Four Temptations Page 3

  I’d never known anything like it. Something about the situation, the intensity, the sheer badness of having revenge sex with my husband’s best friend. Something about the urgency: up against the bookcase, on the floor, too urgent to get more than a few paces away from the front door.

  But also... How long was it since I’d been with anyone but Porter? And now... a man who cared about my response, a man who was turned on by my pleasure, a man who knew exactly what to do and how to do it. An artist. A lover.

  He was in danger of spoiling me for any other man.

  §

  I was still clinging onto him, every muscle tensed.

  Slowly, I forced my body to relax, and he started to move again, long, slow strokes, pulling out almost completely before driving back deep. Such an incredible sensation! Being filled and then filled even more, over and over again.

  As he started to speed up, I met every thrust with one of my own, rising to meet him, to take him deep, but then I stopped him, with a finger to his lips and a slight shake of the head.

  He paused and I pulled back, feeling him slide out of me, his shaft slapping wetly against the inside of my thigh.

  I wriggled free, and then turned, my elbows out, forearms resting on a low bookshelf, my face hard up against a row of old, leatherbound hardbacks.

  It was several seconds before I felt his hands on my hips. He’d been hesitating, taking in the sight of my ass, presented to him like that.

  His hands on my hips, gripping almost too tightly, and then that wonderful wet shaft slid up the crack of my ass.

  I squeezed my cheeks together as he slid back and forward, holding me tight, his hard shaft sliding against my ass.

  For a moment I thought he was going to come like that. I even held my breath for a few seconds, anticipating that sudden hot gush, but then he paused, holding back again. He was clearly a man who liked to pick his moment.

  His right hand moved away from my hip, then, slipping down to grip my ass, a tight, rough grip.

  Then he was holding his dick, guiding it so that the wet head was against my dark opening, teasing it, almost slipping inside – his dick was so wet, so easy to accommodate, if only he would push a little further – and then he pulled it away, sliding it up and down my crack, slipping over that opening, again and again.

  “Go on,” I said, my voice hoarse – had I been groaning and crying aloud so much that my throat had gone this raw?

  That swollen head, pressing, pushing against me, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t going to happen... he was too big, he wasn’t wet enough and there was too much resistance.

  Briefly, I felt relieved. I’d only done this a couple of times before, and Porter was, not to put too fine a point on it, far easier to accommodate.

  But then, with one more push, he was inside, stretching me tight.

  Once that swollen head was in me it was easier, and – slowly, gently – he pushed deeper. It was just like before, the way he slid slowly in and I kept thinking that must be it but he kept on going, until finally he was in as far as he could go, and it felt as if my whole body was filled with him.

  “Fuck me.”

  Both hands on my hips, gripping me hard, holding me steady as he started to move.

  The first thrust was slow and long, as if he was testing me out, checking my responses, waiting to see if it hurt.

  “Fuck me!”

  A second thrust, faster, his entire length pulling back and then driving in until his balls slapped against me.

  “Fuck me!”

  He started to pump, started to find a rhythm of long, deep thrusts, and each time he filled me it felt like he would never stop, like he was going to split me in two, like I was going to explode.

  I was hard up against the bookshelves, breathing in the musty, leather scent; a hard wooden line cutting a groove into my chest. I flung one hand wildly, swiping the books aside, and they fell to the floor in a cascade of heavy thuds.

  My throat. Raw and sore. I was groaning again, an animal sound, a sound I never knew I was capable of until that evening.

  He sensed it, sensed a change in me, and then he slipped a hand around me, stroking down over my belly, finding that narrow strip of hair and driving down, deeper. Fingers pressing against me, rolling from side to side, sliding the hood of skin across my clit.

  Such an intense mixture of sensations... I couldn’t take any more than a few seconds of that.

  I threw my head back and gave an animal cry as my whole body tightened again and his fingers drove deep inside me, filling me again.

  And then there was another sound, a low, deep groan, building. A baritone crescendo, as he thrust deep, held himself there, and I felt his shaft throbbing deep inside me and then a sudden, hot gushing sensation filling me with his wet seed.

  §

  That moment, when you come down from a high, when your normal senses steal back over you. That moment when you’ve been overcome, overtaken, and finally you have to return to reality.

  That.

  §

  He stayed inside me, held me tight, leaning forward to cover my shoulder blades with tender kisses as he grew soft inside me.

  Such a tender moment, that crossing point, the bridge between reality and the delicious escape we had found in each other.

  And then... soft, wet, he slipped out, backed away. Was it going to be all awkward silences, avoided looks, clumsy fumbling at clothes?

  I turned, leaned back against the bookcase, its contents spread over the floor.

  “Let’s avoid the awkwardness, okay?” I said. “We’re both grown-ups. Both a little bit drunk. Both swept up by the moment. Okay?”

  He shrugged and then nodded, clearly trying not to feel self-conscious as he stood there, still in his shirt, his dick semi-hard and wet from our mixed juices.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever.”

  We were grown-ups. Him a man; me another box ticked for him, no doubt.

  “You going to tell Porter?”

  “You want me to?” he asked.

