Chapter 6

 

When Seth had returned to the cabana from his long swim, he’d found it empty. His platter had been cleared away, and Meg—along with her bag—was gone. She’d left her book, though. He fished his cell phone out of his paperback and read the display. Four. Bit early for dinner, but they had an early flight out and would want to get to bed early.

He headed first to Meg’s room and knocked. As there was no response, he let himself in to deliver her paperback. He padded as quietly as he could through the living room and into the master bedroom.

Atop the bed, Meg lay on her back, propped up on the bank of pillows and doing nothing but showing off the bounty of one of God’s most perfect creations.

“I just…came in to bring you your book,” he said, trying dutifully to keep his eyes fixed above her collarbone, but then she recrossed her legs at the ankles and his gaze flitted downward. “Uh…were you hot? I can turn on the fan.”

She crooked an index finger at him. “Figured you’d want to bring me that.”

When he didn’t immediately move, she crooked that finger again.

He edged to the left side of the bed and squatted near the headboard. “Yes?”

“Are you so unmoved by me?”

Unmoved? “I don’t know what you mean.”

She swept a hand demonstrably down her body, indicating her nudity. “You walk in and see me like this, and you don’t react. How am I supposed to feel?”

Safe, perhaps? Unmolested?

Seth was under no pretenses about how he looked to women. Hell, some had told him that they couldn’t be with a man his size. And given his proclivity toward smallish women he could probably carry out of a hundred miles of wilderness on his back, his options had been limited. He’d learned to rein in his enthusiasm.

He stared down at his knees. “I’m not very good at reading women, so please don’t take it personally if I don’t respond the way you’d expect. Tell me what your expectations are, and I’ll try to react within the confines of those.”

He looked up in time to see her cock her pretty little head to the side.

“Take off your clothes, Seth.”

“What?”

She pushed herself up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She patted the space beside her and sighed. “Take off your clothes and sit right here.”

He didn’t ask why. Although he’d only been in her very personal acquaintance for a few days, he’d already come to understand that Meg wasn’t a woman who enjoyed being cross-examined. If she told you to do something, and you were probably going to do it anyway, then you did it without asking her why.

His shirt came off first, followed by his damp swim trunks. Before sitting where she’d indicated, he took the time to hang the garments over the rail in the bathroom.

How could she possibly think he didn’t react to her? He was an intelligent life form, but no matter how sternly he scolded his cock, it was going to prepare to wage battle whether his head was in the fight or not.

She must have finally noticed his body’s response, because as he padded toward the bed, her lips quirked up at one corner.

He didn’t like that look. Or maybe he liked it a lot. Or maybe it scared him. He couldn’t tell, but with each passing second, his cock grew harder and begged for another release.

What was her endgame? He figured he’d find out soon enough.

He sat, and she immediately stood, grazing his sun-heated shoulders with her fingertips as she walked around to face him.

She put her other hand on his right shoulder and bent down to meet his gaze.

There was trouble in those dark eyes—the kind of trouble the Roma girls were always so good at alluding to but never following through on. Prudes.

“So, we were going to talk about our living situation.” She leaned in farther so her left cheek grazed his right one and her silky, warm breasts pressed against his chest.

He drew in some air. She smelled of fruity shampoo, sunscreen, and had an undercurrent of something that was all woman. If he could add his tongue to the sampling of her essence, he bet he’d doubly confirm it was the scent of her arousal.

Had he done that to her, or was she just that hard up? Unfortunately, he knew that feeling of being hard up all too well lately.

“Yes, over dinner,” he managed, pulling his wandering hands back in when he realized they were on her ass.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Last night, he couldn’t help but to explore her, even though she’d asked him to stay still. Keeping that promise felt like an impossible endeavor. She was meant to be held—touched. Not doing so would be defying nature. Still, he’d try. He’d be good, and maybe she wouldn’t run off so soon.

“Now’s fine.” Her breath was a mere rasp in his ear, and her lips tugged at his fleshy lobe before letting it snap back in.

What was she up to?

“Okay…so let’s talk. I work in Fayetteville, so—God.”

She’d pushed his legs open wider and had her left hand wrapped over the head of his cock. “You were saying?”

“I can’t think when you do that.”

A slow grin spanned her face and she shrugged. “You want me to stop touching you?”

Was she crazy? “No. Just…if you want me to answer questions with any semblance of intelligence, you’ve got to give me some respite.”

The other side of her mouth quirked up. “Oh.” She released his cock and pressed the wandering hand to his left thigh. With her other hand pressed on his right thigh, she held herself up a bit below his eye level and batted her lashes at him. “You were saying?”

Witch!

He blew out a breath and tried to ignore her left fingers creeping closer and closer to the inside of his thigh. “I work and live in Fayetteville, so what exactly did you have in mind?”

“Dunno,” she sang in a sweet, soft, soprano voice and her fingertips grazed his sac.

“Witch.” That time he said it out loud and didn’t care how she’d respond.

“Oh, Sergei, I’ve been called worse.”

He didn’t think it possible, but his balls grew even tighter and cock a bit harder at the sound of his true name coming from her lips—a name no woman he’d been intimate with in the past had whispered, much less knew.

“Fayetteville is only an hour from Raleigh.”

“Yes,” he conceded, closing his eyes as her lips skimmed down his chest, groaning when they paused over his left nipple. “But counting traffic…”

He was going to say something about congestion on I-95 and the never-ending construction on I-40, but there she was, between his knees, with the ends of her long hair tickling his thighs.

“Mm-hmm?” she hummed with her lips closing around his cockhead.

“Wait…what were—” He gasped as she increased suction and closed his eyes.

