Neck & Neck (29 page)

He lay back, pulling her down with him, atop him, then turned their bodies so that Natalie lay on her back and he was on his side, one heavy leg draped over both of hers and his hand open wide over her belly. He kissed her jaw, her cheek, her temple, her forehead, then moved down to her throat, her collarbone, her breast. There, he took his time, flattening his tongue over her nipple before pulling it into his mouth, taunting it with the tip of his tongue and then releasing it to lick it more fully. He covered her other breast with his hand, catching her nipple between the V of his index and middle fingers, squeezing gently and lighting more fires inside her. Natalie spread her legs and lifted her hips and rubbed herself against his thigh, panting at the myriad sensations spiraling through her.

Finn seemed to understand, because after a few more hungry tastes of her breast, he continued his journey downward, this time tasting her navel as he passed it and tracing the skin beneath with his tongue. He pushed open Natalie’s legs to duck his head between them, his tongue taking up where his fingers had left off, moving confidently over her without a single hesitation. He lapped leisurely with the flat of his tongue, then drew sensuous circles with the tip. He grabbed a pillow and shoved it beneath her fanny to lift her higher, parting her lips with his thumbs so that he could lick her more intimately and penetrate her with his tongue. Then he penetrated her with his finger, too, inserting it deep.

Ribbons of pleasure purled through her, starting low in her belly and rippling outward, until her body began to tremble. Sensing how close she was to coming, Finn moved again, this time kneeling before her. He grasped an ankle in each hand and opened her legs wide, then pulled her forward to bury himself
deep
inside her. Hooking her legs over his shoulders, he pulled her body up more, and for long moments jerked himself hard against her, his cock buried in her. Then he lowered their bodies to the mattress, bracing both elbows on each side of her and thrust himself forward again. Over and over, he bucked his hips against hers, going deeper with each new penetration, opening her wider to receive him. She wrapped her fingers tightly around his biceps as he thrust, taking as much of him as she could, until they both cried out with the their explosive completion.

For one long moment, they clung to each other, their bodies quaking with the final remnants of their climax. Then Finn fell to the bed beside Natalie, facedown, one hand draped over her waist, the other arcing over her head.

It was then that her confidence about what she had allowed to happen between them began to slip. Because she realized that what she’d been so sure would only be a physical release had instead been something else entirely. She knew then that one night with Finn would never be enough. She knew he would be leaving in a matter of days. She knew that in a little over a week, he’d be back in Seattle, thousands of miles away.

And she knew that in a little over a week, her life would never be the same again.

RUSSELL LAY AMID THE TANGLE OF SHEETS IN THE king-sized bed and listened to the sound of the shower running in the bathroom on the other side of the hotel suite. He was trying to remember if even he had ever paid for two different hotel rooms in one night and was pretty sure he hadn’t. But he and Amber couldn’t have gone back to the Brown Hotel after closing the bar at Proof on Main, since Max would have been there, and it had been so easy to simply get a room at 21C as the hotel was right above them and certainly in keeping with his standards—i.e., as expensive as he could find. Since he’d never been afforded the luxury of spending money when he was young, he had a lot of making up to do now. Though certainly the spare, contemporary decor washed in the bright light of dawn was the ultimate opposite of the Brown’s dark, sumptuous splendor, it had served his needs quite well.

As had Amber. And, all modesty aside, if her, ah, enthusiasm the night before was any indication, he had served her needs quite well, too.

When she’d sat down across from him at Vincenzo’s, he honestly hadn’t thought the night would end this way. Oh, he’d been certain it would after asking her out at Minxxx, since his modesty in that regard was nonexistent. But once he’d discovered that, outside her natural habitat, Amber’s vivid plumage dulled and molted, he just hadn’t thought he’d be interested. He liked bad girls. Women who wore too much makeup and too little clothing. Women whose morals were easily compromised and whose principles were conveniently forgotten. Or, better still, whose morals
and
principles were enjoyably nonexistent.

