Читать книгу Indecent...Nights: Indecent...Exposure / Indecent...Proposal / Indecent...Desires - Jane O'Reilly - Страница 16

Chapter Seven

I fumble in my bag for my phone and call Amber, but it goes straight to voice mail. I leave a message, a confused mess of a thing, then head back to my studio. I’ve got a ton of work to do before this afternoon and I’ve got no idea how I’m going to get it done in time. The last couple of days have been an endless rush. The whole world seems to be spinning around me, and what’s worrying me most of all is that I’m enjoying it.

I take a minute to let that sink in, as I fish my keys from my bag. It feels like I’ve spent far too long living on the periphery of everyone else’s life, and for the first time, I’m living my own. I don’t like to admit it to myself, but my life has been boring for a very, very long time.

I go to unlock the door. It’s already open. Please tell me I didn’t leave it unlocked. It’s not the equipment I’m worried about, that’s insured. But if someone has taken my laptop…

It doesn’t bear thinking about. So I refuse to think about it. I rush inside, trying to steel myself for what I’m going to find, imagining the worst. Everything looks exactly as it did when I left. Nothing seems out of place. I hear the sound of the toilet flushing in the little bathroom at the back, and I grab the nearest thing, arming myself.

The bathroom door opens. ‘Hey,’ says Amber, flicking the light off as she leaves the small room. ‘I was wondering when you’d get here. If you’d get here.’

‘How the hell did you get in here?’ Relief comes out of me as anger. I throw the umbrella down by the door.

‘You gave me a key, remember?’ She flops down on the velvet sofa. ‘Anyway, I was hardly going to go back to work, was I? Not now I know it’s her.’ She covers her face with her hands. ‘I can’t believe he was banging both of us and neither of us knew. All that crap he spouted about workplace relationships, about how we had to be discreet, and absolutely no one could know.’ With a furious twist of her arm, she punches the seat next to her. ‘Lying bastard. What he really meant was that he didn’t want either of us to find out. Until he went and fell in love with Victoria and decided he didn’t need me any more.’ She turns to me then. ‘Do you know what she said to me earlier?’

I’m not sure I want to know, but it’s clear that she wants me to ask, so I do. ‘What?’

‘She said that I’d got the most incredible tits she’d ever seen, and that she’d quite like to screw me! And then Paul said he’d like to watch!’

I wait for her pain to hit me. But it doesn’t. And then I say something that I’d never have said before. ‘You should go for it.’

Amber sits bolt upright on the sofa and stares at me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I want him to suffer, Ellie. I want him to know exactly what he’s missing and exactly how much of a prick he’s being.’

‘I know you do.’ But still, I don’t feel it.

Amber gets to her feet. ‘Show me the photos.’ It’s not a request. It’s a demand. And I know that my time is up. I have to tell her the truth.

I sit down at my desk, open my laptop and click through to the file that contains the photos of her and Tom. The slideshow starts up, and Amber slips in beside me, pushing her hip against mine until we’re sharing the chair. She smells of Coco Mademoiselle and optimism. I get out of the chair and move to the other side of the studio. I can’t bring myself to look at the pictures, not today.

There is silence for a long moment. The pictures I did get are good, I know they are. But they aren’t what she wanted. And I know the second she finds that out.

‘Where is my picture?’ She’s clicking frantically through the folder, trying to find it. ‘Where the fuck is my picture, Ellie?’

I have to face the truth of it, then. ‘I didn’t get it,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

She twists round in her chair, and hits me with a question I really don’t want to answer. ‘Why not?’

I can’t tell her. I don’t really know what is going on between Tom and me, but I know that it’s our secret. It’s precious and delicious and ours, and I’m not ready to share it with anyone. I don’t know if I ever will be. ‘I messed up,’ I confess. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

I’ve not kept anything secret from Amber in years, not since we were at school and she sat next to me in detention and let me copy her answers. She’s the only person who knows that I can’t really read. If it wasn’t for her, I’d never have passed a single exam.

