“It helps that my opening coincides with Jake’s exhibition arriving in London. Especially as word seems to have leaked about our night on the island. The studio had me working flat-out so we could exploit the timing. Have you seen much of him?”
Seth wasn’t fooled by her diffidence. “Not recently. His exhibition has taken up a lot of his time too.”
She eyed him. “Am I going to need a drink for this?”
“Maybe we both will.”
She led the way up a wooden staircase to a mezzanine deck, from which, she told him, a long-ago factory supervisor had once kept a beady eye on his employees. Barely listening, he tried not to be distracted by her shimmering, silver-clad backside swaying as she climbed. He had to stay focused. If he ballsed this up, Jake would never forgive him.
There was a double bed awash with lacy pillows in a corner of the deck under a skylight. Kayla led him to a seating area with a small but well-equipped kitchen.
“Red?” Kayla held up a bottle of wine, and he nodded. She picked up two glasses. “So,” she said. “Are you here with bad news?”
Seth would very much have liked to know what she considered bad. That he and Jake had got it together or that they hadn’t? Luckily he knew his limitations, knew he didn’t have the subtlety to pursue that line of thought. “Jake doesn’t know I’m here,” he started.
“I gathered that.” Kayla sat on the edge of the sofa and poured two glasses of wine.
“I wanted to speak to you alone.”
She handed him a glass. “Seth, whatever it is, just say it, please,” she said, and he realized she was strung as tightly as he was.
He took a breath. “When you meet Jake tomorrow, the plan—
his
plan—is to tell you that we’re not gay.” There, he’d done it. Betrayed his best friend’s trust. There was no going back. “Kayla, he’s so desperate for the three of us to be together that he’s going to tell you that what he and I had is over.”
She gazed into her wineglass, her lashes hiding her reaction. “And you’re here to tell me that it’s not. I see.”
He shook his head bleakly. “I can’t say it. I can’t. It’s a lie. I want him. I’ll always want him.” He had rehearsed this in the taxi, but saying the words aloud both terrified him and lifted a weight off his shoulders.
Kayla touched his hand. “Then don’t say it,” she said gently. “If you two are together, I’m happy for you. You know I don’t want lies. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” she continued. “You want us to come up with a plan to let Jake down gently?”
Seth shook his head, keeping his fingers crossed, knowing that the worst was still to come. “Hell no. I want
you
to be honest with us too.”
She frowned. “About what? I have been honest with you. I wanted the pair of you to accept your sexuality and admit what you mean to each other. I…I’m really pleased it’s worked out for you.”
Did she mean that? Would she look so pale and drawn if she meant it? “I love Jake,” Seth told her. “I love to fuck him. Just him. Not men. Only Jake.”
“Well that’s good—”
“I don’t want to give that up. I really love being with him. We go at it like jackhammers,” Seth rushed on. “Jake loves it as much as I do. You should hear the noises he makes.”
Kayla said nothing, her gaze fixed on his face.
“And Kayla, love, I think that turns you on,” he finished quietly. Still, she said nothing. But her breathing came faster. And two hot circles of color appeared on her cheeks, though the rest of her skin remained unnaturally pale. “I think you like hearing about me and Jake together. I think you’d like to join in.”
There, he’d said it. Now he held his breath. If he had read this wrong, he had probably just lost his two best friends.
“No. That’s disgusting,” Kayla whispered.
She didn’t look disgusted. She looked feverish.
“Two men fucking is disgusting?” he asked carefully. “Or you watching?”
She flinched and dropped her gaze, her voice so low he had to strain to hear. “Me watching.”
The thought of Kayla watching him and Jake together was the biggest turn-on Seth could think of. “Who on earth told you… Wait a minute. Your ex?”
She kept her gaze lowered, but nodded. “You know Marc and I decided to try a threesome to spice up our marriage. It was a complete disaster, but not in the way you might expect.” She licked her lips. “Yes, finding out the truth about Marc came as a shock, but watching him with his lover, watching them together, what they were doing…”
“It turned you on?”
She nodded, not looking at Seth. “Marc had completely forgotten I was even there. I just kept quiet. I’d already given myself goodness knows how many orgasms when he suddenly noticed me and blew his top. He called me perverted.”
