Nerd Gone Wild (32 page)

And now he was looking into her eyes and watching the tension build there, wanting to know that she was close before he let go. She was getting close. This was the woman of his dreams, someone who matched him urge for urge.

In the back of his mind he’d known it all along. He’d denied the truth because he couldn’t see it working out for them. There was the chemistry between them, which meant they were perfect for each other. Then there was the harsh reality of all that money. The idea of her marrying some rich idiot because at least they’d have financial parity sickened him, but it would make more sense than Ally hooking up with a guy like Mitchell J. Carruthers, Jr.

For now, though, he was in her bed and she was welcoming him in wonderful ways, tightening around him and meeting each thrust with a lift of her hips. They didn’t have a future, but they had one hell of a present. Gazing down at her flushed face, he watched her build to a climax.

The bed squeaked frantically as he tipped her over the edge. Then the squeaking became a constant din as he rode hard to his own nirvana. All the way there he watched her face, and knew this was how it was supposed to be between a man and a woman. Then he came, and as glory rained down around him, he refused to think of anything but the wonder of this moment.

“I
s the poker game over, then?” Ally had propped herself against the headboard with a pillow and was sipping her second beer while Mitch fiddled with the baseboard heater, trying to turn it down. Despite the coating of frost on the window, they’d both worked up a sweat.

He glanced over his shoulder and grinned at her. “Want to get dressed and try it all over again?”

She waved her beer bottle in the air. “Way too much trouble. Hey, forget that thing and come on back to bed.”

“Yeah, I can’t figure it out.” He stood and walked toward her. “Maybe it’s broken.” He picked up his second beer from the floor and twisted off the cap. “We’ll have to stay naked, I guess.”

“Now that’s a darned shame.” She looked him over for about the tenth time, still not believing that such a body had been parading around the mansion for months and she’d never noticed. Clothes really could make the man, or not, as in Mitchell’s case.

Not Mitchell. Mitch. The shortened version fit a guy who could play such fabulous bedroom games. “I’m going to take Rudy’s suggestion and start calling you Mitch all the time,” she said.

“Not just in bed?” He climbed in beside her and put a pillow behind his back so he could lean against the headboard.

“I think I want to use it all the time.”

He laid a hand on her thigh. “But if you only used it when you were feeling like making the bedsprings creak, it could be a signal. You could call me Mitchell most of the time, and Mitch when you were ready to get naked.”

His hand on her thigh was starting her engines again. But this time it was a lazy, no-pressure kind of arousal, the kind she was content to let build for a while. “In that case, I might as well stick with Mitch.”

He stroked her thigh. “That’s nice to hear.”

“For you it might be nice.” She gave in to her impulse and ran her finger along the length of his penis. It twitched in response. “For me it’s a problem. I’m supposed to be spending all my spare time with Tanya, not whisking up to my bedroom to have sex with you.” She stroked him again, and noticed a definite change in composition. She had a new toy.

He cleared his throat. “Are you saying that sex with me outranks taking pictures of those partridge things?”

“Ptarmigan. I’m afraid so. I’ve never had an orgasm while snapping a photo.” She circled his penis with her fingers and squeezed gently. It began to swell in her hand. It was an interesting sensation, having a cold bottle of beer in one hand and a warm penis in the other.

“You should have told me you wanted to take pictures.”

She glanced at him, lying there looking like a Greek statue come to life. Except Greek statues never had an erection and she was giving him a dandy one. “You’d look beautiful on film.”

“Um, I was kidding. If you hauled out your camera you’d have to have very fast film to catch me. I’d be out the door before your finger found the shutter.”

“Don’t worry.” She caressed the head of his penis and watched a drop of moisture gather there. “I would never do that.”

“No? Why not?”

She glanced into his eyes as she continued to play with his package. “It would destroy the sense of intimacy.”

“What you’re doing right now is pretty darned intimate.”

“It’s about to get even more intimate.” Scooting down, she turned over onto her stomach so she had the angle she wanted. Then she kissed that warm, velvety tip.

He groaned. “Warning. Contents under pressure.”

“I know. Fire at will.” She began to lick him.

His breathing changed quickly. “I mean it. Having you do that in the dark is one thing. Watching you do it is…” He sucked in air through his teeth. “Ally… hold up a minute. Let me get back in… control.”

“It’s a losing battle.” But she eased away from him and realized she was still clutching her beer in her other hand. She could ask him to hold it, or she could experiment.

Taking a mouthful of beer, she swished it around, making the foam tickle her tongue. Because she wasn’t a guy, she had no idea how he’d like it, but she’d transformed into a bold chick tonight. Bold chicks took action and asked questions later.

She swallowed the beer and glanced at him. “Ready?”

“For what?” He was still breathing fast.

“Fun with beer.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She grinned. “Neither do I, but I want to try something.”

“Is this like a party trick?”

“Maybe a private party trick. Here goes.” She took another sip of beer and held it in her mouth. Then she pressed her mouth against the tip of his penis and tried to take him in without losing all the beer. Some dribbled out, but most of it stayed.

Mitch gasped. “Oh… man. That tickles. Ally, tickling might mean that I’ll lose… I hope you know what you’re… doing.”

She didn’t, exactly, but she had hopes for the outcome. She puffed out her cheeks and got that foam swirling.

