The Billionaire's Allure (The Silver Cross Club Book 5) (20 page)

We went inside and staggered down the hallway toward the bedroom, kissing and tugging at each other’s clothing. Beth got me out of my T-shirt, and I unzipped her jeans and pulled her top up and over her head, where it got stuck on the knot of her braids. “I can’t see!” she shrieked, and I caught her around the waist and tumbled her back onto the bed, and we landed there, laughing, tangled up in each other.

“You’re making it worse, get away from me,” she said, batting at my hands, and extricated herself from her shirt. And then she was lying there, smiling and shirtless, mine to have. At least for the next couple of hours.

I pushed up onto one elbow and bent to kiss her, one hand on her face, thumb stroking along her cheekbone. “You’re beautiful,” I murmured to her between kisses.

She scrunched up her nose, but I thought she was pleased. “You talk a good game.”

“I
play
a good game,” I said. “Want to find out?”

“Oh, I sure do,” she said, and twined her arms around my neck.

She was everything I wanted: soft, yielding, luscious. I kissed my way down her chest and buried my face between her generous breasts. Her bra was some lacy confection, trimmed with ribbon and gloriously see-through. Her hard nipples were clearly visible through the mesh fabric, and I took full advantage, licking and sucking until the bra was wet with my spit. She cradled my head in her hands and moaned each time I used my teeth, which of course only encouraged me to use them more. I wanted her so turned on she couldn’t think straight.

It didn’t take me long to get impatient with the layer of fabric between my mouth and her skin. I eased down the cup of her bra, but it wasn’t very stretchy, and I couldn’t pull it down far enough to expose her nipple. With a groan, I sat back and said, “This needs to go.”

“What?” she asked, her eyelids fluttering open. “The, uh—what?”

I grinned. Already incoherent. That was a good sign. I bent again and slid my hands beneath her back, then pulled her up until she was seated in my lap, straddling my legs.

“Max, what,” she said, but it was too late: I had her up, and I was already unfastening her bra and drawing the straps down her arms.

“Mm, very nice,” I said, and tossed her bra on the floor.

“That’s an expensive bra, you know,” she said, raising her hands to cover herself. I didn’t think she was even aware that she was doing it. “You can’t just drop it on the floor like that.”

“I’ll pick it up later,” I said. “I’ll buy you a new one.” I drew her hands away, kissing each palm in turn. “Don’t hide yourself from me, sweet girl. Everything about you is perfect.”

“Oh, Max, you can’t say things like that,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you’re going to give me a huge ego,” she said, and bent her head to kiss me.

It was a slow, heated kiss, a dance of lips and tongues. I cupped her breasts in my hands and rolled my thumbs over her nipples. Beth inhaled sharply with each pass of my fingers, a quick little breath, and it made my blood boil. My cock throbbed between my legs. Waiting was torture, but the delay made the eventual ecstasy even sweeter. And I wanted to see Beth come before I took my own pleasure.

Our last coupling had been frenzied, rushed. Thoroughly enjoyable, but now I wanted to take my time with her and re-learn all of her responses: every tremor, every indrawn breath. I eased her back down onto the bed. She clung to me, drawing me with her, and I rested on top of her, my body covering hers, pressing her down into the mattress. I loved the feeling of her beneath me, warm and soft.

“This is nice,” she said, running her hands down my back. “Like you’re hugging me with your whole body.”

I laughed. “You wanted to come back to my apartment so we could
hug
?”

“That wasn’t really what I had in mind,” she admitted. “But this is still nice.”

“You’re touch-hungry,” I told her, and turned my head to kiss her neck. “Your skin wants my hands on it.”

“Hungry?” she asked. “Starving.” And she drew my head up and brought me into another kiss.

I loved kissing, and I loved lying there with her and touching her hips and the sides of her breasts, but there was only so much making out I could tolerate while my dick was demanding immediate release. It was distracting. My mind wandered from Beth’s lips to the presumably slick heat between her legs, and my mouth wandered down her neck to suck on her nipples again. She had magnificent tits, gold-medal tits, round and full and just right for squeezing. But even her breasts lost their appeal after a few minutes, and I kissed my way further down her body, approaching what was by far the most fascinating part of any woman’s anatomy: her wet, tight, delicious pussy.

“Oh,” Beth said, as I spread her legs, pressing one knee up and out of the way.

“Oh?” I asked. God, she was already wet and swollen. I drew one finger along her slit, and she trembled at my touch. I pressed a kiss in the crease of her hip, and another on the swell of her mound.

She exhaled shakily. “You never did this when we were kids.”

I grinned pressed another kissed to her thigh. “Beth, I’m not sure I even knew this was an option.”

“Didn’t you watch porn?” she asked. “Don’t they do this in porn?”

“They do a lot of things in porn,” I said. “At the time, I didn’t believe that half of them were real sex acts. I thought it was performance art, I guess. And a lot of the women didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves too much, so I decided that porn wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual for pleasing a lady.”

“Aww, little teenaged Max,” she said. “You did a pretty good job of pleasing
me
.”

“Let’s see if I can do an even better job now,” I said, and bent my head to the task.

She was more responsive than I could have hoped, gasping and trembling at every touch. I had one hand curled around the back of her thigh to hold her leg out of my way, and I felt the long muscles there quiver each time I drew my tongue over her clit. I rubbed at her with the flat of my tongue, using long strokes to warm her up. She moved her hips in time with my mouth, rocking against me ever so slightly. I wondered if she was even aware of doing it, or if she was so lost in sensation that her body moved without her conscious command.

She gasped, quick and shallow, and I looked up to see her stroking her breasts, pinching her nipples with her fingernails.

Christ.
Perfect
.

