The Sound of Temptation: A Standalone Second Chance Forbidden Romance, page 4
A smile starts to tug at the corners of her mouth but falters. “But what about your girlfriend?”
“She’s not anymore. I haven’t talked to her all summer. But, I called her before I came over here. It’s officially over. I want to see where this goes.”
“Really?”
Some of the tension I’ve carried since our phone call this morning eases. “Really. I’ll need to spend the next few months in LA writing and rehearsing. And after that, I’ll be traveling a lot. But you can come out and spend a weekend—”
Her wince and sharp intake of breath stop me mid-sentence. I brace myself before I ask, “Unless…you don’t want to?”
Her eyes widen and she shakes her head sharply. “Of course, I want to. More than I want to do anything.” She reaches up to cup my cheek and her smile creeps back. “But… maybe we should see how things play out. I mean, what you want right now may not be what you want once you’re too famous to grab a cup of coffee without someone taking your picture.”
“Oh, I’ll never be that famous.”
She rolls her eyes in dismissal as if it’s a foregone conclusion. “Oh yes, you will. Soon people will want to know more about you. And the other people in your life. And the people in their life, too.”
“Do you have someone? Back home?” I hold my breath and watch her closely.
She shakes her head.
Relief washes through me. That’s all I need to know. We can figure everything else out.
“Turn around.” I whisper in a voice made gruff by anticipation and white-hot lust. Her eyes heavy lidded and gleaming, a smile tilts her lush mouth as she does as she’s told.
She’s dressed in a loose fitting, dark green tank top almost open in the back. I know every inch of her body intimately. I can trace the patterns made by the spray of freckles that grace her elegant shoulders with my eyes closed.
I pick up one of the bottles of blue paint she pulled out of her cabinet and squeeze it out on to the small tray she’d brought out with it.
“This is the same blue as the piano. What’s it called?” I ask instead of answering her.
“Lapis.” She breathes the word like a praise. “It’s my favorite blue.”
“Then it’s my favorite, too.” I drag my palms through it.
“What are you doing?” Her voice is a breathless, husky, suggestive siren song. ”She wiggles her hips, arching her back to send them toward my aching cock.
I take a step back, and she shoots a look of deep consternation over her shoulder at me. “Why are you teasing me?” She moans.
“I’m not.” I press my splayed hands onto her exposed shoulder blades.
“Giving me wings?” she asks, her smile lifting her voice an octave.
“Nah, you were born with those. I just like this color against your skin.” I press my lips to the soft curve of her neck.
She jumps when my paint slick hands slide under her shirt and covers her small, soft breasts.
“Are you decorating me—oh, baby…” She moans when I pluck her nipples between my fingers and squeeze. Her head falls back to rest on my shoulder. Her eyes are closed, her lips are parted and wet. I press my nose into the dark halo of her hair and breathe in the sweet scent of sunshine and summer.
I slide my hands down until they come to rest on the velvet-soft plane of her stomach. She melts into me—fitting perfectly against me.
“I’m going to fuck you so hard, deep, and dirty.”
“Just like always?” she pants.
Just like always. Nothing is going to change, except for the better.”
“You can’t know that.”
I drag my hand between her breast and cover her thundering heart. “I promise—”
She spins around and slams her hand over my mouth and gives her head a sharp shake “I don’t want to expect anything.”
I take those words as a challenge.
I nip at her palm, and she frees my mouth.
I grip her chin and stare into her eyes. “I love you. Do you love me?”
She nods and tears spill from her eyes. “So much”
My heart feels too big for my chest. “Good. Because you and me, we’re so fucking meant to be.”
“I know…I’ve never felt anything like this,” she whispers. Her hands slip between our bodies, and she unfastens my jeans and shoves them and my briefs down my hips. Her soft hand wraps around my rock-hard erection, and she tugs up in a long slow, stroke that blurs my vision. “Take off my shorts, Carter.”
“My hands have paint on them,” I remind her.
“I don’t care,”
I keep one hand wrapped around her and unfasten her tiny shorts and yank them and her panties down in one swift motion.
“There’s a condom in my pocket.”
She tugs it out and puts it on with impressive speed. I grab her ass and lift her onto the table. “You ready?”
“For you? Always. Forever.” Our eyes are locked, and we’re the only people in the world, again. She rolls her hips and the head of my cock glides through the slick heat of her pussy. I almost come on the spot.
“Oh baby, oh Beth…” I pant when the head of my desperately hard dick nudges against the entrance of the place that’s as close to heaven as I’ve ever come. Her pussy is hot and wet, and I have to grab the table to keep myself from falling forward on top of her when my knees buckle. I thrust up and hiss at the slippery friction of our bodies working together with a common purpose.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day.” I groan
“Then fuck me like it, please. I need you.”
I press her flat against the table, wrap my hand around her neck, and lean down to kiss her. My tongue plunges into her mouth, and I’m instantly drunk on her.
I close my eyes and get lost in my sweet, wild girl.
