TangledTruth Page 6

  Leaning forward, he let his weight carry him farther between her lips and reveled in the sensation as his fingers sought Eva’s breast and began teasing at her nipple. He used his other hand to cup her head, applying only the lightest pressure, resisting the urge to fuck her mouth. He was pitched too high already.

  The slick, hot wriggle of her tongue against his erection was enough to make him sweat, but it was the vibration of her mouth over his flesh when she moaned that forced Drew to pull out and reach for the bedside table, desperate for a condom. He nearly dropped it, his hands were so shaky, but he finally coaxed the thing on and rounded the bed to crawl up behind Eva and spoon his body around hers.

  “Please…” she whispered, arching her back to press her ass against his cock. He gasped and pushed back against the sweet pressure, fingers tugging for leverage on the rope that crossed her hip.

  But it wasn’t enough. Drew reached between them, cursing softly at having to suffer even that much separation, and followed the seam between Eva’s thighs straight up to the slick heat he longed to bury himself in. Her pussy was drenched, and when he slid two fingers inside her she cried out and tried to fuck them. Her motions were too constrained by the ropes, which allowed her only a slight flexing at the hips.

  Her ragged cry ripped through the last shred of Drew’s restraint, and he replaced his fingers with his aching cock, driving balls-deep in one rough thrust.

  Eva’s cries mingled with his own as he worked himself in and out of her, gripping at rope and skin to steady them both against the severity of their responses. Drew felt accosted by pleasure, blindsided, and above all that was the urge to hold this woman even tighter than the ropes that bound her. He wanted to cover her up, tuck her into himself. Spin a web around her that would protect her from the world. And fuck her until neither of them could move.

  “Drew,” she whispered. She was shaking, and he realized through his heated blur that she was crying even as she gasped with pleasure. But she didn’t say the words that would stop him, and only those words would have. Drew surged into her again and again, marking the rising pitch of her moans, the whiteness of her knuckles where she gripped the ropes restraining her hands. It dawned on him that he was in over his head, that he was in love.

  Then Eva came, shuddering in a profound, almost silent ecstasy. It was too much to withstand, the rhythmic tightening of her cunt around him. He went over after her, shouting, startled and unwilling to let it be over. Undone, utterly undone, by what had gripped them both.

  Trembling. Sticky. Sweat already chilling over still-heated skin. Drew lifted his head weakly to see Eva’s eyes were closed. Evidence of tears was still there in the blurs of mascara darkening her lids. He hadn’t even known she was wearing any makeup.

  “Sweetheart?” For the first time in several minutes, he was coherent enough to worry that he might have pushed too far, too fast. “Are you okay?”

  She took a second before nodding. Just that, no words. Perhaps she didn’t have any to fit the occasion, Drew thought. He reached over to his nightstand for a tissue to dab away the ruined makeup but stopped when Eva murmured, “Don’t let go. Not yet.”

  So he lay back down and held her, even tighter than the ropes.

  Chapter Seven

  Why did that have to happen on a Sunday night?

  Drew slurped a bit of foam off his second cup of latte, and the creamy sweetness only reminded him of Eva’s skin.

  The mahogany of his desktop, cool but rapidly warming under his hand, also reminded him of Eva’s skin. And the sunrise that tinted the sky such a rosy, golden hue was exactly the shade of the gorgeous flush that suffused her face when she was aroused.

  Drew looked away from his office window and tried to focus on the meeting agenda on the computer screen in front of him. When he started having lyrically lewd thoughts about the color of the red stapler next to the monitor, however, he pushed his keyboard away and swung his chair around to face his door.

  It was hard sometimes, being the boss. This was his meeting, he couldn’t skip it or show up late. He couldn’t show up unprepared, either. For all his easygoing manner, Drew actually worked hard to make sure his employees were happy. He knew that showing up for a Monday morning meeting to a boss who had slept late and didn’t have a plan would make nobody happy. Least of all him.

