Liberating Lacey (14 page)

The steady rain became a downpour and turned cold as the front settled in. Hunter grabbed Lacey’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on. We should get home.” They sprinted for the short-cut to her street, a dirt path through the eastern tree line. Lacey’s flat sandals skidded on the wet grass as they ran. Her laughter slowed her down, so when he stopped under the thickest stand of cottonwoods he could find to give her a breather, she plowed right into him.

“Whoops!” she said, fisting her hand in his shirt to keep from falling over.

He caught her under her elbows, supporting her until she found her footing. She slapped her hands flat against his chest, breathing hard, her wet top clinging to her breasts. Her nipples hardened under his gaze and a hard shudder ran through her.

“Cold?” Being wet sapped body heat and they were soaked. The air temperature felt like it had dropped ten degrees in two minutes, a recipe for getting uncomfortable real fast.

Rivulets streamed over her lips then reformed to course down under her pink blouse. “Getting there,” she said.

Her tongue flickered out to taste the rain. Before he knew what he was doing he had her backed into a cottonwood, his hands on her jaw and his tongue in her mouth.

She tasted of rain and chocolate-y coffee, her lips sweetly resilient as he kissed her.

It wasn’t just her lips. Her entire body both welcomed and maddened him, the soft give to her breasts and stomach, the way her thighs cradled him, the brush of the baby-soft skin of her inner arm against his back. He’d always enjoyed the slow, sexy build of foreplay, loved women’s bodies and all the mysterious, amazing things they could do, but with Lacey, he couldn’t detach. Kissing meant he had to touch. Touching meant he wanted to crush her under him. Getting her under him meant he had to be inside her, and when he got there the only thing that kept him from losing it and going all caveman on her was the knowledge that he’d scare her to death if he did.

Right now his prehistoric ancestors were beating drums just under the surface of his rational brain. He lifted her skirt, the fabric sodden in his fist, and pulled down her panties. She must be making up for lost time or something, because she never said no.

Asleep, tired, irritable after a bad day, whether he asked for a quickie or a marathon session that lasted four hours she never said no, and she wasn’t now, either. He stuffed the wet scrap of fabric in the pocket of his cargo shorts and fumbled with his zipper.

The shorts were low on his hips, his throbbing cock getting pelted by the rain before he looked up to meet Lacey’s anticipatory eyes. She’d asked if this heat was normal for him. It wasn’t. If he got caught having sex in a public place by someone with a grudge or a holier-than-thou attitude, he’d get fired so fast he’d get rug burn on his ass from the carpet outside the chief’s office. First the parking lot, now the park. Even her driveway 96

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was considered public, with an expectation of being seen. Around Lacey his sense of self-preservation took a scarily long hike.

Today it looked like his career was safe because shitshitshit, “I don’t have a condom,” he said, knowing she didn’t either. She’d left her purse at home.

She peered up at him through her lashes. Lacey never left the house without mascara because her short, reddish eyelashes disappeared without it. The rain had smudged the makeup around her eyes, a shockingly slutty look for her that, combined with her swollen lips and sexy gaze, did nothing to convince his cock to stand down.

“You have your wallet,” she said.

He did have his wallet because he didn’t care if she was as rich as the queen, if she was out with him, he’d pay for the mocha and lunch. But while he had money, he didn’t have protection. “The cupboard’s bare, beautiful. I meant to buy more yesterday but didn’t get to…”

He couldn’t finish the sentence because she’d reached between them to stroke his shaft. Cold water streamed down her forearm, over his balls, making them tighten but he was so hot steam should have been rising from his body. Just to torture himself he cupped one breast through her shirt and thumbed the hard, thrusting nipple, kissing her while he did. She could get him off here. It wouldn’t take long. Then he’d take her home, dry her off and love her up until he was ready for round two.

“Hunter.”

She might have said his name twice because her voice was raised, urgent. He forced his eyes to focus, saw both intensity and hesitation in her face.

“I’m on the Pill.”

He knew that, had seen the container with its twenty-eight tiny pills in her bathroom.

“I’m safe,” she said and stroked her thumb over the tip.

Sure she was. Shit, she’d been with one man before him. She was the one who should be worried. He didn’t keep score but even the approximate number was a fucking scandal.

She stroked him again, tip to base, before he uncurled her fingers from around his cock. “I can’t think when you do that, beautiful, and I’d better be coherent for this conversation.”

