Ever Unknown (5 page)

Her hands hovered over the keyboard and didn’t have a clue what to type. She wanted to go with something neutral, but neutral wasn’t agreeing to what he wanted.
Neutral was much more like—
go
home, eat a microwave dinner, watch TV until you fall asleep. Wait for someone nicer and safer to come along, and stare into the middle distance throughout your entire life. Have nice, safe children and live in a nice, safe place, and never want for anything more because your husband who tells you he’ll be home at eleven p.m. means it in an entirely different way. He means it with all the sweetness of—I’ll be there and love you if you want me to—but without the added deliciousness of blindfolds.

The always and ever deliciousness of not knowing.

She thought of those two words, when she replied. They seemed like too much, too silly, too big for every dirty thing they’d done, but she put them in anyway. If someone as cool and aloof as him could manage
feelings
, she could manage this.

Yes. Always and ever—yes.

Chapter Three

He’d asked for naked, and that’s what he was going to get. Any qualms she’d had about any of this had long since been stripped away—she didn’t mind accepting that. If he were going to be a maniac, he’d have been one, way before this.
If he were going to push her past her limits, he would’ve prior to her wrapping a scarf around her eyes.

It was just a woolly wintery sort of thing, not anything fancy, like silk or rubber or some other stupid material they always used in movies about women embarking on sexual journeys that never seemed real.
Until they happened to you.

She knelt in the middle of her bed and thought…
that’s what I’ve done. I’ve embarked on an actual sexual journey. Like Kim
Basinger
, only not hot and not cool and not any of the things that women usually are, when Mickey
Rourke
decides to pour the contents of a fridge all over them.

But then, he probably wasn’t Mickey
Rourke
. Or maybe he was, but modern-day Mickey
Rourke
.
Kind of falling apart, too-much-plastic-surgery Mickey
Rourke
.
Mickey
Rourke
with a bald spot and a potbelly and a whole host of other things she found she didn’t care about at all. She didn’t care.

She didn’t care as long as he walked into her apartment like her husband coming home, said, “
hi
honey, did you miss me?”
Then did the kinds of things that didn’t belong in that cookie cutter conventional world at all.
As long as that happened, what did it matter?

As long as she could feel this anticipation, for someone who might well be a third rate Mickey
Rourke
. As long as she could carry on bristling the moment she heard the door go, and hear her own breathing become so grating and loud, as though the darkness of the blindfold made everything else bigger and so much more.

She could make out every squeak and click of his shoes, on her hardwood floors. And she knew when his breathing joined hers, largely even, but with just that hint of roughness, as if he’d jogged up the stairs to her apartment. The apartment he couldn’t possibly know the number for unless he had access to that information.

He probably had access to a lot of her information—just little details, though.
Where she lived, her contact number.
That sort of thing.
Nothing he’d used until she’d invited him to, of course.

Nothing he’d used until she kind of knew who he was. She kind of knew because he didn’t speak, and speaking would have marked him out, immediately. He had a very distinctive voice, after all.

And cold hands.

She flinched away almost directly, but mainly because of the giddiness that suddenly flooded her, rather than the chilly feel of his touch. He wasn’t what she’d expected, not at all, not in a million years, but something about that was utterly thrilling and strange and new, and it made her want to rip off the blindfold immediately.

She didn’t, however. Anticipation, after all, was half the fun. And besides, it was his game. She wanted him to do the revealing. She wanted him to do it, slow and careful, and she wanted him to run his hand down her naked back again, before he spoke.

He did so. Just the back of his hand, she imagined, and barely doing anything beyond trailing, soft and feather light. It felt like being pulled apart, one tiny piece at a time. She sobbed, but hardly cared that the noise sounded so undone and ridiculous.

He deserved it.

Then he pressed his hands over her shoulders, and dug deep into the muscle there like a touch-message telling her to relax, and he deserved it so much she wanted to turn around and throw her arms around him.

But oh no, no.
Anticipation.
Waiting.
Slow. Those were his watchwords, and she obeyed them even when he didn’t say them. Just the feel of his hands spreading down over her arms, in no hurry at all—it made her obey.

His palms felt as soft as anything. And his touch was as assured as his typed words, so deliberate that she felt mapped out and newly discovered. When his hands found hers and linked with them, briefly, all the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

She sighed, but sighed more deeply as his touch moved on, to find its way around her body.

It seemed like a hundred years since he’d started, but really she suspected he had only a little more patience than her. His hands slid around and up, cupping her breasts before a minute or so had gone by, and when he did she heard
him
sigh.

She felt it on the nape of her neck. Something made the bed dip, and she imagined him giving in to one knee on her bed. Just to get closer, just to get more, palms pressing into her ridiculously tight nipples but not yet going for anything like a grope.

She doubted
grope
was even in his vocabulary. His thumbs pressed inwards, his fingers stroked and stirred over her flesh, but nothing got close to
rude
. There was something cool and glassy, even in his touch—but underneath. Oh, underneath. She could sense his body humming, just beneath the surface of all of this restraint. His breathing had grown a little hoarse, and when his hands slid downward, she was sure she could feel the tremble in them.

“Delicious,” he said, and it was a shock, a real shock.

She had somehow imagined he’d stay quiet forever, right up until his body spread over hers and perhaps beyond, but he’d spoken. He’d given himself away, completely.

It was him. It really was.

Something like delight and joy poured through her, so fierce that his name almost ripped itself right out of her. She wasn’t even sure how she managed to stay quiet. Especially when he continued speaking, and the words did not fall short of the things he’d said to her through a computer screen.

“You have no idea what you look like. So lovely, so perfectly giving
yourself
over to me. I thought…sometimes I thought, when I saw you around the office, I thought I knew. But I never realised what you were capable of, not fully. You’re amazing, Molly.”

