The First Move Read online

  “There are lots of ways to serve, and I think the Defense Department and I are both better off with me as a contractor, rather than a soldier.” At least he could take pride in the work he did with his company.

  Her only response was to hmm and take a sip of her wine, her expression unreadable behind the liquid shining through the glass. He cleared his throat so he could choke down a bite of pizza without giving away how discomforted he was by her lack of response. The room pressed in on him, those once cheerful songbirds framed on the wall took on menacing expressions, their beaks sharper, their eyes beadier.

  Clearly, love was making him crazy. Either that, or Rey had spiked the wine with hallucinogens while he was in the bathroom.

  Love was the Occam’s razor answer. There was nothing complicated about falling in love with a beautiful woman whose emotional strength and creativity continued to wow him. She even liked his daughter. And Sarah seemed to like her. He shifted in his chair.

  She lowered her glass to the table, slowly revealing the sharp planes of her nose and curvature of her cheeks. Then she cocked her head and he waited.

  “Thank you for being honest and not romanticizing your experience.”

  “There’s nothing romantic about spending four years with dirty, stinking men—and some women, though they were usually less stinky.”

  “I think you’re covering up your sense of failure by making jokes.”

  In his next life, he was going to fall in love with someone less perceptive.

  “And I think you need more wine.” He grabbed the bottle and reached over the small table to pour her a full glass. They were drinking out of juice glasses and he didn’t give a damn about a proper pour. He just wanted her a little less observant so any other secrets he shared escaped her pointed comments.

  She looked up when he snickered, but he waved away any comment. Confessing to being the first man on earth to get a woman drunk for a reason other than sex wasn’t on his agenda for today. Besides, he didn’t want her drunk. He had plans to give her an orgasm with her clothes actually off her body and he wanted them both to remember the experience.

  They spent the rest of the evening, and drank the rest of the wine, on the couch with Rey giggly enough that Miles stopped drinking out of his glass and started drinking out of hers. He tried to get her to eat another piece of pizza, but she wrinkled up her nose at the suggestion and said something about fat pie topped with tomato sauce. An accurate description of Chicago-style pizza, and one of the reasons Miles believed the pizza had been designed with him in mind.

  She also turned down ice cream, nuts or anything else that might soak up the alcohol and the giggles. Finally, he gave up. She was an adult and she wasn’t drunk, just tipsy. If she thought everything he said was worthy of Comedy Central, he wasn’t about to disagree with her.

  Instead, he settled into the pillows on the couch and accepted one of the elegant feet she nudged into his hand. Her toes were painted with a discreet French manicure, matching her graceful style. She moaned when he pressed his thumbs into her instep and he instantly got aroused. He rubbed his way up to the ball of her foot and squeezed. He must’ve been doing something right because she inched her butt along the cushions on the couch until her head was resting on the armrest, her breasts thrust high in the air and her nipples hard through the light fabric of her T-shirt and lace bra.

  The conundrum of a foot rub done right. He was a jerk if he ignored the other foot, but the appeal of massaging her other foot was overwhelmed by the enticement of her nipples and moans. He kissed the arch of her foot and set it down on his lap.

  “You’re not done.” Her other foot immediately appeared in his hand, making him grin. She wasn’t going to let him be a jerk. His hands moved across her foot by instinct, stretching and pressing away tension. His focus was on Rey, who was tucking her hips up slightly, shifting her rib cage from side to side and releasing soft, satisfied groans when his fingers touched a particularly sensitive spot.

  He wasn’t the only one aroused by the foot rub.

  “I’m still not done.” This time he didn’t let her foot go, but slid the hem of her sweatpants up and rubbed the smooth skin of her leg. His hand cupped the curve of her calf as he lifted her leg to his face and mapped his desire with kisses from her foot to the elastic wrapped around her knee.

  Even after a long day at work and under the heavy scent of pizza in her apartment, her skin still smelled faintly of her lotion. He wanted to know what kind of lotion she used in the morning, what brand of shampoo made her hair smell of coconut and if she would secretly try to use his razor when hers ran dull.

  Gently setting the leg down, he pushed her legs off his lap so her feet rested on the couch, her toes under his thighs and her back arched, then he shifted himself so he could kiss his way up the other leg. The softness of her calves under his lips was good, but he could do better. He pulled her legs straight and straddled them, caressing his way up her body until he could slide his hand under her T-shirt and concentrate on kissing the warm skin of her belly.

  “I’m still hungry, only not for food.” He was hungry for Rey. For the feeling of her skin under his hands and the tuck of her hips against his.

  “We can do something about that.” She smiled and reached for his fly, pushing his jeans over his hips. She slipped her hands under the waistband of his boxers and grabbed his butt, her nails digging slightly into his flesh. Her movement jerked him forward enough that he abandoned his concentration on her sensitive stomach to take her mouth in a deep kiss, his arms braced on either side of her, her chest rising and falling against his. While he explored her mouth, she ran her hands under his shirt, leaving a trail of goose bumps in her wake. With a jerk, she pulled his shirt up over his head.