Obligingly she laid her hand flat on his stomach and looked up at him, complete trust and wicked temptation in her brown eyes. “I’m on the Pill. I’m clean,” she said. As if he hadn’t heard her.

“Fuck,” he whispered. He’d resisted temptation before because kids should be wanted and mistakes happened. Because women lied about all kinds of things, birth control not the least of them. But fuck, oh fuck, now that the option was out in the open he wanted to be bare inside Lacey. His whole body ached with wanting.

And Lacey was honesty personified.

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But this meant something, meant yet another barrier between them was gone and that scared him almost as badly as he wanted to feel her slick, tight pussy close around his shaft. Skin to skin. Juicy. Hot. Meaningful.

He could say no, but there was no reason to. He’d had his annual physical last month, after he started dating Lacey, and he’d come up negative for everything. As usual. He could insist on that barrier, though. He should. Eventually this would end and there would be other partners.

He swiped his hand over his face to wipe away the rain and the thought, because if there were other lovers for him, then there would be others for Lacey.

No. No fucking way.

She laid her palms along his jaw and pulled his mouth down to hers, except he went so willingly he might as well have made the first move. “It’s okay,” she whispered in between flickering licks to his lower lip. “It’s okay.” Her hand skimmed down over his stomach, back to his aching length. “We’ve got options.” He thrust forward into her stroking hand, grinding into her palm, but it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t enough, not when the rain was so cold and he knew she’d be steamy hot along the length of his cock. He didn’t want to get jacked off, not after she willingly offered slick, sultry bliss.

The rain pounded into his skin, into his head, the furious lash of water and wind drowning out everything but primordial need. Temptation drove him to slide one forearm under her ass and lift her. She spread her legs to accept him, her thighs pressing tight against his hipbones, her hot, wet sex cradling his cock. Maybe that would be enough, a satisfying way to assuage the need pounding in his head, in his heart.

The slick caress of her swollen folds only heightened the ache. He bowed his head, giving in to roiling emotions that felt dangerously possessive. His forehead came to rest on hers. “Never done this before without a condom, beautiful,” he said.

“I believe you,” she whispered.

“I want to now. I want inside you so bad.”

“I trust you,” she said then locked her ankles at his lower back.

The sirens went off, the strobe lights flashing. Danger ahead. This couldn’t be about trust. It had to be about firsts, about feeling good, about taking Lacey wherever she wanted to go. Not trust. Never trust.

But the primitive, driving urge blasting from his little head overruled the stupid objections spinning in his big head.

He surrendered. The act went against everything in him that was a man and everything in him that was a cop but it was so fucking easy to give in to his thundering heart. He lifted her a little more, probing. She wiggled and then he was in, just the tip.

Holy fuck, it felt good. Real. Intense.

Connected.

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She whimpered as her inner muscles tightened around him, ushering him in. An agonized sound, like he was in pain, forced its way out of his throat. Her smudged, glassy eyes meeting his, she rocked her hips against him and slid down, embedding him to the hilt inside her.

If heaven felt like a slick, tight fist, he was there.

For a long, astonished moment he looked down at their joined bodies. Rain ran in rivulets over his abs, streamed off her jaw and elbows. The incomprehensible decision to take her bare must have short-circuited his sense of touch, because it couldn’t possibly feel that phenomenal. A slow withdrawal and thrust proved him wrong. It felt fucking fantastic, so he did it again, and again, slow and slick, all the way in.

This was too big a first to put into words, but something of his shock must have shown in his eyes because she nodded as if he’d spoken, her own gaze wild and needy, red hair clinging to her cheeks and lips. He picked up the pace, widening his stance to better get at that sweet spot inside her. Then one whimper intruded into his lust-soaked consciousness as pain, not passion.

“The bark,” she gasped.

He turned them around and braced his back against the tree, balancing her ass on his forearms to hold her up, her skirt at her hips, her legs clasping his waist, her slender hands gripping his shoulders for balance. Without a flat surface, horizontal or vertical, to pin her to, it wasn’t the hardest fuck, the most athletic, but the restricted movements heightened the sensations searing him. No pounding, no plunging, just stroke after short, tight, slick stroke, working the ultrasensitive head of his shaft. Driving him fucking
insane
.

She linked her hands behind his neck to kiss him and gasp into his mouth, grinding and quivering in his arms. Then she went rigid and muffled her cries of “yes, oh yes” in his wet cotton covering his shoulder.

