Starfire (Erotic Romance) (Peaches Monroe) (9 page)

Huffing, I attempted to free my other foot, but Adrian grabbed my legs and dragged me five inches closer to him. My damp, sweaty butt squeaked against the floor, and I almost giggled, but then his face was between my legs and in my muff.

BA-WANG.

“Make me come,” I moaned, feeling dirty again.

His tongue delved into my swollen cleft, and my clit cried out a song of joy. Rivers of light and goodness flooded my body, and more was delivered as Adrian’s fingers neared the docking point and entered, gliding easily on the slick wetness.

I arched my back, my head rolling back. Noises between grunts and moans came from my mouth without censor. I peered down to see Adrian on his stomach between my legs, his face hidden to me. His fingers were long and intimate, stroking and enhancing the force of his tongue on my clit. Further along his body, his butt muscles clenched and unclenched in rhythm with his hand, as though he was fucking me. And then, he was. It was still his hand, and his fingers thrusting in and out with urgency, but he was fucking me, and I was being fucked, and I was coming.

I curled up, my sweating hands flat on the floor beside me, and I stared down at his gorgeous, long body before me as my body succumbed to an immensely satisfying orgasm.

When it was done, I pushed his face away.

“I can keep going,” he said, and I believed it.

I quickly sat up, alarmed about the amount of water between my legs.

“Sometimes things get a little gushy,” I explained.

“No need to explain.” He sat up and shook out his arms, which he’d been propped up on.

“It’s normal for some girls,” I said.

He chuckled. “Really. There’s no need to explain. I’m familiar.”

I squinted at him suspiciously. Had he heard something from someone?

“The girlfriend who liked shopping,” he quickly added.

I pushed myself back from the puddle and threaded my naked foot back through my underwear and jeans. Adrian took his cue and started to get dressed as well, even though he looked ready for the next round.

As we got back off the floor and surveyed the situation, I wondered what he was thinking. I got some towels and cleaned up the floor while he took the chicken out of the oven and apologized for using up most of the sauce “on some other
chick
.”

Maybe he wasn’t thinking about anything. I’ve heard that about guys—they can enjoy a blank computer screen inside their mind, whereas any woman will have the equivalent of a hundred windows open, everything going at once. I thought about all the tasks involved in moving the bookstore, the censored version of the evening I would tell Shayla, and about how many calories were in a blowjob when you accounted for the energy used in the blowing. My mind kept whirring. I thought about making some excuse and running out the door, and just running until I didn’t have to think about anything anymore.

CHAPTER 8

After eating our dinner, we moved over to the couch in the living room. Adrian made himself at home, stretching his long legs out and across my lap.

“Don’t be shy,” I said, patting his shins through his clothes.

We’d mostly talked about store business all through dinner, and I was tired of thinking about work. My gaze darted over to the remote control. Watching TV was tempting, but didn’t seem appropriate for a date. Then again, we’d done everything in reverse order, starting off with mind-blowing oral sex on the kitchen floor. How did you follow that?

“Swing your legs up here and I’ll rub your feet,” he said.

I lifted his legs with both hands and rotated my body so my legs were alongside his. Shayla and I sat this way sometimes, but she never offered to rub my feet.

He grabbed hold of my toes with his long, strong fingers. My eyes rolled up and I moaned, “Oh, Adrian, that feels so good.”

He kept kneading my feet, which was surprisingly pleasant and nearly as intimate as what had happened on the kitchen floor.

“Is that a new tattoo?” he asked.

I cracked my eyelids open. My ink was covered by my clothes now, but he must have seen the new tattoo inside my hip bone when I was writhing around on his tongue.

“Doves Cry,” he said.

“I was out with friends in LA one night, and pretty wasted. It could have been worse. I could have gotten
Adrian Forever
in a heart.”

“That would be horrible.” He grinned, his blue eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Oh, but it would be. I’d be too embarrassed to let you see, and we could only be naked together in absolute darkness.”

“What does Doves Cry mean?”

I sighed. “That I shouldn’t do shots.” He kept rubbing my feet, gently pinching each of my toes as though counting them.