She wanted to say something back, anything back.
Just words that represented the strange charge that went through her, when he spoke.
God, he had a beautiful voice. So still and calm, just like him, with that hint of hoarseness and need buried underneath.

It made her
want
to turn, again, and take off the blindfold, and look at him. Just look, look, look at him. It made her want to so much that she found herself blurting the question out.

“Can I take it off?”

But in response his hand slipped away from her. She felt him move off the bed, and almost cried out in desperation. It wasn’t just arousal, now, there was something else, something terrible about all of this and if he could just let her…

“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

Now it was her turn to go silent. She froze in position on the bed, body half turned, palms flat to the sheets. Behind the blindfold, her eyes searched for the space he occupied—
somewhere towards the door
, she thought, but not quite leaving.
Maybe not leaving at all.
Oh God, she hoped he wasn’t leaving.

She had to say something before he did.

“Ben, wait!”

Seconds became hours, again, mainly because of all the ‘
what ifs
.’ What if it wasn’t him? It could be that she’d guessed wrong. The voice sounded right and it fit in all other respects—he worked in the IT department, so he’d easily be able to find out where she lived. He was typically fussy about the filing systems that were kept next to where he worked. He’d been in the office with
Gregson
, most likely to make sure she was safe. He didn’t fit what she’d thought a dominant man would be in most physical regards, but in all other ways…oh yes.

She remembered those clear green eyes staring up at her when she came to him with this or that problem.
Something minor and irrelevant, now.
But those eyes, Lord those eyes—she wanted to call them deadpan, almost, as though he knew a secret joke that he’d never told anybody.

She supposed it was kind of like that, even if it wasn’t a joke at all.

“When did you guess?” he said, and a weird sense of relief went through her. It was him. It was definitely him. Cute, slight little Benjamin from IT!

“I don’t know. I knew for sure when I heard your voice.”

“Really?
I didn’t think anyone paid that much attention.”

The words should have sounded wounded or whiny in some way, but they didn’t. His voice bent easily into a wry, light sort of tone, and she thought of his email address.
Ever unknown.
He might as well have called himself Mr. Invisible.

“Will you come over to the bed again?”

“I probably should—you are naked, after all. It seems kind of weird that I’m managing to stay all the way over here.”

Again, that sense of relief. The barrier of anonymity was down, but everything was still somehow how the same. A little lighter, even. She laughed, and when he came to her his hands went immediately to her face, to push the blindfold up and off.

He looked as lovely as she remembered. She ran a hand over his cheek and into the neat fall of his short, dark hair, watched his eyes drift closed, briefly, in a way that made her crave that clear green all over again.

“How could you ever think I’d be disappointed?” she said, and quite unexpectedly her voice came out wavering, as though there were tears at the back of her throat.

“Because I’m just me.
I’m not really powerful, or magnetic, or—”

It didn’t take much to reach up and kiss him. But oh, the rewards were great. His mouth felt amazing—so soft and good and for a moment, almost relaxed.

Then his hand went into her hair, and he made a sound like someone drowning, and the kiss deepened into the thing they’d started only a few minutes earlier. When his free hand ran over her back this
time
, it felt scorching hot and all too eager.

She only let him break away to start peeling off his clothes. They were almost comical, really—no business suit or anything with a hint of machismo about it.
Just jeans and a T-shirt, a
hoodie
over the top and trainers on his feet.
She watched him toe them off and shuck the T-shirt, suddenly breathless but with that same stillness in his gaze.

It was the gaze, really, that did the trick. You could miss it in him, that streak of dominance, that magnetism he claimed he lacked—if you missed the eyes. But when he looked at her it thrilled through her body the same as the emails, the same as the typed cards.

Then he spoke, and that thrilled through her too.

“Lie back on the bed,” he said, without a single inch of room for any sort of disagreement. “Hands above your head, crossed at the wrist.”

Of course she knew it was coming. He’d lingered over it enough, in his emails. But even so, it sent a bolt of pleasure through her already swollen and definitely aching sex.

“Now spread your legs, baby.”

It made it even sweeter that his firm line of a mouth curled up at just one corner, when he said it.

“I’ve
been wanting
to taste that sweet pussy since you first wore no knickers for me. And now I get to do it, while you lie there and take it.”

The words he used, the tone of his voice, it made her want to close her legs again. She felt suddenly vulnerable and exposed, more naked than him, even though he was spectacularly, awesomely nude. He was as slender as he’d looked in those casual clothes, but so firm and honey coloured all over, cock standing up thick and stiff and almost at his belly.

All of this contributed to the wetness pooling between her thighs.
Especially when he slunk towards her across the bed, and she actually did try to close her legs.
Just briefly, just a little, and only because he looked so good and everything was just so overwhelming.

Then she had to watch, as his mouth curled into an even more predatory smile. And he wagged one finger at her, cheeky as anything.

“You’re not going to be bad now, are you? Because I can think
of
so many, many other ways to make you pay, outside the safety of emails. You did know that, right?”

“I thought you said you weren’t powerful and magnetic,” she said, and his wicked smile deepened.

“Well—maybe you just bring out the best in me.”

He licked a long, cool stripe the length of her inner thigh.

“Now hold still.”

Another stripe, and this time very, very close to her exposed sex.
He murmured something like,
you smell delicious
, but she knew why he said it. Not to make her feel good, exactly.
More to tease her into a state of perpetual arousal and need.

She felt his breath ghost over her swollen pussy, before his mouth moved onward, to the other thigh. Then another lick, this time from the tender inside of her knee, all the way up and around to the groove just below her hipbone—purposefully and obviously avoiding the place just a little to the right.