Unzipped? (5 page)

S
HANNON’S URGE TO KISS
Hal had appeared impulsively out of nowhere, and as far as kisses went it was supposed to be friendly, quick and not too personal.

But when her lips touched his cheek he turned in surprise, making full mouth contact with her. An electric current shot through her, lighting her like a Christmas tree, even though he sat frozen for a long moment.

But then his lips grew hungry and surprisingly, he took over the kiss. His mouth hard on her mouth, he slipped his tongue between her lips and pulled her across the front seat of the SUV, one hand on the small of her back and the other on her bottom.

The electricity hit her again, shaking her as he pulled her into his lap and against an erection that would have done a bull proud.

Warning bells went off in her head, and Shannon started to pull away so that she didn’t give Hal the completely wrong idea. But instead of grinding himself against her or even trying to force her head down toward his zipper, he simply took her face into his hands and kissed each of her eyelids, then her mouth again.

He was so gentle as he coaxed another response out of her, slid his seeking tongue into her mouth again and made love to it.

He made no move to touch her breasts, no lunges toward other private parts of her anatomy. And the irony of the situation was that, after dodging countless numbers of gropers over the years, Shannon wished that Hal
would
touch her breasts.

At the moment, they were tightly zippered into her orange jacket and squashed against his chest. They felt heavy and the peaks throbbed with longing, aching as much as the core of her.

“Unzip my jacket,” she said huskily. “Touch me.”

He raised his head and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yes.”

Still he hesitated, searching her eyes for something, she didn’t know what. “Why?” he finally asked.

“Because you’re here,” she said. “And hot.” She ran a hand along his erection. “And hard.” She mentioned nothing about the endless, hopeless circles of questions rolling through her head. Nothing about needing distraction, comfort, a reminder that she, the child who’d been given away, was desired.

All she wanted right now was some steamy, mindless sex. She wanted the questions sucked from her erogenous zones, kneaded from her flesh, pounded out of her by an insistent physical rhythm building to a frenzied peak.

Hal’s hand went to her zipper, his breathing la
bored, his eyes slightly glazed. Still he hesitated. “Why me?” he asked, his voice thick.

Shannon straddled him and rubbed herself shamelessly against his hard-on. “Hal, honey. Just be a good boy and don’t question your luck. It’s a gift, okay? Now shut up and take it.”

H
E SHUT UP AND TOOK HER
. Inside her office, where her partners were nowhere to be seen on a Saturday evening. She unlocked the door, his hands hot on her behind, even through the leather pants. He allowed her to draw the blinds, and then to her delighted shock, he took over. Hal backed her against the unused reception desk, picked her up and set her on it. Then he pulled down the zipper on her jacket with his teeth and ripped open her still-damp white blouse to bare her breasts in the happy-face bra. He undid the front clasp and murmured his appreciation. Then he pushed her back against the surface of the desk and took one in his mouth.

She moaned and moved restlessly at the hot, wet suction around her nipple, his tongue flicking against it and his hand massaging the other one. Her own hands moved to his shoulders and down his arms, surprisingly muscular for a computer geek.

He caught her wrists and held them prisoner while he suckled her other breast and then leisurely unsnapped and unzipped her leather pants.

“My boots,” she protested.

“The boots are the only things that stay on, gor
geous.” And Hal stripped off everything else she was wearing except for her tiny happy-face thong. The jacket flew to one corner, the blouse to another. Her bra landed midfloor, while Hal seemed to savor sliding her pants down her legs and then, slowly, over the black, spike-heeled boots.

He tossed the pants onto the floor, kneeling in front of her and looking up the length of her calves and thighs with something close to awe.

Maybe it was literally having a man at her feet, looking as if he wanted to devour every inch of her, but as she sat before him in nothing but her boots and a thong, Shannon’s nipples hardened and she grew wet under his gaze.

“Now, put your feet on my shoulders and spread your legs for me. Just go easy with those spike heels.”

