Hot and Haunted (7 page)

As soon as the words left my lips I was shocked at myself. I hadn’t planned this, not at all. But it was fitting—Kyle’s complete betrayal had made me feel cheap.

Why shouldn’t I act like it?

Brody’s eyes were blank for a moment, coherence having drifted away in the foggy haze of foreplay, but when I undid the top button of his shirt, he got it and groped awkwardly behind me in the glove compartment for his wallet.

Pulling out a bill without looking at the denomination, he placed it in my palm. Linking our fingers, I lowered our joined hands to my waist, where the clouds of my white dress had been rolled, and urged him to tuck the edge of the bill into the waist with a murmur.

When his head eagerly lowered to my nipple, I laughingly held myself out of reach, undoing a second button on his shirt.

“Oh, I think you can do better than that.” I looked meaningfully at his wallet. I wanted him willing to drain his entire bank account if it meant that he could finally, finally touch my flesh. I wanted the sense of power that would give me.

It flooded me like I imagined pure cocaine would, rich and velvety, as he pulled out two more bills with a shaking hand and scraped the edges over my inflamed flesh on his way down my body to the waist of my dress. When the crisp paper scratched against the swollen pebbles of my breasts, I gasped and felt an answering surge of wetness between my thighs.

“Is that enough?”

I blinked in surprise at the rough texture of his voice, such a far cry from the quiet, unassuming tones of earlier in the evening. “Is that enough to pay for the privilege of touching your skin?” I thought that I could hear a slight note of sarcasm in his tone, one that was accompanied by a curling tendril of shame on my part, but I chose to ignore both, focusing instead on what he was about to do.

Strong, lean arms closed in around me; I struggled a bit, for I’d always been one to prefer my space, even during sex. But as his teeth attacked the curve of my neck, biting harshly, then soothing with delicate little flicks of the tongue I shuddered, wanting nothing more than to take him between my legs and ride.

But it wasn’t time yet. I’d already sent my plan off course, and I felt panicky with the need to get the situation back under control.

Deliberately, I eased away from his embrace, smiling soothingly at his cocked brow. My deft fingers worked quickly over the rest of the buttons on his shirt and moved down the surprisingly muscled chest, coiling in the pale, curled hairs and tugging gently. His head fell back as I took one of the bills from my waist and showed him how it felt, scraping the sharp edge over the bump of his Adam’s apple, around his pectorals, over the swollen tips of his nipples, into the dip of his belly button. When I replaced the thick paper at his waist with my fingers, moving them surely over the spot where his hair grew thicker and darker, he exhaled noisily and tried to draw me back up his body, to kiss me.

I pulled away. “No kissing on the lips. We are not lovers; you’re just a customer. A paying customer.” He bit his lip, then nodded, curtly, and I continued my quest, my fingers probing beneath the elastic waist of his boxers, finding a spot on his hip bone that made him squirm.

He lifted his hips to accommodate me as I eased his clothing down over his ass to pool at his feet. A strangled cry escaped his lips when I dipped my head and misted warm breath on the straining skin of his cock.

I looked before I tasted, taking in the transparent, veiny skin, the soft, velvety head, the thatch of dark curls. I murmured my approval, then lowered my head and took the tip, just the fat, juicy tip, into my mouth. I tasted salt on my tongue, salt and a tang that was deliciously male, and began to suck, my soft, parted lips working just the head.

He made unintelligible noises, and I decided to add my hand. Holding the base of his cock firm between my fingers, I licked my palm and made a ring around his shaft with my middle finger and thumb. Squeezing gently, I began to rub him, up and down, timing the strokes to the sucking of my wet mouth, increasing the pressure and adding more fingers as I milked him. When I sensed from his breathing, and from the arching of his hips, that he was nearing climax, I tugged his testicles gently away from his body before beginning again.

Licking away at his cock like I would an ice-cream cone, I marveled at how my own body tightened with his every groan. When I planned out the night, when I began to dream up the crazy scheme in which I was firmly entrenched, I had never dreamt that I’d be so completely and utterly turned-on. But it seemed that I was, and I knew that if I were to slide a finger up my own cunt, I would find it swollen and drenched, waiting for the entrance of the cock I was tasting.

The thought made me twitch, and as I felt a responding jerk in my mouth, I realized that I must have nipped him inadvertently. Soothing the sensitive ridge with my tongue, I cupped his balls in one hand and jiggled them as if I were rolling dice. My wet, warm mouth increased its pressure, sucking as hard as it possibly could, and the slick membranes of my cheeks rubbed against the ribbed surface of his skin. Brody’s hands tangled in my hair, his hips lifted, and I felt a flood of thick, salty cum slide down my throat. Waiting until his spasms had ceased, I gently released him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Leaving him sprawled in a postorgasmic haze, I crawled back into the passenger seat.

