Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (18 page)

She just wanted me fucking those contradictions right out of her. But at least she was keeping me around.

Clearing off her coffee table was an interesting challenge. Every book was propped open with index cards, paper clips, ribbons, or pens, one layered over another, and they appeared to live in an ecosystem I was helpless to understand.

She needed some fucking shelves.

Eventually, I carved out space for the Spanish take-out and stationed several oddly-shaped velvet pillows on the floor while she finished packing. Her kitchen was crammed with a random collection of colorful tools and appliances, and she would have benefitted from decent cabinetry. I popped the cork on a bottle of Rioja as she emerged from the bedroom in black yoga pants and a camisole.

I stared at the bottle in my hand, desperate to remember whether Lauren liked red wine, let alone this variety, and came up empty. “I picked up a Spanish red. Is that okay?”

She stared at the glass for a moment, her lip caught between her teeth and she shrugged. “Uh, sure.”

In other words: no, it wasn’t okay.

I handed her the glass and gestured to the tapas. “Any strategy here?”

“Little of this. Little of that.” She snatched up a stuffed Medjool date and groaned in delight when it hit her tongue. My new favorite sound.

I dug into the shrimp with cascabel chiles while Lauren scooped paella onto her plate. “I didn’t expect everyone to show up in my office today.”

At least Angus hadn’t made an appearance.

“You work together. I’d assume they stop by all the time,” she said around another date. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Twisting the stem of my wine glass between my fingers, I polished off the contents before going in for a refill. “Yeah, but it’s always like that with them. My siblings, they aren’t even remotely normal. To be honest, Lauren, it shocks the shit out of me that you haven’t kicked me to the curb yet.”

“So you want to talk about it?”

I turned to face Lauren and stroked her thigh. “Why aren’t you furious? Why aren’t you inventing new reasons to disappear on me?”

She was focused on composing the right distribution of paella flavors on her fork, and for all I knew, ignoring my question and devising ways to sneak out of her own apartment in the middle of the night. I downed another glass and watched her paella-eating technique for several bites. The wine was turning down the volume on my annoyance with Sam and Riley. Lauren in a tissue-thin camisole—braless—was helping, too.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry about Riley. And Sam. I should have thrown them both out.”

I refilled my wine. Emptied it in two gulps.

Lauren plucked the glass from my fingers and set it aside before straddling my lap. She grabbed a fork and the container of paella from the table, and bit into a chunk of chorizo. She hummed and bobbed her head from side to side, and I watched her debating with herself.

“I could tell you a story about my brothers, and how they decided to interrogate my high school spring formal date. I mean rendition-level interrogation while surrounded by my dad’s gun collection. But I’m leaving tomorrow and we moved mountains today so I want copious amounts of wine, tapas, and nakedness, and very little serious storytelling.”

“Let me tell you what I heard just now: your brothers are manically protective of you and they have guns.”

It was a reminder that, in everything we shared over the weekend, Lauren told me hardly anything about herself. I knew her body—every last inch of it—and her specifications for Trench Mills, and some other offhand personal details, but I never stopped to ask whether her brothers were going to pull a black hood over my head, hogtie me, and toss me in the ocean after finding out what I did to their baby sister.

These seemed like important questions.

“So yeah, Riley’s even more of a creeper than you, but when you think about these things, these little annoying things, they don’t matter because they’re the people we have, and we don’t get them for very long. We need to take them as they come and accept the crazy ways they show their love.”

My brows lifted and I trailed my fingers up and down her thigh. “You’re not scarred for life because Riley watched me grope you,
and
he heard me narrate the whole thing? Twice?”

“Not scarred for life,” she laughed. “And Sam is comedy, right down to the weird socks that don’t really go with the look, but work because they’re weird.”

The wine was obscuring her words. Had to be. That was the only way she’d say she was good with Sam skeeving all over her. “Just to be clear, you tear into me when I text you to make sure you’re alive but you have no problem with my douche canoe brother staring at your tits for five solid minutes? You’re okay with that?”

“It’s good for my ego for beautiful boys like Sam to stare at my tits, but if you want to talk about this for even one more minute,” she stood, inching her camisole up her torso and over her head, “you have to talk about it while I sit here naked.”

Her shirt sailed to the floor, and though I wanted to ask about all these velvet pillows and the girly, feel-good determination quotes plastered on her fridge, and the probability of her brothers snapping off my testicles and feeding them to sea otters, it could wait.

It was time for me to lick my naughty schoolteacher until she screamed.

*

I backed Lauren
into her bedroom, my hands on her waist and my mouth on her neck, and we tumbled onto the bed, sprawling over each other and laughing. The wine was saturating my brain, and it didn’t matter whether I brought any finesse to this moment. I had my filthy girl and I was going to do terrible things to her.

“Get undressed and get over here,” she said.

After toeing off my shoes and leaving my unbuttoned shirt hanging from my shoulders, my hand settled on my belt buckle while Lauren’s tongue darted out to lick her lips.

“Keep looking at me like that, Lauren,” I said, fully aware of my sharp, stern tone. “And we might not get very far.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“How can you not know?” I froze in place, exasperated that she still didn’t recognize what she did to me, that we still didn’t understand each other. Or I’d forgotten about her inexperience again.

Lauren crawled to the edge of the bed and reached out to grasp my belt, looking up at me with a virginal smile. “I need you to explain it to me.” Sitting back on her heels, she unlatched the buckle and drew my zipper down. She jerked my shirt from my shoulders and pushed my trousers over my hips, leaving them pooled at my feet.

