Calculated Exposure (9 page)

He nudged it back to her. “Why don’t you put it on me?”

“Sure. Okay.” She forced her gaze downward and throttled the whimper threatening to erupt from her throat.
Fucking hell.
Feeling it was one thing. Seeing it–long and thick and undoubtedly ready, given the slick of pre-ejaculate coating the tip–was another thing entirely. Somehow, she managed to tear open one foil packet and still her hands long enough to slip the condom onto him.

She was so busy concentrating on unfurling the thing to his base that when his fingers alighted on the base of her spine, she jumped.

“Ticklish?”

“Yes,” she lied. Without a doubt, she’d be in sensory overload before the night was over. The sensuality came from so many directions. His lips on her neck, his dancing fingers at her waist, his rigid shaft grinding against her front. Then there was the taste of her cooking on his tongue mingled with her own flavor. The scent of his soap still clinging to his skin after a long day. She wanted to lay down and process it all before going further, but no.

He eased the catch of her bra free and pressed his thumbs against her beaded nipples. When she gasped, it wasn’t a calculated move like she’d faked so many times in the past.

He was working her over like marked-down produce. She was already mush and hurtling quickly toward puree stage.

“Top or bottom, darlin’?”

“Um…”

You’re a temptress, remember? That’s the charade you have going here. You’d better sound decisive, pendeja.

She cleared her throat. “You in the back.” It still came out sounding strained. Guttural, even. Maybe he’d think it was intentional.

Obviously he did. His lips quirked up into a grin so sexy, if her panties hadn’t already been off, they would have incinerated.

He guided her around by the waist, flattening her back and pulling her rear closer to him.

When he wasn’t forthcoming with his press, she looked around her body to find him smirking at her backside. “Curt?”

“Shh. Admiring perfection.”

She was going to make some rebuttal, to hurry him along, but she’d forgotten that he was the one setting the pace. She barely registered the feeling of him parting her lips, or the testing probe of his head at her entrance. But the stretch when he pushed in farther, beyond that tight muscle, that she felt.

When he paused there at that juncture for too long, neither pushing in nor withdrawing, she pushed her ass back against him, neglecting her body’s request she wait, that she go slow. She didn’t want to go slow.

“Excited, darlin?”

Burying her face against the bedspread, she ground her teeth and savored the pleasurable friction. “I want what I want.”

“No, I think you want what
I
want. Remember? I’m leading the dance.” He pulled himself out and slid himself in again, without pause. This time, he went in almost to the hilt, pushing against the end of her, bumping her cervix. “That okay? Some women don’t like it.”

She didn’t want to think about the other women who’d had that pleasure before her, but she wasn’t supposed to care about his conquests. A simple response would do.

“Yes.”

“Just let me know if you want me to stop.”

His pace increased, and he gripped her waist. Although his thrusts accelerated, he had an expert control. Instead of feeling stiffly probed and pounded into, she felt full. Deliriously so. The combination of his girth and her tightness had her gut clenching, legs quivering already, and he’d hardly even begun.

Her orgasm mounting, building within her with such a force, she didn’t worry she would get loud. It was pointless to fret about. She
knew
she would, and the knowledge was freeing.

She wrapped her legs around his so her toes curled against his calves, and dug her fingers into the bedspread. She didn’t warn him, and just came, biting the covers as she moaned, her ass writhing against his cock.

“Fuck, woman.”

When she was done, her body trembling and throat emitting ragged, incomprehensible noises, he thrust into her long and deep several more times, then held her ass very still against him. His fingers digging into her waist was her clue he’d gone, too.

He pressed a hand against the small of her back and nudged her horizontal. More than anything, it was a sort of permission for her to collapse.

She did.

“Sated, darlin’?”

She mumbled something that may or may not have been “Yes.” She couldn’t even tell. Her body felt as if it’d lost molecular cohesion and had fused with the covers. Fuck moving. Curt could clean up his damn self.

