By Appointment Only (22 page)

He wanted her to speak, to say anything. But she kept up the slow, silent attack. Now she was at his throat, his neck. The tip of her finger traced the shell of his ear, delved deep to thrust inside.

“Hannah.” Her name rasped from his throat in a moaning plea for mercy.

She ignored him. Now he felt her touch on his face, moving carefully around the blindfold, measuring his cheekbones with her thumbs, toying with his chin. She didn’t force lotion in his mouth, but she tugged his lips apart, and he felt the brush of her tongue against his.

He responded wildly with a surge of adrenaline, trying to suck her tongue, but already she was gone. Helpless anger and frustration washed over him, but he couldn’t hold on to them, because now she was doing something to his arms.

He felt a weird tickle and then bit down on a cry when he placed the odd sensation. She was touching the sensitive flesh of his underarm with a feather.

“Hannah.” He said her name again. “Let me go,” he said urgently. He was afraid suddenly, afraid he wouldn’t be able to withstand her erotic torments indefinitely. “Let me go, baby. Let me love you.”

Her silence was complete. He couldn’t even hear her breathing. The damned feather moved slowly, retracing the path her fingers had taken with the lotion. Lust swelled and tightened in his loins, making him weak and dizzy.

Every inch of his skin was sensitized. When he thought he couldn’t bear it a second longer, she arrived back at his feet and finally ceased her torture.

And then he heard the rasp of a match and smelled smoke. A new odor permeated the room, even apart from the acrid aroma. She must have a candle. Something musky and heavy with Middle Eastern overtones.

Hallelujah. Maybe she was setting the stage for some romantic lovemaking. And then he jerked in shock when he felt hot wax on his nipples.

“Holy hell.” The exclamation ripped from his throat. It shocked him more than anything. The sensation cooled quickly. But she repeated it on his feet, his knees. And then he got a bad feeling. “Jesus, Hannah. No.”

Sharp stings dribbled over his balls, and he shrank back instinctively, trying to escape the possibility that his manhood might be permanently damaged. For the first time he heard her laugh softly, and the wicked, sensual satisfaction in the low chuckle made the hair on his body stand up. He was one fucked-up dude.

She didn’t plan to release him anytime soon.

Thank God she stopped short of his prick with the hot wax business. He sensed her move away, and the smoke smell grew stronger, so he thought she had blown out the candle. Or he hoped she had. He strained his ears, listening for a clue, any clue at all.

He sucked in a breath when he felt warm, feminine flesh from his chest to his knees. She was snuggling up against him, pressing all her delightful body parts to his. He would have whimpered if it wouldn’t have been an unmanly thing to do.

His arms tugged futilely at their bindings. He wanted to hold her, damn it. He wanted to cup her ass and caress her tits and rub between her legs until she writhed and begged him for mercy.

He almost cried when she left him.

It was impossible to gauge time. How much of their two hours had passed?

It startled him when he felt something at his mouth and realized it was a bottle of water. He drank gratefully, not comprehending until that exact moment how dry his mouth was. Moments later the water bottle was gone, and then he felt cool liquid dribbling over his aching cock.

The sensation was indescribable. She hadn’t touched his prick at all, not even one accidental graze. And now the water on his tight skin both soothed and pained him.

He felt the drops fall onto his thighs and run down his legs. Then a soft towel blotted up the excess. But not from his most intimate flesh.

For long moments nothing happened. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. If he tried really hard, he thought he could detect faint noises outside the room, but it might have been his imagination.

Music filtered into the room. It dawned on him that Hannah was responsible. It was a jazz CD, one they had made love to on several occasions. His pulse skipped a beat and his anticipation grew.

He bit back a howl of shocked pleasure when he felt the feather tease his balls again and then move to his shaft. She touched him so lightly it was almost as if he were imagining the contact.

He shifted his feet uneasily, unclear as to whether he wanted to lean in to the featherlight strokes or back away. But before he could decide, the game changed. A sharp prick on his cock made him flinch. She was using the opposite end of the feather now, and he felt it trespass ever so gently into the opening at the head of his cock.