“I guess it was a very charged situation,” said Seth carefully, vowing to stomp all over this Marc guy if he ever met him. “But I suspect his choice of words said more about how he felt about himself at that moment than anything to do with you.”
“That’s what my therapist said.”
“But…?” prodded Seth.
“The session was all about me understanding and forgiving Marc. She sort of skipped over the bit where it turned me on.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Even my therapist thinks I’m a pervert.”
Oh, boy
. She looked utterly miserable. Everything hinged on how Seth handled this, but he felt totally out of his depth. If only Jake were here. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to watch you get it on with your friend Lottie?”
She glanced up sharply. “Is that something you are likely to say?”
“Never. The only person I want to share you with is Jake. But speaking hypothetically. If a man fantasizes about two women making love, does that make him perverted?”
She wrinkled her nose. “It makes him a man.” Then she smiled slowly. “Oh, I see what you are saying.”
Seth took her hands in his. They were icy cold. “Baby, your ex is an idiot and your therapist should be struck off. You’re being too hard on yourself. There’s nothing perverted about sex between consenting adults, whatever form it takes. If Jake and I were making out and you wanted to watch, we’d both come so hard we’d be heard in Australia.”
She searched his face. “Do you mean that?”
“What would I gain from lying? Kayla, I’m hard just talking about it,” he said honestly.
She held his gaze a moment. “Can I show you something?”
Taking his hand, she stood and led him to a door, which she unlocked, stepping aside to show him the interior.
“Wow.” Seth could say nothing else.
Everywhere in the room were images of him and Jake. Paintings. Carvings. Sculptures. Naked. Sucking. Fucking.
“Every time I started a new piece, I put your faces on them,” Kayla whispered. “I didn’t even notice at first. But even when I tried to do it differently, they still kept coming out the exact same way.”
Seth peered at a charcoal drawing of him and Jake naked on a sofa, watching TV, drinking beer, each with a companionable hand on the other’s cock. The scene was relaxed, affectionate, and hot as hell. “I’m getting a little bit turned on here.”
“Tell me about it,” said Kayla ruefully. “Sometimes I sleep in here.”
“Really?”
She punched his arm. “No. That would be weird.”
“But it does turn you on, me and Jake?” Hopefully he already knew the answer to that, but he needed to be sure.
Kayla nodded.
Hallelujah!
“You know, you don’t have to look at these,” he said. “You can look at the real thing.”
“You think Jake will go for that?” she asked shyly.
“Baby, he just needs to be told what’s good for him. Trust me. He wants this. Almost as much as I do.”
Her eyes shone. “So what do we do now? Wait till you get back from your trip and join forces to persuade him?”
Seth didn’t favor that scenario at all. “I’m not good with waiting,” he said seriously.
Kayla stood on tiptoe to plant a soft kiss on his lips. “Neither am I. Maybe we should make the most of tonight. Unless you think Jake will object.”
Did she mean what he thought she meant? Excitement quickened inside him. “No more than I objected to him sending me halfway across that island so he could seduce you.”
“I seem to remember you objected quite a lot.”
“I can handle Jake,” he told her with confidence.
Her throaty laugh sent heat straight to his groin. “Do you promise to let me watch?”
Chapter Eleven
“Let me get this straight. We are having sex, right?” Seth hoped he knew the answer, but he needed to be sure.
“Yes, Seth, we are having sex.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “And we’re doing it because I’m right? Because me and Jake fucking each other isn’t a problem. In fact, you really want to watch?”
Her cheeks flushed pink, but she nodded, and he punched the air. “Yesss! In your face, Jake Forrester! He’s the one with all the degrees, but I figured it out.”
“You do think he’ll be okay with this?”
“Okay? Baby, it will be his dream come true. Mine too.”
Kayla reached up and pulled a pin out of her hair, shaking her head so the blonde waves fell loose to her shoulders. “Good. I’ve been surrounded by giant cocks for months. I need some perspective.” So saying, she turned and walked the short distance to the bed.
Seth followed. “Have I just been insulted? If so, I’m prepared to let it go.” Without further preamble, he began to strip.
“In a hurry, are you?” she teased.
He didn’t slow. “Am I coming across as desperate? Because I am. Desperate, you know. Jake’s been on the road with his exhibition, and I’m randy as hell.”