Oh fuck, there it was, the contractions of her pussy rippling slow and hard around his bare cock. His orgasm blew through him as sudden and violent as a bomb blast. As the shudders racked him, only sheer force of will kept him from dropping them both in the wet, muddy grass.

What the hell had he just done? And how the hell would he go back to latex?

Lacey was thinking more practically. “Put me down,” she said, her voice almost lost in the pounding rain. “I’m heavy.”

His chest heaved with silent, unexpected laughter as he slipped out of her and set her down in front of him. She leaned into his body in a completely feminine, almost submissive nuzzling gesture that hit him like a fist to the solar plexus. One arm then the other came around her, cradling her at the shoulder blades and hips. Holding her close.

This wasn’t just fun. Somewhere, somehow, without his knowledge—let alone his consent—this had become something more than fun.

“Let’s go home. I want to take a hot shower and make cocoa.” 99

Anne Calhoun

That’s right. It was raining, as much as he’d playfully, stupidly denied it earlier.

Rain sheeted from the skies. They’d stood in the fall storm long enough to wrinkle his fingertips and drain most of the color from Lacey’s vivid face. Normally after sex she was flushed a pretty pink, warm and soft and languid in his arms. Now she shivered, her eyes huge and brown against paper-white skin, her bare arms rippled with goose bumps.

She looked as vulnerable as he felt.

Coming off a fifteen-year marriage, Lacey was no stranger to the trust and connection of unprotected sex. Using condoms probably felt strange to her. For him it was second nature, a purposeful defense no different from the vest or the cuffs. Now he realized he’d let slip an unconscious defense, too, one protecting him from an intimacy just as mental as it was physical. He’d been skin to skin with Lacey, in every sense of the word. He’d left part of himself inside her and he was freaked out.

He buttoned up, then led her out of the cottonwood grove, his brain in a whirl of images and sensations that showed no sign of fading with the passage of time. One thought floated to the top of his mind as they trotted through the downpour that showed no signs of relenting. How could he expect to keep this woman at arm’s length?

He didn’t have the sense to get them out of the rain.

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Kelly the Indispensable hurried into Lacey’s office, two large to-go cups from La Java in her hands and an uncertain expression on her face. “Do you have time for an unscheduled appointment?” she asked as she set Lacey’s mocha on her desk. “You’re due at an offsite…”

Her heart leaping, Lacey looked up from the spreadsheet she was finishing for the meeting. Surely it must be Hunter in Kelly’s modern Danish reception area. Kelly would have admitted anyone she knew well, but while she’d hinted that the smile on Lacey’s face must mean she had a new man, she’d never met Hunter and so wouldn’t let him in unannounced…

“It’s me, Lacey. I’ve got the paperwork for the Thanson-McKnight deal. It’ll take five minutes.”

Davis Burton, her ex-husband, stood in the doorway, a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm, both hands buried in the pockets of a Burberry raincoat she’d helped him choose two winters ago.

“Thanks, Kelly,” she said, meaning both the attempt to keep Davis from ruining her schedule and for getting her a coffee.

“Thank
you
,” Kelly said, hoisting her own drink in emphasis. Behind Davis’s back she mouthed
sorry!
to Lacey, then closed the door.

“Five minutes is all I have, Davis.” To emphasize to her words she got to her feet and began stowing her laptop cord in her briefcase, letting the fall of her hair against her cheekbone hide her face from a man who knew her well enough to see her disappointment, if he chose.

Why would Hunter magically appear in her reception area simply because she’d been longing to see his face since their walk in the park? On the way back to her house his big hand enveloped hers as they trotted through the driving rain. By the time she’d reached her mudroom she’d been so cold her numb, stiff fingers couldn’t insert the key into the lock. Seemingly unaffected by the chilled, lashing rain Hunter had opened the door, stripped her to her skin in the mudroom and bundled her into a long, hot shower.

They stood under the steaming spray until her skin turned pink and she’d stopped shaking.

Something kept him close in the shower, touching her, boxing her between the wall and his big body. Something made him carry her to the bed where he continued to warm her in a deliciously old-fashioned way, missionary style, his palm cupping her cheek and his gaze locked with hers until she shuddered under him, crying out in ecstasy. When she’d showered again after he left for his shift, she rinsed away more than sweat and her own slick fluids.