‘You didn’t get it?’ She shoots out of the chair and starts to pace. Then she turns to me. ‘I want you to get Tom back in here,’ she says. ‘I’m going to show the pair of them that they can’t treat me like this.’ Her eyes flash fire, and her mouth is set hard. This is Amber spoiling for a fight, and I know better than to get in her way.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Come back tomorrow, after closing. I’ll get you what you need.’

I tidy up the studio, bleach the toilet, flick the feather duster around, all the usual things. I’m in the process of setting the alarm and locking the door when Tom shows up.

‘I couldn’t wait,’ he says, shuffling his weight from one foot to the other, his hands hidden inside the pockets of his flasher mac. Although he’s as neat as always, there is something about him that’s oddly dishevelled.

I have never been so pleased to see him in my entire life. Something inside me softens at the sight of him, as other parts heat and tighten. The whole situation with Amber has left me feeling shaken, disturbed, as if I’m missing something that’s right there in front of me.

Tom Hunt makes me want to not care. He’s so deliciously distracting, my entire body clamouring for him, as if he hasn’t already made me come today. When I think about it though, he didn’t make me come. He just happened to be in the room when I did.OK, yes, he contributed to it, and the orgasm I had probably wouldn’t have been quite so intense without him, but he owes me.

And I want him. I’ve had enough of being teased, of being tempted. I want to touch him, like he let me touch him in the delicatessen earlier, only this time I want no clothes in the way, no interruptions. When I’m in that moment with him, I forget who I am.

It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to being myself.

I turn back to open the door, but he stops me. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not here.’

‘Please,’ I say, but he just shakes his head and smiles at me. It’s a shy smile, an almost smile. A nervous smile.

‘Come home with me,’ he says.

So I do.

He lives in a narrow terrace near the train station, about ten minutes’ walk from the studio, and he walks fast. The only reason I can keep up is because he carries my bags for me. Not my handbag, obviously, but my laptop and iPad and camera.

Not only can he walk really fast, he can talk at the same time. I find out that he bought the house because it’s close to the boxing gym he uses, and he hopes I don’t mind, but he’s only decorated half of it. I just about manage to nod at the right moments. I’m a mess of nerves and anticipation. I was fine with the whole idea of having sex with him when he turned up at the studio, but delaying things like this, bringing me back to his house has added a whole new layer of intimacy to everything.

This is making it real. I’m not sure I can handle real, although I want him so badly that I’m not sure I can walk away either. Then he pushes open a gate and pushes me gently up a sloping path towards a black front door and panic sets in. I turn to him. ‘Are you sure…’

He puts his mouth on mine before I can say the rest of it. Before I can talk him or me out of this. The kiss is hot, hard, and fiercely intimate. He tastes of coffee and sweetness, and his tongue moves against mine with a desperate urgency. He grips my hips, fingers digging into flesh through the soft fall of my skirt.

He’s never kissed me before. All the things that we’ve done, and this is the first time we’ve kissed. It shocks me. And before I can even think what I’m doing, I’ve dropped my bag and dug my fingers into that neat hair and I’m kissing him back. His hands are all over me as I shove my tongue into his mouth and let out a low, dirty moan. He feels so hard against me, not just his erection, but his mouth and that muscle-packed body, and it turns me into a soft, quivering wreck.

Lifting his head, he watches me for a moment, then reaches into his pocket and takes out his keys. ‘I’ve been wondering about that.’

‘Yes,’ I say faintly. ‘So have I.’ Although I’ve only just realised it.

He slots the key into the lock and turns it, but he doesn’t open the door. Oh, god, I was too much. Too forward. Too…

‘There’s something I want to say.’ He blushes. ‘About Amber.’

Here it comes. I feel a bit sick, to be honest, partly because I’m jealous as hell and because I’m terrified that I’m not going to measure up to Amber. In any way, shape or form.

‘When I came to the studio with her,’ he says, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, ‘I need you to understand something about that. I was having a crap day. She offered me a blowjob, and I was horny. I didn’t know, Ellie. I…didn’t know about…’ He gestures to the space between us. ‘This.’

‘You don’t need to explain,’ I say, but he touches my face and the words die away.

‘Yes I do.’

