Take Me Two Times Page 13

  She rubbed at her neck again. Kneaded her shoulders. “Have you been happy as a big-shot CEO?”

  Quinn slugged down some beer. “I’ve achieved all my goals.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Are you happy?”

  He shrugged. “I have money. A lot of it. And stock. I had a title. I got to run the show. I had everything I always wanted. You should have stuck with me, honey. Do you want to know how much I’m worth?”

  “No.”

  “More than that stupid mask.” He threw the figure out there, and it clattered onto the coffee table like a pair of dice.

  “I said I didn’t want to know!”

  “No shame in that number, huh? Not bad for a little bastard shit-kicker out of small-town Oklahoma. Son of the town whore, grandson of the town drunk . . .”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” Gwen looked at him with something akin to pity. Something that burned his ass, bad.

  “Oh, spare me the lecture about how money can’t buy happiness, darlin’. Just spare me.”

  “Fine, I’ll spare you. But realize that money doesn’t erase shame, either.”

  “I have nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “That’s right, you don’t. It’s nice to hear you say it out loud. Now maybe you’ll start to believe it one of these days, Quinn.”

  His jaw dropped open and he just stared at her.

  “Your money, your stock, your title—none of that impresses me. You want to know what does impress me, Quinn? The fact that you came out of that horrible childhood a decent person. A guy who didn’t turn into a delinquent—”

  “I stole cars,” he said. “I stabbed the school principal. I smoked pot.”

  “—and put himself through not only college—”

  “I had my way paid by schol—”

  “Let me finish my damn sentences! Not only college but business school. You turned out to be a guy who does the right things despite being set the wrong examples. That’s what impresses me, Quinn. So don’t ever talk to me about your money again.”

  He tossed the bag of vegetables back and forth from one hand to the other. And he let out a short, unamused laugh.

  “Funny thing is, Gwen. . . when you left, I figured it was because you came to your senses. Saw me for what I was—somebody who wasn’t good enough for you. A guy who couldn’t give you the lifestyle you were used to.”

  “That’s so insulting that I can’t even think how to respond to it. You projected your own feelings of inadequacy onto me.”

  “What was I supposed to think when I read your little Dear John note?”

  “Anything but that.”

  “Well, you didn’t stick around to explain in person, did you?”

  She stood up and clutched at her neck again. “I don’t want to rehash the past with you. I’m going to go take a hot bath.”

  He paused. “I noticed a Jacuzzi out there. And I’d be happy to massage your neck and shoulders for you. I’ll even keep my mouth shut, if you want.”

  She gave him a sharp, mistrustful look.

  “Innocent. No funny stuff.”

  She wavered.

  “Oh, c’mon, Gwen. I won’t bite.”

  She wavered some more. Finally she said, “You stay on one side. I stay on the other. Got it?”

  That didn’t sound like any fun at all, considering she’d be wet and almost naked. But he nodded. “I don’t have any swim trunks on me.”

  “Your boxers will work fine.” She moved toward the small dining room and a set of patio doors covered by wood blinds. “Just duct-tape your fly.”

  “Funny,” he said.

  “I’m going to turn the spa on, and then I’ll get changed and find some towels. The water will take a few minutes to heat up.”

  He nodded.

  She unlocked the doors, went outside for a moment, and then came back in, sparing only a brief glance for him before she disappeared into her bedroom.

  He stared at the white-painted door and thought about her peeling off her camisole and shucking off her jeans. Sliding her undoubtedly minuscule panties down her thighs as her full breasts brushed her upper arms.

  He was a poor slobbering bastard, and no amount of duct tape was going to help him now. Quinn cracked his neck and avoided his battered reflection in the dark glass of Gwen’s television screen. As Grandpa Jack would’ve said, he looked like he’d been drug through a knothole backward.

  Screw it. He set down his beer and stripped stark naked. He tossed his pants and shirt on the arm of Gwen’s couch and then arranged his boxers over the lamp shade so she couldn’t miss them.

  You can duct-tape my ass, Daddy’s Girl.

  Then, with a swagger and a flourish, he opened the doors to her patio and stepped outside into the breezy evening.

  Gwen’s neighbors to the left had thoughtfully hung their sheets to dry over a clothesline, blocking their backyard from view. Excellent.

  To his right on the other side of the hurricane fence stood a parade of plastic trellises attached to plastic flower boxes on plastic wheels. Out of the boxes grew a tangle of mixed magenta and purple bougainvillea.

  Beautiful.

  The night air was tinged with salt, charcoal smoke, and freshly cut grass. The wind felt odd under his arms as he lifted them to stretch, and it blew cool between his legs, eddying erotically.

  What in the hell was he doing here, though? Naked as a jaybird in Gwen Davies’s backyard? Quinn rubbed at his chest and wondered briefly if she’d dropped something into his beer to make him stupid.

  He heard the door open behind him.

  “Quinn?” she said suspiciously.

  He figured she’d seen his boxers draped over the lamp and wasn’t happy about it.

  “Quinn, are you naked out there?”

