Exposed to You (10 page)

She couldn’t stop it from happening, though.

He pressed on her clit in a relentless rhythm, and she felt herself cresting. She clenched her jaw hard and tilted her pelvis down, adding the friction of his thick, penetrating root to the pressure on her clit. She began to shudder in orgasm.

“That’s right,” she heard him say through waves of pleasure. “Ah, God, that feels good.”

Her tremors abated slowly, deliciously. He finally removed his hand from her clit, and she opened her eyes.

He was
still
high and hard inside of her. She couldn’t believe it.

“You weren’t joking about that tantric sex thing, were you?”

His grin was both mischievous and strained. She blinked her eyes, noticing the tension in his rigid stomach muscles and in his face. His nipples were very erect. It gave her some measure of satisfaction that even if he wasn’t as desperate as she was, he wasn’t finding this easy.

“Would I kid you about something like that?” he murmured at the same time he put one of his hands beneath her ankle and lifted.

“No, Everett,” she said shakily when he lifted her leg so that her calf rested on his shoulder. He’d just increased the pressure of his lodged cock inside of her, and he knew it, she realized.

“No?” he asked, his eyebrows arched in a query.

She gasped for air, her body becoming accustomed to the new position. She gritted her teeth and pushed down on his cock, squeezing her vaginal muscles. It was a complete reflex action.

“Jesus, Joy,” he muttered. “Tell me if you want me to stop. Don’t do that, though. I don’t want to come yet.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked him in a spurt of frustration. A tear splashed down her cheek. She felt wholly exposed. She wanted him to fuck her so hard that he joined her in a mindless frenzy of need. Her entire body began to shake; her emotions felt so chaotic, and she was so aroused. Her eyelids clamped shut.

She felt his palm on the back of her thigh, stroking her in a soothing motion from her buttock to the back of her knee. Her vagina once again tightened around his cock. She could feel his heartbeat deep inside her. It was incredibly erotic.

It was almost unbearably intimate.

“Do you want me to pull out?” she heard him ask.

“No. No. Please don’t,” she begged brokenly.

Emotion shuddered through her when he gently lifted her other leg to his shoulder. If she’d been exposed to him before, now she was raw—a bundle of quaking, unshielded nerves.

“Open your eyes,” Everett beckoned.

She couldn’t resist the sound of his voice, couldn’t deny his quiet command. She unclenched her eyelids and met his gaze. There was so much desire in his glistening eyes, it stunned her . . . confused her.

Every muscle in her abdomen and pelvic region bunched tight. Suddenly, his hand was between her thighs again, demanding . . . insistent.

She detonated at his touch. She mewled as another orgasm thundered through her, this one impossibly more powerful than the previous ones. Through a haze of sensual bliss, she heard his sharp curse. While her orgasm still shook her, he leaned forward and put his hands on her waist. He lifted her off his erection. Joy cried out at the pain of sudden deprivation.

“Shh,” he said, although he hardly sounded soothing this time . . . more impatient. Desire had finally sunk its claws deep into him, Joy realized in disorientation. She couldn’t help but feel triumphant. He guided her with his hands. She followed his silent, urgent demand until she found herself on her belly, her legs draped over the edge of the bed.

He lifted her ass with his hands. She assisted him, putting her knees on the edge of the bed, raising herself to meet him.

She cried out sharply when he slid the entire length of his cock into her with one powerful stroke. Her eyes went wide. She stared sightlessly at the window on the far side of the room as he began to ram into her, fucking her without pretense or politeness—taking her in just the way she’d craved.

She should be careful what she wished for.

He held on to her hips, completely controlling her actions, serving her pussy to his swollen cock. He was voracious, relentless, so selfish in his erupting need that it left her incapable of thought or movement. In those tense, electric moments where he slammed into her like a locomotive, their skin slapping together with brisk smacking sounds, Joy lost her own will.

She gave herself to him, mind and body, subsumed by Everett’s desire.

Seven

“Joy? Are you all right?”