No song I’ll ever write could be more beautiful than the symphony of our moans, curses, cries when we’re like this. I lift her shirt, and she leans back to give me access. Her hands find my hair, and she tugs it when I bite the rounded side of her breast before I pull her nipple into my mouth. It swells against my tongue when I close my lips around it. I suck hard until I feel her clench around me.
I straighten and tug her to the edge of the desk.
“Open your eyes, baby.”
Our gazes meet and stay locked on each other. Everything disappears but me and the girl who stole my heart. I ride her hard, trying to get deeper, knowing it’ll never be deep enough.
Her back arches. She sobs my name and digs her heels into my ass, her hips grinding against mine, pulling me deeper. Her pussy clenches around me
“Yes. Oh my God. Carter. It feels…”
Whatever she was going to say gets lost in a moan, and she drops her forehead on my shoulder. “Tell me,” I demand in her ear.
As she comes down from her orgasm, she presses her lips to my ear. “Like flying,”
Carter
A Wolfe In Queen’s Clothing
It’s almost dawn when I slip out of the warm, tangled nest of Beth’s bed and slip my clothes back on. I’ve waited as long as I can to leave, but our flight leaves in a few hours.
I press a kiss to her dewy cheek, and her eyes pop open.
“Are you leaving?” Her sleep husky voice is barely a whisper.
I nod. “I’m going to miss you.”
Her sigh, though only barely audible, is unmistakably pleasure laden.
“Not as much as I’ll miss you.”
My heart gives a hard thud of approval, and I wish I could stay here with her…forever.
I flip on the light on the bed side table and smile at her squinty-eyed frown. “Come with me to the house, you can help me pack.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll just be in the way.” She turns the light off again. “And I don’t think your dad and brother like me.”
I turn the light back on. “Jack doesn’t like anyone. And my dad hates being down here. He’s just tense. It wasn’t you.”
She leans up. “I’ll still be in the way, and I hate goodbyes. Just kiss me and say see you later.”
I cup the back of her head to stare down into her face one last time. I memorize the way her hair feels between my fingers and how delicate the bones of her skull feel beneath my hand. I keep my eyes open and commit to memory the way her eyes flutter before they close, and the way she whimpers as soon as my lips touch hers. I memorize the flavor and texture of her mouth, I mimic the movements of her tongue and the nips of her teeth, the tug of her lips so I can replay this kiss when I’m desperate for one, but out of her reach.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I break our kiss. She lies back down, and the sheet covering her slips to reveal the tops of her breasts, her nipple jutting just below the edge of the sheet. I groan, lean down and give each one a slow, hard suck.
She moans when I lift off her. “Lay down, let’s make each other come again.”
I shake my head in mock disapproval. I stand and gaze down at the vision she makes, wrapped in the sex tousled sheets so white against tan skin. She tugs the sheet down, revealing her breast. I bite my fist and groan. “You’re such a bad girl.”
She smiles. “Only for you.”
I lean down, press a kiss to the soft skin between her breasts and allow myself one last, long leisure suck of each of her dusky brown nipples. “You won’t let anyone else have you this way?” I ask when I lift my head and meet her eyes.
Her limpid blue gaze clears, and she sits up “Only for you.” She repeats. “All of me.”
I grunt in satisfaction and heave myself off the bed before I fall over. “I want to tattoo that promise on your ass and sign my name right below it.”
She smacks my arm. “I’m not the one who’s going to have every woman with a television set in love with me after Friday night.”
“But you’re the only one I’ll ever love back.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t make me promises like that.”
“I want you to promise me that after I’ve kept a few, you’ll stop asking me not to make them.”
She nods, her smile wide. “It’s a deal.”
“Good. And you watch on Friday. I’ll send you a special message.”
“I’ll be watching.”
“See you later.” I give her a hard, fast kiss and rush out to my car.
My phone is dead when I pull it out of my pocket, but I don’t need to see it to know that there are missed calls and increasingly irate texts from my father.
It’s raining hard when I turn into the lake house’s drive, and I’m relieved to find the house completely dark. My dad must have given up and gone up to bed.
When I was leaving for her house last night, he’d discouraged me from going. Telling me I was only asking for trouble starting a relationship like this just when my career is taking off.
But he’s also the one who discouraged me from coming to East Winsome, said I’d be bored and begging to come back home after a few days. Look how wrong he turned out to be about that. I love it here. This pace feels better than my nonstop life in New York.
I don’t understand why my father hates it so much. But maybe if I had a family like his, I’d want to forget where I came from too.
He comes from a long line of unsuccessful liars—con artists, snake oil salesmen, and big tent preachers who’d never actually read The Bible.
Our family lore is a myriad of myths about the men and women—losers who’d tried to make themselves into legends—whose misdeeds caught up with them before they’d had a chance to taste the fruit of their spoils. And yet, when the opportunity to swindle, dissemble, or fabricate presented itself, past failures weren’t enough of a deterrent against the temptation of whatever swindle, hustle, or con they found themselves unable to resist. And as far back as we can trace our lineage, every single one of them was a repeat offender.
