Four of Hearts (8 page)

She couldn’t help it, she wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. “No. No. Don’t ever think that! I know how much you love me. I know you wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me, and loving Fallon doesn’t hurt me. I’d be more hurt to think your feelings for her were so shallow.”

“What the hell are you talking about? My feelings are shallow. I don’t love Fallon. It’s lust. That’s all it is.”

“If that was true, then why didn’t you act on it earlier? You’ve known her longer than Richard has.”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t interested in me, and she isn’t now either.” He flopped on his back and covered his eyes with one arm. “This is so fucked up, Candace.”

Candace took advantage of his new position, climbing on top of him and stretching out so their bodies met from their toes to their chests. She nuzzled his neck, running her tongue along the pulse there. “You’re salty. You went for a swim, didn’t you?”

He mumbled something she took for an affirmative, and she continued to taste as much of him as she could reach. “I think, once you get used to it, you’ll see this is all very simple.”

“I can’t believe this. I just told you I lusted after your best friend, and you think this is simple?”

“It is.” She bit his shoulder, not hard, just enough to get his attention. “It isn’t just lust, but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” She kissed the spot she’d just bitten. Ryan shuddered beneath her. “Did she give you a good blowjob?”

Ryan flipped her to her back and covered her. He zeroed in on the spot below her ear that short-circuited her nervous system when he nibbled on it. “Yes, you little vixen.” His lips traveled lower, and she arched her back, inviting him to explore further.

“I wish I could have seen your face,” she said. Ryan’s hand slid beneath her top and closed over her bare breast. Her mind went blank for a second. “I love to make you come. I love. . . .” Ryan took her nipple into his mouth and she cried out. “Ahh! Feels…good…” She cradled his head in her hands and urged him on. “Don’t. . . stop.”

“You love, what?” Ryan switched his attention to her other breast. Her head swam. He rolled her still damp nipple between his fingers and she saw stars that weren’t in the heavens above.

“Hmm?”

He pushed her shirt over her head and went to work on her shorts. “You said you love. . . something. What do you love?”

“Oh,” Candace tried to focus on the conversation. “I love to watch you come.” Her shorts slid past her ankles, followed by her panties. Ryan settled between her thighs, pushing her knees up and wide apart. He nuzzled her and touched his tongue to her clit. Candace rose to meet his questing mouth, and completely lost track of the conversation. Nothing mattered except the way Ryan touched her, the way he touched off a firestorm of need inside her.

The warm night air caressed her naked body. Nothing could have been more romantic than the soft music of the outgoing tide, the ink black blanket of sky dotted with twinkling diamonds and two lovers in perfect harmony. When Ryan finally entered her, Candace welcomed him in. She held him tight within her circle of love, and with every stroke, he whispered the thoughts of his heart into her ear.

Ryan coaxed her to the edge of the horizon, and pushed her gently over. Her heart swelled to bursting with love for him, and when he slipped over the horizon moments later, she held him close to her wildly beating heart.

They swam up together, floating slowly back to the solid beach beneath them. Ryan pushed to his forearms and kissed her lips like she was expensive candy to be savored. “I like to watch you come too,” he whispered against her lips. “I love you, Candace.”

“I love you, too.”

* * * * *

Ryan dreaded the morning. He’d emailed Richard earlier in the week, postponing yet again the Employee Performance Reviews. Richard had been livid, and insisted on a meeting when he and Fallon returned to the island on Friday. How did one go about apologizing for the sordid laundry list of sins he’d committed against his wife and their best friends? Candace insisted there wasn’t anything to apologize for, that they were all adults, and they’d done what felt right at the time.

“Still worried about tomorrow?” Candace asked. She placed a cold soda on his desk and curled onto the futon near the open patio door.

“Yes, I am.”

“I think you’re blowing this all out of proportion. Anyway, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, something I want you to think about before they get here.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just don’t say anything until you’ve had a chance to think about it. Okay?”

Dear God. If it was going to require withholding comment until he’d thought about it, he probably didn’t want to hear it in the first place. From the first moment he’d met her, Candace had knocked him off balance and he hadn’t found firm footing yet. “I’m not making that kind of promise, and you know it.”

“I know. But, Ryan, please, hear me out before you answer,” she begged.

He took a deep breath and let it out before rocking back in his desk chair and clenching his hands around the arms. He had a feeling he was going to need something solid to hold onto very soon. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Good.” Candace sat up on her knees. She almost bounced with her enthusiasm. He really needed to get her a cheerleader uniform. “You know how you said you liked to see me come?” He nodded, not liking where this was going at all. “Well, I got to thinking about it, and I realized all you’ve ever really seen is a small portion of me. You can see my face, or my. . . well, you know, but you’ve never really seen all of me when I come.”

“Candace,” he warned.

“No. Don’t. You promised to listen.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Please?” Damn. He had no willpower against her when she looked at him that way, as if he held her heart in his hands and might crush the life out of it if he said no.

He sighed and gripped the arms of the chair tighter. “Go on.”

“So, I was thinking. . . I’d like to give you that, as a gift.”

He knew he didn’t want to know the answer to this question, but she was waiting for him to ask it. “How?”