  The only thing that would make him truly happy at the moment, of course, involved Eva Godfrey and several hundred feet of well-conditioned rope. He still felt a lingering glow from the events of the previous night. He wanted to believe it was all about finally getting to tie the girl up and boff her, because that was simple. Drew liked simple. But even beyond that heady thrill was the lingering admiration for Eva’s bravery. Her willingness to try, her wholehearted commitment once she had agreed and the payoff that meant a great deal more than just sexual satisfaction.

  Although the sexual satisfaction had also been mind-blowing.

  “Is that your second cup already? Late night?”

  Annabelle, his chief operations officer, was standing in the open doorway of his office, looking rumpled and sleepy and extremely casual in snug jeans and a tattoo art t-shirt. She held her own cup from Starbucks in one hand, a tablet computer in the other. She didn’t look like a Harvard MBA with a wall full of computer-related credentials, or like a woman who could lead a team of high-powered consultants into a Fortune 500 company and revamp their entire workflow, but Drew knew she was all that and more. She intimidated the hell out of him at times, in fact, when she put her game face on.

  Yawning hugely, Annabelle slumped into one of his guest chairs and put her Converse-clad feet up on the edge of his desk. Drew lifted an eyebrow but allowed the feet to remain as he accepted the tablet she pushed his way.

  “A bit of a late night, yeah. What’s this? Budget?”

  “Yep. I was playing with some numbers to see if we can afford one of these things for everybody in the office without messing with Christmas bonuses. End-of-year bonuses, I mean.”

  “Whatever. Do you think it would be worth it?”

  He listened with a fraction of attention to Annabelle’s enthusiastic justification for getting everyone a tablet, one of her new favorite toys, while the greater part of his mind played with his own new favorite toy. He had a particular traditional karada in mind for the next time he and Eva were together. In red rope. Where had he stored the long, red nylon rope? Was it at Dan and Sheila’s place, or still in the small gear bag from the last time he did a demonstration at the club?

  “And then everybody should also get a pony with a big pink ribbon around its neck. Do you want to hear why?”

  “What?”

  “Just checking. Were you listening to anything else, or was I talking into a void?”

  With a self-deprecating smile, Drew chuckled and shook his head. “Sorry, A.B. I’m a little unfocused this morning.”

  Annabelle cocked her head, her messy brown ponytail flipping off her shoulder with the movement. She went from looking like a precocious teenager to looking like a cutthroat corporate negotiator in about two seconds flat, a change that would have unsettled Drew if he hadn’t seen it before.

  “You actually are unfocused,” she remarked, her eyes narrowing. “This isn’t just your jovial Peter Pan act. And you were up late. You’ve been spending an awful lot of time… Oh my God! Drew, is this about a girl? A woman, I mean?”

  When Annabelle got the eagle eye, Drew knew there was no point in attempting to lie to her. And she was one of those happily married people who wanted to see all their friends settled down, so he knew she wouldn’t rest until he was attached. He shrugged and smiled his best charming schoolboy smile, hoping to convey the casual exhaustion of the sated libertine who still had to get up and run a company the next day. But he knew he wouldn’t fool A.B. even that much. She was already on to him.

  “Drew Brantley. Wow, I never thought I’d see the day. You’re a mess.”

  “Yeah, I kind of am.” He liked it. H
e liked admitting he was a hot mess of gooey emotions about Eva. He thought he might even admit it to Eva at some point in the near future, he was that far gone. It felt too good for him to resist. He knew it was too soon to be so foolishly optimistic about his future, but it was that sort of a mood.

  Annabelle grinned back at him, looking like a teen again. He recognized himself in her, that ability to switch gears and to disarm people with a casual front. “Well, good for you. It’s about time.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see how it goes.”

  “For right now, let’s figure out how this meeting is going to go.”

  They finished the agenda together, and Drew was nominally more focused for the rest of the day. He didn’t mind the mild amount of teasing he got after Annabelle outed his romantic daydreaming to the team. It was afterward that he recognized a shift in tone. He was different, and people were different toward him. Suddenly he was this guy with a girlfriend. It shouldn’t have mattered that much, but it did somehow. He felt strangely grown up, like his life was heading in a good direction. And he knew that the real change was in how he perceived himself.

