AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His touch and all that it caused inside her made it difficult to speak. “I told you. I was young. And pregnant. And stupid—” As she spoke, he looped his fingers through the gold belt around her waist and drew her toward him. As their hips met, their lips met, and she felt him respond, growing harder against her, groaning as he kissed her.
When he stopped, he let out a breath of frustration, and released her. But he did not step back, continued caging her in with his body. He reached around her and plucked open a button, then another. “Why him?”
She reached behind her and tried closing the opening, but his hand was already there, stroking downward. She watched his face contort in hunger. Felt his jealousy, how it was eating at him, burned in his eyes. “He…he did something nice for me. I thought that meant he was a nice person, and I was too young to know better.”
He undid a couple more buttons. His big hands trapped her buttocks in each. He kneaded the flesh. “Me buying you clothes is nice. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, you—you buy me nice clothes, thank you.”
“And yet I’m still the bastard who will help you sink him.” His erection scraped against her pelvis and he held her there, his prisoner, and bent his head to let the tip of his tongue dip into her cleavage.
The hot wet heat of his tongue made a sound rise to her throat, a sound of agony. “Yes.”
He gripped her bottom tighter and hoisted her up in the air, forcing her legs around him, forcing her to cling as he braced her back against the wall. He caught her earlobe between his teeth, making her toes start to tingle as he nibbled.
She flushed all over. “Landon, don’t.”
His mouth teased her, approaching hers, retreating then coming closer once again. She shuddered as he pressed into her. Her nails dug into his shoulders.
“Do you see that bit of red over there?” He jerked his head toward the hangers that held all the wicked lingerie.
“Yes.”
He touched her cheek with three fingers, stroking downward so sensually she could burst. “I want to know it’s under this dress.”
“Landon, I don’t…”
“Say, ‘Yes, Landon’—that’s all I want you to say. No one will know. Only me and you. Our own personal little revenge over Halifax.” When he moved her arms up high over her head and lowered his head he added, “Let’s go out tonight, you and me, Beth.”
“You’re asking me on a date,” she panted, breathless and yet struggling to get free. “Won’t our mamas love that.”
“I don’t care about our mamas. What do you say?”
A laugh escaped her and he broke into a grin, chuckling with her. Her husband. Her wonderful, strong, thirty-three year old husband. On a date.
“Yes.”
He kissed her lightly on the forehead before he released her. “You better be ready for me.”
But he’d worked Beth so well she thought perhaps her husband should be the one who should be ready for her.
He sent her home with an Akris dress and one very sexy red lingerie set and a mind that whirled and whirled with memories of what they’d almost done in a Neiman Marcus dressing room.
For the rest of the afternoon, she delved into the new “Share Your Recipe” section of the catering website. When the phone rang, she didn’t think twice about answering. She lifted it from the desk with a happy “Yes?”
“Outside Maggiano’s restaurant at the RIM shopping center. Meet me there in twenty minutes—or you can forget about David.”
Halifax hung up.
Twelve
Fear had a strange beat. It slowed down everything—the time, the way Beth’s mind processed things. It slowed down everything except her heartbeat. Beth couldn’t let Thomas drive her to the restaurant, so she asked for the Navigator, saying she wanted to see her mother, hating to have to lie but too frightened not to.
She made it there in seventeen minutes, but the fear, the gut-wrenching fear, made it seem like years.
These were seventeen minutes of torture where she imagined the worst—David being shipped off somewhere, out of her reach, her touch, forever.
Whatever you do, don’t fall apart, Bethany.
