The Fifth Favor (12 page)

“How long?” he demanded.

She licked her lips, tried to remember. “Graduate school, maybe. Eight or nine years ago.”

“Eight or nine years. A travesty.” He nodded at the sofa. “Lie down for me, Billie.”

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Mesmerized, she shifted and stretched out, found a beige-striped pillow and tucked it beneath her head so she could watch him. Though she was wild and aching with desire, a tiny frisson of apprehension shivered through her. The unknown. She might come apart in his talented hands.

“Take off your jeans,” she entreated, gathering another cushion against her chest to hide behind. “Let me touch you.”

He didn’t do as she asked. He knelt by the sofa and brushed the hair back from her eyes, and his gentleness surprised her.

“What are you going to do?” she whispered.

“I’m going to make you come.” He pulled the cushion away from her grasp. “More than once.” Discarding the pillow, he tugged the blouse from the waist of her gabardine pants, his hand skilled and sure as it skimmed up silk-covered buttons and left her shirt gaping in its wake. “You’re a beautiful woman, Billie. Your hair. Your skin.” He slipped a hand beneath her back and unhooked her bra, then sat back on his heels to consider what he’d uncovered.

Even just half-exposed, Billie had never felt more naked. She held her breath, spellbound, as his warm hand slid beneath the loose bra cup and closed over her bare breast. She had small breasts, ultra-sensitive. Ted hadn’t been much of a breast enthusiast, so she hardly thought about them, or what it would do to every wild, pulsing nerve in her body to have a man’s hands on them as though they were precious, fragile, inherent to his pleasure.

God, she’d been so empty. And now she was so unprepared.

Her eyelids slid closed as Adrian’s thumb whisked back and forth over her nipple, enticing it again and again, until she bit her lip to keep from crying out. Galvanized frissons of sensation shot from her breasts to her womb. Tiny, rhythmic shivers, shades of the orgasm to come.

He leaned forward and his lips traced the valley of her cleavage, paused to fasten on the inside curve of her breast, gently suckled as though to leave a faint tattoo marking his presence. Then he shifted and licked her nipple in quick, flickering laps until it puckered hard enough to hurt.

Another pre-orgasmic shudder trembled through her. “Oh, God.”

Lifting his head, he caught a strand of her hair and brushed it against his lips, his chin. “More?”

Billie shook her head, fingertips digging into the smooth, buttery leather beneath her. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Agitated by uncertainty and impatience, she caught his hand. “Do what you said.” She guided his touch to her stomach, quivering under the pressure of his palm.

His fingers flicked open her thin leather belt, the button and zipper, and slid inside, beneath the low elastic of her pink cotton bikinis to find the soft curls there wet with desire. To find her secrets. Just a teasing, tickling touch, a whisper against her clitoris, then away again, yet it brought her back off the sofa.

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“So responsive,” Adrian murmured. “I knew you would be.”

“Please…” Billie’s palm slid over his smooth, naked shoulder while the other grabbed at the sofa for something, anything to anchor her to the earth. “Please.”

His lips, hot, damp, brushed her navel. His tongue traced it, dipped within and retreated, plunged and withdrew, the way he’d made love to her mouth when he kissed her. The way his shaft would slide into the moist, yearning core of her body. Then he turned his bristly cheek against her tender skin to watch his own hand burrow between her thighs and find the wet, sensitive flesh that craved his touch. One finger glided over her, parting the folds of her sex, tracing the swollen pearl of her desire, around and around until she nearly sobbed from the intense pleasure-pain of it.

“Billie,” he said, nuzzling his nose against her stomach as he slid a single fingertip lower to find her weeping center, “you’re so wet.”

Mortified, tormented by his gentle probing, she sank her fingers in his hair and let her head drop back against the cushion. Part of her wanted the torture to go on and on.

Another part of her wanted it over and done with, braced for humiliation over her blatant and easily won surrender. “Don’t do this. Don’t make me wait. Do what you promised.”

His tongue circled her navel. “Remind me.” He turned his cheek to stare up the length of her body at her, eyes gleaming with lust. His fingers teased between her legs, played in her wetness, limning the portal to her body without entering. “What did I promise?”

