Phoenix Rising (9 page)

Chapter Nine

She should’ve been embarrassed or sorry or
something
. Jessa had bent over her boss’s desk like a wanton freak and let him fuck her until she screamed. The word “no” hadn’t even crossed her mind, let alone her lips. Worse still, Jessa had enjoyed every wicked second of Connor’s masterful possession of her body.

That wasn’t even the shameful part. Now, every time she thought of what they had done on Connor’s desktop, she was wet and willing all over again. The mid-life crisis excuse was beginning to wear thin. This was turning into something else.

No matter how many times Jessa had gone over the incident in her brain, she’d arrived at the same conclusion. She’d wanted Connor. She’d been thankful for every thrust, moan, and scream between them. Now she wanted more.

The glasses on the tray clinked harshly as her hands clenched involuntarily. Shaking the sensual haze from her brain, Jessa carefully placed her load of beer mugs and shot glasses on the bar. Swiping the back of her arm across the perspiration coating her forehead, Jessa took a look around the room.

In the beginning, her worry had been that she’d be too obvious gawking at the wild activity inside the bar. That didn’t bother her anymore. Jessa was more concerned that she was going to trip over her own feet because her eyes were shamelessly glued to Connor’s massive frame standing sentinel at the door.

“Are you okay, Jessa?” Alex asked, nudging her shoulder. “You look distracted.”

An unladylike snort made Jessa cover her face in chagrin.

Alex’s low laughter didn’t help her uneasiness. The crowd had thinned out and he took the opportunity to throw back a few shots of sweet smelling orange liqueur while lounging against the counter.

“Is it always like this?” Jessa asked suddenly.

“Like what?”

“There aren’t any rules here.”

“Not the usual kind, no. But we have rules.”

“Yeah, Connor said everybody involved has to be willing.”

Alex nodded and ran his hands through tousled blonde curls.

“But how can it work? I thought places that let you do…” Jessa struggled to put words to the actions going on around her.

“You’re thinking of fancy swingers’ clubs. Those places full of beds and couches and people with tons of money.”

“I guess so.”

Alex shrugged. “Poor people want to have fun too.”

Jessa had no response to that. Will made good money. They were comfortable, more than comfortable. But the size of her credit card limit had very little to do with her personal tastes, although it seemed to determine what was appropriate and what was not.

“How important is it to let go and just be yourself, Jessa?” Alex asked softly.

“I’m not sure.”

His low laugh sent chills racing up and down her spine. “There should be nothing more important in your life than knowing who you are, love. Even if you can’t show that face to the world all of the time you have to have a place you can let it all hang out.”

Jessa thought about her brunch that morning with Kitty, Georgia, Courtney, and Anne. She remembered how stifled she felt in her prim knit pantsuit. But was it the pantsuit that made her stifled? Or was it who she felt she had to be while she wore it?

“People go to work every day and pretend, Jessa,” Alex murmured. “When they come here, they stop pretending. Some want to play. Others want to watch. And still others want to be watched.”

Across the room Jessa’s eyes were drawn to a burly construction worker. He sat in a hard-backed chair, gripping the naked ass of a buxom woman with short mouse-brown hair, who rode his cock as if there were no other place she’d rather be.

Alex’s eyes followed her gaze. “That guy has to take orders from his foreman all day long. But here, he’s king of the world. And her? She probably spends all day pretending she is a sexless woman with no thoughts or emotions of her own. She’s probably not much to look at. But right now, she’s hotter than fire and she’s rocking his world.”

Jessa was reminded of the country club set’s pastime of judging everyone who walked through the door. It was a place where the cut of your swimsuit could affect you for years. And whom you chose to have an affair with determined your permanent place in the pecking order.

Phoenix
Rising
was completely different. Nobody seemed to be judging anyone else. Jessa could see several other people casting appreciative glances at the construction worker and the woman riding his cock. There was no judgment in their gazes, only arousal.

That didn’t make any of it right. You couldn’t spend your whole life flaunting the rules of decent society, could you?

