The Fifth Favor (15 page)

“You kissed me like you meant it,” he said flatly, “and I liked it.”

Her jaw clicked shut.

The pale glow from the parking lot lights illuminated half of his face, not enough for her to read his expression as he continued, “I thought a lot about what happened between us in my apartment, and I won’t lie. I wanted more. I knew seeing you again was risky, but I didn’t expect this.”

“This, what?” She struggled to keep her voice low and steady. “What is this, Adrian?”

“It’s starting to feel like a relationship.”

Billie wanted to cling to her indignation, but it slipped from her grasp, replaced by soft confusion. “You say that like it’s profane.”

“In my line of work, it is.”

“But I’m not one of your clients.”

“Then there’s no room for you in my life.” He folded the blanket tightly against his chest. “I’m sorry if I misled you by inviting you here tonight. It was a mistake.”

They began to walk again.

Instead of being insulted, Billie took a closer look at him as they passed through a puddle of light. Despite his careful tone, he looked…riled. Flushed. His hair was ruffled 80

The Fifth Favor

from her caress, his mouth still reddened from her kiss. He hugged the blanket to his heart like a shield.

“You coward,” she said slowly, halting his progression. “You feel something for me, don’t you? It’s scaring the hell out of you.”

“Jesus, Billie.” A sad smile touched his lips, as though she sounded pathetic. It was what he wanted her to think, that she was the pitiful one. But suddenly she knew his truth. She recognized his vulnerability. How could he do what he did for a living and not be crippled when it came to intimacy?

At thirty-three, Billie didn’t want to nurse any man back to emotional health. But this man…this man, she liked. Something deep inside her said he was worth the trouble, and tonight she wanted nothing more than to listen to that voice.

“Adrian.” Heart pounding, she caught his hand. “It’s been a wonderful evening. I don’t want it to end like this.”

“I won’t take you home with me.” His voice was unyielding, even as his fingers curled around hers.

“I understand that.” She drew him unresisting off the dirt path, toward a small copse of trees, where she set down the wine carrier and took the blanket from him. Pale, purple light spilled through the branches from the parking lot nearby. She could see his face more clearly now, and the uncertainty there both astonished and touched her. “I want nothing from you.”

“Good.” A muscle jumped in his jaw, in direct opposition to the steely carelessness of his response.

“Except your arms around me.” A few steps into the shadows, trees grew side-by-side like sentries, blocking out the world. There, she draped her arm around his neck and breathed a soft, tender kiss at the base of his throat, where his skin was warm and a little salty under the brief flick of her tongue. “And not the way you put them around your clients either.”

“It’s all I know.”

“I don’t believe you. And there’s something else I don’t believe.”

“I’m afraid to ask what it is,” he said aridly, his hands coming to rest at her waist.

“I don’t think you want me to stop caring.”

“I never asked you to start. This is a mistake.” His tone was wooden. “You don’t even know me, Billie.”

“But I do.” Her fingers slipped down the front of his shirt, over rigid muscle and smooth cotton, until she reached his belt. “I know your face, your smile, your scent. You smell wonderful,” she whispered against his neck. “You feel…incredible.”

His throat moved, his hands tightening on her waist. “What do you want to do, then? Drop right here in the leaves and go at it?”

“No.” She slid her hands beneath his arms, down his sides, around to meet at the dip of his spine, reading the resilient muscle and strength and anger in his lean body.

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Her lips caressed the hollow at the base of his throat, soothing, placating with the truth.

“I just want to taste you. To make you feel as good as you made me feel at your apartment.”

“Jesus, Billie,” he said again, but this time it was a groan of toppling resistance. She drew back slightly and slid a hand down the placket of his pants, where his flesh had already stirred to life, at once hard and demanding.

“Let me touch you,” she said against his ear, her tongue tasting the tiny gold earring he wore.

“You already have,” he whispered.

