Enticement (6 page)

She wondered what he looked like when he came. Quietly restrained? Or did he let his emotions out in a violent explosion? Ross exuded passion like a force of nature. Outwardly, Kit seemed more refined, less earthy somehow, and more teasingly urbane, but that didn’t really give her any insight into what he was truly like beneath the surface.

“Penny for them,” Kit remarked.

“Eh?”

“You’re staring. That or you have some sort of weird zombie eye disorder.”

“Zombie what?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

Something kept her focus fixed upon him, despite the observation, which in turn made Kit sit up. “What is it?” he asked. “Did that mouse tell you all about my evil deeds?”

“What evil deeds?”

“If you need to ask, I guess not.” He slumped back down again, his hands clasped behind his head so that his elbows stuck out to the sides.

“Were you and Ross the village tearaways?” she asked.

Kit’s brows furrowed. He turned partially onto his side and curled his legs up towards his body. “We got into all sorts of trouble, just like most teenage boys. Scrumping apples, nicking asparagus, twanging bra straps, all the normal stuff.” He counted them off on his fingers, turning one down without remark and leaving the little finger noticeably standing.

“And later you broke hearts,” she said, curling the last finger down for him. The contact stoked a shocking fire in her innards, quelled a moment later by the hollow look in Kit’s eyes. The realization struck her that he hadn’t just drifted away from Kirkley in search of adventure. He’d run, all the way to Japan at a guess, with no intention of ever coming back.

Despite the dark swarm in his eyes and the thickness in her throat, Evie had to ask. She couldn’t just ask him straight out why he’d gone though. If she did, judging by his current expression, he’d probably just tell her to go fuck herself. Instead, she twisted the question round, eventually asking, “What was Ross like the last time you saw him? Tell me about the last day you spent together.”

“What do you damn well want to know about that for?” His knees got even closer to his chest, until he was virtually hugging them. “Nothing happened. We had a few beers together out by the ruins.” The tone of his voice suggested that far from being an unremarkable occasion, it’d been positively influential. She’d have to remember to ask Ross about it later, to see if he clammed up in the same way he had over Kit’s job, which was something else she still hadn’t had a satisfactory answer over.

“Tell me something else, then. How did you and Ross first meet?”

The hunch vanished from Kit’s shoulders, and he uncurled a little from his foetal position. “God knows, Evie. I was probably only five months old. What did I do to suddenly warrant the inquisition?”

“It’s not an inquisition.” She perched on the sofa arm. “It’s called getting to know you. It’s what normal people do in place of innuendo and exposing themselves. They ask questions. You are living with us. I have a right to know a bit about you.”

The mini rant finally earned her a grin. Kit pushed his fringe back off his face, revealing a thin silvery-white scar just above his right eyebrow, on which her attention honed in, until he let his hair fall back into place. Scars always came with stories, not that she expected him to be very forthcoming over that one given his current record. “You want a story, right? I’ll give you one. About Ross and myself and a camping trip.”

“You go camping?”

He sniffed and looked rather put out.

“Okay, you go camping. Tell me.”

“It was part of what I like to refer to as the summer of sin and seduction, when—”

“The what!” Evie lurched forward, which resulted in Kit’s explosive laughter filling the empty room.

“You know, it hardly seems fair to be telling you about this when Ross isn’t here. Maybe we should save it for later.”

“Oh, no, you’re not wriggling out of it.” Evie battered his knees until he budged along the sofa far enough for her to sit comfortably without touching him. “Start talking, buster, or you can pack your bags and move into this dump right now.”

“Are we agreeing the rent criteria here?” he quipped. “Tales for torment? Your guest bed’s lumpy as hell. I reckon this one’s good for a month.”

“A fortnight.”

“Without prying?”

“Prying as part of the flow of conversation is allowed.”

The look he gave her—a wickedly calculated glare—suggested he had a more visual form of snooping in mind.

“All right, if you’re sure you’re ready for this.”

