Unsuitable Men (4 page)

That might intimidate the average man, but Brendan had never let that faze him. He’d cracked on her pretty much routinely when they first met, sometimes half-heartedly, but never honestly believing that it would pay off one day.
Not that he didn’
t have confidence in his skills
;
it was just that he’d chalked Tracy up as an ice princess.

His world was full of women and there were generally three types. Hoochies,
homegirls
, and the ones who were frigid, pretty and bitchy. Tracy wasn’t in their world, but she had many of the same characteristics as women in the last category. Beautiful but untouchable, cold as ice, and if they ever “let you” have sex with them, they never really let go of their inhibitions, never called out your name, never had a loud-ass, holler-at-the-moon type orgasm. They were just too pretty for all that.

At least, that’s what Brendan thought Tracy was. At the Grammys she’d proved him wrong.

Brendan shed his clothes and tossed them across his bed, heading straight in for a shower. He hadn’t showered at Meghan’s this morning, slipping out before she was even awake. First time he’d ever done that. And all Tracy’s fault.

His bathroom, like the rest of his apartment, was sleek, ultra-modern lacquered bachelor cool. Women might visit him here, but they never slept over. Never,
no one
, not
ever
. This was his sanctuary, made for one person only; it had a huge bedroom suite and enormous living space, and open loft-style
rec
room and adjoining kitchen overlooking it.

The kitchen being in the loft, adjacent to the
rec
room,
and the bedroom downstairs was a feature that his realtor said pretty much guaranteed that he’d never sell the place unless the buyer wanted to gut and remodel it but Brendan didn’t care. He had no intention of conforming to anyone else’s standards of what an apartment should be like, not when he could afford to do whatever he wanted.

He stepped into the shower and turned on the jets. He had an eleven-thirty appointment to go over the final details for the opening of the Lounge Two-Twelve. Two-Twelve was his and Shawn’s newest venture. They had long planned, and now were finally opening a chain of nightclubs in all the happening cities around the country, beginning with the flagship in Manhattan. A week from today the doors would open to what they expected to be the
flyest
joint in the tri-state area.

Probably because of Riley’s influence, Shawn was now all about taking charge of his own wealth, not patronizing places like Xander’s where the owner had no compunction about taking your money as a patron but wouldn’t want you living next-door to him in a million years. So Two-Twelve was their nod to keeping Black wealth in the Black community. Between them, he and Shawn knew dozens of young Black millionaires who were spending like there was no tomorrow, but hardly ever at Black-owned businesses. Two-Twelve (named after the Manhattan area code) would hopefully begin to shift their loyalties back to their own community in the nightlife arena and later, Shawn and Brendan’s plan was to work on more substantive things, like music management and ownership. It was crazy how many artists didn’t realize that they didn’t even own their music.

Thinking about business, and about music was a welcome distraction for a moment, but soon Brendan’s mind wandered back to Tracy. He looked down. Yeah, he was thinking about her alright. And the Grammys. Always back to the Grammys.

Brendan didn’t believe his ears at first. She wanted to skip the parties? Tracy.
Skip the celebrity parties
. But more confounding was that she would skip them just to sit in a room with him watching movies. He agreed to it almost just to call her bluff. But once they were in her suite, him in jeans and a t-shirt and Tracy in a pink flannel PJ bottom and tank top, he saw that he’d underestimated her. She wasn’t just one thing. She could do the laid-back night at home thing just as well as the going out being fabulous thing.

For the first hour or so they’d watched broadcast television then decided to pick a movie and argued good-naturedly over what to watch. Finally they picked a Colin Farrell cop movie because Tracy claimed the last time she was in L.A. she’d seen him and he winked at her.

“Sure he did,” Brendan laughed.

“Why?” she asked with a pout. “You don’t think I’m cute enough for Colin Farrell to wink at?”

Brendan let his eyes run over her body quickly, taking in the pert breasts, nipples hard because of the chill in the room, and finally settling at the
peek
of caramel-candy brown flesh between the tight tank top and the PJ bottoms. He wanted nothing more than to lift that tank top and lower his head . . .

“Yeah, you’re cute enough,” he finally admitted.

They watched the first fifteen minutes of the movie and ordered dinner, two garlic chicken pizzas and two bottles of wine. And for good measure, a six-pack of beer because Brendan wasn’t much of a wine drinker. Before their food arrived and when Tracy was in the bathroom for a minute, her cell phone started buzzing on the bedside table. Shooting a look toward the closed bathroom door, Brendan glanced at the console and seeing that it was Riley, reached over and shut it off in case Tracy heard it and felt compelled to answer. Then for good measure, he shut his phone off as well.

This was the first time he could remember being
this
alone with her. They’d shared a couple of car rides together alone, eaten a couple of meals alone, but had never been alone together in an enclosed space. This, he thought, might be his very best chance. If he wanted to get up in that, this was his time.

And then Tracy had come out of the bathroom and there was a look in her eyes, and a smile on her face. Her expression was almost predatory, but he kind of liked it. She advanced toward where he was
half-reclining, half-sitting on the bed and before he could even begin to wonder what she was up to, straddled him. She pressed her pelvis against him in a way that left no doubt that it was intentional.

“Before we get the wine and the beer and get so drunk that you wonder whether it’s okay to even make a move, I just want to assure you; it’s okay to make a move.”

Those words and her closeness were all he needed to get him from half-mast to standing at full attention. Her scent was clean, like that of freshly-washed cotton. And of course, that was when the food arrived. Tracy went to the door to let them in, tipping the servers and even making friendly banter with them before showing them out. And while she sounded cool as a cucumber, he sat on the bed, trying to wrap his mind around what had just transpired, wondering whether it had happened at all.

