49 - The Write Way

Jon stretched his arms out and flipped from his back to his stomach, the darkness reassuring him that sleep was still an option.  The clatter of something hitting the floor, however, had him jack-knifing up in bed with the adrenaline pumping.  Switching on the lamp, he peered over the edge of the mattress, finding that the culprit was his phone. 

He swore softly and picked up the noisy device, recalling that he’d doused the light while waiting for the mysterious e-mail from Sheridan.  However, he’d evidently fallen asleep with the damn phone still resting on his stomach.

That recalled mystery had him swiping the screen, and tapping the icon that bore a white envelope.  It said there were five unread messages. 

“Blah, blah, blah…” he muttered, squinting in the brightness and glancing through the first couple.  “A-ha.”  There was one from ‘S.N. King’ about three hours ago, at one in the morning.   Jon hit the lamp switch, dousing the light in the room and settled in on his right side.  “Let’s see what’s so damn mysterious.”

John,

I assume that’s how you’d like to be addressed since it’s emblazoned on my arm?  If not, feel free to correct me. :-)

Anyway…  You wondered what I’ve been doing on my iPad.  Now you’ll know.  Sorry it took so long getting to you.  I was having internet issues.

xoxo 

Kitten

His mouth curled up in a slow smile at the signature line.  The nickname she hadn’t been all that crazy about in the beginning was evidently starting to stick. 

Tapping on the attachment with proud approval, he settled in to read.

The past hour had been interminably long and I was ready to go home.  The gorgeous blood-red heels that had looked so fetching on my feet when I dressed for the evening had begun to cling in the most unpleasant way. 

But, no.  I couldn’t go yet.  There was a man I just had to meet, according to my friend.  Bracing myself for another inane party introduction, I turned with a polite smile pinned in place for the stranger.

Only he wasn’t a stranger.  I knew those beautiful blue eyes.  They, combined with the sculpted cheek bones and wide mouth, took his perfectly handsome face and made it sinfully stunning. 

My pulse accelerated into a fitful rhythm, and I was sure he could see it trilling at the base of my throat.  God knew it was the only thing moving at my throat since I all but swallowed my tongue.  I couldn’t have spoken a word if my life depended on it.  Being a routinely articulate woman, that was a problem for me, and embarrassed heat flooded into my face, but that wasn’t as embarrassing as the other heat…that rushed to all parts south of my racing heart.

Did he recognize me?  Would he know me as the woman from so many months ago, hundreds of miles from where we stood tonight?  One whom he had never seen in the light of day?

Yes.  He would, and he did.  Those beautiful blue eyes knew me the same way I knew them.  I could see it in the way his pupils flared, eroding the blue irises like a stormy sky over the sea. 

“Hello,” he greeted with impersonal politeness, as unwilling as I to divulge the secret we shared.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.”

I’m not altogether certain what the actual chain of events was during the next few moments, but the next thing I clearly recalled was my friend saying, “You don’t mind if he takes you home, do you?”

Yes, I minded.  I minded so severely that I considered having my very first epileptic seizure at that moment.  Why, you might ask?

Because I knew I couldn’t be trusted alone with him.  The memories of that one, hot night were too strong, too vivid to stay camouflaged behind the prim and professional façade that everyone – everyone but him – knew as me.

“That’s not necessary,” I demurely declined, intent upon escaping with my reputation intact.  “I’ll just catch a taxi.”

“There’s no need for that,” he countered with devilry dancing in those unforgettable baby blues.  “It’s not out of my way at all, and I have a car waiting.”

Of course he would have a car waiting.  All the best fantasies-come-to-life did.  There was no way I could politely refuse without raising a red flag to my friend, so I succumbed to my own latent wishes, knowing I may regret it.

“If you truly don’t mind, then I would appreciate the lift.”

His smile was as blindingly beautiful as the rest of him.  “I truly don’t mind,” he mimicked lightly. 

I was left with nothing to do except fetch my coat, during which time I sternly lectured myself.  His wicked smirk was an invitation to sin, but no matter how tempting he was, I couldn’t submit to the temptation.

Cupping my elbow, as any good gentleman would, made me skittish.  I involuntarily jerked away from the incinerating touch that branded me even through the layers of material separating our skin.

“You don’t have to be afraid.”  The husky words found their way through the soundtrack party-goer revelry as they wound through the crowd.

“Why would I be afraid of you?”  I couldn’t fathom why he would say that.  He’d never once given me reason for fear.

Lips curling upward in a wolfish grin as he held the club door  for me, a gently restraining hand found my shoulder and he dipped his head to quietly clarify,  “Not of me.  Of yourself.”

He hit the nail on the head.  So accurately, in fact, that I stumbled in the four-inch heels I had worked like a professional model all night.  I needn’t have worried, though.  Two masculine bands of steel caught me, locking securely around my waist until I was once again able to stand upright under my own power.

“Careful,” he admonished, his scent assaulting my olfactory memory banks.  I remembered his smell with a silent groan of ecstasy.  My body remembered his smell and leapt to eager attention, anticipating…  What?

Not trusting myself to avoid tripping over my own tongue, I nodded once, my long blonde waves shifting accordingly as he handed me into the back of the vehicle.  Several long strides, and not nearly enough breathing room later, he slid in beside me, his hip touching mine.  The door had no more closed than the glass partition between us and the driver crept silently upward at his hand, affording us more privacy than I would admit to craving.

“Baby,” he rasped, abruptly hauling me into his lap.

His grip was so urgently fierce that I had no choice but to go along, lips eking open with a gasp of surprise.  It was an opening he was ready and willing to take, and wasted no time in delving his tongue into the hungry recesses of my mouth. 