Shannon put one foot on his shoulder and watched as he enjoyed the view. “You take your clothes off, now.”

He turned his face toward her thigh and nipped it gently, then licked upward as she grew impossibly wetter. “’Kay,” he agreed. He shrugged out of his jacket and peeled his shirt off.

Hal without a shirt was a very pleasant surprise. Though he obviously hadn’t seen the sun in months, and his posture was normally terrible, he had the build of a swimmer and no flab on him.

But Hal without his pants…who knew? Who could possibly have predicted the dot-com nerd was
hung like
that?
He was thick and muscular and completely at attention, his focus unwavering on her.

Shannon’s insides melted at the sight. She put her other foot on Hal’s shoulder, obeying orders. He grinned wickedly at her and tugged her forward on the slick surface of the desk. She could feel his breath at the very center of her, through the flimsy fabric of her thong. But he didn’t touch.

Touching was reserved for her breasts, and as he rose to take her nipples again into his mouth, her feet rose with him, slipped off his shoulders and eventually down around his waist.

Once he’d reduced her to a whimpering puddle of need just through her nipples, Hal sank onto his knees again and focused on the prize right in front of him. He spread her thighs as wide as he could and dipped his head to the core of her, slipping his tongue under the fabric of her thong.

She convulsed at the contact, gasping, and he gripped her buttocks to steady her and hold her in place. Then he went to work in earnest, slicking his tongue over her and around her lips, between them, over them. He sucked the most sensitive part of her into his mouth and played it expertly.

Hot rushes of sensation pooled there and licked at every erogenous point on her body. She could feel tension building and spiraling in her belly while he toyed with her clitoris and menaced any vestiges of self-control she had left.

“Please,” she begged. “I want you inside, Hal, before I lose it…”

The words were hardly out her mouth when he’d ripped off her thong and somehow sheathed himself in a condom. She didn’t know how or where it had come from, but frankly she didn’t care.

All she cared about was the way it felt when he entered her, filled her, stretched her. She was so wet that he slid in immediately with no awkwardness and began to pump deep within her.

He was a hot, hard, slick piston driving inside and awakening some answering rhythm in her body. She slid her hands up and down his back; allowed them to fall to his buttocks, which were rigid with tension and muscle mass.

She rode him, and he rode her, for minutes more. Then the tension finally culminated and broke into a hot explosion of brilliant color and gratitude.

Shannon collapsed against the desk, loving her new fashion statement: nothing but boots and a naked man.

H
AL’S LIBIDO
was intensely grateful for Shannon’s unexpected
gift,
especially as he still lay on top of her and inside her.

Hal’s ego, however, was another matter entirely.
Why?
he’d asked.

Because you’re here….

Why me?
he’d said to her.

Just be a good boy and don’t question your luck.

He couldn’t shake the ugly feeling that he’d been
used to scratch the goddess’s itch. If he hadn’t been around, she might have chosen a gas station attendant, or a bank teller. Anyone with the right equipment for the job: a fairly hefty hard-on.

He shriveled with the realization and rolled off Shannon to find his pants.

She yawned and stretched before sitting up. “You’ve got a really cute butt, Hal.”

“Uh,” he said, starting to feel like a piece of meat.
Does that mean she wants to sprinkle my ass with salt and pepper and throw it on the grill?

“And an impressive knowledge of the female anatomy.” She grinned.

“Well, thank you. Glad I could be…of service.” He glanced at her and saw that the grin had faded. Her eyes narrowed, too, at his tone.

“What’s the matter, Hal? You don’t respect me now?” She twisted her long, curly hair into a knot on top of her head.

“I respect you just fine.” He wrestled into his shirt and tried not to get turned on by her all over again, while she stood naked except for those dominatrix boots. “I’m just, uh, cowed by your beauty, that’s all.” His tone was drier than dust.

