The Piano Man Project (29 page)

She pulled his tie loose and unpicked the buttons of his shirt. He pushed it off when she eased it back off his shoulders, kissing the skin she revealed.

‘Why did you turn out the light?’ he said, trailing his lips over her face with his hand buried in her hair.

‘To make it even,’ she said. They both knew it would never be anywhere close to even.

‘Crazy girl. Did it work?’ he asked, opening the buttons on her dress and kissing the curves of her breasts.

‘Not really. I can still see you,’ she whispered. ‘You’re beautiful, Hal.’

No one had ever called him beautiful. He paid the compliments. So Hal let himself get lost completely in the wonderland of being here with her, in the soft warmth of her compliments and in her efforts to make him feel good, because he mostly felt so goddamn awful. It moved him that she’d turned out the light. It moved him because she wanted this experience to be as good for him as it was for her. He remembered back to their previous terrible attempt at sex, to her telling him that she’d brought a blindfold. He’d scorned it at the time, deriding her in his head for not having a clue how he felt, but right now, he got it. She’d never understand the reality of how this was for him, but the fact that she even wanted to try turned out to be a huge fucking turn on.

‘Pass me my tie?’ he said, and took it from her fingers when she’d reached it from the floor.

‘Are you sure you want it to be even?’ he murmured, running it between his fingers to find the centre.

Her nails dug into his back, and he heard her low gasp as she lifted her head to help him. Her breath tickled the skin beneath his ear, and her hips rocked up to meet his.

‘Blindfold me, Hal.’

It had been shadowy in the lounge, and Hal’s tie took it back to complete darkness. He’d secured it well, no slivers of light to guide her way.

‘Okay?’ he whispered, and she stroked her hands over him, learning his body; the lean compacted muscles of his shoulders, the smooth length of his back. She saw his inked biceps in her head as her fingers curled around them, and felt the strength in his hands when he held her face between them.

‘Better than okay,’ she said, finding his mouth in the darkness, feeling more for seeing less.

‘I bought this bra for you,’ she said. He ran the slender velvet straps between his fingers and then traced over the lace cups, making her nipples stiffen.

‘I like you in it,’ he said, kissing her as his fingers slid beneath her to the catch. He opened it easily, the assured touch of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Honey lifted her shoulders to help him slide it from her body, loving the way he wrapped her against him. He had a vulnerability, a capacity for tenderness she hadn’t anticipated from him; he usually hid it well. He didn’t hide it from her now. She heard her own low moan when his hand moved between them to her bared breasts, his tongue an erotic slide over her lips as his thumb circled her nipple.

‘Pink,’ he murmured, not really a question. ‘Like turkish delight, or rose streaks across the morning sky.’

‘Yes,’ she said, helping him paint her picture in his head. Her heart aching for him that he’d never see either of those things again, and for herself that he’d never see her at all.

And then he moved slightly, dipping his head to take her nipple inside the warmth of his mouth, and she pushed her fingers into his hair, overwhelmed. He wasn’t the first man to touch her, but in that moment it felt brand new and more powerful than she’d ever realised it could be.

At that point other men might have stepped the gear up. If anything, Hal knocked it down, sighing low in his throat as his hips moved languidly against hers.

‘It’s been a while,’ he said.

‘Forever,’ she said, because she’d never known this before. ‘What do you see in your head right now, Hal?’

He laughed softly against her mouth, easing his weight slightly away from her. She’d have happily stayed right there forever, cradled between the back of the sofa and Hal’s body.

‘I don’t need to see you to know how beautiful you are, Honey.’ He stroked a single fingertip from the dip between her collarbone to the edge of her silk knickers, and the raw, honest edge to his words intensified the feeling tenfold.

‘My hands tell me.’ He covered her breasts with his hands; warm, firm, massaging. Honey arched into his touch when he squeezed her nipples and then lowered his head to lick each one in turn.

‘My mouth tells me,’ he whispered, sliding his lips back up her neck and pressing her against the sofa with his weight. Honey could feel her breath becoming shallow in her chest as Hal’s hand moved slowly down between her legs.