Memories came flooding back with the scrape of his tongue.  They piled high, pushing with all their overwhelmingly seductive might.   I whimpered his name in a meager gesture of self-defense against the ruthless hands that plundered beneath the skirt that now rode high on my hips. 

“Christ.”  His hot breath warmed the underside of my jaw and my nipples reacted as though he’d stripped me bare.  The problem was magnified when his roughened fingertips found the tender flesh waiting bare at the tops of my stockings.  As though I knew he would be coming for me tonight.  “I thought I dreamed how hot you were.  How hot you made me.”

“If you dreamed it, so did I,” I moaned, completely stripped of any sense of decorum as I blindly fisted his sandy blonde locks.  I was set ablaze by his touch and found the woman in his arms a nearly unrecognizable clone of myself.  This wasn’t how I behaved.  But this was the man who, from the first time I saw him, made me itch to misbehave in the most inappropriate ways.

Those ruthless hands triumphantly lit upon the drenched scrap of lace between my thighs, and he chortled with arrogant pleasure.  “You’re as horny for me now as you were then, aren’t you?”

“Yes, damn you,” I gasped, the admission ripped free by the finger that tunneled into my heated core. “Why are you here?  What are you doing to me?”

His thumb slipped into the pool of desire he was stirring between my legs and my hips reflexively ground against him.  Completely shameless and unrepentant, he stoked that desire with the press of one very sensitive, fleshy button.

“You know what I’m doing.”  The chuckle that vibrated against my throat was dirty in the most delightfully debauched sense of the word.  “And you know why I’m here.  Karma loves us.”

“Holy shit,” he muttered, understandably aroused at the piece of work he’d just read.  Not to mention frustrated that it ended before its logical conclusion.  Glancing at the time, he saw that it was four-fifteen.  The middle of the night.  But she had said it didn’t matter what time if he wanted to call.

He wanted.

“H’lo?”

The sleepy greeting stirred the one tiny piece of his libido that wasn’t already doing pre-workout chin-ups.  It wasn’t even an effort to imagine her sleep-tousled head and the soft way she cuddled against him in the middle of the night.

“Kitten.”

“Jon?”  There was a rustling on the other end.  Sheets and blankets as she converted to a more awake position in bed, he presumed.  “Is something wrong?”

“Yeah,” he declared quietly.  “The ending to your email.  You didn’t let me get that far.”

She snuffled groggily before breathing, “No.  But I wanted to.”

Whatever pliability was left in his dick was completely erased by that unguarded admission.  He could ask why she hadn’t, but his horny man-mind was more interested in where the mythical tale would lead.

“What else did you want?”

“To feel the sting of your bite.”

Jesus... Mary… and Joseph.

“You like that, huh?”  His erection strained against the blankets, aching in its fullness.

“I dreamed about it for a while after I got home.  The phantom pain woke me up more than once.  Then, when I realized it was only a dream, I wondered who you were biting at that moment.”

“Nobody.  You’re the only one that makes me hungry enough to bite.”

And it was true.  Granted, he hadn’t gone his entire life without a fair nibble here and there, but there hadn’t been a single woman before Sheridan that begged to be marked the way she did.  He’d never, ever left another woman dotted with passion patches that required more than a dab of makeup to cover.

“You’re just saying that,” she accused mildly, with a sniff.

“Nope.  You make me crazier in bed than anybody ever has.  Then you go and throw soft porn on the fire.  Dayum, Kitten…”

Her sleepy chuckle was damnably beguiling, and her voice was huskier than usual.  “Too bad you can’t sneak over for a booty call.  I wouldn’t even have to empty the honor bar this time.  And I wouldn’t have to take matters into my own hands.”

“You little minx,” he growled lightly.  “By the time Christmas Eve gets here, I’m gonna be as wound up as my kids.  I’d go jack off in the bathroom with Penthouse, but your stuff is better.  Got anymore?”

“Mm.  I’m working on another one.  You really like it?”

“I do.  Can I be conceited enough to think this is my Christmas gift?  My own personal porn subscription?”

Dating a fledgling writer was going to have interesting perks, he could see.

“You probably are conceited enough,” was her gently teasing reply.  “But that’s not the reason I wrote it.  This is the writing avenue I think I’d like to pursue, and my friend Bridget is helping me by sending it out to potential publishers.”

“Whoa.  What?  You’re going to publish porn?”

His conservative socialite girlfriend was going to be a professional porn writer.  Jesus Christ how was that going to fly in his increasingly stodgy, grown-up world of philanthropy, politics and social awareness?

“It’s not porn, it’s erotic fiction, and that has yet to be proven.  There may not be any interest in my writing.  You could end up with exclusive rights to my dirty mind.”

“I can’t say that I’d consider that a bad thing.  Your dirty mind is quickly becoming one of my favorite things.”

Hopefully nobody will care about her pseudo-porn but me.

“I would hope so.  It’s inspired by your dirty mind,” she hummed, still sounding unusually baritone.

“Have I told you I miss you in my bed?”

“I’ve never been in your bed, darling.  You miss being in my bed?”

“Semantics,” he scoffed.  “You know what I mean.”

“Mm.  That I do.  It’s probably just as well though.  I think I’m coming down with something.”

That explained her throatiness.

“You better get to the doctor and get that shit cleared up.  Christmas Eve is only four days away.”

“Thank you for your tender concern…” she laughed.  “I’ll see about getting 'that shit cleared up’.  Dare I hope that Christmas Eve will be just as romantic as that little sentiment?”

“You can hope,” he returned her playfulness with a dash of cockiness.  “But don’t get your heart set on it.”