  All I did was tie her up and fuck her, he told himself sternly when he found himself contemplating installing ring bolts in the sides of his bed frame. It’s not like we got engaged. It’s only been a few dates. We’re having fun.

  Eva texted him a smiley at lunchtime. He texted back a bigger capital-D smiley, the huge dopey grin he had been concealing for hours. Instead of deleting her text as he usually did, Drew hesitated with his finger over the phone screen.

  He suspected it was a defining moment when he selected Eva’s smiley and hit “archive”.

  * * * * *

  “I really don’t know why. She just says she wants to meet you.”

  It made no more sense now than it had the first time Eva had told him, a few minutes earlier.

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “I’m so far from okay with it, I can’t even tell you.”

  “Well, that’s something, I guess. But you still want to do it.”

  Eva’s mother. Her whackadoo and possibly evil mother. Taking them out to dinner on Christmas Eve, because she would “happen to be in town”.

  Drew pushed his linguini around on his plate, noting that the clam sauce was starting to congeal. They had both wanted something rich, some cold weather comfort food, but now he regretted his order. The heavy meal had been so much more appetizing ten minutes earlier.

  “I think ‘want’ is far too strong a word,” Eva objected. “But I do think I probably need to go. She is my mother, and it’s Christmas. I only wish she hadn’t found out I was seeing somebody. You really don’t have to come though. Have dinner with your family. I can meet your parents another day. They’re staying with Seth until after Christmas, right?”

  “Right. Would you have told me about it, the thing with your mom, if I hadn’t asked you to spend Christmas Eve with me?”

  Eva frowned at her minestrone, looking about as thrilled by it as Drew was by his pasta. “I don’t know. Probably, at some point. I mean, you’d have to meet her some time, if we—I don’t mean that I’m expecting a long-term relationship just because of the other night, but if—”

  “I am.”

  “I guess it’s…oh. Oh.”

  Nothing like a declaration of intent to bring a conversation to a roaring halt.

  “And not just because of the other night,” Drew added after a few moments of torrid silence.

  “Do we have to go back to talking about my mother now?”

  The waiter cleared his throat, interrupting their overloud burst of shared laughter, to ask if their meals were satisfactory. When he departed, Drew reached across the table to twine his fingers through Eva’s.

  “I really did want to bring you to Seth’s for Christmas Eve, but you have to do what you think is right. Obviously you think the right thing is to have dinner with your mom, so I will come with you and protect you if necessary.”

  His tone was light, but he meant what he said. He felt protective of Eva in general, lately, wanting to keep the rest of the world from spoiling the fresh, childlike wonder that had started to emerge as her brittle shell dissolved. She had been shy about sharing it with him at first, but now she would relate the beauty of a new painting in the gallery, or her joy at a snow-covered field that reminded her of Currier & Ives, and he loved it. Like a kid offering up a noodle painting she’s worked on all afternoon, she presented these glimpses into her soul, and Drew cherished each one.

  * * * * *

  Wherever that sense of joy and wonder had come from, he decided later, it hadn’t come from Eva’s mother.

  Dinner with Carolanne Damron, formerly Godfrey, turned out to be an exercise in forced civility. Drew suspected Eva had just as much difficulty remaining polite; he could swear at one point during the meal he saw a vein throbbing on her forehead, like a visible indication of an impending migraine. Was Eva’s mother evil, Drew wondered, or simply nuts? Or possibly a combination of the two? He kept himself as entertained as possible by debating the question with himself. He had to do something to distract himself from the conversation, that was for sure.

  “So Mr. Brantley, you’re one of those computer people?”

  “Yes, ma’am, kind of. I supervise a lot of those computer people, at least.”

  “Supervise?” The older woman tapped her fork against the edge of her plate, putting Drew in mind of the way a lawyer might twirl a pencil. “I heard—that is I gathered, from what Eva said, that you were an independent consultant. Isn’t that code for being between jobs, these days?”

