On the Steamy Side (25 page)

He wanted her exactly like this, transported and uninhibited, gloriously selfish in her pursuit of her own elusive pleasure.

His shaft still outside her body, yet sliding smoothly in her cleft, she ground down on him in a circular motion that made a series of husky groans spill from her throat and tremors shake her thighs. She hung there, suspended, and Devon encircled her back with his arms and pressed her down hard while thrusting up with all his strength.

One last pass of his painfully hard prick through the searing softness of her, and he exploded between them in jets of white.

Lilah was like warm cream against him, all limp and pliant in the aftermath. Devon’s back started to hurt where his spine had been ground into the floor, and if they didn’t get up soon they were going to end up glued together, but he couldn’t seem to make himself care.

After long moments of doing nothing more than passing breath back and forth and tracking the slowing of their heartbeats, Lilah shifted and sat up.

Unsure of what he’d see on her expressive face, Devon folded his arms behind his head and schooled his expression to simple satisfaction.

She gazed down at him, the picture of heavy-lidded sensuality.

“Well. I certainly never did it that way before.”

“What way? On the floor or without actual penetration?”

“Both,” she clarified, without a trace of a blush. Devon smiled. He’d fucked the blush right out of her.

“Did you like it?”

“I did.” She looked thoughtful. “I don’t know what you’ve got against a bed, though. Too conventional for you?”

“Next time,” he promised her.

“Oh-ho, so you think there’s going to be a next time, do you?” Lilah said, grinning down at him. She appeared perfectly comfortable nude and smeared with the evidence of Devon’s passion.

Devon admitted to himself that he could easily get addicted to the sight.

“There’ll be a next time,” he said. “I’ve got proximity and your sense of adventure on my side.”

“Mmm,” she purred, drooping against him. “I like that. Adventure. You know, you’re probably the only person in the world who sees me like that. Or sees it as a good thing.”

“Maybe I’m the only one who stands to benefit directly from it.”

“Oooh, standing,” she said, sounding delighted. “Let’s try it that way next.” Devon groaned, but his cock lengthened and gave a twitch of interest. “Christ. I’ve created a monster.” Lilah leveled him with a pointed stare. It was very effective in the nude. “You created nothing. And don’t swear.”

“All right, all right. Geez. Bossy,” Devon grumbled, but there was a warm glow of pleasure in his chest.

“That’s my job,” she said.

Devon tried not to tense, wondering if she’d remember her previous objections to her nanny job translating into sex with Devon.

He brazened it out. “So what do you think? Like this job any better than the last one? I imagine the perks are incomparable.” It was surprisingly hard to dredge up a cocky, careless grin.

He relaxed when he felt her snort against his shoulder. “Bless your little heart. Your ego trip is a bumpy one, isn’t it?”

“Not usually,” Devon confessed. “Mostly it’s a pretty smooth ride. Lately, though, with Market . . . And Tucker, too . . .”

Lilah clucked soothingly, like a mother hen. Devon wanted to mock her, but found himself unreasonably soothed by it, so he didn’t.

For once uninterested in talking about himself, Devon said, “You want to take this to the bed? I think we can make it now.”

“My knees are starting to get a little sore,” Lilah agreed.

They hauled their weary, well-used bodies up off the floor and fell into Lilah’s bed. Devon stretched like a cat against the bazillion-thread-count sheets and congratulated himself again on reaching a level of success where Egyptian cotton against his skin was a normal, everyday occurrence.

With gentle persistence, Lilah curled herself into his side and said, “Do you want to talk about Tucker?

We never did manage to have that discussion about how he should be spending his time.” Devon froze. She wanted him to participate in the planning, take some responsibility. He understood that, but the idea of it terrified him. He was bound to fuck it up. “Not really. I agreed to hang out with you two. Can’t we figure it out as we go?”

“Sure. That’s good enough for me,” Lilah said, although her tone indicated something more along the lines of “For now.”

Devon decided to take what he could get. Seeking a change of subject that would be sufficiently distracting to get Lilah off his back about Tucker and other tricky topics, Devon said, “So tell me about this mythical Aunt Bertie you’re always talking about.”