That comment seemed to upset her. “Let’s leave my looks out of this, shall we?” Then she snorted. “Except we can’t. That’s why you did me, isn’t it. Because of what I look like.”

“No, Shannon.” He said it quietly. “If you remember, I asked you if this was what you wanted, if you
were sure.
You
did
me.
And I have to wonder why. Because I was
here,
you said. That’s very flattering.”

Hal shrugged into his jacket and jammed his feet into his shoes. “Tell you what. Next time you’ve got an itch that needs scratching, I’ll drop you off at the local Wal-Mart and you can pick up the greeter.”

She opened and closed her mouth.

He fully expected her to throw something at him. Maybe beat the crap out of him. Knock him down and put one of those spike heels through his eye socket.

The last thing he expected was for the goddess’s lip to tremble, her nose to turn bright pink or her face to crumple. The very last thing he had anticipated was for Shannon Shane, Queen of L.A. Cool, to burst into tears.

But she did. She wept as she tried to put her thong back on, realized it was ripped to hell, and shoved it into the pocket of her black leather pants. She dotted those with tears as she slid them up her long legs and over her delectable bottom. She cried on her blouse, which she had to tie together since he’d eviscerated all the buttons. And she snarled through tear-filled eyes as he tried to hold her jacket out for her. “Go away!”

“Shannon—”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. I take that last comment back.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do. I said it in anger, basically. It came straight
from my ego. I—” He cracked his neck. “Shit. I figure, a beautiful girl decides to have her way with me, she must be using me because I’m not much to look at.”

“I wasn’t using you,” she sobbed. “I was using…the sex. To feel better.”

“Oh,” said Hal. Then he laughed mirthlessly. “That’s even better. I could have been a damned dildo.”

“What? No! Oh, God…” Shannon couldn’t speak for a few moments. When she recovered, she gripped his arm. “That’s not what I meant. Hal, first of all I don’t sleep with people very often. Second, I only sleep with people I’m very attracted to. And third, I’m feeling very emotionally screwed up right now and…and…I was looking for whatever comfort I could find.”

He found a box of tissue on the windowsill and handed it to her.
Christ. So I’ve gone from dildo to teddy bear. Which is worse?

Shannon blew her nose and Hal stared at her, wondering why he found her even more appealing with the swollen red nose and puffy pink eyes. He took a couple of steps closer to her and zipped up her jacket, since she was utterly indecent in the buttonless blouse. Then he tipped up her chin. “Why are you feeling screwed up?”

She sniffled and shrugged.

“’Cause it seems to me that you should be feeling scrumptiously screwed, but not screwed
up.
”

He received a glimmer of a smile for this attempt
at lightness. He pressed on. “I think I’ve figured out that you don’t mean to be breathtakingly rude. So you didn’t mean to call me a dildo or a pacifier, right?

“I figure this takes great perception and tolerance on my part. Or stupidity. Anyway, I’m still talking to you. So why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

Can
anything
be wrong in the life of a woman who looks like you do? Or honestly, have you just broken a nail?

S
HANNON WAS TEMPTED
. How nice it would be to pour out all of her insecurities and confusion onto this unexpectedly broad, masculine shoulder. Where had the geek gone hiding? She looked into Hal’s deep blue eyes and saw kindness and compassion there, in spite of the fact that he was annoyed with her.

But no way was she going to talk to this guy. She hadn’t even known him twenty-four hours! She looked at her watch to see that it was 7:00 p.m. She’d known him for only
six
hours.

Basically, she’d shaken the man’s hand, chopped off his hair and stuck plastic into his eyes. Then she’d jumped his bones.
Smooth, Shan. Real smooth.

She hadn’t even had a meal with him….

“Talk to me,” Hal prompted. “You’re obviously upset and there has to be a reason.”

Shannon ran her fingers over her hair and flashed him a bright smile. “Thanks, Hal. But we don’t know each other that well, so—”

“We now know each other intimately,” he said.

“But not well.”

