All Hands Below (18 page)

“My hotel is not far from here.”

“How long are you here for?”

“Hey, honey.” He cupped her face and tilted it up to his. “I know what it cost you to be with me tonight, the fear you’ve had to let go.”

She breathed out a shaky sigh. “How long do I have with you?”

“A week. A month. Whatever you want. I’m off for the next two months and…I want to be with you while I’m here.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “You know, see where you live. Where you work.”

“So you’re not here on business, then?” she asked, curious to know if she was a pit stop for another reason that warranted his visit to Portland.

“My only reason for being here is to see you again, Evie. But if I’ve come at a bad time…” A look of regret swept into his eyes.

Elation raced through her veins. She wasn’t an afterthought. There was also no point in denying…his e-mail had touched her heart, too.

“You’re timing is perfect, Liam. But I want you with me while you’re visiting.” While making it clear she understood the terms, she needed to spell out terms of her own. “As my guest, at my place. My way.”

“Your wish is my command, sweetheart.” Smiling, he bent to kiss her lips.

Evangeline closed her eyes and swam in the pleasure of his kiss. She’d be a fool not to grab this gift of time with him. Not when he’d gone out of his way to contact her. He’d come to Portland looking for her, and now that they’d reconnected, he was willing to accept her terms. What it meant after all was said and done didn’t matter. Not now.

She’d worry about after
later
.

Chapter Eighteen

“Rise and shine, Liam.”

Liam woke up to two things—the aroma of Arabica and the feel of silky lips grazing his morning wood. His body hardened as his mind drifted with the ease she took him inside her mouth.

They’d stopped at his hotel so he could pick up his clothes. Unable to resist the temptation of Evangeline being in the same room as a bed, Liam had toppled her down into it and shushed her laughing mouth with his.

Only when he’d plugged his cock into her still drenched pussy did her laughter turn into delicious little sighs.

Now, as she made love to him with her mouth in her bed, the tingle of toothpaste and mouthwash from her freshly scrubbed mouth added piquant dimension. Sensation raced throughout his arousal and spread across his thighs.

With one hand holding his cock at its base, her mouth embraced him with wicked intensity. She squeezed his balls in her fingers, traced the cap of his cock with her tongue-tip, and sipped at the elixir that beaded his slit.

She took each of his balls inside her mouth, rolling those globes around, first one, then the other as she pumped his raging dick inside her fist.

“Mmm!” Liam growled and flexed his hips in counterpoint to her hand. “Hell, that’s good, honey.”

“You’re a very distracting houseguest,” she whispered, her tongue glazing his penis until its head belled and bulged beneath her sensual licks.

He groaned. “Bring your sweet pussy over here and I’ll give you an even bigger distraction.”

She pulled his rigid inches into her mouth.
Suck, tongue-twirl.
When her tongue-tip flurried around his glans, he moaned.
Compress, lick.

Excitement bombarded him from all sides, even as its aroused core lay in his cock rooting inside her sweet mouth. Her hands swept all around his thighs and stroked his penis.

Soft sighs caressed his ears. Goosebumps popped up his hairless follicles at the sound. And that mouth of hers! He palmed her head.

“Evangeline,” he rasped. “I need to fuck you.”

His hips rocked and writhed, his cock at the mercy of her sinful tongue.

Gently, she pulled her mouth off his shaft. “No. This is for you. Just for you, Liam, because I know how much you enjoy this.”
Lick.
“So whenever you’re ready, you can start fucking my mouth.”
Tongue-twirl.

A blowjob?
I’ll take it!
Liam ground his hips. As his head sank back into the pillow, his shoulders, torso, ass, and limbs rode high on the erotic roller coaster of Evangeline’s mouth.

Her tongue served as the rails, controlling the peaks and falls of his pleasured cock. Wicked hands gripped his hips hard to keep his thrashing ass still.

Liam felt her smile. He used her mouth with shameless abandon while her hands clutched his ass and held on for dear life. When his passion spilled recklessly between her lips, euphoria whipped through his body like a windstorm.