They’d eaten their pizzas and watched the movie, had some wine and laughed and talked. They were just about to find a second movie and Tracy realized the time. It was dark out now, and she wondered aloud why Riley hadn’t called her.

“She must have been trying to get rid of me all along,” she complained, heading for her phone.

Brendan dived across the bed to grab it and stave her off, but they both reached it at the same time, which led to some breathless wrestling, and gratuitous mutual grabbing. Finally, Tracy got the phone from him, but only because he let her. They were both still on the bed, Tracy on her back and Brendan next to her on his side. She looked at the dark console of her phone and then turned to him.

“You turned it off?” she demanded.

Brendan shrugged.

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

They were so close; he could see how beautiful her eyes were. Flecks of brown and green mixed in with the predominantly golden hue. And her mouth, perfectly-shaped and full. He wondered idly how many men had made fools of themselves hoping for a chance to press their lips against that mouth. Before he had even formed a conscious intention to do it, he was kissing her. And she was kissing him back. And not just kissing him back either, but diving into the kiss, her tongue actively, enthusiastically, wholeheartedly tussling with his, her teeth nipping his lower lip.

She actually pushed him back and tried to get on top of him, but he wasn’t having that. Letting her get on top first set the wrong tone for what they were about to do here, and about who would be in charge. He pushed back until he was on top her, his legs straddling hers, his weight on his forearms. She tasted like garlic, but it was okay because he knew he did too and because underneath the garlic she was so, so sweet.

“Did you need to get drunk to do this?” he asked her, his mouth on her neck.

“Yes,” she said surprising him. “But not because I didn’t want to do it when I was sober. That’s what I was saying earlier. Just needed some liquid courage, that’s all.”

He kissed her, purposely avoiding contact between her pelvis and his increasingly uncomfortable erection, because he knew she was curious. Women always were because of his height. He couldn’t speak for any other man’s assets, but he was pretty damn confident about what he brought to the game. He concentrated on her lips and neck, behind her ears and along her collarbone until she was raising her hips, trying to press against him.

By then Brendan was pretty sure she was making a little wet spot in her PJs but he forced himself not to check, moving instead to another area of curiosity. He slowly raised her tank, which she willingly facilitated, and took her in. She was fucking beautiful. Her nipples were a dark plum color and looked ripe, he played with them, torturing her and himself, hearing her loud breathing echo throughout the room, feeling good that he was making her feel good. She was the one who finally removed the top altogether and then she was reaching for his shirt, practically ripping it. He had to rear back a little to pull it off and noted with satisfaction that her eyes fell to his groin. She reached for the fly of his jeans but he grabbed her wrist and stopped her. If she touched him he would embarrass himself.

So he pushed her back against the bed again. Then he did something he never did the first time he was with a woman. He moved south, kissing her along her breastbone, over her perfectly flat stomach, teasing and sucking and licking her there for awhile until once again Tracy moved things along by shoving her pajama bottoms over her hips and shuffling them down. Brendan finished the job, and looked at her in astonishment. Not only was she wearing nothing underneath but Tracy had recently had a very,
very
thorough and complete Brazilian bikini wax. He tried to swallow but his tongue seemed to have lodged in his throat. Never had he wanted to taste a woman so bad. So much that he was almost afraid that he wasn’t up to the task.

Tracy was propping herself up on her elbows now, looking down at him between her legs. Her lips looked almost bruised, because they’d been kissing for a long time, sometimes really hard. When Brendan’s eyes fell once again to the juncture between her thighs, he saw just one pearl of moisture, peeking out between those smooth, hairless . . . and that it was it, he was done.

He went in for the kill. . .

Never had he gotten as much pleasure out of going down on a woman as he did this time. He didn’t just want to taste her, he wanted to climb
inside
her and just fucking live there. When she squirmed and moaned and raised her lips, pressing herself against his thrashing tongue, grinding into it, he grabbed her thighs and used his forearms to press them apart. Brendan almost didn’t even register the sensation of her pulling on his ears until she just yanked those suckers like she wanted to rip them off. He lifted his head, almost annoyed at being interrupted.

“
What
?
”
he demanded.

Tracy was breathing heavily, like she was having trouble catching a breath and he realized for the first time that she must have reached her climax.

“Get up here,” she said. “Get up here and
fuck me right now
.”

Yeah.
Tracy
. Said the words ‘fuck me right now’. She didn’t need to ask him twice. His jeans were off in half a second and in two, he was buried deep inside her. As he pressed into her, it felt like she had the sun between her legs, like he was enveloped in something impossibly hot but in no danger of being burned. No, not the sun, because she was wet too, perfectly hot, perfectly wet. Neither of them had even talked about it, but he was all the way in her, totally raw. Another first. He had done that so seldom that he’d almost forgotten how damn good it was. But with Tracy, it was even better, and he didn’t want to say anything that might make common sense
prevail
. He didn’t want to say anything that might mean he would have to stop.

Tracy was a talker. And she liked it hard. She pressed her mouth against his ear, telling him what she liked, how she liked it, making him go faster, slower, harder . . . Brendan didn’t mind the direction because nine times out of ten, she was spot on. It was all good. And when he thought he might come, she felt the tension in his thighs and sensed the change in his movement and wrenched free of him, so he slid partway out of her so his impending orgasm stopped dead in its tracks

“No!
You’d better not!
”
she hissed. 

That was pretty hot.