I explained, “It also means that everything is fine. I get knocked down, I cry, I get up again. Everything’s going to be okay. Stuff happens to everybody.”

Adrian pushed up the sleeve of his blue T-shirt. He’d ditched his black rock-band shirts that night for a tight-fitting V-neck. He flexed his meaty bicep and turned his arm out to reveal a small, hidden tattoo I hadn’t noticed before.

“Cute!” I squealed, scrambling onto my knees to crawl along the couch toward him to get a better look. “Is that a star?”

He frowned, pretending to be deeply offended. “That’s a compass.”

“Of course! Very nice.”

His voice husky and soft, he said, “Do you know why I got a compass?”

I shifted one leg so I could get comfortable, kneel-sitting on his lap, his long legs stretched out on the sofa behind me.

Our faces were so close, I could feel his hot breath on my cheek.

I licked my lips, then said, “Is the compass so you’ll never get lost again?”

“We all get lost.”

“Just like we all cry.”

“And we keep going,” he murmured. “We keep loving.”

I froze, my breathing shallow.

“Even though we get lost in each other,” he said. “We keep—”

I kissed him. The kiss turned from tender to desperate, both of us gasping, our hands tugging at clothes and pulling our bodies closer. I rocked my hips, feeling him thickening between my legs, and I was as desperate for him as ever.

He pulled away abruptly, his hands on my shoulders to keep me back. “Someone’s at the door,” he said.

I reached down between my legs and squeezed his shaft with my hand. “Tell me about it, big boy.”

He snorted. “No, really. Someone’s knocking on your front door.”

A persistent rapping came from the front door.

I climbed off Adrian and went to answer, knowing with certainty from the knock alone that it was my neighbor Mr. Galloway, and he was in distress.

His face was ashen, his glasses crooked on his long, fine nose. He didn’t seem as tall as usual, perhaps because I’d been hanging out with Adrian, or because whatever had him scared had made him hunch.

Mr. Galloway started talking, his words running together in a jumble. After a moment of confusion, I invited him in and got him sitting down on a chair in the living room. I ran to get him a glass of water, and when I came back, Adrian had taken control of the situation and was extracting the story.

In short, Mr. Galloway’s battle with the rat who’d been terrorizing him in his house had reached its climax. Thanks to the cat, and some traps, the rat was cornered under the refrigerator. But victory had come with a cost. The rat was injured, and making horrible noises. My neighbor was beside himself, and tears ran down his cheeks. “I’m not a killer,” he said.

Adrian stood, looking almost as pale as my elderly neighbor. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “That’s the house on this side?” He pointed in the right direction.

We both nodded silently.

Adrian disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, then walked by with a plastic bucket from under the sink. He went out the front door, and Mr. Galloway and I sat waiting in silence. The sun was setting outside, and the room was bathed in a golden light that seemed to cheerful for the occasion.

There was no noise, no screaming or banging from next door.

After eleven minutes and twenty seconds, Adrian returned, his expression solemn.

“Everything’s taken care of,” he said.

I helped Mr. Galloway to his feet and walked him back over to his house while Adrian stayed behind.

Mr. Galloway patted my arm when we reached his front door. “You’re a true friend,” he said.

His tears were gone, but his discomfort remained, hanging in the air between us. Mr. Galloway wasn’t from a generation that was okay with men crying, not that things were incredibly different today.

“I’m sure we’ll laugh about this tomorrow,” I said. “But if you’d prefer, I won’t ever mention it.”

He looked down at his feet. “Thank your boyfriend for me,” he said, and he quietly slipped inside his house and closed the door.

As I walked back over to my house and up the steps, I realized my body was trembling, even though the late summer sun was just setting now, the air warm and fragrant with the scent of the blossoms in Mr. Galloway’s front yard.

Adrian met me on my porch, looking anxious. “I should get going,” he said.

I wanted to say something to make everything right again, but the evening had taken a turn and there was no salvaging it.

“Okay.” I stood on my tiptoes and stretched up to kiss him goodbye. I couldn’t quite reach on my own, but after an awkward pause, he bent down and brushed his lips on mine.