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Anne Calhoun

Whatever that
something
was, it hadn’t led him to call her or come over in eight days, a response she considered odd given the humming, arcing electric connection forged between them that rainy afternoon in the park, then later in her bed. She’d seen the bare emotion in his eye, bemused, wary wonder flashing through his normally shuttered gaze.

And she hadn’t heard from him, aside from precisely two text messages in response to her two calls, saying he’d call when he could. So much for protecting herself.

“Still buying coffee for the help?”

Davis’s voice ended a train of thought that was leading nowhere, fast. Even better, no response was necessary. Lacey felt if she asked Kelly to walk two blocks to get her a mocha from La Java, buying for Kelly was the least she could do. Davis said getting coffee was part of Kelly’s job and she should buy her own lattes.

Hunter would have said nothing at all.

Sensing she wasn’t going to respond to an old argument, he set the paperwork, flagged with “Sign Here” post-it notes, on her desk. “I see you’ve redecorated.

It’s…different.”

She looked around as she uncapped her pen and prepared to close a seven-figure deal. Almost eight months ago she’d redone the whole office, carpet to ceiling fixtures, in a bright, airy, ultra-modern style that energized her every time she walked in the door. Davis, however, preferred the obvious old-money trappings of dark wood, heavy furniture and leather accessories.

“Thank you,” she said as she flipped through pages, scrawling her name next to each sticky note. “You’re looking well.”

He did look well, the man she expected to grow old with. His sandy blond hair was a bit longer, the waves combed back from his face. The tie with the subtle swirls in the blue silk wasn’t familiar, but the air of satisfaction was. He’d developed that shortly after moving out.

Lacey double-checked to make sure she’d signed in all the correct places then handed the paperwork back to him. “What’s brings you by, Davis? We agreed another partner would handle my business.”

“This is a personal visit, as well as business. I…hear you’re seeing someone.” She didn’t pause, finding her purse and swiftly examining the contents. “I am.”
Please let him be busy, not blowing me off because after the park we’re in too deep.

Emboldened, he continued. “Four different people who were at the party at the Met mentioned your date to me.”

“Really?” She raised her voice. “Kelly, where are the files for the—“

“Top left hand drawer under the market analysis—“

“Got them.” She inserted the files into her bag and pressed the button to send her laptop into sleep mode.

Davis wasn’t taking the hint. “Yes. The general consensus is that he’s young.” 102

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The general consensus? Was he actually trying to embarrass her with gossip?
Amused, she met Davis’s eyes. “He’s of legal age.”

He squared his shoulders. Lacey recognized the look he’d practiced to seem calm, cool and collected in front of a jury. “Vince Jameson said he made a fool of himself in front of Shane Baldwin.”

She couldn’t resist just the slightest of jabs. “Vince did,” she said.

Davis gave an irritated huff at her semantics. “I meant your date.” She’d spoken to Shane earlier in the week. He’d set up a time for a property tour then invited her to dinner with him and his wife. Shane’s invitation specifically included Hunter. That, however, was none of Davis’s business. “Really,” she said again but this time with her ice-princess smile.

The son of an electrician and a teacher, Davis came from a background not all that dissimilar from Hunter’s, except he’d spent the last twenty years doing his best to distance himself from a perfectly respectable family and upbringing. Highly attuned to the whims and perceptions of the people who wielded power, he picked up on Lacey’s cooler tone. “I know I don’t have the right, but…at your age,” he began.

“I’m thirty-six, the same age you are, yet I haven’t manufactured an excuse to discuss your current girlfriend, a twenty-five year old paralegal who was your employee when you began dating her.”

He had the grace to flush, a brick-red color staining the newly tanned skin of his cheekbones.
Davis, Davis
, she thought, but said nothing.

“Yes she’s young, but Brianna is the daughter of a VP at Central States and has a degree from Vassar.”

“Meaning?”

“We both know what that means,” he said, his voice quiet.

She covered her thoughts with sliding her laptop into its protective sleeve, then her briefcase. She’d spent fifteen years serving as Davis’s native guide as he gained the polish and connections necessary to fit into the rarefied strata of society she occupied with ease. Brianna would segue smoothly into Davis’s hard-earned social life. She could identify and use a fish fork, knew who to chat up at parties, which committees and charity events to join. While young, his new girlfriend moved in their circle and had since birth.

