Single Mom Seeks... (11 page)

He held her there, firmly but gently, rocking ever so slowly against her, which only multiplied sensation on top of glorious sensation.

The man felt impossibly good there in her arms.

Her breath came in little pants, and she was afraid there were tears seeping out of the corners of her eyes, that her whole body was awash in sensations and emotions of every possible sort, and it was all just overwhelming at the moment.

His hands still cupped her hips, fingers digging into them as he tried to control his movements and hers.

“Lily,” he warned, because she couldn’t be still, couldn’t stand it, or maybe she couldn’t move slowly enough, or maybe it was just his way of tormenting her and driving her crazy, and she was messing with his concentration or his self-control or something.

But it turned into a battle of sheer will, his versus hers, to see who could drive each other over the edge first.

She used the muscles in her thighs to thrust herself against him and kissed him hard and ran her hands all over him, very, very glad that he had taken all his clothes off in the light.

“You are so bad,” he told her, when she refused to be still and let him set the pace.

She grinned up at him.

He kissed her hard, thrusting and thrusting against her, until everything in Lily’s body went impossibly tense and then just stayed there, frozen in time and space with him, before she tumbled over the edge.

Wave after wave of pure satisfaction echoed through her. She cried a bit more and buried her head against his neck, felt him pulsing deep inside of her, shuddering, gasping for breath, gasping her name.

“Lily, Lily, Lily.”

They stayed right there, clinging to each other.

Lily was suddenly exhausted, her legs aching, her arms clinging to him even harder, tears still flowing.

He held her tight, so strong and yet so gentle, his chest heaving against hers, making her want to do nothing but burrow closer and wishing they were somewhere in the privacy of a deep, dark place.

But they weren’t, and he was trying to figure out what was wrong, trying to see her face, dry her tears.

“Hey,” he said. “What is it?”

“Just…I don’t know. My eyes are leaking.”

“Leaking?”

“Yes, leaking,” she insisted.

He gave her a little grin.

“They just do that sometimes,” she said. “I’m not upset. I’m not crying. I’m just…My eyes are leaking. Don’t you ever get…overwhelmed and find that your eyes are leaking?”

He shook his head.

“Well, mine do,” she said, feeling overwhelmed, still, and a bit shy and extremely naked. “Can we go hide in the dark now?”

“Sure. Just give me a second.”

He turned away from her, but stayed close enough that she didn’t fall off her perch on the countertop, got rid of the condom and pulled up his pants. Then he lifted her into his arms and carried her upstairs to her bedroom.

She snuggled against his chest and closed her eyes, trying not to think of the fact that she’d just had sex with him in her kitchen in broad daylight and that she had few, if any, regrets about it, except for being embarrassed for behaving so shamelessly and not getting her way about doing it in the dark.

Not that being able to see him didn’t have its definite advantages.

She directed him to the door on the right, and he got her on the bed, tucked under the covers, then bent over and kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around him when he went to pull away, afraid he might disappear, that this might have all been a dream. Nick, her Dream-Lover. That was easier to believe than them getting naked in her kitchen.

He grinned down at her, letting her hang on to him, but said, “I need to run over to my house and grab something.”

“Another condom?”

He nodded.

“Feeling pretty sure of yourself? That you’ll be needing it?”

“Hoping. Just hoping. And not wanting to be caught unprepared.”

“There’s a box of them in my bathroom. Far right drawer, buried in the back,” Lily admitted. “My sister gave them to me after she got a look at you.”

He grinned and headed for the bathroom. “Remind me to thank your sister the next time she comes to visit.”

“That is not funny,” Lily yelled after him. “Don’t you dare, Nick! Don’t you dare!”

She found he dared most anything.

He walked back into her bedroom like a man who felt very much at home there, closed the blinds tight, asking if that met with her approval and her need for sheer darkness.

“It’s better,” she said.

Then with the bedside light still on, he watched her as she watched him slowly, matter-of-factly, strip for her once again.

Lily blushed, couldn’t help herself.

He was an absolutely beautiful man.

All tanned skin and hard muscles everywhere, a hard stamp of satisfaction in his smoky-dark eyes.

And he wanted her again.

His body left no question about that.

Her breath started coming fast and shallow, and she itched to touch him all over.

“Seen enough?” he asked after a moment.

“No,” she said.

“Hey, I’d be happy to leave the light on. I’m just trying to give you what you want, Lily.”

She shot him a look of exasperation, because the man knew he’d already given her exactly what she wanted and more, and he was about to do it all over again, and he knew that, too.

Wanting to put him a little off balance, too, if she could, Lily slid over in the bed to his side, reached out to turn off the light herself and then in the darkness, found one, well-muscled thigh with her palm, finding heat and firmness to the touch, a bit of roughness from the dark hairs there.

He let out a breath, but didn’t say anything else.

