Uncommon Pleasure (29 page)

What had he done?

Possibilities flashed in her mind, each one hotter than the previous image. Apparently, the old Sean had new tastes, new interests. She should have guessed. Sex last year was an unhurried, subtle exploration of her body, their responses together. Sex this year had an edge to it, one she’d attributed to the aftermath of a year overseas and her own needs. But maybe he’d grown accustomed to the highly addictive combat adrenalin, sought it out in bed. Maybe that made her hot as hell.

Maybe this was exactly what she’d been looking for, something that would drive a final wedge between them, something that was here and now, immediate, not leave last year, not breaking up ten months ago, but right now.

Something moist, fleshy, and smelling vaguely of sweat moved slowly in front of her face, but the brisk, officious snap right in front of her nose jerked her back to the present. A pudgy, solemnly drunk man peered deep into her face. “Earth to Red,” he said, followed by a long pause. “Hey…?”

“Red?” she supplied helpfully. The other guys at the table laughed like she was the funniest thing ever.

“Yeah. Red. Earth needs Heineken.”

Earth was already about a six-pack of Heinekens to the wind.
Afraid the reeking beer breath would knock her unconscious, she took a step back and found her smile. “Of course. Anything else?” she asked the rest of the table.

Tray tucked under her arm and order in hand, she trotted back up to the bar. So what if she’d told him not to expect her tonight. He’d given her a key. That sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach was relief she’d just found the best way to slam the door on her unruly emotions. Make it sexual. Stiff-arm him back where he belongs, tonight.

After she found out exactly what he’d done when he left No Limits.

A shadowy figure stepped between the bed and the thin curtains
covering the window. Adrenaline poured along Sean’s nerves, and he was off the bed, in a fighting crouch, knife in hand when the feminine shriek and the light from the full moon silvering the figure’s red hair brought him fully awake.

“Jesus Christ,” he said as he straightened, his heart rate out of the red zone and heading for the stratosphere. “Jesus
Christ
, Abby! You said you weren’t coming over!”

“You gave me a key,” Abby said, her voice high and thin, her hands spread like he was holding a weapon on her. Which…he was. “You gave me a key! Why did you give me a key if you freak out when people come in unexpectedly?”

“I didn’t know I’d freak out,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Goose bumps rippled under the fine sweat on his skin. “No one else comes over.
Fuck
,” he ground out.

For a few seconds their irregular, stressed breathing was the only sound in the room. “Are you okay, Sean?”

The distressed tone in her words cut into him. “That’s not a PTSD thing, Abby,” he said quietly. “That’s a Marine thing.”

“That’s a really big knife, is what that is.”

He looked at his hand, his fingers still wrapped around the leather-washer handle of his KA-BAR fighting utility knife, the seven-inch blade long enough that keeping it in his boot was technically a violation of Texas’s concealed carry law. He carefully replaced it behind the alarm clock, noted the slight tremor to his hand. That would take a while to subside. Even though he’d put the knife down she stayed where she was, just inside the room, so he shifted backward on the bed until he leaned against the headboard. “Standard issue combat knife,” he said. “No big deal. C’mere. I’m harmless.” That was as much for himself as her.

She stayed where she was, in the doorway, her hands slowly dropping back to her sides. “No, you’re not, Sean. You are absolutely lethal.”

His brain jerked into high gear as he scanned from her head to toe, but with her back to the window her face was hidden from view. She was here, when she said she wouldn’t be. “I would never hurt you, Abby,” he said.

At least she dropped her bag, stepped out of her heels, and crawled onto the bed. Then she straddled his body, her knees outside his, her hands by his hips, and kissed him, openmouthed, provocative. When she nipped his lower lip fight-or-flight adrenaline cracked into sexual response. His cock hardened painfully, and suddenly the only thought in his brain was getting Abby spread for him. He fisted one hand in her hair and gripped her hip with the other, ready to roll her when she resisted.

“I want to ask you a question.”

Her tone was challenging, the look in her eyes even more so, and the urge to fuck her doubled. “After,” he said.

“Now,” she replied.

