When he walks down to the lobby ten minutes later, he is bathed and dressed in a navy blue button shirt and dark slacks. Our eyes lock, my nipples pebble, and my mouth waters.
“Hello. Directions to Daniel, please.”
His features are chiseled to perfection, more noticeable now that he has slicked his hair back behind his forehead.
“Of course,” I say, impressed by his dining choice there. He watches me as I take out a map and mark the restaurant’s location with a red X. It’s been a while since I’ve given out a paper map. With GPS so prevalent, it’s allowed concierges to focus on other things.
Like how truly dark his eyes are, and how deeply I sense them watching me from under his lashes. He leans forward as I hand him the map, and the cologne on his skin teases my lungs into breathing a little faster. His hand fully covers mine, and crackles race up my arm and somehow down my legs.
He acts as if he doesn’t notice my reaction and casually pockets the map.
“Tomorrow then, at nine.” He shoots me a look that promises every single wicked delight reflected in his eyes to happen tomorrow at nine.
I clench my legs behind the counter and try to keep my heart from kicking in my chest. Damn, I wish I weren’t working tonight so I could work on him and his gorgeous body right now.
“If you can manage not to have fun without me until then. That means no coming by yourself or with anyone else,” I whisper at him surprisingly.
The guy gives me the merest smile and leans even closer.
“Consider it done… if you can assure me the same.” His eyes are dark and penetrating as I bite down on a smile and nod.
I feel crazy with need as I watch his broad back and gorgeous ass walk away.
Ian
I’ve got papers from the World Films takeover strewn across the room, and my focus is about as lax as my cock is hard.
I plunge my hands into my pocket and wait by the window.
I scan the buildings downtown, not for the first time, wondering why the fuck I’m here. I have a home in New York, so how do I keep ending up in hotels every time I’m in town?
Doesn’t matter right now.
Because she’s coming. Pun intended.
Oh, sweet Sara will be coming all right.
I dial the hotel concierge from the phone by the bed.
“Four Seasons concierge, this is Sara speaking.”
“Sara, this is the gentleman from room 1103.”
“Oh, yes. How can I help you, sir?”
“I’d like your panties in a little wad in my pocket and you thrashing in my bed.”
There’s a slight hesitation, and then her answer, not quite steady: “Right away, sir.”
I hang up and stand, my dick stiffening under my slacks, knowing she’s about as ready to get it from me as I am to give it to her.
I smile as I remember asking her for directions to Daniel. Like I need directions for anywhere in New York.
Daniel couldn’t appease the kind of hunger I’m grappling with.
I’m ready for it. I keep checking the minutes, keenly aware that it takes her exactly eight of them to finally knock.
I open the door, and she stands before me with a look of anticipation in her eyes. I stare for a beat, absorbing her. She’s slender and a medium height, with a delicate face and skin like the moon. My gaze moves from a set of silver-gray eyes to lips like a plush, perfect red heart. A heart my dick wants to puncture.
For a moment I want to kiss her, all fucking night. I can’t remember a woman ever looking at me with such anticipation before. Too many years fucking for fucking’s sake to remember what it’s like to taste or touch.
I don’t remember ever feeling this damn starved for someone.
I seize her neck with one hand, stroking the flutters of her heartbeat that vibrate against my fingertip at her pulse point.
I ask her if she’s already turned on, and she hesitates in silence. I can tell she’s younger than me by decades of experience, even if our age is only a few years apart.
She eases into my grip, and I lift her by the ass and drop her down on the entry table. Take it easy, Ford. Damn, you’re acting like a crazy man.
I try to be gentle as I duck my head and taste her, but she wants it. Her desire, her confidence is even more of a turn-on.
I suck and savor her, my hands digging into her ass as I open her mouth.
I clench her tight enough to push her tits into my chest.
She asks me to do her hard. I tell her exactly what I’m going to do with her. The need to feel her hot and wild around me burns bright as I take another taste.
She strokes her hand along my shaft.
I feel unhinged. I flip her around. It’s less intimate this way.
I lift her dress. I drive in.
She cries out.
I plunge my fingers between her thighs and tease her clit, biting into the back of her neck to pin her in place as I thrust. She moves back, wanting it harder. I grip her hips and catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, of me inside her. I watch her move, the expression of lust on her face. I flip her back around. Suddenly I cannot look at anything but her damn face.
I clench it in one hand and drive back in. Animal sex. Not the kind a mature man would have with the woman he loves. The kind you imagine you’d have with sluts, or strangers.
She bites my lip and I throw her on the bed. I strip her. I strip, too.
This time when I fall back on her, I don’t give her my dick. I won’t last and I don’t want it to be over yet. I suckle her tit and wander my mouth lower. My balls tighten against my shaft when I taste the cream between her thighs. I didn’t know a taste could be so intoxicating.
I finger her as I lick up her clit, around it. There’s nothing sweet about the way she comes—she’s too wild for that. She dives straight in like an adrenaline junkie would dive off a cliff, without a second thought as to whether or not her bungee string is attached. She rides the waves with uncontrollable movements and a gasp in her throat, her mouth on my neck as she clutches me to her.
