Call Me Irresistible (22 page)

“Good point.” He dropped the T-shirt.

Before she knew it, they were on the lumpy futon and he was kissing her again. His hands curled around the bare cheeks of her bottom, and a thumb slid into the top of the silky floss that rode in her crack. “I pretty much enjoy it all when it comes to sex.” His erection pressed hard against her leg. “You be sure to let me know if I do anything that scares you.”

The blood supply that normally fed her brain had surged to other parts of her body, so she had no idea whether he was putting her on or not. “You worry about yourself” was the best she could do.

He played with the floss for a long, heated moment, then withdrew his thumb to drag it over her dragon tattoo. Although she loved the fantasy of having a man slowly undress her, she’d never known one of them who did it really well, and she wasn’t giving Ted a chance to be the first. Sitting up on the narrow space beside him, she leaned back on her heels and pulled her T-shirt over her head.

In the age of silicone-enhanced breasts, hers weren’t particularly memorable, but Ted was too much of a gentleman to criticize. He paid attention, but he didn’t make any clumsy grabs. Instead, he curled his fingers around her rib cage, pulled himself up using only his spectacular abs, and bestowed a slow trail of kisses across her midriff.

Her skin pebbled. It was time to get serious. She was naked except for her thong, but he still wore his khaki shorts along with whatever was or wasn’t underneath. She tugged the fastener to find out.

“Not yet,” he whispered, pulling her down next to him. “Let’s get you warmed up first.”

Warmed up? She was ready to ignite!

He rolled to his side and offered her body his complete attention. His gaze lingered on the hollow at the base of her throat. The curve of her breast. The pucker of her nipple. The patch of ivory lace below her belly. But he didn’t touch any of it. Any of her.

She arched her back, inviting him to get to it before she went up in flames. He dipped his head toward her breast. She closed her eyes in anticipation only to feel his teeth nip at her shoulder. Had the man never studied basic female anatomy?

It went on like that for a while. He investigated the sensitive spot at the inside of her elbow, the pulse point at her wrist, and the bottom curve of her breast. But only the bottom curve. By the time he touched the soft skin of her inner thigh, she was quivering with desire and fed up with his torture. But when she rolled over to take control, he shifted his weight, deepened his kisses, and somehow she was once again at his mercy. How could a man who’d gone four months without sex be so restrained? It was as if he weren’t human. As if he’d used his genius inventor skills to create some kind of sexual avatar.

With the world’s largest erection.

The exquisite torture went on, his caresses never quite reaching where she so desperately needed them to be. She tried not to moan, but the sounds slipped out. This was his revenge. He was going to foreplay her to death.

She didn’t realize she’d reached for herself until he caught her hand. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

“Allow it?” With lust-fueled strength, she twisted out from under him, threw one leg across his hips, and yanked at the snap on his shorts. “Put up or shut up.”

He trapped her wrists. “These stay on until I take them off.”

“Why? Are you afraid I’ll laugh?”

His thick hair was rumpled from where she must have dug her fingers into it, his bottom lip a little swollen from where she might possibly have bitten it, his expression vaguely regretful. “I didn’t want to have to do this yet, but you’re leaving me no choice.” He flipped her beneath him, pinioning her with his body, fastened his mouth on her nipple, and delivered the perfect suction, just this side of pain. At the same time, he slipped a finger under the thin strip of lace between her legs and then inside her. She groaned, pulled her heels high on the bed, and shattered.

As she lay helpless in the aftermath, his lips brushed her earlobe. “I thought you’d have a little more self-control. But I guess you did your best.” She was dimly aware of a tug at her lace chastity belt, then the slide of his body down over hers. He caught her legs and parted them wide. His beard stubble brushed the inside of her thighs. And then his mouth covered her.

A second cataclysmic explosion claimed her, but even then he didn’t enter her. Instead, he tortured, comforted, tortured again. By the time her third orgasm hit, she’d become his sexual rag doll.

He was finally naked, and when he entered her, he did it slowly, giving her time to accept him, finding the perfect angle, nothing clumsy, no groping, no accidental finger scratch or elbow jab. He delivered a steady angled stroke followed by a hard thrust, flawlessly orchestrated, designed to deliver maximum pleasure. She’d never experienced anything like it. It was as if her pleasure was all that counted. Even as he came, he supported his weight so she didn’t have to bear all of it.

She slept. They woke, made love again, and then once more. Sometime during the night, he drew the sheet over her, brushed her lips with a kiss, and left.

She didn’t fall back to sleep right away. Instead, she thought about what Lucy had said.
Every woman should have Ted Beaudine make love to her.

Meg couldn’t argue with that. She’d never been loved so thoroughly, so unselfishly. It was as if he’d memorized all the sex manuals ever written—something, she realized, he was perfectly capable of having done. No wonder he was a legend. He knew exactly how to drive a woman to her maximum sexual pleasure.

So why was she so disappointed?

T
he club was closed the next day because of the holiday, so Meg did her laundry, then headed out to the cemetery to attack weeds with a couple of rusty tools she’d found near what was left of the storage shed. As she cleared some of the oldest headstones, she tried not to obsess too much about Ted, and when her cell rang, she didn’t even take his call, although she couldn’t resist listening to his message. An invitation to dinner Friday night at the Roustabout. Since Sunny and Spence would undoubtedly be part of their dining party, she didn’t return the call.

She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to discourage him. Around three, he pulled up in his powder blue truck. Considering the way the town’s females primped for him, she was happy with her dirt-streaked arms, bare legs, and the tight-fitting Longhorns T-shirt she’d rescued from the trash bin in the ladies’ locker room, then modified by chopping off its sleeves and neckband. All in all, she looked just the way she wanted to.

