Perv (14 page)

Jenna stepped into her apartment and kicked off the high heels that hadn’t gotten her fucked this evening. As much as she would have loved for Mason to bring her home and have his way with her, she knew it would have been a horrible choice.

Katy was right. She needed time.

The look on Mason’s face had spoken volumes when Jenna told him Rafe would bring her home. The man hadn’t wanted her to leave with someone else, but he nodded and walked her stiffly to the door. He kissed her forehead and hugged her before she left. His only words had been brief. “I’ll call you?”

Jenna had nodded consent.

With a deep breath, she padded across the worn carpet of her apartment. She poured a glass of water from the tap and hit the button on her answering machine.

“Jenna, darling. We haven’t heard from you in weeks. Please call home, or better yet, come to dinner this Sunday. We’re having Chicken Marsala. You love that dish.” Her mother’s voice grated on Jenna. The last thing she needed tonight was to listen to the woman’s pleading in her usual haughty tone.

Jenna shut off the machine so she wouldn’t have to hear the rest. Joann Mathews was not a woman to be ignored. She called every Friday to check on Jenna and invite her poor lost lamb back into the fold. Every week she insisted Jenna attend Sunday dinner. And every week Jenna ignored the woman.

She had her own life to live, and it didn’t include glamorous parties with caviar and pâté served by underpaid waiters wearing tuxedos.

Jenna cringed and flopped down on the couch. She popped her ass back up and moved a few inches to the left when she hit a loose coil.

As punishment for not agreeing to live up to her parent’s standards for a true debutante of her age, she’d been cut off from the family’s allowance. And good riddance. It was much more gratifying making it on her own, anyway.

When Joann called inviting Jenna to dinner each week, what she really meant was, “Have you come to your senses yet, young lady?”

Jenna was an embarrassment to her parents. They had a long line of lies they used with their friends to explain her lack of appearance at family functions, none of which made Jenna so much as flinch. She’d never bought into the family wealth as a child, and she had no intention of starting now.

How she’d managed to be raised in such affluence without succumbing to the lure of money was a mystery.
Well, maybe not
. It might have had something to do with the little boy she’d played with for years as a child. The head maid in the house had a son Jenna’s same age, and she lived in a guest home on the Mathews’ property. Jenna spent long hours running with David, climbing trees, scuffing knees, and making a mess of David’s room at his house. His mother, Mariel, took Jenna under her wing and let the young Jenna get into all sorts of mischief.

Jenna learned at a young age she could trust Mariel. And through a woman who was more of a mother than Joann had ever been, Jenna learned humanity. David was no less of a person to be respected in life than Jenna. He was her friend. And when it later turned out he was also gay, Jenna hadn’t cared a bit.

They’d been teenagers at the time, and David had hidden his sexual orientation for years. Finally one day when he’d been seventeen, he’d come home with another guy, and Jenna’s mother had seen them holding hands. Joann had promptly fired her head maid of almost fifteen years, and Mariel had been left destitute on the street.

Jenna was outraged. She’d fought incessantly with her mother over the issue, to no avail. With tight lips, Joann Mathews made it perfectly clear if Jenna wanted to remain in the family fold and attend the college of her choice, she would shut her mouth and let bygones be bygones.

In retrospect Jenna wished she’d have told the woman to go fuck herself and left with Mariel and David. However, that wouldn’t have gotten her where she was today.

Instead Jenna played the game for five years, finishing high school and then college, all the while seething inside about the injustice of her mother.

She considered her father, Patrick, to be a browbeaten man who didn’t have a spine of his own. He didn’t say much, and Jenna often caught him with one brow lifted at his wife’s decisions, but he let the woman rule like a true matriarch.

Jenna let her head fall back on the couch and groaned. Why was she pondering all this shit from the past when she had far more pressing issues to deal with in the present? Starting with sleep. She needed rest before she had to work all day tomorrow.

Owning her own flower shop had been challenging, and she’d barely scraped by for years. But it was her dream. As much as her mother tutted about the absurdity of her daughter working, Jenna was determined to prove her mother wrong.

She could and most certainly would make a life for herself. She didn’t need her family’s wealth and had no interest in participating in the farce that was their lives.

Her only regret along that line was she also had no relationship with her only sibling. Jean was two years younger, and at twenty-four, still lived at home. Jenna hadn’t seen her in two years. She hated the loss but wasn’t sure how to breach the gap.

She hauled herself off the couch and padded to her bedroom, pulling her camisole over her head as she walked. When she reached the bed and saw her shorts and tank top lying tossed on the covers, she smiled.

Mason. For all his oddities, he was a much better subject to ponder than her family.

Jenna stripped naked, used the bathroom, and then slid between the sheets. She never slept naked, but her skin was so hot and over-sensitized tonight she couldn’t contemplate putting on a T-shirt.

She closed her eyes, but the top sheet rubbed against her nipples, seeming to abrade them into tight points as though the sheet were made of sandpaper instead of cotton.

What the hell world had she slipped into? Now she couldn’t sleep because she was so horny, she was on fire. She’d never been horny—with the exception of the two times she’d been out with Mason before tonight. At least not so aroused she couldn’t concentrate.

She crossed her hands under her breasts and tried to tent the sheet to get it off her nipples, but instead found herself stroking her fingers over her skin until goose bumps rose. She moaned and squirmed against the mattress, lifting her knees and digging her heels into the bed.

