The Alexandra Series (84 page)

She jerked several times in his arms when he kissed the back of her neck and his hand fondled her freely. Then, when the last sensations died away, he turned her about and held her until she was ready to back away.

“It was never as good as this, was it?” she said.

“Not in my memory,” Ian replied. “But then if memory serves me well, there’s no orgasm quite like the present one.”

“Oh, not for me, I could rate them on a scale from one to ten,” she said. Sighing, she picked her clothes up off the floor and collapsed into a chair too weak to do more.

“Humph. I never believed you that objective,” Ian retorted.

“Ah, this is not an objective thing at all.”

“So, how about dinner?” Ian suggested. “You hungry?

“Ravenous.”

“You have a bath through here?” He pointed to the doors at the end of the room.

“Uh, huh.” She answered. “Take your time, I’m in no hurry.”

As Jocelyn watched Ian disappear into the bathroom, she gazed toward her desk, immediately spotting the picture of her and Reggie taken at Tahoe after their wedding. His arms surrounded her and their faces were flushed with excitement from a day water skiing. In an unguarded moment the photographer had caught them in a casual moment. What exuded from that rendering was Jocelyn’s favorite memory of her husband, spontaneous and smiling with his signature charm reeking from every atom of his carefully cultured soul. What one glance at that photograph did was bring her back to an awful reality she hoped she could forget for a few more hours. Unfortunately, the sweet emptiness of the sex was gone, and she had to wonder to herself why she was compounding the problems that already loomed over her life.

Chapter Five

Life almost seemed normal with Reggie home. They had sex the night he arrived, almost as memorable as sex with Ian. Ian was special because he was different, but not because he made her feel any better. Sex with Reggie was comforting, though it was never mundane. But after her interludes with the scoundrel, re-establishing the relationship with her husband was the foremost thought in her mind. She was relieved to know that Ian would be leaving town the day after their dinner together. Vulnerable as she was, too much temptation proved dangerous.

It was time to get make things right with Reg, and time to get beyond the muddle of her working life. She was mulling changes, almost ready to admit that Reggie was right about her business’s demise. The morning after his homecoming they sat together in the kitchen sharing a civil breakfast that promised to proceed without an argument.

“You were pretty hot last night,” she said, running her toes along his leg. Perfectly starched and ready for work, his face was buried in the paper, but he looked up responding to her fondling.

“I have a fondness for your ass, what can I say? Is it still sore?”

“Just a little. I thought you’d never stop spanking me.”

“You liked it, didn’t you?” was his cool reply, and he returned to his newspaper while Jocelyn returned to the kitchen for the coffee pot.

Strange how things turn out, she was thinking. Rarely was she punished enough to feel the effects the day after. But the night before, once Reggie had tackled her to the bed, he’d been unrelenting with a new leather spanker he’d purchased in a New York leather shop. It started and ended playfully, with a rash of hard burning smacks to the center of her ass cheeks; but he might as well have been punishing her for some crime considering the intensity of the spanking. Maybe without even knowing, he was punishing her for her dalliance with Ian. How poetic, she was thinking in the aftermath. Would that be enough to absolve her of her guilt? Perhaps not. But she’d give it a try.

“More coffee?” she asked as she was about to pour some into his mug.

“What’s this?” Reggie asked. What had been a decently pleasant look on his face abruptly faded into a scowl. He pointed to Germaine Charles’s gossip column, something he rarely read.

“What’s that?” she asked, gazing down at the paper.

“Let me read it to you,” Reggie said, pulling the paper away from her.

“One wonders what’s amiss in the romance between the Reginald Harolds, the irrepressible Jocelyn Killian Harold just seen at
Dorsis
with a new man-about-town, who this reporter has yet to identify. Sources suggest that Mrs. Harold’s new darling is a European born magnate of some renown. It’s nice seeing a smile on the face of the lovely head of Killian Management, who’s been so reviled by the press for her alleged part in the now infamous Ibercon catastrophe. Seeing her so cozy with this elegant man on the dance floor Friday night, one can only speculate that the idyllic marriage between the Harolds is ripping apart under the strain of this never ending and very public corporate battle. Perhaps the cool Reggie Harold is no long handling his wife’s faux pax with his accustomed grace. Quite fascinating drama, don’t you think?

By the time Reggie spit out the last of Germaine’s biting chronicle, Jocelyn was weak-kneed and slumping into a chair opposite her grave looking husband, trying to keep him from noticing the sudden fear that swept her soul.

“New darling’?” He looked at her with eyes sharp and biting.

“Reg, it was nothing. You know how Germaine exaggerates little things, that’s what her column thrives on.”

“You weren’t at Dorsis Friday night?”

“Well, yes I was.”

“And mystery man?”

“An old friend,” she stated with a believable aplomb. That said Jocelyn rose from her chair and puttered about the kitchen as if there was nothing at all to worry about.

“What old friend?” Reggie asked.

“Ian. Ian Pennywhistle,” she replied, deciding to be as honest as she dared be, less of a hassle should he have other ways to discern the truth.

“And?”

“It was so long ago. He looked me up when he got to town, and should be off elsewhere by now.”

“I see.”

“From Europe?” he asked.

There was a lot of dangerous territory to cover here, since she’d never mentioned to Reggie the bawdy summer of indecency she’d spent with a dapper young Englishman.

“England,” she said.

“Would you like to tell me more?” he asked.

“There’s nothing more to tell,” she replied. “Really Reg, it was totally innocent. Germaine can make bedfellows of anybody she likes, but she’s making things up reading romance into my dinner with Ian. He’s typically Continental, droll and fawning.”

“I thought he’s English.”

“He is, but he’s spent lots of time on the continent.”

