Ecstasy (8 page)

Her face set in a mulish expression. She turned away from him, but instead of walking back out the door, she walked towards the small stage and sat down at the piano.

“I’m auditioning,” she said, and he knew she was trying to be brave, but even in the dim light of the bar he could see her hands shaking.

He looked down at his jeans and cursed the huge bulge in the front of his pants before taking several menacing steps towards her. But before he could forcibly grab her by her skinny little shoulders and throw her out onto the sidewalk, she opened the Blue Book of Jazz and Pop standards and began to play.

He stopped in his tracks. She played thirty seconds of one song and then flipped the page and played thirty seconds of the next. Zane sank down into the nearest chair.

The little choir girl was incredible. The piano player of his dreams. Shit! He couldn’t have her in the bar. Every man in the place was going to start having dreams about laying her sweet little body over the front of his thighs, pulling up her pleated skirt and...

“Stop!” Zane said loudly, almost more to himself than to her, but this time she obeyed him.

“I want the job, sir,” she said in a calm but firm voice.

“No. The bar is called Piano Man, not Piano Woman.”

“That’s sexual discrimination,” she pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. “You’re not good enough.”

Her eyes shot fire at him. “Yes I am!”

Suddenly Zane had a thought. “How badly do you want this job?”

She lowered her long eyelashes and then looked back up at him. “I want it.”

Slowly, Zane got up from the chair and sauntered over to her. Sitting down next to her on the piano bench, he said, “I’m willing to make you a deal.” He saw her swallow and then she licked her lips.

“I’m listening,” she said as she removed her slender fingers from the keyboard and clasped them primly in her lap.

He bent his head over hers until their lips were touching and then he slipped his tongue into her mouth, dying to taste her.

“This is what I want. Are you willing to give it to me?”

Her eyes grew even wider, but she nodded.

“Whenever I want?”

She nodded again.

“However I want?”

This time she smiled at him and reached out her hand to shake on the agreement. “I’m Jolene,” she said in a voice as sweet as honey. “What’s your name?”

* * *

That first night, Jolene played the piano like she had never played it before. She knew she was still on shaky ground. Besides, she was so excited and nervous about the terms of her contract with Zane, she needed to blow off her energy at the keyboard or she’d go crazy.

All night she had watched him out of the corner of her eye. In her fantasies, she had never created any man as incredible as this one. Six feet tall, and all muscle beneath his worn jeans and tight black t-shirt, his teeth gleamed white against the dark tan of his skin. Stubble covered his jaw line and his shoulder-length dark brown hair and piercing green eyes made him look so much like a pirate that Jolene felt as if he was living in the wrong century, on the wrong continent even.

At the end of the evening as the last customer walked out, he locked the door and then joined her on the stage again.

“Stand up,” he said as he sat down on the piano bench.

She did as he asked and tried to get her knees to stop shaking. Pulling her so that she was standing between his knees, he reached around the back of her skirt and popped open the top button, then slid the zipper down until her skirt fell into a heap at her heels.

She looked around the bar at the hundred tea-light candles glowing, at the fireplace roaring, and knew that all of her fantasies were about to be made real.

He hooked his fingers into the edges of her cotton panties and slowly slid them off, over her ass and down her smooth, untouched thighs. Jolene had to fight the urge to cover herself from him, and she barely managed to keep her hands clenched at her sides.

Before she knew it he had moved his hand between her legs and slipped the index finger of his right hand into her vagina. She gasped even as she felt her muscles convulse around his thick, long finger.

Jolene was scared. She had barely even touched herself there in the shower. But she was so excited her fear hardly seemed to matter. She strained against his finger and he pushed it so far inside her his palm covered her and his thumb was pressing on the sensitive flesh at the top of her vagina.

She knew from her books that it was called the clitoris, but she could hardly think the word to herself.

“Your clit is so swollen,” he murmured, his mouth less than an inch from the cleft between her legs.

She liked the way clit sounded coming from Zane’s mouth and she forced herself to say the word out loud. “My clit has been swollen all night,” she murmured.

He groaned, then lifted his thumb off her clit and blew softly on the engorged flesh. Her vagina clenched around his finger and as he blew on her again and slid his finger in and out of her vagina, she closed her eyes and started to see a rainbow of colors. Her legs were shaking uncontrollably now, but not from fear. She was trying to crest the tallest hill she had ever encountered, and she needed Zane to help her over it.

She put her hands on the back of his head and pressed his mouth to her. “Thank god,” she cried as he worked his tongue and his teeth over her inflamed flesh and clasped her buttocks with his strong hands.

Jolene’s world exploded in a blaze of fireworks. Now that she knew what awaited her on the other side, she knew she would never be able to go back to the perfect world she had come from.

Jolene Mackenzie wasn’t a good girl anymore.

Candace looked up from her computer screen and realized she had been writing all morning. She reread the beginning of her new story and smiled.

Evidently, Charlie’s lessons had inspired more than her underutilized libido. His incredible lessons had stimulated her mind and imagination as well.

But as she remembered their promise to each other to keep whatever happened in Charlie’s “classroom” inside the classroom, she was assailed by guilt.

A bad little voice inside Candace’s head said,
Don’t worry, honey. He’ll never read your book. He’ll never find out that you and he are the live action figures playing out your sex scenes.

Candace had never written so fluidly before. What’s more, she had never been so inspired to continue with her story, to find out what was going to happen with Jolene and Zane.

I can’t stop now.
The words reverberated in her skull, so she said them aloud, announcing them to herself in her empty office. “I can’t stop now. I
won’t
stop now!” she proclaimed and gave up trying to win the battle to be the good girl she was supposed to be.