Alex moved back toward the bar, leaving Jessa alone with her twisted thoughts. One part of her wanted to revel in the thought of limitless freedom. Freedom from the obsessive calorie counting and self-loathing that made Jessa feel dowdy and undesirable. Freedom to do and say whatever she wanted, to be the woman she was before convention forced her to grow up. The other part of her brain was convinced there was no such thing.

“
Phoenix Rising
isn’t just a name.”

Jessa whipped around. She’d been so involved in her inner turmoil that she hadn’t even heard Connor approach. She considered his statement. “I assumed the name has something to do with the anything-goes atmosphere.”

“No.”

Jessa stared up into his face. Connor’s limitless black eyes beckoned, the depths gleaming like shards of obsidian in the dim overhead lighting. Her breath nearly caught in her throat.

The hint of a smile pulled up one corner of his generous mouth. “Haven’t you ever felt it Jessa?”

“Felt what?” His proximity was making it difficult for her to remember exactly what they were discussing.

His hands clamped on her hips. A rush of heat flooded Jessa’s pussy. She ceased paying attention to anything in the room but Connor. Her breath was coming in pants. He leaned down until his mouth was pressed against the shell of her ear. “As if everything you ever were is burned away, until nothing remains but ashes.”

Jessa gasped, his words sending her body up in flames of desire.

“But before the wind can scatter those ashes, you’re reborn, given a second chance to be the person you were meant to be from the very beginning.”

His words drifted through the haze of pleasure, touching her very soul. Every inhibition and insecurity crumbled. Nineteen years of proper conditioning burned away in the heat of Connor’s onslaught. Only the two of them remained.

Mindless with desire, Jessa’s hands found Connor’s arms as she told him without words what she needed.

His fingers flexed into the flesh of her hips. Her nipples puckered, peaking beneath her shirt as a fresh rush of cream soaked her panties. Jessa’s mind struggled to grasp what Connor was suggesting, but her body wanted nothing more than to respond to his touch.

Connor stabbed his hands beneath the waistband of her slacks and cupped her ass. Jessa’s body pressed against his, her pelvis cradling his massive erection as Connor groaned and bucked his hips.

“God Jessa, you’re so fucking soft.”

“You’re not,” she whispered reverently.

“I need you, Jessa. I need your cunt wrapped around my cock.”

The molten desire in Connor’s explicit words made her squirm against him. Jessa’s hands fluttered against his sides a she tried to decide what to do next. But desire quickly overrode caution, and Jessa yanked his shirt from his pants. Sliding her hands beneath it, she reveled in the feel of the satin smooth skin covering Connor’s rippling abdominals.

Reality kicked in when the cool leather of a barstool made contact with Jessa’s suddenly and inexplicably naked backside. A little freedom was a wonderful thing, but Jessa had to draw the line somewhere. She couldn’t understand why this man seemed to be able to wipe away her inhibitions and good sense with a kiss and a touch. But he had. And Jessa had to stop it.

“No, Connor.”

“No?”

The velvet-wrapped gravel of his deep voice called forth another hot wave of lust. Jessa’s womb clenched in anticipation. “We can’t do this here.”

“Why not?”

He hadn’t stopped touching her. Connor’s big hands pushed her slacks past her knees until they pooled with the shoes lying on the floor.

Those were
her
shoes. How did he get her shoes off without her noticing?

Connor nudged her back and pressed his full lips to her jaw. His hot tongue traced fire down the column of her throat to her collarbone. Jessa’s mouth opened involuntarily in a soundless struggle for breath. She couldn’t stop. Her body wanted to react, consequences be damned. Their iron wills dueled for supremacy as Jessa battled him fiercely, trying desperately to make him stop, and managing to fan the flames higher, instead.

She finally managed to pull away. “No!”

Connor’s response was to pull her blouse over her head and toss it aside. He roughly palmed her breasts through the thin white cotton of her sensible bra. Jessa’s next protest died a quiet death as her head lolled back.

His teeth nipped one peaked nipple before rolling it between his fingers. Jessa arched wildly, wanting more. Connor rumbled against her puckered skin, a sound of naked arousal. His hand snaked around her side and freed her breasts. The bra dropped soundlessly to the floor.

Connor pressed her breasts together and laved his tongue over each nipple in turn. Jessa’s breath hitched, and she flung her head back. She wanted more.

