“Not a lot,” he said. “A normal number.”
I bit my lip, looking up at him. “Was there anyone special?”
A muscle in his jaw tensed. “No.”
I was watching him closely, and I could feel every line of his body. He wasn’t lying. “So, you just dated, then,” I said.
That earned a short laugh. “Olivia, the time I took you to dinner is the only date I’ve ever been on.”
He wasn’t lying about that, either. I’d been on dates—too many dates. Boring, awkward dates that never seemed to end. Dates that appeared polite but were actually a negotiation for sex, namely that the man wanted sex and I didn’t. I tried to imagine how you did it without dates and couldn’t. “So, what then?” I asked him.
On top of me, Devon grew tense. He didn’t want to talk about this. “Okay,” he ground out. “You want to know the kind of woman I usually fuck?”
I blinked at him, not sure I did anymore.
“Waitresses,” he said. “Bartenders. Women drinking alone who come on to me. Strippers, occasionally. Divorced women who want a revenge fuck, and want it rough.” He looked in my eyes, challenging me. “That kind of woman.”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. He was trying to disgust me, turn me off. But all I could think of was that it sounded lonely. And that I may not have had the same experiences, but I knew how lonely felt, even when you were in bed with someone. I knew that feeling so, so well.
“I stopped,” Devon said, as if reading my mind. “I don’t know why, but I did. When I met you, I told you I was having one-handed sex. That was the truth.”
“I hadn’t had sex in eighteen months before you,” I said in a rush. “We’d been on three dates, and I knew he expected it. I barely even remember what he looked like. I just didn’t want to sleep alone.”
Something flickered across his eyes—understanding, maybe. Because even though we were so different, he knew. He leaned down and kissed me again, and then he broke the kiss, unbuttoning my skirt. “Forget those guys,” he said.
I lifted my hips so he could get the skirt off. “I told you, I already have.”
“Forget them more.” He tossed the skirt away and pushed up my cotton camisole, which I’d been wearing beneath a light sweater I’d long ago taken off. He ran his hands over my breasts, then pulled down my bra to expose my nipples. Then he lowered his head and sucked one.
I arched my back, pressing up into him. The fear was gone. The past was gone. Everything was gone except for me, and him, and his hands on my skin. His teeth grazing my breast.
“Don’t…” I tried to form words, to say what I wanted. “Don’t be gentle,” I said.
One of his hands moved up and cupped the back of my head, then twisted powerfully but gently into my hair. He lowered his mouth to my ear. “You think I don’t know what you want?” he said to me, low and dirty. “You think I can’t tell exactly what makes you crazy? What makes you come? How you like me to touch you?” His hand twisted harder, hi
s other hand pulled my bra down further, and I moaned, wrapping my legs around his thighs. “I know exactly what to fucking do,” he said. “I know exactly how you fucking like it. And it’s just the way I like to fuck.”
I pushed up harder into him, wrapping my legs around him, and sunk my teeth into the hard, hot skin of his shoulder. “Do it,” I panted.
He did. He took my clothes off. He pushed my legs apart. He used his big, hard, body, his expert hands, his incredible mouth. His big, blunt cock. He pulled me to pieces and made me sore all over again. And when I came, it was like white-hot fire twisting through me, burning me until I could feel nothing but flames.
Twenty
Olivia
Saturday was chilled and rainy, and we spent it together, sometimes in bed, other times on the sofa in the living room at the side of the house, overlooking the deck. We put the TV on and I lay next to Devon’s big, sprawled body, watching lazily as he read through endless sheafs of paper.
He was, I discovered, reading everything there was to know about his new situation—what he owned, what the different kinds of investments meant, when they were bought, what they were worth. It was how he’d spent his week. On the surface it looked like a greedy accounting, a tallying of his money, but I already knew Devon well enough to know that was the last thing he was doing. He’d been given, without asking, a massive amount of wealth he didn’t understand. So his first self-appointed task was to understand it.
I was no help. I knew a little about acting residuals from my mother, but as far as complex money matters went, I had no idea. I was an art school dropout. Devon was a getaway driver and a mechanic, but as we lay on his sofa hour after rainy hour, his green eyes focused on page after page, I started to get the idea that he was more than that. That he could be more than that. Once Devon Wilder was not only rich, but understood everything about his wealth, there would be no stopping him.
Something was bothering him, though. There was a shadow behind his eyes, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, he’d get a look of deep concentration, as if he was thinking through a puzzle he didn’t much like.
“What is it?” I finally asked him, sometime in the late afternoon. We were on the sofa, and I pulled the papers out of his hand and sat up, straddling his hips.
He looked up at me. He was wearing jeans and a dark gray t-shirt, his arms marvels of muscle and ink. He was relaxed, but I could feel the knot of tension in his spine, his shoulders. Still, he blinked at me lazily. “What?”
“Whatever is bothering you,” I said. I was wearing a pair of women’s boxer shorts and a snug cotton top, and I watched his gaze travel down over my breasts at leisure. The sated lion thinking about another meal.