With Extreme Pleasure (18 page)

C
ady had been teasing King about animals and blankets before she’d run butt naked out of the shed, but she was glad when he’d followed her up the front steps, through the house, and out the back, that he’d stopped and grabbed the quilt off the bed where she’d napped.

The quilt had kept them from having to worry about dirt and sunburn and things with six legs coming close. Yet as much physical pleasure as they’d shared, she’d had a great time getting to know him better.

Not that doing so had come easy.

Prying answers out of him—serious answers—was worse than prying herself into panty hose, and even at the end of the day, she wasn’t sure her success rate outweighed the work it had taken to get there.

“King?” she asked, curled up against him, her head on his shoulder.

“Cady?” he answered, his arm draped down her back, his hand playing with her bottom.

She wiggled. “Do you think we’re compatible?”

“We seem to fit,” he said, stretching out his fingers as if measuring her width. “You’ve got the round hole, and my peg ain’t so square.”

Men and sex. Always with the size. “That’s not what I mean.”

“You’re going to have to be a little more clear then, chère, because except for you being the target of a psycho drug kingpin, we seem to be getting along.”

She ignored his dig and rolled onto her back, staring at the sky that was turning indigo. “If we had checked each other out on a dating Web site, do you think we would’ve hooked up?”

“Wait,” he said, a frown in his voice. “Are we dating?”

If she wasn’t so lazy, she would’ve smacked him. “We skipped a lot of normal relationship steps on our way to intense.”

“Wait,” he said, the frown giving way to good humor. “Is this a relationship?”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to hurt you now,” she said, and pinched his nipple.

He pinched hers back. “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to like it.”

“Can you be serious for five minutes?” she asked, squirming when he lingered longer than required by a retaliatory pinch. “Or for five questions at least?”

“What five questions?”

“Five questions you’d have to fill out for your profile on a dating Web site.”

He huffed. “You fill out a lot of those?”

She wasn’t going to tell him that she’d worked for a dating service and had been assigned to design them. She just started feeling him out by asking the ones that came to mind.

“Would you rather read
Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Paste
, or
Time?
”

“You’re assuming I can read,” he told her, turning onto his side and replacing his fingers on her nipple with his mouth.

She clenched her thighs that were tingling. “Would you rather visit the UK, China, Australia, Italy, or Tanzania?”

“The last three I could probably handle—” He paused, licked her, sucked her, blew a breath across her damp skin. “As long as you take me there in the middle of summer.”

He wanted her to take him there. He didn’t want to go alone. She closed her eyes, the thought even more than his tongue causing her nipples to tighten, and she found her hand sliding down to her clit that tingled in response.

It was getting really hard to remember what she was saying. Or why they were talking at all. “Would you rather eat seafood, barbeque, Tex-Mex, steaks, or lasagna?”

“I’d rather eat crawfish, but I won’t say no to any of them.” He opened his mouth over her belly, nipped her skin, moved lower, and sucked on her fingers wet with her flavor. “I’m like you that way. I love eating.”

As long as he kept her on his menu…“Would you rather spend a day off fishing, playing golf, skydiving, hiking, or building houses for charity?”

“I think my best days off involve screwing and you,” he said, moving his body to cover hers.

She closed her eyes and parted her knees. “Would you rather watch a horror movie, a Seinfeld rerun, a Broadway musical, a meteor shower, or an air show?”

“Porn. Isn’t that one of the choices?” he asked, sliding into her with a slow, steady, never-ending stroke.

She was done being able to think. “Your turn.”

“For what?”

“To ask me five questions.”

“How about I just ask you one, but give you five answers to choose from?”

“Okay.” That she could probably stay conscious for.

He leaned close to her ear, and on a gruff whisper asked, “Would you rather I make love to you on your back, on your stomach, bending over, standing up, or from beneath?”

“That is not an appropriate dating profile question,” she said, then it was a very long time before she had the strength to say anything again.

Shifting his body weight from her to the ground, King stayed inside of her until he grew soft, and even then he didn’t move, just slipped free to lay against her. “So you
are
familiar with those services.”

“I never said I wasn’t,” she said, enjoying the intimacy and his comfort in letting her feel him.

“They work out for you any better than finding roommates online?”

She ignored the dig, concentrating on his naked body. “I met some people.”

