up she’d gotten him, he offered a final, final warning. “I’m three, maybe four seconds from coming like a motherfucker. My balls are so full, they ache. My cock feels heavy enough to anchor the Titanic. If you’re not prepared to swallow fast and often, you need to get up now. Put me between your tits, your thighs… bend over and offer up your ass. But make no mistake Quinn. I’m coming, and I’m coming hard.”
And then, God help her, she sucked all the slack out of her lips. He remembered bending forward. Vaguely registered grinding his forehead to the crown of her skull. From universes away, he heard a triumphant sound.
Hers.
A long, grateful groan.
His.
He stayed like that, hunched protectively over her, while she swallowed, and swallowed, and then cradled his wrung-out dick in her mouth, toying with him just enough to keep him semi-hard.
No good. He refused to let his tired cock languish there. She deserved only his best. Holding her shoulders, he pulled himself from between her lips. He slid free with an audible pop.
She curved her lips and raised her beautiful face to his. She glowed—a woman flushed with the power of bringing her target to his knees, and not yet overly concerned about the wisdom of her actions.
The next words had to come from him, and he needed to choose them very carefully. Something to put them back on solid ground, and reestablish their roles, despite the fact that she’d just owned him in a fundamental way.
With a barely perceptible move, she shifted her weight to her left leg.
The need for answers overrode caution—or maybe he simply wanted to push her boundaries as payback for letting her run right over his. “Tell me how you sprained your knee, Trouble.”
The glow of triumph dimmed from her face, and her expression shuttered.
Yeah, wrong call. Pushing this particular boundary only made her close up.
I miss you, too…
She swiped her index finger to one corner of her mouth, then the other. Then she got to her feet. “Thank you for my reward.”
“Quinn…”
She walked into her villa and closed the door behind her.
Holy shit, he’d fucked this up. Badly, and on every level. Crossed the line with a client, and then driven her away in a clumsy attempt to resolve jealousy he had no right to feel. And while all that was damning enough, it wasn’t the worst of his transgressions. Not even close.
He sank his fingers into his hair and pulled until his scalp sang. She was a client. An actress. A bundle of reckless impulses wrapped in a package so stunning, it qualified as a defense mechanism.
And he was falling for her.
Fuck.
Chapter Eleven
The lovers strolling arm-and-arm along the shoreline in the distance up ahead probably thought the full moon hanging low in the star-strewn sky looked romantic, but to Quinn’s tortured conscience, it looked like a judge surrounded by a jury of stars, aiming a big, accusatory eye directly at her. One she couldn’t evade, no matter how many miles she logged trying to outrun her humiliation over the encounter with Luke that afternoon.
She focused on the couple. As she watched, the guy turned to the woman, pulled her into a kiss and…whoa…okay, in addition to finding a moonlit beach romantic, they also clearly thought they had it to themselves. Rather than thunder past and hurl an ill-tempered “Get a room!” at them, she changed direction and jogged back the way she’d come. After all, some people came to Paradise Bay for pleasure.
Not Luke. He’s here as a favor to Eddie. He’s here to do a job. He’s told you this more than once, and still you…what? Put his dick in your mouth and hope an unrequested blowjob changes his mind?
He didn’t stop you, a self-defensive voice inside her pointed out. What about the spanking? What about the ‘Help me help you’? He’s no altar boy, either.
True. But instead of giving rise to righteous indignation, the realization only made her feel worse—or maybe the pinch in her side from overexertion deserved the credit? Either way, she knew damn well she owned most of the blame for those incidents.
Why did she keep taking them there?
At first, admittedly, she’d done it as a pathetic attempt to gain a measure of control over him. He had a ridiculous amount of control over her, didn’t particularly approve of her, and he’d been a real jackass about it initially. She hadn’t been above trying to gain a little power by making him want her.
She dug her fingers into her side to ease the uncomfortable pressure, and acknowledged the motive possibly made her exactly the neurotic, narcissistic actress Luke had accused her of being during the call in Eddie’s office. But things had changed since those early weeks. Power and leverage hadn’t factored into her actions this afternoon. That had been nothing but genuine desire, and affection, and…something deeper. Something that just kept on getting deeper, no matter how much she wished it wouldn’t, because he wasn’t a jackass, as it turned out. He was a good guy—the kind of guy who paid a debt to a friend even when it went above and beyond the call of friendship, the kind of man who kept his promises to her even when she didn’t necessarily keep up her end of the deal. A man who wanted her, but didn’t want to want her.