She pressed the tip of her nose against that thigh, running up and down the muscle there, then nibbled a bit, taking in the scent of him and liking it.

“Lily,” he groaned.

“What?”

She got up on her knees on the edge of the bed, and wrapped her arms around his waist, her breasts against his thighs, kissing his chest and then letting her head fall back for his kiss.

He lifted her right off the bed and wrapped her legs around him once more, squeezing her hips, rubbing up against her.

“I don’t seem to have the patience to do this right today,” he said, kneeling with her on the bed, laying her back against it and then following her down, his body hot and hard on top of hers. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” she got out between long, deep, thrusting kisses.

“We’ll do better next time,” he said, like a promise.

Lily let her thighs fall apart, giving him her body to do with as he pleased, and a moment later, he was inside her once again, and it was even better this time, if that was possible.

She loved having the weight of him on top of her, the sheer volume of the man, those broad shoulders and the tight, sexy hips, all those beautiful muscles flexing and straining, propelling him up and back and then down and in once again.

Lily clung to him as best she could, content to let him set the pace, to let him take what he demanded. She started whimpering when it all got to be too much, clutched at his shoulders, might have sunk her nails into his back in protest when she didn’t think she could take it anymore.

And then she gave up, gave up all sense of self-control or pretense or self-protection, and just let herself be with him, be his, be completely free and it was like everything fell away. Like nothing else mattered or even existed, except being there with him, and she was nothing but sheer feeling, sheer pleasure.

He groaned on top of her, gave one more, deep, long thrust, and she felt a pulsing deep inside, first from him and then her own, and then she just didn’t care about anything at all, except how good she felt.

He crushed her to him, breathing hard, lying heavily on top of her, waiting for the sensations to end, trying to hang on to every last second of bliss. Lily would have held him, too, if she’d had the strength. As it was, it was all she could do to lie there, her arms falling to her sides, breathing heavily, limp as could be.

Nick nuzzled the side of her neck, her ear, her cheek, his breath still harsh and heavy.

Ever so carefully, he rolled to his side, waited there for a moment, then rose from the bed and made his way into the bathroom. He was back a moment later, getting in beside her and then pulling her to him, until she rested against his side, his arm thrown casually around her, her face against his chest.

He kissed her forehead and told her to rest, and then the world fell completely away.

L
ily woke to a languid warmth and pleasant near-exhaustion that made no sense at all.

She was so relaxed, she thought she might have taken a pill of some sort. A fabulous pill, if it could do this to a woman.

She rolled over in her bed, her skin feeling so good against the soft sheets, feeling tingly and alive, like every pore was happy.

Since when were her pores happy?

“Lily?” She heard a deep, husky voice and felt a slightly raspy cheek press against the side of her face, warm breath on her ear, tickling it. “What time do the girls get home?”

“Girls?”

She had to be dreaming.

She never felt this good awake.

Then she remembered wishing for her Dream-Lover, Nick, thinking she could make do with nothing but the dream, and then remembered the reality of Nick, the lover, insistent and demanding and so maddeningly sure of himself and what he wanted and how to get it.

She remembered her kitchen.

Where he’d gotten it.

She’d left her clothes there, she feared.

“Oh, my God!” Her eyes flew open, searching for the lighted digits of her alarm clock. “Three-ten?”

Lily shrieked, planned to throw back the covers and jump out of her bed, but then realized she was naked.

Nick sat there. “Three-ten is bad?”

Her mouth hung open for a moment, then she waited, fearing the sound of a door opening or footsteps on the stairs. Hearing none, she looked at Nick and demanded, “Go downstairs and get my clothes! Hurry!”

He didn’t argue, threw back the covers and went.

Naked.

Really cute, but naked.

Lily whimpered.

He stopped in the doorway, came back and grabbed his jeans off the floor and yanked them on, heading out the door as he fastened them.

Lily grabbed underwear from her top drawer and yesterday’s jeans and a T-shirt from the top of the clothes hamper in her bathroom and dragged everything on as fast as she could.

She straightened her bed and then ran down the stairs, worried that Nick might have trouble finding all her things. She had no idea where they’d ended up, just remembered flinging her bra in the direction of the sink.

The door opened just as she got to the bottom of the stairs, the girls blowing into the room like a happy, chatty storm, hardly paying her any attention to her at all, except to call out a greeting.

They dropped backpacks and kicked off shoes into their favorite corner of the room and headed for the kitchen.

“Girls!” Lily called after them, managing to get them to stop and turn around and look at her.

“Mom, are you okay?” Ginny asked, looking at Lily like she was a puzzle Ginny would figure out if she tried hard enough.

“Of course, why?”

“You look funny,” Ginny said suspiciously. “Your hair’s all messed up.”

