A small moan broke from her lips at the unexpected gesture, the intimacy. The heat and demand that he injected into that one kiss was enough to burn away every uncomfortable second of the past few moments. His lips parted hers and his tongue swept in, tangling with hers, his fingers tightening on her ass and the side of her neck. The kiss, the hold, told her she'd stirred him up considerably. When he finally lifted his head, he kept holding her, which was a good thing, because her knees were weak, just like the romance stories said they should be. As she pressed her lips together, she felt the moisture his had left upon them. His eyes were hot with desire, his gorgeous mouth firm. She wanted it all over her.
"I masturbated on your bed today," she whispered. "And thought of you and Chris there with me."
"Bad, bad girl," he murmured, bending his head again. "Next time you wait until I order you to do it in front of me. Otherwise, I'll take a belt to your ass."
She clung to his shirtsleeves, her fingers making fervent caresses of his bunched muscles beneath them, her body straining against every inch of his. His short groan of need told her he liked her aroused reaction to the threat. She'd liked the spanking. She thought she'd like even more things like that. A belt would be incredible. Or a paddle. The flat, wide wooden cooking spoon in the kitchen . . .
When Geoff nipped her lips, finally taking the kiss into a more playful place, she was smiling. He looked down at her. "Why did you initiate this while Chris was gone?"
"Because you're both tiptoeing around each other about it. You think it's a contest between you, about who I want to be with. I want you both. I thought maybe if I could get you to see that first, it would help, because, like you said . . . you're the one in charge."
She dropped her gaze and toyed with a button on his shirt when she said that. Though she thought these things easily enough, saying them aloud could fluster her. Touching her chin, he made her look up at him.
"It wasn't just that," he said. "We wanted you to make choices based on what you want, not what's safe. We're safe. You haven't had a date in a while."
After that demanding, brain-scrambling kiss, safe wasn't the word she'd use to describe Geoff. Maybe that explained why she didn't think before she spoke. "I have a date."
"Excuse me?"
In a blink, Geoff switched from reasonable lawyer to a hostile-looking male with testosterone loaded and ready to fire. A bull about to charge a china shop might have the same expression. While it thrilled her a little too much to see that reaction, she hastened to correct the assumption.
"I was thinking about that very issue this week, so I thought I should test it, you know, while you and Chris were still stalling on the whole thing. But I was wrong. This tells me I don't need to do that. I'll cancel it."
"No." Geoff folded her robe over her again and tied the sash, though she caught her breath as he cinched it more forcefully than perhaps he'd intended. Holding the ends in tight fists, his knuckles pressed against her abdomen, he stared down at her, a million indecipherable thoughts flickering over his features. But before she could react or reach for him, he stepped back from her. "You're right. You should give it a chance. Since Anthony, you've stayed pretty close to us, and that hasn't been fair."
She blinked in confusion, but irritation replaced it pretty fast. "You act like I just handed you an escape clause. Something to keep you from having to face any of this."
"No," he said. "It's not that." But his body language was stiff, his expression now wooden. "I'm just trying to be fair to you. Go on the date. Who's the guy?"
"Mark in the Records department. It's just drinks at a bar, a group thing. Not really a date." Sort of. "This is crazy. I'm going to call it off." After that kiss, she was sure she knew her mind on it, but Geoff was suddenly as far away as the moon.
"No. Don't. Go on the damn date." He pivoted and moved toward the door.
"Geoff, what the hell . . ." She heard a hint of desperation in her tone, which kind of disgusted her with herself. Her gut was roiling with confusion, hurt and anger.
"It's all right, Sam." He turned at the doorway, met her gaze. "I'm not saying any of what just happened was a mistake. You were beautiful. Perfect."
If he'd sounded patronizing, she would have hit him with a blunt object, but he didn't. He sounded conflicted. But she wasn't in the mood to be kind.
"It's not me, it's you?" she said frostily.
His expression cooled. "I need to think about this, just like I said. And so do you."
She wanted to tell him he couldn't tell her what to do, but that would sound a little fucked up, wouldn't it? Given that she was pushing him to take charge of her. She literally didn't know what to say, but he took care of that.
