Just Rules (17 page)

He pulled Susana’s pants off and threw them on the floor while she fumbled with the button on his jeans. Mac pushed her hand away because if she touched him, even by accident, he’d finish and embarrass himself. He held her hands on top of her head and keep on kissing Susana. He unbuttoned his jeans but didn’t take them off. In order to take them off, he would have had to pull away from her, to stop kissing her, and to stop touching her, and he didn’t think he was capable of doing any of that. Her underwear bothered him. Her bra was just going to have to stay on though because there was no way he was going to stop long enough to take it off, but her panties were a different story. He was capable of ripping them off, that he could do it, and he was about to do when he remembered he had already ripped one of her pairs. And if he wanted Susana to give him even the slightest chance, maybe he should show her that he could be more sophisticated than a wild animal. He breathed out of his nose and started to pull down her underwear. She lifted her hips and tried to move her arms, but Mac wouldn’t let her. Susana took her lips away from his and bit him on the neck.

Mac trembled with pleasure and a guttural sound escaped from his throat.

What was he turning her into? She had never bitten anyone before, or rather, she had never felt the sudden urge to bite anyone, and much less a man in her bed. But with Mac she went crazy. She lost all inhibitions and her body took over. Not only did she want to bite him, she wanted to grab him by his hair and pull him against her. She wanted to lick that enormous back of his and explore his pecs and abs of steel with her fingernails to see if she could make him tremble.

His hand went up her thigh in search of her sex. And without warning, he slipped a finger inside her. Then he stopped.

“Kev…” moaned Susana.

To hear her say his name calmed Mac down a bit and he opened his eyes. He didn’t even remember having closed them. He had gone to Susana’s apartment to ask her for help with the financial report for the foundation, not to take her clothes off. But when he got near her, he began to feel like he’d die if he never got to touch her again.

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t let Susana condemn him to a life of not feeling anything anymore.

He was furious and frustrated so he had gone to see her to tell her that she could continue to go out with the idiot from the opera and that she could take her message and shove it; he wasn’t just any guy that she could brush off with a little message. He had gone to see her to tell her that he didn’t want to repeat what happened the other night either and that the best for everyone would be to never tell Tim about it. In the end, it was just casual sex.

But then he saw her wearing that t-shirt and those pants, smelling like vanilla and with flour on her face and completely forgot the speech he had prepared and became even angrier. And Susana’s reaction was completely unexpected, which was so Susana.

And Mac decided that talking to her was a complete waste of time, and that what he needed to do was kiss her. Kiss her and take her to bed. Maybe then they would both calm down enough to have a civilized conversation.

He needed to be inside of her, to make love to her again, to feel her near him. Susan trembled and moved below him, but everything was happening very fast, and he’d rather die than do something that she didn’t want to do.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked in a gravelly voice, sliding his erection slowly over her.

Susana couldn’t, and wouldn’t, deny the need that was crawling her skin apart.

“Yes! You are an arrogant idiot,” she said, although she added the second part of the phrase so that the first part didn’t seem so overzealous.

Mac nodded and clenched his jaw to gain control, and when he thought he had it, he grabbed his manhood with one hand and without taking his jeans off, started to push inside her. He breathed deeply and they were both quiet for a second, looking each other in the eye.

He let her wrists go, but Susana kept her arms where they were. Kev moved his and entwined his fingers with hers. Then, and only then, he began to move slowly, Mac moaned from the depths of his soul. He went in and out, little by little, making sure she felt every inch of him, making her aware of connection between them, which was much more than just lust or attraction.

She got lost in his eyes and in a desperate attempt to hide how confused she was at the feelings he was waking up in her, she let herself be swept away by the pleasure. At the moment, it was the only thing she felt she’d be able to confess about how she was feeling…having him inside of her was too much for her emotions.

For a year, she had been with another man, almost got married to him. And she would have spent the rest of her life denying that Kev MacMurray was the only one capable of waking up her most deep and secret emotions.