Lily smoothed down her hair as best she could, wishing she’d taken a moment to look in the mirror, then smiled nervously and claimed, “I was working hard all day.”

Then Nick stepped out into the hallway leading to the kitchen, his hair messed up, too, but fully clothed, thank goodness.

He looked like he had no idea what to do, having been caught in her house as the girls came home.

Had he found her underwear, at least?

Lily tried to mouth, “Underwear?” at him.

“What?” Ginny asked, definitely knowing something was up now.

Nick shook his head and frowned at Lily.

Did that mean he hadn’t found her underwear, or that he didn’t know what she’d tried to ask him?

She didn’t know.

And it didn’t look like she had time to find out. She just shooed him away as best she could by nodding toward the door behind him, and then giving him a little wave with her hand that she hoped said clearly, “Get out now!”

“Mommy?” Brittany said, coming to hold the hand that Lily was waving, maybe like a woman in the midst of a seizure.

“I’m fine, honey, just…starving. I’m starving,” Lily claimed, realizing it was true.

She’d slept through lunch and burned off a bunch of calories in the kitchen and in bed.

How could she have done that in her own kitchen?

She’d never be able to go into that room again and not think of what she and Nick had done there.

And she sure wasn’t going into that kitchen now.

“I’m hungry, too,” Brittany said.

“Me, too,” Ginny added.

“Great. How about we go out for pizza?” Lily suggested.

She could get her girls to forget anything by offering to take them to their favorite pizza place. It was a treat she saved for moments when it was absolutely necessary to distract them from something.

Did that make her a bad mother?

She hoped it didn’t, but at the moment she was just grateful to understand so fully how to manipulate her girls.

They scrambled back into their shoes and headed out the door, Lily bringing up the rear.

Whew.

She was safe, for the moment.

Now all she had to do was get the girls upstairs when she got back home and search the kitchen herself.

And try not to think about what she’d been doing all day with Nick.

Lily got through an early dinner with the girls just fine, and then managed to shoo them off upstairs when they got home.

She was frantically searching her kitchen and trying to call Nick a moment later when her back door opened and in walked her sister.

“What is the matter with you today?” Marcy asked as she came barreling into the room, her youngest daughter, Stacy, behind her.

Lily froze, thinking to herself,
What is the matter with you, Lily?

Years of careful living, gone out the window, lost on the kitchen countertop, and she still didn’t know where her underwear was.

Maybe Nick had found it and taken it with him.

An idea that Lily kind of liked, when she thought about it, then imagined seeing her pretty pink bra in those big, strong hands of his, maybe shoved into his front pocket to remind him of what they had done.

Her face turned bright red, she was sure, and she turned away to try to hide it, went to the sink and turned on the cold water to try to cool herself down, wishing she could immerse more than her hands into the cool spray.

She feared she absolutely reeked of really good sex.

The girls wouldn’t know what it was, but Marcy would.

“I…I’m sorry,” Lily said. “What did I do?”

“You forgot me, Aunt Lily,” Stacy cried, bottom lip trembling visibly when Lily turned around to look.

“Oh, no!” Lily said, not remembering until that very moment. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. You were supposed to come here after school today, weren’t you?”

Stacy nodded, looking like she’d been orphaned for life, instead of forgotten about for an afternoon playdate while her mom went to the dentist.

“I had to go home with Angelica instead, and I don’t like her,” Stacy said, laying on the guilt. “And her mother said you were irr…irrreee.”

“Irresponsible?” Lily guessed.

Stacy nodded.

“She’s right. I am so sorry, Stacy. I just completely forgot. I was working on the wooden trim for the dining room, and then I…I guess I just lost track of time completely, and then the girls and I went out for pizza.”

“Pizza?” she said wistfully.

Lily had just made it worse.

“Aunt Lily will find a way to make it up to you later, Stacy,” Marcy said. “For now, why don’t you go upstairs and play with Brittany?”

“Okay,” Stacy said, shooting Lily a look that said she would definitely expect to have this made up to her in spectacular fashion.

Lily had finished with her hands and was drying them, paying extraordinary attention to getting them perfectly dry, and wondering if that slight burn in her cheeks meant she’d been roughed up a bit by Nick’s afternoon stubble and if he might have even left a mark on her neck.

Tons of possible things that Marcy could see and then know…

But it seemed Marcy didn’t need to see or maybe she already had or maybe she just knew, because Lily’s sister looked absolutely delighted.

“Lily, sweetie, what did you do all afternoon?” Marcy asked with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Nothing,” Lily insisted. “I mean, I worked. I had a lot of work to do.”

“I bet it was more like…somebody worked you over,” Marcy said.

Thoroughly,
Lily thought, trying so hard not to let it show in her face.

“He finally gotcha, didn’t he?” Marcy asked, grinning from ear to ear.