“I’ll call you,” he said, and then he was gone.

I went back into the house, where I gingerly opened the cabinet doors under the sink. The plastic bucket wasn’t there, thank goodness.

~

The rat was still on my mind Tuesday at work. I had so many positive things to think about, yet dark thoughts kept bubbling up the way they do on Tuesdays.

What’s the deal with Tuesday, anyway?

It’s always the slowest day of the week at the bookstore. Nobody can be bothered to work up a true hatred for the day, like they do Mondays, yet there’s a bleakness to Tuesday, as though it’s gradually dawning on everyone at once that the fresh, new week isn’t going as well as planned.

The sound of cars driving by on the street shifted to that of wet tires on pavement. Rain came down half-heartedly.

A man came rushing into the empty store, his face down.

“Escaping the rain?” I said cheerfully.

“Always running from something, aren’t I?” He swiped some raindrops from his brow with one sweep of his hand and turned his radiant smile on me.

Dalton Deangelo.

In my bookstore.

With his fucking chin dimple and dark eyebrows and all that sexy, cocky attitude.

“The washroom is for customers only,” I said.

Looking cute enough to take my breath away, he strode over to a display table. “I’m buying this.” He picked up a book and brought it to the counter.

So far, we’d been recreating the day we met.

“Excellent choice,” I said. “ She won the Nobel prize for literature.” I kept my eyes down on the book, avoiding Dalton’s hypnotic green eyes.

“This is a great store,” he said.

“How did that book about kegel exercises work out for you, by the way?”

“Not the way I expected.”

I looked up into his eyes, too curious to avoid him any longer. His famous face looked the way I’d left it—perfect, from his defined jaw and cheekbones to those expressive, dark-lashed eyes. His black hair was damp and shiny from the rain. The planes of his face caught the store’s light as though it had been set up exclusively for him.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I have to be somewhere, and I need a break from LA.”

“I’m sorry to hear about… everything.” I really was sorry that reporters had discovered his past, but even more sorry he’d been denied a normal childhood. One of the stories I’d read about him revealed that when he was four years old, he’d woken in the night and wandered out of his room to find a film crew and an orgy in his living room. The actress who spoke to the reporter said it used to happen all the time, and she felt sorry for the kid, but they had to shoot when and wherever they could. She’d hoped the money his parents were making would eventually build a better life for the kid, and everything would be worth it. But then he ran away from home as a teen, changed his name, and made his own life, without them.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Is that all?” Dalton replied.

“What else is there? Congratulations on buying the cabin. How’s that going?”

“I thought you might actually apologize for what you did,” he said.

My pulse started to hammer in my ears. The way he was looking at me—it wasn’t his usual flirty expression.

“You’re scaring me,” I whispered, because he was.

“You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone. You promised me.”

I swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go down.

“I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Are you saying the video of the curvy blonde at the tattoo shop isn’t you? Because it sure looks like you. I only watched it once, but the video’s up to a couple million views.”

My mouth dropped open.

Thunder rumbled outside, the rain picking up fury.

A lightning bolt punctuated my sudden realization.

The person who revealed Dalton Deangelo’s secret past was me. I’d been worried about this. It must have happened during the night I couldn’t remember clearly. My friend Mitchell wouldn’t have betrayed me, so it must have been one of the model guys we were out with who’d recorded me on his phone. Then again, maybe Mitchell had betrayed me. People did that. After all, I had betrayed Dalton.

“I didn’t know,” I said, looking down at my shoes, away from his cold expression. “This is the first I’ve… oh, Dalton. I’m so sorry. I could literally die right here from how sorry I am. I never meant to hurt you.”

“You haven’t seen the video?”

“No! I didn’t want to read all those terrible things people were saying about you. All those horrible people on the internet. I mean, I looked once, but just for a few minutes.”

He sighed, and his tone softened a bit. “To be fair, you didn’t say everything, but you dropped some huge hints, and that reporter, Brooke Summer, put the clues together and figured out where to look.”