An Affair of Deceit (24 page)

“Like when you kicked me in the balls and then informed me that you only kicked me because my groin was the closest thing to your foot. And furthermore, that I should have known better.”

“I keep on telling you that, and you keep on ignoring me. You need to stay out of my circle of pain. Stay out of my reach, and you’ll be fine. I don’t have a gun, so I can’t get you if you don’t come close.”

“Maybe I want to come close. Maybe I don’t mind the fifty-fifty chance of needing medical attention.”

She did a quick calculation of their relationship so far: there had been roughly six incidents of extreme physical closeness, and only two of them had ended with him needing ice.

Ha!

“You’re wrong. Your chances of injury are one in three,” she said.

“I like those odds,” he said, his devilish half-grin barely visible underneath his bag of ice. “I like you, Abigail.”

The simple words sent a delicious shiver up her spine. Nobody had ever said something so emotionally unequivocal to her before.

“Is that so?” she said, feeling shy but thrilled.

“Definitely.” He lifted the ice pack off his face, and she saw that the bleeding had stopped. His smile faded, and he stared at her with such great intensity that she thought she might snap in two. She tensed her body again, but her muscles resisted her calming efforts, instead contracting and expanding desperately with every beat of her heart.

His mouth opened. The world slowed. She watched him draw in a breath, imagined that lazy air molecules around him were startled awake and drawn inside him, drawn to the purpose of keeping him alive. She felt herself be drawn to him, too. As helpless as a scrap of paper in a windstorm, she flew to him, wrapping her arms around his body as he stood to catch her. They kissed, joined at the hips and lips. Their fingers clawed desperately at fabric, pulling impediments off and away. His hands gripped her bare bottom, and he lifted her onto the counter, the granite icy against her skin but delicious in contrast to the sweating heat of her body.

His lips traced her collarbone and molded to her breast where his teeth, gently but insistently, tugged her nipple. The spike of pleasure drove through her core, and she cried out once, fiercely, before lowering her mouth to his. He touched her between her legs, where she was silky and hot, his hands tender and light on
her skin. He slipped a finger inside her. Just one. It was enough to make her skin feel a stretch, for it’d been a damn long time since she’d let anything near there. He pushed against her clitoris with his thumb and gently slid that one finger in deeper. Then he pulled it back out before plunging it in again. Over and over again, he pistoned her in a slow but increasing rhythm, his thumb pressed against the hard bead between the folds of her skin all the while. Then he slid that one long finger inside her and held it there, firm but motionless, as his thumb spiraled her clitoris.

She moaned, putting voice to the ebbing and flowing of her desire as it rose, in waves, to a high tide that threatened to wash over her. Still, he kept his finger calm inside her, only massaging between her lips with the gentlest of motions. He kissed her deeply, and she pulled him closer, wanting him to keep going, but he held still, save for that impossibly small but exquisite circling of his thumb. She started to move against his hand, showing him what she wanted. Her butt rocked on granite as she tilted her hips backward and forward, letting his finger slide in and out once again.

But she wanted more. She wanted him.

He looked up, met her eyes, and in his eyes she saw a ragged hunger that matched her own. She wrapped her legs around his body and drove her heels into his back, forcing him closer, forcing the hard edge of his erection to press against her softness. She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to their undergarments. She opened her legs farther, and he slid inside. The burning pain of the entry was quickly overtaken by the escalating desire for something she’d never felt before but understood in the way one understands thirst and hunger. This part of human existence did not require analysis and explanation, a guidebook or a plan.

A plan.

She opened her eyes and froze. He looked at her in alarm and pulled out.

“Is this safe?” she asked, feeling like a teenager, or rather like an utterly irresponsible idiot for not knowing whether he’d sheathed before burying himself within her.

“Of course. I would never…” He didn’t finish, but instead took her hand and guided it low.

Tentatively, she touched him, and felt the small fold of latex that marked the beginning of the protection. It was hot and lubricated, and it felt smoother than skin. She rubbed it from base to tip and was rewarded with his moan.

His jaw clenched.

Was he trying not to cry out?

She gripped harder and ran her hand down the length of him again. His hips rocked; his eyes closed. Amazed by his delight, she stroked him, subtly adjusting her technique to elicit louder groans, noticing how he seemed to prefer slow, hard pressure to quick, light touches.

Then his body began to tremble. He opened his eyes, and the look of hunger was gone. In its place was a demand—one she was eager to fulfill.

She guided the tip of him close to her body, and he slid deeply inside, slowly but decisively, hitting something deep within her that caused an explosion of sensation that for a moment she mis-took for pain. Her brain threatened to intervene, but as Riley moved out and in again with deliberate tenderness, she focused on the feeling and named it pleasure.

Oh, what pleasure it was! She lifted her knees and wrapped her arms around his damp neck, wanting him deeper, forever. She wondered fleetingly why she hadn’t done this with him before. It was something that should be done at all opportunities. Each hard ripple of his shaft delighted her entryway as it passed, again and again. Her rational mind began to fade, lulled into submission by the pursuit of primal gratification.

Her body began to tremble. It was beyond her control. This was not an act that could be done interminably. No, they were
building toward some end, some finish that she suddenly was loath to achieve. Once it finished, would it ever really be reached again? Could this pleasure really be experienced more than once in a lifetime?