‘Your body tells me,’ he murmured, sliding his hand inside the silk. She held her breath, as if she were walking along the very edge of a cliff path, and he held still and kissed her slowly until she had a secure footing again.

He stilled her fingers when she reached for the button on his jeans. ‘Not here. Not now. And not because I don’t want to, or because we never will, but because this is yours. It’s all for you.’

He was the best man she’d ever known by a country mile.

‘Okay?’ he asked her for a second time that evening, and she couldn’t find the words to tell him how much more than okay she was. He shifted slightly to remove her knickers, and then came back again, lying on his side and gathering her against the length of him.

Being naked and held by Hal in the darkness turned out to be the sexiest thing that had ever happened to Honey in her life.

He was a sensory feast; the low sounds of pleasure in his throat, the smooth heat of his skin, the sensual weight of his body moving against hers. His hands travelled over her, sweeping her spine, cupping her backside as he rocked into her, kissing her open mouthed and breathless. When he opened her knees with his own and moved his hand between her legs, Honey could only cling on to the slick breadth of his shoulders and gasp his name into his mouth.

In those moments, it never occurred to her to wonder if he might be the first man to make her come, or if it was time to fake it to please the man she was with. Hal had her mind totally relaxed and her body as tightly wound as a spring, completely in the moment, and there was only one way it was ever going to go.

He smoothed her damp hair from her forehead, kissing her jaw, her ear, her mouth. His words, his hands, his body, his mouth. Honey let them all move over her, let him pull her under, push her further than she’d ever been. Her blood raced in her veins, pounded in her head, and there was nothing but him, and here, and the intense, spiralling tension he’d created between her legs. Even when she could feel her tears dampen the blindfold it didn’t stop, like a tightening screw, every thrust of Hal’s denim-clad hips against his hand ratcheting her closer, and closer, and closer, and then he opened her knees wider and moaned deep in his throat, the sexiest sound she’d ever heard, and she couldn’t hold on anymore. She took a running jump right off the edge of that cliff path holding tightly on to Hal for safe harbour, free falling, and utterly, utterly dazzled.

‘Easy as that, Honey,’ he whispered, barely there kisses as her breathing came in almost painful gasps.

Benedict Hallam had set the bar high. It was the kind of climax that could give a girl unrealistic expectations for the rest of her born days.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, still trembling as she pushed his tie from her eyes a couple of minutes later. ‘Oh my bloody God.’

‘Fucking hell,’ he probably said; she couldn’t be certain. He wrapped her close in his arms, holding her to his bare chest, stroking her hair while her breathing steadied.

‘I never knew,’ she whispered.

‘And now you do.’

‘Even if it never happens to me again, I’ll always know.’

‘It’ll happen to you again, Honey. Trust me, it’ll happen again.’

‘I’m going to do something for you now that I’ve never done for you before,’ Honey said a little later, still curled against the warmth of Hal’s chest.

He traced lazy fingertip circles on the back of her shoulder.

‘Does it involve my cock and your mouth?’

Honey laughed and shook her head.

‘Nope. I’m going to make you a cup of tea.’

‘You sure know how to look after a man,’ he said, and Honey could feel his smile against her hair.

‘Never let it be said that I don’t have good manners. You gave me an orgasm, I’ll give you tea. How’d you like it?’

‘Is on your knees out of the question?’

‘Sugar?’ she asked sweetly, extracting herself from his arms.

‘Two,’ he grumbled, pulling himself up to sit, his denim-clad legs thrown out in front of him. He was a sparely built man, long and lithe, the kind of guy who could eat Ben & Jerry’s out of ice cream and still fit the same jeans he’d worn at twenty-one.

