“You came here to kiss me,” she finished for him.
“Maybe I did,” he said.
“Or maybe you came here to lay me down upon the grass and lift up my skirts…”
His breath hitched as she whispered the invitation into his ear, and the excited expectation that thrummed through her scattered any lingering lethargy and brought her to a new level of awareness. She danced her fingertips over his chest, feeling the hard muscle beneath his waistcoat, and John closed his eyes on a jagged exhale. It thrilled Ora to have such an effect on him, to feel that she had power in this one area of her life when it was missing from so much of the rest of it. But then John took her hand and gently removed it from his person, and it was as if something shifted between them. The sense of power evaporated, and Ora again felt like the helpless, hapless soul so many people wanted her to be.
“Wait…” he whispered, focused on where he still held her hand.
Her body went rigid, bracing itself for the emotional blow it could sense was coming.
“I must tell you something. Something of great importance. I cannot let you continue imagining me to be a man who is deserving of your affection when nothing could be further from the truth.”
He is married. Or engaged to be married.Those were the obvious conclusions, and her heart sank with the heaviness of sorrow and the embarrassment of her foolishness, followed by anger that he should have kept this from her all this time. Sure, he owed her nothing in the way of love, or even friendship. But she’d thought…
She’d thought…
“There is no bird, Ora. It was a complete fabrication, invented solely in an effort to draw you here.”
Ora could do nothing but blink as she processed the words. Finally, she managed to get out an appropriate response. “I don’t understand. You…you sent me an illustration of a bird that doesn’t exist so that I would come visit?” she asked, baffled by the admission. Was he saying he lied so that he would have an excuse to meet her? That was odd. And harebrained. But perhaps something she could forgive.
“It was not my idea,” he said quietly, glancing up at her before looking back down, shamefaced. “Not solely.”
“Then whose…?” Her mind swirled with names and faces of those who considered her a threat. Graves? Fleming?
“Guy Ledford.”
It felt as if her lungs ceased to inflate, and she nearly choked on the trapped air. She pulled her hand away from his.“Guy?”
John’s gaze remained focused on the ground. “Ledford and I know each other from our school days. He approached me at theend of last year and asked me for assistance solving a…a small problem.”
A small problem. Her, presumably.
Years of education and hard work, playing the game how they demanded she play it, and she was still always destined to be reduced to some man’sproblem. And a small one, at that! Somehow it was insulting to not at least be respected enough to be a large one.
“I am sorry, Ora,” John said. “But it has all been a lie.”
EIGHTEEN
Callahan
It’s become rarerthe longer I’ve been in the antique business, but every now and then I come across something that takes my breath away with how utterly sublime it is. There’s this sensation that I’ve been forever changed in some fundamental way, just from seeing it, handling it. And god, if that isn’t exactly how I feel right now as I take in the sight of Annie, lying there on the counter, eyes closed, wavy brown hair fanned out in all directions, her beautiful breasts rising and falling, her deliciously thick thighs still splayed wide and trembling with the aftershocks of her orgasm.
I move so that I’m standing by her head and lean down, feeling the need to be closer. She blinks her eyes open, as if sensing me there, and says, “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“Was that okay?” I ask.
“Beyond okay,” she says with a contented sigh that someprimal part of my brain accepts as the equivalent of a big, shiny trophy. I’m surprised by how much of a relief it is to hear the satisfaction in her voice.
Because I’ll admit, some of the issues I’ve been having since Nicole and I broke up are probably rooted in the anxiety that I might not be able to figure outhowto be with anyone else. But with Annie’s needy little noises and tugs on my hair, her subtle guidance and reassurance as I set out to learn her body, she made it so easy to ignore any self-consciousness and give myself over fully to the desire that’s been plaguing me since we met.
Still plaguing me, actually. I think I could do that again and again, a million times, and it wouldn’t be enough to rid me of this intense need that I feel so deep inside, it’s like it’s attached itself to my very being.
It’s a need that she isn’t oblivious to, apparently, because she reaches out and skates her fingers over the bulge straining the front of my pants. “Want to go upstairs?” she asks.