“Oh, God.” In anguish, she closed her eyes and tugged at his hair, her hips moving restlessly against the sofa cushions, against his evasive hand, straining for fulfillment.

“Adrian, please, just do it.”

“This?” Two strong fingers pushed into her wetness, deep and firm, and she bit her lip to keep from screaming, first with pleasure, then with frustration when he withdrew to tease again. “Or this?” His thumb rubbed her clitoris in light circles, sending electric shocks through her limbs.

“Oh, yes. That. All of it. Put your fingers inside me. Please.”

He spread her knees wide and exposed her to the heat of his perusal, his expression impassive save for the dark fire in his eyes. “I’m going to taste you. Inside and out.” His fingertip traced the sensitized skin of her labia, taunting, driving her to a level of need that obliterated pride and propriety and everything except the driving urge to be filled.

By his fingers. His tongue. His cock. Anything.

“Adrian…” She squirmed, but he held her spread wide.

“If I make you come, you’ll owe me,” he said, darkly enough for Billie’s lashes to flutter open.

She lifted her head to stare at him. His dark hair was tousled from her desperate clutching, his lean cheeks flushed, lips reddened from exploring her skin. The sight of his hand buried between her legs sent a fresh surge of arousal burning every nerve. “I can’t afford you. You know that.”

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“This isn’t about money.” His finger probed her opening, delved inside her again, just enough to make her shudder while her inner muscles contracted in a bid to hold him. “You’ll owe me your time.”

She didn’t know what he was asking. She didn’t care. “Yes,” she choked, thrusting against his hand. “Yes.”

He eased back and drew her slacks down her legs and off with methodical ease, material sliding against skin, metal buckle softly clanking. Her panties followed and cool air brushed her burning flesh, followed by the intense heat of his words uttered close. “A favor for a favor, Billie. What do you say?”

Her answer came in a soft, surrendering whimper when he pressed her thighs apart again, ducked his head and found her clitoris with his flickering caress. Then he did what he promised, he made love to her with suckling lips and grazing teeth and plunging tongue, relentlessly, ravenously, and Billie shattered, over and over, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that she’d made a deal she didn’t understand.

A favor for a favor.

And then she couldn’t think anymore.

* * * * *

She watched Adrian covertly as he fastened his jeans and leaned to swipe his Tshirt from the rug. His muscles moved like fluid beneath his brown skin.

Why had he bothered to undress when in the end, he didn’t let her touch him?

More than once she’d reached for him, wanting to touch his erection, to feel its silken, smoldering throb in her grip, but he’d held her hand aside. Despite the thrum of liquid satisfaction that still pulsed between her legs, she felt strangely bereft. This was a man who could go all night, but she’d wanted him to be as wildly excited as she felt with each calculated thrust of his fingers and tongue inside her. To see him lose total control was the one desire he hadn’t fulfilled for her tonight. After three powerful orgasms, though, she’d finally quit worrying about it. And now she was terribly confused.

When he glanced at her, she flushed and finished buttoning her blouse. She didn’t know what to say in the aftermath. Shame and wicked delight bickered in her conscience.

A scrap of lace hanging from a dark finger floated into view. “You forgot this.”

Jesus
. Her bra. She didn’t remember taking it off. Snatching it from his hand, she stuffed it in her pants pocket and tucked in her blouse. She could go home without wearing it. Sometimes small breasts were convenient.

Buckling her belt, she tightened it and leaned down to retrieve one conservative beige pump. The other had mysteriously disappeared, along with her stockings.

“I’m missing key articles of clothing,” she said without meeting his eyes.

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Adrian pulled his T-shirt over his head and shoved his arms into the sleeves before leaning over the back of the sofa to find her belongings. “Here’s a shoe. And…” He leaned farther. “Stockings.”

“Thanks.” She took the proffered items and sat down to put them on. While she was occupied, he left the room. His voice, low, polished, came from the foyer. He was calling her a cab for the two-mile journey back to the grocery store and her car.

So this was what it was like to feel cheap. It burned in the back of her mind until he reentered the room and stopped in front of her. His feet were bare. He had perfect feet.