She pressed a palm against his chest and backed him deeper into the shadows, where darkness engulfed them completely. Knowing he might come to his senses and push her away, Billie unbuckled his belt with fumbling fingers, slid down his zipper and reached inside his briefs for the impressive proof of his desire. The rush of blood and heat beneath her palm swelled his arousal, speeding his pulse until it surged against her fingers and kept time with the beat of her own galloping heart.

“Adrian,” she said, astonished and a little afraid as she measured him in the dark,

“you’re so hard.”

“All night long.” His voice went husky. “I can’t seem to control it with you.”

Pleasure curled through her, and though she couldn’t see his eyes, the labored rush of his breath confirmed his words.

“Do you like this?” she asked, knowing he’d demand the same were their roles reversed. “Does it excite you, being touched like this out here where anyone could stumble upon us?”

“Yes.” He nudged aside her fingers momentarily to free his erection completely from his briefs. Then he led her touch back to his burning flesh, which had grown impossibly harder, and a flood of desire sluiced through her own body in response.

She needed more of him. More taste. More touch. With her free hand, she worked open the buttons on his shirt until it hung open, his bare skin a slash of umber in the dimness. She scattered a path of soft, lingering kisses down his throat to his chest, one hand stroking his penis and the other sliding around his warm, sleek side to his back, reading the flex and tightening of muscles as he grew more aroused.

The scent of his skin filled her senses like ambrosia, sultry-hot and clean and sweet.

He shivered; chills pebbled the hot skin stretched over ribs and lean musculature as she worshipped his bared chest with the brush of her lips and tongue. And all she could think was,
more
. He was a drug to her heated senses. A primal need, like food and water and air.

When she slid down his body, he caught her arm. “No. No, Billie.”

“Yes.” She knelt before him, dry leaves crackling beneath her weight. “I’m going to lick you. Suck you. Make you beg, the way you did to me.”

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Adrian stood like a statue, one hand still wrapped around her upper arm, the other in her hair. His fingers flexed convulsively, tangled in the curling strands as she took the tip of his penis in her mouth and gently tongued it, fearful he’d stop her from giving him the same pleasure he’d offered her four nights ago.

When she paused to look up at him, to read his reaction, he brushed an errant curl from her eyes and let his palm linger against her cheek. Reluctant gratitude, maybe.

Permission to proceed. She closed her eyes and let him sink into her mouth again, as far as he would go.

The sharp sound of his inhalation rent the air, but he said nothing. He shifted like a restless charger, found the broad trunk of the tree behind him and braced against it while she withdrew enough to slide her tongue along the sensitive ridge on the underside of his erection. His fingers tightened in her hair. His pulse throbbed against her fingers, inside her mouth.

She swirled around the tip, tasted a drop of his essence, a little salty and all male, drew his cock between her lips as far as she could, then out again in a teasing, seductive rhythm. He was big, steely, burning the tender skin inside her mouth. Blood rushed in cadence through his shaft; with every pull of her lips it surged more fiercely, indicating the wild stampede of sensation he was experiencing at her hands.

Billie had never thought herself particularly skilled at pleasuring a man this way, but he tasted so good, so exotic and delectable, she wanted to devour him. Acting on pure delight and instinct, she took him in again, played him with tongue and a light graze of teeth, savoring the shudder of his body above her.

“If you don’t stop,” he said, panting, “I’m going to come.”

An exalted shiver ran through Billie and she wrapped her fingers more firmly around him, sliding them up and down his shaft in rhythm with her mouth. Steady, firm. Quickening as his breath quickened. Harder when he groaned, “Harder…yes, Billie.”

“Beg me,” she whispered, stopping long enough to let her hot breath tease the pulsing head of his penis. It jerked as if in protest.

“Please.” His hand covered hers, tightened it around him, and slid it from base to tip and back, guiding her into a fiercer rhythm. “Put your mouth on me.
Suck me
.”

Adrian from Avalon wasn’t there in the woods, under her mouth and hand. This Adrian, someone new, wanted like every man, shuddered like every man, responded like every man under a tender woman’s ministrations.