  The shirt and their arms were caught in a massive tangle, eliciting a laugh from both of them.

  “If you wanted my shirt off, you could’ve just asked. Rey, I’ll give you anything you want.” His shirt covered up his smile and the desperate truth of his words. This was a woman he didn’t think he could say no to.

  He sat back on his heels so he could pull his shirt off over his head and then looked down at the woman stretched out beneath him. Her eyes were dark pools and her mouth was open in invitation. Tonight was not a question of want. He needed her.

  She pushed his jeans off his hips and he stood so he could shuck them and his boxers. He stopped her when she reached for the waistband of her sweats. “Please. Let me.”

  He was already hard and stripping her sweats over her slim hips to reveal lacy panties that matched the bra he had seen earlier only made him harder. He wouldn’t have believed such a phenomenon possible until it repeated when he hooked his finger under the waist of her panties and slipped them off, too.

  This was the culmination of all his high school fantasies, only he didn’t have enough experience as a teenager to have imagined this. He couldn’t have known that kissing Rey, touching Rey, feeling Rey beneath him would engage his heart as well as his balls. Or that the phrase “I’ve got you under my skin” meant that he wouldn’t be able to separate the physical from the emotional.

  This experience would’ve been wasted on his sixteen-year-old self.

  Fortunately, I’m older and wiser, he thought as reached down and dug a condom out of his jeans while Rey crossed her arms and pulled her T-shirt off over her head.

  “Thank you for leaving me free to explore,” he said when she took the foil packe
t from his hand. Her breasts were round and full and fit perfectly in the palms of his hands, so his thumbs could rub over her nipples and feel them pucker under the uneven surface of the lace.

  His gasp as she rolled the condom over him was answered by her sigh when he pushed into her. He had no sense of relief. There would be no relief, only the building of need upon need until he could finally release himself into her.

  They moved in concert with one another. His thrusts answered the welcoming lift of her hips. He held on to her, her body solid and hot under his hands, while he kissed her neck. She tasted salty and smelled like passion.

  “Just a little more,” she said, her voice catching on each word, pulling him in deeper.

  When he felt her body tighten under his hands, he turned his attention to her mouth. They climaxed together, their moans and grunts lost in their kiss. Every last bit of energy exploded out of him in one last plunge, leaving him unsteady on his shaky arms as he tried not to flop in a heap onto her.

  He took slow breaths in and out, his chest expanding and collapsing in a desperate attempt to control his breathing.

  Her smile was slow and suggestive, and her eyes twinkled as she grabbed his face and pulled him in close for a kiss. “Sex on the couch, another missed high school experience?”

  He was laughing as he pulled out of her. “If we’re going to make sure to recreate high school experiences, we have to do this again, listening to the Dave Matthews Band, on the couch in my mom’s basement.”

  “No Alanis Morissette?” she asked.

  He found the trash can and disposed of the condom. “Please, God, no. If you have any affection for me at all, no.”

  When he turned back to her, she was sitting upright on the couch. That her hair was still in a ponytail was a technicality. The elastic band clung to the bottom of a lock of hair hanging down her chest while the rest celebrated its escape from confinement by floating loosely about her shoulders. She took his breath away.

  “No Morissette, I promise.” She lifted her lithe body off the couch and he finally got a good look at her round butt as she walked away from him.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I thought we could continue this conversation in the bedroom.”

  He didn’t need to be asked twice. He grabbed the box of condoms from the paper bag and followed her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MILES SLOWLY BECAME aware of Rey shaking next to him. The curtains in her bedroom were cracked and enough light came in from the city that he could see tears on her face. He laid back down, on his side instead of his back. She whimpered, but didn’t wake up, even when he pulled her close to him.

  * * *

  HE WOKE UP warm and comfortable, if still a bit tired from last night’s marathon session of sex. Despite his attempts to prove otherwise, he wasn’t twenty anymore and a night like that would require at least a week’s recuperation. Although...

  He reached a leg out and explored the rest of the bed. Nothing but cold sheets. Rey had gotten out of bed—and long enough for her warmth to have dissipated. Damn. Even if he was too wrung out for more sex, he’d at least like to hold her against him while he dozed.

  He stretched and rolled over, fumbling in his sleepiness for an alarm clock on her nightstand. No such luck. According to the cell phone he nearly knocked to the floor, it was just after seven in the morning. He groaned and rolled over, resting his left forearm over his eyes.

  His arm was not enough to protect his eyes from the insult of the overhead light when Rey flipped it on. Keeping his forearm in its defensive position, he lifted himself up on his right arm and took a deep breath. When he was finally ready to face the light, the woman of his dreams unceremoniously dumped his clothing on the bed.

