Beneath the Surface (10 page)

Tabitha thrust and made circles with the digit, riding her hand and stimulating the bundle of nerves near the entrance of her vagina, writhing in her seat when she reached her G-spot. She thumbed her swollen clit and plunged her finger in a steady rhythm until she felt herself creeping towards climax.

Poised on the precipice, trembling and hot before the gathering force of her orgasm pushed her over the edge, Tabitha released a long deep moan, incredulous, the animal sound shocking her with its unfamiliarity. It concerned her for only an instant before she completely gave into her hunger and tumbled headlong into rapture—waves and waves of cold heat suffusing her belly—that left her perspiring and whimpering in her chair.

49

Gracie C. McKeever

Tabitha came back to herself several seconds later, and instantly glanced at the clock across the room, wondering if she’d locked her door.

No sooner than the thought formed in her brain did someone knock.

She started, sat up straight in her chair, opened her handbag on the desk, rummaged through it for a moist towelette—she never left home without them—and quickly cleaned herself up as best she could.

“Tabitha, you in there?”

“Be with you in a minute, Cynthia!”

Tabitha threw the towelette in the trash, quickly glanced at herself in her compact mirror and didn’t recognize the glazed bedroom eyes and smudged lipstick of the wild woman looking back at her. She’d been biting her bottom lip so hard she’d bitten the light burgundy hue clear off.

God, what had the man done to her?

Over a weekend she’d turned into a profligate wanton prone to uncontrollable urges, and engaging in early morning sex acts in her office when she should have been conducting business!

And the entire time she’d convulsed in the throes of passion, she thought of him, seen his face with her mind’s eye, his gaze intent upon hers, smiling as he watched her bring herself to completion. Looking like the proud teacher of a prized and favorite student who’d just worked out a difficult math problem on the blackboard.

Tabitha gritted her teeth, more frustrated now than she’d been when she’d arrived with that man’s image firmly imprinted on her brain cells, taunting her, the release she’d just experienced all but forgotten.

“What were you doing, catching a nap?” Cynthia teased once Tabitha opened the door.

“Of course not!” Tabitha blurted much too quickly and loudly she realized when she saw the arch of Cynthia’s eyebrows. “I was in the middle of responding to a client and I didn’t want to stop the flow before I answered the door.”

Cynthia grinned. “Oh, I thought maybe you had given into a basic human necessity for once like sleep, Bionic Woman.”

Tabitha felt herself blush, the heat of blood rushing to her face so concentrated she thought she might be having a hot flash. If Cynthia hadn’t come so close to the truth, the situation might have been funny. “You leave me and my basic necessities alone,” she mumbled.

Cynthia offered a stack of messages. “These came in Friday while you were out and after you called in the last time.”

Tabitha took them. “Thanks.” She sifted through them quickly, saw one from Eric that had come in at eight-thirty that morning and showed it to Cynthia.

“Oh, yeah, that one came in as I was walking in the door. You must have been involved in your e-mail and didn’t hear the phone.”

50

Beneath the Surface

“I guess so.”

The man must have had radar, his call coming in somewhere between her thrusting her finger into herself, and climaxing. Sheesh!

What was he doing up at such an early hour?

Tabitha would have liked to believe he was as hot and bothered by the thought of her as she was by the thought of him, unable to sleep or function as usual. Not that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of relieving himself with her. He could damn well suffer in silence like her.

“He was just calling to confirm your appointment for later this morning,” Cynthia said then stepped back, peering at Tabitha from top to bottom as if seeing her for the first time.

Tabitha put a hand to her hair, face tingling still, wondered if evidence of her earlier activities was on her person, something she’d missed. “What?”

“I like that outfit!”

“Oh, please, this?” Tabitha raised her arms away from her body and glanced down at royal-blue silk blouse, burgundy flower-print skirt, royal-blue pantyhose, and matching burgundy suede pumps. “It’s not like I haven’t worn this before, Cynthia.

You’ve seen me in it.”

