Pleasure for Pleasure (9 page)

His brain might have been resisting, but his body was riveted by her lesson like a straight-A student.

“So you
do
like it rough.”

She placed her foot between his thighs on the chair again, this time to remove her boot. The view between her legs was almost more than Trent could take.

“No, I occasionally like it fast and hard, sometimes slow and easy, always hot and sweaty. But not rough.”

She made no comment as she finished unlacing one boot and began working on the other. When that boot was unlaced, she tugged each one off and tossed them aside. In nothing but her thong panties, she stood right between Trent's legs, her own knees against the chair, her naked body close enough to touch.

“How's your feeling of anticipation now?” Her expression was vaguely amused, her tone teasing.

This was pure, uncensored Josie. She hadn't changed a bit in the years they'd been apart. And if Trent weren't so tense with pent-up sexual energy, he might have produced a witty comeback.

Instead he looked up at her and forced a smile. “I think you'd better get dressed and go have someone else take these handcuffs off of me. Then make sure you're nowhere to be seen when I leave the building, because otherwise—”

“And miss all the fun? No way.”

She strolled over to the garment bag, grabbed it off a chair, then strolled back just as casually. As if she didn't have a clue what her naked body was doing to him physically. She was a good actress.

Trent watched in frustrated silence as she got dressed
in her work clothes. When she was finished, she turned to him and smiled.

“Anticipation—see how much fun it can be?”

Right. Fun. Trent and his rock-hard, no-hope-of-relief erection were having the time of their lives.

 

A
FTER HER SLIGHTLY
humiliating stint as a dominatrix, Josie spent the next week strategizing. She understood that it would take careful planning and calculated action to get Trent into bed, and she fully intended to achieve her goal. She'd rehearsed the necessary steps in her head a hundred times, and tonight she would begin to execute her new-and-improved seduction plan. If throwing herself at him wouldn't work, then she was just as capable of a covert operation.

Tonight's lesson on the anatomy of female arousal might have seemed on the surface to be fairly straightforward, even a bit simplistic for a guy who'd been around the block as many times as Trent had, but it was just one integral part of Josie's master plan.

Step One: build self-confidence in his sexual expertise by presenting him with an easy topic. Step Two: get him thinking in vivid detail about sex. Step Three: tempt him with a hands-on lesson. Step Four: get naked. And considering what a lather she'd left him in during her stint as a dominatrix, the rest would take care of itself.

However, if she'd miscalculated—if Trent hadn't gotten as worked up as she'd suspected during her striptease—there was always Plan B, in which Josie would resort to more aggressive tactics.

Okay, so Plan B wasn't as well thought out as Plan A. In fact, she couldn't be sure what her more aggressive tactics would be until the situation arose—or failed
to
arise.
Josie winced at her own pun and decided to put the necessity for a Plan B out of her head. Positive thinking was mandatory for success, after all.

She surveyed her modest but comfy living room, wondering how it would look to Trent. Would he guess from her decorating taste that she was a sexually repressed nutcase? Would he suspect from the lack of family photos displayed anywhere that she had serious issues with her mother? Surely a guy like Trent wouldn't think that way. He'd probably just take one look at the lack of a recliner or big-screen TV and deem the place an uninteresting chick pad.

She was just letting the fear get to her. What she needed to do was visualize a successful seduction. As a therapist, she knew that visualization was a powerful tool for overcoming fears. And she'd already come up with the mental image she would use to calm her nerves when the time came—an image of her and Trent making passionate love on the floor of her living room.

She bent and plucked a piece of lint off the leopard-print throw rug—her one act of true decorative daring—and deposited it in the kitchen trash. There was no more obsessing or fidgeting left to do. If Trent didn't arrive soon, she was afraid she'd feel compelled to change her underwear and bra again, second-guessing her choice of a hot pink satin ensemble. Maybe he'd prefer something more subdued, or more innocent, or—

The doorbell rang and Josie hurried to the door and peered through the peephole. Trent stood in the hallway staring back at her, a bag of carry-out food in one hand. He looked downright edible in his black leather jacket and cream-colored turtleneck, and Josie decided she'd definitely ordered the wrong thing for dinner when she'd specified Kung Pao Chicken.