“Fine. I won’t push you. But I’m here if you need to talk.”

She had to get things back on a professional footing, if that was even possible now. She kept her toothpaste-commercial smile pasted on. “Thank you.”

A long, awkward pause ensued.

“Well,” she said with all the perkiness she could muster, “back to business! I’d like you to consider a couple more cosmetic procedures, just to ensure you look your best in photos and on television, okay?”

Hal just stared at her.

“I’d like to take some stray hairs out of your brow line and also have you do a minor bleaching process on your teeth. They’re straight, they’re even and you’ve got a great smile, but I’m guessing you drink a lot of coffee?”

Hal put his hands on his hips. “How do you go from your emotional issues to my teeth within thirty seconds like that?”

“Hon, I’m a blonde, remember? So as far as you’re concerned, I really don’t have emotional issues—just boobs.” She made no effort to keep the sarcasm out of her tone. “And disregarding what just happened here, I’m paid to do my job. Shallow as it may be, your eyebrows and your teeth are of critical importance to that job.”

“Critical,” Hal finally agreed, heavy on the irony.

“Now, on the bright side, you have no unattractive back hair, so we won’t be forced to wax that.”

“Gosh. That is excellent news.”

“But you look like you haven’t seen the sun in two decades, so I’m going to get a package for you at a tanning salon.”

He glowered at her. “Is that absolutely necessary?”

“Yes. You’re a successful president and CEO. You must look as if you play golf and take expensive, glamorous vacations.”

“Why? I don’t. No time for them.”

“Regardless, you’ve got to look as if you do.”

“Fine,” Hal sighed. “So next week you’re going to bleach my teeth, pluck me and then roast me like a chicken on a spit. I can’t wait.”

“I also need to get you started at a gym and see your closet,” Shannon said decisively. “And we’ll need to go shopping.”

“Shopping?” Hal blanched. “Shop is a four-letter word. You sure we can’t just talk about those emotional issues? Because I think you might be taking out your frustrations on an innocent man, here….”

She ignored him, writing everything down on a notepad. “We’re not going to wait until next week on the teeth or the tanning, Hal. You’re going to pick up a package of whitening strips at the local pharmacy, and you’re going to start at Betsy’s ’Burban Beach tomorrow. Just a tip—take
everything
off. You don’t want tan lines.”

“Everything?” Hal swallowed.

She nodded and kept writing.

“But what if my, uh, rocket gets scorched?”

She looked up at him. He was serious. “Hal. You can cover that with your hands.”

“You want me to grip myself in a lighted coffin for twenty minutes?” He was outraged.

“If that bothers you, then wear a sock.”

“Unbelievable,” he muttered.

“Can I come and look at your closet tomorrow afternoon?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Nope, not really.” She flashed him a cheerfully malicious smile.

“Then tomorrow afternoon would be lovely, Miss Shane. Your wish is my command.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said.

S
HANNON’S RIGHT BOOT
squished into the wet car carpet every time she shifted the beemer’s gears on the way to Hal’s house. The whole vehicle smelled musty, and it was her own damn fault. She doubted the leather seats would ever recover from the soaking they’d gotten yesterday, during her wild drive in the rain.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
What got into her sometimes? She honestly didn’t know. But it hadn’t seemed right that the rest of Farmington should go on existing peacefully when her whole world had been kicked off-kilter by her mother’s revelation. She’d needed to shake up the place, snap herself out of her daze, shock a few placid souls on their way to the ATM or the supermarket or the elementary school. Judging by the stares sent her way, she’d accomplished her goal.

To the detriment of her car, this car that seemed all wrong for her. Too expensive, too shiny, too exclusive, too status-conscious. Was that the kind of person she’d grown into? Or did the car just represent the best of German engineering, natural elegance and quality?

She heard the wet squish again as she downshifted, exiting the highway to get to Hal’s house in Simsbury, a town of quiet charm about twenty minutes from Hartford proper.

