The Dirty Secret (19 page)

There was a thump, then a muffled voice said, “Don’t do this to yourself, Killer. Call her when you’re sober.” The recording played another verse of music and then went dead.

“Vessa. Good morning. This is Killian. I apologize for whatever messages I might have left last night. You haven’t picked up, so I’m guessing you don’t want to talk to me right now. I’ll respect that, if it’s what you want. If you’d like to talk, about anything, I’d love to hear from you. And thank you. Last night was amazing. The open house, I mean. Not us. Fuck.” He cleared his throat. “Yeah. You have my number. I’ll be here.”

Vessa scrubbed at the tears on her cheeks, and hit the call back button, but he didn’t pick up.

* * *

Killian’s phone rang again with the number he didn’t recognize, a Vermont area code. This time they left a voice mail, but he didn’t listen to it. The phone rang again, a minute later, from Starla’s number. He let it ring three times before answering the wrong sister’s call.

“Hi,” she said.

He closed his eyes, his head and heart aching, because the two of them even sounded alike. “Hi,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m a bit drunk, actually.” The voice was right, but the accent didn’t have New England clipped syllables.

Adrenaline ripped through him. “Vessa?”

“Not nearly as bad off as my sister, though,” she said. “Who needs to learn how to use private browsing. You were right, by the way. Girl likes her some filthy porn.”

“I called you.”

“My old phone number has been deactivated by the account administrator, because bad stepchildren need to be punished, so it’s deader than an unwashed latex brush. I got a new phone. All my own. But I didn’t get your voice mails until this morning. Do you want to come over? Maybe talk a little? There’s pizza.”

Killian shut his laptop without saving, and was out the door in three strides. “How much have you had?” It wasn’t even noon.

“Well,
she’s
passed out on the sofa.” Her syllables were a little breathy, but not slurred. “I’m cognizant, at least. Though probably not legal to even drive a tricycle.”

“Are you okay?” He turned his phone to speaker mode and dropped it into the cup holder in the dash.

“Yes. No. Maybe? You need to hang up, before she wakes up and catches me on her phone.”

“Vessa, wait.” Killian gripped the steering wheel, his head swampy with his hangover. “I don’t know where you live.”

Silence hung like doom on the other end, and he waited, one hand on the key in the ignition.

“Look for me at the blue door next to Manny’s,” she said, and relief surged through Killian’s soul. “Don’t ring the bell—it’s really loud.”

He raced through town, pausing briefly at the red lights before running them. She met him at the sidewalk by Brass and Bones. Her eyes were smeared with light blue, messy underneath—watercolor tear tracks, sad clown sexy—with her hair all over the place, and she was so pretty his chest hurt to look at her.

“Hi,” she said. She tilted her head sideways. “I have nothing to hide anymore.”

“Vessa.” Her cheeks and mouth were red with the wine on her breath, and all he wanted was to pull her into his arms. “I am sorry. I was an ass. A hypocrite. And you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, ever.” A customer left Manny’s shop, eyeing the two of them as she got into her car. “Can we go in?”

The loft apartment had wide windows that looked out over the street and down over the waterfront. Her furniture was all collapsible, wooden folding chairs and a drop leaf table, bookshelves made of kitchen cabinets, modular and easy to transport with their contents still inside. All her things looked temporary, even the cushions and quilts scattered everywhere. The walls were white and undecorated.

Starla lay on the couch, covered with a throw, a small trashcan nearby.

“Did she get sick?” Killian pulled the blanket over her toes.

“No. But I have no idea what kind of a drunk she is.” She gestured to the kitchen counter. “There’s pizza and wine if you’re hungry.”

He shook his head. He leaned back against the fridge, watching her. “So—”

She hopped up, sitting on a stack of boxes. “You’re still really sexy. I’m glad.”

“Um...me too, I guess.”

“I was worried that it was just the job and your magic house.” She swung her feet back and forth, watching her toes, but her mouth was curled up in a teasing grin.

“If it was, I’m building another.”

The smile faded. She looked away, out the window. “I don’t want to be anyone’s secret anymore.”