Regret spiked through him when he saw the damp tracks of tears on her cheeks. He pulled her closer into his arms and used his thumb to dry her skin. “I’m sorry. I know I was rough. I wanted you so much,” he said, recalling in graphic detail how he’d just fucked her like a madman, completely abandoning himself to unbridled lust. Even though he’d just had the mother of all orgasms while pressed tight against the limit of Joy’s womb, and even though guilt washed through him, he felt his cock stir again at the memory.

Her flushed lips parted. Her wide-eyed gaze struck him as dazed . . . incredulous.

“Joy?” he asked warily, unable to fully interpret her expression.

“Excuse me,” she muttered.

Everett stilled an instinctive reflex to pull her back into his arms when she sat up. She slid her slender legs over the edge of the bed. He stared helplessly at her retreating form. A few seconds later, he heard the bathroom door close.

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, his head hitting the pillow.
“Fuck.”

Self-recriminations paraded across his consciousness. He must have hurt her. He shouldn’t have let his arousal build to the breaking point as he had. She’d probably never want to see him again.

But she’d been so exquisite, lying back with his cock lodged so high in her warm, clinging pussy. She’d been so open to him, so vulnerable
.
It’d driven him a little nuts.

A lot nuts.

He’d made her pay the price by not better regulating his lust.

Now he was going to have to forfeit the price if he’d alienated her completely. His bitter, silent self-lecture continued as he removed and disposed of the condom. He drew on his boxer-briefs and sat at the edge of the bed, his head down.

He was about to go and check on Joy when he heard the bathroom door open. He braced his arms on either side of him, his muscles bunching tight, when he heard her tread in the hallway.

“Are you okay?” he asked when she entered the room wearing a short pink bathrobe. At first he thought she’d splashed her face with water, but then he realized that her hair was damp at her temples and nape from perspiration. He was wet with sweat himself. It’d been like running a marathon, making love to her.

She nodded and silently came and sat next to him on the bed, several inches from his hand. He wanted to touch her. He wondered if he’d lost the right.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked.

“No.”

He paused. Her tone had sounded starkly honest.

“Then what’s wrong?”

He saw her throat convulse as she swallowed. Her sideways glance struck him as wary . . . bewildered.

“Why did you do that to me?”

He just stared at her. For some reason, even though she’d said
why
, he’d heard
what
. It struck him that she felt wholly vulnerable. He covered her hand with his.

“I didn’t just want to have sex with you. I wanted to connect with you. It worked a little too well, on my part. You were so . . .” He made a ragged, helpless sound. “I lost it a little, there at the end. I’m sorry.”

She turned her head, searching his features. “I wanted you to lose control. I’m not talking about that,” she said.

His forehead bunched in confusion.

“Never mind,” she whispered, glancing away. “It doesn’t matter.”

He cradled the back of her head. She fit his palm perfectly.

“It matters.”

She dropped her chin to her chest. “You overwhelm me.”

“I apologize. I didn’t mean to.” He froze for a second after the words were out of his mouth. Was he lying?
Had
he meant to break down her defenses?

“You don’t understand,” she said so abruptly that he started. She glanced at him entreatingly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re . . . wonderful. Perfect. I wouldn’t want you to change anything.”

“I’m not following you, Joy,” he said slowly.

She shook her head. He sensed her frustration. He tamped down a strong desire to hold her; she looked so small sitting there, so lost. Instead, he stood. She’d told him he overwhelmed her. He couldn’t push himself on her farther.

He reached for his trousers.

“You don’t have to go,” she said in a cracking voice.

He turned, his hand on the zipper of his fly.

“I think I better,” he said. “Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He nodded and reached for his shirt. He was angry with himself for pushing her, but dammit, he had
wanted
to move her, to reach her, to touch her in more than the surface sense. That’d been the reason he’d made love to her the way he did. Joy clearly was a formidable fortress, but she wasn’t entirely impregnable.

Tonight had shown him that.

He felt raw and confused. Irritated. The experience had rattled him as well as Joy. The only reason he was leaving was that she appeared to be even more exposed and bewildered by what had happened between them than he was.

