“I don’t hear you narrating.”
“I’m pulling one arm out and now the other.” Her cheeks flamed. “And now I’m sitting here in my bra.” She didn’t add, “feeling real self-conscious.”
“Details, details,” he said.
It took her a moment to understand what he was getting at. “You want me to tell you what the bra looks like?”
He half-smirked at her. “I want you to do your job. You wouldn’t lead me up the stairs without telling how many of them there were, would you?”
“It’s nothing special,” she said. “Just two triangles of cotton.”
“Take it off.”
“I’m taking it off,” she said. “Now I’m sitting here naked from the waist up.”
“Draw me a picture of what that looks like.”
Embarrassment swirled inside her stomach as she answered, “I’m all-right looking, I guess. I mean, I’m not big-chested like most of your girlfriends.”
“How do you know what my girlfriends look like?” he asked. “You been checking up on me, Josie Witherspoon?”
Yes. When she’d still been living in Atlanta, she had flipped through a few celebrity magazines in the supermarket to see if he was in them. But out loud she said, “You seem like the kind of guy who’d prefer a chest over substance.”
“Don’t go discriminating, now,” Beau said, his Alabama drawl in full effect. “You can’t judge a girl’s brains by her boobies.”
He suddenly covered her breasts with his large hands. And she gasped when she discovered that despite his trust fund background, his hands were rough and callused, probably from years of throwing footballs.
She also gasped because of what the fingers on his right hand were touching. A short thin puckered line. “What’s this?” he asked.
“A scar,” she answered.
“How did you get it?”
“It’s a long, stupid, mood-killing story.”
Not a lie, but not exactly a truth either. She waited with baited breath to see if he’d question her further.
“It feels like you got more than a handful, which is enough for me.” To her great relief, he moved on from the scar, caressing the undersides of her breasts while his rough thumbs worked her nipples.
Soon the tension of the scar conversation was replaced by something else. A delicious thread of desire licked down her stomach, and when she looked down, her nipples were standing at attention. He dipped his head and pulled one into his mouth, and the warm, wet sensation made her forget the previous conversation all together as her lips parted on a moan.
He gave her engorged nipple a few long, lazy tugs before he said, “Tell me how this is making you feel.”
“Nice,” she said.
He stroked her nipple with his tongue again. “Just nice?”
“Good,” she added. Then she moaned when he drew her breast into his mouth and sucked on her nipple quite a bit harder. “Really good. You’re sucking on my nipple, but I can feel it down there, too.”
“Down there? Tell me where. Exactly.”
Embarrassment flooded her otherwise aroused senses. “You know where, Mr. Prescott.”
“I know I know where, but I want you to tell me.”
“Down below, inside my kit kat.”
She felt silly using such a childish word, for not being the grown woman an exchange should require her to be. But she didn’t have a lot of experience with being sexy.
Wayne had preferred for her to lie there, quiet and docile, while he moved on top of her. He’d never asked that she actively participate in their lovemaking, especially not like this.
She expected Beau to tease her about not using the right words, for not talking sexy like his hotel room groupies, but instead he said, “Take off the rest of your clothes and lay back on the bed.”
She did as he asked, but once she was lying down, she had to fight the urge to cover her chest and womanhood with her arms and hands even though she knew he couldn’t see her, that’s how self-conscious this made her.
You’re just an object to him, she reminded herself. A warm body. He doesn’t care what you look like.
But what he did next was even more intimate than looking at her. He climbed up on the bed, still fully clothed, and lay down beside her.
“Turn toward me,” he said. Then he started touching her.
First her hair. “It’s not straight anymore, and it’s shorter,” he said, feeling the asymmetrical wedge of riotous curls at the top of her head. His hands then found the shaved sides. “Much shorter.”
She waited for him to state his displeasure with the cut Mindy had labeled drastic.
“I like it,” Beau said. “That weave you were wearing before didn’t look like the real you.”
She wondered how he could think he knew anything about the real her, but then his hands made contact with her glasses. “Are these…?”
He smiled like a little boy on Christmas. “You’re still wearing the cat-eye glasses I bought you?”
“I ran out of contact lenses,” she said defensively. “And I haven’t had time to get a new pair of—”
He kissed her again, hot and strong, his tongue delving into her mouth like a proprietary claim. And once again her kit kat responded, swelling hot and bothered, just because Beau Prescott was kissing her.
One hand cupped her nape and the other continued his exploration, moving from her neck down to her chest, where he again revved up her nipple, torturing it under his thumb until she was squirming.
“Mr. Prescott…” she said, helpless with need.
“Hold on, darlin’. I’ll get to that part of you soon enough.”
Then his hand was moving down again, and she tensed but he stopped when he got to her ribcage.
“You’ve lost weight. A lot of weight.”
She would have thought that would have pleased him as many skinny starlets as she’d seen him out with, but he was frowning.
“Yes,” she said, searching for some credible explanation for actually being almost twenty pounds lighter than she’d been in high school. “I’m not sick or anything, I just lost weight because…” …because of her previous all-soup diet, because of her recovery from being married to Wayne… but in the end she said, “…because Loretta’s not feeding me anymore.”
He didn’t laugh at her joke. “I want you to gain some weight,” he said. “That’s an order.”