His cock throbbed. For the first time in his career as a Marine he was in a position to relieve combat stress with something other than a combat jack, and she was arguing with him? They’d discuss the immediacy of reptile brain male physiological responses later. Much later. “During,” he said.

At that her mouth softened. She bent forward and placed her soft, open mouth against the pulse pounding under his jaw. Meticulously but rapidly she made her way down his throat to his collarbone, then along his sternum to his abdomen.

Fuck, yeah.

He shifted up so just his shoulders and head were braced against the headboard, brushed her hair back from her face and wound his fingers in it, all the better to watch. Abby gripped his cock in her fist and took the head in her mouth.

Three minutes ago he was sound asleep. Sound fucking asleep, beyond dreams. His eyes dropped closed as Abby swirled her tongue around the head, went down until her lips met her fist, then came back up again with enough sucking pressure to make his hips buck. She did it again, again, then backed away and licked the tip.

“I was talking to Lisette tonight,” she said.

Who?
Waitress. No Limits. Blonde, with a malicious sense of humor. “Uh-huh,” he managed.

“She said you were in No Limits a few weeks ago with another guy and a woman.”

And just like that, his past caught up with him. He went still, prey-still, like she did their first night together. His eyelids lifted enough to see Abby looking up at him innocently as she closed her pretty pink lips around the head of his shaft and flicked her tongue against the bundle of nerves just below. He groaned, shifted his hips up while he used the fist in her hair to urge her down.

“Tell me about that, Sean,” she murmured when she came back up.

Okay, so he didn’t know the protocol for this situation, but she was asking…and she was going down on him while she asked, so…she wasn’t mad? He had nothing to be ashamed of here. She’d told him she was over him. “A friend called me and asked me to meet him and his girlfriend at the bar. So I did.”

Abby sat up and put her fingers to the buttons of her blouse. “What else did you do?”

He watched her take off her shirt, then her bra before he answered. “The things you do at No Limits. Drink.” Ass in the air she went down again, and he groaned. “Dance. Jesus, Abby.”

“I heard about the dancing,” she said, a cat’s smile on her face. “Lisette said it was very hot. All three of you at once. And then you left together.”

His cock throbbed, and whether it was from the memory of that night with Ty and Lauren or Abby’s teasing sucks and licks, he didn’t know. When he kept quiet, she pushed. “Did you do something naughty, Sean?”

“No,” he said.
Naughty
was Abby in her No Limits uniform, teasing him with glimpses of her cheeky panties. What he’d done with Ty and Lauren…fuck, he had to choose the right word during a blow job?

She paused and looked at him, eyebrows cocked expectantly. “No, you didn’t do something naughty?”

“We did something erotic,” he rasped, scrambling for an answer so she’d continue. “Adult. Carnal. That’s the right word.
Carnal.
” It came from some hot, dark place inside him, a place unlocked by the adrenaline and Abby’s tight, wet mouth, and just thinking about it tightened his balls. Heat pooled at the base of his shaft, began to climb.

She wrapped her hand around his spit-slicked cock and began to jack him, slow but hard enough to retain that erotic edge. “When?”

“The night after I found you at Ben’s.”

“What did you do?”

Tell the truth. All of it.
“We drove to her place and had sex with her just about every way you can have sex with a woman.”

A blink, a curious tilt of her head. “Oral,” she said, but it wasn’t a question. “Vaginal?”

He nodded again, not sure how she’d take that, but she didn’t seem fazed at all.

“Anal?”

“Not me. Ty did.”

She took him deep. At the slick pressure of his cock against the back of her throat he tensed, clenched his fists in the sheets to avoid clenching his fists in her hair and bucking up into her mouth until he came.

“Why?”

Why what?
He struggled for the trailing end of their conversation, latched onto it.
Why did you do it?
That was the subtext under the single word, and Abby’s beguiling mouth, wet and tight and purposeful, was stripping his ability to filter his responses. “Because I found you at Ben’s.”

“Did finding me at Ben’s make you mad?’

Finding her at Ben’s broke his heart, but he wasn’t about to tell Abby that. “And,” he said, driven to honesty, “because odds aren’t good I’ll get another offer like that again.”

