Shades of Sexy (5 page)

That deep laugh. “I thought as much.”

“Although I’d like it more if he…” I couldn’t finish voicing my idea.

“If he joined us?”

I gulped. “Yes.”

My request must have really turned him on because his strokes sped up. A low moan rumbled in his chest. His fingers dug into my hips as he directed my movements over his cock.

Releasing a long sigh, he quickly jerked inside me a few more times and then leaned into me, panting. He moved his hands to my breasts and cupped them gently, tenderly. We stayed there like that for a minute, maybe longer.

His shaft started getting softer and eased the pressure in my pussy, but knowing more lay in store for me, my arousal remained strong.

Ty eased me off his cock and I stood. My head swirled with visions of two men devoting their complete attention to my sensual gratification. Every cell in my body hummed with elation. My knees weakened. I had to sit on the bed for fear that my legs would give out.

Footsteps muted by the carpet approached from the recesses of the room. I instantly turned toward the sound and my breath caught. Bernardo came toward us, completely nude with a full-blown—pardon my word play—erection.

“Anything else we can do to make your fantasies come true?” Ty’s eyes sparkled with mischief.

Although playing coy is quite out of character for me, I averted my gaze. But in truth, telling them my deepest desires embarrassed me a little. “Maybe I’d like to be tied up.” Heat instantly bloomed over my face.

A wicked grin lifted one corner of Bernardo’s mouth.

“But loosely enough that I could escape. If I wanted.” I mean, I didn’t know these men. No need to be stupid.

Bernardo flashed Ty a conspiratorial nod. Ty eased himself up then stepped around the bed.

I could hardly breathe as I watched Bernardo slip a condom over his erection. He reached for something on a table. I licked my lips as he pushed a clear plastic ring over his cock, all the way to the root.

“Lie down,” Ty commanded.

Liquid heat flooded my veins at his tone. Carefully sliding toward the middle of the bed, I never took my eyes off Bernardo’s. The room was cool, but my whole body felt as if it were on fire.

Ty stroked his hand over my hair. “Give me your right arm.”

I lifted it toward him and he tied it to the wrought-iron headboard. Then he repeated the process with my left wrist. Inconspicuously, I tested the bindings and confirmed I’d be able to get free if I wanted. Which I didn’t.

The notion of being tied up and relatively helpless ratcheted my libido even higher. Knowing two hot men were about to treat me to incredible carnal delights, I could barely keep still. My pussy ached with lust.

The men spoke in hushed voices I couldn’t hear over the blood pulsing in my ears. Bernardo leaned down and kissed my mouth, tasting and sucking and exploring.

I shut my eyes for a moment, incredulous that I was really here, in this sexual nirvana. I felt Ty’s presence as he walked around the bed. He took hold of my shin and used it to turn me on my side.

Excitement flared through me as the object in his hand came into focus. He lifted the black cat-o’nine-tails over me then snapped it against my buttocks. I broke away from Bernardo’s lips and yelped, but after the sting, my pleasure flared. My breath hitched as I awaited the next crack. It came, harder than the last, but I didn’t mind.

Bernardo yanked at the chain attached to my nipple clamps and I bit back a gasp. I struggled against my tethers and whimpered with helpless need.

Sensing my delicious desperation, Bernardo spread my legs apart and drove his cock into my entrance. Little shock waves quivered through me. I’d never been so wound up with wanton craving.

Ty moved onto the bed and kissed me. My head swirled as I picked up the taste of my lust on his lips. He broke the kiss then unclamped my nipples. They ached for a moment, but he quickly closed his mouth over one, soothing it with his tongue.

Bernardo thrust into me, deep and slow and I bit back a gasp. The lush sensation of two men pleasuring me overwhelmed me. I feared my body would short circuit from the blissful overload.

Ty scraped his teeth over my pebbled nipple. Bernardo increased his pace and I arched against his driving thrusts. I writhed with luxurious sexual gluttony. When he slid his hand down to my pussy and started rubbing, my control shredded. A savage cry I hardly recognized as my own broke from my lips.

I totally surrendered to the frenzied sensations singeing every nerve ending in my body. My orgasm came like a primal deluge of ecstasy, snatching my breath away. Over and over, the huge blissful waves made me convulse and thrash and moan. My climax went on and on, engaging all my senses in primal euphoria. I’d never before experienced anything even close to it. Ripples of delight continued to wash over me.

Bernardo bared his teeth and moaned as he pumped into me, harder and deeper. With one final thrust, he released on a long sigh.