“It means I know you’ve been thinking about me fucking you all day. It means I can’t wait to hear the filthy things you want. It means you have me so worked up right now, and all I need is one of your hot little looks and I’ll be coming all over you.”

Pushing her to the bed, I leaned down, my eyes fixed on her while my mouth covered her nipple, and she responded with a low whisper of approval. Smiling, I kissed and licked my way down her body until my lips traced the flesh between her hips.

“Tell me what you want,” I growled into her skin.

“Lick my pussy. I want to know how good it tastes.”

Her words—those dirty, electric words—were everything I needed and they did something to me I couldn’t explain. And I didn’t want to waste a minute on explanations when I could have my mouth on her clit.

My fingers brushed over her folds while I kissed from one hip bone to the other, and then down, lower, to where her arousal perfumed the air. I parted her, holding her open to feather my tongue over her, then dipping inside to taste her.

Pushing up on her elbows, Lauren gazed at me between her thighs while my lips fastened around her throbbing nub. She allowed an occasional moan or hum of satisfaction, but said nothing else while I drew her clit between my teeth, sucking and teasing, and filling her with my fingers.

She drove a hand through my hair and shifted my head to hit a different angle. “I want to hear it,” she said, her tone domineering. I fucking loved it. “I want to hear how good it tastes.”

I shifted my hand, pressing my thumb to her ass and adoring the flood of arousal it triggered. She didn’t know how to ask for it yet, but she liked it.

“You are fucking delicious. Sweet and salty and perfect,” I said against her mound, and I meant it. Not all pussy was created equal, and though I rarely made enough oral offerings to the beasts for adequate points of comparison, Lauren was my favorite. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without this pussy for three whole weeks.”

I looked up, following that golden skin over her belly, past those full, beautiful breasts, and up to her mouth. Our eyes met and my thumb pressed harder, and I saw the tremor move through her body as she came apart. Her head fell back, calling out for
there, there, right there,
and
oh, yes, don’t stop
, and her thighs tensed around my head. She held me in place while she rode through her spasms, and I kept my tongue fixed to her.

Remembering Friday night was like calling up a distant memory, one gilded and soft around the edges. Four days stretched between that night and this moment, but inside the warp-speed incubator of those ninety-six hours, I was lost, overwhelmed, confused. But I didn’t want it to stop.

“I licked it and now it’s mine,” I said, my tongue sweeping from her clit to her core, and laughter rolled through Lauren.

LAUREN

S
pitting the toothpaste
into the sink, I rinsed out my mouth a few more times. My knowledge of oral sex was pathetically limited, and though I savored the way Matthew surrendered when my tongue was wrapped around his shaft, and I even liked swallowing when he exploded in my mouth, there was nothing wrong with disliking the aftertaste.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to recognize the person looking back at me. I was different yet everything was exactly the same, and I wanted to find that thread of newness, that variation, and study it under a microscope. I wanted to know what it was and where it came from, and how I could encapsulate it and hold on to it forever because this night was ending too quickly, and my reality waited for me on the other side.

The hallway floor creaked beneath my feet, and I leaned against the doorframe, gazing at Matthew’s bare backside. I didn’t think they actually made men like this—strong and defined without being muscle-bound, dark without being excessively hairy, and gorgeous without being too pretty.

And most importantly, he was naked in my bed at three in the morning.

“I’m gonna need a little time after that.”

“Hmm?” I stammered, my thoughts stuck on the curve of his ass.

“Need some time to recover. I might be paralyzed.”

I collected the twisted heap of sheets and blankets from the floor, shaking them out and spreading them over the bed, over Matthew.

“Your eyes give away all your indecent thoughts, Miss Halsted.”

Peeling back the covers, I ran my palm up his leg to his ass. I squeezed, feeling his muscles cording under my hand, and landed a resounding slap.

“All of them?” I challenged.

He shot a heated glance over his shoulder, and I rubbed the pink handprint blooming on his skin before switching sides. He rolled, swinging an arm out to grab me around the waist and pin me beneath him.

“I’d really like to know what you’re thinking.”

I brushed the hair from my eyes and smiled up at Matthew. “I’m thinking you are an unbelievably hot sample of your species, and I wanted to feel the perfection for myself. Then I was wondering whether you wanted to fuck me in the shower, and if you did maybe you’d want to use the massaging showerhead on my—”

“Holy fuck, Lauren.”

A howling groan filled the room, and Matthew balanced on his forearms, kicking the sheets away and rocking into me with one rough motion. That response told me everything I needed to know about the unrefined and frankly shocking requests that kept rolling off my tongue.

I probably wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but I was drunk on the power he gave me and my words. I didn’t understand where they came from or how he drew them out or why we needed them. But I knew they did something to him, to us both, and I was slowly understanding the depth to which they affected us. They freed me from everything, from my rules, from myself, and they didn’t just turn him on, they turned him
up
.

“You always say you need some time,” I said. It came out in a stutter, rasping in time with the hammering of his hips. I wrapped a hand around the headboard; we usually found ourselves on the floor after this kind of thrusting, and we’d done this enough to know when to hold on. “And look where you end up.”

“Thought I did. But then you spanked me, and opened that filthy mouth of yours.” He shook his head, his expression bewildered. “If I knew I’d like you slapping my ass so much, we would have started there.”

He lifted my hips a few degrees, and I knew from the concentration on his face and bunched muscles in his shoulders he was close, but that angle hurt like hell.