“Marcy, I…Honestly—”

Marcy walked toward her, like she was going to corner her or something. Lily tried to dodge her, thinking to slip past the refrigerator and into the hall. She could run, if she had to.

“I just forgot about Stacy. I’m so sorry. But it’s really nothing—”

And then Marcy reached behind Lily and up, above Lily’s head, and pulled Lily’s favorite pink bra from…Must have been from the top of the refrigerator.

“Been looking for this?” Marcy asked, the pink lace dangling from her hand.

Lily grabbed it and went to put it in her pocket, but she didn’t have one, so she settled for hiding it in a drawer behind her.

“He got your bra off in your kitchen?” Marcy asked, laughing.

“He got everything he wanted in this kitchen,” Lily said, suddenly deciding to come clean and get it over with. Marcy would probably get it all out of her eventually anyway.

She had the satisfaction of seeing Marcy’s look of complete disbelief at first.

Lily glared back at her sister, not backing down one bit from that statement.

“No way,” Marcy said.

“Fine. Don’t believe me. He didn’t get anything.”

“No, wait,” Marcy insisted. “Wait. I want to know. I won’t argue one bit. I just…need to know, okay? I’m your sister, and I’ve been sleeping with the same man for twenty years, Lily. I need to live vicariously for a moment and I got a look at him, so I can guess that he’s really, really good at…everything. So, please, do me this one favor and tell me everything!”

Lily’s cheeks flamed as she thought of being here in this room with Nick, how crazy and out of control it had been, how it had been completely unlike anything she’d imagined letting herself do with him.

Marcy groaned, like Lily thought she must have done when Nick sank his teeth into her neck and took a little bite of her.

“That good?” Marcy asked.

Lily nodded, simply having no words.

Marcy sank back against the counter like she’d just been reduced to a puddle, which was how Lily felt, too, every time the man so much as looked at her.

“Well,” Marcy said. “If it couldn’t be me with that gorgeous hunk of man, I’m glad it was you, honey. You deserve it.”

“I have no idea how to handle a relationship like this,” Lily said. “I mean, do I even call it a relationship?”

“Beats me,” Marcy said.

“What do people call it these days?”

“I have no idea. I could ask my next-door neighbor. She has kids in their twenties. She’d probably know.”

“And where do we go from here? What do we do?”

“Anything you two want,” Marcy said. “But wait, before we forget, did you ever find your panties? Or should we be looking for them before the girls come downstairs?”

“What did you do today?” Jake asked that night as he and Nick ate take-out Chinese.

Nick tried to look completely innocent and asked, “What do you mean?”

Jake shoved a huge forkful into his mouth and halfway chewed before saying, “You seem…I don’t know…happy or something.”

“What am I, a grump, normally?”

Jake shrugged. “Not really, I guess. I mean…You just seem awfully happy.”

Nick shoveled the last of the kung-pow chicken onto his plate before Jake, the human garbage disposal, could get to it, and lied through his teeth, “I didn’t do anything, really. I mean, it was a nice day out. Sunny…and…nice.”

Jake looked at him like he didn’t believe a word of it.

Nick touched a hand to the outside of his jeans over the pocket where Lily’s little pink panties were, for safe keeping until he could return them. He’d shoved her shirt and jeans into the cabinet above her refrigerator, along with her bra, thinking her girls wouldn’t be able to reach that spot and would never find them.

But he’d had trouble finding the panties and then the girls had come in, and he didn’t think he had any choice, really, but to take them with him.

They were still there, still tucked safely away from sight, making him a little crazy for her every time he remembered they were there.

Lily, turning into a beautiful, half-wild woman in her own kitchen.

He would never have guessed that.

“See, there,” Jake said. “You do look happy.”

Nick tried his best to look grumpy and told Jake he needed to take out the garbage and clean up his room. Jake just shrugged, as if he was not fooled at all, and got up and took his plate and glass to the sink to rinse them off, then put them in the dishwasher.

Nick fought the urge to pick up the phone and call Lily, fought an even stronger one to wait until Jake was upstairs for the night and Lily’s girls were asleep, to slip across the side yard and into her house and return her panties.

If he was really lucky, to carry her off to bed again.

He didn’t think she’d go for that with the girls home, but a guy could give it his best shot and see what he could get before she kicked him out for the night.

His phone rang as Jake was collecting his backpack to go upstairs and do his homework.

Nick grabbed for it with unseemly haste, which also caught Jake’s attention, and said, “Hello,” probably sounding happy just saying the word, thinking it might be Lily.

“Nick, I finally caught you,” a distinctly unhappy voice said.

“Hello, Joan.”

Jake made a face. Joan was his father’s older sister, the relative who made the most vocal objections to Nick getting custody of the boys and a real pain in the ass.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were dodging my calls,” she said, in a tone that made it sound like she’d actually said,
You jerk, quit dodging my calls.