Eight

Chad Thurman, the only male in Joy’s class of ten, gave her a sympathetic glance when she checked the clock again above the blackboard.

“Do you want me to go out into the hallway and look around, Miss Hightower? Maybe he’s lost. Their kind aren’t always the sharpest tools in the shed.”

“No, that’s all right,” Joy said, opening the drawer to her desk and digging in her purse for her cell phone. “I’ll go out and have a look around and try to call him. Maybe he just got stuck in traffic or something.”

“This is it. We’re finally going to see what you look like with your shirt off, Chad,” Chancy Orbus said, a teasing gleam in her dark brown eyes.

“You wish,” Chad replied under his breath, the color in his cheeks belying his cocky negligence as he slumped in his chair. The rest of the girls in the class twittered. After spending six weeks with the talented, intelligent group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, Joy still wasn’t quite sure whether the experience of being the token male was an absolute torture or an utter delight for Chad; she daily saw evidence that argued for both.

“It’s not going to come to that,” Joy assured them, giving Chancy a wry, slightly repressive glance as she walked toward the hallway. “I’ll be right back.”

She grimaced when she opened the door and moved from the air-conditioned classroom to the stuffy, hot hallway. The Steadman School was located in a historical, enormous, Romanesque-style building on Chicago’s west side. The arched hallways were either freezing in the winters or stifling in the summer. There wasn’t a soul in sight. All the other classes being taught for summer school were located over in the academic wing of the building.

A wave of drowsiness hit her as she looked for the phone number, a combination of the sudden heat and a restless night. After Everett had left, sleep did not come easily. He probably thought she was a hysterical fool after the way she’d acted.

Why
had
she felt so shaken by the sexual experience—so vulnerable?

So what if it wasn’t a position she’d ever before explored? It was just sex, and Everett was just a man. That’s what she’d told herself repeatedly last night and this morning.

She was still waiting to actually convince herself it was true.

She suspected she knew what
Cosmo
would call the problem if a man were acting the way she was:
intimacy issues
. Joy would have called it
healthy caution
. Her life already existed on shifting sands. Falling for any guy at this point would be like adding an earthquake to her already shaky world. Falling for a man like Everett was like inviting a fiery, plunging meteor.

She forced her sluggish brain to its task. Her class schedule was going to be completely screwed up. She was going to have to use tomorrow for the final project versus today. She’d planned a casual checkout day in the classroom tomorrow, and then she was going to take the kids to an exhibit at the Art Institute and out for pizza. They would be so disappointed.

Frustration rose in her with every unanswered ring of her phone. Clearly, the young man she’d hired to model for the students’ final project was blowing her off.

Chances were Everett would blow her off, too. Isn’t that what usually happened after an awkward sexual moment with a new partner? A sharp pain of disappointment stabbed through her.

Surely it was all for the best.

She hung up when she heard the man’s recorded greeting.
Strike
his
name from the eligible list of male models,
she thought as she hung up.

“Joy!”

For a split second, she thought it was the model she’d been trying to call. Relief swept through her. But that couldn’t be right, she thought as she peered down the dim, empty hallway. She was sure she’d never mentioned her first name to him.

Once the man came closer, she immediately recognized his tall figure and confident gait. He passed beneath a window, and a ray of sunshine momentarily hit the blond hair beneath his hat.

“Everett,” she said, thunderstruck when he approached her and stopped several feet away.

“Hi. I’m glad I caught you. I saw Max Weisman over in the other wing. He sent me this way.”

He carried a supple leather duffle bag on his shoulder. In addition to his plaid newsboy cap, he wore a pair of well-worn drainpipes, gray canvas tennis shoes and a slightly wrinkled ivory T-shirt featuring three ducks flying across it. It was an awful combination.

Everett looked amazing in it.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, still stunned by his appearance in the familiar, mundane location of her workplace.

“My agent booked me on
The Shay Show
tonight,” he said, referring to a popular late-night talk show. “The New York premiere of
Maritime
is tomorrow. I’m catching a plane in a few hours.”