She reached for the doorknob and a sense of déjà vu came over her. Three years ago he'd shown up at her old apartment, just like this, wearing that same leather jacket. His arrival had been unannounced, but she'd known exactly what he wanted—an explanation for her inexcusable behavior at the beach. That night, though, she'd never answered the door.

She felt a great sense of shame at her cowardice. But no more. Tonight was the night she'd overcome her cowardly ways with Trent. Tonight was the night she'd face her fear and conquer it for good.

This time, she did open the door. “Come on in.” Josie stepped aside and tried to appear casual, nothing like a woman who moments ago had been obsessing over her choice of coordinating bra and panties.

“Thanks for agreeing to have the lesson here at your place tonight. I don't know what to do about my dad.”

“He must be lonely,” Josie offered. Trent had called earlier to change the location of tonight's lesson from his apartment to hers, explaining that his father had practically taken up residence at his place after returning recently from a boating trip.

Trent shook his head. “He's never acted so strange before. I mean, he always drops by unannounced when he comes back to the city, but I'm starting to feel like I should be charging him rent.”

“You're a good son to put up with him like that.”

He shrugged. “How about we forget dear old dad and talk about something more interesting?”

Josie picked up her lesson materials from the nearby hallway table. Out of the folder she pulled an enlarged textbook-style diagram of a woman's body and spread it on the coffee table, setting in motion Plan A.

“Tonight's lesson,” she said, “is on the anatomy of
female arousal. Why don't you study this while I get our drinks?”

She held out a hand for the bag of carry-out and he gave it to her. As he eyed the paper on the coffee table, he sat on the sofa. Josie watched him from the corner of her eye, curious to see what his reaction to the subject would be.

“What can I get for you?”

“Got any beer?”

“Sure.” Josie felt her cheeks burn, and she ducked her head into the fridge to retrieve their drinks.

She hadn't anticipated how much their history could come back to haunt her. The mention of beer immediately brought to mind sophomore year in high school, when she and her best friend Amanda had gotten hold of a couple of beers at a school football game and drank them in the girls' bathroom. It had been Josie's first taste of alcohol—and her first time kissing Trent, when she'd met up with him later at halftime and they'd slipped away together under the bleachers. Even then the heat between them had been scorching, and Josie had, like always, run away.

It was a wonder he'd even consider turning to her for help with his sexual problems, with the way she'd treated him back then.

She got out plates and forks and arranged their dinner on trays so they could eat in the living room. She carried the trays in and placed one on each side of the naked woman diagram.

“I hope you don't mind if I chow down before we get started. I'm starved. Dad ate all the food in the house.” He stabbed a fork into his fried rice and started eating.

“Sounds like he might be depressed. Is he dating anyone?”

“He was, but they broke up a few months back. I don't think that's the problem,” he said between mouthfuls. “He wasn't serious about her at all—just another one of his midlife-crisis girls.”

Josie frowned at her dinner, then took a bite. They small-talked their way through the rest of dinner, managing to avoid—much to Josie's relief—any discussion of the past. When they finished eating, Trent insisted on cleaning up before they started the lesson.

After he finished banging around in the kitchen, Trent came back into the living room, leaned over the coffee table and peered at the diagram. “What, exactly, am I supposed to learn from that picture?”

“It's a visual tool. Tonight you'll learn all about how to physically arouse a woman.”

“I had a sex-ed class in junior high, and lots of hands-on experience since then. I think I can find the clitoris.”

Oh, yes, he most certainly could. Josie blushed. “Trust me, this will be a far different lesson from any you had in school. And there's more to learn about the subject than the location of the clitoris.”