“Ahh!” Liam lost control, happy to give it all to her. She fed on him, licked him up,
devoured
him until he was spent.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said with a hopeless laugh. He would always be, he feared, hard around her. He caressed her cheek, then nudged her up. “I love being with you, you know that? The things you make me feel…mmm!”

“I feel the same way.” She smiled as she slinked up beside him on the bed.

He chuckled. “Yes, you’ve made that obvious. I’m yours to command. Today. Tomorrow. The day after—why is it still pitch black outside?” he wondered, palming her breast.

“Because you’re mine to command.” She pulled away from him with a soft laugh, taking away his heaven.

She slipped into a robe. “Shower’s that-away, Liam.”

“Cock’s this-away.” He pointed to his naked missile, already poking straight up, ready to fire.

She gazed at him with open adoration, barely hiding a smile he found both sexy, and shy.

“You can give me directions later. Don’t be long. I don’t want to be late.”

“Late for what?” He reached out to her.

“It’s a surprise,” she said, her smile playful.

“I love surprises,” he cooed, which made her laugh, and Liam felt the sun shine in the darkened room.

****

“Evangeline, he’s a slacker. I can tell just by looking at him. He might be
hawtt
, but…he just screams slacker.”

They were back in downtown Portland on the ground level of an older building equipped with a large kitchen and half a dozen picnic tables. The morning sun radiated through tinted windows that looked out into the traffic of the city.

Evangeline laughed. “Can you tell, Gwenn?” she said to her kitchen supervisor, a beautiful, cocoa-skinned girl barely out of her teens. “We’ll just have to put him to work, won’t we?”

Gwenn had slung an apron around Liam’s waist, jerked it tight, stuck some steel tongs in his hand, then slapped his ass.

That was his introduction to whatever task he’d been assigned.
This
was his special surprise, and surprised he was when Evangeline unlocked the doors to Morning Glory, a breakfast kitchen that she managed. A place free to the city’s homeless and hungry.

“I’ll take it easy on him,” Gwenn sassed back, flinging steaming biscuits off a baking pan and into a large basket lined with a red-checkered gingham cloth. “Don’t just stand there looking hot, Lars. Flip the bacon over before it burns! How’s that for easy, Eve?”

“It’s Liam, Gwenn.” Evangeline grinned at him from across the room, where she was covering tables with pretty matching red and white gingham tablecloths.

She stifled a giggle behind her hand, then made a pinching motion with her fingers, a reminder for him to turn the bacon over that sizzled on the grill next to him.

He pointed to his chest.
Me?

She nodded, winked, and swathed her lips with her tongue until they were nice and glossy, promising a treat.

By mornings end, he was a bacon-flipping fool.

Gwenn was kind enough to give him a ten-minute break from the grill to help Evangeline bus tables.

“I like your surprise,” Liam said as he cleared the table next to the one Evangeline was setting, to make room for the next wave of guests.

She greeted several faces that walked in the door.
Hello, Zack. How’s the job search coming along? Tadpole, you forgot your glasses when you came in the last time.

A family of four walked in. The father, scruffy and unshaven, sensed that Evangeline was in charge. He responded to her welcoming smile, and something blossomed in Liam’s heart to feel her care and concern for others.

She didn’t ask questions and waved them over to Liam’s table to keep the family seated together. Liam shook the man’s hand, introduced himself to the wife, and shook her hand. Their teen boys kept their faces downcast.

“Hey, nice kicks, guys,” Liam complimented them on their sneakers. He asked if they were the same brand worn by a rising-star basketball player who’d had some hard knocks in life.

His interest in them raised the boys’ animation levels and coaxed them to smile. They were soon talking with Liam about the star’s latest stats.

“So this is what you do?” Liam murmured in Evangeline’s ear when he got her alone, next to the industrial-sized coffee pots.

She unwrapped a stack of paper doilies. “In addition to managing the Spencer Foundation—yes.”

“Do you also serve lunch and dinner here?”

Her eyes glinted at him with curiosity. “In the winter months, I serve up soup bread bowls and a simple salad for lunch. It’s a little operation, but it fills hungry stomachs.”