As he stepped out of the cab, a couple of indigo buntings perched in the box elders burst into joyous song. She shook her head in disbelief. He wore a baseball cap and another in his seemingly endless wardrobe of broken-in shorts—these were tan chinos—along with an equally broken-in green T-shirt sporting a faded Hawaiian print. How did he manage to make whatever haphazard piece of crap he’d tossed on that morning look like high fashion?

The memory of last night intruded, all those embarrassing moans and humiliating demands. To compensate, she came out swinging. “If you’re not planning to take off your clothes, you’re dead to me.”

“You California women are too damned aggressive.” He gestured toward the cemetery. “I send a maintenance crew out here once a month to clean up. You don’t have to do that.”

“I like being outside.”

“For a spoiled Hollywood brat, you have some unusual ways of entertaining yourself.”

“It beats hauling your clubs around.” She pulled off her baseball cap and swiped at her sweaty forehead with the back of a grimy arm. Her messy curls fell in her eyes and stuck to the back of her neck. She needed a haircut, but she didn’t want to part with the money. “I’m not going to the Roustabout with you on Friday. Too many Skipjacks.” She slammed her cap back on. “Besides, the less time we spend together in public, the better.”

“I never said they’d be there.”

“You didn’t say they wouldn’t, either, and I’ve had more than enough of them both.” She was hot, cranky, and determined to be disagreeable. “Be honest, Ted. This whole thing with the golf resort . . . Do you really want to let the Skipjacks ruin another natural area just so more idiots can knock around a stupid white ball? You already have the country club. Isn’t that enough? I know about the benefits to the local economy, but don’t you think somebody, like maybe the mayor, should think about the long-term impact?”

“You’re getting to be a real pain in the ass.”

“As opposed to being an ass-kisser?”

She’d genuinely angered him, and he stalked back to his truck. But instead of tearing off in a huff, he jerked open the passenger door. “Get in.”

“I’m not exactly dressed for an outing.”

“The only person you’ll see is me, which is a good thing, because you look like hell and I’m guessing you smell worse.”

She was glad he’d noticed. “Is your truck air-conditioned?”

“Find out for yourself.”

She wasn’t going to pass up a mystery outing so she could hang around here pulling weeds. Still, she took her time meandering toward the truck. As she climbed inside, she noticed a missing dashboard, some odd-looking controls, and a couple of circuit boards mounted in what had once been a glove compartment.

“Don’t touch those wires,” he said as he slid behind the wheel, “unless you want to get electrocuted.”

Naturally, she touched them, which made him surly. “I might have been telling the truth,” he said. “You didn’t know for sure.”

“I like living on the edge. It’s a California thing. Besides, I’ve noticed that ‘truth’ is a flexible word around here.” As he slammed the door, she poked a grimy fingernail toward a series of dials near the steering wheel. “What are those?”

“Controls for a solar-powered air-conditioning system that doesn’t work like I want it to.”

“Great,” she grumbled. “That’s just great.” As he pulled away from the church, she inspected a small screen set between the seats. “What’s this?”

“The prototype for a new kind of navigation system. It’s not working right, either, so keep your mitts off it, too.”

“Is there anything in this truck that does work?”

“I’m pretty happy with my latest hydrogen fuel cell.”

“Solar-powered air-conditioning, navigation systems, hydrogen fuel cells . . . You really have earned your geek blue ribbon.”

“You sure are jealous of productive people.”

“Only because I’m mortal and therefore subject to normal human emotions. Never mind. You wouldn’t understand what that means.”

He smiled and turned out onto the highway.

He was right. The solar air-conditioning system didn’t work very well, but it worked well enough to keep the truck’s cab cooler than the blistering outside temperature. They drove along the river for a few miles without talking. A vineyard gave way to a field of lavender. She tried not to think about the way she’d let him turn her into a gooey mess of moaning need.

He took a sharp left onto a narrow road paved in crumbling asphalt. They bumped past some rocky scrub and rounded a limestone bluff before the landscape opened into an expansive, treeless mesa that rose unnaturally about ten stories higher than the surrounding area. He turned off the ignition and climbed out of the truck. She followed him. “What is this? It looks weird.”

He hooked his thumbs in his back pockets. “You should have seen it five years ago before they capped it.”

“What do you mean ‘capped it’?”

He nodded toward a rusted sign she hadn’t noticed. It hung crookedly between a set of weathered metal posts not far from some abandoned tires. indian grass solid waste landfill. She gazed out over the weeds and scrub. “This was the town dump?”

“Also known as that unspoiled natural area you’re so worried about protecting from development. And it’s not a dump. It’s a landfill.”

“Same thing.”

“Not at all.” He launched into a brief but impressive lecture about compacted clay liners, geotextile mats, leachate collection systems, and all the other features that distinguished old-fashioned dumps from modern landfills. It shouldn’t have been interesting, and it probably wouldn’t have been to most people, but this was the kind of thing she’d been studying when she’d dropped out of college her senior year. Or maybe she just wanted to watch the play of expressions on his face and the way his brown hair curled around the edge of his baseball cap.

He gestured toward the open space. “For decades, the county leased this land from the city. Then two years ago the landfill hit capacity and had to be closed permanently. That left us with lost revenue and a hundred and fifty acres of degraded land, plus another hundred acres of buffer. Degraded land, in case you haven’t already figured it out, is land that’s not good for much of anything.”

“Except a golf course?”

“Or a ski resort, which isn’t too practical in central Texas. If a golf course is done right it can offer a lot of natural advantages as a wildlife sanctuary. It’ll also support native plants and improve air quality. It can even moderate temperature. Golf courses can be about more than idiots chasing balls.”

She should have known someone as smart as Ted would have thought about all this, and she felt a little stupid for having been so self-righteous.