Escorted (35 page)

When he finally
heaved some of his weight off her and met her eyes, his expression wasn’t what
she expected. His features were delicious relaxed, but she saw a flicker of
disappointment in his eyes.

“I’m sorry it
wasn’t any better,” he said, sounding awkward and hoarse.

For a moment, Lori’s
chest hurt so brutally she couldn’t breathe. “You didn’t think it was good?”

He stared,
blinking several times. “Of course, it was good for me. It was—I don’t have
words to describe it. But I could barely even make it until you came.” His face
twisted, painfully embarrassed. “Pathetic.”

“Oh,” Lori
growled, suddenly so mad she could scratch him. “Just
stop it
.”

Ander blinked
at her again. He was still propped up above her. His sated cock hadn’t even
slipped all the way out of her, and she felt a gush of fluid where they were
joined. “What?”

“I said just
stop it.” She took his face in her hands in an attempt to make him understand.
“Your role here isn’t to please me. Just get that out of your head. Your role
is to
be
with me. We please each other. And don’t you ever act like I’m
expecting a certain kind of performance. You’re not that man anymore. That’s
not the way we are together now. So just
stop it
.”

Ander stared at
her for a long time, and she saw something torn in his expression. Then his
mouth started to twitch in that expression she so loved. “Right,” he murmured.
“I guess you told me.”

She pulled him
down into a hug. “It was amazing, Ander. Truly. Better than...than anything.”

“Yeah,” he
breathed, pressing kisses into her hair. “For me too.”

They lay
tangled together and kissed for several minutes, until Lori felt an
inexplicable sensation between her legs.

“Oh,” she
gasped, jerking her lips away from his and trying to focus on what she felt.

Ander murmured,
“Hmm?” as he edged a hand between their bodies to squeeze her breast.

“You’re getting
hard again. That’s quick!”

With narrowed
eyes, he drawled, “Have I ever given you reason to doubt my powers of recovery
before.”

“No,” she
admitted with a snicker. “But this seems really quick. Yay me!”

Ander’s body
shook with stifled laughter and he leaned down to kiss her again, his tongue
stroking deeply and hungrily.

By the time he
pulled out of the kiss, he had hardened all the way in her wet, sensitive
channel. He helped her adjust her legs so they were bent up with her heels
pressing against his ass.

The position
let him sink inside her more deeply, and they both moaned at the penetration.

Ander
straightened his arms, pulling his chest off of hers a little. And he started
to thrust with a slow, pleasing rhythm. Every stroke of his body sent tingles
of sensation to a newly growing orgasm at her core.

As they moved
together, they held gazes, and she saw everything she needed to know in his
eyes. She had no idea how she’d gone so long without seeing, without knowing,
without realizing the kind of man Ander really was.

He wasn’t a
cool man, despite the pretense he put on. He was a passionate man who’d learned
not to be.

But now she saw
real passion in his eyes, in his expression. And it matched the depth of
passion in her own heart.

He moved over
her rhythmically until she came, arching up and gasping out his name, and then
he kept thrusting with a deep, naked tenderness until she felt her body clench
up once again.

Drowning in feeling—both
emotional and physical—Lori’s irony came to save her. A spark of memory
inspired her and she adjusted her hands so they were clinging to his shoulders.

Then she
started to tap the fingers of one hand in quick succession on his shoulder.

Ander’s rhythm
faltered and he blinked at her dazedly. She could tell from the tension in his
features that he was getting to the end of his control.

That only made
it better.

“Aren’t you
going to lose it?” she asked, breathlessly but with a characteristic tartness.
“I thought this was what you liked the most.”

She tapped her
fingers some more for good measure, even though she was pretty sure she was
going to come with just a little more stimulation.

Ander’s face
transformed with enlightenment and his elbows buckled. He shook against her,
gasping out his amusement as his hips moved in delicious, involuntary thrusts.

It was so
good—and so full of memories—that Lori whimpered in pleasure, her orgasm
starting to tighten.

