Seduce Me Tonight (29 page)

He took everything I gave him, his mouth never leaving my wetness, lapping and tonguing at my opening, rubbing my G-spot with a finger inside of me, then two, while he alternated licking and rubbing my clit with his thumb. I was a bundle of exposed nerve endings, so far gone that I didn’t notice when he took his hands away and used only his mouth on me. I realised why when he surged up against me and pressed his condom-sheathed cock to my pussy.

I slid lower, taking the head inside of me with just that small motion. It was enough penetration to make him groan.

‘Damn, oh damn,’ he gasped as he pushed forward and slid the rest of the way into my wetness. ‘You feel so good, Alexandra.’

The use of my full name seemed more intimate somehow than calling me Lexi and I whimpered at both the feeling of fullness his cock gave me and the sense of closeness I felt to this man. And then all thoughts flitted away as sensation took over and he rocked into me, pushing me back into the chair and then pulling me forward onto his cock, over and over, in a sinuous rhythm that reminded me of a seesaw. Back and forth, his hands hooked under my thighs, anchoring me to him, pulling me on and off him as I stretched my hands above my head and held tight to the top of the chair.

My breasts strained against my T-shirt as I arched my back and pushed my hips forward, and their prominence was an invitation for Sam to nibble them. He sucked my nipples through the fabric, wetting my T-shirt and drawing them up into even tighter points than before. I could feel his cock swelling inside of me, the added friction of the condom stroking my already sensitised pussy. Then his hands tightened on my thighs and he was coming, thrusting into me, pressing me back hard into the chair as his body went rigid and his cock pulsed inside of me.

I pulled him to me, wrapped my arms around him, drew him down over me, feeling every twitch and throb of his damp body against mine, his breath harsh and ragged in my ear.

‘You’re amazing, Alexandra Zambruski,’ he whispered, nipping at my earlobe. ‘After all these weeks of foreplay, I knew you would be.’

‘Foreplay. One of my favourite words. I wonder if Word Games will allow it.’

He laughed, his chest rising and falling against me. ‘We have plenty of time to find out.’

I cradled his face in my hands and kissed him hard. ‘Maybe in the morning,’ I said. ‘I can think of better things to do right now.’

Then I whispered words in his ear that Word Games would never, ever allow.

We all grow up with the idea that someday we’ll be the captains of our own fates and we will be happy. I knew what I wanted – the husband, the house, the kids, the white picket fence, the job I adored as much as I loved my family. I never thought that someday I would wake up alone in a house with a mortgage that was killing me, a sixty-hour work week at a job I hated and no relationship prospects on the near (or distant) horizon. But here I was. A travel agent who had never travelled
anywhere
, working in a college town where everybody was from someplace else and everyone else’s life was more exciting, more interesting, more
alive
than mine.

Depression is a wily creature. It sneaks up on you with its long and twisting tendrils wrapping around you in a way that at first feels comfortable and familiar and not altogether bad. You feel vindicated. You’re sad and you deserve to be sad. But those tendrils start tightening pretty quickly and, the next thing you know, you’re strangling. And you’re too tired and sad to fight it.

I was fighting it. Damn it, I was fighting it. Which is why, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, I quit my job, sold the house at a slight profit, broke even on the car and sold or gave away everything else I owned except a few clothes, my laptop, my books, my bike and a few pieces of furniture that I couldn’t bear to part with, and bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. The bike, most of the books and all of the furniture went into storage in my parents’ basement. I bought a three-piece set of luggage to replace the ones I’d had since high school and had donated to Goodwill, and packed everything I had in them right before I handed my house keys over to the realtor and caught a cab to the airport.

The house had made me feel like such a grown-up when I’d bought it and had ended up feeling like an albatross strangling me – and as it grew smaller and smaller in the rear window, I felt as if I was getting lighter and lighter. I looked at my shiny new red luggage on the seat next to me. My life, condensed into a roll-on bag, a duffel bag and a backpack. I didn’t know if I was exhilarated or terrified. Maybe a little of both.