“Omigod… Ally, that’s… amaz—” With a moan wrenched from deep in his chest, he came.

Mission accomplished.

* * *

Mitch would never look at a bottle of beer the same way again. He’d never be able to play poker without thinking of this night, either. So there were two things in his life forever linked to sex with Ally. Oh, and matchsticks. Matchsticks would now remind him of the poker game, which had turned into a strip poker game, which had led to incredible sex, which eventually had ended up giving him adventures with beer.

“That was fun.” Ally wiggled up next to him still holding her beer.

He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t dumped his own bottle all over the bed. Fortunately he’d kept it in a death grip all during the climax and hadn’t spilled a drop. “That was more than plain old fun for me,” he said. “I’d say from my perspective that falls into the category of extreme fun.”

She tapped her beer bottle against his. “Here’s to extreme fun.”

“Right.” He was beginning to realize that he might have miscalculated. Yes, having sex with Ally was a good way to keep track of her. And yes, by doing that he was shutting out the unacceptable types hanging around hoping for some attention.

But it was supposed to be a stopgap measure, and at the moment there was nothing stopgap about it. He had the urge to employ this strategy for quite a while. Like
for
the next fifty years.

He’d really underestimated how great sex with Ally would be, or how great Ally would be, aside from the sex. He really liked her. Come to think of it, he’d been underestimating all kinds of things lately, starting with the difficulty of the job Madeline had hired him for.

One thing he hadn’t underestimated, or at least he hoped not, was Kurt Jarrett’s desire to get his hands on Ally’s money. The guy was fairly transparent to Mitch. Ally wasn’t willing to see that, yet, but she was a smart woman. Mitch had to stay around long enough for her to wise up. Then he could leave.

Yeah, leave. If the concept didn’t thrill him, too bad. He’d known from the beginning that would be the story. If he happened to be falling for the woman lying beside him in this creaky bed in Porcupine, Alaska, that was the breaks. He’d get over it. Maybe.

“Mitch, I need to ask you something.”

He took a swig of his beer and hoped it was a question he could answer. “If you want to know if I lost some of those hands on purpose, the answer is yes.”

“That’s okay. So did I.”

He glanced over at her. “All of them?”

“No, just the one where I had to take off my sweatshirt.”

That bit of information gladdened his heart. “So what happened after that wasn’t a complete surprise to you.”

“No. I was wondering if you’d crack.” Her smile had definite overtones of smugness.

He didn’t care. She deserved to feel smug. “I cracked. I cracked right down the middle. And it was the shuffling that did it.”

She laughed. “The shuffling? I thought it was my boobs.”

“It was. The shuffling made your boobs dance. If you shuffled like I do, none of this would have happened.”

“None of it?” She looked skeptical.

“Okay, it would have happened, but later. That shuffle of yours put me over the top.”

“I’m glad.”

He met her gaze. “Me, too.” And he was glad, no matter what.

“What did Grammy tell you about Uncle Kurt?”

Wham. After a bunch of easy pitches, she hit him with the fast ball. He considered how much he should say.

“Please tell me. Grammy would never talk about him. Uncle Kurt says she hated him because he was living proof that Grandpa Clayton was married before, and she didn’t want to think about that. If that’s true, it’s so unfair, because Grammy was married before, too, and she had my dad when they met. Both she and Grandpa were in the same boat, with kids from a first marriage.”

No matter what, he had to make sure he didn’t come across as interrogating her. But he had some questions of his own. “So you’ve been in touch with your uncle Kurt?”

She nodded. “He came down to see me when I was in college. I’d always been curious about him, so I was glad when he showed up. I mean, we may not be directly related, but he’s still family.”

Mitch had the urge to shake Kurt until his balls rattled. Ally needed an uncle who was a decent human being. Instead she got Kurt. But he wished Madeline had found it within herself to tell Ally the truth about him.

“I knew Grammy would have had a fit if she’d known
I
was communicating with him, so we e-mailed through my roommate’s e-mail address. We used forwarded jokes, with short messages at the bottom. We even devised a loose code, in case anyone should ever read the e-mails.”

He
had
read some of the e-mails, and he’d fallen for the whole scheme. Some PI he was. After reading a few, he’d dismissed them as being exactly what they seemed to be. So Kurt had been wooing Ally for a long time. And she was desperate for a sense of family. Once again, Mitch had underestimated the difficulty of the situation.

“So I need to know what Grammy said to you about him. I can tell you don’t like him, so I want to know why.”

He sure didn’t want to be the one to deliver this information. He took a deep breath. “You won’t like it.”

“I don’t expect to like it.”

“According to your grandmother, she tried to make one happy blended family out of the situation. Your dad was ten and Kurt was eighteen when she married Clayton, so there was a fairly large age difference, but she hoped they’d be friends. Kurt was invited to spend the summer at the mansion.”

“And?” Her gaze was totally focused on him.

He put down his beer and cupped her face in both hands. “Ally, I wish your grandmother had talked to you about this. Long ago. But she was a very modest woman, and I’m sure she couldn’t bring herself to say it.”

Apprehension flashed in her eyes. “Say what?”

“Kurt sexually assaulted her.”

“No!” She pulled away from him.