When in Rio (14 page)

I realized I was wet again just as he silently urged me up to take his engorged tip inside myself. Watching him reach down and stroke himself first, then work himself to just the right position beneath me, was as erotic a sight as I could ever remember seeing. It made me moan from wanting him, wanting more, and I moaned louder still when I sank down onto his erection in one slow fall, taking him to the hilt.

We shuddered at the same time and then laughed, both amused by how easy we were. Jack had already slid his hand closer, angling it so it brushed against my clit each time I stroked down on his length and ground myself closer, never feeling quite close enough. Although the slow pace was agonizing for me, the look on Jack’s face was worth it. He had thrown his head back and closed his eyes, and with each move I made I could see the tension and need wash over him, transforming his face, flexing across the tight muscles of his chest and belly.

“So good,” he murmured, and I felt a slow spark and catch of heat low in my belly, bit my lip to keep from crying out, from letting it take me over.

Then I remembered that the rules were suspended, and just as I hit the point of no return, the orgasm toppling me slowly and sweetly into brief oblivion, Jack opened his eyes…and smiled. He watched me, one hand lifting to cup my face, brush over my parted and panting lips, with a look of utmost awed astonishment and pleasure. Each shiver, each contraction along his length was transmitted back to me in his expression. When I finally started to calm again he pushed up, deeper still, to stir another series of tremors that caught me off guard, tugging a groan from me I hadn’t planned.

While I was thus distracted, Jack took over the pace, guiding my hips faster with both hands for surprisingly few thrusts before shuddering to a halting, jerky climax with a soft curse, pushing his head back against the pillow as he strained to empty himself inside me. The sudden heat, the bursting pressure and release surprised me. I had forgotten what it was like to be lucid enough to notice that.

It made me feel exposed, raw. I had never thought of my sexual practices as something that shielded me, but what Jack and I had just done felt almost indecent, more intimate than I was prepared for. No props to hide behind, no rules. I wasn’t even quite sure what it had been, or why I had unaccountably enjoyed it as much as I had.

“
Shhh
…” Jack said, pulling me down to rest on his chest when I would have gotten up, unwound myself from him and disappeared into the bathroom. “
Shhh
…”

“I didn’t say anything,” I whispered against his sternum, tracing my fingers through the light dusting of almost-black hairs that formed a T across and down his chest.

“You didn’t have to,” he explained lightly, playing with my hair in idle, soft strokes. “You were thinking so loudly I could hear you.”

“Was I?”

“Mm-hmm.
Shhh
…”

The air-conditioning came on with a click and a soft chugging sound, startlingly loud in the quiet darkness. Jack felt around on the bed and snagged the corner of the bedspread, pulling it over my back to cover us both just as the air from the vent would have hit us with uncomfortable cold.

It was warm under the covers and I could hear Jack’s heart beating, safe and reassuring, feel him softening but still buried inside me, and I told myself it was time to get up, because it would never do to fall asleep this way…

* * * * *

The clock claimed it was eleven p.m., but it felt like I had only fallen asleep for a split second. Disoriented, I sat up and had a few moments of panic before I remembered where I was, and with whom. Jack was still sleeping peacefully on his back, and at some point I must have rolled off his chest because I had awakened lying next to him.

At eleven in the evening on the Copacabana, people were just finishing dinner and thinking about heading out to nightclubs. If the balcony door were open, I knew, a lively noise would be rising from the beach and streets now. It reminded me of New Orleans a little, a town that also had a dark side and was also busiest after sundown.

I wondered if here, as there, my favorite time to walk through town would actually be the early morning, just at dawn, just before the deliveries started or the garbage trucks came through. That was when it was quiet…the
only
time it was quiet, really. But it put me in mind of the quiet one felt after a night of rough play when, waking a little early, one realized there were still several hours left to sleep. The city, like a tired lover, stretched, yawned and rolled back over for another few hours of well-earned rest, while her denizens went about their business more quietly than usual out of respect for the worn-out lady they had spent the night loving so well…

I stifled a laugh at my own silly analogy and rose from the bed carefully, so as not to wake Jack. I tiptoed to the ludicrously well-appointed bathroom in anticipation of the heat, the pressure, the multidirectional spray of the shower. I might not be in love with Rio yet, and I might be in doubt as to the state of my feelings for Jack. But my adoration for the bathrooms in the suites at the Copacabana Palace was already established, deep and true and abiding.