A perfect body. What must it be like to be trapped inside such a flawless shell?

His hand settled on the crown of her head and caressed her hair, letting the strands sift through his fingers. When she looked up at him, he traced the curve of her bottom lip with his thumb, tested the edge of her teeth, glided across the tip of her tongue until, with a fresh surge of lust, she closed her lips around his thumb and drew on it, hungry for more than this mere taste. She would fantasize about taking more from him. His penis in her mouth. The hard thrust of his hips as she milked him with her lips, drawing on his pulsing flesh. The scalding jettison of his semen on her tongue. But it would only be a fantasy.

He watched her through lowered lashes, his hot gaze fastened to the sinuous workings of her mouth for a silent, electric moment. Then he drew her to her feet, held her face and kissed her. Gently at first, then hungrily. As though he couldn’t get enough of her.

The last of her confused dismay dissolved. “You didn’t let me touch you.” She clung to the front of his T-shirt as his lips wandered over her brow. “I’m not like your clients. It matters to me.”

He drew back to consider her, and for a long time he didn’t speak. “Thank you for that,” he said finally. “But now you have to go. Get your purse. I’ll walk you downstairs.”

When Billie climbed into the taxi, Adrian paid the cab driver, then braced his forearms on the back window. “Billie. Have you forgotten?”

“No.” She watched the melting shift of shadows in his eyes, unable to read them.

“A favor for a favor. I owe you.”

“I’ll call you.” He leaned in to catch her lips one last time in a soft, lingering kiss.

Then he stood back and the taxi rolled out of the drive. Billie took a single backward glance at him standing barefoot, hands buried in his pockets, where she’d left him. God help her. Whatever he wanted, she would gladly give.

* * * * *

The apartment seemed eerily deserted when Adrian returned. He closed the door, turned the locks, switched off the foyer chandelier. Then he moved through the living 67

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room, methodically straightening the rumpled sofa and the pillows that had been tossed askew, all without allowing himself to replay the torrid encounter that had transpired between him and Billie.

A glimmer of gold beside the coffee table caught his eye and he stooped to pick up a single, delicate hoop earring. The first sign of a woman’s presence in his home in six years.

Her scent still drifted on the air, perfume and warm, wanting female. He followed the dissipating trail of floral desire back to the foyer, where he set the earring by the telephone. A reminder to not let her get away quite yet.

What did he want from a woman like Billie Cort?

His body had an obvious answer: to take her, over and over and relentlessly, until she begged him to stop, until she begged him for more. So what had prevented him?

He’d tried to define a relationship with her by
his
standards tonight, tried to classify her as one of his clients, tried to turn her into a mercy fuck. And failed. His attempts at gaining control had backfired.

Pressing a palm against the hard, relentless throb beneath his jeans, he drew in a steadying breath and forced his mind to focus. He’d maintained the space between them with an iron will, without knowing why the hell he was holding back. He could have had her, could have screwed her senseless just like the other women who filled his schedule every week, all the while knowing Billie wasn’t someone he could take to bed and then cast aside. The ultimate conquest, and yet he’d denied both of them.

A frown lowered his brow as he headed toward the shower, stripping as he went.

She was untried. Virginal in mind and spirit. The innocence that hovered about her, disparate with her wily reporter persona, teased Adrian’s senses like an aphrodisiac.

She wasn’t the kind of woman who could give away sex without giving away her heart, and he liked that in her, that vulnerability. It was, at the very core, something new and different in his world. It also stood as a reminder of another time, when he believed in the wholesomeness, the rightness of desire. Desire earned and given freely, not bought, before he knew its worth could be meted out in paper currency.

She was hot-blooded and sensuous too, and didn’t seem aware of it. It called to the primal male in him, made him restless and hungry to touch her. But tonight a deeper part of him had won out, preserved the strange wholesomeness between them and shielded it from the anomaly his lifestyle had become because of sex.

Maybe, at the very bottom of it, he knew a whore—even a high-priced one—didn’t deserve a woman like Billie. She was reality, gritty and truthful and tangible. He…he was a phantom born out of Azure Elan’s sensuous imagination.