“Being good has always been my problem,” she muttered, thinking how very close to the truth her new heroine Jolene was. And then Candace smiled again thinking about all the different ways Jolene was going to be bad, and couldn’t wait to get the story finished.

Candace spent the rest of the afternoon typing away at her laptop computer, working hard to get every nuance and every emotion of her first two lessons with Charlie just right on the page.

And as she did so, Candace began to forget that she had ever lived a life without pleasure.

Chapter Eight

Charlie stood up from his desk and walked into the guest bedroom of his house. He hadn’t been able to work since Saturday, since the day his whole life had been turned upside down by a redheaded vixen who didn’t even know the power she wielded. He needed to call her, but as it was, he was still too chicken to dial her entire number without hanging up.

He hoped she would still talk to him. After the way they had parted on Saturday, after she stood up, put her clothes on mechanically, and then turned to him with a plastered smile and shook his hand, saying “Thank you very much for the lessons, Charlie,” he wasn’t sure if he had done the right thing with her at all.

His conscience was bothering him more than he wanted to admit. Above and beyond the fact that he was worrying he might have taken advantage of her, was the indisputable truth that if he were with her again, he knew he wouldn’t have one single qualm about making her scream his name out, over and over again.

He was still upset that she had left after only seven orgasms, when he had planned to give her at least ten. He supposed, somewhat ruefully, the three times he took care of himself that night after she had left practically made up the difference. Nonetheless, he would rather have Candace coming in his arms or on the tip of his tongue, than his hand and his memory making him shoot all over the shower walls.

The phone rang and Charlie picked up the cordless handset on his shiny black and white kitchen island.

“Charlie Gibson.”

“Hi Charlie. It’s Candace. How are you?”

Charlie nearly dropped the phone he was so surprised by her phone call. “Um, uh, I’m fine. Great. Super.” He thwacked his forehead with the back of his hand for sounding like such an idiot. “How are you doing?”

He heard her laugh across the wireless phone line and the choking sensation around his heart eased up a bit.

“I’m great Charlie. Really, really great. I wanted to thank you for your excellent lessons on Saturday.”

“You do?” he asked and then tried to cover his gaffe by saying, “What I mean to say is, I wasn’t sure if—“

Thankfully Candace cut him off before he could make an even bigger ass of himself. “I loved every second of it, Charlie. And you know what, I’ve been writing better than ever.”

“That’s great,” he said to her, and meant it. He hadn’t written worth a shit since Saturday, but he didn’t care at all. All he wanted was to see her again, but he was afraid he’d be coming on too strong, that he’d be too obviously sniffing after her if he suggested moving onto lesson three.

“Anyway,” she said, “I was wondering if you’d be up for lesson three?”

Her matter of fact, professional tone confused him, again. Didn’t she know what was bound to happen again when they got in a room together? But he was so glad she wanted to see him again, he pushed the thought aside.

“I certainly am,” he said, trying to sound as detached as she did.

“Should we meet at your house again? Or mine perhaps?”

“Actually, this time I was thinking we would meet at a restaurant.”

“A restaurant?” she said, her misgivings sounding clearly in her voice. “To learn about sex toys?”

He chuckled softly into the phone. “Don’t you trust your mentor, Candace?”

She was silent across the line for a couple of seconds and he knew she was thinking it over.
Say yes,
his brain urged her telepathically.

“Yes I do, Charlie,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “Do you know where Oceanview Restaurant is on the edge of Golden Gate Park?”

* * *

Candace was shocked by Charlie’s suggestion. She had been shocked ever since she and Charlie had hung up that morning.

When she had boldly called him, she was completely sure she was going to have no problem rolling with whatever Charlie was going to throw at her. She couldn’t suppress a shiver of delight as she imagined him using a dildo, or something even more creative, on her during this lesson.

She couldn’t help the flicker of disappointment when it didn’t look like that was going to happen. There was no way he could ply her with a dildo in a restaurant, was there?

Besides, wasn’t learning about having sex in new locations lesson four, not lesson three?

She checked her makeup and outfit one last time before stepping out of the car. The previous Saturday at his house, he had seen her under forgiving candlelight and fire glow. As the sun hadn’t set yet and he was going to see her in full daylight, she wanted him to think she was pretty.

She had dressed a little more risqué tonight than she usually would have for a date. She shook her head.
This is not a date
, she reminded herself again. He was her mentor and she was his apprentice.

If she read anything more into it than professional education, she was going to end up with a broken heart. Candace figured she already had enough of those as it was.

Nonetheless, she had dug out a gold-sequined tank top from the bottom drawer of her dresser and paired it with a flirty black skirt, which brushed the tops of her kneecaps when she walked. She had swept her ginger curls up onto the top of her head with a gold clip and wore small gold-hoop earrings on her lobes. The final touch to her outfit was a pair of frivolous spike-heeled black and gold sandals that she had never had the nerve to wear before.

She left the parking lot and walked up the pathway to the beach. Charlie was waiting for her on the steps to the sand, looking out to the Pacific Ocean. She noticed he had a plastic shopping bag in his hand and shivered, wondering what was inside of it.

She put her hand on his arm and he turned around to face her with a huge smile on his gorgeous face.

“Candy,” he said, “You look amazing.”

She blushed. “Thank you. So do you.”

He looked better than ever, which was really quite a feat considering how incredible he had looked the two other times she had been with him. He had dressed up slightly, wearing navy blue light-wool slacks and a pink pin-striped long-sleeved Ralph Lauren shirt.

He slipped her hand into his and was moving towards the front door of the restaurant. She pulled back slightly, saying “I’m curious about what you’ve got in the plastic bag.”