Iron bands squeezed Killian’s ribs. He swallowed, fighting to take a breath. “Vessa.” He forced himself to walk slowly, to give her the room to tell him to fuck off, one step at a time until he stood in front of her. “I love you.”

She gasped, and he touched her cheekbone with the back of a finger, testing the heat that had risen there. “I couldn’t keep you a secret, even when I tried. Everyone at the firm knows I’m crazy about you. I was hoping they would get to know you, to meet you for you, and see your work and how skilled you are before they knew we were involved.”

She met his gaze then. Her eyes were wide, her mouth soft.

“That went over like a brick balloon,” he said. “Mara Bjorn told me if I let Bengt anywhere near you she would fire me without references. Bergman told me I had good taste. Deb told me if I looked at you any harder my eyeballs would—never mind. It was disgusting.”

He stepped closer, his arms around her, his lips at her temple, her hair soft against his face. “And I don’t want to keep you secret. I’m so fucking grateful you agreed to work with me. I want to do another house with you. It’s been so great. Not just the sex. I used to spend ten to twelve hours a day at the office. Almost every day. The custodian knows me by name. And these past two months I’d sneak out of there early, just so I could see you, or see what new thing you had done. And I want that. I want to build a house for you, for us, with a million rooms for you to paint and put weird things into and make magical and sexy. Would you want that? With me?”

She moved then, her hand on his mouth, three fingers pressed to his lips. He waited, barely daring to breathe, damning his idiot tongue. The words were too big, too much, too soon. He’d practically proposed.

“What if we started out slowly,” she said, and he was pulled back to two months ago, to his naked house after spilling everything he wanted to a mysterious girl bargaining for her own terms, and him standing there, bewitched, his breath held, begging
please
.

“Anything you want,” he said into her fingers.

“Well...” Her smile was one length shy and two inches tricky. “I need a roommate.”

He gripped the edge of the counter as his spine sagged in relief.

“Maybe we could try this place on for size first,” she said, “and figure out what we really want?”

He kissed her palm, her wrist and her mouth until she slid her arms around his neck. She kissed him back, the teasing wet kisses that drove him crazy, and it took all his restraint to keep from losing control and just mauling her there in her kitchen, ripping what was left of her shredded shorts off her thighs.

“I want you,” he confessed. “All the time. I’ll be obnoxious to live with, trying to get into your pants every waking moment. Probably sleeping, too.”

Vessa rose to him, responsive as always. She kissed him with her hands, fingertips on his face, thumb touching his bottom lip as she kissed his mouth. Her breath came in little panting gasps, like he was already inside her.

“Do you think she’ll wake up if I take you right here?” he whispered, glancing back at Starla.

Vessa wrapped her arms and legs around him, shoving him back, sliding down his body in a wriggle that rubbed his cock through his jeans the whole way, then led him to the room in the back of the loft.

Her bedroom was a pirate captain’s quarters, an explorer’s stowage, stacks of cabinets and portmanteau boxes and locking chests of drawers. “We’ll have to get a bigger bed,” she said, snatching up clothes and throwing them into a hamper.

“I know a decorator who’s pretty good,” he said. “She could probably find something, but there’s no telling what she might
do
on it before she gets it to you.”

Vessa flung a pillow at him. He caught it and turned it over in his hands, trying to remember the last time he’d been in a girl’s bedroom.

She stepped up on the bed and leaned down to kiss him, driving every other thought from his head, except the feel of her mouth on his.

“Will you paint this room for us?” he asked her. “I want a wall the color of your lips when you are about to come. They get so dark red. I wake up in the morning, every morning, raging hard because I’ve dreamed of your mouth, saying my name as you come.”

Her fingers were up inside his shirt, tickling his skin. He pulled the T-shirt over his head, and he’d never known how sensitive his forearm was, or anywhere else that she touched him.

“I want to give you permanent walls, with shelves for your things, so you don’t have to live out of boxes anymore. And sexy. Can you make it sexy? Messy sexy, with our underwear mixed together on the floor, like it’s having sex, too.”