He groaned and shuddered. It was too much. He’d concentrated fiercely on holding back his inevitable orgasm, but now the terrible stimulation raked him with shivers of need. He moved restlessly. The teasing feather followed. Hannah scraped at his balls, retreated to his nipples momentarily, and came back to the swollen, sensitive head of his cock.

He craved her hands on him. “Please,” he muttered, his masculine pride long since consigned to the dust. “Please, Hannah.”

The wicked little pricks and scrapes ceased. Silence reigned but for the low, sensual notes of music stealing into his head and making his lust grow and deepen.

He heard something being dragged across the floor. But the noise made no sense. A hard object bumped his shins. Hannah murmured an apology. And then he bit out a curse when he felt her sex brush his groin.
What the hell?
She was standing on something, a chair maybe?

Her hands landed on his shoulders and her legs bracketed his waist just as she lowered herself onto his erection. The excruciating pleasure paralyzed him for a moment. He held his breath, deathly afraid she would move away. That she was only playing with him.

But the tight, slick caress of her body remained, enclosing his pulsing shaft in heat and bliss. His hips thrust wildly, and her nails dug into his shoulders. “Don’t move.” The words were a breathless hiss. “Stay perfectly still. I’ll do all the work.”

It was agony to obey. He clenched his fingers around the post and braced his feet. Somehow, her legs wrapped around him and she lifted and lowered herself on his cock. The sensation, the knife-edged jolt of fire tearing him in half, increased. He was gasping for breath, the muscles in his arms strained beyond endurance.

Her sex milked him steadily. Her unorthodox position made hard thrusts impossible, even if he had been allowed to participate. She rode him slowly, grinding down on him to increase her own pleasure.

Even without the blindfold, he would have been blind with the red haze of insanity. Even with the desultory pace of her movements, his climax threatened. “I’m gonna come,” he muttered.

She froze. “No.” It was unequivocal.

He sucked in deep breaths, trying to ignore the urge to shoot off. He doubted his ability to obey any longer. When she started to move again, sweat dripped into his eyes, causing the blindfold to stick to his face.

He could feel her breasts mashed to his chest. In his mind, he pictured her, nude and lascivious in her carnal attack. He wanted desperately to regain his sight, even more than he wanted to touch her.

She bit his ear and he jerked, driving his cock an inch deeper. His hips moved in a primal rhythm and she chided him. “None of that,” she taunted. “I’ll do this.”

His head dropped back against the post and his chest heaved. He would never survive.

But then it got worse.

She disengaged their bodies, and he heard her ragged breathing. “Sorry,” she muttered. “This position is impossible.”

He felt her move away, and then the bed behind him moved slightly. “What are you doing?” he asked, his words husky, his throat raw.

She didn’t answer. Moments later, he heard the unmistakable sounds of a woman playing with herself, sliding her fingers over slick, wet flesh, moaning with pleasure, crying out in feverish joy when her hips arched off the sheets and she came with a long, moaning cry.

He hung there in shock, his wrists and his emotions numb. No way. No fucking way.

He ground his teeth, almost doubled over with the pain of his abrupt inability to climax. “Hannah. God, honey. Help me.”

He waited for her to come back, to mount him, to finish what they had started.

But she was always two steps ahead of him in this impossible-to-predict, endlessly long, incredibly frustrating miscarriage of sexual justice.

The water bottle came to his lips again and he spat it away. “Untie me. Now. I’ve had enough.”

She didn’t answer him. His blood pressure notched into the danger zone. “Hannah.” He tried for a cajoling tone, but it sounded more like a humble entreaty.

Then he felt slim singers close around his cock. His heart lodged in his throat. Oh shit, not like this. But his wishes didn’t amount to a hill of beans, and his traitorous dick was giving an enthusiastic
yes
to the new plan. Anything was better than nothing.

Hannah knew what he liked. And she was damned good at it. His eyeballs rolled back in his head, his entire body went catatonic, and then he gave a hoarse shout and jetted his release into her warm, caressing palm.