“Open your eyes,” he rumbled, hands still shaping her breasts.

Jessa’s eyelids fluttered. She was sitting naked on a stool with her back pressed against the bar. She barely registered her explicit position. All her focus was directed at Alex. The striking bartender leaned languorously against the counter behind her. The fly of his jeans was wide open. One hand restlessly clutched a bottle of top shelf scotch. The other pumped his thick shaft up and down. His intense blue eyes were glued to Jessa. And his expression was unmistakable.

Jessa squirmed, fighting Connor’s hold. Passion ran hot and heavy through her veins. But her innate shyness battled with this newfound sensuality. How could she lay here and let Connor pleasure her body while somebody else watched?

“Let me go!” Jessa demanded huskily.

Connor leaned forward. One strong hand held her captive. The other forced her to meet his hell-black eyes. The smoldering heat there burned Jessa to the core. She’d aroused a beast.

Burned away and reborn from the ashes.
That was how he’d described it. Jessa knew now it applied to the both of them.

Her heart pounded. But underneath the fear and desperate denial was something else. She wanted him, wanted to be possessed, dominated, pulled kicking and screaming over the edge of her self-repression until the only things remaining were she and Connor, their sweat-slick bodies, and the aching need for completion.

“Kiss me, Connor, before I change my mind.”

Connor’s rolling chuckle reverberated off the walls and crashed over Jessa like a wave of brutal sexuality. “Watch Alex, Jessa. Can you see how aroused he is?”

Her body plumped, blood rushing into her excruciatingly aroused skin. Jessa whimpered. Her eyes were glued to Alex’s thick erection as it disappeared and reappeared in his palm.

Connor’s lips whispered over the sensitive shell of her ear. “Watch him.”

Sight and sensation blurred inside Jessa’s brain. She was on sensory overload. Arousal drew Alex’s handsome face taut with lust. The crown of his cock turned a dusky purple. It gleamed in the dim lights as pre cum glistened on the tip, dribbling down the flange and disappearing beneath his big palm.

Her body exploded to sudden climax, the muscles of her pussy undulating in waves that cursed the emptiness of her vagina, longing for the hot length of Connor’s cock. Jessa’s hips bucked, pressing against Connor’s palm as he ground the heel of it against the swollen hood of her clit.

Propriety be damned, her first instinct was to beg him to fuck her senseless. But her pride balked, refusing to let her beg for a release in the sensual storm sweeping her body.

Connor’s big hands bracketed her hips, tilting her body. The long, hard length of his erection slid against Jessa’s plump, wet labia. She melted against him, the creamy gush of juice enticing him to slip inside her pussy.

Alex’s groan drew Jessa’s attention back to the gorgeous man watching every wave of desire sweep her body. His eyes shimmered cobalt, darkened by his increasing hunger for release. His shirt rested above his abdomen to give Jessa an unfettered look at the perfect span of smooth skin and rippling muscles above his cock. A trail of golden hair began at his navel before snaking downward and meeting with the slightly thicker hair surrounding his cock. His muscles were tightly clenched against the maelstrom of his desire. His testicles drew tighter. The long vein running the length of his cock pulsed, once, twice, three times. Alex’s eyes slid shut as his lower body convulsed. A thick stream of white cum spurted onto his stomach.

“Oh!” Jessa gasped, mesmerized by the sight of Alex’s cum spread sexily over his stomach.

“Now, Jessa,” Alex murmured. “Let me see your passion.”

His words threw gasoline on the flames Connor carefully tended with his hands and mouth. Jessa gasped, arched her back, and was rewarded with the long thrust of Connor’s thick cock as he slid home.

Connor’s hands firmly held her hips while he slid his cock in and out of her slick pussy in long, lingering strokes. The pace drove her mad. She wanted him to pound her until she exploded. Instead, he stroked her with precision. Each slide and play of his shaft rubbed against her pubic bone. The slow massage was steadily driving Jessa insane with desire.

He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Beg me, Jessa.”

Ladies didn’t beg. Especially not for sexual completion.

“I can keep this up all night, baby. I could stroke every inch of you until your body is numb with pleasure.”

A desperate cry passed Jessa’s lips before she could swallow it down.