The time for words passed, engulfed in grim silence. His fingers rubbed her hair in mindless, frantic circles, faster as she increased the speed with which she slid him in and out of her mouth. Her free hand moved around his smooth hip, shoved his khakis and briefs down to his thighs and gripped his bare buttock, where the muscle hollowed with every urgent thrust he made between her lips. Faster, faster.

Deeper
.

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Maybe she thought it. Maybe he said it. He didn’t have to say anything.

Instinctively she knew what he wanted, what would please him, and gave it with all her heart.

An unintelligible sound wrenched from his throat, a stifled cry, the sweet sound of pleasure too great to bear. A second later, when his hot ejaculation pulsed into her mouth, she sank her fingers into his hips and held him in place, deep in the back of her throat, swallowing his essence. It was something she’d never done for any man, but she wanted to give Adrian everything. She wanted everything he could give.

As the last aftershock vibrated through his body, he slumped against the tree, caught her elbow and urged her back to her feet.

“Billie,” he whispered.

Nothing more. But a million emotions crossed between them, riding on the back of that one breathless word, and then he pushed his fingers through her hair, sought her gaze in the darkness and lowered his mouth to hers, kissing her in desperate gratitude until she felt bruised. Until she held no thoughts except one: she would never be the same.

* * * * *

The atmosphere in the BMW vibrated with unspoken emotions. Billie didn’t want to make meaningless conversation; she was drained, replete and more than a little impressed with herself. Tonight she’d stepped over the line that restricted her day-today existence. She’d reached for what she wanted and taken it, taken
him
. Whatever price she’d pay, it was worth it.

Beside her, Adrian steered the sleek vehicle through sparse midnight traffic, the streetlights illuminating his features in rhythmic flashes.

Luther Vandross filled the silence with mellow, honey-sweet vocals. Adrian had placed the CD in the stereo and offered another hint of his persona. He liked the Rolling Stones, too, she discovered when he laid the CD holder on the console between them and it fell open. Janis Joplin. Bruce Springsteen. The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

He steered the wheel with one lazy hand, the other resting on his thigh. When he slowed the car at a stoplight, he glanced at her and their eyes met. He was still thinking about what had happened between them in the woods. She saw it in the drop of his lashes, in the slight furrow between his brows. But she couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or disconcerted.

The answer came when he drove to her apartment building instead of taking her home with him. He pulled the BMW through the circular drive and parked while she released her seatbelt, gathered her purse and reached for the door handle without looking at him.

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All her tipsy self-satisfaction had crashed to the ground. Out with a bang, she thought, squelching the urge to cry.

“Well,” she said, one foot out the door, “thanks for letting me touch you. Believe it or not, I think I needed it more than you did.”

“Billie.” His fingers grazed her back, bare where the dress dipped low, and she turned to find him watching her with dark, fathomless eyes. “What are you going to write in your article?”

“The truth. Everything you’ve told me. Everything I’ve seen.”

“What happened back at the park is intensely personal.”

A rueful smile lifted her lips. “Maybe it’ll give my article a nice, snappy edge.”

“Will you mention it?”

“I don’t know.” She studied the beaded purse on her lap. “Why does it matter?”

“Put whatever you need to in that article,” he said quietly. “But there’s a price.”

Billie scowled at him. “The other night you told me you didn’t care what I wrote.

‘Tell it all,’ you said.”

“I changed my mind.”

“That’s not playing fair.”

His mouth twitched. “Neither was performing oral sex on me in a public park.”

Billie wanted to argue, but his particular brand of frankness, as usual, made her thoughts stumble. Staring through the windshield, she said haltingly, “You’re saying I’ll owe you if I write about what happened between us?”

“That’s right.”

“Jesus—” She clenched her fists, overcome with frustration and confusion. “What is it with you and debts? I gave you everything I knew how to give tonight, but obviously it wasn’t enough.
I’m
not enough. I don’t see why you’d want anything more from me.”

“I’m a prostitute,” he said in that same calm, infuriating tone. “Anything of value you take from me comes at a price.”

Unexpectedly her pulse skipped a beat. “Does what happened between us tonight hold value to you, Adrian?”