Uncommon Pleasure (6 page)

The man picked a fine time to get a sense of humor. “How do you know?”

His big thumbs shifted deftly over the tiny keyboard.
My partner would ask me who I was talking to if he could hear you
.

“Okay,” she said, but she was putting pieces together. Former Marine, earpiece, a business park housing technology and oil industry firms. “And your work has nothing to do with committing industrial espionage related to Gulf Independent, right?”

The answer was short and came without hesitation.
No
.

She looked at him for a long minute. Behind the mirrored shades he could have been looking back at her, or at the lake or a person or a doorway into the building. If pressed she wouldn’t have been able to say why she believed him, but believe him she did. “I trust you,” she said.

The words seemed to hang in the air, then he turned away from her to scan the lake, then the door leading from the building. Several minutes passed before he picked up his phone again.

“Because in addition to working in industrial espionage, you’re an old-fashioned Southern bad boy?” she asked. “Hard-drinking, hard-partying, looking for the next score?”

You like bad boys
. The text neither confirmed nor denied her assessment and came with a single dark blond eyebrow arched over the sunglasses.

She shrugged, went with it. “On occasion,” she said. “They certainly have their uses.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped, as if the idea of being a one-night stand in her life didn’t sit well.
Be careful. We break hearts
.

Real bad boys didn’t worry about hearts getting broken, but maybe he was just protective. Except it didn’t fit. Nothing about this fit, right down to the tension in his shoulders. “I went to high school in Texas and college in Virginia. I know the type.” And
despite his best efforts, she had a hunch he wasn’t that type at all. “You can trust me. I’m not going to get my heart broken.”

She finished the healthy portion of her lunch and brushed the crumbs from her sandwich onto the pavement. Three tiny, dusty birds hopped over to squabble over the bits of bread. She’d run eight miles that morning, earning her treat for the day, a chocolate chip cookie. Chocolate and sugar blended on her tongue, and the sensation of sweat trickling down her back sent her body back into his hotel room. She remembered taking his weight, the slow lick of flame under her skin as he moved inside her, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he used hands and hips to control her. The way he’d waited when she cried out, then taken her body’s resistance and molded it into a dark, seething ache, used that beautiful, hard body to satiate her.

The way he disappeared into himself a split second after it ended. Being with Ty was like drinking salt water. Every sip stirred the need for more, and more. “You make me curious, Ty,” she said.

She smiled because she liked complex things. Puzzles. Projects. People. “That’s too bad, because if I were curious, I’d invite you over tonight.”

She didn’t need to see his eyes to tell they’d sharpened. His whole demeanor ratcheted up a notch, muscles tightening, breathing shallow. His hips shifted on the bench, and she reflected on the simple pleasure of teasing a man, watching him get hard for her, knowing she’d pay for it later.

“I thought we were pretty hot,” she continued. Incineratingly hot. “Worth a second round. If I were curious. If I’m not…Gretchen needs a bath. Oh, and there’s a
Toddlers and Tiaras
marathon on tonight.” She gave him a smile. “Help me out?”

He brushed his thumb absently over his phone’s keypad before replying.
Address?

Without a word she entered her home address in her phone and
texted it back to him. “Any time after seven,” she said, then stuffed her containers in her lunch cooler and zipped it shut. He wasn’t looking at her when she walked away.

*   *   *

She’d said any time after seven. It was nine thirty when he rang
her doorbell. Flowering pots of geraniums stood on either side of the old oak door, and dog bones decorated the welcome mat. After a moment Lauren appeared, her slender figure distorted by the lead glass panes in the window, and the moment she opened the door, he knew he shouldn’t have come to her home. She wore a thin gray T-shirt and a pair of shorts made from a thick cotton material. No bra. The length of her smoothly muscled legs drew his attention to her bare feet, the toenails painted a brilliant blue.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey yourself,” he replied and lifted a six-pack of bottled beer.

She opened her mouth, probably to automatically thank him, but at the sound of nails skittering against the tile she turned and shifted her weight. Ty braced for the big guard dog, then looked further down to the wriggling, barrel-chested tube of a dog, with a black face and ears and a dark brown body. Using her ankle, Lauren kept the dog from escaping. “Come in and shut the door,” she said.

