Beneath the Surface (40 page)

“Praying for him?”

“Of course I was! What, you think I’m a total heretic?”

He shrugged, didn’t seem to get her little joke. “I didn’t want to assume you were religious in any way. Everyone’s not.”

She wasn’t really, didn’t consider herself any particular denomination, but had a particular aversion to Catholicism in any form. “What about you?” she asked then wanted to bite out her tongue when she realized what she’d asked, except that Eric was totally unoffended by her question.

“Lapsed Catholic,” he said sheepishly. “But every once in a while, like now, I remember my roots, and all the old prayers and habits come back.”

“Your mother’s pretty devout.”

“You can tell, huh?” He smiled, glancing in Viviana’s direction. “I can’t knock it.

It gets her through the rough times.”

“Like today?”

“And others.” He looked at her, indigo eyes deep and serious. “My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago,” he whispered.

“Oh, no! Is she…?”

“She’s been okay for a long time now, achieved remission six months after her initial diagnosis with no recurrence.”

234

Beneath the Surface

“I’m so glad.” Tabitha sighed, looking over a shoulder at the picture of strength, good health and wisdom that was his mother.

“It was touch and go for a little while, but her faith and the doctors got her through.”

“I’m sure having all you guys around helped, too.” She smiled. “I know this must be extra hard for you. Your father being ill and all.”

“He’s pulled through the worst I think. We’ll help him get through the rest.”

She threw her arms around him then, held tight, trying to absorb all the love and positive energy he harbored for his family and that they harbored for him, but held onto her own love, keeping it to herself and close to her heart like a talisman against bad tidings.

She wondered if she had had more faith or prayed as a child, would her mom and Dad still be together and in her life.

* * * *

It frightened and excited him that he was so attached to her, used to her company, accepting it as his due.

He waited now as she unlocked her door, stepped in front of her to enter the apartment first, cutting on the lights and glancing around before he let her come in.

“You know you really don’t have to do that.”

“Habit. You know like sitting with my back to a wall in public, or only letting the woman walk on the inside, away from the curb and traffic.”

“And they said chivalry is dead.”

“Not with my mother alive and kicking. She’d kick my butt if I didn’t hold the door or give up my seat for a woman.”

Tabitha kissed him on a cheek. “Shame the chivalry doesn’t translate in bed when you make me sleep on the monster side, near the door.”

“Hey, I take the window!”

She chuckled as she removed his scarf, hat, coat, and hung them on the coat tree.

“Seems like one of us is still a little overdressed.” He leaned in to kiss her throat, licking his way up to gently bite her chin as he removed her coat and threw it in the general direction of the coat tree.

Tabitha tossed her keys towards the peg board by the door and hurriedly got out of her clothes, standing naked before EJ in the living room as he hungrily licked his lips and stared at her like a piece of steak.

235

Gracie C. McKeever

“Last one to the bedroom is a rotten egg!” Tabitha broke into a sprint and EJ

followed, removing his clothes along the way until he was down to his shorts by the time he reached the bedroom.

Tabitha was lounging back against a pile of pillows, legs invitingly spread so he could see her juices glistening beneath the bright overhead lights of the room.

He wondered vaguely if she had stuck her finger in and spread her cream around to tease him when he came in.

EJ stood at the foot of the bed for an interminable moment admiring her body—

the lush

curves and firm muscles, the rich chestnut waves flowing across the pillows and down over her shoulders, the red-painted toenails on her small dainty feet—and his already hardened cock twitched as if to remind him that he was fully loaded and ready for action.

He slid down and stepped out of his boxers before crawling across the bed until he’d reached his goal.

He planted a palm on each thigh, spread her wider, pushed his face between her legs and inhaled deeply.

She quivered beneath his touch and he splayed open her lips with his thumbs before sliding in his middle finger slow and deep.

Tabitha whimpered, closed her eyes, and arched toward his hand, writhing beneath him as she licked her lips. “Oh, God, Eric. I want you. I want to feel you inside me.”

“You will. I just have to take care of something important first…” He paused to lick her, up, down and sideways before thrusting his tongue inside and teasing her clit with a thumb and in rhythm with his strokes.

“Eric…”

He popped up his head long enough to say, “You taste so good, I could stay down here all night. Forever.”

“I have other plans for that tongue of yours.” She ended her sentence on a gasp when EJ flicked her clitoris with his tongue before gently nibbling and suckling the hard kernel of flesh.

He slid up her body until he was balancing his weight on his palms, each planted on opposite sides of her face. “You deprive me of one of my favorite joys in life. What possible plans could you have for my tongue than what I was doing?”

She reached up and softly bit his full lower lip, sliding her tongue into his mouth and kissing him deeply as she moaned and raked her hands through his longish black hair. “Don’t tease me, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Threats?” He smiled, but had already decided to put her and himself out of their misery.

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Beneath the Surface

He reached over to the bedside dresser where he’d left the box of condoms he’d brought and left the other day and Tabitha caught his wrist.

“I want to feel you.”

EJ arched a brow, searching her soft features. He didn’t know what she was up to, whether she wanted to start working on those two kids now to which they had once alluded, and didn’t want to examine his feelings on the matter too closely or he’d chicken out. “Are you sure?” he asked.

She nodded, reaching down to caress his balls before gently squeezing them. “I’ve never been more sure.”

He didn’t know what held him together, what held him back at the drugging look in her whiskey eyes, just wanted her with such an intensity all thoughts of love, marriage and babies took a backseat to his desire.

EJ gripped her hips as he mounted her, thrusting hard and burying himself deep within her, rolling his hips with steady athletic precision, luring Tabitha into the dance until she was matching him thrust for thrust and pant for pant.