Not that Amber was a good girl by any stretch of the imagination, in spite of her clean-scrubbed looks. She did work at Minxxx, after all. And she had checked into a hotel for the sole purpose of having sex with a man she had known a matter of hours and met him in a place like Minxxx. And her sexual appetite had been as voracious as Russell’s own, and as slow to satisfy. Even after that third coupling, they’d wanted more but had had to resort to oral gratification to achieve it.

Never in his life had he enjoyed sex more than he had last night. Not with a stranger. Not with a girlfriend. Not even with his wife.

And yet there was something about Amber that reminded him of Marti just the same. He had no idea why. The two women had absolutely nothing in common. Marti had been tall and willowy, her Mediterranean heritage evident in her olive skin and short black hair and eyes the color of espresso. She’d worn bright colors and lots of . . . stuff . . . with her clothes. Scarves, necklaces, long, dangly earrings. She had laughed loudly and a lot, had never judged anyone, had been the peacekeeper in every situation that grew tense. And once Max had come along, she’d become the quintessential earth mother, wrapping the baby to her body with bright batiks, buying only organic food, breast-feeding in public and turning the tables on anyone who expressed disapproval, asking them in that soft, sweet, conciliatory voice what they could possibly find distasteful about motherhood.

Amber was . . . Well, not the quintessential earth mother, that was for sure. She was small and curvy and pale, es chewing all decoration on her person. She didn’t laugh loudly. She didn’t laugh at all. Oh, there had been smiles and chuckles during the evening they’d spent together, but Amber kept a tight rein on her emotions that she never once eased. And as far as being nonjudgmental or a peacekeeper, she seemed to have strong opinions—particularly about men—and she’d spoken them freely and without fear of reprisal during the hours they had been together before checking into the hotel.

Then again, considering her line of work, Russell supposed her opinion of men would naturally be less than favorable. And, then again . . . again . . . he supposed he did objectify women. Some women, anyway. Like those who worked in strip clubs.

Amber, however, transcended objectification. Although she had behaved predictably in some ways—like landing in bed with him—she hadn’t in others. Her openness and uncompromising opinions and frank way of speaking was a refreshing change from all the cloying yes-people who normally surrounded Russell, telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. Even if he didn’t agree with her about many of her convictions, he’d still enjoyed sparring with her last night. Over the course of the evening, no subject had been taboo. They’d covered politics (hers were considerably more liberal than his), religion (hers borrowed from a variety of belief systems where his was nonexistent), sports (she’d nearly thrown her drink in his face when he told her he thought Mike Krzyzewski was the greatest university basketball coach of all time), art (she liked the Pre-Raphaelites where the only movement he could think of was, um, none of them), and movies (her favorite was Jean Cocteau’s
La Belle et la Bête
where his was
Meet the Fockers
).

But even more troubling than his enjoyment of their time together was the fact that, the more he had looked at her last night—and he’d looked at her a lot last night—the more stunning she’d grown. Truly, stunning. There was something about her quiet beauty that appealed to him even more than the overblown cocktail waitress disguise she wore for work that had drawn his eye in the first place. By the time they’d concluded their dinner at Vincenzo’s—and loaded up nearly a dozen boxes worth of leftovers—he’d stopped seeing her as Amber. In fact, as the evening wore on, he’d stopped calling her by name, since he realized he didn’t know it. Didn’t know her. By the time they’d checked into the hotel, he’d barely been able to remember the woman he’d met at Minxxx.

So why had he checked into the hotel with her, when she wasn’t the woman he’d asked out? And why did he find himself this morning wanting so desperately to know her real name?

He heard the water shut off in the bathroom and rose from the bed to locate his clothing. While he was looking, though, his gaze fell on the little black purse that had fallen to the floor the moment he’d kicked the door shut behind them. He strode over to collect it, and with a cursory glance over his shoulder to see that the bathroom door was still closed, flipped it open. It was so small, he found her driver’s license immediately and pulled it out, quickly and effortlessly memorizing the information upon it before tucking it back inside and closing the purse again.