Susana squeezed Mac’s hands and gave in to him with a sigh of desperation.

Mac clenched his teeth when he slid his hard dick through the wet lips of Susan’s sex. He pressed himself against her and forced himself to remain calm while the rest of his body was concentrated on the extreme pleasure from being inside Susana. The way she was breathing was, without a doubt, the most erotic sound he had ever heard. Mac was burning from head to toe. His hair even felt like it was on fire, and as soon as a layer of sweat got dry, he was drenched again.

He needed to touch every inch of her. He pressed his forehead to Susana’s, and caressed her nose with his, working his way down to her lips.

“Susana,” he sighed, moving one of her legs to the side so he could penetrate her even more. “I’m only capable of feeling when you’re touching me.”

Susana moved her hips in a way that was so pleasurable that Mac could barely stand it.

“Kev…”

Hearing her moan like that made his whole body tremble.

“Damn it, stop moving like that or I’ll end up losing what little control I have left.”

“You call that control?” She sighed and lifted her hips to provoke him, unaware of how much he was suffering inside. “What the hell do you do when you lose it completely?”

Mac smiled for the first time in weeks, he let go of her arms and held her tightly to his body. He kissed her and began to slowly move his hips. His only objective was to make her feel the fire that was burning between them. He would have liked to have been completely naked, to have felt Susana’s thighs beneath his, but making love to her with his jeans on was also very sensual and it made it so he couldn’t move freely or move his hips as much. He had to do it more slowly, with even more determination. Susana lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist. He gobbled up her moans while his got lost somewhere in his throat. He felt the exact moment when Susan climaxed; the lips of her sex closed around him and she dug her fingers into his back. Mac didn’t want to keep holding back his orgasm, nor could he do anything about it, so he and Susana both surrendered to each other at the same time.

When they both stopped trembling, Mac remained on top of her for a few seconds, but then he feared that he was squishing her so he lifted himself off of her a little. He did it slowly, carefully, telling himself that if she gave him a cold look he could handle it. Susan’s head was tilted and the back of her neck and forehead were covered with sweat. Her mouth was half open, and she licked her lips, trying to catch her breath.

Little by little she turned her head toward Mac’s.

“You’re beautiful,” he muttered, and she smiled at him. However, then some sort of bell sounded, and Susana’s expression completely changed.

Shit.

Susana blushed from head to toe and looked the other way. Mac didn’t move and kept staring at her, determined to keep her in the moment.

“The oven,” she explained. “The cake is going to burn. I’ll be right back.”

Mac didn’t let her move, because he knew that if she left the room without admitting what was going on, she’d find a way to put up again that damned wall between them.

“Please, Kev,” she said to him, touching his cheek with her hand.

If she knew the effect it had on him when she called him by his real name, she could get whatever she wanted from him. And when she sweetly caressed him, gave him that tender touch that had nothing to do with sex, Mac found it impossible to resist her. He carefully pulled off her and lay down on the bed.

Susan got up and grabbed a nightgown that was on a chair in her room and started to put it on in the hallway as she walked toward the kitchen.

Mac stayed there with his eyes closed and his heart beating a mile a minute, listening to her turn off the oven and take something out of it. The smell of vanilla that filled her apartment since he had been there intensified. Mac found it strange that Susana was taking such a long time, although perhaps she was finishing that good smelling cake the kitchen. He heard her footsteps coming down the hall toward her bedroom, and he let out a sigh of relief. Susana hadn’t changed her mind about him after all.

Thirteenth rule of American football:

Field goal:
if a team makes it to the fourth down and is near the end zone, it has the option try for a field goal by kicking the ball between the goal posts.

Susan had thought about not going back to the bedroom. She had thought about leaving her apartment in her nightgown and hiding in the lobby until Mac left. She had even thought about hiding in the bathroom. She couldn’t have a relationship with Kev MacMurray.

