“Malone, stop,” I said, shuddering as he freed my hair from its messy bun and turned his attention to my breasts.
He paused.
Just as I thought I might have imagined the whole thing after all, the buzzing began again.
“It’s my phone,” he said. “And I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. Not a soul.”
Our lips and tongues met again, our hands frantically exploring each other’s bodies.
The buzzing resumed.
We ignored it.
More buzzing returned.
“Anchovies,” I said with a deep sigh. “At least make sure it’s not an emergency.”
Letting loose with a creative series of curse words, he squatted and fished through the tangle of his sweatpants until he freed his phone. One look at the person who’d been calling him—and texting him, from the looks of it—and his face drained of all color.
After adding a few more colorful words to his repertoire, he looked up at me, then at the phone, then back at me, his expression one of agony.
“You have to take it, don’t you?” I asked, now feeling awkward with my legs dangling.
“I don’t want to,” he said as he stood.
“But you have to.”
“What I want to do is push that thong to the side and bury myself in you, but I’ll be damned if the first time I have sex with you is a hit-and-run,” he said as he shoved his legs into his pants. “You touch yourself and think fond thoughts of me because I will be back. I can’t guarantee it’s tonight because a catastrophe of epic proportions has just happened on the work front, but ... it will happen. I promise you that.”
He pulled me close for a rough and hungry kiss, gave a groan of frustration, and then practically ran out the door. I heard his apartment door open and close, open and close before the Lexus started and departed with a squeal of tires.
Just call me Little All Undressed Up with No Place to Go.
Normally, I didn’t like being told what to do, but Malone’s suggestion had some merit.
Chapter 22
The worst part about Malone’s departure was the conversation it forced me to have with myself.
He’s abandoned you.
No, he hadn’t abandoned me. He’d gotten an emergency call for work, similar to my situation the first time around. Truth be told, I’d had less reason to leave him than he’d had to leave me. Probably. Hard to know since I didn’t know the particulars.
Well, he’ll be done with you the minute he actually has sex with you. That’s what men do.
If that were the case, he would’ve done just as he pleased with no concern about how things went for me. He had walked away with a raging boner because he cared enough to want the experience to be good for me too.
Mind you, the idea of his sliding my thong to the side and—
Cold shower, Stella. You need a cold shower.
The shower ended up being hot; I ended up thinking those fond thoughts.
Afterward, sleep came more easily to me than I would’ve anticipated, but I still jerked awake every few hours and looked outside for his car. By seven, I groggily decided I’d better get something productive done since my final project for my Legal Research class was due on Monday.
I worked on that project, then did background checks on potential teachers for a private school. Working that job along with another added four hundred or so more dollars to the tally.
I’d moved on to looking through my assorted databases for any hint to Blake Malone’s whereabouts when I finally heard someone out in the breezeway.
