Breathless (23 page)

M
ariel had to call Jayne.
Jayne
was no stranger to wild impulsive living, and she’d encouraged Mariel many times to break free. If she dug deep, she would admit to a nugget of jealousy over Jayne’s ability to take what life had to offer.

Danny was exactly one of those things life offered. A couple of weeks earlier, they’d agreed to be exclusive, which was no strain for Mariel. Danny was her perfect lover and a perfect model. Her work on his body improved daily. The theme for the event fit her penchant for landscapes, and even if she said so herself, the Garden of Eden she conjured on Danny’s gorgeous body got better and better.

If only he could arrive on time for their sessions. The competition was three days away and she still wasn’t satisfied with the lines of the river she wanted to flow down his chest. At his thigh, she tried time and again to create a plume of water cascading over rocks into a pool that was actually Danny’s right foot. She’d tried for an entire session last night, but it just wouldn’t match her vision. She remembered Danny tapping his forehead in his workshop. He understood her frustration with vision versus the end result.

They’d come to a perfect understanding, in bed and out.

For the first time in her life, she was in a fulfilling relationship.

If only he could arrive on time for their sessions. Maybe he’d be punctual tonight.

She entered her house through her laundry room at the end of her kitchen. Her renovated kitchen, thanks to Danny. Cherry cabinets, granite countertops, deep drawers, and under cabinet lighting combined to make her cooking area a dream.

If she managed to get through this competition, she might succeed in breaking the bonds of fear that ruled her life. She called Jayne. “I think I’m in love,” she said, when her friend answered.

“Are you crazy?”

“Probably. But Danny’s—”

“A carpenter you
employ
.”

“—so supportive. And creative. I’m very happy with him.”

“Then why are you upset when he doesn’t get there on time?”

“I don’t know. My head says traffic’s murderous at that part of the day. My head says there are times he needs to do estimates for jobs. He has to be available when potential clients want to meet. I’m being unreasonable. I know that. But still, I can’t get it out of my heart that maybe his being late is a kind of sabotage.”

“You mean the way your family sabotaged you?”

She closed her eyes, held the phone tight, and nodded. “Yes, sort of.”

“Have you explained this to Danny?”

“Not exactly. I told him how they browbeat me into teaching and never believed in my art. He knows my parents refused to buy me art supplies.”

“Does he apologize for being late?”

“Yes, he says he understands that I let my confidence waver when I’m away from the work.”

“This being aggravated with Danny is a symptom of your own reaction to stress.”

“You’re right. And teaching’s getting to me. I hate being there, and my students have noticed. I’m turning into one of those bitter teachers who wants to be anywhere else but in the classroom.”

“Ugh. I hated those teachers.”

“And I hate that I’ve become one!”

“Why not withdraw from the competition? Would the world come to an end? Would you stop painting?”

She’d wondered the same thing all day. “Quitting now is not the answer.” She couldn’t imagine never painting again. “I would still be a frustrated, bitter teacher, and that’s not helpful to anyone, least of all my students.” Not to mention her self-esteem.

Danny walked in. She waved to him while she gave Jayne a quick good-bye and hung up. “You’re here and on time! Thank you.” She walked into his arms for a deep kiss. As always, his cock rose between them. She laughed and cupped him. “Way to say hello, big man.”

He slid his hands to cup her breasts and fondled her in appreciation. “After holding a hammer all day, these feel soft as pillows.”

She laughed and danced out of reach. “Not tonight. I’m still fretting over that waterfall.”

The night before, Danny had stayed still as stone while Mariel worked on the rocks by his thigh. The brush strokes had felt intoxicating, and seeing her lively lovely focus, he’d been almost ashamed to have his cock rise and break her concentration.

She’d ignored the tip of his cock peeking up out of the thong for a good fifteen minutes while her breath fanned out across his upper thigh. She took her interest in detail to the extreme, and he’d been suggesting for over a week that she lighten up. To his mind, a body art competition was about the overall effect, not the minutiae she seemed to get caught up in.