“People? Or penises?”

“Does everything have to be about sex with you?”

“It has something to do with my present company.” He kissed the tip of her nose, her chin, her closest ear. “And my present lack of pants.”

He tickled her, and she found herself charmed. “Ask me something real.”

“Dogs or cats?”

“Goldfish. They don’t require any work.”

“Frank Sinatra or Frank Zappa?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn for either one. I’d have to go with John Mayer.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

That didn’t surprise her at all. “We’re looking less and less compatible.”

“If you found a buried fortune in gold coins, what would you do first? Build a new house, buy a shrimping trawler, or drill an oil well?”

“What did you do first?”

“I’m asking the questions here, boo.”

Fine. “D. Other. I’d buy a vineyard in California and forget the East Coast exists.”

“I’ve seen you drink coffee and tea. I’ve seen you drink water, juice. Maybe a soft drink. I have not seen you drink wine.”

“I gave up alcohol after getting drunk and punched,” she told him.

His expression grew protective and fierce. “Then why buy a vineyard?”

“Because it’s the farthest thing from where I live, who I am, and what I know.”

King rolled up onto one elbow and looked down at her, stroking his thumb over her undamaged cheekbone, his touch nearly making her cry. “This is all make-believe, Cady. You don’t have to run when it’s not real.”

His words did make her cry. “That’s the thing. I stopped believing in make-believe. I’ll be running for the rest of my life.”

B
y the time they’d come back inside, having spent the remaining hours of daylight wearing themselves out, their bodies bared to the great outdoors and who knew how many prying creaturely eyes and satellites, she’d been freezing.

Temperatures dropped quickly in the city, yes, but the steel and concrete and millions of bodies held onto that warmth long after dusk. Out here in the middle of God’s green nowhere they weren’t so lucky.

When the sun set, it took the heat with it. The only way to generate more was with physical exertion and the friction of their skin. She would’ve loved it if they could’ve kept making love forever, wrapped up in the quilt like bugs in a rug, toasty and close and less two people than one, but by that time they resembled the walking wounded.

Her thigh muscles had never been so sore. Even the hot bubble bath she’d just climbed out of had barely eased the ache. Wrapping up in her grandmother’s old terry robe that smelled of green fields and the sky and lavender, helped ease more than her physical pain.

She piled herself and the yards of worn pink fabric into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, counting the smorgasbord of soup cans lined up near the sink, and the pots heating on every burner of the stove. She and King never had made it to the store, so soup it was.

As cute as he looked stirring the pots’ contents and checking the flames beneath, she wouldn’t have traded this meal for one cooked by any of the hundreds of specialty chefs in Manhattan who prided themselves on their ratings and stars. “I never did thank you for getting the house ready.”

“Not a problem,” he said, bringing spoons and two mismatched crockery bowls to the table, adding two bottles of water he’d fetched from the truck, and dish towels to serve as hot mats.

And then he leaned close, as if to kiss her, saying instead, “No sex for you tomorrow until we shop. A grown man cannot recharge on soup alone.”

“Hmm. Sounds like an old wives’ tale to me.”

“And they got to be old wives because they saved the soup for when their husbands had colds. You need to pay attention when they speak. Feed a cold, starve a fever. Or is it the other way around?”

That made her laugh. “When we’d come here for vacation, we couldn’t do anything, not eat, not go to the bathroom, definitely not run off to play until the car was unloaded, the groceries put away, the electricity and water working again. My dad made sure to time our trips and bathroom breaks so that we flew through getting everything done.”

“Must’ve been hard for you, the not eating part,” he said, setting a pot of tomato soup on one towel, a pot of vegetable beef on another, adding serving spoons to both, then returning to the stove.

She breathed in the aromas of the veggies and salty broth, and her stomach growled its impatience. “I don’t know when I became such a pig, seriously. I don’t remember eating much at all as a kid.”

“You’re doing a good job of making up for it now.” A pot of cream of chicken completed their meal. “I found a tin of crackers, but they weren’t good for anything but sticking together with mortar to build a house.”

“I’m done with crackers, thanks, but I could go for a thick grilled cheese sandwich,” she said, ladling tomato soup into her bowl and inhaling again. “Mmm. This smells so good. My grandmother was a big believer in soup for lunch.”

