While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 (9 page)

“You’ve really got to stop whacking me.” Using one hand to hold her, he covered his eyes with the other. The tiredness in his face, marked by the dark circles under his eyes, showed he’d been missing sleep lately too, which gave her unreasonable pleasure.

“Or what?” She repeated his earlier childish question, but this time he was close enough to respond.

Which he did by rolling them over so he loomed above her, pinning her with his size and the sheer sexual heat of himself. “Or I’ll retaliate.”

Her snort sounded loud in a room only filled with both their racing breaths. “You won’t hit me.”

The feral grin that twisted his features sent shivers racing across her skin. She became aware the T-shirt had ridden up and that it rested around her waist, baring her lacy panties to his view, and that her unfettered breasts heaved as she panted. His eyes tracked over her, the expression on his face only growing more dangerous by the second. By the time his gaze met hers, heat flooded her body and she longed to arch into him or grab his face for another of those soul-shattering kisses.

“Oh, Sheri, darling…I can think of far more interesting ways to torture you than hitting you.”

She should have stopped him then, knowing he would kiss her. The slow movement of him bending toward her, push-up style, could be avoided simply by spider crawling from beneath him.

Instead, she surprised herself and slid her fingertips into his hair to draw him closer. “Bring it.”

Chapter Thirteen

He’d read somewhere that some author or another stood on their head to remove writer’s block and as the night wore on, he gave it a shot. Other than getting dizzy from the blood rush to his brain, no story ideas appeared. He’d tried a shower, before the handstand, and it had been equally ineffective. Altogether, his mind seemed obsessed with rehashing the moments against the tree with Sheri in his arms.

Then she’d plowed in—dammit, the woman really needed to start wearing more than an itty bitty T-shirt when she roamed the house in the wee hours—and demanded he return her painting.

He’d taken a second to get to his feet before he even answered her, considering the possibility that he had simply passed out from standing on his head too long and found himself in a particularly tempting fantasy.

When he turned, she still stood there, all sexy woman in too few clothes, and when she’d raced across the room, her breasts swung and his mouth watered. Perhaps he could pretend to be the hero, not take advantage of her late night visit and let her get more comfortable before he again tried to taste her.

Then again, once she’d raced around the room, his very primal need to chase took over and he couldn’t be held responsible for capturing her.

But outside, she’d backed out.

He should move slowly. She’d mentioned why she kept her unusual calling—the dead fiancé she felt like she cheated on with a simple kiss—and he knew enough about human relationships and psychology to realize the event shaped who she’d become sexually as an adult.

When her fingers delved into his hair, yanking him closer, and her mouth met his, all thought of psychology vanished under a hunger for more flesh, more her, more
now
.

It only took one stroke of his hand to move the shirt up, to finally free her breasts to his view and from there he became ravenous. He didn’t want the shirt in his way at all, so he removed it while her hands streaked across his skin, further igniting a bonfire of sensations.

Again lost in her kiss, her breasts so soft against his chest, he tried to string thoughts together, to center himself so he didn’t scare her…

And made one of the hardest decisions of his life.

He couldn’t take what he needed. Or rather, if he took what he needed, driving into her like a madman with no desire beyond conquest, he’d scare her further away than she’d been on the first day he’d met her.

Punching the floor near her head, he knew what he had to do. Tonight would have to be about her.

Even if his dick would ache from the choice.

“Radcliffe?” Her whisper followed by her biting down on his shoulder left him gritting his teeth.

A tough choice, but it didn’t leave him without extensive pleasure to be had. Looking at her flushed cheeks, he brushed her hair back and peppered her brow with kisses. “Trust me, okay?”

Before she could answer, he kissed her, long and slow and changing the pace of their encounter dramatically. When his fingers stroked her breasts, she rose on a sigh to meet him. His hands might have shook as he ripped off the delicate lace hiding the last bit of her from his eyes, but he drowned her in kisses to hide the weakness.

The smell of her taunted him and he rolled to his back to fulfill that first fantasy he’d had of her. He could, as he’d guessed, grab her by her thighs to lift her above his head. Her shocked gasp made him smile but then he sank into his task, trying to fill his starving hunger for her with his busy mouth and tongue. At first, she seemed tense, as if unsure of the position, of him. In moments, he felt her muscles go boneless and he helped support her thighs so he could make her soar.

She tasted sweet, hot, and he could spend all night lost in the sound of her soft moans as her hips pressed closer to his head.

“Wow,” she managed to whisper. Her hips had begun to buck slightly, moving to the pace he’d set with his tongue and fingertips, and the image of her trying to ride his face implanted itself on his mind for all time. “Wow,” she repeated.

He smiled into the soft folds of her body. Touching her made him ache, but he found satisfaction in pausing so he could flick his thumb against her clit to make her twitch. “Thought we went over this, but don’t state the obvious. It’s boring.”