She never listened, though. In fact, Mariel seemed tighter and tighter every day.

His cock had stayed hard for her. How could it not? Her wet lips were mere inches away, and every few moments, the pink tip of her tongue would come out and lick her lips. His balls contracted every time he saw her tongue, until finally, he couldn’t help shifting an inch just as she tried for a shadow by the waterfall.

She looked up, her eyes filled with pique. “You made me mess up. Can’t you wait?”

“I am waiting. Don’t you think longer, less detailed lines would work? How about some mist as the water sprays over the rocks?”

“No, that won’t look right. That’s not what I see.”

“I’ve never seen a waterfall without mist.”

She settled on her haunches and glared up at him. “Fine!” Then she pulled his thong down and attacked his cock like a starving woman. He loved the deep, rhythmic strokes, the way the fine edge of her teeth scraped the underside of his shaft. She gave his balls a firm squeezing and pumped her head up and down while she fluttered her tongue around his ridge.

He groaned when he saw her fingers slide under her smock. Her knees spread wide so she could work herself. He imagined her firm clit standing on end, her fingers trailing juice from her slit to her clit.

Her mouth worked him faster, harder, and he pumped gently, fucking her mouth and throat with delicate precision. He knew her so much better now, that he could feel when he was deep as she could take.

She was angry again. The tension in her strokes, in the way her hand worked under her smock. She groaned, but the quality of the sound was all wrong.

He heard frustration and heartbreak in the sounds she made. Her frantic movements were beyond sexual need.

Danny stepped off the stool, pulling his cock free of her mouth. She cried out and kept working her pussy. “I need—Help me!” She fell back on the floor and he covered her with his body, oblivious to the paint smearing across her smock.

He gathered her close and crooned in her ear, while she sobbed in wretched gasps. “Baby, baby, it’s all right. You’re fine, you’ll do fine. You’ll be great. Slow down, now. Just slow…” She sniffed and her stiff body responded to his comforting croons. “Let me love you. Let me be gentle and take you there.”

She sniffed and nodded, while he settled his head between her thighs. When he looked at her beautiful pussy, the full, plump labia, the darker slit that opened at first touch of his tongue, his heart melted in sympathy. She used sex to work through her anxiety, but even that failed her this time. He’d do anything, be anything she needed, but he wasn’t sure she understood how much he cared.

He wanted to tell her where his heart was headed, but she was in no kind of head space to hear it. No one under this kind of pressure needed more.

He kissed her folds softly, let her feel his delicate touch, his gentle, swirling tongue. She sniffled, tense and too upset to respond. He slowed to calm and ease her with his lips and tongue. He pressed on her low belly gently to steady her, letting his touch warm her through. She quieted after a moment.

Her clit receded, her thighs relaxed while he took her down from the angry place she’d been. Once she eased back to pliable and soft again, he crawled up her body for slow, deep kisses. She sighed into his mouth and accepted his comfort.

He had his lover back, the wonderfully giving woman he loved. This was his Mariel.

Slowly, carefully, he used what he’d learned about her to build her need to a peak before he settled his mouth on her again. This time, when his tongue delved into her, she creamed for him. When he suckled ever so gently on her clit she moaned for him. When he pumped his fingers in and out of her, she bucked and wept as she came.

He kept his raging hard-on away from her, determined to keep this about Mariel’s needs, not his own.

For the first time, he held her instead of taking his own relief. He carried her to her bed, then showered. She’d had all the comfort he could give her, and when he checked on her after his shower, he found her asleep.

They hadn’t spoken of those moments afterward. But today, he read anxiety in her jerky movements again.

“I’ll take a shower first, Mariel. Take the edge off, so to speak. I want to get through this session without a hard-on, if you can get through tonight without getting angry.”

She flushed. “I’m sorry, I just get so damn wired.” She kissed his chin, his nose, then his lips, lightly. “Thank you for last night.”

“No thanks needed. I live to serve.”

The night before the competition, Danny loved her to the point of exhaustion for both of them, but it hadn’t done any good. She’d dreamed over and over again about that day in Nigel Withers’s gallery.