“With the grilled cheese sandwich,” he said, finishing her thought as he sat.

“Or fried bologna and onions. Or tuna.” She sipped a spoonful of soup. “Was there tuna in the pantry?”

“Enough to populate the seven seas. But tuna’s on my hit list. I lived on the stuff for years. Tuna and chips. Tuna and crackers. Tuna and tuna.” Forgoing the serving spoon and then forgoing his bowl, he ate vegetable beef out of the yellow club aluminum pot.

“Was this before…” she left the question unfinished for a reason she didn’t understand. Bringing up his history seemed an intrusion she had no right to make. One she didn’t think she wanted to make when things here finally seemed so…normal.

“Before prison? Before my parents died?” He caught her gaze, held it, deepening her chagrin that she hadn’t just blurted out her whole question. “It’s okay to talk about it, chère. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

“It’s so…personal.”

“And having my cock in your mouth isn’t?” he asked, shaking his head. “Sorry, sorry. I know. Grandmother Josephine would be turning in her grave to hear cock talk at her table. Bad enough to have one poking around in the shed.”

Cady sputtered, blowing her soup off her spoon and back into the bowl. “Not to mention in the backyard.”

“Guess it’s a good thing cocks were allowed in the bedroom, or else Edgar would have never been born, eh?” He reached for his water bottle, uncapped it. “And I wouldn’t be here eating soup with you now.”

“Hey, at least it’s not tuna.”

“Ugh,” he grumbled, before drinking, the plastic crackling in his hand, crackling again when he set it on the table. “When I got out, I was twenty-two, bare bones broke, and mentally blitzed. What money I had went for booze and smokes, with food coming in a distant third.”

“Where did you live?” She didn’t remember if he’d told her. “Your house was the one that had burned down, right? The fire you were accused of having set?”

He nodded, ate a bite. “I had a piece of shit trailer. One room with a bed, another with a couch and a kitchen. There was a bathroom, too, though most of the time I stood at the front door and pissed into the wind. Seemed the thing to do after four years of going in a bowl in front of anyone who wanted to take a look.”

“I can’t even imagine—” she started to say.

King cut her off. “Can’t you?”

“Not really,” she said, knowing he wasn’t talking about pissing into the wind.

“You’ve been looking over your shoulder for a good chunk of your life. You have no idea who’s been watching you, or what they’ve seen. I doubt anyone’s had a camera in your toilet, but one of Tuzzi’s spies did have the run of your house. Who knows what the guy may have seen?”

Cady swallowed the soup she had in her mouth and left her spoon in her bowl. She also left her water alone. She wanted a drink, but her hands were shaking, and she didn’t trust that she could get it to her mouth and not spill.

“You hadn’t thought about him watching you, had you?”

“I only made the connection between Tyler and Tuzzi a couple of days ago, remember?” She closed her eyes, shuddered, clenched her hands in her lap. “I don’t care if he saw me undressed, but watching me flossing or poking at zits or showering?”

How many personal rituals did she go through that she wouldn’t want anyone, including King, to see? Much less someone looking for a way to ruin her life? Each thing she thought about—shaving, menstruation, even clipping her toenails—humiliated her even more.

King backed his chair toward hers, the legs scooting across the scarred linoleum floor. He draped his arm around her shoulders and urged her close. “I could be talking out of my ass, Cady. He might’ve done nothing but keep an eye on you while waiting for Malling to get out.”

“I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

“You’re right. It’s not nothing. But I didn’t want you thinking too much about that toilet cam.”

“Too late. That’s all I
can
think about.”

“How ’bout you don’t think of anything? How ’bout you finish your soup and climb into bed and get more than a couple of hours of sleep?”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I was thinking of doing the same thing.”

“Just sleeping?”

“Just sleeping.”

“No bumping naked parts?”

He pulled back, frowned at her as if thinking she needed her mouth washed out with soap.

“Hey, that’s what it is. And I’ve heard your potty mouth say a whole lot worse.”

“The look wasn’t about your potty mouth.”

“Then what?”

“That you’ve got the energy to go at it again.”

She didn’t, until she started thinking about it, then realized if he was the one she was going at it with, her energy would never flag.

She reached over and tweaked his nose. “You’re the old one, remember? And the one who has dishes to do.”