She passed the town hall on the right and a large cemetery to the left, with gravestones as far as the eye could see. All of those people, she thought, had once been alive and productive and loved by their families. They’d all had identities of their own, knew their niches in the grand scheme of things, unlike her.

A stocky mother waited to cross Main Street with her daughter, the child looking up at her with adoration. Shannon swallowed a lump in her throat that had appeared uninvited. The little girl had no worldly knowledge, but she knew where she came from, knew whose lives intertwined hers. She was young enough still to be blessed with unconditional love.

Shannon shrugged off the unwelcome thoughts invading her mind. Three more quick turns had her driving down Hal’s street to a surprisingly modern house. There weren’t many contemporary homes in the area, New England being a bastion of the traditional and the quaint.

Two last squishes in the beemer’s carpet and
she was on the sidewalk, striding toward Hal’s domain. The place was stucco, also unusual, and he’d painted his front door cerulean blue. Next to it a single, scraggly-looking holly bush reached courageously for the sun. She wished it luck and good fertilizer before ringing the bell.

Hal opened it almost immediately and gestured her in.

“Hi,” she said, struck again by the strength of his jaw and the intense blue of his eyes. Now, she’d have to get him to stand straight instead of slouching, dress him decently and drag him to that gym.

Whew. They only had a few short weeks. And during that time she had to coach him for the media, too. She foresaw many hours in each other’s company.

“Hi, Shannon. Are you feeling happier today?” He looked at her searchingly.

The question caught her off guard. “Uh. Yes, thank you.”

“Hmm.” He didn’t seem to believe her.

“Really,” she said with a bright smile. “Everything’s fine.” She looked past him at the foyer and the living room beyond. She’d never seen a house so bare. The foyer contained a single black umbrella and an empty coatrack, nothing else. No mirror or rug or pictures on the walls.

The living room, too, was all bachelor and function—no creature comforts besides a massive, overstuffed, cotton-duck sofa, an elaborate state-of-the-art entertainment center, and what looked like a
bouquet of remote controls radiating from a simple glass bowl on an elliptical steel coffee table. No art hung on the walls, though a stack of framed pictures, protected by cardboard corner covers, leaned into a corner. Shannon’s guess was that they’d been delivered by his mother or sister—a well-meaning female in his life—and he’d promptly forgotten them.

“So…what’s that in your purse?” Hal eyed the black plastic hanging out of it.

She cleared her throat. “That’s a lawn-and-leaf bag.”

He blinked.

She smiled reassuringly. “You know, in case we need to weed some stuff out of your closet.” She thought it best not to mention that most of his clothes would likely need burning. It didn’t seem kind. Though if his closet was as minimal as the house, she wouldn’t have much to do.

“Oh.” They stood in awkward silence for a moment. He seemed fascinated by her hair. She really,
really
shouldn’t have had sex with him.

Shannon dropped her hobo bag, twisted the mass of hair behind her head and secured it with a pencil, true to habit. “Well, do you want to show me where your bedroom is?” The question sounded odd and intimate to her own ears.

“Yeah.” Hal turned and led the way out of the foyer. The first article of clothing she’d need to burn was the pair of jeans he had on. They fit poorly and were more fray than hem at the bottom. She was a big fan of faded denim on men, but it had to be made
by Levi’s only and hug the buns properly. She pondered how to get them off him so she could toss them into her Hefty bag. Hot seduction, take two?

Hal had a big, rangy frame. Any essence of nerd he possessed came from the way he carried himself, not his actual build. He was completely unassuming, as if he’d just been too busy to notice when God had filled out his shoulders and broadened his chest. Shannon, used to the buff, gym-trained bodies of L.A., found it endearing. Somehow it made her want to hug him.

He led the way down a hall to the master bedroom, which was surprisingly orderly, except for a crop of dirty socks dropped at the end of the bed.
Men.
Why they considered it impossible to walk them to a laundry basket, she’d never know. Her last, brief boyfriend, Brian, had done the same thing, waiting for the socks to skip by themselves into the washer. The only difference was he’d thrown them to the left side of his bed, not the foot.