“Oh,” she said.

He held her gaze for a second before he ducked his head. “I won’t take up your time. I know you’re busy. I couldn’t leave town without telling you that I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be,” she rushed to say. “I had a wonderful time with you.”

He glanced up. “You did?”

She nodded.

He let out a little puff of air and smiled. Her heart hitched.

“I thought maybe you thought I was a freak or something,” he said under his breath.

“No. Not at all. I’m sorry if I didn’t handle things well . . . That is . . .” Awkwardness swamped her, but she forced herself to meet his stare. “I’m just sorry.”

“I hope not. I thought it was amazing.”

Her cheeks blazed hot. A loud female hoot of laughter emanated from her classroom. She glanced back anxiously.

“I should probably go back in or they’ll be hanging from the rafters soon.”

He nodded. “I understand. I’m glad I caught you, even if was just for a few seconds.”

Her bewilderment mounted. Was he here to say good-bye to a particularly pleasant but irrelevant fling before he left the city like a brilliant sunset?

“I’m glad you did, too,” she said, searching his face and finding no answers to the dozens of questions buzzing like furious bees in her brain.

He nodded toward her classroom door. “What were you doing out here, anyway?”

Joy blinked. What
had
she been doing in the hallway? She stared blankly at her cell phone and got her clue.

“Oh. The male model I hired for the class’s final drawing project blew me off. I’m going to have to try to find someone else for tomorrow. The Art Institute and pizza field trip I planned for the last day will have to be canceled.”

He glanced toward the door, straining to see through the small rectangular window.

“You don’t use nude models, do you?”

She smiled. “No. I’m afraid the school board won’t allow it. We’re just focusing on the torso and face.”

“I’ll do it for you, then, if it doesn’t take much more than an hour. I left early for the airport.”

Joy gave a soft bark of incredulous laughter. He’d sounded so matter-of-fact, like it was the simplest thing in the world for him to drop everything in his schedule and pose for a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old high school art students.

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“I don’t have the build you’re looking for or something?”

“No, of course not,” she said. His expression was impassive, but she sensed he was entirely serious. “I wanted someone who is lean and has good muscle definition. We’ve been focusing on accurate human anatomy. You’d be perfect, but surely—”

“I’d be happy to do it, if you think it’d be okay with my time limit.”

She laughed again. He really was priceless. “Everett, it’s a class full of teenage girls, save one. If you walked in that room, I’d probably have to reschedule their final project anyway, because they’d all faint from shock.”

“They’d get over it. I get old pretty quick. Besides, artists are practical types.”

She saw the tilt of his mouth and shook her head. “You clearly don’t know that many artists. Especially of the teenage variety,” she murmured, reaching for the door. “Are you really serious?”

“Yeah.”

She inhaled deeply, trying to ground herself. “Okay, but I can’t guarantee you’ll come out unscathed.”

“I like an adventure,” she heard him say softly from behind her, his deep voice sounding just inches away from her right ear.

This was lunacy.
All
of it.

She led him into her classroom, her heartbeat starting to pound furiously in her ears. For a few seconds, the kids continued their typical self-involved teenage chatter. The first pair of eyes that moved, widened and stuck acted like a catalyst for the other nine.

“Okay. Move over to your sketch pads. Our model is here.”

She could have heard a toothpick drop at the back of the room in the silence that followed. Joy clapped.

“Come on, you guys. If you don’t move, we’re going to have to cancel the field trip tomorrow and do your project then.
Now,
” she added loudly when Everett continued to be the object of stunned, pale-faced incredulity. A few of them started to stand hesitantly, then the rest of them seemed to come out of their trances.

“Lacey, put that cell phone away, please. I’ve asked you to leave them in your backpack during class a dozen times,” Joy said in a beleaguered tone as she set a high chair with a cushioned back before the students’ drawing pads and easels.

“But . . . but, Miss Hightower . . . that’s . . . isn’t that . . .” Lacey trailed off, at a loss.

