She sat back on her heels. “They expect us to have sex in here.”
He blinked at her and then laughed as the recognition dawned. “In here?”
“It’s a love hotel with lingerie.”
“Goddamn, then let’s do that.” He motioned her onto his lap, her knees either side of his hips. “Let me have you how I like best, in my arms, mouth to mouth, where I can use my hands, where I can feel all of you.”
No argument with that. She wrestled his shirt off. He kissed her face, her neck and then a slow line from her jaw down her throat and between her breasts. His hand was at her back, fingers feeling and not finding what he wanted. He growled against the swell of her breast.
“It’s at the front.”
No time lost finding the clasp, undoing it and sliding the bra off her shoulders. A lot of time spent nuzzling, licking, sucking, tiny bites that thrilled more than threatened, and a slow grind of their bodies that built and built until Tom pushed the elastic of her panties to one side and eased inside her.
She was so wet and so full. His forehead dropped to her shoulder. “So good, Flick, I don’t want to move.”
He would, or she’d make him, but for the moment, she held on tight to this tenderness, knowing that when they moved it would explode her world. She should tell him, tell him what she felt and let him decide what it meant. She should tell him, and she’d know if she could afford to cling or needed to steel herself to say goodbye.
This thing they had shifted from friendship in high gear once they’d hit the sheets, and with each coupon the revs went higher, the connection intensified. She knew Tom was as mad for the sex as she was, she knew he cared for her, loved their time together. They would never be strangers again, but that might be all he felt and before she spun out of control she had to know.
She was still trying to connect thought to reason, reason to words, to explain what she felt, when he claimed her mouth, her tongue, seconds before he lifted her, still joined to him, and brought her down on her back on the lounge.
With an experimental thrust he shuddered, eyes on where their bodies locked. He’d get extra friction from the elastic leg of her panties. “If we ruin these we’ll buy more,” he said.
On his knees, he ran a hand down her thigh to her calf over the stocking. She still had her heels on. “Leave these. My God, you’re so hot.” A hand to her stomach, a caress. “Your body, what it does to me—” He lowered over her, lip to lip. “The way your brain works. Excites me more than I have words for. I can’t keep up with you. I had a fantasy scene all picked out, saved that coupon, but after this, I know it’s not enough for you. I’m not enough.”
No, no, no. Compliments and love sentiments wrapped in a version of reality she didn’t share with him. “You’re enough, Tom. More than enough.” These games and fantasies worked because of him, because he was easy to please and willing to let her lead, and played along so nicely.
He thrust and she brought her knees up, taking him deeper, the elastic biting into her hip, grazing meanly along that soft line of flesh inside her thigh where her leg met her body, but she didn’t want to stop, give him any opportunity to doubt. He thrust again and the panties gave with a ripping sound, and she gasped as the sharp discomfort flipped into shocking pleasure. Tom was lost inside his desire and the drive to come, and she was there with him, shuddering, bucking, breathing in snatches, clenching and urging him on with everything she had, and hitting her peak with his name thudding in her heart, screaming in her mind, and loud from her lips.
They ran overtime and someone did knock on the door to hurry them along. Her panties were shredded. They’d fucked the lounge several feet across the room and she’d gouged an angry seam down Tom’s hip and butt with her heel.
She saw it when he stood to fix his pants, reaching out to trace it. “I gave you a sex wound.”
He twisted around to look and then grinned at her. “Only fair we both lose some skin in this game. I think they heard you shout my name in Pittsburgh.”
Game? A turn of speech or an insight into his thinking? She studied his face. He was happy and that’s what this coupon was about. It was what all of them were about, an excuse for them to come together, an agenda to keep them focused. A pattern Tom would recognize, a commitment, a calendar event. It was so much more for her, but for him?
At the service counter a sassy hostess called him by his first name when he paid for new panties in several colors, and he blushed, going pink from the collar of his T-shirt to his hairline.
“She’s looking at your credit card,” Flick whispered, loving his reaction.
He shook his head and turned his card so she could see it said Mr. T. M. O’Connell.
She shrugged, trying not to laugh. “Lucky guess.”
He pinched her ass and then pulled her into his arms, but did nothing more than stare down at her with a puzzled expression that was unsettling. The game, if that’s all it was, had hit the final quarter, eleven coupons remaining and overdue for analysis.
The hostess coughed.
“Creeping everyone out,” Flick said.
He frowned and released her. “Can’t have that.”
On the walk home, she tried to coax him into opening up. She made a poor can opener. Not his fault—he kept up his end, but her questions were fumbled and fell halfway between an interrogation and flirtation and it confused him. It frustrated her. She ended up making ridiculous guesses at his middle name. Melvin, Montgomery, Murgatroyd, Maximilian, Maverick. It was Michael, and she’d figured it would be. Why was that so easy and speaking her mind so difficult?
She had to give clients advice that was far more complex, with serious ramifications, every day. In Washington, she’d be selling an unpopular agenda to people in power who had every reason to consider her an irrelevant interruption and she’d get them to listen, but she couldn’t tell the man who held her hand she was in love with him. All of him. The take-charge career guy, and the more socially reticent one. The man who liked his disciplined routine, and the one who would willingly experiment with her, even when it sometimes made him feel uncomfortable.
Once they were inside the apartment he retreated to the kitchen and moved the conversation on to safer ground, and she let the topic rest.