Chapter Eleven

The second day of the conference dragged on forever. Jack wasn’t presenting again until Wednesday and we were in separate sessions all day long, two each in the morning and afternoon. We hadn’t really made a plan to meet for lunch and, after looking around awhile to see if Jack would surface in the lobby, I let myself be dragged along by Kendra, Jane, Elizabeth and another few attendees I didn’t know, out onto the
Avenida
Atlantica
for lunch at a café. There would be sand in my sandwich, I just knew it. I felt grouchy about the sun and the sea breeze and wished I had brought my hat.

But it was impossible to stay grumpy too long in Rio. The air was too balmy and the conversation too lively at the table. Knowing what I did about Kendra and Jane made it especially amusing to listen to them skirt around the topic as the other ladies, Elizabeth and Shauna and Some-B-name-I-couldn’t-remember, all talked about their husbands or boyfriends back home.

I didn’t have much to contribute either, of course. Although I tried to be noncommittal, Elizabeth predictably gave me several funny looks, which I met with as pleasant and innocent an air as I could. I was hardly going to bust out with, “I can’t really sympathize with all your stories about husbands leaving socks on the living room floor, because in my current relationship the more pressing danger is that my boss will leave the paddle lying around after he spanks me with it. It’s a genuine hazard. Somebody could trip and fall over it. But picking up after him isn’t an option because, of course, I’m usually hogtied in the middle of the bed when he does it”.

The thought of saying something like this grew increasingly tempting, just to see what sort of reaction I might get. And people wondered why I so often seemed quiet, reserved in social settings. I had an undeserved reputation for being shy and a little prudish, actually, because of my behavior in just such situations. If they only knew.

Kendra and Jane knew, of course. I was considering inviting them to a debriefing session in Houston after we got home, just so we could laugh ourselves sick over all the things we would have loved to say but couldn’t at this lunch. Kendra beat me to it, catching up to me and giving me her card as we walked back to the hotel, insisting that we meet for margaritas no later than the weekend following our return home.

“It’ll be my treat, but you have to bring Jack,” she said. “I’ll come clean to Jane after we get back. I don’t think he’d mind, and I’d like to catch up.”

“It’s a date,” I said automatically, then grinned and agreed when she pointedly said that it was
not
a date.

I was still smiling in anticipation minutes later when I walked to the conference room of my next session and saw Jack there, leaning nonchalantly against the wall, clearly waiting for me. And I realized I had just agreed to bring him on a non-date margarita-drinking spree back in Houston, with his sister’s ex-girlfriend no less, when I really still had no idea if we would even continue doing any of this once we left Rio.

I was cheered enormously by the way Jack greeted me—taking both my hands in his and kissing me lightly, obviously not minding who saw, boding quite well for the relationship continuing after the conference I thought—and by the fact that he skipped the afternoon session he’d planned to attend to sit in on the one I’d chosen. He had missed me, he said, during lunch.

* * * * *

I carried that little morsel of affection with me all afternoon and into dinner, which followed more swimming on the beach. I was starting to warm to the beach scene, I had to admit, possibly because everyone was doing it. With dinner customarily served so late, there had to be some way to kill the time between the end of the conference sessions at four-thirty or five, and the start of the evening meal at eight or nine.

A light snack from a vendor or the hotel lobby, and then down to the beach for some rest and a quick swim. Afterward we rinsed off at the open shower at the beach edge before reentering the stream of pedestrian traffic on
Avenida
Atlantica
, browsing in shop windows, strolling until we found a suitable place to sit and sip a
caipirinha
or beer or lethally strong coffee, and watch the ocean and all the people still playing on the beach.