My father is the exception to that rule, he wasn’t able to avoid it completely, but he only fell prey to temptation’s call once.
Maybe having to live with an irrefutable testament to his sin had something to do with that.
I’d had private guitar, piano, and drum lessons most of my life and was quickly identified as virtuoso - I mastered every instrument I picked up and I learned to read music before I could read words proficiently.
When I was six, instead of starting kindergarten in my local Upper West Side elementary school, my father and I made an hour-long drive to a private school in Greenwich, Connecticut that was hailed as an incubator for young musicians.
I had tutors for my academics and took private swimming and tennis lessons on the weekend. I made friends with other kids at the music academy, but none of them lived close by. So play dates and birthday parties weren’t as plentiful as they were for other kids.
I’d tag along with Jack to the park, or with Nadia to the arcade where she met whichever boy she was dating. ,They’re twins and six years older than me, so I ended up watching longingly as kids my age played together.
So, when I saw a flyer for a Halloween party at the local school that was open to the whole neighborhood, I nagged my parents until they agreed to take me.
It had been a year since I’d seen my friends from preschool, but we found each other in the crowd pretty quickly and ran off to the playground.
It didn’t take long for me to regret it.
Alex, a freckled redhead who had been my best friend since I was three years old was the first to ask. “Why are you white and the rest of your family is Black?”
I wasn't bothered by that.
Penn, as everyone calls my stepmother, is the only mother I’ve ever known. But the first time I noticed how different I looked compared to the rest of them, I’d asked the question, too.
Penn had put me on her lap and explained that the woman who’s belly I’d grown in, and who I looked like, had gone to heaven. She told me she was my mother by choice, which was just as important as blood when it came to families. The way we looked had nothing to do with it. How we chose to love each other did.
Her answer had been a relief to the four-year-old me who’d been afraid I was pale because I was sick or something.
So, I repeated Penn’s answer to the group of children who’d gathered round me on the playground and expected that to be the end of it.
It was just the beginning.
“My mom said it’s cause your dad’s a cheater,” one of the boys taunted.
“My mom said they sent you away to school so no one would know what your dad did.”
“My mom said they quit doing tv so they could hide you.”
“My sister said Jack told her that your real mother is a home wrecker.”
I called them all liars, and ran in search of my mother.
When I couldn’t find her, I did what she said I should if I ever got lost somewhere - I went back to the car to wait.
It didn't take long for her to come looking for me, but by the time she'd found me my young mind had replayed their taunts and was I was frantic for answers.
She smiled in relief when she saw me, but I didn’t give her a chance to speak before the question that had been burning on my tongue, burst out of me. “Did Daddy steal me from my mother in heaven?”
Her smile disappeared, and her eyes searched mine with an intensity that made my stomach knot in dread. “Of course not. Why?”
I told her what the kids said, but then I wished I’d kept my mouth shut as her expression went front alarmed to angry.
She told me to wait in the car and, fists balled at her side she marched back into the school building. She emerged ten minutes later, wearing her sunglasses and said, “I’m sorry you heard that. There’s nothing bad about you or your father.”
I believed her.
But that night I went to sleep in their bed instead of mine and was awakened by loud voices coming from the back porch right below their bedroom window.
“You can’t run away from what you did. No matter where we live, you’ll always be the man who cheated on your wife. I’ll always be the woman without a backbone who accepted her husband’s love child and pretended she was happy,” my mother yelled.
“I know, dammit. What the hell do you want me to do. He’s here. We can’t change that,” he shouted.
I crept out of the room and back to mine. I crawled into my bed, heart hammering painfully. I didn’t have the full picture, but I knew enough to know that somehow, I’d ruined this family. And because of the way I looked, everywhere we went, everyone else would know it, too.
We moved to the Brooklyn brownstone that summer and I wrote my very first song lyrics on our first night in that house. In the years to come, song writing would become the refuge to all the things I felt but couldn’t say to anyone. And even though mixed families weren’t a rare sight in our neighborhood, there was always someone who asked questions that reminded me that I was the fly in their ointment.
When I was twelve, I got into a conservatory in upstate New York that had a residential program. And Penn suggested my father be the one to drive me up so we could have a chance to bond.
It was during that ride that he told me about the reality show he was developing. He’d been an entertainment lawyer turned television producer who launched some of the most iconic reality shows of the last decade.
This new project was going to center on his family. With Jack becoming a star both on and off the soccer field, he wanted to seize that momentum and build what he called a brand driven empire. I could choose whether or not I wanted to be part of the cast. But because the show would be filming in our home, I might be on camera sometimes. And inevitably, the television audience would wonder about the silent Bosch.
The same discomfort I expressed to Beth about being in the public eye was compounded by my self-consciousness about the role I played in my family’s drama.
So, I declined. If my parents suspected my reasons, they didn’t say anything. They were delighted by my passion and dedication to my music.