She started to laugh, if a bit huskily, but he didn’t let her finish the sound, sinking a fingertip to the knuckle in her clenching warmth. Her mirth broke off on a sound that he would have called a blend of a sob and a gasp if he were writing. Her fingers tugged at him helplessly, but he’d chosen this position to keep her from tempting him more.

Then again, looking up her body, he watched her tits move as she rode his face. Her hair trailed across his belly and tickled his flesh even as she got more vocal, crying out she was close and begging for more. Even without being able to touch him, watching her unravel provided temptation aplenty.

He hoped Candice was a heavy sleeper.

Seeking a better angle, he flipped her to her back and lifted her ass in his hands. “Radcliffe, I—”

The angle allowed him to swipe his tongue in one long sweep through her folds and her words shuddered to a halt as her thighs quivered. Deciding to torture her a bit, since his cock turned to granite at the first sip of her sweetness, he rested his chin on her mound to ask, “Yes? Did you have a question, Sheri?”

“Shouldn’t I be doing something? I mean, I—oh, please, yes.”

She was babbling. Since she wasn’t adding anything of worth to the conversation, he decided to satisfy them both by focusing on his work. Now that she could move more freely, her hips rose up and tried to ride his face, demanding the pleasure he offered. He sank a second digit inside her body, stroking the sweet spot he could touch by curving his fingertips. Managing to capture her clit between his teeth gently, he accompanied the motion of his fingers with the fast flick of his tongue on her exposed nub.

Digging her claws into his hair, his chest, his little Sheri screamed out her release, her legs clamping around his face as her whole body curled into him with her orgasm. He took one final taste of her before lifting her again to wrap her into his arms.

Her eyes hadn’t opened, her breath still wheezing out of her in harsh pants, when he pulled her into a kiss and she melted against him, all boneless surrender.

Even though his cock positively throbbed in unsatisfied need, he smiled. She’d liked that.

She’d liked it a lot.

“Dear Lord, McQueen.” Her shaking touch on his face and her eyes, blinking at him in stunned pleasure, only increased his happiness.

“Remember, darling, don’t state the obvious. It’s boring.”

She snickered and smacked him. He caught her wrist and raised a brow. “Tsk, tsk, tsk, I said no more hitting.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

The fact that she hadn’t run out of the room or asked him to stop pleased him nearly as much as his restless fingertips tracing the line of her spine.

“I’m still taking the painting.”

He swatted the white globe of her ass, making her squeak and squirm against him. “You’re leaving it. Go to bed.”

“Um, you…” Her gaze turned shy and she nuzzled into his neck, hiding her face from him. “I mean, you didn’t…”

“Finally? You don’t have words? Note to self, eat at Sheri’s more often. It shuts you up.” He meant the words playfully, to ease her awkwardness, and it worked because she glared at him.

“What I meant was…” Again she trailed off, nibbling her lip.

Apparently she wasn’t aware of the self-control he exhibited so he sighed. “Take the painting, if you must. But you should go to bed now. Get some rest.”

He smoothed the hair from her face and fought not to smile when her lip puckered out in a pout. She reached for the T-shirt and his amusement vanished as she covered up the lovely breasts. She stood and he didn’t move. He couldn’t, his dick hurt just lying there. If he stood up, he’d be in agony.

“Um, thank you?”

He covered his face. “Good night, Sheri.”

The door clicked behind her and he heard her race up the steps. Once he was sure she’d closed her door, based on the slam from upstairs, he unzipped his pants and let his cock free, sighing at the release of pressure.

“I’m being a gentleman,” he reminded himself out loud. “I did something one of my heroes would do.”

He wondered why none of his heroes ever suffered from blue balls.

Chapter Fourteen

Two days. Two endless days.

He’d been nothing but polite to her, smiling at her almost wistfully at random moments. Something about the intensity of his gaze when it landed on her turned her to a klutz. She’d broken glasses, plates, dropped her cell phone and otherwise knocked over piles of things in the hoarder house so much in the past few days she was sure she could change her name comfortably to Wrecking Ball.

And yet, even with the strange sensation he was aware of her and her newfound awareness of him—he only had to glance her way and her eyes seemed drawn like magnets to him—he hadn’t made another move toward her since he’d brought her to shattering orgasm in his office.

Candice—bubbly, cheerful, graceful and efficient—seemed to be crushing on her boss, taking every opportunity to rub her generous bust against his arm or lean into him and laugh up in his direction. He never rebuffed her, never chastised her, never threw anything or otherwise showed the temper Sheri came to expect from him. Instead, he kept his well-mannered façade up, a parfit gentil knight.

It made Sheri want to scream.