“You’re starting to see the appeal, aren’t you, little Katie?” Jack asked, as I held my face up to the last rays of the sun and wiggled my bare feet comfortably on his lap where I’d placed them, the better to stretch out and relax on my café chair. “Rio’s getting to you.”

“It has its moments,” I confessed, watching the sun setting in quiet splendor over the bay. “May have something to do with the company though.”

“Speaking of the company, I’m afraid I have some work to do after dinner. I should be doing it right now actually. Sorry, I checked e-mail while I was up in the room changing for the beach. My mistake. I never should have looked.”

“I guess I should actually check
my
e-mail,” I said thoughtfully. “Although I assume the boss would let me know in person if there’s anything important.”

“The boss is satisfied with your current work. Although he’d like it even more if you’d move your foot a few inches to the left…yeah, just like that.”

Snickering, I burrowed my foot suggestively in his lap. “You do realize we’re in the middle of a public walkway here?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I see.” So Jack was a bit of an exhibitionist. Good to know. I tipped my straw hat back a little, playing with the beads on the string and taking another sip of my drink, looking anywhere but at my foot and what it was accomplishing. “This is probably a bad idea if you have to work later.”

With a sigh, Jack patted my foot and gently moved it away, back to the safety of his thigh with its mate. He rubbed my instep with obvious regret. “True, true. Another time though. So what are you going to do while I’m stuck working?”

I remembered the book I’d picked up in the airport, a murder mystery. I had fallen asleep on the plane before getting a chance to read more than the first chapter and hadn’t opened it again since. “Read, I guess. Maybe take a bath. Help you do the work, if it’s something I can do.”

Jack smiled, almost shyly. “You’re just going to hang out with me then?”

“Well, I was. Is that a problem? I don’t want to be in the way.”

“No. No problem. And you won’t be in the way. A little distracting maybe. But I’m used to working with that all the time. It’ll make me feel like I’m back at the office.”

I grimaced. “I don’t even want to think about the office right now.”

“We’re going to have to talk about it sometime, Kate,” Jack pointed out softly.

“I know,” I replied, hoping I didn’t sound as snappish as I felt. “Just later, okay?”

“Later,” Jack agreed with a sigh, looking down to the ocean, where the last shreds of reflected pink were slowly fading into darkness.

Chapter Twelve

Later, Jack worked and I read my slightly trashy book in a hot bubble bath. ���Chewing gum for the eyes”, my eighth-grade English teacher had called this sort of reading, disdainfully. I tended to think of it as chewing gum for the brain, myself.

Either way, it certainly passed the time nicely, much better than real literature would have, I thought. I read literature too, Mrs. Mortimer would have been happy to know. I read everything. I was a literary gourmand in the eighth grade, and I still was. But for a lazy night in Rio, sitting first in the tub and then on the balcony, when the air was breezy and the wine was making me sleepy…this was clearly a night not for great literature, but for a fun and easy read.

We had picked up the wine—along with some bread, cheese and fruit—as we took a somewhat meandering route back to the hotel. Neither of us was particularly hungry. Jack knew where to get everything and was able to deal with the vendors in the noisy street market, the
feira
, in a rapid, none-too-formal Portuguese that ensured we never got stuck with the higher tourist prices for anything. Even in the small liquor store close to the hotel, where we purchased the wine, he pulled the native act off beautifully. I kept my mouth shut and the merchant bade us good evening casually, clearly not pegging us for tourists.

The unintentional subterfuge thrilled me for some reason and Jack admitted that he loved being able to blend in when he wanted to. Carrying our purchases in a straw bag we’d picked up for that purpose, feeling and looking like locals, we walked slowly hand in hand through the darkening streets, which were really just coming alive for the evening.

The bath had been steaming hot, the balcony just a little too cool as the evening drew on. The living room, where Jack sat typing on his laptop surrounded by files, was just right. I wandered in with my book and wineglass, leaving the balcony doors open to catch the breezes, and settled as quietly as I could on the far end of the couch with my feet pulled up under the fluffy hotel robe. I was already contemplating actually breaking down and purchasing one of the robes before I left. I couldn’t quite bring myself to justify stealing one. But it was close. The robe was a hedonistic delight.