He tried to take her shirt off, but she danced away, standing behind him, undoing his jeans, fumbling a little because she couldn’t see, and he didn’t help. He watched her hands, delicate and female, doing the things he was so used to seeing with his own hands: buttons, zipper, pulling his cock out of his underwear. And then her fingers worked over the shaft, cupping his balls underneath. She had a light touch, palming the head, and when she pulled away to push his pants down, hands flat on his ass, he was rock solid, red hard and ready to be
in
. But she pointed to the bed. “Lie down.”

“Are you going to join me?” he asked her, easing back on the blanket, diagonally, so his feet didn’t hang off the end.

She sat down on a steam trunk. “Not yet.”

Killian folded his arms back behind his head.

“So when you jerk off, do you fuck your hand, or does your hand fuck you?”

Fuck,
this girl. “Er. Right hand is dominant, I think. Left hand services.”

“Show me,” she demanded.

Killian’s cheeks heated, but his cock wasn’t bashful at all, the randy bastard ready to do cartwheels for her. He’d asked her to do the same thing, in the house, and now she wanted to see him, in her bed. He grabbed and squeezed a few slow strokes, milking the pre-come to coat his palm, and then he stroked the skin over the shaft, tight at the base, loose at the crown.

She watched, her lips parted. “What do you think about when you do that?”

“Anything. Everything.” He wasn’t self-conscious anymore, not with her watching him like he was candy she wanted to suck. “The first time I saw you. How it feels to be inside you. You touching yourself on the girly sofa. Can we have a girly sofa? I want to watch you touch yourself like that every day. I want to come on your clit while you are playing with your pearls all up inside you.”

Her little whimper tore through him, as if he’d been licked by her mouth.

“Switch hands,” she said, her voice low and breathy.

“Take your shirt off,” he countered. She was out of her shirt and bra faster than he could curl his left fingers around his erection, fist tight and still, him thrusting his cock into his hand.

“Now what are you thinking about?”

“That you have incredible tits and I’d rather be playing with them than myself.”

“I like watching you,” she said. “I’ve never had a boy in my bed before.”

He stopped, lust and triumph boiling under his skin. She’d just said two more things that started with
I
, and both made him burn. “Come here.”

She wrenched off her shorts, her underwear with them, and crawled up his body, breasts on the inside of his thighs. He slid his cock between them, and then she settled over him in one long, wet slide.

“Mirrors, too,” he said. “Lots of mirrors, so I can see you from every angle while we’re fucking.”

Vessa moved over him, setting a slow pace, breasts swaying as she worked her hips over his cock, gorgeous and sultry.

“Fuck, you are so beautiful.” He arched to meet her as she rocked her body, but it was too much, he was rising too fast, and she wasn’t there yet—her breathing hadn’t become the quick little pants that tortured him in his dreams. He sat up, pulling her legs around him so she was riding his lap, and he kissed her, over and over.

He found the top of her slit with his thumb, and he could feel it, inside and out, the drag and the pull and the push. She was shaking, gasping tiny cries in time with her hips, and he kissed her, swallowing her noises as the hot muscles squeezed his cock tighter.

“I love you,” she said against his mouth as she came.

He grabbed her hips and thrust up, shuddering as he exploded, his brain and his cock and his psyche overwhelmed by her words. He collapsed, his face in her hair. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” she said, panting.

He stroked her spine, listening to her breathing ease. When he shifted she shook her head, clutching at him internally. “Stay,” she said. “It feels good.”

And fuck if that didn’t make him even harder than before, cock head swollen and tender, wanting more, no recovery time needed. He pulled her to him, still sealed together, and rolled her beneath him. “Can you take me again? Are you sore?”

“Yes,” she said, then, “Ooh.”

And just when he was about to stop, to ask “yes, more?” or “yes, sore?” she grabbed his ass in both hands, and pushed up to him to take him deeper.

She was tighter inside, after the orgasm, and wetter, sticky with his come, a different friction on his sensitive cock. He moved slower this time, a careful stroke, but she was already primed—

“Like that?” he asked. “Right there?” and she told him, “yes” and “more” and the final “
now
” that had him pumping every last drop into her soaking wet heat, cheek against hers, groaning with how fucking good she felt.

He rolled off her, mind and body spent, empty and drained.

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “We can’t really go anywhere until Miss Spanky Pants wakes up.”