He lost a few chunks of time after that. Nothing so dramatic as losing consciousness. Merely a sort of out-of-body experience that made him completely unaware of what his devious fiancée might be doing.

The noise of the paper shredder brought him back to reality. It was a shock to feel his wrists being untied. Instinctively, impatiently, as soon as he was free, he lifted a hand to the blindfold and ripped it loose.

He was shocked by what he saw. Hannah was fully dressed. She was sitting in a chair, watching him with dark, wary eyes. No one examining her demeanor would ever have believed her capable of planning what had recently transpired in this room. He felt uncomfortabe in his nudity, so he turned away suddenly and reached for his clothes, donning them with clumsy haste and tucking in his shirt.

When he was back to normal, socks, shoes, and all, he glanced at his watch. They had eight minutes left. He raised an eyebrow. “Cutting it kind of close, weren’t you?”

She lifted an eyebrow, her grin smug. “Are you complaining?”

He considered the question for a moment. “Hell, no,” he said, theatrically rubbing his wrists. “I enjoy a little bondage and torture as much as the next guy.”

He stalked toward her, enjoying the moment when her eyes flared wide and feminine outrage brought her to her feet. “Don’t try intimidating me with your big self,” she whispered, coming up on tiptoe to align their mouths.

He caught her close, holding her tightly and stroking his hands over her back. It felt so good he wanted to groan aloud, but he contented himself with cupping her ass and nibbling her lips. “I’m too scared of you to try,” he teased, moving his tongue lazily on hers.

She trembled in his arms. His gut said to scoop her up and carry her back to the bed. But they were down to four minutes. He checked.

He let her go reluctantly. She picked up her roomy tote bag as they prepared to leave the room. The woman could carry all sorts of scary things in there. But was one of them a marriage license? Or was that particular piece of paper at the bottom of the trash can? He had a hunch she had shredded the other.

The divorce decree had merely been a smoke screen . . . a gentle dig by the good doctors to test Hannah’s resolve. No one really thought she and Morgan would end up divorced.

The question was—would he and Hannah ever get married to begin with?

He followed her into the reception area and almost lurched to a halt when an uneasy thought occurred to him. What kind of answers had Hannah filled in on the last questionnaire that could have prompted this afternoon’s scenario? It boggled the mind.

They spent longer than usual on today’s postsession assignment. Hannah was concentrating fiercely, her brow furrowed, as she bubbled in choices and wrote in answers. His own paper was straightforward. All of the choices were easy and, in fact, almost automatic.

He was a man who had known from the beginning what he wanted and how to get it. The fact that it was taking longer than he might have liked was irrelevant.

Hannah loved him. He knew it in his bones. All he had to do was wait her out and everything would be fine.

Wednesday, the city sweltered in the grip of an aura of excited dread. The bad weather threatening off the east coast of the state had been upgraded to a tropical storm. Her name was Constance.

And Constance was making life miserable for a lot of people.

Hannah knew that all three retirement centers where she worked were top-notch and would take good care of her elderly clients. But still she felt responsible for their mental and emotional well-being.

So she worked flat-out all day, trying to make at least minimal contact with every person in her database. It was a frustrating task, not because of traffic or the frantic weather reports or even the crowds at the supermarket. But because each of her charges in one way or another was anxious and more than normally verbose.

Some worried about family members elsewhere in the state. A few fretted because their prescription medications were running low. Hannah was able to help with the second concern, but getting in touch with relatives who couldn’t be bothered to pick up a phone made her furious.

People who were fortunate enough to have grandparents and great-grandparents and yet didn’t appreciate them ought to be smacked. Maybe that would drill some sense into them. But then again, maybe not. Human nature was to take blessings for granted.

Elda didn’t ask for anything out of the ordinary when Hannah stopped by late in the afternoon. But she was concerned. She drew Hannah into her warm, fragrant kitchen and pressed her into a chair at the table. “Here,” she said, holding out a plate. “Eat a cookie. And then promise me you’re about to go home and get your own place ready. I don’t like you out driving in this mess.”