He cleared his throat. "I'm going to reread those three files and then head to bed. Good night."
He closed her door behind him, an external manifestation of the internal doors he'd just closed against her. She didn't know whether to spit, hiss or cry. She wondered what he'd do if she whipped out her vibrator and turned it up on maximum setting so it would vibrate through the walls like a jackhammer. She'd scream out her climax like a banshee. Let him deal with that.
The anger wasn't enough to keep the other, deeper emotions at bay. Sinking down on the bed, she played with the ends of the robe's sash and wiped impatiently at frustrated tears. Damn it, damn it, damn it. That set look on his face said the round was over for tonight. She wouldn't whip out her vibrator. She'd get a glass of wine, settle in here with a book and ignore him the rest of the night. Or relive every single moment of the past couple of hours, when she'd gotten so very close to the place she wanted to go with him.
Goddamn stubborn men.
***
Geoff paused in front of the Naughty Bits erotica store. Most days, he ate lunch at his desk, unless he had to meet a client or have a powwow with coworkers, but today the problem he faced took priority over his work schedule. He'd told Sarah he should be back in ninety minutes. If she could take a whole afternoon for her kid's award ceremony, he could take ninety minutes to resolve a sexual dilemma about his roommate.
Despite all the arousing things about that scene in the kitchen with Sam, what he kept remembering was how she'd looked when she teased him about Mr. Cade. With her gray eyes dancing, she'd put her hand up to her mouth to hide her smile. Her hair was baby soft, so straight and silky. The strands sometimes caught in the corner of her mouth or on her eyelashes.
It made him think of the night she'd drunk too much at a New Year's Eve party. She wasn't a drinker, but in the spirit of the holiday, she'd unwisely downed three tall, fruity drinks with tinsel sparkler garnishes. When he'd heard her throwing up in the bathroom early that next morning, he'd slid out of bed fast, but Chris had beat him there, of course. He was kneeling behind her, holding back her hair as she hunched over the toilet.
"Oh God," she'd said weakly when she saw him there. "Now my humiliation is complete. Both of you get to see me vomit."
Chris rubbed her back as another convulsion took her. Geoff estimated about a third of the alcohol, plus the pizza and snacks she'd had at the party, evacuated. "I'm never drinking again," she moaned. "Or eating."
He ran a washcloth under the sink faucet, dropped to one knee and wiped her mouth, then a trembling hand that had gotten in the path of the rapid expulsion. Despite her misery, it was clear she was embarrassed. She was a private girl when it came to anything that happened in a bathroom, but neither he nor Chris gave that a second thought. Caring for her was as automatic as breathing to them.
In the small space, he was pressed hip to thigh with the other man, but casual contact between them wasn't something they thought about, either. Well, Geoff did, a lot more lately, but it wasn't from a desire to avoid it.
He watched Chris tease her gently as he held back her hair with one hand, stroking it lightly with the other. Geoff expected Chris didn't mind having an excuse to enjoy those strands of silk threading through his fingers.
She'd worn jersey
cloth shorts to bed. Since she was kneeling on the bathroom floor, hunched over, they were stretched out low on her hips. Geoff could see the pink elastic band of her panties and a hint of the cleft between her buttocks.
Since then, he'd thought about that tempting spot quite a bit. Slipping his finger down to trace the sensitive tailbone and going lower, he'd massage her anal rim and make her writhe. He'd oil up his finger and slide it into that tight passage. He wondered if Sam had ever done any anal play.
In short, at this point, he had an anthology of fantasies about her the size of War and Peace. He hated that he might have left her last night thinking she was alone in fighting those kinds of feelings. He'd kept his own under wraps, but her drawing Chris and him into Naughty Bits had broken that seal, or at least damaged it enough that he wanted to stop fantasizing and start doing. Badly enough he'd given in and made a move in that direction yesterday.