She’s still coming when I flip her to her stomach, lift her ass up, and drive into her.
She groans deep in her throat and another contraction hits her, tightening her pussy walls around every hard inch. I pump her hard and fast, unable to keep a lid on my groans. I stroke a hand down her spine. Cup her ass. Her tits. Bite her neck. Grab her by the hair.
The smell of her shampoo is in my nose. Her hip bone is in my hand. Her pussy grips me. Pretty soon I’m rocketing to the edge. Flying past it. I press her down on the bed and bury myself to the hilt, groaning as my release takes over me. I start jetting off, so full that I can’t stop my dick form jerking, the waves from crashing.
She likes it. Likes me holding her pussy in my palm and caressing. Likes me pinching her clit. I set her off a second time. Set her off so hard she buries her moans into my pillow, shaking beneath me for another five… ten… fifteen seconds.
“Oh my God,” she groans as she flips around.
We’re both breathing hard and coated with sweat as I sit back and try to reassemble what’s left of my brain.
She snuggles to my chest, and I ease my arm out from beneath her. I dread seeing her look up at me with stars in her eyes. I’m still too fucking drugged. It takes effort to step away and head to the bathroom to clean up.
I splash my face with water and meet my gaze in the reflection.
You fucking happy with yourself, Ford?
I brace my arms on the sink and exhale, then shove back and head to the room—not to the bed. No. To the desk. Where the majority of my papers are.
Sara
I need to leave, but I’m lingering, dressing at a tortoise pace. I slowly ease my panties back up my legs and fix my hair using the mirror above the entry table.
He’s scanning my ass, hungrily, as if I didn’t just give him a very big O. I’d never felt a man come for so long. He was filled to the brim. Yum.
“Your name?
” I ask as I turn to face him. He stands bare-chested in slacks behind the desk. His gaze alternates from me, to the papers on the desk, back to me.
“I think its best that we leave it like this. I don’t do…” He motions between us. “I don’t do this.”
“Sex?”
“Clearly, I do that.” He smiles briefly. It’s a rather regretful smile, and it doesn’t last more than a second. But that second is all it takes to cause my last breath of air to get trapped in my throat.
I swallow. He means a relationship. Do I look desperate to him?
As casually as I can, I smile back at him, still not breathing quite right. “Well then, goodbye, stranger,” I say, starting for the door.
“Sara.” His voice stops me, and when our eyes meet again, there’s something dark and intense in his gaze. “I enjoyed you. And that hot little body of yours. Very much.”
“My pleasure, sir. Please consider staying at the Four Seasons on your next visit,” I say, trying to make light of the situation as I step out. I board the elevator, sigh, and lean my head back against the wood panel behind me, swooning inside.
Have I ever been bitten this much?
Have I ever been fucked this hard?
I thought my teeth would break, and I fucking loved it. I wanted to sink in my nails and drag them down every inch of his glorious, taut, tanned skin. The way he looked into my eyes when he ate me up, I get chills remembering. And when he had me on all fours, I wanted to scream from the pleasure of the wild, hungry way he drove into me. He tangled and pulled my hair. Why was that so hot?
I have never felt so full, or seen such a glorious dick in my whole life. My knees wobble thinking about it.
Aren’t you glad you shared that cab, Sara? Went upstairs? Let him get you off twice and get himself off on you?
Yes, yes, yes to it all.
I walk into my apartment an hour later, listening to the noises of my next-door neighbors playing video games. “Shut up!” I bang on our shared bedroom wall, sigh, and slip into bed with my laptop, checking the advertisements for anything Broadway related. There is…
Nothing.
I’m stuck as a concierge for now. I set aside the laptop when my neighbors start screaming at their video game again, and I groan and cover my head with my pillow, deciding noise-canceling earphones will be the first thing I buy when I have extra money. I keep telling myself this, but I always manage to spot a nice pair of shoes I want instead.
Thoughts of money lead to thoughts of my impending rent payment. My roommate has moved out and I’m finally alone, but now I have to cover the entire bill. I sit up, open my computer, and start drafting a want ad. Dark eyes flash in my mind. My heart stops for a beat before resuming. God. What a yummy motherfucker he was.
Ian
Two days ago…
The droning sound of her voice over the telephone goes on and on and fucking on. I exhale and growl, “Talk to my lawyer,” and I slam the receiver into the cradle.
I glare at the phone and grind my palms into my eyes before exhaling and dropping my hands to my lap.
What the fuck happened?
We dated all through college and, after graduation, took the next logical step and moved to New York. I made money. I kept making money, giving her more than she ever dreamed we would have: a four-bedroom West End Avenue penthouse with views of the Hudson, generous shopping sprees at Bergdorf, exotic vacations via chartered private jets. I thought only of earning more, providing more—until the day I walked into our apartment to find a pair of cufflinks that weren’t mine.
I asked if she’d been fooling around.
She denied it.
Like a fool, I believed her story about buying them as a gift for me. I ignored the fact that they were already open and there was no empty package. I took them. I even wore them to our next event. Like a goddamn fool.