“Ask Richard to make love to me.” His blood pressure dropped and the flash play of images firing through his brain almost made him miss the rest of her insane plan. “You’ll be there too, right beside us, so you can see everything. You can watch what my body does when I come.”

Asking him to withhold comment hadn’t been necessary after all. He couldn’t grasp a single word, much less string any together and force them past his lips. He wasn’t sure he was breathing. His fingers hurt and he glanced at his hand curled around the arm of the chair. Something solid. An anchor in the storm raging inside him. She’d lost her mind. She thought he’d lost his too, apparently. Maybe he had. As appalled as he was by the idea, a spark of something flared inside him, and his oxygen-deprived brain might have actually been considering the idea.

“Ryan?” Her voice snapped him out of his stupor.

“Couldn’t we just get a video camera?”

“Sure, but what fun would that be? Fallon could watch too. Maybe—.”

“Don’t! Don’t go there, Candace.”

“But, if you did, then I’d be able to watch you too.”

Ryan groaned and peeled his numb fingers off the chair. “No. No, and no.”

“But—.”

“But, nothing.” How in the hell was he going to face Richard and Fallon tomorrow with this idea in his brain? “Go away, Candace. I have work to do.” He hoped to God she didn’t come around the desk and see how interested his body was in her proposal. She’d take it as an indication she’d come up with a fantastic idea, one he was as enthusiastic about as she was.

Candace headed for the door, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then she stopped on the threshold, turned and flashed him that look—the one that made him want to leap over the desk, pick her up and drag her off to his cave. “Talk to Richard.” Then she wiggled her crazy sweet ass out of his office.

Talk to Richard. Yeah, right. Ryan wasn’t ready to die, and telling Richard about Candace’s insane idea was a sure way to get him a condo for one, with no view. To her credit, Candace didn’t bring the subject up again, and by the time Richard and Fallon arrived on Friday, Ryan had almost convinced himself that she hadn’t said anything at all.

Candace greeted Fallon effusively. The two women hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year, instead of a few days. Ryan shook hands with Richard, and brushed a brotherly kiss on Fallon’s cheek. As he pulled away, her eyes met his, and for a nano-second he had the feeling she was sizing him up. It has been a long time since a woman had looked at him that way, and it scared the shit out of him.

“You got a new manicure!” Candace took Fallon’s hand in hers. “I haven’t had a manicure in ages!” The women put their heads together discussing the new manicurist at the
Lothario’s
spa as they wandered away, leaving Ryan alone with Richard.

He pulled two beers out of the fridge and handed one to Richard. “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said.

“Damn straight,” Richard agreed.

Ryan took a swig. He needed all the help he could get to apologize for what happened the previous week. “Let’s go for a walk,” he invited. “The girls are going to be discussing the latest nail polish colors. They won’t miss us.” And if Richard was inclined to kill him, it would make less of a mess on the beach.

“I’ve got a couple of matters to discuss with you,” Richard said.

Ryan led the way to the stretch of open beach he’d used daily as a running track since he’d first moved to the island. It was out of sight of the house, and quiet, even when a shipload of tourists inhabited the other side of the island. The sun blazed, reflecting off the water and sand. It was warm for this early in the day, and promised to get hotter. The men walked barefoot along the surf line. Ryan finished his beer, and plunged in. “About last week—.”

“Stop right there,” Richard said. “We have more pressing matters than what happened last week.”

“But—”

“Look, Ryan. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it, straight out.”

Here it comes. Richard wants out of our partnership, all because we crossed the line as friends.
Ryan took a deep breath. His brain went into problem solving mode. He had to come up with a way to talk Richard out of leaving.

“Fallon wants to sleep with you.”

His feet refused to move. His lungs seized. His knees gave out.

Ryan sank to the sand and dug his heels in. He propped his elbows on his knees and used his hands to keep his head from falling off his shoulders. This couldn’t be happening.

Richard took a few steps, realized Ryan wasn’t keeping pace, and turned back. Ryan sensed his friend beside him, but didn’t dare look at him. “This is so fucked up.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Richard said.

The rising tide crept close to their feet. Ryan briefly considered letting the tide wash him out to sea. It might solve all his problems. “How do you know?”

“Know my wife wants to sleep with you?”

“Yeah, that.”

“She told me.”

“Maybe you misunderstood.”

“One thing Fallon is good at is expressing herself. I didn’t misunderstand.”

Damn
. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, just so you know. I’d never make a move on your wife.”

“I know. She has this crazy idea that there’s more going on between the four of us than friendship. She even has a ten dollar word for it—polyamorous.”

Ryan snorted. “Leave it to Fallon to put a shiny label on screwed up.”

“She does have a way with words.”

Ryan got to his feet and Richard followed. “I spent the last few days worrying about how to apologize for what happened. If Candace hadn’t started this ball rolling with her request to be tied up, we never would have gone down that road. Then you come out with this. I don’t know what to say.”

Richard stopped well back from the surf and sat. Ryan joined him. There wasn’t any use going back to the house until they had a plan. “I have to tell you—Candace said the same thing about you. She thinks I’d enjoy watching.” Ryan lay back. An ancient palm arched over the beach directly above them. A plump group of coconuts clung to the top. “Why can’t a coconut fall when you need one? Right here, right now.” He tapped a finger on his forehead.