And what had happened? He'd second-guessed himself and screwed things up. She'd barely been speaking to him this morning, and didn't waste any time getting out of the house for work, though usually she left after he did. He should have taken control of that situation, made her sit down and talk it out with him, but if he didn't get it straight in his own head, he was going to take them right back to the place where he'd hurt her and made her angry. He'd rather have cut off his arm than cause her pain, but what was done was done. When things went the wrong way in a trial, he didn't waste time chasing the mistakes, but instead focused on how to push it back in a winning direction. Though he had an ache like a punch in the gut and wanted to do anything to bring a smile back to her face, he had to figure out how to fix it, the right way.
Christ, he wished Chris was home. He was better at the touchy-feely stuff with Sam.
"Geoff?"
He'd been made. He tried not to jump like a guilty shoplifter as Madison, the owner of Naughty Bits, peered at him through her half-open door. "Are you coming in to see me? Or just window-shopping? We storeowners love it when you come in, though. We can talk you into all sorts of unlikely things."
"You could have done that on our last visit and you didn't," he pointed out.
"Well, maybe I've come to my senses and I'm ready to empty your wallet. Run while you can."
He smiled. Her long brown hair was tied back loosely with a ribbon, and she wore a corset-style lace top over jeans and boots that made the most of her curvy figure. She was an attractive woman, but today she looked . . . prettier. If he had to guess, he'd say something was going on in her life that was making her happy. Maybe she was falling in love.
He'd been in love for a while, and the feelings grew stronger every day. But so did other feelings, and that was what worried him and held him back. How would this impact his friendships with Sam and Chris? He'd always sensed Sam shared some of those reservations, and that had helped him keep things status quo, but it appeared she'd worked past that and was going full steam ahead. Jesus.
When she'd walked into the kitchen in that outfit designed to give him a lifetime hard-on, he hadn't even known where to start. All the things he'd ever wanted to do to her flooded into his head. Serious, things that went beyond a little spanking. Did she really understand that? Could she? What if that wasn't what she wanted and he opened that can of worms, making her feel like he couldn't be happy with less?
He had no idea what the hell he was doing and, for some reason, that had brought him back here. But he wasn't sure how to broach it with Madison. She had her Dungeon Room and had shown him a few things, but he didn't necessarily get a Domme vibe off her. Actually, she had more of Sam's kind of vibe. But she could still be knowledgeable about both sides of the fence. He wasn't really looking for a discussion of the mechanics, though.
"Geoff?"
Shit, he was still standing there like a statue. Before he could snap out of it, make some lame excuse and hurry onward, Madison hung her clock sign on the door, indicating she'd be back in ten minutes, and stepped out, locking the door. "Come with me next door. I think I can help you with whatever you're thinking so hard about. Well, in a way."
She took his arm with a friendly smile. Before he could say anything else, they were headed into the hardware store. Troy, the guy he remembered from the last time they were there, was setting up a pyramid of bug spray. The guy had excellent upper-body definition, the kind that suggested the job he did here required a lot of physical labor. Chris was like that. He'd never seen the inside of a gym, but he'd never needed to lift weights, not when his job was all about strength and stamina. It was the turtle-versus-hare kind of strength. He and Geoff had run together before, and Chris would get winded long before Geoff, but if they did yard work together, Geoff would hit the exhaustion point days before Chris did. They had different skill sets, different approaches.
Chris being Chris, he hadn't hesitated to note why Geoff was a good runner, even though Geoff was gratified that he had to make his snarky observation while he was bent over, wheezing from their four-mile run. "You were one of those skinny kids who couldn't keep his mouth shut, so you had to do a lot of running," Chris pointed out. "I was easygoing. No one picked fights with me."
"No one picked fights with you because you look like a tank," Geoff had retorted. Chris's response to that had been to tackle and pin him in a wrestling hold. Geoff had thrown a few punches against his radial motor points to get him to let go, which Chris claimed verified his theory that he'd had to fight off bullies. Then Sam had broken up the friendly argument by suggesting they get Chinese for dinner.
Geoff remembered something else about that wrestling match. When Chris had pinned him, there'd been a moment when Geoff noticed Chris studying his mouth in a distracted way, his hands flexing on Geoff's hip and biceps. "Let go of me," Geoff had said.