Knotting her robe around her waist, she busied herself making tea, her mind back on the sofa with Hal. He’d made it so easy, just brushed aside her hang-ups with his easy touch and his gentle mouth. Ordinarily he was just about the toughest man she’d ever known, and paradoxically, he’d turned out to be the most considerate lover. He’d held himself back tonight and made it all about her, despite the fact that it was his own birthday. That was the thing with Hal. He rarely played by conventional rules, and it made him addictive company. Maybe that was why she’d sought him out as a confidant so many times, sitting on the floor outside his door and pouring out her heart even though he barely acknowledged her presence.

Honey crossed the kitchen to grab the milk from the fridge, and her eyes fell on the envelope that had arrived a few days ago for Hal. Addressed to Mr Benedict Hallam in bold black pen, it definitely looked like personal mail rather than the bills that made up her own usual morning haul of letters. Surely it was a birthday card? The green glow of the oven clock informed Honey that there was still an hour or so left of Hal’s birthday. She stuck the envelope on a tray with the cups and a packet of chocolate digestives and headed back through to the lounge.

‘A letter came for you,’ Honey said, and she felt the temperature in the room plummet from afterglow warm to snowstorm cold. Good job Hal had slid his jeans back on while she made the tea or he’d die of frostbite.

‘A letter?’ he said, completely failing to pull off the casual tone he’d aimed for because of his ramrod-straight shoulders. ‘What kind of letter?’

‘Well, it’s a brown envelope with your name and address written on the front in bold, black writing,’ Honey said, turning it over in her hands. ‘if I had to guess I’d say it’s a man’s handwriting, and by the feel of it it’s probably a birthday card?’

‘Miss Marple’s granddaughter is back in the building,’ Hal muttered.

Honey ignored his barbed comment.

‘Should I open it?’ she asked.

Hal didn’t reply right away. His heavy sigh was the only sound in the quiet room, and he rolled his shoulders and cricked his neck to the side like a boxer limbering up for a fight.

‘It’ll be from my brother,’ he said, grinding the heels of his palms against his jaw. ‘He’s the only one who has this address.’

Was that so bad? Honey wondered silently. A birthday card from his brother? From Hal’s reaction, the answer was most probably yes.

‘Just open it,’ Hal said, so quietly that Honey felt the need to double check.

‘You’re sure you want me to?’

He didn’t reply. Honey looked at him, feeling his simmering anxiety and hoping that the letter turned out to be nothing after all. Dragging her gaze away from him and back to the envelope, Honey slid her finger under an open edge and ripped it carefully.

As predicted, it was a birthday card, heavy and cream, and again as predicted, the front said ‘brother’ in embossed gunmetal letters. It definitely wasn’t the kind of card Honey would have found in the corner shop; it screamed money and understated elegance.

‘Well?’ Hal ground out, still facing the floor.

‘Well,’ Honey began, ‘it’s, umm, it’s a birthday card saying “brother”, so you guessed right there.’

‘Inside?’

She hadn’t opened it yet, and in truth, she was frightened to. Hal had arrived in her life as if he’d been dropped from outer space. No family or friends intruded into the bubble, and it had allowed Honey to get to know him in isolation as a man, rather than as a son, a friend, or as someone’s brother. The arrival of the card served to highlight that she didn’t really know him well at all, and that there were people out there who did. With unsure fingers, she cleared her throat and opened the card.

It wasn’t just a birthday card. There was a second, smaller envelope nestled inside the card, and written across it in cerise ink was just his name. Hal. The writing was different to that on the previous envelope, very distinctly feminine. Honey’s heart sank. This wasn’t just a birthday card after all, or a minor intrusion. It was a letter; it was two worlds colliding. Hal’s old life and his new life about to intersect.

‘What does it say?’ he asked, his anxiety coming through as impatience.

Honey forced her eyes to read the writing in the card.

Honey and Hal sat in silence for a few seconds after she stopped reading. The unopened letter burned in her hand. Part of her ached to know what lay inside, and another part of her wanted to run a thousand miles. This was not her business, and Hal was not her boyfriend. Was he still Imogen’s boyfriend, officially? It was another question that she didn’t have an answer for, and now was definitely not the right time to ask it.