‘No,’ I say again, fighting the urge to turn my head and lick his hand. ‘I know what that’s like. I spend half my time fantasising about someone walking through the door and offering to lick me out, because I’m lonely and bored and horny, and I’ve just had to watch yet another besotted couple crawl all over each other.’

He doesn’t say anything. He drops his hand from my face and unlocks the door, then pushes it open. He has me through the door before I can even think to ask him what he’s doing, and when I can think to ask him, I can’t think at all, because he’s eating my pussy like it’s dessert. He got my knickers down as far as my knees before he bent me over the arm of the living room sofa and buried his face between my bum cheeks.

I grip the cushions until my knuckles go white and let out a long, slow moan. His big hands are on my arse, holding me steady, exposing me to him. I can’t see him. I can only feel. The slide of his tongue. The warmth of his hands. The heat of his breath and the scratch of his chin. He tastes every single part of me in a long, torturous journey that starts at the small of my back and ends at my clit. He lingers there, until my whole body has become a focused throb, centred at that point. ‘Tell me what you need, Ellie,’ he says, as my hands roam over the sofa, trying to find something to hang on to. It is huge and squishy, with that clean smell that I associate with him.

But I can’t find the words. It’s not even that I’m too scared to say them. I simply can’t find them. He moves away from me, leaving one hot hand on my hip to hold me in place. As if I could move, even if I wanted to. I turn my head enough to see him pulling my bags closer. He finds my iPad and pushes it into my hands. ‘Is it this?’

I need you. Just one more thing that I can’t say, as he sinks to his knees behind me again, and puts his wicked mouth back on my clit. Because I can’t say it, because I can’t look into his hot blue eyes and tell him everything, I turn on the iPad instead. My hands shake as I find the file that I want. He feels so damn amazing, licking me out, tasting me, and he looks so beautiful in the pictures I took of him, pleasuring himself. It feels like the ultimate in sexual decadence, having Tom Hunt on his knees with his face between my legs, pleasuring my body, as I pleasure my mind with my pictures of him.

Tom Hunt. On his knees. For me.

In a blinding flash, I feel a little piece of my heart break loose. I know that I’ve just given it to him, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I should be more scared than I am, but it’s hard to focus on fear when you’re a heartbeat away from orgasm.

And when it crashes into me, it’s stupendous. My eyes go blind; I can’t hear anything but the thundering of blood in my ears. I don’t just feel it in my pussy, my clit. I feel it everywhere. He is everywhere. Then I realise that he’s scooped me up, that I am curled up on his knee and his arms are around me and when I kiss him, I can taste my climax on his mouth.

‘You were looking at me,’ he says, and then I realise that he has my iPad in his hand. ‘All those pictures to choose from, and you were looking at me.’ He stares at me, those blue eyes hot. ‘Did it turn you on, Ellie? Did you like looking at those pictures of me when I had my tongue in your pussy?’

I turn away from him and get my first proper glimpse of the inside of his house. I assume this is his living room. It’s not big, but it’s very tidy and very clean, which makes the dirty thing he just did to me over the arm of his slate-grey sofa seem even more outrageous. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the room is sterile and cold, but it isn’t, because it matches him perfectly, and he’s neither of those things. ‘Yes.’ I fidget with his cuff. ‘Did you?’

‘What?’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Fuck, yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve enjoyed everything we’ve done, Ellie. I thought you knew that.’

I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all, and it’s too much for me. ‘What about all those horrible accounts meetings in your office?’ I say. ‘You can’t have enjoyed those. They were work. Who likes their work?’

‘You do,’ he says. ‘And I do.’

‘You like being an accountant?’

‘I like playing with numbers.’ He shrugs. ‘I like helping people out. It’s very satisfying. There’s always a right answer.’

‘I like taking photos of people fucking,’ I say, and the revelation shocks me so much I can’t breathe for a moment. I’ve never dared to admit that to myself, let alone anyone else.

‘I know.’ He grins at me, a boyish twist to his mouth that lights me up and turns me on. ‘I can tell.’

‘Oh.’ Now I feel like a pervert. A hot, squirmy pervert. My legs have gone trembly, my breasts are hot, and I’ve got this wet furnace between my legs, despite the fact that I came all over his face only a few minutes ago. ‘How?’