Unsuitable Men (18 page)

“Right here?” he used her hand to rub a spot near her hipbone.

Tracy shook her head.

“Here?” he moved her hand lower.

Tracy shook her head again and he smiled a slow, sexy smile.

“So . . .” he said, “where exactly does it hurt?”

Tracy moved her hand, still under his, so that it was directly over her
mons
.

“Maybe I should kiss it and make it better,” he said.

And before she knew what was happening he had grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up one step higher and raised the skirt of her dress, putting his head under it.

Brendan was shrouded by her skirt so that when she looked down, all Tracy saw was the mound that was his head, moving back and forth. But she felt him;
god did
she
ever
. He had captured her clitoris between his lips and was gently working it with just the tip of his tongue, making her feel as though she would dissolve into a pool of warm liquid at his feet.

With each licking and suckling motion he made, his head bobbed and her knees threatened to buckle under her, so she gripped the stair railings, hanging on for dear life, which was just as well since
Brendan had put his hands on her inner thighs and was spreading her, burrowing closer as he took more and more of her into his mouth.

Tracy felt her hips beginning to buck uncontrollably against him, and he moved his hands, palming her buttocks and holding her against him so she couldn’t escape if she wanted to. He held her there, his tongue lashing against her, his lips simultaneously sucking, and just when she thought her heart might literally stop from the intensity of it, Tracy cried out his name. Still, he didn’t stop, though he slowed a little, lessening the pressure, the strokes more delicate until she came down from the crest of her climax and could feel sensation in her legs once again.

After a moment, he lifted her skirt and using the hem, dabbed his mouth like someone in a fine dining establishment and licked his lips.

“Wow,” he
said,
his voice surprisingly steady. “It was hot under there.”

Tracy looked at him, and using the hem of her dress as he had, dabbed away a few tiny beads of perspiration that had formed on his forehead. Holding her by the waist once again, lifted her off the staircase and deposited her on the floor next to him, but not before pausing to kiss her briefly on the lips. She looked up at him and something deep in her chest, literally ached. Breaking eye contact because it was just too intense, she noticed for the first time the protrusion in Brendan’s slacks and looked back up at him.

“
Oh
no,” he laughed pulling away as she reached for him. “If we go there, we won’t ever get out of here tonight and as much I’d rather stay here, I need to go. Our PR people invited a bunch of bloggers to come check the Lounge out.”

“Well you can’t very well walk out of the building like that.” Tracy said smiling.

“I’ll concentrate,” Brendan said.”It’ll go down by the time the elevator hits the ground floor. ‘Cause I’ma Jedi mind-trick it.”

Tracy rolled her eyes. “Okay, why don’t you start on that while I go put on some underwear?” she said.

“No. No underwear. I want you just like you are. Raw, and wet.”

Tracy’s eyes opened wide for an instant, wondering whether she would ever get used to him saying things like that.

The rational part of her knew that Brendan was just that kind of guy who people were drawn to. Men wanted to hang out with him and be his friend, and women wanted to . . . be much more than that. It was obvious from the way they exploited his basic touchy-feely nature. He was the kind of guy who hugged you when he greeted you, who touched you, or nudged you, or took the fabric of your blouse between his fingers and tested the texture when he talked to you. And some women misinterpreted that. They got a bright, glittery look in their eyes and played with their hair, lengthened their neck, straightened their backs to showcase their chest, and worst of all, they
touched him back
.

After what happened on the staircase at the apartment, Tracy should have been mellower and more tolerant but far from it, she was tense, overexcited, and felt incomplete. She still needed to feel Brendan inside her. So she was stuck here, wanting him still and having to watch these bitches crawl all over her man. Okay, so he wasn’t
technically
her man, but dammit, he was
her
man.

Coming to the Lounge had been a blunder on her part. This only made sense if the goal was to drive
herself
crazy with jealousy. She had never come with him before when he was working and as long as he came home afterwards, hadn’t spared a thought about what it was like for him in the club, surrounded by scantily-clad women who mistook his natural friendliness for interest in their skanky asses. Now she would never be able to let him go alone again. If she did, her imagination would run wild, so she may as well be there to see with her own eyes what she was imagining anyway.

And to make matters worse, she was going to be forced to pretend it all didn’t bother her because if she breathed a word of complaint, Brendan would tell her she was “trippin’ again.” But who
wouldn’t
trip? She made a mental note to ask Riley to send Shawn to the club more often. It wasn’t fair that Brendan was carrying more of the burden for managing what was supposed to be a joint venture, after all.

Tracy leaned forward a little from her vantage point in one of the semi-private VIP areas and watched as Brendan grinned one of his signature grins at some woman in a white bodysuit. Anyone who wore a white bodysuit in a club that had black lighting was just an exhibitionist plain and simple, because everyone knew that the black lights made lighter colors glow. She sighed and leaned back in her seat so Brendan and the tramp in white were out of view once again.

What seemed like a long while later he came back to her, and Tracy smiled blandly at
him.
After pulling the gauze curtain to close off their sitting area, he collapsed next to her on the sofa. After a moment he slid his hand along her leg and Tracy clamped her thighs shut.

“Uh oh,” Brendan said leaning back. “What did I do now?”

“Nothing,” Tracy said. She reached for her glass of champagne.

“You sure?” Brendan asked, leaning into her line of sight.

“Positive,” she said, taking a sip and avoiding looking him in the eye.