She pressed her hand against his chest.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t want it to end.”

He smiled, one corner of his mouth lifting higher than the other in his familiar grin. “You’ll like the end. And we can do it again, soon. Today.”

“We’d better.” She thought she should feel dirty for saying it, but she didn’t. Instead she smiled, and he kissed her softly, and then harder, and their passion snapped back into place.

He embraced her and carried her off the counter, his penis still buried within her body. He collapsed back into a chair, and she fell fully onto him. Then she began to ride; there was no other word for it. Up and down, she moved slowly against his body, locking his rod inside her while she rubbed hard against the short, curly hair that darkened his groin. The friction was like a thousand tiny fingers, and it combined with the deep aching inside her to send her yet again to the verge.

She cried out loudly in the quiet kitchen. It was a request that she was unable to withhold any longer.

“Now?” he asked.

“Now.”

Like a wild horse released from a gate, he bucked under her, fierce and full, slamming into her core. His thrusts pushed her into the path of a tsunami that crested and flooded through her in shuddering ripples. She held herself taut, thinking of nothing but maximizing the pleasure of the full-body quakes. They echoed through her, fading gradually. Only then did she think to ease her fingers out from the grooves they’d pressed into Riley’s back.

That would be an orgasm,
she thought, and fell onto his chest.

“Do you have anything to eat?” he asked, minutes later.

She tried to rouse her brain. Food seemed like something that shouldn’t be a priority right after sex, but she supposed it had been a kind of exercise. The tingling in her thighs reminded her that she’d done a fair equivalent of a leg workout, herself. Maybe a snack wasn’t a bad idea. “Crackers, possibly. And tea.”

“Eggs? Potatoes?”

“Not a chance. I might have some salad dressing somewhere.”

He shifted, disconnecting their bodies. “After exercise like that, I require sustenance.”

Although she usually didn’t eat a big breakfast, she warmed to the idea of getting food, liking that he felt the same sort of exhaustion as she did. “Then we need to go out. Takeout is the only dish served in this house.”

He looked to the shuttered front window. The bright light of early morning streamed through the slats. “How about we pay my mom a visit? She’s always got something good cooking. I usually go see her on Sundays, anyway.”

Abigail grabbed the carefully folded blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it under her arms like a strapless sheath dress. “I can’t talk about your mother while we’re naked.”

He picked up a maroon cloth napkin from the kitchen counter. With a smile, he laid it neatly across his lap, as though he were about to eat a meal. It barely covered his unmentionables. “Better?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, totally.”

“Really, let’s go to my mom’s house. You’ll like her.”

Abigail could think of dozens of things she’d rather do than meet Riley’s mother. Mothers were, in her experience, hair-pullingly difficult, and that was only her own. She imagined that the mother of—whatever Riley was to her now that they’d had sex; her boyfriend?—would be even less pleasant to deal with.
She glanced at the clock above the stove. “It’s barely seven. It’s hardly an appropriate time to call on someone.”

“She’s an early riser, like you. You’ve got a lot in common with her.”

Abigail couldn’t stop her snort of doubt.

He frowned. “You really don’t want to?”

“Not really. Why would I?”

“Because she’s my mother, for starters. You’ll like her. And I want to get away from your house today. It’s too obvious that you’d be here. We’re sitting ducks for anyone who wants to get in this place. Two entrances means it only takes two people to block us in.”

Scary thought. “You’d put your mother in the line of fire?”

“I’ll make sure we’re not followed.”

T
HE LANDSCAPE CHANGED
quickly just thirty minutes outside of Washington. Gone were the hordes of cars and stately monuments. Here, voracious green vines choked most of the deciduous forest that shaded the road, making Abigail feel as though she was buzzing down a South American river rather than a Southern highway.

Riley drove. They’d taken a short subway ride to his place—he invited her in, but she refused, so they’d simply gotten into his car and left the city immediately. Now he turned up an unpaved road that meandered through the thick, almost primeval woods. They rode in mystical silence, and just as he shifted into a lower gear to manage the incline, the trees vanished and a wide, manicured green lawn spread out from the road.

At the top of the knoll was a simple white house with black shutters and a wide front porch. As their car crunched over the gravel at the end of the circular driveway, a smiling woman with lean, tan arms and close-cropped blonde hair walked out of the house’s front door.

The woman waved, and Riley said, needlessly, “That’s my mom.”

He seemed so happy to see her. Abigail couldn’t relate.

They parked, and Riley leaped out of the car to run to Abigail’s side. He opened her car door for her, and she wondered whether the gallantry was a show he put on for his mom. Already, she was wary of the influence that this woman had over her son.

“What a wonderful surprise to see you!” his mother said, and hugged him fiercely. “And you’ve brought a friend.”

“Mom, this is Abigail Mason. Abigail, this is my mother.”

The woman’s eyes, which were the same shade of green as Riley’s, narrowed just a touch before she stepped forward to grab Abigail’s hand in hers. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

Abigail found it disturbing to see Riley’s eyes in another person, but the woman’s smile was her own. He must have gotten that crooked, sexy little grin from his dad.