I licked at her until she was moaning steadily and tossing her head from side to side, all of her muscles tensed and straining toward release. She was close, and it would be so easy to let her topple over the edge into orgasm, but I wasn’t finished with her yet. There was an empty span of eight years that I had to compensate for: ninety-six months in which I should have been doing this all the time but wasn’t. If Beth was starving, I was a man presented with water after a long sojourn in the desert, and I would drink until my burning thirst had been quenched.

“Max,” she cried out, and I pulled back and kissed her knee, her shin, waiting for her to come back from the edge.

A few moments passed. She raised her head from the mattress to scowl at me. “Why did you stop?”

Darling, crabby Beth. “Because I’m not going to let you come just yet,” I said.

“That’s so mean,” she wailed, letting her head fall back to the mattress.

I smiled. She was so cute in her outrage, like a wet kitten. And completely at my mercy. I pressed one finger into her, carefully, going slow, but it sunk right in, and she arched her back to take me deeper. Oh, she
liked
that. I gave her another finger, and she took that one, too. Her body was a tight clench of heat around my fingers. I couldn’t help imagining what she would feel like around my cock.

I pulled my fingers out almost all the way, watching how she stretched around me, and then thrust them back in, gently but firmly. She made an encouraging noise, so I did it again, a little faster, and soon I was fucking her with my fingers, and she moaned and moved with me and loved it. She started getting noisy again, working herself up to orgasm again, and I couldn’t have that. I pulled my fingers out and waited.

“Maaaaax,” she whined. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. She bit her lip and looked at me with mute desperation. “
Please
…”

I didn’t give in. I waited until her breathing evened out, and the frantic pulse in the hollow of her neck slowed. Then I bent my mouth to her and started all over again.

I repeated the cycle twice more, using my lips and tongue on her until she wailed, then switching to my fingers, and then back to my mouth until she was a limp, trembling tangle of limbs on the bed—but never giving her quite enough, never letting her reach satisfaction. Then I stopped, finally, and raised her from the bed and into my arms.

She gasped and shivered, too close to orgasm to protest being manhandled. I stroked her back, waiting for her to quiet. At last she lifted her head from my shoulder and said, “You
bastard
.”

I chuckled. “My parents were married when I was born,” I said. “So that isn’t technically accurate.”

“Fuck you anyway,” she said, her voice too weak for the words to have any power.

“Yes, please,” I said, and I felt her body shake against me with her laughter.

I lay down on the bed, arranging myself against the pillows, and steadied her on top of me with my hands on her hips. “You want to get off, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, her hands creeping up again to cover her breasts.

I grasped her wrists and drew her hands away. “Ride me. I want to watch you.”

“Max!” she exclaimed, like I had shocked her, but I didn’t miss the sudden hitch in her breath. She liked the idea as much as I did—and I liked it a lot, a hell of a lot. Beth above me, taking her pleasure from my body, her incredible breasts swaying with each motion…

“You’re not scandalized, sweet girl,” I said. “You don’t need to act coy with me. What’s shameful about liking sex? I sure enjoy it. We can enjoy it together.”

“It’s different for men,” she said, “but you’re right. I enjoy it, too. We’re going to have a good time.” She leaned down to kiss me, her breasts brushing against my chest, her belly and soft thighs pressing against my cock and driving me wild.

I couldn’t get enough of her. She was curvy in all the right places, with hips that were perfect for squeezing and an ass that begged to be smacked just hard enough to cause a little excitement.

She sat up and planted her hands on my chest. “Do you have a condom?”

“Do you even need to ask?” I reached for the drawer of my nightstand and handed her a condom in its foil wrapper. She frowned at it, biting her lip adorably as she ripped it open and rolled the latex sheath onto my iron-hard cock. Even the brief touch of her hands threatened my self-control. When she lifted herself up and sank down onto my cock, using one of her hands to hold me in place, I felt my eyes roll back into my head.

“Oh,” Beth said, with wide eyes, and began moving.

I curled my hands around her hips and held on.

She rode me quickly and confidently, her hands braced on my chest for leverage. She rolled her hips on my cock like she was born to it, and even through the condom, the heat and pressure of her felt incredible. I was going to lose it way too fast and blow my load inside her willing body, and despite the potential embarrassment that my poor stamina would cause me, I couldn’t think of anything better.

“Oh boy,” Beth said, completely incongruous for a woman who was currently working my dick with such enthusiasm, and I burst out laughing, full of desire and joy. She frowned at me, still moving, and said, “No laughing.”

“I’m happy, that’s all,” I said, reaching up to touch her cheek. “I’m happy to be here with you.” Then I slid my hand down between our bodies to stroke at her clit, fast and hard, giving her—at long last—exactly what she wanted.

She arched her back and came in long, rolling waves.

I gave myself permission to let go.

After, when we had both cleaned up, we lay twined together in bed for a few minutes before she had to put on her clothes and leave for work. The feeling of her bare skin against mine, smooth as silk, was a treasure worth any price. I would pay anything, do anything it took to be with her. I would kill a man. I would abandon my carefully crafted life.

“I’m so happy,” Beth said. “Max, I’m so—I’m really glad you decided to look for me.”

“So am I,” I said, and prayed that she didn’t hear my voice crack.

Guilt twined itself around my stomach, a wicked serpent.

I had to tell her the truth. It was time.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Beth

All at once, overnight, the city exploded into spring. The daffodils were harbingers, and then the next time I left my apartment, the trees were covered with brand new pale green leaves. The entire display was a painfully obvious metaphor for my own heart. Like so: after years of lying in dormant slumber, I had been reawakened to love. It was horribly unsubtle, and yet that was what I thought to myself as I walked to the grocery store on Wednesday afternoon, the day after my rendezvous with Max. I was still feeling the after-effects of our lovemaking, a pleasant, tender soreness between my legs. Everything was bright and glorious. I felt alive.