Maybe she should have let Mason bring her home.
No. Bad idea
.

The way the man looked at her, eyes smoldering with desire, made her panties wet. Hell, tonight she hadn’t even worn a thong. She’d been bare under her jeans, and her pussy rubbed against the denim all evening, driving her insane.

There wasn’t anything Mason could do to her right now she couldn’t do to herself.

Sure. Go ahead and tell yourself that
.

Picturing the last time she’d been with Mason and imitating his movements, Jenna pinched her nipples and tugged on the distended tips. Her mouth fell open, and her head tipped back as she thought of his hands roaming over her body, his mouth licking and nipping at her breasts, his cock—the one she’d never seen—straining toward her entrance.

Jenna smoothed her hands down her body and spread her legs farther. She flicked a finger over her clit first, intentionally going where she knew Mason wouldn’t have gone. The man liked to torment her. She felt a sense of naughtiness at her brazen intent to bring herself to fulfillment fast and now.

She could picture him shaking his head at her as she stroked her clit over and over, uncaring that she was going to come without delay. She was alone, after all. She didn’t have to do things his way.

In minutes, she tipped over the edge, a deep sound coming from her throat as she arched her hips off the bed and pulsed around her finger. She hadn’t even reached inside her pussy. All this reaction was from her clit.

As she settled back against the mattress, she sighed.
Girl, you’re in a heap of trouble
.

At five o’clock Saturday afternoon, Katy pounced into Ribbons and Bows, a grin spread across her face. “How’s it going?”

Jenna smiled at her from behind the register. “Busy. But I’m glad. Kept my mind occupied.” There were no customers in the shop at the time, and Jenna was enjoying a moment of reprieve from the bustle. Both her employees were out making deliveries.

“Are you going to close soon? I thought we’d go to dinner.”

“Yeah. Just wrapping things up. How about takeout back at my place?”

“Perfect. Chinese?”

“Mmm.” Jenna’s stomach growled at the thought. She hadn’t eaten more than a granola bar at lunch.

“I’ll go grab the food and meet you back at the apartment, then.” Katy bounced back out the door, leaving Jenna to close up. Her saving grace was having two employees she could count on every day of the week. She hadn’t come by them through ordinary means. Nope. Mariel and David were the perfect choices.

She grinned as she locked the register and headed to the back to shut off the lights. When her coworkers returned, they could handle anything else that needed to be done. Working with people who were closer than family was what made her business run so smoothly.

Everything she knew about plants she’d learned from Mariel. As far back as Jenna could remember, Mariel always had a bouquet of flowers on the small kitchen table in her tiny house behind the Mathews’. She’d organize the gorgeous blooms and tell Jenna all about them. David was forced to listen too. He would tug on Jenna’s sleeve to go outside, but Jenna would make him wait, fascinated by the tales of which roses were hardier than others and which blossoms would last longer.

Deciding to open her own shop was a no-brainer. Her degree had been in business. Her parents never would have agreed to allow her to take horticulture classes, but that didn’t matter. Everything she knew about flowers had already been established. All she’d needed was the business sense to run her own shop.

It wasn’t until she was in college that she ran into David on campus and found out he’d been studying the very subject he’d feigned no interest in all through childhood. Deciding to work together after they graduated had been easy. And luring his mom away from her job with a temp agency had been icing on the cake.

It took a few years for Jenna to pull her act together and move out of her parents’ home, but now she, Mariel, and David were making it happen. What Jenna most hoped to do was to open another shop in the next town and turn this one over to her lifelong friends.

Jenna shut the door behind her and dashed for her car. She pulled up to her apartment minutes later as Katy was arriving.

Famished, they headed inside and tore into the boxes of fried rice and chow mein, grabbing forks and digging right into the containers. Plates were hardly a necessity between friends.

When they were both stuffed, they curled up on each end of the couch, popped open a bottle of merlot, and leaned back with their stemless glasses.

“So, have you thought much about what you saw last night?”

Jenna shook her head. “Haven’t had time. I thought about Mason’s wide chest and firm muscles, but that’s about it.” She grinned.

“What would your parents say if they found out you were dabbling in BDSM?”

Jenna cringed. “God. They’d freak. My mother would lose it.” She lifted both eyebrows. “Almost makes it worthwhile to see the look on her face.”

Katy tossed a pillow at Jenna, barely missing the wine glass in her hand. “They
are
your family, you know. You might want to consider reconciling with them at some point.”

“Why? They never consider reconciling with me. The only reason my mother calls dutifully every week is to try and sway me to her way of thinking. My father probably puts her up to it.”

“I bet he misses you.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Have you mentioned your family to Mason?”

“Hell no. Why would I do that?”

“Do you think he deserves to know who you are before you enter into any kind of relationship with him?”

Jenna glanced up at the ceiling. “Probably, but no more than I deserved to know who he was before he stripped me naked physically and emotionally and fucked me six ways to Sunday without taking off his pants.”

“True. But he has told you now.”

Jenna shook her head and took another drink. “My parents don’t define me. They aren’t who I am. Mason’s secrets were an integral part of his life.”

“I’ll give you that, but I’m not so sure your parents have as little influence on you as you suggest. In spite of or because of them, you are who you are today as a result of being raised under their roof.”

The woman had a point, but Jenna couldn’t imagine a day she’d want any man to find out prematurely about her family. As long as she could keep that side of herself hidden, she would.

•●•