“I love that this is what you do, and somehow…I’m not at all surprised. But Evie, wouldn’t the lovely Gwenn know college students or other responsible people who can help her hold down the fort so that sometimes you
can
travel?” he asked hopefully.

“Oh, Liam!” she beamed up at him. “I can pretty much manage the charitable foundation from anywhere, as long as I have a computer. As for Morning Glory, I can travel with Gwenn in charge. She’s got street smarts. She’s hardworking and brilliant. She also graduated from the school of hard knocks, but…I’m not the kind of boss who dumps responsibility on her crew to go gallivanting.”

“Okay. I get that. Now what about the baby?”

“The
what
?”

He lowered his voice. “If you had a baby, who’d help you take care of it when you’re here?”

His earnest ramblings tugged a smile from her lips. “Ah, ah, ah. Don’t go there, Liam. Together for the moment, remember?”

He nodded, but in his mind’s eye he pictured her here with a baby bundled in a sling, nesting against her heart.

He bit his inner cheek. In his mind’s eye, the baby tucked in her arms had a thatch of dark hair, like his, poking up from his cocoon.

His?
Great. The baby was a boy, now, too.

****

“Liam? Are you okay?” Evangeline asked, exasperated.

A thoughtful look had shaded his features while they were speaking in low, good-humored tones. That, and he was poking around her business about her someday baby.

“I’m good, honey,” he told her with a smile. “Too good. Thank you for bringing me here. For letting me be a part of your life. Gotta get back to the bacon. Anything else I can help you with, beautiful?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that I can say out loud right now.”

A smile curved his lips. “Then do me a favor and think about where you’d like to eat tonight.”

They decided to eat in.

They spent a portion of the afternoon at a local year-round farmer’s market shopping for fresh vegetables and pasta. Later that afternoon, as rain pounded on the rooftops, they worked in the kitchen.

He insisted on making his secret recipe for chicken basil spaghetti sauce. After she uncorked a bottle of apple-tart
pinot grigio,
she poured the wine into two glasses, then took a seat on a stool at the granite-topped counter.

“What’s behind that Mona Lisa smile?” he inquired, while slipping her apron over his head.

“You know your way around a kitchen,” she told him, impressed. Liam in her neon purple apron, standing in front of her stove was raising her body temperature. “And the bedroom.” She sipped her wine.

He grinned and jerked his chin toward her living room where a fire snapped in the fireplace. “Wait’ll you see what I can do in there.” He gave her a wink.

Evangeline shivered at the intimacy behind that wink. “Where’d you learn to cook?” she asked, watching his elegant hands tear up half of an herb-garlic rotisserie chicken.

“My grandfather has a restaurant in Italy. I’ve also picked things up—special recipes and techniques over the years.” He smiled. “You don’t get to be a bachelor at my age and not know how to cook.”

Especially a confirmed one. She lowered her eyes and sipped her wine again, putting aside the reminder that this time with him wouldn’t last forever.

Determined to keep their time together upbeat, she tipped her wineglass to his lips so that he might have a sip, too.

With a handful of torn basil leaves, he then tossed everything in a pot of spicy crushed tomatoes to simmer.

After washing his hands, he swept the apron off his body. Then he grabbed his glass of wine and a couple of cocktail napkins, gave her a mischievous grin and said, “Let’s go check out your fireplace, hmm?”

As he led the way into her living room, excitement ramped up her heartbeat. He stopped on the blue-gray sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace, took a drink of his wine, then placed his glass on the driftwood mantle.

His eyes gleamed when he turned and drew her into his embrace. Tipping her face up to his, he dropped a tender kiss on her lips. Then he held her gaze as he took her glass from her fingers and set it on the mantle.

Heat licked around her body. Those tiny flames had little to do with the logs crackling in the fire, and everything to do with the sexiest guy on the planet easing her down to join him on the sheepskin.

On their knees, they faced each other. Her lungs quivered out a breath.

“We’ve got fifteen minutes till I have to boil the water for the
gnocchi
. What should we do?” Liam asked innocently.

Evangeline pressed a finger to her chin. “I don’t know,” she said, mock confused. “Maybe…should we start by taking each other’s clothes off?”