Without Mercy (Mercy 1)

Outwardly, everything appeared as it always had.

Serene. Peaceful.

But a change was coming.

He would see to it.

His passion would guide him.

If he didn’t allow it to rule him. That was the trick. Passion was a double-edged sword. Especially when it came to women.

Shaylee Stillman’s face came to mind as he turned his gaze to the dorms and the window of her room. She was the challenge, the one he wanted. He would love to tame the mutiny he saw rising in her big hazel eyes, love to let his fingers graze the white, white skin of her side to linger at her waist. He’d surround it with a hand, his thumb poised right above her pubis, his fingers pressing hot near her spine. Making her hot inside. Making her wet.

He licked his lips and told himself to be patient. Careful.

His weakness was sex.

Always had been.

It had started with his mother, he knew now. She’d caught him with his tutor, a high school girl who had the most incredible breasts he’d ever glimpsed. Secretly, from his upstairs window, he’d watched her sunbathe in her backyard.

Lissa Harvey.

She’d oftentimes taken off her bikini top while the sun’s rays had been the most intense and caressed her skin, causing sweat to collect. Dark nipples had pointed upward at the sky. Perfectly round. Making him hard. Chocolate disks that were larger than he had expected. God, how he’d wanted to suckle and lick and bite at them.

Better yet, sometimes, when she was alone and the family minivan wasn’t in the drive, she’d slip her hand under her polka-dot bottoms and, closing her eyes, pleasured herself while baking in the warm summer sun.

He’d touched himself as well, timing h

is orgasm with hers. And he had fantasized about her in those sultry summer nights when no breeze had stirred the curtains and wasps, trapped inside, had beaten themselves to death on the windows.

She’d turned bronze over the summer, her nipples seeming to fade as her breasts darkened. She’d been a scholar, without a boyfriend, a college-bound student with long dark hair who understood math, algebra in particular.

He hadn’t cared about school at the time, and his mother had been worried, hiring Lissa in late July before she took off for university.

That’s when the affair had started.

In the musty basement with its low ceiling and tiny windows. On a futon reserved for guests, in front of the cold hearth of an unused fireplace with books and notes spread over the coffee table, they’d first kissed. First touched. First made love.

It had been fast.

Embarrassingly so.

But Lissa had been patient.

Intent on teaching as well as learning.

It hadn’t hurt that he was good-looking, physically mature for his age, developing muscles and shaving before most of the boys in his class. They’d explored every orifice, tried new positions, worked on titillating and turning on. There in the musty old basement, on the futon his grandparents slept on when they’d visited.

And then she’d left.

Gone off to college.

Never written, never called.

Nor had she returned one phone message.

It was as if she’d erased him from her life.