  It didn’t take a PhD to understand that the scowl on her face meant the morning wasn’t going to go well.

  “It’s time for you to leave.”

  He didn’t answer her right away. If she was going to kick him out of her apartment like he was a piece of trash, he was going to take the time to enjoy the sight of her in a white terry cloth robe and blue towel wrapped about her head. The little amount of skin he could see was still wet and glistened in the light.

  “You should’ve woken me up. We could’ve showered together.” Maybe he could piss her off into revealing why she was going to boot his butt to the door after the night they had just spent together.

  Apparently she didn’t think her message had been clear enough because she stomped back over to the bed, dug his boxers out of the pile of clothing and dropped them on his face. “Put those on. You aren’t staying.”

  By the time he peeled his underwear off his eyes, she was at the other end of the room, digging through a dresser drawer and tossing clothes to the side in a huff.

  He was not about to climb, naked, out of a bed to face an angry woman, even if he had gotten an enticing glimpse of her breasts down the front of her robe when she leaned over to throw his boxers on him. His mama hadn’t named him stupid. There was also something about her performance that felt...forced. “Care to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Am I not being clear enough?”

  No, he thought, your voice is muffled because you are bending over a drawer on the other side of the room. Though I am getting a nice view of your ass.

  “I’ll leave if that’s what you really want, but I think I at least deserve an explanation.” The temptation to swing his legs over the side of the bed and shove on his pants was overwhelming, but then he would be one push closer to being out the door. If she shut the door in his face, the chances that he’d find out what was really upsetting her approached zero. As uncomfortable as his position in the bed was quickly becoming, he wasn’t going to let her escape so easily.

  She turned to face him, her hands clutching scraps of pink lace and silk. “We had sex last night. I came, and now I want you to go. What more explanation do you want?”

  This entire conversation was wearing a bit thin. “Rey—”

  She lifted up her chin and looked away.

  “—it’s not like this was a one-night stand and I picked you up in a bar. We have—” Rey scowled, but he didn’t change the verb tense “—a relationship. Don’t pretend we don’t.”

  “You’re reading too much into last night. I was drunk. Remember, you pointedly gave me more wine so I wouldn’t ask questions.”

  Miles drew his hand down his face, fingers tight, enjoying the pain as his skin stretched nearly to the breaking point.

  “You had one and a half glasses of wine and a slice of deep-dish over the course of a few hours. I would say you were relaxed, tipsy maybe, but not drunk.”

  Miles dodged, but not before her underwear hit him full in the face. She had managed to put a good spin on her ball of lace and the metal hook on her bra dinged off his teeth. He shut his mouth before the morning got weirder.

  “Last night was the first time in eighteen years I’ve had any alcohol that wasn’t in cold medicine, you jerk.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.”

  She stood, triumphant, at the edge of the bed, her hands on her hips and her eyes blazing with anger and, he thought, shame. He couldn’t guess what she was ashamed of, but he was beginning to understand the other emotions radiating off her body.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me you didn’t want wine? Did you think I would hold you and force it down your throat?”

  “N
o, I...” Her hands left her hips and she wrapped her arms around her chest. “I didn’t want you to know I don’t drink because I was a teen alcoholic. I’m already feeling a bit like a fuckup for abandoning my daughter, without admitting to being a drunk, too.”

  That sentence had too much pain for him to even pretend to know where to start. “One, I don’t think you’re a fuckup for the pregnancy or the drinking, and I definitely don’t think you abandoned your daughter.” Her eyes shifted. She didn’t believe him, probably wouldn’t believe anyone about Ashley’s adoption until she’d found a way to come to terms with it herself. “Two, next time you don’t want something, tell me right away and we can save ourselves this morning-after fight. Three...” He couldn’t believe he was going to say this after what she just revealed. “I still think there’s something more you’re upset about. You can tell me now or not, I won’t force you, but I also won’t let you push me away so easily.”

  * * *

  THE LAST BIT of reproach keeping Renia upright swept out of her in a whoosh and she sat on the bed before she fell. Miles didn’t reach out to her, didn’t move at all, but the sympathy in his eyes made her want to hit him. She also wanted him to wrap his arms around her and hold her until they both could pretend this morning had gone differently. Neither was going to happen. He wasn’t going to let her push him away, but neither was he going to force her honesty. At least not yet.

  At some point he would expect her to tell him what scared her so much about their relationship. When he forced that honesty out of her, she hoped she would know what to tell him.

  She hugged her knees tight to her chest and laid her cheek on her kneecaps, looking at Miles. His hair stuck out in every direction but flat on his head. The pillowcase had left wrinkles deep in his forehead that morning hadn’t yet had a chance to scrub away. He looked sleepy and caught somewhere between caring and irritated, which she couldn’t blame him for. Uncertain with herself and last night, she had gone at him like a Shakespearean fishwife before even saying “Good morning.”