“That’s your dog?” Ty asked as he closed the door behind him.

“This is my dog,” she said. “You sound surprised.”

“I was expecting one of those gray dogs. A Weimaraner. Not a wiener dog.”

“She prefers dachshund,” Lauren said, putting a German guttural into the pronunciation as the dog peered at Ty from behind her ankles. “Or doxie if she’s feeling flirtatious. Come here, sweet girl,” she said fondly as she slid one hand under the little dog’s butt and the other behind her forelegs and lifted her into her arms. “Why did you think I’d have an eighty-pound gun dog?”

He wasn’t sure if he’d offended her, so he tried to explain. “It’s what came to mind when you said you had a dog. I pictured big, useful. Something you went running with, or played Frisbee with. Silvery, kind of like your hair.”

“Gretchen is very useful. She makes me feel better after a bad day, and my hair is a dull ash brown,” she said.

“It catches the sunlight like polished steel does.”

The uncensored words were almost poetic, and when they eddied into the tiled foyer, he felt his face heat. This wasn’t about romance, and based on their previous encounter, he wouldn’t have to sweet-talk her into anything. She shifted her dog a little higher in her arms and kissed the top of her head. “Ty, meet Gretchen, my non-Weimaraner.”

Obligingly Ty lifted his hand to scratch her head, but Gretchen cowered back in Lauren’s arms. He blinked, then said, “What did I do?”

“She doesn’t respond well to men, especially big men. The humane society caregiver said she had a sprained back when she was left in the overnight drop box, and she preferred female attendants. Best guess is that a man or maybe some teenage boys abused her,” she said, stroking Gretchen’s back. “I thought maybe if I was holding her…well, we’re working on it. Come on in.”

In the kitchen she set Gretchen on the floor. Ty followed, the six-pack in hand, and while he’d taken off his boots in the foyer, Gretchen still hid behind Lauren. “Bottle opener’s on the fridge,” she said. “She’ll feel safest if I put her in the laundry room,” she said.

The dog scurried as fast as she could down the hall. Lauren cajoled her into her kennel, then the click of the metal latch slid home as he popped the tops off two bottles of beer. When she returned, he offered her one, they clinked the bottles together, and she tipped the bottle back.

“Want to sit down?” she offered.

His parents raised him with a firm hand and an eye toward manners, habits not yet broken by his new personality, so he said, “Sure,”
and followed her into the living room to settle at one end of the sofa while she curled up at the other. They both had another swallow of beer while he looked around. The kitchen was at the north end of the house, with the dining and living rooms sharing the same large, rectangular space. A rug under the dining room table delineated the dining space from the living room. A sofa and two armchairs clustered around a large stone fireplace, and big sliding glass doors opened to the backyard. Pale cream walls were covered with black-framed photographs of her family, and the bright red and orange throw pillows added color to the dark brown leather sofa.

“Nice house.” And he shouldn’t have come, because every passing moment confirmed his opinion that Lauren wasn’t the kind of woman he usually hooked up with the first night off the rig.

“Thanks,” she said, and he could hear the pleasure in her voice. “I bought it a couple of years after I got the job with Gulf Independent. I was straight out of college and needed to save up the down payment. It was a real fixer-upper. The kitchen hadn’t been renovated since 1957, and the whole house had to be rewired to bring it up to code. I did some of the work myself…”

He was looking at her, just looking, sprawled out at the opposite end of her sofa, and her words trailed off into silence. His hair, still damp from a shower, slid forward to lie against his cheekbones. “I’m not here to talk about your house, Lauren.”

The words were intended to reestablish boundaries, focus on the chemistry crackling between them. She cocked her head and looked at him, a mysterious little smile on her face. “So that means you don’t want to talk about the driller job, or what you were doing at the business park today.”

He shrugged, then finished the bottle of beer and set it on the floor beside him. “I’m not taking the driller job,” he said. “A friend, a fellow Marine, has a security business. I work for him when I’m not on the rig. Taking the driller job would end that.”