She walked in with her portfolio under her arm, murmuring a thank you to the man who was leaving when he held the door open for her. The man who walked away without a backward glance. The man who looked like Danny.

She turned and watched as he strode away, his burnished brown hair and broad shoulders receding into the distance while her heart turned to shards of pain. She loved Danny and he had left her here alone. Once Danny disappeared, she saw Withers inside the door, his expression impatient. His sparse mustache twitched.

He was busy, he said without speaking. Too busy to see yet another artist without an appointment. The words echoed in her head while her heart pounded. She had tried over and over to book a time, she explained, but he’d refused her calls.

If she didn’t already have a name in the art world, he was unavailable. Until he looked at her. She wore the clothes she’d worn to tempt Danny.

Her blood heated when she looked down and saw the tight black skirt and purple camisole. Withers’s white, narrow hand tugged her skirt up to expose her pubic hair. Then he turned her so he could see the cheeks of her ass, which he palmed and squeezed. When a finger extended into her pussy and shoved in hard, she opened her legs and took it. He slid his finger in and out until her body betrayed her and moistened as his finger pumped faster.

Withers expressed no sound, made no comment while he showed passersby on the street how easily he manipulated her. She held her portfolio open, but he refused to look at her work while his finger pumped roughly, his thick knuckle swirling and plunging to make her wetter and wetter.

He stepped away and, still without speaking, swept his hand to point the way through a doorway that opened into a pitch-black space.

When she walked through the door a light overhead came on to reveal a table with a pillow at one end. The table was spotlighted by a yellow glow.

Withers never spoke, not a word, but she understood she had to lie on the table. Her landscapes littered the floor now and Withers walked across them, unseeing and uncaring. Her life’s work lay under his feet and he refused to look.

No, look! Please
.

His hand entered the glow of light and motioned her to take her place on the table.

She did, but she kept her head turned toward her scattered landscapes abandoned on the floor.

Leather-clad hands opened her legs. Her wet pussy twitched with the cool air. Strangers’ hands hiked her hem to her waist, while others pulled her top up to expose her breasts.

The table was surrounded by men. Men wearing tight black leather gloves. Men whose faces she couldn’t see, but whose hands stroked and plucked at her nipples and the soft flesh of her inner thighs. She wanted to rise, but the sensations were crowding her, the hands touching her in too many places, swamping her.

She wasn’t bound by anything but her fear and sexual need. She felt more moisture gather in her pussy and behind her eyes. Her belly felt the feather light wisps of breath as the men leaned over her to scent her entire body. They murmured approval, but the words were lost in the cavernous dark.

Fingers skimmed her pubis, lightly, lightly, until she was driven to the point of madness for a real touch, a real caress. Even Withers’s rough finger work would help, but she couldn’t see him now.

All she had in her world were silent men with gloved fingers in the dark. She arched toward the brushing fingers and the men clapped, slowly, in ponderous time to see her arch and moan. They enjoyed seeing her arousal, and their enjoyment tormented and teased.

Withers appeared at the end of the table, by her feet. His face was the only one that showed in the glowing yellow light. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips and his trim black mustache. He flicked the tip of his tongue toward her pussy in time to the rise and fall of her chest. His tongue was not lewdly fast, but slow, like a lover’s laving.

She thrashed on the table when she saw him nod his approval at the sight of her wet, creamy slit. The leather gloves were gone now, and she could feel soft palms and naked fingers. The men who surrounded the table pulled on her thighs to open her legs wide. Other hands wedged under her ass to hold her crease open to their view. She felt exposed, vulnerable, but needy and sexually open to all of them. Her belly clenched in need, and one of them saw and rubbed her there in a deep massage that reached her womb. She gasped at the heavy hand and needed more, lower.

Instead, he kept the pressure on her low belly and refused to cover her distended clit. A man on each side clasped her legs and bent them to split her wider. Nothing was hidden. Her stiff clit was exposed and her folds opened to their view. Moisture slid from her pussy to the table, wetting her completely.