“Maybe, but there’s something different about the way it’s looking on you today.

The skirt is more flouncy and flirty. The blouse falls on your body more sensually.”

“Will you stop.”

“I’m serious, it’s like you have a…glow.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

Cynthia chuckled, undeterred by her employer’s glare. “Probably has something to do with that hunky new client.” She pointed her chin at the message in Tabitha’s hand.

Tabitha frowned. She had a special aversion to the term “hunk” or any variation thereof.

Her mother had had a penchant for using the all-encompassing description quite frequently to describe men she found attractive, which consisted roughly of most of the male population. To say Denise Sayer Lyons wasn’t very discriminating was an understatement.

This alone would have been enough for Tabitha to question her parentage, despite her tender eight years. At one point she had even considered the possibility that she had been adopted, so much more exotic looking and darker than both her parents, that she couldn’t imagine being the natural child of so pale a pair of Caucasians.

She remembered her mother during one of the woman’s more plastered and mean days—with the usual glassy faraway look in her eyes—nipping the adoption theory in the bud when Tabitha overheard an argument between her and the man Tabitha had grown up knowing as her dad. She found out then that her biological father had been a “hunky”

51

Gracie C. McKeever

rock musician that Denise, the wild and undisciplined devotee, had met and screwed backstage after a concert.

Her mother hadn’t even known the man’s name!

Oh, what the sisters at St. Anthony’s Catholic Orphanage would have to say about that, Tabitha thought now, wincing at the memory of a ruler smacking her knuckles or bottom for what the nuns deemed soul-forfeiting transgressions. At the time the category included anything from profanity to smoking, both of which Tabitha had done with great regularity, if only to give the black-clad celibates conniptions and something to think about when they were bruising their knees doing penance and reciting their Hail Marys.

Come to think of it, her earlier act of self-love ran pretty high on their burning-in-hell meter of sin too. Poor her.

“Hunky?” Tabitha arched a brown now at Cynthia. “You don’t be careful, I’ll tell that new husband of yours.”

“I love Dillon with all my heart, but I’m not blind. The guy is hunky.” Cynthia stared at her as if waiting for a response, and when she didn’t get one, she asked, “Don’t you think so?”

“He’s a client like any other. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Oh, he’s a client all right, but he’s not like any of the other stuffy old clients already in your stable. No offense. He’s a fresh piece of prime meat.”

Tabitha just grinned, shuffling her messages as she went back to her desk. She sat down and glanced up at Cynthia poised at the door. “Get back to work, you.”

“Want me to hold your calls?”

She took a minute too long to think about it before Cynthia was closing the door with an “I’ll hold all calls” in her wake.

Tabitha put her messages down next to her phone, staring out over the empty expanse of her large glass desk. Barren. Unlike Cynthia’s cubicle with the swarm of framed family photos on every available surface and others pinned to the two tack boards. Nephews and nieces, mom and dad, brothers and sisters, new husband…

It reminded Tabitha of Eric’s entertainment center, the simultaneously full empty feeling she had gotten perusing the shelves of pictures, and coming to the realization that she had nothing like that sort of support system in her life. No siblings or cousins to argue or fight with growing up. No aunts and uncles by whom to be spoiled. No sister to have lunch with at a sidewalk café the way Evelyn had been having lunch with her older sister Angela when Tabitha had bumped into her client one day on the upper east side.

She realized that if she dropped dead today or tomorrow, there was no one to mourn her, no one to really miss her, the bastard child of a manic-depressive groupie mother and nameless, faceless rock musician father. Sure, Cynthia and the rest of
Lyons’

Style, Inc.
employees might miss her for the time it took them to start a collection and notify all her clients of the sad news, but other than a job and a paycheck, what was she to them, really?

52

Beneath the Surface

Vogue might miss her, but once the initial shock of her mistress’s unmoving body wore off, a long period of time past before anyone checked on the rotting-corpse smell in apartment 2A, and hunger set in, Tabitha reasoned she might become convenient kitten chow for her practical and self-possessed little beast.