I looked from one man to the other and smiled ear to ear. If I could turn on both of these incredibly hot men, I knew I’d eventually find someone for a relationship. When I was ready. I also realized the shop had lived up to its name. Ty and Bernardo had made my wildest dreams come true—at least the sexual ones.

Epilogue

I woke late in the afternoon in my own bed, although I had no recollection of getting home. Shaking the sleep from my body, I climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

After I washed my face, I caught my reflection in the mirror and did a double take. My cheeks bore a rosy hue and my skin seemed smoother, almost glowing. Even my hair, in its mussed state, appeared shinier than it had the day before. I smoothed a hand over my stomach and sighed as I recalled the amazing time I’d had with Ty and Bernardo.

And I realized something. I hadn’t obsessed about my asshole ex at all. Not from the moment I’d entered the store.

But an unsettling thought occurred to me. I didn’t remember getting out of the store with my bustier or the matching thong. Although a slap on the wrist from my employer would be well worth the pleasure I’d experienced at Your Wildest Dreams.

I quickly perused my house in search of the lingerie, but as expected, didn’t find it. I sat at the computer and logged on to the mystery shopping company’s website. When I pulled up my assignments page, I stared at the screen, baffled by what I saw. Or what I didn’t see. I could find no trace of that assignment.

What the hell?

A chill skittered up my spine. Hands shaking, I shut off the computer then grabbed my purse. There’s no way I could have imagined this whole thing.

My hands trembled on the steering wheel as I drove to Your Wildest Dreams. I turned into the parking lot and narrowed my gaze at the building. The place looked abandoned. Since this morning?

No way.

I swallowed hard as I got out of my car. Marching to the door, I tried to reconcile what I was seeing with my memory of the store. Only I couldn’t.

A canker of mold climbed up the walls and the door. The faded paint was crackled and peeling. I knew I’d come to the right address, I recognized the building. But it appeared to have aged twenty years since this morning.

I tried the door, but found it locked. Reeling from the shock, I stepped off the porch and circled the exterior, kicking up a cloud of dry dirt and sand as I did.

Something shiny caught my eye as I rounded the front. I bent to retrieve the small silver hunk, half-buried in the soil.

Disbelief clawed at the back of my throat as I closed my fingers around a nipple clamp.

A warm breeze whispered around my ankles and I glanced toward the sky, laughing. Shoving the metal into my pocket, I headed back to my car.

No one would ever believe I’d had the experience I did, but I knew it was as real as the ocean and the sky. And I knew I’d never be the same for it.

The time had come for me to move on. Maybe I’d even take my handsome neighbor up on his offer to buy me dinner sometime. I was so beyond ready to start living again.

Without Rob, without regrets and without all the doubts that had been dragging me down since my divorce. I said a silent thank you to Ty and Bernardo then I drove out of the parking lot toward the rest of my life.

###

Getting Even With Warren

Chapter One

Macy Halstead never hated her husband more than she did at his funeral. An assortment of his mistresses—sobbing and sniffling in their black dresses and netted hats—stood out from the bluebloods like brightly colored bubblegum balls in a box of fine chocolates. By her estimation, half a dozen of them had the nerve to show up. If Warren wasn’t dead already, she’d ring his neck.

Strangely, she couldn’t put her finger on one physical characteristic common to all Warren’s former mistresses. Nothing she could point out to say, “That one’s prettier than me,” or “This one’s thinner.” They were all different. The redhead all the way on the left looked almost homely. And the blonde in the back row had at least forty pounds to spare, quite a bit larger than Macy’s size-sixteen frame. She’d wondered if Warren cheated because he found her fat, but now she suspected it had nothing to do with that.

At the podium, a colleague of Warren’s from the law firm, droned on about what a wonderful person her husband had been. Did he know the bastard had nailed everything that moved, including the speaker’s own wife?

“Warren never encountered a challenge he didn’t meet head on. If he came up against a brick wall, he thrust straight through it.”

Macy clenched her teeth. Warren thrust into things, all right. Every hole from Coral Gables to Key West.

She tried to tune out the eulogy, none of it true, not a single flowery word. Yet his two youngest sons sat in the front row with their wives, crying their eyes out, probably wondering how much he’d left them in his will. Had Warren shared the news that Macy had asked for a divorce? She didn’t think so. He’d never been one to admit defeat easily.

Why had she come, anyway? Her marriage had ended more than a month before Warren’s heart attack. And frankly, she’d grown to hate him. But proper etiquette had always mattered to her. She wished she didn’t care what her husband’s hoity-toity friends thought. They’d made it clear many times how little they cared what she thought. Never failed to remind her she wasn’t one of them.