“Okay, nothing’s wrong,” Brendan said, nodding his head thoughtfully. “So if I wanted to do something to fix the ‘nothing’ that’s wrong—hypothetically speaking of course—what would I have to do?”

Tracy tried, but couldn’t prevent herself from smiling. No one made her smile this much, or laugh as hard. No one made her feel as good as he did, or as bad as he could, or as beautiful, or as sexy, or as angry, or as jealous, or as alive. Or as completely herself. Ah, to be
herself
with a man—what a revolutionary notion.

Sensing that she was somewhere else, Brendan leaned closer.

“Huh? What can I do to fix it? Hypothetically.”

“If something
were
wrong,” Tracy said, playing along, “you could,
hypothetically
, kiss me. Maybe that would make me feel better. If something were wrong, that is.”

Brendan smiled and leaned in, brushing his lips lightly against hers and nuzzling her nose with his. When Tracy leaned forward to make contact with his lips again, he leaned just out of her reach.

“It’s a good thing then,” he said, “that nothing’s wrong.”

Tracy reached for him, putting a hand at the back of his neck and pulled him toward her. His lips opened for her and she slipped her tongue into his mouth, kissing him almost desperately. As he always did when she got this way, and maybe because he knew it would drive her crazy and make her want him even more, Brendan pulled back and slowed things down, taking his own sweet time
exploring her, his hand lightly caressing her hip. When he moved his hand around, and down between her legs, this time she opened up for him without hesitation.

“
Whoa
. Better stop,” he said against her lips. “In a few minutes I might not be able to. And I still have some celebrity website bloggers to entertain.”

He stood and pulled her up, leading her out of the VIP area.

“C’mon, I want to show you off,” he said against her ear. “You’re the most beautiful woman in here, Tracy. I want everyone to know you’re with me.”

Somehow, he managed to pretend her neurotic insecurities were neither neurotic nor insecure. He never tired of it, and she wondered sadly how long that would last. A thought flitted through her mind and was gone in an instant, that maybe it wasn’t Brendan who was not good enough for her; it was she who was not good enough for him.

The Lounge had filled up nicely in the time since they’d gotten there, and Brendan continued to play the perfect host, but this time kept a firm grip on Tracy’s hand as he made his rounds. When he introduced her, he only told people her name, and didn’t clarify the nature of their relationship in any way which made Tracy strangely disappointed, even though she wasn’t sure what she would have had him say.  Still, to even the casual observer, it would be obvious that they were together and that was good enough for now.

When one of his conversations, with th
e blogger from CelebHotSpot.com
began to exceed her attention-span, Tracy pulled her hand out of his to head for the bar. To her surprise, Brendan excused himself and turned to her.

“You okay? Where you going?”

“To get a drink. You stay here,” she said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll come find you in a few.”

He nodded and turned back to his conversation and Tracy smiled as she walked away.

See? Women were easy, really
, she thought.
All we need is a little acknowledgment sometimes
.

She was fairly certain that she would be able to make it through the rest of the evening without getting irritated when women got pushy with Brendan again. Because now, you would have to be an idiot not to have seen that Brendan was most decidedly taken.

The bar was crowded, but one of the bartenders who Tracy thought might even be the young woman who had served her and Brendan on the launch night, approached her right away and took her order
for a Two-Twelve martini, which had a fruity taste that Tracy was still trying to identify
. When she tried to pay for her drink, the young woman smiled.

“No charge,” she said. “Earlier this evening Mr. Cole told me to make sure I take care of whatever you might need.”

“Thank you,” Tracy smiled.

She stood by the bar sipping her drink, taking everything in, including more than a few celebrities and a couple of radio deejays she recognized from posters around the city. There were even a few professional athletes among the crowd. If this was representative of the average Friday night, Tracy had no doubt the club was going to be a huge success, something that was no longer a foregone conclusion just because the owner was a celebrity like Shawn.

And Brendan was of course a natural at making people feel welcome. Watching him greet someone else who had joined his conversation with the blogger, she felt something suspiciously like pride. Tracy had never thought much about how good he might or might not have been at his job, but seeing him in action now, she could only imagine how essential he had been to smooth over the rough patches and run interference when managing someone as moody as Shawn. She made a mental note to begin telling her clients about the Lounge; something she often did with restaurants and nightspots around town that she liked and could vouch for.

“I don’t recall putting that sweet of a smile on your face,” someone said close to her ear.

Before she even turned around, Tracy knew it was him. Her body reacted before her mind did, maybe because of that scent he was wearing. She hadn’t been able to get it out of her nostrils for days afterward. It was a scent she now associated with shame. Swallowing hard, Tracy turned to face him.

“You remember me, don’t you baby?” he said, his face closer to hers than she expected. “KEL-
vin
. Not Kevin, but KEL-
vin
.”

Tracy said nothing but shot a desperate look in Brendan’s direction. She didn’t know why, because the last thing in the world she wanted was to have Brendan know who Kelvin was. Not just because she was ashamed—though she was—but because she knew how important tonight was to the Lounge, and felt certain that Brendan would still do something stupid like haul off and hit the guy.

Kelvin followed her quick glance and nodded. “Yeah, I saw him,” he said. “That your man?”

His breath smelled strong, like cognac, and his eyes were bleary. Tracy tried to recall what he’d told her he did for a living, and wondered why he would be a regular at the Lounge. God forbid he should be in the same business as Brendan, know people in the same circles.

“Your
man know
you can suck the skin off a dick?” Kelvin asked matter-of-factly.