  It was my turn to shrug.

  “So this is just revenge, is it?” he said. “That all?”

  “We’re grown-ups,” I said, all I could come up with to say to him, no longer even sure what I meant by it.

  What more could it have been than that? A moment of passion, a complex stew of revenge and need and liberation.

  I was fragile, broken, caught on the rebound. That was all it could be.

  “What if I was to say it was more than that?” he said.

  Those eyes. Those piercing, pale blue eyes. They wouldn’t leave me alone. Wouldn’t let me hide behind my platitudes and easy answers.

  “What if I was to say that I’ve wanted you for the longest time? That ever since Porter first introduced us I’ve longed for you, and only ever stopped because he’s Porter and how could I do anything that would hurt him? Because you’re gorgeous and how could you ever see anything in me? That I’d even stoop so low as to take advantage of you on a night when you’re vulnerable because I’ve dreamed about you for years? That I’ve never had a relationship that worked because – always – no one else measures up when compared with you? What if I was to say all that, in a long, embarrassing, gush, as if those words have been waiting to spill out for years and–”

  I silenced him, briefly, with a finger to his lips.

  Then: “Didn’t you know?”

  Does knowing have to be a conscious thing? Or can it be there in how you respond when the situation arises? Would I ever have done this thing with him if a part of me hadn’t always known? Maybe I’d blanked it out, maybe my mind had protected me, but when the time was right it was as if I had known all along.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ll go. I’ve said too much. I’ve spoilt it. I’ll–”

  This time I silenced him with my mouth, my lips sealing his closed, and then my tongue, tenderly prizing them apart.

  I felt him respond against me, instantly.

 
; §

  I had never really seen Simon Darby in that way before. Or, at least, I had never quite put all the clues together, all the little signs. He was tall, slim, with strawberry blond hair and eyes that were a piercing pale blue. He was charming, funny, intelligent, and he had the kind of physique that good clothes just hung off, as if they had been made for him to wear.

  Others saw him that way – he had never been short of female company, although, for some reason, they never seemed to stick around for long. It was as if he fended them off, distanced himself from them; as if there had always been something else occupying that space in his life.

  Someone else.

  Me.

  I had never, consciously, thought about all of this.

  I had been blind.

  Or I had blinded myself.

  He was just Simon Darby.

  An old acquaintance, a part of the backdrop to my life.

  My husband’s best friend.

  My lover.

  Simon Darby.

  Words of Love

  Maggie

  I really should have known better. I’d be the first to admit that.

  Doomed relationships? Volatile lovers who can never make things work together? So many fights the admittedly fantastic sex just isn’t enough in the end (although it takes the longest time to really be sure about that when the sex is so good)? Temptations that should really be ignored, because how could that particular relationship ever stand a chance?

  Tell me about it.

  I’ve been there, seen it all. Written the book and sold the movie.

  And maybe that’s the problem.

  §

  I’m Maggie Nolan and I write.

  I write novels based on the experiences of my friends and, predominantly, myself. Novels that leave no stone unturned. Just as the sex in my stories is explicit, so too is the scratching beneath the emotional skin. I try to tell it as it is.

  He’s Brandon Tyne and he writes, too.

  He writes for the New Yorker and Granta. He writes books about his travels, and about the food and drink he discovers along the way; he writes about the people he meets and fights with and sleeps with. He likes to tell it how it is.

  Both of us really should have known that a relationship between us would never work out.

  But sometimes the truth isn’t so obvious when it’s right in front of your nose, is it?

  §

  You learn from your mistakes, though. You learn that even a mistake is not a bad thing if you’ve gained from the experience. Also, you learn when to call it a day.

  And you learn that – no matter how much your memories may have become rose-tinted – the past really should remain in the past.

  §

  Brandon always had a default charm about him. There was something about that lazy Texan drawl and the spark that could appear in his eyes at any time that would disarm anyone. He was tall and rake-thin, with salt and pepper hair and small, wire-rimmed glasses that gave an intellectual edge to his slightly weather-beaten good looks.

  I've never known anyone who manages to combine that innocent charm with a sharp glint of mischief in his look quite as well as Brandon does.

  And the bastard was doing it all over again.

  §

  The smiles, the little possessive touches, the unguarded comments. The flirting.

  Did he even know he was doing it, or had he finally learned to relax in my company again? By that logic, had he finally stopped caring, if he was able to relax with me again?

  We were at the annual Abel and Riley soiree, the kind of event where I was always going to run into Brandon, given that, in Jimmy Abel, we shared a literary agent and we were two of Abel and Riley's hottest properties.

  Drinks and canapés with a mix of writers, journos, editors, bookstore buyers, TV people, publicists and more; it was the kind of event that reminded me I really am a proper writer. I'd become accustomed to this kind of thing in the last couple of years, since Leaving Lulu had hit the bestseller lists and the movie rights had sold to Hollywood (although I must say I’d never seen Lulu as an Anne Hathaway type, but hey).

  Abel and Riley loved to wheel me out for these things, and generally I was happy to play along. It’s how the business works, and it had never harmed my career that I was easy company and even easier on the eye: tall and curvy in a way that I know from experience men love.