Lauren, seated beside her, rubbed Macy’s arm in a gesture most observers would interpret as sympathy. But Macy knew better. Her best friend merely offered encouragement. Only Lauren understood the full extent of Macy’s humiliation. Lauren’s first husband hadn’t cheated with the extravagant number of women Warren had, but he’d engaged in one affair for nearly the entire eight years of their marriage. When Lauren learned of the tryst, she’d been more devastated by the emotional breach than the physical. Thankfully Lauren had found a good man a few years ago and she seemed enviably happy now.

I’ll never be so lucky.

She didn’t have that drop-dead-gorgeous-blonde-bombshell thing going on that Lauren did. No. With her straight dark hair and plain brown eyes, Macy paled next her friend’s beauty. Thanks to Warren, she didn’t have a law degree, either. He’d admitted a year or two into their marriage that he’d asked her to quit law school because he didn’t want a wife competing with him on any level. Purely selfish. Not that she minded her job as a paralegal, but she’d never make the money she would have had she continued in school.

Her cranky mood lifted a little when the eulogy concluded and the funeral director took the podium. Thank God this charade would end soon.

The pallbearers accompanied the casket out and she resisted the urge to shout good riddance at her husband’s corpse. Good riddance to all the lies, all the deceptions and that awful pain. She shuddered at the memory of that first day she’d discovered another woman’s panties in the pocket of his suit jacket as she took it to the cleaners on her way to work.

Then, like the layers of an onion, she’d peeled away his half-truths, excuses and inconsistencies. How could she have believed in him, in them? She’d never be such a blind fool again.

“Your turn.” Lauren nudged her forward, jarring her back to the present.

Macy stood, filed out of the pew with her head high as she fell into step behind Warren’s nearly identical daughters-in-law. As she exited the auditorium, she caught sight of a lavish spread set up on long tables in the wide hallway. Warren’s firm had made all the arrangements and as always, spared no expense.

Everything shouted top-of-the-line from the oysters on the half shell to the Russian caviar to the
pate de foie gras
. Shouldn’t funeral food be simple? But then, nothing about Warren had been simple. He’d have loved all the elegance and the banter. He was in his element when an occasion called for schmoozing. And judging by how his sons now chatted up Warren’s personal attorney, she knew there had to be some serious schmoozing in progress.

“The demon spawns are trying to find out what he left them.” Lauren looped her arm through Macy’s. “Assholes.”

“You read my mind.” Macy held up her palm, refusing a tea sandwich from a passing server. “Far as I recall, Warren left everything to the two of them. I still have his will in my safe deposit box, although he probably changed it after I moved out.”

“You’re still legally his wife,” Lauren pointed out.

Macy nodded. “A wife with a pre-nup. I never wanted any of his money. His fidelity would have been good, though.” As more mourners filled the room, the din of voices grew louder and the pounding in her head intensified. “How long do we have to stay?” she whispered in Lauren’s ear.

“That’s completely up to you.”

When she heard Lauren’s sharp intake of breath, she followed her friend’s gaze to a light-skinned black man in his mid-thirties wearing navy chinos and tan polo shirt. In the sea of tightly buttoned-up white men in black suits and women in designer dresses, he stood out like a juicy peach in a bowl full of raisins. Stunningly handsome, his piercing amber eyes reminded Macy of Warren’s.

Of course. That had to be Alex, his eldest son, the one she’d never met. He caught her staring and headed straight for her. She vaguely noticed Lauren dropping her arm and taking a step away. “I’m going to grab a bite of something decadently high in calories.” Then she disappeared.

She nodded. Up close, his eyes resembled Warren’s even more, only they held a warmth her husband’s hadn’t. “Macy?” He offered a hand and when she took it, he pulled her into a hug.

Her heart hammered furiously. When he released her, an inexplicable emptiness settled over her. She coughed to clear the cobwebs from her throat. “Um, yes. I’m Macy. You must be Alex.”

His smile brought out Warren’s dimples. Only on Alex, they looked a million times sexier. “Nice to meet you.” His brow furrowed as he shook his head. “I mean, you know, the circumstances suck, but…”

Their eyes locked. “It’s nice to meet you too.” She patted his arm and felt a rush of heat bloom inside her.

Talk about inappropriate. What’s wrong with me?

“Sorry I’m late. My plane from Atlanta was delayed.”

She rubbed the base of her left ring finger and glanced toward the buffet table. Warren’s other sons stood too close together, staring at her and Alex. Warren had never mentioned any problems among his three children, but she wondered now if some sort of rivalry existed. She knew little about Alex. He’d come from “the wrong side of the blanket,” as Warren so callously put it. Macy had always wondered if Warren neglected to speak much about his eldest son because Alex was half black.