“It’s Everett Hughes, yes,” Joy said calmly. Everett gave the kids a friendly wave. “I don’t want a lot of silliness. We’re very lucky that he’s volunteered to do this for us, but he only has so much time. If you guys waste too much of it gawking and trying to text your friends, you’re going to flunk your final project. Not to mention miss the chance to own a personal sketch of Mr. Hughes,” Joy added sharply when her previous threat had no effect whatsoever.

All ten of them sprang up like she’d set their seats on fire. “But . . . what’s Everett Hughes . . . I mean”—Chad transferred his attention from Joy to Everett—“what are
you
doing here, dude?” Chad asked dubiously. The tension broke. The girls laughed nervously, and Everett smiled.

“He was here for his premiere of
Maritime
yesterday,” Joy said innocuously as she moved the chair a little to get better light.

“I’m a friend of Miss Hightower’s,” Everett said. “I stopped by to see her just now, and she said the model she’d hired didn’t show. I offered to fill in.”

“Wow,” Meg Brown said succinctly, staring from Everett to Joy and back to Everett again.

Everett approached Joy and the chair, his eyebrows raised in silent query. Joy silently mimed removing his cap and then pointed to his T-shirt.

She couldn’t believe she was doing this.

She turned toward the clock on the wall, pretending to check it, not wanting Everett or the students to see her blush. Even her young art students were used to seeing partial nudity in the classroom. Learning to draw the human form was a crucial skill. She couldn’t believe she was acting so ridiculous. She pretended to be searching for something on her desk, but glanced around when Chancy Orbus made a sound that sounded like
grrrgh
.

Everett had removed his shirt and sat in the chair. Chancy—with all her piercings and tattoos and nothing-can-touch-me teenage armor—was looking completely flattened.

“Can’t we at least get a picture, Miss Hightower?” Shelby Ryan begged.

“Oh,
please
,” Lacey whined.

Joy sighed. “This project is forty percent of your final grade. I suggest you try to focus. You have . . .” She glanced at Everett in query and wished she hadn’t. His lean, golden six-pack obliques and negligent, somehow graceful pose were really something to see. “One hour?” she asked him, keeping her voice neutral.

“Works for me,” Everett said.

“Can’t he at least wear his hat, Miss Hightower? He’s famous for his hats,” one student said.

“And couldn’t we at least have
one
picture?” Chancy persisted, entreating Everett directly.

He shrugged, smiling. “It’s up to the boss,” he said, glancing at Joy.

The kids looked to her hopefully. “Hair is a big part of your final project, so the hat stays off. As for a picture, there isn’t going to be any time for one if you don’t get to work. If there
should
be a minute at the end, you’ll have to get Everett’s permission.”

“Fine by me,” Everett replied pleasantly when ten pairs of eyes zoomed over to him. She normally would have arranged the model in the position she wanted in order to highlight certain muscle groups for her students to sharpen their skills, but she couldn’t bring herself to instruct, let alone touch, Everett in front of all the rapt teenagers. Besides, she rather liked his pose.

“Begin now,” she said. “You have until twelve o’clock. Just get done what you can with the time you have.”

She had to hand it to her students: They went to work with a concentration she’d never before witnessed in them. Joy picked up her grade book and the half-empty coffee she’d picked up at Harry’s that morning and walked to the back of the classroom, sitting in a desk where she could observe the students draw.

She could also observe Everett, and that made focusing difficult. Every once in a while, she’d feel his gaze on her like a tickle on her cheek. She’d glance up and see just the hint of a smile on his lips. It was more than likely some combination of her overactive imagination and libido when it came to him, but even at this distance, his eyes appeared warm . . . seductive. His nipples looked very erect. He must be getting chilly due to the air-conditioning. Why, then, did she feel so hot all of a sudden?

Joy shifted uncomfortably in the student desk and forced herself to concentrate on the task of entering the grades from a quiz last week in her book. After several minutes, she told the students to work on any corrections they might have while Everett took a break. Chad was the only one who worked during the next minute, however. Most of the girls were too busy gaping and drooling as they watched Everett stand up and flex and stretch his pectoral and arm muscles while he paced.