“Let’s call it keen rather than desperate.” She unzipped her dress, and it puddled to the floor, revealing a lacy silver bra and tiny matching panties. “And I like keen. Oh! Your leg.”
Seth cursed the scar on his thigh, which was still raw. “It looks worse than it is, honest.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” To prove his point, he practically bulldozed her onto the bed, sighing in contentment as he buried his face in her neck. “I remember your perfume.”
“I’m not wearing any. But I know what you mean. I had to change my shampoo because the smell of coconut made me so randy. And your scent and Jake’s come back to me in my dreams.”
Seth kissed her, and she met him eagerly, matching his erotic demands with her own. While they kissed, he deftly undid her bra and dropped it onto the floor while she wriggled out her panties. Now they were both naked, skin on skin, exactly the way Seth liked it. “You dream about me?” he asked. “Us?”
“Every night,” Kayla said. “I dream about you coming in my mouth. I dream about you coming on my breasts. When I’m working, especially with clay, I’m thinking about you or Jake. Sometimes…sometimes I…”
“What?” he demanded, getting more turned on by the minute. “Sometimes you what?”
“Sometimes I have to stop and give myself an orgasm just so I can keep working,” she finished in a rush.
“And the gallery is okay with that?”
She laughed. “Here. I do it here.”
“In private, in public. Either way, it’s hot. You should know that when Jake and I are together, you are all we talk about. Your skin, your taste. Those happy little noises you make when we’re both inside you. Frankly I don’t know how we’d have coped living without you if we hadn’t had so much CCTV footage.”
Kayla drew away, her eyes wide with horror.
“What?”
“You don’t think Ma’ K’âaba is ever left unguarded, do you?” He dodged a none too playful punch on his shoulder. “Hey, I’m kidding!”
“You’d better be! What we did there isn’t something I’d want anyone to see.”
“No? You filled your gallery with my cock. And Jake’s.”
“But no one knows it’s you.”
“And you filled a room with images of us fucking.”
“I keep the door locked!”
Seth loved teasing her. “Fucking you haven’t even seen in real life.”
“I have a vivid imagination.”
“I know. But I’m going to make it my mission to ensure you don’t need an imagination.” Having her in his arms felt fantastic. Seth rolled onto his back and pulled her over him, maximizing contact as every one of his senses reveled in her very existence. He breathed in her scent and stroked every glorious inch of skin. He sucked on her nipple, then watched, fascinated, as the pale flesh flushed to a deep raspberry color.
“Do you know,” he said happily, “we’ve barely ever spent more than ten minutes in each other’s company without getting naked. We didn’t even have that drink.”
“Time enough for drinks later.” Kayla covered his face in kisses, her mouth and hands as eager and active as his. “I need you, now.”
Music to his ears. “You looked so intimidating when I first saw you at the gallery. I never imagined the evening would end like this.”
“It’s just going to end, period, unless you get on with it.”
With a speed that made her gasp, Seth rolled, pinning her beneath him. He nudged her legs apart with his knee and reached down to gently stroke her wet, silky, soft core. “Happy to oblige. Or maybe you want some of that foreplay stuff?”
“Seth.” She grinned up at him. “You do great foreplay just with your eyes. I’m more than ready.”
He was so aroused he suspected that if he didn’t get inside her soon, he might suffer permanent damage. “Are you sure about the foreplay? Remember, I’m pretty big.”
Kayla rolled her eyes. “If you have to say it, you’re not as big as you think.” With that, she wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. “Trust me, I’m ready.”
The musky scent of her arousal wafted to him—enticing, intoxicating, exotically feminine, and uniquely Kayla.
“Now, Seth,” she said, and the plea in her voice snapped him into action.
Taking a moment to roll on a condom, he moved back between her legs. He still met resistance as he sheathed himself inside her, but with Kayla so wet and slippery, the degree of resistance was absolutely perfect. A smooth, shockingly intimate glide, and they were one.
“Sweet mercy,” he gasped.
She pulled his head down and kissed him while she moved her body feverishly beneath him, speeding them both towards orgasm. He bit the soft skin on her neck, not quite hard enough to bruise, and she parried by using her teeth on his ear. He drove into her, and she met his every thrust, the loft filling with their joyful, uninhibited cries.