“Aunt Bertie. What can I say about her? She and Uncle Roy took me in when I was a baby. My mother, her sister, got in trouble with the high school quarterback. He ran off before I was born, and my mother had me, dumped me with Bertie, who was already married and settled, and took off after him.

For all I know, they’re living happily ever after in Timbuktu.”

“Jesus,” Devon said, shocked despite himself. “Oh, come on, don’t give me the eyes. That’s definitely worth a little blasphemy. I’m sorry that happened to you, Lilah Jane.”

“I’m not,” she said stoutly. There was no hesitation in her voice or regret in her clear green eyes. “I was better off. Aunt Bertie and Uncle Roy raised me, along with a pack of cousins, on their farm. Everything I know about cooking, human nature, life in general, is due to my Aunt Bertie.”

“You miss her,” he said, a sinking feeling dragging at his guts. He didn’t want to examine it.

“Of course I do,” Lilah said. Then she sighed. “Well, I do and I don’t. Aunt Bertie is a . . . fairly forceful personality. My uncle cal s her Hurricane Bertie. She’s one of those people who knows exactly the right thing to do in every situation—and always does it.”

“Not very comfortable to live with.”

“Not all the time, no. I got pretty good at it, though.”

She fell silent and Devon rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling, contemplating this new information. Whatever Lilah wanted him to believe—hell, whatever she believed herself—he could read between the lines about that childhood in Virginia.

In a small town like that? Her mother’s fall from grace would’ve been a scandal that dogged Lilah’s footsteps everywhere she went. And life with Aunt Bertie and her brood . . . Devon felt a sudden, swift tug of kinship for the lonely little girl who didn’t quite fit in, but wanted to, so badly that she ruthlessly suppressed her desire for excitement, passion, adventure, to live the safe, normal life her mother couldn’t.

And he thought he understood a little better why Lilah was so quick to jump in when it looked like Devon was about to let Tucker go.

Lilah was falling asleep; her body rested more heavily against him with every passing moment. He urged her closer with an arm wrapped around her shoulders and didn’t question his desire to stay awake, in spite of his exhaustion, and watch over her rest.

Just before she dropped off, she turned her face into his neck and muttered, “Tomorrow. Gonna catch fireflies.”

Devon smiled. One more mystery to ponder before sleep took him.

Lilah was speaking quite literally when she said they’d catch fireflies.

It was on her list of Things to Do with Tucker to Make Devon Realize He’d Be a Great Dad. The list was long; she was proud of it.

On Monday, they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an hour in the afternoon. Tucker was very interested in the paintings, although he pointed and snickered at the nude sculptures.

“Which painting do you like best in this room?” Lilah asked.

Cocking his head to one side, Tucker took the question seriously. “This one.” It was a gory scene, two men on horseback being attacked by tigers. Lilah wasn’t terribly surprised by the subject matter he chose; what surprised her was the reason he gave: “The leopard, the dead one in the front, with the tongue going like this?” He demonstrated, unnecessarily. “I like how real it looks.

Like you can see every hair in its tail.”

“That’s quite an observation,” she said, impressed. She looked more closely. The painting was a Rubens. Tucker had good taste.

Devon cleared his throat. “You like art, huh? I’ve seen you drawing in that notebook.” Tucker shrugged. “Yeah, I like it. We started learning how to draw some cool stuff last year in art class.” A frisson of excitement raised the hairs on Lilah’s arms. They were talking! They were having a moment!

Hoping to gently encourage it, she said, “What do you think you’ll learn next year?” Tucker shrugged again and turned away from the painting. “Nothing. We don’t get to have art next year.”

“Why not?” Devon asked.

Tucker scrunched up his face. “Ms. Donaldson, the art teacher? We had a big party for her at the end of the year because she had to go away. But there’s not going to be a new teacher, they said. So we can’t have class.”

As they moved on to the next room, Lilah noticed Devon’s drawn brows.

“Same story all over,” Lilah said. “Public schools are losing funding for arts programs.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” Devon said. “Where else are kids going to start figuring out what they like to do? I took home ec in high school to piss off my dad, but it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. I found cooking and knew I could be good enough at it to get out of Trenton. I can’t imagine any other way I would’ve figured that out.”