Concentrate.

“What were we discussing?”

She drew back, a pop sounding as she loosened her lips’ vacuum and rolled her eyes up to his face. “Living arrangements. We have to keep up appearances or this whole thing will end up being pointless.”

“Oh.”

Lowering her head once more, she made a long, slow lick around the start of his retracted foreskin that made his toes curl. “Doesn’t make sense for me to uproot Toby, so—”

“Right, right.” He swallowed and tipped his head back, concentrating on the gold whirls painted on the otherwise white ceiling. At the rate he was going, he’d come with just a whisper near his dick. Why she had such a profound effect on him, he didn’t know. He did know he didn’t want to talk about Toby when the kid’s mother was doing some very salacious things to Seth’s family jewels. “We’ll work something out,” he concluded.

She hummed around his cock again before dipping her head lower so supple lips teased at the base of his shaft while its head plunged oh so briefly in her throat.

“Fuck.” Planting his hands on her shoulders, he gave her a small press backward to give his dick a reprieve.

A sigh blew her hair from her face, and she sat back on her heels, elbows draped on her thighs, shaking her head at him. “I’d venture to guess your vodka tolerance far exceeds your sexual one.”

Was she kidding? If he dared look at his slick cock, he’d probably lose it. With a huff, he pressed a hand over his erection, protecting it from her lascivious stares. “Lately, I drink far more than I screw, so your theory holds water.”

Her head tilted to the side, just as it had earlier. “Would you rather be drinking right now?”

“Don’t assume my tentativeness indicates a lack of willingness. Just give me a minute.” Take a stallion out of competition for a few months, and he’d probably lose his first few races, too.

Some expression he couldn’t read flitted across her face. Anger? No. Something milder than that. Annoyance or…shame, perhaps. But at what?

“I’ll be right back. Don’t move.” With a lithe uncoiling of her fit body, she stood and padded to the dresser near the closed door, immediately fishing her ring hand into a cosmetics bag.

His immediate thought wasn’t one of curiosity, but rather a surprising desire to get her a different ring. Then he quickly dismissed the idea. She came into the scheme with the diamond, and the bands were given to them by Sharon, who’d picked them up at the last minute before heading to the airport back in North Carolina. The rings were completely devoid of sentiment, which was fine considering the fact they were mostly irrelevant. The only purpose they served, really, was to overturn Meg’s public reputation. He’d been so out of the loop he hadn’t even known what people called her until Sharon sat him down for lunch that day.

When Meg returned, she flashed a condom in front of his eyes and tore the packet open without further pleasantries. Rolling the rubber onto him, she said, “The gift shop’s clerk gave me a hard time about those.”

“Why?”

“I asked for the bigger size, and I guess she didn’t believe I’d need it.”

“If I get funny looks from the staff, I’ll know why,” he said with a chuckle.

“Yeah. If you’re going to keep letting me have my way with you, I’m…uh, we’re going to have to get tested for STDs. I’d like to feel you once without the latex.”

Yet another statement no woman had ever made to him before. No one had ever hinted that there’d be a next time.

“Okay. I’ll go after work on Monday.”

Pushing his knees closer together, she furrowed her brow, and her confusion was evident.

“What?” he asked as she climbed onto his lap, cowgirl-style, tits to chest, so her knees pressed into the mattress. He scooted back a bit to help her balance.

“So, just like that, huh? I suggest it, and you’ll do it without a grumble?”

He raised his shoulders as much as he could with her arms draped over them and pressed his nose into the warm crook of her neck.

She settled herself over his erection.

“It’s such a minor thing to get defensive about, Megan.”

“I’m glad you agree.” Easing down onto his shaft, she blew out a ragged breath and dragged her hands down his naked back. “Lend me a hand, big boy,” she whispered in his ear. “My thighs may look great, but they’re not strong enough for me to stay in this position long.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” he murmured, but moved his hands down to cup her ass, assisting her enthusiastic movements, and even slowing her a bit.

She punished him for that by clamping her muscles hard around him.

“Witch.”

“Yep. Gonna ride you like a broom, and when I get off you, I’ll make you clean up the mess.”

He paused her there at half-mast, and the joke settled into his brain in pieces. Laughing, he helped stabilize her already-broken rhythm and swiveled his pelvis us to meet her halfway. “Gonna prop me up in a dark corner until the next time you need me for some dirty work, too?”

“Mm-hmm.” She swiveled her hips in a circular pattern while gliding up and down with his aid, her breaths becoming shorter with audible rasps. “But…I won’t…leave you there…long!”

Her voice trilled upward into a breathy shout at the end as she came, hugging him tighter, and rubbing her cheek against his like the cat he’d called her earlier.

The name seemed apt now, because just like one of those mysterious pets, he couldn’t understand a damned thing about why she did what she did. She may as well have been from another planet. Women had always been a mystery to him, but this one took the cake.

Gratefully, he lifted that mental floodgate—that divide keeping his body in check as much as a man could—and he came too, pushing her down forcefully so the tip of him met the very end of her.

“God, you’re going to fucking break me,” she panted as he lay on his back, taking her down with him.

And there it went. That thing they all feared. “I’m sorry…I can—”

“Shush.” She pressed an index finger over his lips briefly and let it fall to the side of his face as she relaxed on top of him, seeming unable to catch her breath. “I don’t think you get it.”

“That’s nothing new.”

He listened to her breaths as they steadied, then quieted to mere whispers over the course of minutes. Rubbing his hand up her spine, he said, “Megan?”

No response came from her beyond an involuntary sigh.

He decided to let the cat sleep. She was sure to race away soon enough.