Hunter didn’t and after the night at the Met she‘d learned not to blithely forge ahead without considering his feelings. A party of a hundred was one thing. Two couples dining together might be too intimate. The restaurant Shane proposed, Le Pain, was the best French restaurant in town, with a clientele drawn from the Metropolitan Club’s membership list and a wine list five pages long. Davis would have jumped at the opportunity to be seen with Shane Baldwin, dropped all kinds of erudite tidbits about the recent crop of Bordeaux wines. Hunter had nothing to gain from the engagement other than her gratitude for being there and he hadn’t called her for over a week.

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Anne Calhoun

Odds were very good she’d dine with Shane and Andrea Baldwin alone.

Much more of this ruminating and her ex, unobservant as he was, would catch on.

“Davis, I’m not really interested in whether or not he fits in with our social circle,” she said.

Only after the words left her mouth did their implication occur to her, but the look on her ex-husband’s face made the gaffe worthwhile. Apparently the thought that Lacey might choose a man for purely sexual reasons hadn’t occurred to him. She’d hooked up with Hunter at Buff because she responded to him in a deliciously erotic, unfamiliar way, but that wasn’t why she kept seeing him, or brought him to the Entrepreneurs event at the Met. She liked the sex, because she liked
him
. Hunter was about as unpretentious a human being as she’d ever met. When she was with him,
perfect
had no place in her vocabulary.

“I really do need to leave,” she said when the silence made Davis’s complete speechless evident. “Can you find your way out?” With one last bewildered look Davis stuffed the documents in his coat pocket and left. Lacey gave him a minute to start the short walk to his law firm’s offices, then pulled on her coat and grabbed her bags.

“From now on, he needs an appointment,” she said when she stopped in the reception area to button her coat. She doubted Davis would be back with a task so mundane as bringing her papers to sign but to be safe she’d remind Ernest McGovern, the founding partner in the firm, that she expected all aspects of her business to be handled by him and no one else.

“You got it,” Kelly said, tossing a narrow-eyed look at the closed door.

Lacey got into her car and headed for a strip mall on the city’s growing west side, driving on autopilot as she reflected on Davis’s unexpected appearance and the subtle air of satisfaction he’d developed in the eighteen months since they separated. She’d done her share of begging, pleading with Davis for a reason why he would want to leave, and her share of soul-searching when he couldn’t give her sensible answers.
I’ve
met someone else
she would have understood.
I need to move on
didn’t make sense to her.

His recent relationship with a much-younger cotillion queen notched the puzzle pieces together quite neatly. He wanted someone who saw him as he saw himself, successful, accomplished, well-to-do. The history he shared with Lacey, the struggle through law school, the efforts to fit into society, the long hours to make partner brought shame, not a sense of joint success. He wanted to wake up with someone who didn’t remember his run-down car, his department store clothes, his need-based scholarship to Amherst.

Thinking about Davis naturally turned to her reasons for going to Buff and then to Hunter. On the surface it appeared she’d stuck to the traditional road most women in her circle followed, college, job, cars, marriage, house, vacations, better houses and cars, more expensive vacations, repeat
ad nauseam
. But she worked when she didn’t need to, 104

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long after Davis started dropping hints about swapping property deals for charity functions.

Her family gently bemoaned her curious exits from the superhighway of upper-class life. Rich, but working hard. In her thirties, but divorced and childless.

Comfortable at galas and events, but not the slightest bit interested in them beyond what they could do for the recipients of her social class’s largesse or her business.

Hunter simply saw them as who she was. That silent acceptance liberated her in a way that the new haircut, her blatantly sexy clothes at Buff, even choosing a younger, blue collar man for her first lover couldn’t. It was a rare thing to find someone who simply let her be.

She pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall, the bays still steel girders and exposed beams, but didn’t see the developer’s truck yet. To kill time she scrolled through messages on her BlackBerry. The usual work stuff, but nothing from Hunter.

Two clicks and scrolls brought her to his cell phone number. Her finger hovered over the button to dial, but she canceled out and locked the BlackBerry. She’d called twice.

He said he would call when he could.

Her resolve to get more pragmatic about their relationship had lasted until the rainy afternoon in the park and the unbearably intimate lovemaking afterward. Claire had warned her that sometimes casual relationships ended abruptly, that guys often backed away if things got too serious, too scary. The intimacy of skin-against-skin sex might have been enough to make Hunter simply stop calling or texting or emailing.

He has a good reason
, her heart insisted.

It takes no time to send a text message, or call and explain. A minute at most
, her protective, sensible brain argued.

Her yearning heart won.
I don’t care. Call. Please call.

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