Why Ireland? I don’t have a clue, other than I’d always wanted to visit it and I had just booked a one-month vacation for a couple who were going there on their divorcemoon. That’s what they called it, too. A divorcemoon. After thirty years of marriage, they’d gotten divorced and realised they were still in love. They’d already sold their house and packed their belongings, so they decided to take leaves of absence from their jobs and take off on a trip. He was a professor and she ran a bookstore over in the City Village shops, so June was the perfect time for them to take off. One month in Ireland, to start. A Greek island cruise after that, maybe. Or Australia. They really didn’t know. They were going to travel for a year and decide what they wanted to do next. It sounded exciting – and romantic. They seemed like carefree teenagers, not a couple in their fifties. They also seemed a lot younger – and a lot happier – than me. So I’d decided, if Ireland was the place they were going to start over, it was good enough for me.

It doesn’t hurt that my name is Caitlin and I have naturally red hair. My mother’s parents were originally from Ireland, so maybe it was in my bones to make Ireland my first destination when I finally got up the nerve to overcome my fear of flying, get on a plane and leave the United States. Whatever it was, I was going. The wheels had been set in motion and I was really and truly starting my life over. Or running away from my very boring life. I guess it depends on your perspective. All I know is that when the plane touched down in Dublin, all I could think was, ‘I’m home.’

I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do in Ireland. There would be things to take care of – getting a job, getting a temporary work visa to stay in the country, taking care of the paperwork and minutiae of being a foreigner setting up a life there – but I figured I would worry about all of that after I took a real and proper vacation.

At thirty-three, I could honestly say I’d never been on a vacation as an adult. I’d gone to Disney World and Busch Gardens and the Grand Canyon with my family when I was a kid. I’d done the spring break thing with my friends when I’d been an undergrad at the College of Charleston and I had hazy memories of Cozumel and Lake Tahoe. But since graduating from college with a very useless degree in history, I hadn’t been anywhere. I’d come back home, job-hunted with the optimistic goal of landing a position at the Smithsonian or another museum, decided that writing might be fun and applied to every history periodical that existed, ended up with a gig at a niche travel magazine that specialised in historical trips and then, when it inevitably folded, slid into a job at a travel agency while occasionally freelancing for more lucrative travel magazines. I wasn’t anywhere close to where I’d wanted to be and only a few miles from where I started – first living in my parents’ house, then taking the small inheritance my grandmother had left me and buying a small bungalow just a few miles from where I grew up. I no longer knew where I wanted to be, but I knew I didn’t want to be there any more.

And here I was. In Dublin. Not knowing a soul, not having a job, with a few thousand in the bank, a small flat that I had rented for a month and enough clothes to get me through the summer. The rest would come, or so I hoped. What I really wanted, more than a home or a job, was some clarity. A sense of belonging. I wasn’t sure I’d find it in Ireland, but it seemed as good a place as any. So I found my way to the small, ugly apartment building near Trinity College, feeling as if I’d just flown several thousand miles to start over in exactly the kind of place I’d just left, and fell asleep on a pillow that was too flat to be called a pillow, with city noises right outside my window. I felt suddenly, horribly lonely.

‘What have I done?’ I whispered as I fell asleep.

* * *

Pounding. Loud, unrelenting pounding. That’s what I awoke to the next morning, with sunlight just creeping in the window. I pulled the flat pillow over my head, desperate to get more sleep. My internal clock was not on Irish time yet, but I’d slept very little the past couple of weeks and hadn’t been able to sleep on the plane at all, so I had known, once my head hit an unmoving target, I was going to sleep until I was rested. Except the person who was doing the pound-pound-pounding seemed determined to make sure I didn’t sleep.

The pillow wasn’t helping. Neither were my fingers in my ears. I’d gotten in so late – or early, since it had been about dawn when the cab had dropped me off – that I hadn’t really had a chance to look around my new home. The keys had been on the sill of the transom window above the door, as promised, and I’d simply let myself in, stripped down to my underwear and fallen into bed. Now I uncovered my head and looked around the small apartment that would be home until I found something else.

The pictures on the walls – vaguely pastoral in their faded ugliness – literally rattled on the walls from the pounding. Whoever it was, they had to be pounding on the other side of my bedroom wall.

