If she’d ever needed a reminder of why she kept her own panties on, she’d just had it.
One she’d never forget.
Chapter 6
The never-ending spread of hot flesh felt like a midnight chocolate-and-lobster buffet at a nudist resort. Add a few bottles of Chateau Lafite, and Derry would think he’d reached nirvana.
And yet his mind wandered.
Freddi’s tongue was in his mouth. Then Isla’s breast was against his lips. Gillian’s masterful palm caressed him there, and there, and oh—there.
Yet it left him flat.
Not flat. The plumbing worked. It worked just fine.
But his heart wasn’t in it.
As Manny directed the car down the city streets, the back of the limo filled with the heat of four sets of lungs, the scent of pussy and wine crowding out all others.
Including Jess.
He could feel his mouth and nose searching for the last remnants of her, like looking through a departing window on a plane until the person on the tarmac is real only in your mind. Isla’s hand slipped under his waistband as Freddi dispatched with his belt and pants. Freed and hard, he took all the women in with his eyes.
His body relaxed into it.
His mind clenched.
God damn it. He doubled up his efforts, trying to unclench. He watched as Freddi dove between Isla’s legs, the tangy scent of her so familiar and enticing. The buildup that came from wanton abandon was part of the thrill of so much flesh. Tumbling into a pile of limbs was about losing himself.
His mind, however, seemed to have found him.
Found her. Jess.
And wouldn’t let go.
Isla tightened her thighs against Freddi’s cheeks. It looked like two stretched pieces of hard taffy, cold and stripped. She moaned and moved in short thrusts upward until Freddi pulled back, as Derry watched, his stomach twisting like barbed wire in a tornado.
He couldn’t.
He just… couldn’t.
Gillian’s offer of ministrations to his cock was pleasant enough. She looked up at him, coquettish and coy, her eyes on his as her hand reached down for his softening shaft, like slipping a chilled body into a hot springs in Iceland.
Freddi worked on Isla, giving pleasure with a lusty reverence that he could appreciate visually but could not match sensually. Not on the inside.
And not with his own, aching body.
The whole scene became surreal. He watched it all as if from a distance, though his own sweat dripped onto Gillian’s arm as she looked at him with so many questions, the limo unbearably warm even in the New England autumn chill.
He felt like a wax statue from Madame Tussauds museum.
What the hell had happened to him?
Alcohol. He needed more alcohol.
He needed an ocean’s worth of alcohol.
Barring that, he sought out the decanter of fine scotch that his staff always stocked in the limo. He found it.
Dry.
Freddi’s mild snore from between Isla’s legs gave him a clue as to how the decanter had come to be empty. Searching Isla’s face, Derry expected disappointment. Outrage.
Instead, he found slumber.
Gillian’s eyes tipped up in an eerily subservient expression as she bent down to suck on his unresponsive cock, her head moving up at the last second, sucking suggestively on his finger instead. The limo lurched to the right, and her lips were dislodged from him with an audible pop! that made him start to laugh.
It was a bitter, confused sound.
What in the hell was wrong with him?
“Derry?” Gillian said, her hand primping her mussed hair, her fingers searching for the bottle of Champagne propped between Freddi’s calves. She gave him a look that said everything it needed to say as she tipped the bottle up, her throat working hard as she drained it.
“I’m… tired,” he grunted. Tapping on the window, he got Manny’s attention.
“I’d like to be dropped off at Gavin’s, and then take these three lovely ladies home,” he declared.
“Will do, Mr. Stanton,” Manny replied.
Gillian gave him a pouty look, then took in the snoring women. “They’re so fake.”
He gave her a sardonic grin. Surprise—a staff member willing to be honest. Most were worried about losing their jobs. He reappraised Gillian with new eyes.
“No more or less fake than anyone else.” His answer surprised him. He tucked his cock in his pants and dressed fully again. Gillian made no protest.
Ah. So it was like that.
She snorted at his words, then let out a small belch from the bubbly. “If you really think that’s true, you’re deluding yourself.”
“I appear to be shockingly capable of extraordinary levels of self-delusion,” he said sadly.
“Aren’t we all.”
“I have elevated it to an Olympic sport,” he muttered under his breath. Blood throbbed everywhere, behind joints he’d taken for granted and in parts of his body that now craved the unfamiliar. He was done, three women splayed before him in various states, and while he wasn’t a cad and would never sleep with a passed-out woman, he was completely dumbfounded.
Three. He had three women ready, willing, able, and horny. So many warm mouths. So many wet holes. So many inhibitions cast aside.
And all he wanted was one who wasn’t here, and who had humiliated him for sport.
Self-delusion?
He just won the fucking Nobel Prize for it.
“We’re here,” Manny announced. Derry gave Gillian a curt nod and climbed out, his body unfolding as he stood. He felt like a deflated camping mattress that reinflates when granted space to spread out. Given his size, he’d learned to fold and curl, bend and slouch, yield to the vagaries of a world not designed for beings his size.
Molding his form to fit the spatial norms of human society was one thing.
Denying himself the pleasures of the flesh was quite another.
“Good night,” he said to Gillian, the words a formality. She gave him a cold look as he shut the door. Manny took off.
Derry stared at the elevator in the parking garage. It would take him straight up to Gavin’s penthouse.
Where the decanters were always full.
Jess was dreaming.
The best kind of dream. The sex kind.
In her waking hours, she controlled her body, her thoughts, even her fantasies. She never indulged. God knew, some of her fantasies she could never indulge.
But she wasn’t awake. Because none of her fantasies, even the vanilla ones, were ever fulfilled, her subconscious liked to take revenge at night. When she slept, she lost control. When she slept, she couldn’t stop herself from diving headfirst into her most secret desires.
Like tonight.
It began in an old elevator. The elevator, the same one where she’d been hours earlier. A massively powerful man stood behind her, his face hidden in shadow. But there was no mistaking who he was.
Him.
She smelled his skin, she tasted his sweat, she heard his heartbeat.
“It beats for you,” he said, his voice so low and powerful, she could feel it vibrate in her cervix. “Jessica.”
It was a dream, so she did the wrong thing. She always did the wrong thing in her dreams. Turning to him, she reached out and rested her hand against his broad, muscular chest. His heart thudded against her palm. Then she smiled and slid her hand down over his abdomen to the cold, hard metal of his belt buckle. “Just your heart?”