Looking at Hal’s bed made her oddly self-conscious; aware that she was standing in the private space of someone she didn’t know very well, even if they’d been
intimate,
as he put it. He had squashy goose-down pillows, her favorite, and a fluffy down-filled duvet.

She knew a crazy urge to be ten again, and take a flying leap from the doorway into the center of the mattress. Funny, that—she usually tensed up in a man’s bedroom, wondering when he would pounce on her and expect her to fulfill his every pin-up girl fantasy.

Hal moved to the double closet doors and pulled them open. Inside minimalism had died a horrible death, buried under an avalanche of dated and hideous clothing.

Shannon stared at it in disbelief. Was that a plaid Western shirt with pearlized snaps? Ye gods. And a color-block shirt from the eighties. And a red-and-blue argyle vest…then there were a couple of dated eighties suits, in tan and light blue, made of fabrics she wouldn’t even use for drop cloths.

“Hal? Have you ever gone through and purged your closet completely?”

“Well, I’ve gotten rid of things that didn’t fit.” He seemed pleased with that.

She turned to him with a fixed smile. “I see. Listen. I see a lot of things here that…well, they won’t quite work with the new image we’re going for. The
GQ,
media-ready Hal Underwood. You’re becoming a power player, so we’ll need to get you power clothes.”

“Power clothes,” he repeated doubtfully.

“Yes.”

“How much is this going to cost me?”

She decided to sidestep that particular issue. “I’m not sure yet. But will you trust me to get rid of what needs to go? I mean, I know you’ve got a ton of work to do.” She flashed him a winning smile.

His eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but I think I’ll just get my laptop and do it right in here.”

Damn. The battle commences.
Shannon rolled up
her sleeves. By the time he’d returned with his laptop, she had a third of his closet on the floor in heaps.

It was bloody war. He fought for every shirt she pulled out, every ratty pair of jeans, and even shoes that were curled at the toes and blue-green with mold, or had barely any leather left to them.

“Those can be resoled!” he insisted.

“Veto.”

“Carpenter bell-bottoms are still fine for mowing the lawn…”

“Yeah, no. What a shame—the zipper’s broken.”

“I saw you twist it! What the hell…?” He grabbed for the denim, but Shannon stuffed the jeans into the bag and sat on it. She looked up and blinked her eyes, all innocence.

“I did no such thing.” She tugged at a hideous maroon velour jacket next.

“Velour is fine for inside the house.”

“
No,
velour is not fine for
anything
on a man. Erase the concept of it from your mind. Toss!”

“But—hey! No way! That Western snap shirt is a souvenir from Texas.”

She shuddered. “Maybe so, but you’ll get arrested if you wear it in Connecticut.” She ripped a sickening checked jacket from its hanger and rubbed her eyes to see if it would go away. Nope.

“I paid seventy bucks for that blazer,” Hal moaned, “and it still almost buttons.”

“Key word—
almost.
We won’t discuss the fact that it’s unlined.” She shoved it into the bag.

“Hey, I didn’t agree—”

“Hal, honey. I wouldn’t use that horrifying rag to clean my toilet. Let it go.”

When they got finished, a total of seven items were left in Hal’s closet, and he looked stricken. “Three white shirts,” he moaned. “Two pairs of jeans…one tie and a windbreaker? That’s all you’re leaving me?”

“Yup.” Shannon, merciless, finished tying a knot in the third lawn-and-leaf bag. She turned to him with an evil grin. “And, babe, that’s only so you won’t go naked to work while I start to build your new wardrobe.”

“You…you give new meaning to the word brutality,” he complained.

“I know,” she agreed. “I realize this is traumatic for you. But really, it’s for the best. You just wait. The reincarnated Hal will be beating off women with a stick.”