“Fuck, Lori,” Ander
gasped, his body still shaking helplessly. He seemed to be laughing and making
love to her at the same time. “You’re incredible.”

“You too—” Lori’s
spine arched as her climax crested, spasms of sensation pulsing in rich tremors
through her body. “Oh Ander! Oh yes!”

Ander let out
an uncontrolled exclamation and started rutting for real, pushing against the
contractions of her orgasm as he built up to his own release. “Lori,” he
grunted, sounding primitive as he ducked his head, clearly on the edge of his
control. “Lori, baby.”

Lori gasped
frantically as she started to come down, loving the feel of his wild abandon. “Ander,”
she breathed, giving into the irresistible urge to dig her fingernails into the
back of his head.

Ander made a
burst of noise as he froze on the cusp of his climax, his features twisting
with leashed pleasure.

Then his pelvis
jerked and twitched against hers and he rolled his hips with the flood of
sensations. He ducked his head down as his cock pulsed inside her. “Love you,
love you, love you, love you, love you.”

The words were
mumbled, torn out of him without conscious thought, and released with the last
of his breath. They washed over Lori, filling her with a satisfaction she’d
never experienced before.

It all felt so
natural--even the repetition making them seem that much more real--that it took
her a minute to process what he’d said. His body was softening above her and
she’d just about caught her breath when realization caught up to her.

She stiffened
beneath him. “
What
?”

“That’s what
you call sex,” Ander murmured fondly, kissing the spot on the dip of her
shoulder that he’d bitten earlier. “I thought I’d taught you that a year ago.”

Lori stifled
the urge to laugh at his wit. He must not have realized she’d heard him this
time. But she had. He hadn’t been able to restrain himself as well as usual,
and she’d come down enough to register the words.

“That’s what
you say when you come?” she asked threadily. “Love you?”

Now Ander
stiffened.

“That’s what
you say?” she demanded, grabbing his face to look him in the eye.

After a tense
pause, Ander’s expression relaxed. “That’s what I said
this
time.”

She glared at
him suspiciously. “And all those other times you wouldn’t tell me?”

“Just
nonsense,” he said, with impressive plausibility. “I told you not to pay any
attention.”

Her heartbeat
as wild as the feelings in her heart, Lori begged, “Ander, tell me the truth.
You love me?”

His mouth
twisted but he didn’t look away this time. “Yes. Didn’t you know that?”

“Well, I
thought probably ...” She swallowed. “But you hadn’t said it before. You really
burst out with the words when you come?”

“Is something
wrong with that?”

She snickered.
“Certainly not. I just didn’t think you’d be so clichéd.” Before he could
bristle, she said, “I love you too. You know that, right?”

Something deep
and warm ignited in his eyes. “I thought you probably did. Why else would you
hook up with your gigolo?”

Laughing, she
pulled him down into a hug. She just reveled in sappy feelings for a minute
before a spark of curiosity prompted her to ask, “But really, Ander. Is that
what you said when you came? All the time?” Her voice broke on the possibility.

“Obviously, I
didn’t say it at first.” When she glared at him, he admitted, “Yes, it’s what I
said. For a long time.”

“You loved me?”
she breathed, washed with a wave of awe. “Even back then? Before there was any...any
hope?”

Ander swallowed
hard. “I knew I felt for you in a way I’d never felt for anyone before. Sex had
never meant anything to me—except for business—before you. I’ve never had sex
with any feeling. Never had sex without a condom before today. Not once in all
my life. And you were awakening emotions I’d never experienced. I wanted to be
with you, please you, protect you, take care of you. I don’t know if it was
love back then, but I didn’t know what else to call it.”

To her
mortification, Lori’s eyes burned with tears. She sniffed a little and tried to
suppress the ridiculous urge to cry.

Ander gazed at
her for several moments. Then he leaned down to murmur in her ear. “Try to
fight it, Lori. We mustn’t turn into saps.”

So she laughed
instead, squeezing him in her arms and wondering how she’d ever written romance
novels without really understanding what love was.

They stayed in
bed all night and all the following day, dozing a little and waking up to make
love or to chat or to just lie in an intimate embrace.