“So why haven’t I heard about him before?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I just didn’t say anything, and then it seemed unnecessary. And we were very busy last night. Good god, if I’d known that shrew would set her claws like that, I’d have fessed up the minute you got home. But it was honestly innocent.”

“And was Ian a former lover?”

Jocelyn stopped short at that question. Her hesitation didn’t suit Reg, but he calmly waited for a reply.

“He was. But it was so long ago.”

“I thought I’d heard about all your men. But not this one.”

“I suppose that just indicates his importance in my life—which was very little.”

He nodded, then gazed at the column again. “Perhaps you should be more careful displaying your private life in public,” he suggested.

“I swear, Reg, it was nothing.”

“I hope not,” he replied, suggesting that he wanted to believe her, but wasn’t sure if he could.

***

After an early meeting with her staff, Jocelyn was putting the finishing touches on her plans. Bail out. Hadn’t Reggie used that term? Surely someone had in the midst of the tempest in a teapot that had brewed over the last five months of disaster. But bail out was the most direct way to put it. Once decided there would be no going back. Shut down Killian Management, take her chips and go home to some great whatever after. Perhaps Alex had said it best. “Maybe it’s just Jocelyn Killian wanting another lifestyle.”

Wise advise. She was thirty-five, had all her wits about her, a husband who adored her in a strange sort of way and the possibilities were endless for life after Killian Management. That decided, there’d be more meetings with attorneys as she hammered out the details, and some personal friends to assuage as she sent them to another management consultant in town, one without the shoddy reputation.

Looking out from her high-rise office to the city she loved, Jocelyn breathed deeply, thinking she was on the way to something new even if she had no idea what that might be. In her bones she was tired, the months having taken their toll. Perhaps she could convince Reg to take a long vacation.

A knock at the door startled her.

“Come in,” she said, seconds later seeing Ian Pennywhistle’s smiling face appear.

“Lunch, love?” he asked, slipping inside.

“I thought you were supposed to be gone?” she asked.

“Couple days yet, my dear. But that just means we have more time.”

“My husband’s home, and the game’s off,” she replied.

“Ah, I see,” he replied thoughtfully as he ambled toward her. “That just means we’ll have to be more careful.”

“No, it doesn’t mean that at all,” she answered him, remaining firm.

But Ian was sidling up to her where she sat behind her desk. Soon on one knee before her, his uncanny charm oozed about her like a thick, warm liquid. A hand worked its way up her leg and found her wet where her thighs meet and she was most womanly. One finger dipping into the lusty reservoir toyed daintily with the cottony folds inside.

“Just one more for the road.”

“No, Ian, no,” she replied trying to remove his hold on her—a difficult task when the attention was almost too delightful to pass up.

“Don’t say no. I’m not good at being denied and you know that.” How right he was. It had taken her weeks to tear herself away from the man when they were entangled years before. “In fact, I won’t take no as your answer.”

“It’s not a simple lunch you want, is it?” Jocelyn asked.

“What does lunch mean but a sensuous feast? And what would we be doing that we haven’t already done? I hardly think you should feel ashamed, but if you do, why turn me down? It will only add to that perverse and antiquated thrill of guilt.”

“You have extraordinary logic,” Jocelyn replied.

“I’m not trying to be logical, I avoid that at all cost. But you’re the woman I plan to dine on and I won’t be rejected.”

“Do I have to screw you to get rid of you?” she asked.

“No, just enjoy me.” His hand, having control of her hungry pussy, continued experimenting with the spasming hole, producing exactly the results he desired.

“You are leaving tomorrow?” she asked.

“Or the day after.”

“But today is it,” she said firmly.

“I promise, I’ll leave you to your marriage.”

“You’re mocking me.”

“Why would I do that when all I want is to make love to you?”

Desire so rampant, face flushed, heart beating, her skin burning hot – she would have climaxed just from the feel of his roving fingers, though Ian would not allow that.

“Where?” she asked.

“My little home away from home?” he suggested.

“Okay then, let’s be quick.”

The escapade reminded her of stealing candy from a drugstore, pilfering baguettes of bread from French markets and other acts of petty larceny she and Ian perpetrated across France and Italy when they swept through those charming countrysides. She was just twenty at the time. Now, in the same spirit, they walked the street beyond Jocelyn’s office, grabbed a cab one block down and arrived at the French restaurant just in time to hustle up the stairs to Ian’s apartment.

“Jacques will bring us lunch, we’ll eat up here.”

A day with potent air, succulent with the aromas of spring and just warm enough for open windows, they made love in the bed in the breeze, with curtains fluttering and something so delectable about the atmosphere Jocelyn could feel the taste of it on her tongue, yet there was no flavor to recognize except the flavor of springtime.

Dissolving into his body, hers was atop his. The feel of his hand’s caress from her breasts down her slim waist, to the cushy rounds of her ass brought musical sounds of pleasure to her lips. For a while, as he marveled at her satin skin, his lips joined with hers, and she forgot who she was with. Just sex, just passion, one body or another didn’t matter with such pleasure. Feeling Ian’s prick surge within her dropping its seed deep, she rocked with him, allowing what had begun in her office to burst free.

When the last of the subtle seizure disappeared, Jocelyn sat back on his groin with his dwindling cock still inside her. Looking out the window to old apartments and the street a story below, she breathed deep the freedom. A last hurrah, perhaps the encore to the last hurrah. She’d enjoy the rogue for a half hour more then go home to the stability of her darling Reg. Perhaps she just needed Ian to get her through the ending of this personal era.

Before Jocelyn left the cagey Ian, he begged for just one last glance at her perfect derriere, and took the chance to lay three strokes of a bamboo cane on her flesh before she could stop him.