Smoothing my skirt back down my hips and easing the straps of my bodice back over my shoulders, I tucked the wrinkled cash into my cleavage and combed my fingers through the copper skein of my hair. To ease the slightly bitter taste in my mouth, I swilled the last of the wine and leaned my face toward the crack in the window, gulping in fresh, though hot, air. The glass in the car was completely steamed over, and I looked at the sky through the crack of open window as Brody tried, several times, to form a sentence.

“What?” His words slurred slightly. “Why? Why are you doing this? Any of this?”

Though guilt blanketed me at the question, I wasn’t about to tell him. Wasn’t sure I could spit the words out.

Though memories of that afternoon swirled just below the surface of my consciousness, I wasn’t even entirely sure myself why I was doing it, only that, no matter how my mind knew that it was wrong, I couldn’t seem to tell it no.

Chapter Three

I
’D NEVER DONE
my spring cleaning in the spring. I always started to think about it in March, but it was inevitably June or July by the time that my procrastinating rear end finally got around to it.

This year was no different. I let the clutter and the dust pile up until its very presence began to affect my ability to think, to
be.

It had to go.

With classes for the year finally over, and the knowledge that I would be free from learning about psychology in any form for another few months, I finally felt the urge to tidy up the pigsty that Kyle and I called home.

I didn’t at all enjoy scrubbing at the beard bristles that my fiancé, Kyle, left in the tile grout in both bathrooms, but somebody had to do it. I was especially perturbed about it right then because we’d had a major fight, just that morning, about how often he was gone for work. A pharmaceutical sales rep, he was away from home more often than not. Though I truly believed that he was doing it to save up money for our future, the similarity to the relationship I’d had with my ex-husband Steve had me missing him horribly when he was gone and punishing him by being nasty when he was home.

I suspected that my sudden urge to clean had to do with needing to put my life in order. Psychoanalyzing myself would get me nowhere, though, and so I found myself sitting on the floor of our spacious bedroom, sorting through stacks of DVDs, trying to match them to their cases, which were scattered here, there, and everywhere. Neither of us had ever been able to keep the promises that we made to each other to put a DVD back once it had been watched, and the mess represented nearly a year’s worth of viewing pleasure.

But I was almost done. Just a handful of discs remained: ones burned on our computer, silver discs that had no cases. As I began to slip them into cases, my fingers touched the slick surface of one that was unlabeled, which I found strange. We might be messy, but we’d both always been vigilant about labeling our home-burned discs with a black marker.

Shrugging, I slipped the mystery disc into the DVD player and pressed the button to turn on the flat-screen TV which, though it was entirely too large for the room, Kyle had insisted upon. Crawling on all fours to my bedside table as the disc loaded, I rummaged through a pile of expired condoms that neither of us had bothered to throw out—I’d add those to the trash bag in a minute—and other miscellaneous junk in search of a felt marker.

The static unique to a home movie didn’t filter through my consciousness at first. It wasn’t until I turned around, marker clutched triumphantly in my left hand, that I began to realize what, exactly, the disc contained.

The sounds of sex and the sight of Kyle’s rather pale ass clued me in quickly enough.

Mesmerized, I moved toward the screen, fingers reaching out to touch. My first inclination was toward anger—when had Kyle filmed us fucking, and why had he hidden it from me? This was a secret that just shouldn’t be kept in a committed relationship.

The longer I watched, though, the more I came to see that Kyle had a bigger secret, even, than homemade porn. Oh yes, indeed he did, and I was watching it right that moment.

I was watching a movie, time-stamped one week earlier, of my fiancé getting hot and heavy with a curvaceous brunette, a woman that I didn’t think I’d ever met but who looked somewhat familiar.

The realization hit me hard enough to knock me back on my ass. I rocked, drawing my knees up to my chest, telling my frozen fingers to turn the image off. But, like people passing by a car wreck, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Couldn’t stop from gaping at the horrid spectacle that was unfolding before me.

Kyle was cheating on me. Oh, and how.

I watched as he moved out of the frame of the screen for a moment, leaving me with a clear view of his partner. Inky black waves of silk cascaded over the face that was pressed into the bed, falling nearly to the ass that was raised and quivering in the air. The side of a luscious-looking, peach-toned breast plumped out underneath an arm that was bound to the bedpost—the iron post of
my
very own bed, the one that I was sitting next to at that moment. I assumed that the other arm was tied down as well, as both ankles were also shackled, leaving her spread and open, pink and ready.