A smile, knowing and amused, curved her wet, pink lips. “You really have no idea how hot you are,” she said. “You could walk into No Limits and walk out twenty minutes later with any two girls in the bar.”

He was the exception to the rule about the sex appeal of Marines. Women didn’t emerge from the woodwork and hurl themselves at him. Even in uniform. They asked him for directions, trusted him to drive them home without violating them when they were shitfaced, cried on his shoulder when their boyfriends screwed their friends and broke their hearts. “You’re crazy.”

“You’re arguing with me?” she asked coquettishly, and took a firmer grip on his cock. “I must not be doing this right.”

She practiced assiduously for a few moments, and just when release seethed in the tip of his cock, she lifted her mouth again. He groaned.

“Poor baby. Have you done that before? Anal sex?”

The question, combined with a particularly hot moment of lips and teeth and pressure applied to the tip of his cock sent his orgasm climbing his shaft. “No.”

“Do you want to?”

That got his attention. He opened his eyes and focused on her face. “Whatever you want, whenever you want, Abby.”

“I want,” she said.

Sweet Jesus.
“Later,” he said. “I’m too turned on to take it slow now.” Slow was key.

Her cat-green eyes flashed a provocative challenge. “That’s not all I want,” she said.

It took him a second to get it, because she’d taken up that torturous siege on the tip of his cock. When her words formed meaning in his brain he slid his hand under her jaw to lift her face.

Maybe you should have thought about what she meant to you before you did it.

His conversation with Ty when the ménage with Lauren was over flashed into his brain. Then, he couldn’t understand why he’d share a woman he cared about with another man. Now…it turned him on to think about it. Now…he remembered the look on Lauren’s face, and the look on Ty’s, when they shared that experience together. For a long, charged moment he looked deep into Abby’s eyes. She meant it. Her truth was in her eyes, the flush on her skin, in her pouty, swollen lips. The explanation, a rationale beyond
whatever, whenever
, wasn’t as forthcoming.

You just made it sound hot as hell, you moron. Abby won’t need a rationale beyond that.

“Come here,” he said, lifting his chin.

Still innocently obedient she let his cock slap against his belly and shifted her weight up to straddle his hips. With his eyes focused on hers, he worked his hand under her skirt and found slick, wet heat. Her eyes went heavy-lidded, and her lips parted on a soft sigh. With his wrist twisted awkwardly he sought and found her clit, swollen at the top of her sex. He stroked both sides gently, and heat flared on her collarbone and in her cheeks.

Time to turn the tables on her. “What turned you on, Abby? Giving me a blow job, the thought of anal sex, or the thought of a ménage?”

“All of the above,” she murmured. “I’m not the girl you left behind, Sean.”

Her hips tilted forward, seeking more contact. “Ah, ah,” he said, heard the edge in his tone. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“Ben,” she said, high-pitched, soft.

No surprise there, and if Abby thought she could drive him away by bringing her lover into their bed, she was wrong. Right now it didn’t matter. He wanted Abby back here, going wild with him, not lost in her mind. “Turn around,” he said.

When she did, moving slowly, awkwardly, he tugged her cheeky panties down and off, then flattened his palm between her shoulder blades. At his not-quite-gentle push she peered over her shoulder at him. “Suck me, Abby.”

Then she got it. She aligned her sex with his mouth. When her hand gripped his cock and her mouth took him deep he delved his tongue into the juicy folds and followed her rhythm, circling her clit in time to her wanton sucking. It didn’t take long. Her thighs stiffened and her hips tilted, then her throaty cries reverberated through his cock as her clit fluttered under his tongue. He shifted his hips back, telling her he was about to come, but she braced her
forearm across his pelvis and kept a firm grip on his cock with hands and lips, and he couldn’t stop. His orgasm pulsed from his cock, and a stuttering groan from his chest.

A minute later she shifted her weight across his chest and collapsed on the bed, her head by his feet. He should take off her skirt, the only article of clothing she still wore, get her a glass of water, get her under a sheet. But she was already falling asleep, and it was hot enough that he’d turned on the ceiling fan. It turned lazily overhead, the shadows from the blades flashing in the dim moonlight.

He was half asleep himself when Abby’s voice came into his dream. “Do you want me to ask him, or will you?”