  The smirk on her face might have angered Drew if he hadn’t recognized the look. It was Eva’s nervous smile, the same edgy, lopsided twitch of the lips, and it was more than a little eerie to see it on a face that looked so much like he suspected Eva would in thirty years. She was still quite beautiful, the former Mrs. Godfrey, with the figure of a much younger woman and skin that had been jealously guarded from the sun. But Drew hoped Eva would never have the look of suspicion and potential for malice that made her mother look almost ugly despite the good bone structure and fine features.

  “It may be,” he acknowledged, “but in my case it means I own a company that employs consultants. And they deal with computer systems at other companies. As long as they’re doing good work, and as far as I know they are, then we all still have jobs.”

  Eva, clearly mortified, interjected. “Mom, who did you hear that from? It wasn’t me. Are you talking to Dad again?”

  “Emailing now and then,” her mother replied with a careless laugh, as though email correspondence was a frivolous game. “I still can’t stand to look at him or talk on the phone unless I absolutely have to, but somehow it’s not so bad through email. It’s like it isn’t really him.”

  “Like Monopoly money,” Drew volunteered. Eva glanced at him with a quick smile, but it was pretty clear the analogy was lost on her mother.

  “I know Dad is familiar with Drew’s company, we’ve talked about it. I can’t think why you got the impression he was unemployed.”

  “Well, it isn’t as though your father is the most trustworthy source of information. I hate to say mean things about him behind his back…”

  Drew said it in his mind before Eva’s mother actually spoke the word. But…

  “But you know, I wouldn’t have put it past him to exaggerate, to make the whole thing sound better. More respectable.”

  It was like an optical illusion, he decided, fascinating by the difference between Ms. Damron’s genteel, almost coy tone and the implied sting of her words. Her quick sidelong glance at Drew however, strongly suggested she wasn’t really talking about the respectability of his employment. She suspected him of something. It was clear from her posture, from the tight set of her lips as she maintained her false smile. She might not know what it was she suspected yet, but she obviously wanted to find out. Drew wondered if what he and Eva had enjoyed over the
past few weeks even remotely approached whatever level of depravity Ms. Damron imagined.

  “Drew is perfectly respectable, Mom. Dad didn’t have to make anything up. I’ve never known him to make things up.”

  “You remind me so much of him sometimes,” her mother said, in a fond tone that almost hid the implied insult. Almost. Drew was leaning toward mean, not merely crazy, as a diagnosis. But he was still undecided.

  “Thank you,” Eva said, as if she’d been paid a compliment. Gracious. Drew admired her spirit, even as it unnerved him to see her playing this dysfunctional part so very well. “So are you flying home tomorrow, or staying in town for the holiday?”

  “Flying home tomorrow. My sister Barbara lives here,” she explained to Drew. “In fact she would have been here tonight, but she had to go make sure the nativity scene at her church was still intact. They’ve had a rash of vandals. Should I even ask if you’re planning to attend a late service tonight, Eva?”

  “Mom, don’t start. Please? Let’s have a nice dinner.” Eva was starting to look stiff again, with all her guards up. Drew hadn’t seen her looking so cold since before their first date. She looked astonishingly like her mother, he realized.

  “Do you attend church, Mr. Brantley?”

  “Mom!”

  “Where exactly did the two of you meet, again? Eva’s father wasn’t clear.”

  Things were escalating fast, despite Eva’s valiant attempts to keep the conversation light and pleasant. She’d been pretending all evening long that her mother wasn’t being catty. Her mother had been pretending, too, but not quite as well, because she couldn’t really hide the hostility beneath her words. She loved her daughter, Drew thought, and she was possibly genuinely concerned for her soul. But she didn’t like her. She wasn’t proud of her, obviously didn’t respect her. She didn’t seem to see Eva as the beautiful, strong, amazing woman Drew knew her to be, and under such censure Eva was freezing up again.