  I was there with a drink in my hand, laughing at something inane that the little guy from an American bookshop chain had said. Unusually for me, my heart really wasn’t in it this evening. On the back of the movie deal, my second novel had secured a massive print run, with all the attendant publicity that brings. There was even coverage in the broadsheet press and the BBC in the lead up to next week's publication of the book; trashy was the new high-brow, apparently, and my work was the exemplar. I took that as a grudging compliment.

  And, against this rather frenetic backdrop, I was trying to keep my head down and concentrate on the next book. Oh for a quiet life.

  The little bookseller had said something else and for a moment there was an awkward silence as he waited for some kind of response. I laughed – the safest option, given that he’d been trying to crack jokes for the past five minutes.

  “And then she said–”

  He was interrupted by a tall figure leaning into the too-small space between us, pulling an eyes-wide-open expression of surprise and saying, “Excuse me for interrupting, but may I just say... Wow!”

  And with that, Brandon Tyne took me by the elbow and steered me smoothly away from the somewhat less than stimulating bookseller.

  “Thanks, Bran,” I said. “I was in danger of gnawing my own arm off to stave off the boredom.”

  “No really,” he said. “I meant every word of that ‘wow’. You sure haven’t lost it, Maggie.” Then he gave that rakish grin that would make a woman forgive anything, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. The scent... the touch... So familiar and yet simultaneously like some distant memory of a dream.

  “It’s only been two years, Bran.”

  “An eternity without you.”

  That way of his. The way you could never tell if he was joking or serious, or what the balance was between the two. He was the kind of man who hid behind jokes, but whose humor always had serious depths. He was impossible to read, and he knew that and played on it, and somehow that was all part of the charm.

  “Stop it, Bran, okay?”

  “I would if I knew what ‘it’ was, babe.” He shrugged and smiled and I wanted to punch him. “So, Words of Love. Out next week, right? Jimmy sent me an advance reading copy. I like. I was surprised to see that there’s so much us in it. I like that, too, I think.”

  “What part of ‘stop it’ don’t you get, Brandon?”

  “You sure have come a long way, babe.”

  Was he deliberately reminding me of my debt to him, or was that just an innocent observation? Either would have been in character.

  Back then I’d been freelancing as a copywriter, doing a spot of promotion for a TV series by some American journalist I’d never heard of. Name of a river. Brandon Tyne, The Traveling Foodie. Not quite a cookery show, not quite a travelogue, but somewhere in between. I’d ghostwritten features for various women’s mags and blogs, pitching him as a bit of a sexy rascal, the kind of man it was okay for a married woman to have a thing for. Indeed, the kind of man it was almost obligatory for a married woman to have a thing for: if you didn’t, you just weren’t normal.

  He’d done that thing, the chat, the spark, the little touches. He’d said he liked my writing but I wasn’t naïve enough to actually believe that. I didn’t mind the flattery, though: the flirting, the attention from a man I’d helped put at the centre of everyone else’s attention.

  Much to my surprise, he’d been serious about my writing. He kept telling me I should write books, and he'd told his agent, Jimmy Abel, all about me.

  The first I knew was a call from Jimmy, asking if I had
anything available. Thinking quickly, I’d said I was working on a novel based on a magazine piece I’d written recently. It was about a young woman called Lulu who used her charms to make her way in the world. He asked to see the piece and I emailed it to him, thinking that even if he was interested literary agents were notoriously slow, so I would have plenty more time to think about it and write some more.

  He called back that afternoon, asking to see the book.

  “I might need a couple of weeks,” I told him. “It needs a bit of a polish.”

  “Cool, cool. So tell me, by ‘a bit of a polish’ do you mean you haven’t actually finished a first draft yet?”

  There was something about his voice that put me at ease. “Well,” I said, “if by ‘haven’t actually finished a first draft yet’ you mean I don’t have much more than a chapter where I’ve been trying to turn that magazine feature into fiction, and lots of post-it notes, then yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  He’d laughed, which I took as a good sign. Then he said, “Just send me whatever you can, whenever you can. I’m keen. I think we could do things with this.” Which I took as an even better sign.

  §

  So... Brandon and his flirting. And he really was flirting.

  “That scent,” he whispered in my ear as we chatted to another of Jimmy’s authors. “Didn’t I buy that for you?”

  “It’s soap.”

  It was actually Madame by John Paul Gaultier, and yes, Brandon had introduced me to it. Call me a heartless bitch, but I hadn’t seen any reason to dump the scent just because I’d dumped the man.

  “It’s okay. I just needed an excuse to lean in close like this,” he said, leaning in close to whisper into my ear again, one hand resting briefly on the small of my back.

  That was the moment...

  Up until then I’d been vaguely amused by his behavior, but now... now I realized he might just be serious, and what’s more, I liked it.

  Yes, I know, I should have known better than that. I write about this all the time: relationships that work and those that don’t. I think I’m a pretty good judge of this kind of thing, and Brandon and I was a thing that had had its chance and been found wanting.