She might know, in a logical sense, that she wasn’t good at relationships. The one meaningful one she’d had ended with her cheating on a man who deserved to have her devotion. Leopards didn’t change their stripes, not really, and although she could renovate people, she only returned them to their core personalities. Before they’d been damaged, the people inside whose lights shined so bright she knew she could help them find their way out of the darkness.

She’d learned what her core personality was under pressure and there wasn’t light in it. It was ugly, it was gritty, it was hers, and she’d owned it for years without a single regret. Well, until she’d met a reclusive author prone to pitching sour cream and whiskey bottles, with no manners, too much hair, only one eyebrow and kleptomaniac tendencies.

It seemed, unfortunately for her, that was the impetus for her to want to renovate herself. Which meant forgiving her moment of youthful weakness and scraping at the wound she’d thought she healed.

She also needed to step back from her attachment to Radcliffe and consider his issues and how he dealt with them. He’d confessed more than she’d expected about his marriage and his mother…admitted in his own words that he lived in a shrine to his past mistakes, which no doubt caused the darkness he’d worn as a shroud when she met him.

The new Radcliffe wasn’t an improvement and she was pretty sure she didn’t just think so because the new Radcliffe had Candice eating out of his long-fingered hand. As much a mask as the klepto-crankfest version, the New Improved Radcliffe hid the man underneath. The temperamental artistic nature? That seemed real to her. The man who bent in laughter at the ridiculous situation in his office at three in the morning? Real.

The man who’d lifted her as if she weighed no more than a pillow, planting her on his face to make her feel things she’d only dreamed of? Dear God, she hoped real.

If she accepted that perhaps she’d been young, that she’d been under tremendous pressure and that her mistake with the carnie hadn’t been a great personality flaw, rather a reaction and not altogether that horrible of one considering, it meant she accepted she might not flub any relationship she stumbled into.

Then again, she could be rationalizing because she cared for her newest project in a way that had little to do with helping him and a lot more to do with attraction.

As if summoned because she’d thought about him, Radcliffe lumbered to a stop in the doorway to her studio and cleared his throat. He’d started doing that, a vast improvement from his quiet lurking and scaring the hell out of her from their first encounters. “Hey,” he mumbled.

“Hi,” she answered. He immediately stuck a finger to his lips and came closer.

“Shh… Keep it down. She’ll hear us.”

Furrowing her brow, she turned back to her latest piece—a bleak landscape with only one flower in the foreground like a survivor breaking through post-apocalyptic soil. It needed more highlights, since she’d gone too dark and washed out the contrast. “Is there a reason we wouldn’t want Candice to hear us?”

“I’m hiding. She wants me to do another phone interview.” Coming to a stop behind her, he pointed, his arm sliding into her range of vision. “I like it. Does it have some deep meaning, like hope breaking through the darkness, or is it a case of the drapes are just blue?”

She turned, but he’d paced over to the twin-sized bed to flop down on his belly, pulling a pillow over his head. She sighed, again facing her work. “What does that mean, the drapes are just blue?”

“Sorry,” his voice rumbled out from beneath the pillow. “Sometimes I forget not everyone was an English and Creative Writing major. When they had us read stuff back in school, they looked for deep and overwhelming meaning in everything. A flute, a stick, anything hard really, represented sex, for example. We had to deconstruct—never mind. The point was that it was a joke. Was the author trying to point out the desolation, fear of death, sorrow with the choice of color for the curtains or were the drapes just blue?” He removed the pillow to peer at her and she snapped her gaze back to the painting. “Make sense?”

“Mmm…” She nodded, tapping yellow into the center of the flower with a mostly dry brush to make it have texture. “In this case, I don’t know.”

He laughed, rolling to his side and hugging the pillow like a child. “Okay, that’s funny. It’s your painting.”

She quirked a brow at him, tapping the bottom of the brush against her lip. “So with every book, every scene, you know what it means? Like the deep deconstructed meaning? Or are you just telling a story the way it comes to you and sometimes the drapes end up meaning something deeper you didn’t even realize you were saying at the time?”

His lips moved around a bit as he considered. Finally, he sat up and said, “Okay, sometimes I don’t know until afterward why I made the drapes blue. It falls into place, but not always while I’m writing.”

“See?” Wiggling her brows at him, she grinned. “Maybe it’s something more than a flower on a desolate landscape. Maybe it’s just a flower. I don’t know yet. I’ll have to ruminate on it once I’ve finished it.”

She dabbed up more of the yellow, touching the edges of the petals to make it look like a light source off canvas touched the delicate bloom in the unlikely dirt.

“I want to go through the boxes.”

She dropped her paintbrush, sighed at her return of klutzmode, and picked it back up while gathering her thoughts. “So, one step at a time?” She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He meant his mother’s boxes, the piles of hoarder stuff coated in dust.

