Crush on You (14 page)

“I’m not one of your groupies,” she said hotly, but the anger in her voice was belied by the sudden shine of tears in her eyes. “You stood me up.”

Penn froze, her words echoing in his head.
You stood me up.

He wasn’t the only one who didn’t appreciate feeling the fool, he realized. Alessandra wasn’t so much angry as she was hurt because she thought he’d rejected her. That he’d found her . . . what? Forgettable?

A wash of unfamiliar tenderness cooled the burn of his blood. It was foreign enough to unsettle him, but still he dropped her hand to curve his palms around her small face. The kiss he placed on her forehead was more uncle-to-niece than lover-to-lover. “I’m an ass.”

“I thought we established that several days ago.”

Even hurt, she could administer a sting. “Ouch.” He placed another kiss on her forehead.

She broke from his hold to glare at him from two feet away. “Listen, Daddy Warbucks, Little Orphan Annie doesn’t need any more of your generosity.”

Huffing out a sigh, he glared back. No doubt about it, he sucked at this tenderness thing. “You’re a pain, do you know that?”

“An inconvenience to you, anyway,” she said, snotty as all get-out. “Do I have to say it again? Go away, Penn.”

He took a step forward. “That’s not what you were telling me last night. Then I think it was,” he lowered his voice to a husky whisper, “ ‘Do me, Penn. Please, Penn. I’ve got to have your hands all over me, Penn.’”

Outrage washed color over her face. “I said no such thing, you egotistical moron.”

“That’s e gotistical-moron-I-want-to-have-a-secret-affair-with to you,” he shot back, realizing that the “secret” aspect of the whole thing was still grating on him. Maybe there
was
a reason besides Rocky and the lucky spermers that he hadn’t made it to Alessandra’s place the night before.

Not that he was backing down now. He stepped forward again, reaching for her at the same moment.

Her hand came up and back and he recognized a girly slap when he saw one coming. Tenderness evaporated. He caught her wrist just as the momentum of her swinging arm brought her toward him. Their bodies slammed together.

Their mouths fused.

Her taste burst against his tongue as he thrust inside her lips. She was slick and sweet and they moaned together, a sound both frustrated and needy. Her arms twined his neck. He slid his hands down her back and then up again, his touch eager, his need insatiable.

He had to feel her, feed on her, find satisfaction.
Now. Now. Now.

Some sensible part of his brain applauded his actions. Yes, it urged. Get this eruption out of the way and then there’d be no need for an affair, secret or otherwise. Surely this once would burn the want right out of them.

His right hand palmed her breast while his other drew up the back of her warm thigh. Her hem rode high with his wrist and as he slanted his mouth over hers, his fingertips breached the waistband of her panties.

Bikinis. Slinky, silky, bikinis.

His hand squeezed the cheek of her ass as her nipple pebbled against his other palm. Alessandra was crowding closer, the soft pad of her mons riding the ridge of his hard cock, and he grunted at the goodness of it.

This would do it. This would have to do it.

Something that felt this incendiary was too dangerous to risk a second time, let alone for longer term.

Her small hand was yanking up the tail of his shirt. Then it was branding the skin of his belly, causing goose bumps to break out across his ribs. For the first time in memory, he felt his own nipples tighten into hard points as a hot shudder crawled down his back.

Even this one time might kill him.

He shoved down her panties, then he boosted her up, her naked little ass in the palm of his hand. Still rubbing his tongue against hers, he opened his eyes so he could find her desk. He perched her there, almost coming in his pants as he watched her bright white bikinis slide down her legs to catch on her ankles above her businesslike high heels.

Breaking the kiss, he lifted his head. Her eyes were closed, feathery lashes against her flushed cheeks, her swollen and pink mouth raising toward his. He sucked on her upper lip as he pushed up the front of her skirt.

His heaving chest seized.
Holy Mother of . . .
The Nun of Napa was rated X where it counted, her female folds completely exposed to his gaze. “Bare,” she’d teased him at the party, and that’s what she was. Bare and swollen. So pretty. He lightly traced the line between those naked lips with his forefinger, opening them to release a slick wetness that made a hot shudder roll once again down his spine.

“Alessandra,” he said against her mouth, the syllables like a succession of kisses. He pushed his hand against her inner thighs, widening them, preparing her for a deeper touch. Then he gave her a harder kiss at the same time as his thumb rolled over her clitoris and his middle finger found the snug wet pocket of her body.

She stiffened.

Penn made a sound at the back of his throat that was supposed to be soothing, even as he hardened the kiss. Reaching deeper inside her, he stroked in and out and then nudged her clitoris again. Her tense body tightened, he kissed, he stroked, he nudged once more, and then . . .

Her hips jerked once and her eyes flew open.

Holy Mother, he thought again. She took off, just with that, her body bowing, her inner muscles gripping his finger in an unmistakable rhythm.

His mouth lifted from hers as she came against his hand in silent pleasure, her body releasing only small, stiff tremors. Stunned, Penn watched her ride through the last of her orgasm. He’d never known a woman to come with such quiet or with such agonizing restraint.

That tender feeling washed over him again—and it scared the hell out of him.

He backed away the instant her tiny shudders abated, gritting his teeth against the pain of leaving her wet inner clasp. His cock clamored for its release, but a wise voice inside told him that finding his own little death wouldn’t be the ending he was seeking to this.

“I . . .” He lifted his hand, scenting the air with Alessandra’s arousal. It made him take another hasty step back before he did something stupid like fall to his knees between hers in order to taste the flavor of that sweet perfume.

On her desk, her phone rang.

She jolted, blinking, and he realized she was yet to come out of her post-orgasmic state. That weird tenderness welled inside him again and he quickly helped her off the desk and then drew up her panties.