Eight months later, I walked into our apartment to find two glasses of wine in the sink, her shoes on the floor, and a string of underwear leading to our bedroom. I stood by the door, listening to them.
THEM.
My wife, and someone else.
My whole body trembled as I yanked the door open and charged at him.
I grabbed him off her, turned him around, and sent him flying to the wall.
“We’re done,” I spat at her, gathering the man’s shit and shoving it into his chest. “And you—never, ever step back here if you know what’s good for you.”
He was some young accountant who worked for the firm my film company hired, who was helping my wife with her personal expenses. Ha!
“Ian,” she begged, “you’re never here.”
“You,” I snarled, “are here because of me.” I motioned to the apartment, every luxury she could ever want on display. “You’re fucking here because of me, Cordelia.” I looked into her eyes, once so innocent and sweet, a girl who used to bake me cakes she served with homemade ice cream when it was my birthday. What happened to her? What happened to us?
“You’re never here,” she sobbed. “I’m twenty-five years old, Ian. I have needs!”
I shook my head, the disappointment in me, in her, in us crushing me to the point that my lungs could hardly pull in air. “You could have talked to me.”
“I’ve tried.” She covered her face and lowered her gaze.
I grabbed a suitcase and started packing my bags.
“Where are you going? Ian, please.”
“Out. I’m not coming back. You’ll hear from my lawyer.” I zipped my suitcase shut in record time. It was always something I did with a shade of reluctance when I had to leave on another business trip. This was the first time I packed a bag without a moment’s thought.
“It doesn’t have to be like this!” She chased me to the front door and froze unexpectedly when I faced her.
“No. It didn’t,” I said, glancing down at her clothes on the floor and her naked body as proof of her betrayal, and I walked out.
It’s been over a year and our divorce is still not finalized. I told her to keep the apartment—all I want is her signature. I want to be free of her and the reminder of how goddamn stupid I was.
I can’t believe I have to go back to fucking New York tomorrow.
I press the intercom button to my assistant. “Make sure you don’t book my room under my name. I don’t want her to get even a whiff of me being in the city,” I growl. “And don’t put her through to me next time she calls.”
I release the intercom button, exhale, and lean back in my chair, scraping a hand across my jaw.
Twelve and a half months since that fateful night, and it still looms over me like a cloud. She said all I did was work. It wasn’t true, but her words were prophecy and that’s all I ever do now. All I ever am. Work and bitterness and distrust, and money, lots of money. Lately I wonder if there’s anything on this damn planet that’ll get me to feel human again.
I shoot an email to my divorce lawyer and ask to meet him in New York.
Ian
Present day…
“I need a divorce. Now.”
“So you’ve said.” Mattias Wahlberg sits across the lunch table from me, just another day for my divorce lawyer. “But I have to state once more that without her consent, and without proof of her affair, it’s going to—”
“I have proof,” I say, cutting him off.
Leaning down to my briefcase, I enter the combination, click it open, and pull out the cufflinks. I drop them on the table. “These cufflinks. I’m sure they’re his.”
“You’re sure? How? We have no proof of him wearing them.”
I drop them back into my briefcase in a quick, frustrated move and drag a hand across my face. “Look. I need this done.”
“She doesn’t seem to want to divorce you.”
“Nobody wants to divorce me—my name opens doors.”
“Cut her credit cards.”
“And have her starve?” I growl, shaking my head.
“Ian, we’ve known each
other for a long time. Talk to her. See if you can appeal to the heart inside.”
I exhale and lean forward. “Give her whatever she wants. The West End apartment. The Cabo house. Half my cash. But the company stays with me—give her anything else. And get me that damn divorce,” I growl and shove away from the table.
I climb into a cab and head back to the hotel. I need to finish my paperwork and deliver it to my New York office before my 5 p.m. flight back to LA.
And yet, while the driver wades through traffic, it’s not work I’m thinking about as I stare out the window. I see her in every woman walking down the sidewalk. Some have her hair; some have her legs. I lean closer to the window when I spot one that I’m sure is her. She’s nicely shaped like Sara, with the same long, elegant neck, her dark hair held back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a knee-length black dress, and it hugs her body just right when she bends to pick up something she’s dropped. I drink her in.
The taxi halts in the middle of traffic, and I curve my fingers around the door handle, ready to leap out. The woman lifts her head and stands again. It’s not Sara.
Not her eyes. Not her face. Definitely not her lips.
Jesus, man, get over it already.
I exhale and drop my hand to my knee, drumming my fingers restlessly. I fucked her—a one-time thing. But it opened the gaping hole that makes me crave human touch, human connection. A woman’s scent, a woman’s voice… This girl may be the key to open me back up.
I consider it for a minute. But only a minute.
What for, Ford? There’s nothing good of you left.
I walk into the lobby and head straight toward the concierge desk. She’s not there.
“Sara?” I ask.
“She’s home. I’m covering for her because of the day she covered for me. Do you want me to call her, Mr.…”
I pull out a card. “Ask her to call me.”
She flashes a rather coy and flirtatious smile, which I ignore, and I ask her for an envelope and write a message on the back of the business card.