“Post–nine-eleven, the security business has been growing,” she said. At his sharp glance, she added, “My dad was in Army intelligence. I know what kinds of work sharp former military types go into. Is your friend’s business doing well?”

“Real well,” he said. “We were supposed to go into business together, but plans change. He still wants me to buy in.”

“Sounds like it would be interesting work,” she said. “More interesting than running pipe on the T-22.”

“I sat on a park bench for six hours today, and when I wasn’t sitting on the park bench I was sitting in a truck,” he said dismissively.

“You have a degree?”

He did. It took him five years of online classes and campus courses when he was stateside, but he’d gotten the degree. It was nobody’s business but his if he wasn’t using it. “International relations.”

“And field experience in two of the world’s biggest hot spots. Partner work wouldn’t involve sitting on a bench for hours a day. Planning ops, maybe. Sales meetings. Strategic thinking and planning related to your client’s industry or political situation.”

She was too fucking curious. Seven years ago, when he started college, that had been his goal. Now he had no goals other than getting a second beer and getting laid, so this trip to her house wasn’t a total waste. “Don’t waste the energy wondering about me. I work, I sleep, I eat, and I’m off the rig, so I want to fuck as much as possible. Then I’ll leave. Next time I’m in town, I won’t call. Still curious?”

She considered him for a few seconds, his brusque words hanging in the air. “Yes, I’m still curious,” she said.

The curiosity was going to burn her eventually, because she wasn’t the type to keep emotions from the questions she asked. God knew his answers were nothing but the emotions he’d learned to loathe. Time stretched as raw, edgy energy poured from him, then he got to his feet, using movement to push away feelings he couldn’t bear.

“Now’s good.”

She led the edgy, wound-up former Marine down the hall to her
bedroom. He stood just inside the doorway, hands on hips, eyes ticking off the details of the room while she drew the sheer curtains. It was an old-fashioned room, pretty bare, but she’d left it that way to show the bones of the house, the light against the hardwood floors and original trim around the doors. A chenille spread covered the oak spindle bed, and a cheval glass mirror stood in the corner. The oak dresser across from the foot of the bed matched. The set looked old but was new; she was too tall to sleep easily in an antique bed. She had braided rugs on either side of the bed, but otherwise the polished wood gleamed in the moonlight.

He crossed the room to her nightstand and glanced at it. “Twenty-first-century woman, right? What’s in the drawer?”

She added the occasional moments of humor to her growing list of things she liked about him. “Help yourself,” she said, because questions of trust seemed key to Ty Hendricks. He told her not to
trust him, then looked almost hurt when Gretchen recoiled. Definitely a hot-button issue.

He pulled out her red leather restraints, tossed them to her, then strode back down the hall. Pure sexual heat blended with a sense of freedom. The unassuming way he chose the cuffs from the modest assortment of toys in her nightstand told her he was comfortable with sex outside the realm of plain vanilla. More to the point, he didn’t shy away from having her under his control. He hadn’t missed her body’s shuddering, female response when she’d struggled between him and the door at the hotel. That visceral flash of memory, and the way he moved across the helipad, so completely self-assured and all man, surfaced as he walked out of the room, and her blood heated and thickened to molten lava.

When he returned he held one of the chairs from her dining room table. He set it down in front of the oval mirror, eased into it, and gestured her to stand between his knees. When she did he held up his hand and beckoned for her to give him the restraints.

She dropped them in his hand and felt her heart start to pound hard against her breastbone, slow, sledgehammer-like thuds. She watched him turn the cuffs over, examining them, getting familiar with them.

“Red?” he asked as he deftly unfastened the snap hook hanging from one D-ring. “Really?”

“I like color in my accessories,” she said.

A wry smile. “I noticed. Wrist.”

She held out her right wrist, then the left, waiting docilely as he slid the leather over her hand and drew the loose end tight before fastening it in the buckle. There were two ways this could go down. He could fasten the cuffs in front of her, turning the scenario playful and giving her some measure of independence. Or he could fasten them behind her, placing her completely at his mercy.