  He turned around with a smile. “Why, yes, darlin’, I am.”

  chapter 16

  Gwen shut her eyes and pulled her head back inside. Okay, so she clearly shouldn’t have made the comment about the duct tape. She shouldn’t have agreed to get into the hot tub with Quinn, either, but it had been a long, frustrating day, and her shoulders and back were killing her.

  “C’mon, Gwennie. It’s not like you haven’t seen it before.” Quinn’s voice held amusement at her expense.

  She stuck her head out again. “Yes. But it doesn’t hold the magical appeal you seem to think it does.”

  “Chicken,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes and stepped out, closing the door behind her. “You’re being juvenile. But if you want to wave your johnson around my yard, go right ahead—I’m sure it gives you a thrill.”

  She actively felt his gaze on her body, roving over the muted silver of her bikini and stopping, riveted on her navel.

  “Is there a problem, Quinn?”

  “That had better not be what I think it is.”

  He started toward her, and though she refused to look below his waist, she watched the shadow of his cock bounce with each angry step. She bit her lip, because right now was a very unwise time to laugh.

  Quinn stopped a foot short of her and peered at her navel. His mouth worked, but no sound came out.

  She took advantage of the moment to wrap a towel around his waist, tucking the edge in as he straightened with a thunderous expression.

  “You turned the diamond I gave you into a . . . a . . . belly ring? How could you?”

  “Zigzag,” said Gwen, shrugging. She brushed past him and swung her legs over the side of the spa. It was lukewarm. He was hot.

  “You . . . you . . .” Quinn had no words.

  She’d never seen him like this, and guilt set in.

  “I didn’t mean it to be disrespectful,” Gwen said.

  “What the fuck, Gwen!”

  “You wouldn’t take it back. What was I supposed to do with it, make a necklace out of it? Pawn it?”

  He practically growled at her. “You wear that with Mr. Mayonnaise?”

  She sank into the water up to her neck and
leaned her head back. “We’re not going to talk about Curtis,” she said firmly. “That chapter is over and done, and there’s no sense in revisiting it.”

  Quinn’s mouth twisted. “How about the others, Gwen? How many men have gotten up close and personal with the diamond that I gave you?”

  She glared at him. “None of your business. How many women have you been with, Quinn? Don’t even try to tell me that you’ve been a monk for fifteen years.”

  His mouth tightened, he looked away, and she pressed her advantage. “Oh, but that’s different, isn’t it? Because you’re a man.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said, finally climbing into the water. We were discussing—”

  “We weren’t discussing anything! You were interrogating me, and you have no right. We’ve been divorced for fifteen years, Quinn, and you don’t get to be jealous.”

  “I’m not! It just grates on me, that’s all.”

  Gwen raised an eyebrow and pointed at his biceps. “You wore that with those other women, right?”

  “My tattoo? Yeah, but it’s not like I can take it off at night and leave it by the door.”

  She shrugged. “Same difference.”

  “Not even. You didn’t pay thousands of dollars for this, like I did for your ring. And I couldn’t afford it, not being a trust-fund baby like some of us.”

  Gwen froze. She leaned forward, jabbing him in the chest with her index finger. “I never asked for anything but a wedding ring. It was your pride that demanded a diamond.”

  “How could I marry the daughter of banking’s Andrew S. Davies without a big rock? He was already pissed enough that his daughter was getting hitched to some worthless shit-kicker, a guy who’d make change in a church collection plate.”

  “You have a chip on your shoulder about my family background, and I’m tired of it. My family never had a problem with yours. I never thought I was better because I grew up privileged. That’s all in your head.”

  Quinn closed his eyes and laughed mirthlessly. “No, babe. It wasn’t all in my head. Daddy never told you that after you left, I showed up looking for you?”

  Gwen stopped breathing. “What?”

  “Yeah. Jesus, it was like a scene out of some Victorian novel. He actually offered me money to go away.”

  Dear God. Horrifying . . . but she could see it. Anything for her father to have his daughter back, not realizing or caring about the scars he’d inflict on someone who didn’t deserve any more.

  Quinn’s expression and body language could have chipped marble. She reached out a hand to touch his shoulder. He looked at it as if it were a tarantula. She dropped it.

  “You should never doubt that you’re loved, baby doll. That son of a bitch, he wrote me out a check for a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Gwen felt ill. “What . . . did you do?”

  “Oh, I proved I was a real class act. I took the money. I said thank you, real polite. I pulled the wad of Wrigley’s out of my mouth and stuck that check to his hundred-dollar tie. Then I told him to have a nice day and left.”

  The burble of the water jets and the hum of the spa’s motor filled a long silence between them.

  “Quinn . . . I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. That’s unforgivable.”

  He shrugged. “Your mom came running after me in tears, trying to make it right. I made her swear she’d never tell you.”

  Gwen stared at him, at the cynicism and moonlight playing across his face. “Why?”

  Quinn’s mouth twisted. “I didn’t want you to be mad at your dad.”

  Gwen shook her head in disbelief. “You didn’t want me to be mad at him?” She reached out and gripped his shoulders, shaking them as best she could. “That makes no sense—and I should have been mad at him! How could he?”