Kyle moved back into the frame, settled his weight on the bed. The woman moaned as he did so, the movement of an extra body on the slick satin sheets—
my
sheets!—sliding her ass closer to his hard thighs, which he spread on either side of hers as he knelt behind her.

What was this? Since when was he into bondage? Why hadn’t he ever asked me to indulge his fantasy instead of turning to another woman?

Sick to my stomach, I buried my face into the bony planes of my knees, pressing the newly clammy skin of my forehead against them. But the lightning crack of flesh hitting against flesh had me jerking my chin back up, gluing my eyes once again to the screen.

A large, cupped palm, one that had explored every inch of my own body, lashed out to strike the quivering globes of the woman’s ass, which turned a pretty pink under the blows. She screamed at what must have been intense pain, for he wasn’t being gentle as he smacked her again and again, but there was an undeniable edge of excitement in her voice, a sharp knife of pleasure that slid smoothly through the sounds of pain.

Again and again, he smacked the flat of his hand against her ass; over and over she screamed. I wanted to scream myself. Where had I been that day? Why was this happening?

What had I done to deserve it?

My numb brain turned over that question as I heard the crinkle of foil and saw Kyle roll a tube of latex—and thank goodness for that, at least—over the cock that had fucked me a thousand times. Bracing the woman’s thighs farther apart than they already were, he dipped into her wide-open cunt once, twice, before sliding up, up the crease of her ass to press against the pucker that lay hidden deep within.

Oh God. No. I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t stop watching it. I knew we’d had arguments about sex before, about a lackluster sex life, about my need for slow yet sensuous love, about Kyle’s wanting to try things that he didn’t think I’d like. But he hadn’t told me what those things were. I wasn’t sure how I would have reacted if he had, but I’d never,
never
thought that he’d turn away from me to someone else to obtain his pleasure.

But it certainly seemed that he had. My eyes glazed over a bit as I watched his cock slide, bit by tiny bit, into the crease of the woman’s ass. His breath hissed in, hers came out in a hot moan as he hit home and began to move, slowly, in a sensual dance.

I was ashamed enough to feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes when my traitorous cunt grew damp at the steamy scene playing out before me.

Reaching for the remote, I unfolded my legs and moved to turn the set off. I’d seen enough. But the wobble of the camera caught my eye then, a sharp vibration before the perfect stillness of the frame.

Had someone else been holding the camera?

I received my answer when another man moved out from behind the tripod that the camera now obviously sat on. The warm light of the bedside lamp washed over tawny skin and hard muscles, and a new dagger of grief stabbed its way through my gut. My mouth fell open as the man knelt beside Kyle on the bed, ran hands down his shoulders, and leaned in for a brief but obviously sexual kiss.

That was my ex-husband. My ex-husband Steve, kissing my current fiancé Kyle, on my bed, in my house. And now I knew where I’d seen the woman before, why she’d looked familiar—her name was Madeleine, and she was Steve’s current wife. The woman he’d left me for.

Déjà vu rolled over me in a sickening wave.

My hand began to shake, a tremor that rioted its way up my arm and down my torso. Before the remote could slip from the sudden slickness of my grasp, I pounded a fat thumb on the power button and inhaled a jagged, sobbing breath of relief when, with a hiss of static, the screen faded to black.

“Fuck” was the only word that my trembling, swollen lips could utter. “Holy fucking fuckity fuck.”

What was I supposed to do? The panic that was clawing its way through my system had me wide-eyed and wild. I stood, then sat down again, not sure what to do to stem the flood of emotion that was rioting through my body.

I felt like my whole life had spun out of control.

I
hated
it when things were out of my control.

What could I do to feel in control again?

I wanted to punish Kyle. I wanted to punish Steve, and Madeline too, but I couldn’t. Kyle had left for yet another business trip earlier that day, and I no longer had a way of contacting my ex.

I wanted to scream. Someone had to pay, had to share this feeling of madness that was descending upon me.

Though I was already sitting on the floor, I collapsed the rest of the way, curling into a ball, the prickles of the carpet poking uncomfortably against my skin. I allowed my mind to wander free, searching for a course of action that would make me feel better, would act as a release valve for the unbearable pressure in my soul.

Kyle was out of town, would be for the night, which meant that I couldn’t confront him in person for nearly twenty-four hours. The thought of waiting, of keeping all of these emotions inside, nearly made me scream.

I would go see him. No, I would stay here. I would go out. Oh, how could I decide when my head was so full?

I knew one thing for certain, however. Something had to give, or I would explode.