She probably wasn’t, but without him even having breathed a word of the tale, she was on tenterhooks to hear it. Kit settled himself with his legs crossed and his fingers steepled before him, the tips of his index fingers pressed to his generous lower lip. “Every year we used to escape for a week, fly south a bit, and try and plan a music festival into the jaunt. They were always good times, away from all the gossips in the village. I swear there are people around here who count how many toilet rolls you buy. Anyway, I think you can imagine we were rather like two exuberant puppy dogs let off the leash for the first time. Ross was still living at home, and he never took anyone back to his place, and I was still rooming here for the summers, contending with Flora. My aunt was never the biggest respecter of privacy. She once came into my room and watched the entire EastEnders omnibus while I was in bed with someone. Needless to say, the lady in question and I didn’t do much besides look meaningfully at the ceiling for an hour.”

“Not at each other?” she asked. “But you were telling me about Ross.”

Kit continued. “It was the last night of this particular festival. Really late. We’d both turned in, when this girl starts calling among the tents for Ross. Turns out that we’d been chatting to her earlier on and she’d taken a bit of a shine to Ross, because no sooner had he replied than she was in the tent and crawling up to the head end of his sleeping bag to plant a great big smooch on his lips.” He turned his black gaze upon Evie again, looking her over as if he were about to drink her down. “Ross has never understood his attraction to the ladies, and he’s even crapper at turning them down. Not that I think he wanted to in this case, and well, you just don’t when the lady in question has gone to quite such lengths to find you.”

“Nothing to do with him being pinned inside his sleeping bag?”

“He wasn’t,” Kit clarified. “It was too warm to sleep completely zipped up, and she wasn’t a big woman. Nicely curvy, though.” He glanced at Evie in a way that suggested a figure not dissimilar to her own. Ross put her at ease about her abundant curves, but not everyone was quite so appreciative and she’d had her fair share of snide remarks over the years. Kit was probably into fine-boned, petite women, much like the Japanese ladies he’d no doubt dated. Only his next remark didn’t really tally with her assumption.

“She had this delicious way of shimmying her arse like she was a flamenco dancer or something that just made you want to grab hold and squeeze.” His fists tightened so that his knuckles bulged before his tone turned wistful. “Ross wasn’t stuck, but I was. Stuck inside a scrap of canvas with two smooching lovebirds, and in danger of becoming a mattress for their antics if they ever rolled over. I’d just figured that I’d better take a stroll and do some stargazing, when Ross happened to catch my eye. His date was whispering frantically into his ear. I couldn’t make out what, but that look stopped me dead in my tracks. Stay,’ he said.”

The moment Kit said the word Evie guessed where the tale was headed, and it wasn’t anyplace she’d ever envisioned Ross having been. She knew all about his kinks and turn-ons. They’d shared and acted out more fantasies than she could easily count, so that falling back on old favourites had become second nature when they were both tired. But Ross had never given any hint that he’d ventured along this particular avenue, and the knowledge that he’d kept it secret smarted more than learning he’d shared past lovers with Kit. Though looking at him and remembering the way in which Kit had casually loitered in the doorway watching last night, that wasn’t such a surprise.

If she had any sense, she’d stop Kit now and forget the whole issue, but of course she didn’t. She sat, riveted, gnawing the skin around her thumbnail.

“I stopped unzipping my sleeping bag, and Ross and I sat and looked at each other for a few seconds, and I looked at the girl, and instead of specifically making a decision, I just didn’t move. They fell back into kissing again, and I watched, not really sure if that was all I was supposed to do, or if joining them had been part of that odd request.”

“But you did,” said Evie, trying to picture the woman with Ross and spectacularly failing to do so. She just kept seeing herself. “What was she like?”

“She had on one of those gypsy tops, the type that’s all ruffled around the top, and slips off the shoulders all the time. And a skirt, an itsy bitsy little tie-dyed thing, she’d been wearing with pink spotted Wellies during the day.”