He leaned over her so she could see his grin before he edged off the bed.

I guess he deserves to be smug.

“Do you have a spare toothbrush, darlin’?”

“Stash under the sink. Towels are in the closet next to the shower if you need ’em.”

“Don’t go tellin’ a guy like me you have clean towels. You might end up with a lodger.”

Doesn’t sound so bad, actually.

He draped her afghan over her still form before shuffling to the bathroom. The words “thank you” caught in her throat. She was asleep before he made it out.

Chapter 7

Erica dreamed the same dream as always, a rerun she didn’t have the luxury to turn off. It didn’t matter if she’d fallen asleep happy or sad or anywhere in between. It was usually the same from one night to the next. Something this time, however, was a little different. The plot seemed the same. The characters were same. The mood, however, was off.

She was running through the streets of Miami, constantly looking behind her for an attacker whose face she couldn’t see, whose voice she couldn’t hear. Her spirit just felt as though she were unsafe, that someone was going to get her, drag her home.

Her feet were bare, bloodied, and bruised. But still she ran harder, pounding against the glass-specked sidewalk toward a moving goal.

Strong arms clenched her waist from behind, and she struggled, kicking the air and trying to wrench herself free. The man would not let go.

Finally, he spoke. “It’s okay, honey. I’ll take care of you. No one’s going to hurt you,” Tate said in her ear.

She capitulated, nodded as always, but this time her dream-self didn’t buy it. For once, she decided to just to play along. To hold her cards close for a while. She could run later.

Odd.

Erica, lucent now, stopped fighting the dream, stopped forcing herself awake. She’d let the story unfold to see if it would be the same.

She followed Tate to his car and got in. That was the same.

He pulled the seatbelt over the raggedy clothes she wore and buckled her in. He cupped her cheeks in both hands and focused his intense brown gaze on hers. He repeated, “I’ll take care of you.” That was the same.

She felt herself swallow down bile, and watched as he put the child safety lock on her door, locking her in.

“Wait!” she shouted, putting her hands out to stop the door’s closing, but she was too slow and he was too strong.

This was different. He’d never locked her in before.

Tate walked around to the driver’s side and got in. He wore that smile she used to think
was charming but now, after years of learning his quirks, she knew it was the one he wore when he wanted to manipulate people.

“Let’s go back to my place, huh? We’ll get you cleaned up. Find you some clothes to wear. Get you something to eat.” He reached over and stroked her cheek.

This time, she drew back.

He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “Then maybe we can talk about what you can do for me.”

Enough
.

She shook herself awake and forced her eyes open, heart racing, breath ragged.

Oh, yes. That was Tate. Absolutely Tate. But why had the dream changed? Why now?

She tried to sit up, but something, no,
someone
pinned the covers on her right side. How quickly she’d forgotten about her guest, and he was actually one she enjoyed rather than endured.

She looked down at Curt in the television’s dim light and felt the tension in her chest unfurl. He didn’t want anything from her, and that was just as well, because what did she have to give? Still, as she ran a fingertip down the line of his elegant nose and traced her thumb’s pad across his parted lips, her compulsion was to
keep
him.

But how did that work? Tate had been the only man she’d dated long-term. The relationship had been educational in its dysfunction. It’d been the kind of partnership where she couldn’t have done much worse even if she’d tried.

She’d held no pretenses of being Tate’s one and only, but monogamy seemed natural to her. So, when he wasn’t in her bed, she kept chaste. Besides, she hadn’t liked anyone else enough to give up so much of her body.

She’d never wanted to give that up again until she’d met Curt, and she didn’t bother understanding it. Maybe she was a little infatuated–in awe of the man. He’d been filling nearly every spare thought in her mind for a week. The boys she knew back in Miami were good-looking enough, and definitely had swagger, but geniuses they were not. She found herself hanging on his every word, filled with an unquenchable curiosity of what would come out of his mouth next. He was interesting in the same kind of way the stars were: pretty from a distance, but up close, kind of dangerous and complicated beyond measure.