According to Warren, he’d had a brief affair with Alex’s mother and had never truly been sure Alex belonged to him. But looking at the man’s eyes erased any doubts. Warren had to have seen the resemblance as well.

“Warren and I separated last month.” Where had that come from? She quickly clamped her mouth shut, afraid she’d blurt out something else just as tactless.

“Oh?” Alex’s lips lifted in a sad smile. “I hope my father didn’t hurt you too.”

She schooled her expression, but too late. She’d already reacted to his words. Was she the only person who hadn’t known about Warren’s philandering? The familiar pain seized her, but somehow it hurt a little less than the last time she’d allowed herself to think about it.

He squeezed her arm. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually rude like that.”

She shook her head. “Not rude. Merely honest. You knew him well.”

He leaned closer and she drew in a breath laced with his piney cologne. “He was an asshole, wasn’t he?”

A laugh escaped before she could stop it. She quickly covered her mouth. A few people turned to look at her with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah. That describes him.” She couldn’t keep from staring at him. He bore so many of Warren’s traits, the strong jawline, chiseled features and tall stature. Only Alex had curly brown hair where his father’s had been straight and gray. And Alex had a better smile and absolutely perfect teeth. Not to mention caramel skin.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

She prayed her face didn’t show the rush of heat his gaze had inspired. “Okay.”

“How in the world did my father snag you?” His eyes slid slowly over her body sending a shudder of awareness through her.

Her nipples pressed painfully against the lace fabric of her bra. She tamped down forbidden desire. She could not be turned on by her dead husband’s son.

Or could she? Warren had broken every rule out there about fidelity and propriety. Why should she keep honoring vows he’d all but ignored for the four years of their marriage? And wouldn’t it be sweet to have an illicit affair with Warren’s own son. But she couldn’t possibly go through with it. It sounded so…juvenile. “Um…what?”

Now Alex laughed. This time even more heads whipped toward them. “You’re a beautiful woman and what are you, like thirty years younger than him? You look around my age.”

“Warren had about twenty-eight years on me. And thanks for the compliment.” She liked that he said whatever came to his mind. Too few people did.

“Forgive me if I’m being nosy, but what did you see in him?”

Her heels started aching. She shifted from foot to foot.

His grin brought out those sexy dimples. “Sorry. I’m doing it again. This isn’t the time or place, huh?”

She shook her head. “No, not really.” She glanced over his shoulder at Lauren, who gave her a questioning stare. “Would you excuse me a moment?”

She whisked Lauren to a corner away from the crowd. “Why did you leave me alone with him?”

Lauren let out a groan. “You seem to be enjoying yourself. He’s completely hot. Don’t you deserve to hang out with a gorgeous guy after all Warren put you through? Who gives a rat’s ass what these idiots think? If they were decent people, they’d have clued you in on Warren’s extracurricular activities.”

Her friend had a point. Warren treated her worse than any man ever had. But she’d thought no one knew that side of him except her and all his mistresses. His cronies and hoity-toity social-circle members shouldn’t know about his philandering ways, yet she had a feeling they did. Apparently he’d made no effort to be discreet. The notion that everyone knew felt like salt on an existing wound.

No wonder I feel like such a fool.

But he’d been good to her—in the beginning. He’d treated her like a princess and advised her about her career. Even pulled a few strings to get her a paralegal job at a top firm. She’d looked up to him like a mentor or a father figure at first, eventually as a lover. She’d trusted him and he’d deceived her. Again and again and again. Bastard.

She’d given the relationship her all. And in the month since she’d left him, she’d never once had the desire to be with a man—any man. Until now.

But why shouldn’t she have some fun? So what that Alex was his son. Maybe it would make her feel a little better. Like dishing out just a smidgeon of the shit Warren had given her.

“I do deserve it, don’t I?”

Lauren winked at her. “Am I still driving you home?”

She hugged her friend. “I think I can find a ride. Thanks for everything.”

After walking Lauren out, she returned to the reception and found Alex standing a few yards from Warren’s other two sons, who looked so beyond pasty. Especially when compared to Alex, whose rich, dark skin contrasted so dramatically with theirs. Hard to believe they shared any DNA at all.

“I feared you’d slipped out and left me here with the vultures.” He gestured toward his half-brothers.

Macy covered her mouth in feigned shock.

“But I’m so glad you didn’t.” He hooked her arm and led her away from the buffet. “Would you be offended if I asked you to leave with me? I don’t really think you want to be here any more than I do.”

Relief washed over her. “I thought you’d never ask.”