Tim leaving her had hurt. But if Mac left her it would destroy her. She just needed to remember that what had just happened with Kev was only sex. The problem was that it didn’t feel like just sex. When it came to Tim, she never felt like she would die without him. She never had the feeling that if Tim didn’t make love to her, she wouldn’t want to keep breathing. With Mac, she had the strange feeling that she would even be capable of killing anyone who got in the way of him kissing her. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t have those kinds of relationships. She was a normal and calm girl who only wanted to have a good job, a family, and a stable future. And Kev MacMurray was everything but stable.

But she wasn’t a coward either, she said to herself, nor was she a strait-laced prude. She was perfectly capable of having fun with Mac. Besides, he had never suggested that he wanted anything more serious with her. Maybe she was getting all worked up over nothing. Maybe he just wanted to sleep with her. Yes, surely Mac was only in it for the sex. It was impossible that he wanted anything more. The fact that they hadn’t been thinking clearly and that they got all hot and bothered in bed didn’t mean that they had stopped hating each other. They could be lovers until one of them got bored with the other, she decided, and she took the cake out of the oven.

She left the kitchen, determined to go back to the bedroom and tell Mac that she was willing to be his lover, but then her phone rang, and she remembered that she had left it on the bar while she was making the cake, so she turned around and went to go get it.

It was Pam.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Hi, Sue. What are you doing?”

Susana turned red just thinking about it.

“I just took a cake out of the oven.”

“And you didn’t invite me over?” exclaimed her friend, offended. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m less than ten minutes from your house.”

Oh, God.

“No, don’t come!”

“Why? Do you have company, you little naughty girl?”

“No, I’m alone.”

“Really?”

“Of course I’m alone. Who am I supposed to be with?”

“I don’t know, maybe with the captain of the Patriots?”

“That’s stupid. It hasn’t even been a month since Tim and I broke up. I’m not with anyone, and I don’t want to be either.”

“OK, OK, don’t get so defensive.”

Susana heard a noise in the hallway and turned around. Kev was dressed and standing there in the doorway of the kitchen. From the look in his eyes and the way he was clenching his jaw, it was obvious he had heard everything. She covered her phone and started to say something to him, but she couldn’t. He shook his head, turned toward the door, and left her apartment without saying anything.

“Sue? Susan?”

Pam’s voice snapped her back into reality.

“Sorry,” said Susan, clearing her throat. “I got distracted. What did you say?”

“I’ll be there within ten minutes, OK?”

“OK.”

She hung up, went to take a shower, and pretended that the water running down her face was simply that.

Mac found himself once again walking down the street aimlessly, trying to see if he could understand what the hell he was feeling. The minutes he spent lying in her bed waiting for her to return from the kitchen had probably been the happiest moments of his life. He had just made love to a woman who fascinated him, who intrigued him and turned him on at the same time, and who was incredible in bed. She had told him that she’d be right back and he had assumed that they would sleep a while and that they would then make love again and plan how they were going to spend the rest of the day. In his mind, which was satiated and euphoric from the sex, Mac pictured both of them eating pasta and drinking wine in one of his favorite restaurants.

But then the damn phone rang and Mac stopped dreaming.

He could only heard Susana, but her answers were enough to know how the entire conversation went. Whoever was on the other end of the line had asked Susana if she was alone, and she said that she was. It was a clear-cut answer. And not only that, Susana had also made it clear that she had no intention of being with anyone in the near future, that she was still hurting from Tim’s breakup, Although it was obvious that her body had miraculously forgotten about her fiance quite easily, Mac thought, feeling hurt.

He barely even remembered standing up and going to get his t-shirt. He buttoned his jeans and left her apartment without even bothering to use the bathroom first. He didn’t want to see his reflection in the mirror, because he didn’t want to see the pain and rage written all over his face. He walked down the hallway and stopped in front of the kitchen door to see if Susan would try to stop him. Obviously she didn’t, just like she didn’t try to justify herself or apologize either.