Virginia Collins. That was her real name. He smiled at the connotation. Who had named her after the virgin queen? Was that the name she went by, or had she or someone else shortened it to a nickname along the way. Ginny? Ginna? Gin? Yes, that last suited her much better. He laughed lightly. Gin Collins. Now
that
was the name of a woman who worked in a cocktail lounge.

Her address indicated she lived in a house, not an apartment, on a street called Southern Parkway, in the 40214 zip code. Shouldn’t be hard to find, he thought. And now that he had her real name, it shouldn’t be difficult to discover other things about her. Normally, he’d assign the task to Finn or one of his other security guys, but not this time. Virginia Collins was a secret Russell wanted to keep to himself for now. He had no idea why. Probably because he’d never asked anyone on his staff to look into the background of any of the other women he’d dated. He’d never cared about the background of any of the other women he’d dated.

And he was also still wondering about that phone call he’d seen her making in the bar, on his phone, when he returned from the hotel check-in the night before.

When he finally approached her, she’d claimed she was only playing Tetris while she waited for him to return, since she didn’t have it on her own phone, but Russell had known she was lying. For one thing, her purse was too small to be holding
any
phone. For another, he didn’t have Tetris on his phone, either. And for a third thing, he’d seen her talking into the phone when he’d reentered the bar, then had stepped out of her view to watch her and see how long the conversation lasted. Only moments before, the two of them had been necking and groping in a secluded booth at the back of the bar. As he’d slipped his hand between her parted legs and fingered her through her wet panties, she’d rubbed her open palm over the length of his cock, and almost in unison, they’d groaned something about getting a room. While Russell went to do just that, Amber—or, rather, Virginia—had made a call to someone, presumably to tell that person she wouldn’t be coming home tonight.

So who might that person have been? A husband? A lover? And what reason had she given for not coming home?

He heard the hair dryer switch on in the bathroom, so he hurriedly pulled on his trousers and shirt, leaving the latter open and ignoring the rest of his attire of the night before. Except for his suit jacket. That he picked up off the floor and reached inside it to retrieve his phone, switching it on. Then he pulled up the last number dialed. A local call, prefix 363, made at 1:54 a.m. He pulled up the Internet and typed the number into a search engine, and wasn’t much surprised to see that the number belonged to one Virginia Collins who lived on Southern Parkway in Louisville.

So Virginia/Ginny/Ginna/Gin—and the more he thought about it, the more she was definitely a Gin—had called home last night to tell someone she wasn’t going to be home until morning. Somehow, Russell didn’t think a husband or lover would have been too keen on hearing such news. A mother probably wouldn’t be, either, unless she was used to that sort of thing from her daughter, in which case, why would the daughter, an adult woman who worked in a strip club, even bother calling home?

But, he thought further, a spiral of something he wasn’t sure he wanted to identify curling up from somewhere deep in his belly, a child—or a child’s caretaker—would need to know if its mother wasn’t going to be home. And unless Amber had given birth when she was negative five, chances were good any child she had wasn’t old enough to fend for itself. So she must have been calling the sitter.

Good God, he thought, looking at the bathroom door into which the most exquisite ass he had ever beheld had disappeared only moments ago. That exquisite ass belonged to a mother. He had bedded someone’s mother last night. Had done unbelievably erotic things to and with a woman who had a child of some age at home. Had received unbelievably erotic gratification from her in return. Such a possibility had never occurred to him.

He waited for what should have been, at best, shock, and, at worst, revulsion, to wind through him. He waited to be appalled by the knowledge that he had aided and abetted in the corruption of a mother.

Then he reminded himself that he and Marti hadn’t stopped having sex just because she’d given birth to their son. On the contrary, after Max’s birth, because they hadn’t had the leisure—or energy—to enjoy sex that they’d had before he was born, their lovemaking had taken on a new, more intense quality that had often been more satisfying than the hours-long lovemaking they had enjoyed as new lyweds. And there had been something about the knowledge that she had nurtured and created a life—albeit with a little help from him—that had provided a new, more powerful dimension to her that had inexplicably turned him on and made him even randier.