“Believe me, I know. I loved teaching drama—those bright, young faces all eager to explore the possibilities. For some of those county kids, practicing a scene in my class was the closest they’d ever come to seeing what else is out there in the wide world. But the school levy failed, cuts had to be made, and of course, the theater and art departments were the first things to go.”

“And just like that, the job and the future you thought were so secure were ripped away,” Devon said with one of his sudden bursts of insight.

“Not to be trite, but I do believe things happen for a reason. If I hadn’t been let go by the school district, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

It was easy to be philosophical, Lilah found, when the handsomest man in the room was staring down at her with something perilously close to affection on his face.

“You’d still be Lolly, not my Lilah Jane.” Devon smiled, the real smile he didn’t wear on television or to get his way or to hide what he was truly feeling. It was small, a little lopsided quirk of the mouth, and it made Lilah want to drag him behind the nearest marble sculpture and kiss him breathless.

Instead, they followed Tucker around the rest of the European Paintings gallery before hitting the museum shop, where Devon spent a small fortune on art supplies for Tucker.

Lilah shook her head, but she recognized gift-giving was Devon’s comfort zone with his son. She let it go and steered them both around the back of the building and into Central Park.

The late summer days were getting shorter, and just as Lilah had hoped, even at four o’clock in the afternoon, the Sheep Meadow flickered with elusive lightning bugs. Not many, and it was hard to see them before true dusk fell, but Devon had to get to the restaurant in half an hour.

Tucker gaped at the insects like he’d never seen fireflies before, then leaped after them like a young gazelle.

Devon and Lilah sat on the grass and watched for a while in contented silence before Devon headed off to work, and Lilah gathered up her sweaty, red-faced charge and dragged him back to the apartment for a bath.

When he was clean again, she stuffed Tucker’s new art supplies in his backpack and got Paolo to drive them to Market.

Devon didn’t look particularly surprised or pleased to see them, but he didn’t throw them out, either, so Lilah counted it as a win. She let Tucker say hello to Frankie, to whom he’d taken a disconcerting liking. Then, since Violet was already done for the night, Lilah installed Tucker at the back pastry table with his notebook and colored pencils.

She sat with him awhile, chatted with Grant when he had a second, and just generally tried not to be in the way. When Tucker started to frown and squint at the paper, running his hands through his hair the exact same way his dad did, Lilah packed up their things and carried him back to the apartment.

Devon took a moment to wave good-bye from his place up at the pass. Lilah’s smile was so wide her cheeks hurt by the time they got home.

Hours later, when Devon walked in the door, he came straight to Lilah’s room. She had waited up for him reading one of her New York City guidebooks—pretty soon she’d be able to give guided tours herself—and wearing the blue pajamas.

His eyes flared with heat when he saw her propped up in her bed, glasses on her nose. She’d toyed with the idea of waiting for him in something sexier (which she didn’t really own) or maybe undies, or even naked, but now she was glad she’d decided not to put on airs. Or lingerie.

That look on his handsome face, and the way he touched her through the thin, soft cotton—Lilah threw her head back on a gasp, vowing to wash those PJs and wear them every single night.

Devon kissed her, and slid his hands down her body, and Lilah melted under the attention like ice cream left out in the sun. And when it was over, he stayed with her until she fell asleep.

That day set the pattern for the next few days. On Tuesday, they took Tucker up to the top of the Empire State Building. Wednesday and Thursday were reserved for the American Museum of Natural History, because it was too huge and too enticing for Tucker to rush through. The planetarium show was an especially big hit.

Every evening, Lilah and Tucker hopped into the big black chauffeured car and headed to Market for family meal with the restaurant crew.

At first, Devon mostly observed as his brigade took breaks to joke with Tucker (Frankie) or show off their knife skills (Milo, who could carve the most marvelous shapes out of vegetables) or let Tucker stir something on the stove (Quentin, whose quiet, easy manner with the boy made Lilah smile).

But as time went on, Devon started jumping in. He’d throw a careless remark Tucker’s way, or hold out his hand for a high-five as he passed by. Because Tucker tended to watch his father covertly and constantly, he always responded instantly, which had Devon grinning like a fool.