“I want to pop the bubble. I went through a couple of Mom’s boxes. It wasn’t as bad as I guess I’d thought it would be… Actually, it was nice to see some of the things since they brought back good memories. Most of it is garbage, though, so I’m going to get a dumpster. I’ve been trying to be more polite and—”

“I noticed.” She practically growled the word and he dropped his feet to the floor. She’d no sooner dropped the brush into her cleaning solution than he loomed over her.

“Why don’t you sound happier about that? I thought you wanted to renovate me, turn me into someone fit for society and all that gobbledy gook you touted.”

“You make me sound like a Bible salesman at the door of an atheist,” she grumbled and moved away from him.

His hand touched her back, guiding her in the direction of the back door. “Outside. Avoiding Candice, remember.”

She thrilled that he’d finally touched her again. Tamping down on that unreasonable joy, she allowed him to lead her. “It’s not gobbledy gook.”

“Yeah, sure, ignoring my question.”

“Don’t state the obvious,” she quoted. “It’s boring.”

He snickered, striding fast across the back yard as if Candice would trot outside and catch him if he didn’t make the tree line. “Why aren’t you happy? I’m far more personable, don’t say half of what I’m thinking, and I’ve made many advances in personal hygiene. One would think you’d be over the moon with the state of your project.”

When he put it that way, she should be. Other than the fact she was reasonably certain he faked it… “Are you happy?”

Since he’d managed to enter the forest, he finally slowed down and turned to face her, walking backwards. “Define happy?”

She sighed.
How in the hell did one define happy?
“Are
you
pleased at your appearance? Do you like filtering your words? I’m impressed that you want to go through the boxes, but…”

“Isn’t there always a but?” He grabbed a tree limb and hung from it monkey style, looking more carefree than she’d ever seen him. Compared to the hunched old man, he did seem vastly improved right that second.

“In your case, I’m almost positive there is always a but.” Not giving him more attention, curious if he’d follow her, she continued walking away from him without a backwards glance.

“I feel like I’m faking it.”

His honesty with her made her more happy than the office orgasm. Somehow, she felt closer to him when he talked to her like this—as if he told her things he wouldn’t tell anyone else. “Because you’re not being a temperamental spaz?”

He’d caught up to her and stopped to sit on a fallen log, looking up at her. “I don’t mind cleaning up—actually, I’d hoped you’d be more impressed by that than you are—however I don’t like pretending and not telling people when they’ve extended beyond their stupid quotient for the day.”

Since the only people he spoke to were herself and Candice that she knew of, Sheri frowned down at him, stopping to face him full on. “Do I often exceed my quotient?”

He smiled, a half-grin that sent her heart racing. “How honest do you want me to be? And if I answer, are you going to smack me?” He wiggled his brows, suggesting he remembered their conversation and the repercussions of her smacking him and almost hoped she would.

Since he hadn’t touched her in days—
two full days
—she sucked in her breath.

She’d almost convinced herself that the reason he’d banished her from his office after licking her to earth-shattering orgasm had been that he hadn’t wanted her.

The look in his eyes suggested otherwise and she resisted a quick fist pump.

“Radcliffe, I’ve been thinking about Preston.”

His cobalt gaze dropped and he suddenly seemed very interested in shredding a leaf. “Well, that’s sweet.”

“You were right.”

“Usually.”

“I’ve been hiding as much as you have.”

The piercing intensity of his gaze snapped back up, honing in on her face. “I didn’t retract that statement due to the fact I was sure I had been correct.”

Shifting from foot to foot, she snagged a piece of her hair and twisted it between her fingertips. “I’ve also been thinking perhaps I was young, under pressure, and that my actions weren’t nearly as horrific or defining as I’ve considered them to be.”

He didn’t answer and she forced herself to look and see what he thought.

The most unguarded expression she’d ever seen was etched into his face. It looked, if she were to put a word on it, a bit like hope. When he swallowed and lifted a single hand toward her, she moved closer to him, accepting his hand and twining their fingers together. “I also realize that I might be afraid of some of the feelings I’m having in regard to you. I’m pretty sure I’m stating the obvious, so excuse me if I bore you, however I feel the need to say that some of them have nothing to do with a simple personality renovation.”

“I’m not bored.”

She’d hoped he’d say more than that so she growled at him.

He added, “And I find it strangely hot that you’re picking up some of my bad habits. I don’t think you growled when you first came to stay with me.” His smile had erupted to spread across his face.

With her free hand, she touched one heavy dark curl that flopped across his brow. “I can’t promise I’m magically better, that I’m not going to freak out if things feel intense.”

“I’m not going to promise not to get drunk and throw shit at you, if that’s of any comfort.”

She snorted. “Well, God forbid you promise not to act like an oaf. Anyway, what I was going to say was, could you sit still for a moment?”

He nodded, seemingly otherwise frozen.

“Not that still.”

He raised his brows.

Leaning down, she cupped his face and did what she’d wanted to do ever since he banished her from the office.

She kissed him.