It was all new.
To both of them. No matter what experiences they brought with them to their
love.

At one point
the next day, Ander asked, his tone a little diffident, “When did you know you
loved me?”

Lori could see
now a path leading out from this moment—filled with day after day of new
experiences to look forward to, ones they could live through together.

So she smiled
and told him the truth. “When I fired you.”

“Don’t you dare,” Lori gritted
out through her teeth as she fluffed her hair in the mirror of the women’s
restroom at a trendy restaurant.

Sabrina gave
her a wink before she applied a new coat of lipstick to her full lips. “I
wasn’t going to say a word.”

“Yes, you were.
I can just see you brimming over with the urge to make sarcastic comments about
Pretty Woman
or
The Wedding Date
.”

With a long
sigh and a sparkling look, Sabrina murmured, “Dermot Mulroney is
hot
.”

Lori couldn’t
help but snicker.

Recognizing her
cousin as off-guard, Sabrina went in for the kill. “But you have to admit you
two are the sweetest thing,” she gushed with exaggerated saccharine. “You
should write a novel about it. The Virgin and the Gigolo.”

Her cheeks
warming despite her best efforts, Lori shushed Sabrina and ducked down to check
under the stalls to make sure no one else had heard. “Stop it. We’re not like
that. I’m not a virgin any more. And he’s not a gigolo.”

“I know. But it
is kind of funny. And it proves I was right all along.” Before Lori could do
anything more than growl, Sabrina went on, “And don’t think I didn’t notice how
you two couldn’t keep your hands off each other tonight. He was groping your
thigh under the table.”

Lori’s blush
deepened and she pretended to hunt through her purse for lip gloss. “He wasn’t
groping,” she insisted with indignation if not entire honesty. “We just haven’t
seen each other much lately.”

“You live
together.”

“I know.” Six
months ago, Lori had moved into Ander’s apartment. While her old apartment was
larger, Ander was really attached to his place. And Lori had grown to love it
as well. Plus, it was in walking distance of the university, which made it
easier for Ander to get to classes. And Lori could write from anywhere.

Lori went on to
explain, “But he’s been buried in studying for his qualifying exams for months,
and for the last two weeks he’s been at the library almost constantly. Now that
they’re over, he can actually relax and we can spend some more time together.”

Sabrina gave
her a dubious look. “Are you trying to convince me the two of you haven’t
fucked in months?”

“Not months. A
couple of weeks. But he’s done like three years of graduate coursework in less
than two. He’s been obsessed with studying. So in these last couple of months
before the exams we haven’t spent as much time together as normal.”

The closer Lori
got to Ander, the more she learned about the obsessive streak in his nature.
She’d known he was meticulous, determined, and assiduous in his commitment to
his job before. But now that he was doing something he could pour his whole
heart into, he was extraordinarily driven. Sometimes, she had trouble getting
him to eat, sleep and relax. She had decided that taking care of him was her
special duty and prerogative, and she’d found various strategies to distract
him from his work.

Only in the
last two weeks had these strategies failed.

She knew now
that he’d successfully passed his qualifying exams for his degree and was
starting on his dissertation, he would return to a more normal schedule.

“So tonight’s
the big night?” Sabrina asked with a tart smile. “Is non-stop sex on the
docket?”

“I’m not going
to give you details,” Lori said, meeting her cousin’s eyes without flinching.
After so long of this sort of thing, she wasn’t even self-conscious anymore.
“So don’t even try to fish for our plans.”

Sabrina
grumbled under her breath as she closed her purse.

* * *

Lori and Ander were leaving the
restaurant after having said goodbye to Sabrina and her date when a woman
waiting for a table called out Ander’s name.

Ander’s face
showed no reaction as the woman—mid-thirties with dark hair and an entitled
expression—came hurrying over on very high heels. Hhis hand was on Lori’s back,
however, and they were walking quite close.

She felt when Ander
stiffened.

“Ander,” the
woman said with a wide grin. “How have you been? It’s been ages!”