Josie adjusted her sitting position on the floor and tried to ignore her growing sense of discomfort. Having Trent in her living room was sort of like having invited a lion from the zoo over for coffee. He seemed very large, very dangerous, and very out of place.

Josie fiddled with the charm bracelet on her left wrist, suddenly aware that this was the first time she'd had a man inside her new apartment. It was the first time a man had sat there on her celery-colored couch with its big comfy throw pillows.

Boy, did she ever need to get a life.

No time to fret now, though. She had a lesson to teach. “Take a good look at the picture and show me where a woman's major erogenous zones are located.”

His eyebrows shot up and he smiled slyly. “I thought I showed you those last week.”

He was clearly trying to rile her, and she wasn't going to fall for it. “For the sake of today's discussion, just point them out again.”

Trent shrugged and gave the diagram a cursory glance. He went to Josie, offered her his hand, then pulled her up off the floor.

“Let's see…” He reached out and touched her neck, sending a wave of chills through her. “Here.” He lowered his fingertips to her breast and brushed over one nipple lightly. “And here.”

Oh, how her whole body begged for more of his touch. And then his hand dipped lower, going for the next danger—er, erogenous—zone.

Plan A was progressing even more smoothly than she'd anticipated. The way things were going, there definitely wouldn't be any need for a Plan B.

Trent's hand paused a few inches below Josie's belly button. “Ah, you meant, show you on the
diagram,
didn't you?”

“This way is fine, too,” she assured him, trying her best not to sound too eager.

His trademark devil's grin appeared. “Oh, yeah?” His hand dipped lower. “And here, I've heard, there's another one.”

Josie gasped at the exquisite sensation of his feather touch between her legs.

“Th-that's correct.”

He removed his hand, and Josie willed herself not to grab it and press it right back where it belonged.

“So, do I pass the quiz?”

“You covered all the bases, but we'll be delving deeper than just the traditional erogenous zones.”

“You mean, there are others I don't know about?”

“It could be said that the skin itself is a sex organ, and that's especially true for women. Where men are aroused primarily through stimulation to the sex organs, women can be aroused by stimulation to almost any area of the body, under the right circumstances.”

Trent's eyebrows perked up. “Interesting.”

“We'll be doing some hands-on…lab work, I guess you could call it.”

“We learn by doing, right?”

“It'll require me to get undressed.”

“Will this be part of that skills assessment I haven't taken yet?”

Josie pursed her lips, pretending to weigh the matter seriously. It wouldn't do for Trent to suspect she was determined to get that
skills assessment
from him if she had to tie him down and take it.

“Only if you're ready for it,” she lied.

Trent crossed his arms over his chest, revealing pectoral muscles that bulged under his cotton shirt. “I've got to admit, I wasn't completely honest the other night when I said I wanted to take things slowly between us.”

Oh, goody. Josie mentally rubbed her palms together. “What were your reservations, then?” she asked in as neutral a tone as she could muster.

He stared down at his black leather work boots. “To be honest, I'm kind of worried about my ability to, uh…perform with you.”

Josie blinked. Never had she imagined perpetually
confident, ever-smirking Trent O'Reilly standing in front of her looking like such an uncertain little boy. Her heart warmed to his embarrassment. Of course, it was natural that he'd feel reservations about having sex with her, after admitting that he had trouble pleasing women in bed. He knew she'd be hyperalert to the issue. And she was a fool for not having anticipated this problem.

“There is absolutely nothing for you to be ashamed of. It takes real courage to admit you have this kind of problem and then go about trying to solve it the way you have.”

He looked up at her and his expression brightened. “Really?”

“Really.”

He frowned again. “I'm still not sure I'll be able to perform to the best of my ability. I mean, with it being a test and all.”

Josie decided it was time to take action, before Trent completely lost his nerve. What he needed was a little enticement. She began to unbutton her top.