The description gave Evie no clearer image of the woman. Instead she imagined herself in the ridiculously flirtatious getup, writhing against Ross’s hard body. As Kit’s words continued to pull her into the story, she could smell the organic scent of earth, mixed up with a hint or two of aroused male. The inner space of the tent lay in darkness but shadows flickered across the outside of the canvas, bodies moving nearby. A thread of music played somewhere in the distance. It coalesced with the faraway hum of the traffic. Kit’s eyes shone like black diamonds, longing scored across their surface. He leaned over and pressed a whisper light kiss to her bare shoulder, causing a zing of electricity to shoot up her spine. Completely immersed in the role, Evie turned, breaking the kiss with Ross in order to meet Kit’s gaze. Still holding her lover tight, she opened herself up to Kit, kissing him in a slow, deliberate way, so that warmth and desire swept across her body.

“It was one of the most pleasurable sensations I’ve even experienced, having her lie between us like that, all that softness sandwiched between wiry muscle,” Kit said, continuing to reel her in. She’d seen pictures of Ross from way back, before they met, when his hair flowed halfway down his back, but she imagined him much as he was now. Kit too appeared as he was, or at least how she’d glimpsed him last night: lean, lightly muscled and perfectly clean-shaven. Currently, a fine shadow covered his jaw.

“You didn’t touch each other?” she asked, still submerged, imagining four hands caressing her body.

“No. It was all about her.” Kit tapped his steepled fingers to his chin. “It involved a whole lot of wriggling as I recall, negotiating with sleeping bag zips and limbs going everywhere, and Ross and I trying not to inadvertently end up in the middle or put our mitts in the wrong place. I think we might have thrown our rucksacks into the porch if we’d been thinking well enough, just so that we could have stretched out properly, but none of us were demonstrating all that much brain power.”

Too much blood flowing elsewhere, Evie thought, picturing the smooth contoured lines of three naked bodies pressed together. There didn’t seem much space for rational thinking. Her gaze strayed down Kit’s body, following the path his hand had taken just a moment before to where it now lay against his thigh, failing to conceal the swell of his cock. Assuming he was trying to hide it, which given Kit’s previous record, she seriously doubted. If she muttered a few magic words, such as “please” and “unzip”, he’d probably oblige without missing a single beat of the story.

“Of course, we both wanted her, and neither of us was all that eager to sit back and wait our turn. She’d started with Ross, but then I’d been invited in.”

She didn’t imagine them arguing, but silently locking horns, in a very underplayed, masculine contest to see who was top dog. Neither man won, exactly.

“She kept pressing against me. Pressing and pressing. Really getting off on my cock being up against her bottom. So, when Ross rolled over and she straddled him, I got on my knees behind her.”

“You didn’t!” Evie clamped both hands across her mouth. Damn, she hadn’t meant to blurt that out loud.

Kit’s eyebrows shot upwards. “Didn’t what, Evie? Get onto my knees, or are you pre-empting the story?”

“You did?” she said and apprehensively pressed her teeth back into the groove in her already bruised lip. “Oh, my god!”

Kit burst into laughter again. He flopped back against the arm of the chair and lay howling at the ceiling, until he had her laughing too at her own embarrassment. Awkwardly, she leaned over and tapped him on the stomach, perhaps not the ideal location, because his cock, which was still forming an impressive hump beneath his fly, gave an appreciative little jerk.

Still beaming, he sat up. “God, you’re incredible! Do you really think we’d do DP with a complete stranger? I thought you knew Ross.”

“You’re making this up?” Shock, followed by rage, relief and a bitter hint of disappointment caused her to gape at him.

Kit looked up at her from beneath his brows then slowly shook his head. “Nah, it actually happened. Crazy, I know. But I swear it’s the goddamned truth. Bet you didn’t know Ross had such a wild past.”

In her experience there were only two places Ross got wild: in the bedroom and in a downpour. “Was it raining?” she asked. Although she guessed Ross hadn’t really been all that instrumental in the kinkier aspects of this liaison.