth. I wanted to taste it.
“Tell me.” His whisper was a seduction. “Tell me everything.”
The night was so dark, and I felt so safe in our little cocoon that I decided to tell him.
“My parents were in the military so we moved around all the time, but we moved to Austin when I was fourteen. Just another school where I was the new girl. I had no friends. I never had time to keep them. I never fit in because by the time I figured out what I had to do to fit in, we moved again. But this time I talked my parents into sending me to the regular school instead of the Lycée. I just wanted to be a regular kid, and the difference between the French school and a regular public school in Texas? Planetary. I’d traveled all over the world at that point, and that Texas school was like nothing I’d ever seen.”
“How?”
“Everything was football. It was like a religion. Except for the religion, which was second.”
“My mother would argue with that.”
“Well, she’d be right, I’m sure. But from the outside, where I was? The high school players were treated like kings. The girls whispered their names. And there was one. Tyler Stokes.” I said it with the same fascination I heard it.
“Let me guess. The quarterback.”
“Yes. A senior. With a girlfriend who was the biggest bee-eye-tee-see-aytch in the school. I could tell it the minute I saw her. So I steered totally clear of her and hung out with the kids in the French club.”
“You had a French club?”
“Four of us, actually, including Tyler.”
He chuckled.
“His mother made him join because he’d failed before. She wanted him to go to Texas Tech, and he needed a language.”
“And he hit on you,” he said as if it was a fact he already knew damn well.
“Yeah.” I didn’t continue right off, remembering that moment in the hall after school. We were outside the library. The other girls in the club had practically done his French homework for him, and he cornered me. I’d felt short and vulnerable, yet emotionally aroused. “I felt like I had this big opportunity. I could really fit in. I could live where I was as if I was from there. You know? Like he could validate me or something. I played coy for a week, but when he broke up with his girlfriend and came for me an hour later, I couldn’t even pretend I’d say no. So, yeah. It went on for about a month. And I didn’t play it safe because he didn’t want to. I wanted to fit in so badly. I dreamed of a big stupid wedding and a big dress. A party. All of it. So stupid.”