How did one trap a star?

“Don’t scare him away,” she whispered to herself.

He stirred at the sound of her voice, turning his face toward the ceiling, but didn’t wake.

She eased off the bed, being careful not to jostle the mattress, and tiptoed down the hall. The living room was dark as she padded in, so she didn’t see Curt’s shoes near the chair. She stumbled, but her anger was short-lived, and quickly devolving into giggles.

She liked his stuff taking up space in her home. Made her feel less invisible, having someone around.

The buckles of her camera case seemed impossibly loud as she unfastened them, and she cringed pulling the device out. The goal was to keep him asleep, and every time the camera beeped and whirred as she manipulated the settings, she cringed. She felt like a photographer on safari, afraid to make a sound for fear the lion would run. Curt probably wouldn’t roar at her, but he likely didn’t want to be captured mid-slumber.

She padded down the carpeted hallway and knelt beside the bed. Camera poised and in focus, suddenly he tossed his arm to the empty place where she’d been. As his body and brain registered she wasn’t there, he opened his eyes.

Shit.

She shoved the camera under the bed as his eyes finally focused on her kneeling form.

“Turn off the television and come back to bed, darlin’. I’ve got to leave early.”

“Oh.” She felt like her stomach had tied itself in a knot. She didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to forget his shoes were there and trip over them again. But, it was probably for the best. Tate had a tendency to drop in on her unannounced. When he saw her Jeep in the lot, he’d keep knocking until she opened the door. She didn’t know how she would explain that situation to Curt. “
Oh, see, I was a prostitute for about five minutes at age seventeen. This John picked me up and decided to make me his project. It’s over now, but he’s my supervisor at the newspaper. Isn’t that funny?”

Shit, it wasn’t even funny to
her
.

“You have…something to do tomorrow?”

He rubbed his eyes and shifted under the sheets to face her. “Running a study group. Department-mandated. Really stupid, since we’ve only been in school a week, but I do what the people in the ties and loafers tell me.”

“Oh.” She found the remote and turned off the television.

I guess that’s a good enough reason.

She climbed onto the bed, on the other side from where she’d fallen asleep, and snuggled her backside against his front.

He seemed to draw back for a moment, which made her tense, worrying she’d made some blunder. But, before she could analyze his stiffness, his arm around her waist pulled her closer, and he rested his chin atop her head.

“What are you thinking about? Is that weird to ask after having sex?” she asked.

“Maybe a little.” He trailed his fingers down the arm she held on top of the covers and let them linger at her hip. “But, to answer you, I was just thinking about your curves. Curves give mathematicians problems.”

“My curves? What kind of problems could my curves possibly bring you?”

He flattened his palm against her hip. “The addiction kind of problem.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re an extraordinary woman.”

That was the kind of thing she’d always craved to hear. But why did it sound like it came with a caveat? She held her breath.

“Who I could become very entranced with.”

“But?”

“But I’m not in a position right now to entertain distractions. My life is somewhat chaotic at the moment.”

Distractions,
did he say? Was that all she was? A diversion? Had he really driven all the way down to Kannapolis for a fuck and cuddle? A
trick
? She ground her teeth and concentrated on counting her breaths.

Get a grip, pendeja
.
Not every hook-up comes with a promise.

At least he was being up front. And what was she doing? Lying through her teeth and pretending to be some outgoing temptress she most certainly was
not
. She assumed that’s the sort of woman he wanted: someone fearless and bold.

She was neither of those things.

She was the type of woman who constantly needed rescuing, and was damned tired of it. Still, she wanted to savor what she could of the moment. If this was the only time she’d get to lay in his arms, she didn’t want the memory to be sullied by her running off at the mouth. Her mother had always said her mouth would get her in trouble.