Within minutes, he felt the pressure irrevocably building in his scrotum, pistoning his hips, massaging his shaft against her canal until he couldn’t hold himself off any longer. Still, he gave her a chance to change her mind, didn’t know from where his restraint came. “Tabitha, are you sure? I’m going to come.”

“Yes…yes! I want you to, Eric. I lo—I need you. Just hold me and come.”

He burst at her words, at her almost-confession, spurting free in her channel as her inner muscles clenched around him and milked his cock for all it was worth.

Slick and sated, he shuddered in her arms as Tabitha trembled and clung to him with her arms and legs, squeezing him tight to her. “God, I never want to let you go!”

“You don’t have to, Tabby.” He peered at her and she averted her eyes and in that second he was on the verge of telling her. Telling her everything but the moment past as soon as she pierced him with her gaze, a sad smile on her lips.

He didn’t know what was worse: that she didn’t believe in him enough to tell him how she felt, or that he didn’t believe in their relationship enough to be honest with her.

Either way, he needed to stop lying to Tabitha and soon.

237

Gracie C. McKeever

Tabitha woke up early the next morning pleasantly sore and invigorated.

She should have left well enough alone, but decided to tempt fate, couldn’t resist waking him with a few light licks to his penis.

He was instantly awake and aroused, softness a distant memory.

“Isn’t it me who’s supposed to wake you up out of a sound sleep poking you in the butt in the middle of the night?”

“I figured I’d beat you to the punch. Don’t like being poked in the butt in my sleep.”

“Where do you like to be poked in your sleep?”

She grinned before she went down on him in earnest, fondling his balls and licking and sucking his hard shaft from head to base.

“God…” He clenched his teeth and caught her around the shoulders to lift her off of him.

“I wanted a little snack before I started breakfast and you ruined it.”

“I’ll give you a snack.”

Her interrupted blowjob segued into tender mind-blowing lovemaking that left Tabitha near tears and the on the verge of breaking.

She still went off to work a couple of hours later without telling him how she felt.

She did, however, arrive a few of hours later than her normal time, determined to take it a little easy, especially after what had happened to Eric’s father and how close she had come to losing Eric over a stupid misunderstanding.

Life was too short and she needed to start taking it easy and enjoy what she had with him for however long it lasted.

238

Beneath the Surface

Cynthia arched a brow when she walked through the door.

“Sorry I didn’t call.”

“Hey, you’re the boss. You can come in when you please.”

“How was your New Year?”

“Great! We watched the ball drop, kissed each other and a bunch of strangers and got out of Dodge as fast as we could to have a nice bottle of champagne at home.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself and made it home okay.” Tabitha passed the desk to go to her office before Cynthia came from behind her desk to stop her.

“Before you go in, you have a visitor.”

It couldn’t have been Eric since she’d just left him lounging under the comforter in her bed. He was the only person she could think of that Cynthia would leave alone in her office. “You let them in my office?”

“He says he’s your father, Tabitha, and he has some bad news about your mother…”

Tabitha’s emotions went on high alert, running the gamut from rage to confusion to happiness and back again.

She stalked toward her office and barged through the door trailing Cynthia’s bewildered, “…but I thought your mother was dead.”

Tabitha slammed the door and the man standing in the middle of her office started and slowly turned to her.

It was him, looking a little older and more dignified with gray at his temples and a little rounder in the middle than she remembered, but with the straight and erect posture that made him appear as trim and tall as he’d always seemed to her when she’d been a child.

He was the man she’d known as her father for eight years before he walked out.

Not that she blamed him for that. If she could have left Denise she would have, too, but she hadn’t had a choice, and
he’d
left her all alone, on her own to deal with the madwoman.

How dare he come to her office, she suddenly thought, and wondered what it was about the men in her life sneaking up and ambushing her at her place of business.

“Tabitha…” He started across the carpeted floor, arms outstretched and Tabitha put up a hand like a stop sign, glared at him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I have some bad news about your mother.”

“So I heard.” She peered at him, saw the tears behind his lightly tinted tortoiseshell-framed glasses, her stomach somersaulting. “What sort of bad news?”

“You mother…she’s dead.”

239

Gracie C. McKeever

“No…” All these years she’d been alone, believing her mother and father alive out there somewhere, but just not wanting her, and here was solid evidence that she really was motherless. “You came here just to tell me that?”

“I didn’t want to tell you something like this over the phone.”

“Why tell me at all? Why track me down after all these years?”

He lowered his head, looking so abashed she almost felt sorry for him. “I thought you were dead until very recently.”

“Why would you think that?”

“When your mother tracked me down in New Jersey, that’s what she told me.”

She’d tracked him down? In New Jersey? Is that where her mother had gone when she’d left Tabitha alone in that bus station? Running off to find her husband? “You’ve been together all this time?”

He nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

Twenty years! Living the married, childless life in New Jersey, building a life together without her and they didn’t seem to miss her until now.

The thought numbed her, chilled her to every angry, violated bone in her body!

“How could you do that to me? You left me. You left me alone with her and then you accepted her back no questions asked.”

“That’s not exactly how it happened, Tabby—”

“Don’t call me that! You don’t have that right anymore.”

He nodded as if agreeing. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay any longer. It was tearing me apart to watch her slip further and further away, watching her destroy herself little by little every day.”

“What about me?” God, she hated herself for asking, for sounding like a whiner.

She didn’t need him anymore, didn’t want to need him.

But here he was standing in her office twenty years older and looking older than that, grief and probably guilt weighing down on him.

Something he’d said earlier suddenly dawned on her. “She told you I was dead?”

Edward nodded. “I took her word at face value, never thought to question her.”