‘What the hell?’ I muttered to myself, followed by a string of more colourful cursing as the noise continued.

I felt like my teeth were going to rattle out of my head as I crawled from under the faded quilt and struggled to get back into my sweater and jeans, feeling clumsy and sore from so many hours of travel and a lack of sleep. Finally dressed, I unlocked my door and popped my head out. No one there. The noise had to be coming from the apartment next door, judging by the way my interior walls were rattling.

The pounding continued as I walked to the door, unrelenting. What the
hell
were they doing in there?

I knocked on the door. ‘Hello? Excuse me? You are banging on my wall and I can’t sleep.’

The pounding stopped. I heard someone walking to the door. I braced myself for an angry confrontation with my new neighbour. The door opened and I blinked. I knew him.

‘Greg?’

He held a hammer in his hand and gave me a mock salute with it – coming awfully close to cracking himself in the head. ‘Hey, Caitlin! How are you?’

I shook my head. Greg Hemmingson was my brother Landon’s friend. I’d met him at a few of Landon’s parties and was never very impressed. Oh, he was cute and charming – always the centre of attention – but he never struck me as terribly deep. Landon said I wasn’t being fair, but my brother always manages to find the best in people that turn me cold, including his ex-girlfriend Candace. I was secretly relieved they’d broken up and he was dating Katie, a girl he worked with. Not that it was any of my business whom he dated – or befriended. I was one to talk, after all. My dating history was a mishmash of blind dates and one-off events that never went anywhere.

What’s funny is that Greg’s dating history sounded a lot like mine, at least to hear Landon tell it. But what’s embarrassing for a woman is something to be proud of when you’re a man, I guess. Or maybe I was just too sensitive to the fact that all of my friends were settling down and getting married. Maybe Greg was my single soul mate. Maybe I needed some more sleep.

‘What are you
doing
here, Greg?’

He shrugged. ‘Work. We’re setting up an Ireland office and I’m part of the start-up team. The company set me up here –’ he made a sweeping gesture behind him ‘– because they’re cheap bastards. Just trying to make it home.’

I sighed. I left the country to start my life over and here one of the less than wonderful parts of my life was ‘trying to make it home’ at dawn. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

He shifted from one foot to the other and had the good grace to look sheepish. ‘Sorry. I’ve been here a couple of weeks and thought the apartment next door was empty.’

‘I just got in a couple of hours ago. Literally. And I’m wiped out, so –’ I mimicked his sweeping gesture ‘– could you make it home at a more reasonable hour?’

I was already wondering how difficult it would be to get out of my contract and move somewhere else. But that seemed impractical, since I’d end up forfeiting a month’s rent and I was only planning to stay a month anyway. I sighed.

‘Sure, no problem,’ Greg said, grinning. ‘Maybe we can get a drink later? When you’re awake and, um, put together?’

I shuffled back to my own un-homey apartment. ‘This is as together as I’m ever going to be,’ I muttered, closing the door on his question.

* * *

I woke up some time later and squinted bleary-eyed at the clock by the bed. It was nearly 6 p.m. I groaned. I’d never get on Irish time this way. Greg was pounding again, but this time it sounded like he was outside my door. I was still wearing my clothes from when he’d forced me to get dressed earlier and I climbed out of bed and made my way to the door. I scowled at his smile.

‘Are you still sleeping? You’re never going to adjust to the time change this way,’ he said, pushing his way past me. ‘Go get a shower and put on something that doesn’t smell like stale airplane.’

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I’m just going to stay in –’

‘Shower, clothes, now,’ he said, nudging me toward the bathroom. ‘Please.’

I was annoyed. I’d never much liked Greg – and I was liking him even less on this side of the pond. ‘Why should I?’ I said, sounding like a petulant child and not really caring. This was
Greg
, not someone I wanted to impress.

I expected some snappy comeback, or at least another insult about my maturity or how pathetic I was, but his expression was stark. ‘Because I’m lonely and you’re the first friendly face I’ve seen in two weeks.’

I probably looked like a fish gaping open-mouthed in the bottom of a boat. I gave up trying to think of a response and headed for the shower. If it was a line, it was a good one. He’d hooked me.