Instead of it coming out the way it would if two guys were wrestling one another for fun, there was another note to it that had caused a spark in Chris's eye. As if he was about to say, Make me. Then the moment was gone. He'd sat back on his heels and helped Geoff up with a firm hand clasp, his other hand steadying Geoff briefly against his back. The touch was a near caress, a quick grip of his shirt, but when Geoff turned to look at him, Chris had already released him and was striding to the house.
As complicated as things might be with Sam right now, he and Chris were a quagmire in comparison. They both seemed to prefer to focus on Sam, a mutually unspoken agreement that gave them an indirect way to address what simmered between them. No matter what happened with Sam, they could always leave that part of things right there.
But that thought just left Geoff with another layer of dissatisfaction. He knew where Sam wanted to take them all, but what people wanted wasn't always the best thing. That was what worried him most. He didn't trust his own impulses, because they were too damn strong, and Sam was trying her hardest to tear loose any restraint he had. If he let that happen, those impulses could consume him, Sam and Chris, override his judgment and destroy everything he valued.
"I should probably go." He came to a stop with Madison inside the hardware store. "This maybe isn't--"
"Is Logan here, Troy?" Madison asked.
"He's in his workshop," the young man responded. "It's been pretty quiet this morning, and he has a customer picking up a piece at the end of the week. He wanted to put one more coat of finish on it." When Troy's attention shifted to him, Geoff was surprised to see recognition there. Troy nodded, a friendly greeting.
"Just go on back," he added to Madison.
"Good. Okay." Madison glanced up at Geoff. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. What were you saying?"
Geoff shook his head, brushing it off. Giving him a smile, Madison proceeded to the back of the store, passing through a curtained area to bring him into a storage area. As she guided him along the narrow alley flanked by stocked shelves, Geoff heard an eighties radio station playing, the sound filtering through a door at the opposite end of the storeroom. Madison drew him through that door, bringing him into Logan's worksh
op.
From the sawdust smell, he'd deduced Logan was doing woodwork, but his current project wasn't a birdhouse or bookcase. Geoff had visited enough BDSM clubs on his travels and surfed enough websites to know what a spanking bench looked like. This was a custom-made one, with some intriguing additions that, if his mind wasn't focused on another priority, would have captured his attention far more thoroughly.
Instead, he focused on the man who'd built it. A rugged, powerful-looking forty-something, Logan had thick, long brown hair bound back in a thick tail that fell between his shoulder blades. While most men over forty couldn't rock that look, Logan did. Geoff didn't consider himself a romantic, but he could easily see the man in boots, breeches and an unlaced shirt on the bridge of a pirate ship, doing the Tyrone Powers thing. His mother had watched The Black Swan a hundred times.
Geoff's own love of black-and-white movies had come from watching those kinds of flicks at his mother's side. Hell, he'd received his first guidance about lines between right and wrong in those romantic mediums. Which was painfully ironic, considering his current relationship with his nuclear family.
This was so not the moment for that. Pushing away those thoughts, he planted himself firmly in the present.
The cushions for the bench were propped off to the side while Logan painted a cherrywood finish on the frame. He glanced up, pleased surprise in his warm, brandy-colored eyes as Madison entered. Since he followed that up with a leisurely perusal of her from head to toe, Geoff wondered if the spark in Madison was glowing brighter because of her next-door neighbor. Given that her cheeks pinkened a little under his regard, Geoff expected the answer to that was a resounding yes.
"Logan, I'm sorry to bother you, but do you remember Geoff? He was in your store not too long ago."
"His face is familiar." Logan set the can and brush aside and extended a hand. "Geoff."
He had a strong grip, strong as Chris's. During their earlier visit, Sam had come into the hardware store with Geoff and Chris briefly before going next door to Madison's shop. When Logan had asked her if she was looking for anything in particular, she'd gotten a little tongue-tied. Chris had teased her later about getting all flustered by a handsome older man, but based on the events of the past few days, and what Geoff read from the guy pretty clearly now, he thought there was another reason Logan's steady regard had flustered her. The same reason Geoff could fluster her. The way Geoff could fluster her when he looked at her a certain way.