The phone pealed insistently.

He went all Daddy Warbucks once more and kissed her forehead before lifting the receiver and putting it in her hand. Then he made a casual spin and left her office, whistling “The sun’ll come out tomorrow,” despite the sudden sense that the forecast for his own near future was gloomy, with a chance of trouble ahead.

Penn returned to the Bennett home that afternoon sweaty, dirty, and feeling downright mean. Alessandra had never showed up at the cottage—good—but he couldn’t get her out of his mind—bad, very bad.

He didn’t know what the hell he was doing with her.

And as he climbed the steps to the Bennett villa, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing here, either. He ran into the housekeeper, Charlene, in the spacious foyer. She mentioned something about the dinner she was leaving in the kitchen for them and also that Liam and Seth were both out in the vineyard acres adjoining the house. There were other acres owned by the family in different parts of the valley, places Penn had yet to visit.

That he’d never visit, he decided, as he started the shower in the granite-and-mirrors bathroom. The tub was a sunken affair, something a Roman might appreciate, but Christ, Penn was a kid from a one-bedroom apartment in the San Fernando Valley. This wasn’t his place.

To paraphrase The Beatles, it was time for Penn to get back to where he belonged.

Clean, and in jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, he hurried downstairs to give the news to Liam and Seth. Yeah, he hadn’t finished the Baci cottage, and yeah, there were things left incomplete between himself and his father’s legitimate sons, but he didn’t owe a thing to anybody. Not really. That was the upside to the situation. He was the bastard, right? He might as well go right ahead and act like one.

The huge house was empty, though. The housekeeper had left for the evening but his brothers hadn’t come in from the vines. He stood in the opulent game room for a moment, shaking his head at how different it was from his beachside place in Malibu, and his need to escape deepened. He headed back outside.

The temperature was still warm, the lowering sun turning the afternoon light the pale gold of chardonnay. The earth held onto the daytime heat with a greedy grasp and it seeped through the leather soles of his sandals as he headed for the barn behind the house. There, one of the workers directed Penn to an all-terrain vehicle that was used to travel through the vines and pointed to where he’d likely find the other two men.

The sooner he told Liam and Seth, the sooner he could start for southern California. Alessandra’s face popped into his head, but he refused to feel guilty—or think about breaking the news to her. Let the Bennett brothers tell her he’d let her down.

Something told him she wouldn’t be surprised.

He refused to feel bad about that, either.

A short ride on the ATV lifted his mood some. He was a guy, wasn’t he, and four fat wheels plus thrumming engine plus the straight, narrow tracks between the grapevines equaled boyish fun. Seth seemed to agree as Penn came to a halt behind the younger man in a similar vehicle. His grin was wide, even through the dust cloud created by Penn’s sudden stop.

“Bro!” he called out.

Penn pretended he didn’t hear the familial greeting. Probably every guy was a “bro” in Seth’s book, anyway. “Where’s Liam?” he asked. He only wanted to go through this one time.

“Right here.” The older Bennett was crouching to inspect something on a nearby vine. “What’s up?” he asked, straightening.

Seth snapped his fingers before Penn could reply. “I’ve been meaning to get some info from you. You have a lawyer, right?”

“Yeah,” he answered, but cautiously. He didn’t like the look on Seth’s face. While Penn had a lawyer, an agent, and an accountant, all supposed to be looking out for him, recent experience told him that no one truly stood between him and stupid-ass mistakes. “What do you want her for?”

“I assume your attorney will be handling the inheritance issues for you,” Seth said.

Yeah, Penn really didn’t like where this was going. “Look, let’s be clear about something. I don’t want anything from Calvin Bennett. I never have.”

Liam and Seth didn’t say a word.

Penn pushed his hands through his hair, then sighed, his gaze roaming the vines arranged like disciplined rows of soldiers ordered to stand with arms outstretched. They extended forever, it seemed—a startling view for an urban kid more familiar with houses arranged shoulder to shoulder and cars idling bumper to bumper.

“This isn’t my place,” he said, trying to explain.

“Of course it is,” Liam replied, his voice mild. “You’re a Bennett.”

“I didn’t want to be,” he confessed. “I couldn’t understand why my last name was different than my mother’s and I would have changed it, except,” Christ, this sounded stupid, but it was true, “Penn Penn was ridiculous.”

Seth’s mouth twitched. “Penn is your mother’s last name, I take it.”

“Yeah.” And he could have changed that, too, he supposed, renamed himself Miles Smith or Reginald Jones, but that would have been like erasing Debbie Penn from his life and she’d been a nice woman. A loving mother. A person sucked in by a good sob story, but who was Penn to criticize that? “She had the proverbial heart of gold.”

When the other two men didn’t say anything, he found himself getting defensive. “Look, your father apparently was a temporary regular at the bar where she worked. I suppose he gave her the usual ‘unfulfilled before now,’ and ‘never felt like this before,’ what-have-you. When she found out she was pregnant, he stuck around for a few more months. Long enough to get his name on the birth certificate, though he was gone by the time she could go back to cocktail waitressing.”

“And she didn’t hear from him again,” Liam put in, his expression giving nothing away.

“Not until I was getting ready to graduate from high school and he presented her with a college fund that he didn’t want me to know came from him.” At Cal Bennett’s insistence, his mother had given it to Penn as if it was something she’d saved herself. She’d swallowed her pride and acquiesced to her former lover’s demand, even though that meant facing Penn’s teen anger. “She said she’d been pinching pennies all those years and I believed her—too young and stupid to realize she couldn’t have saved that much in seven lifetimes. I was so damn angry. I took the money but barely spoke to her for the next four years.”