She swallowed, not used to all the deep reflection, definitely not prone to the maudlin self-pity that was beginning to pervade her chest. At least not before she had met that maddening man with the big, close knit family of which any former abandoned-orphan-sexually-abused-and-neglected-foster-child would be envious.

Envy. Another emotion for which she would have gotten a sound whack across the knuckles had she allowed the nuns to know she harbored it. So she’d hidden her jealousy of the cute little girl four years younger than her and who had been placed with a nice couple from the suburbs. Or the plainly Caucasian gap-toothed boy her age who had been adopted by a nice couple from upstate New York.

Either she’d been too young, too old, too female, or too ethnic, but never just right for a family to want her, or a stable couple willing to take her in. And the ones that did take her…well, they had left a lot to be desired on the altruistic, good-parenting-skills meter.

Hell, she was doing a lot of soul searching this morning. Amazing what a round of early morning masturbation could dig up and do for the spirit. She guessed she had Eric and the memory of his sexy smirk and wink to thank for providing the shovel.

Tabitha answered several e-mails and returned her calls from Friday before she finally, quickly dialed the number Eric had given Cynthia.

She couldn’t get out of it. His call warranted a response, she just determined she would make it short and to the point. There was no need to get personal or go into details.

Because the longer she stayed on the phone with the man, the more chance she ran of having to close herself up in this office for the rest of the afternoon to masturbate the day away rather than confront in the flesh the inspiration behind her urges.

Coward.

She winced as if from a physical blow, the term was not something she usually thought of in conjunction with herself.

Eric answered his cell on the second ring, sounded winded, voice shaky and fading as if he were on the run.

“Hello Eric, it’s Tabitha returning your call.”

“Hey, Tabitha!”

He sounded genuinely happy to hear from her, voice silky smooth despite the bad connection. It made her heart beat that much harder at the idea that she had been denigrating the man since she’d walked in the door this morning at the same time she’d been using the memory of their time together as a prelude to pleasuring herself.

“I’d just wanted to confirm that we’re still meeting later this morning,” Eric said.

“Yep, at eleven—”

53

Gracie C. McKeever

“In front of Macy’s.”

“You’ve got it.”

There was a long pause into which Tabitha could have rammed her entire wardrobe, which was pretty substantial by some standards, and she held her breath before Eric spoke again.

“Is there something wrong, Tab?”

“Nothing except you calling me out of my name.”

He chuckled on the other end, and Tabitha saw the big dimples as if he were standing right in front of her, felt as if he had been with her in spirit all weekend anyway.

And soon he’ll be with you in body.

God, what was she going to do with him?

If she were telegraphing her emotions so obviously over the phone that he could, through static and a bad connection, pick up on her mood, she was in trouble. It was a good thing she knew about it now so she could act and steel herself accordingly.

This meeting was not a date, they weren’t in a relationship other than client and personal shopper, strictly business. That was it!

Suitably self-chastised, Tabitha took a deep breath and said coolly, “I’ll see you at eleven.” Then she disconnected the line before he could argue or otherwise comment.

54

Beneath the Surface

EJ stared at his cell, shaking his head as realization dawned that she had actually hung up on him. Anyone else on the other end and he would have deemed the act rude, but for some reason coming from Tabitha, it just seemed like business as usual, her way.

Blunt and to the point and not her problem if someone didn’t like it. Charming.

He grinned, looking forward to his meeting with her now more than ever.

A challenge
.

He’d been looking forward a lot lately, more productive—finishing two articles and two chapters in his work-in-progress—and busier the last couple of hours than he’d been the last couple of days, like the U.S. Army, doing more at five a.m. than most people did the entire day.

Jodie Klein had shown up bright and early at eight this morning, as per their discussion Friday. She had another resume with her and a giant portfolio with samples of her limited, though impressive, work.

He liked her ideas and energy, knew a real go-getter when he saw one, went with his gut and hired her on the spot, and thought himself lucky to have her on his team.