  “He did it because he loved you, Gwen. And I realized that in his shoes, maybe I’d have done the same thing.” Quinn caught her wrists, looking down into her eyes with an expression of such sadness and tenderness that it broke her heart. And yet, shards of old anger scraped at the edge of her consciousness. These two high-handed men had both done irrevocable damage with their power plays, their need to control things.

  Quinn stroked the insides of her wrists with his thumbs, and Gwen closed her eyes as sensations streaked along her nerve endings, eddied into shivers, and broke the surface at her erogenous zones. Kiss me, Quinn. Please . . .

  What was she doing? She’d been in hot water with Quinn years ago, and here she was again.

  He tugged her closer, brushed her cheek with his lips, and turned her so that her back was to him. Then—oh, heaven—he began to knead her shoulders, using his thumbs to work the knots and the tension out. She moaned and dropped her head forward, unable to resist. The hot water enveloped her, and the massage made being between her ex-husband’s naked thighs a little less threatening.

  Gwen dropped her elbows and let her arms rest on those powerful, hair-roughened thighs, her hands draping over his knees. She traced her fingers over them, feeling the scar on the left one that he’d had since he was a kid and had fallen off his bike onto some broken glass.

  Quinn being Quinn, he’d never gone for stitches, just picked most of it out himself and bandaged it with a paper towel and some Scotch tape. His mother hadn’t noticed until it was festering and infected.

  Gwen had gotten stories like this out of him in bits and pieces. He didn’t talk much about his childhood, but she knew that he had pretty much run wild while his mother worked two jobs—as a waitress in a diner during the day and as a checker at Wal-Mart during evenings and weekends. There’d been a lot of men on her few nights off. Gwen couldn’t bring herself to condemn a lonely single mom, though.

  Quinn’s hands moved up to the base of her skull and into her hair, making her scalp tingle and a deep shiver run down her spine. He dropped a quick kiss at her neck, and then rested his chin on her shoulder, putting his arms around her.

  It was odd, it was intimate, and for a moment she wondered if he was simply staring at her cleavage, but a quick glance reassured her that his eyes were closed.

  His arms around her felt dangerously good. She sensed his reluctance to move, and she felt it, too. Then his hands moved lower, to her belly, and smoothed along the skin until they reached her navel. Quinn fingered the diamond there, toying with it, and her breathing quickened.

  “I’m glad you didn’t pawn it,” he said softly.

  Her heart turned over. “Me, too.”

  He didn’t say anything else. She could feel his own heart beating against the muscles of her back, and his expelled breaths teased the nape of her neck.

  She wanted him to . . . She didn’t know what she wanted. Gwen sat there between his legs in a state of heightened awareness, as caught between the possibilities as Quinn was himself. Would he touch her breasts? Slip his hands down her bikini bottom? Do nothing at all?

  His stillness made her crazy, and yet she wasn’t sure she wanted him to make a move. He was hard against her backside, had been for some time, but she hadn’t teased and he hadn’t pushed.

  Gwen found his hands and laced her fingers between his. Then she brought them up to her breasts. Quinn palmed them, gentle but expert.

  “You sure about this?” he whispered.

  She bent her head back and kissed him.

  He kissed her in response, but a little warily. “What are we doing, honey?”

  “I don’t know, but it feels good.”

  He turned her to face him, caught the edge of her bottom lip between his teeth, and stroked it with his tongue as he lifted her breasts with his hands and circled the tips with his thumbs. Heat shot through her, and it had nothing to do with the spa.

  Quinn placed her in front of him again. He undid the bow at her neck with his teeth, and the ties of her swimsuit fell into the water. She felt the bristle of his chin scrape down her spine, and he did the same with the bow at her back.

  He let the two silver triangles of her string bikini fall into the
water and churn with the bubbles. His hands cupped her naked breasts, and a hard pulse kicked up between her legs, stealing her breath.

  He turned her slightly in his arms and took a nipple into his mouth. More heat streaked through her, and she felt as if she were liquefying, becoming one with the water. She was living her recurring dream.

  She closed her eyes and then opened them, focused on his hard biceps, the tattoo ringing it and accentuating the muscle.

  Quinn changed breasts and slipped his fingers into the front of her swimsuit bottom. She bucked uncontrollably as he touched her there, shocked as orgasm ripped through her without warning.

  She automatically went to push his hand away when the intensity undid her, but he ignored that and hit the replay button, forcing her to explode again and tremble with after-shocks.

  Quinn made a sound of male satisfaction, a sort of growl with smug overtones, and stripped off her bikini bottom while she lay gasping in his arms. Then he pulled her on top of him so that she straddled him face-to-face and his cock nudged her intimately.

  “Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of doing that again?” he asked. His forehead glistened with water droplets, and his lids were heavy. That touch of smugness on his face was really rather dear—he was happy that he’d made her happy.

  “Almost as long as I’ve dreamed of doing this.” He took her almost reverently by the hips and pulled her down onto him, inch by inch, until he was fully sheathed and she could barely breathe. They stayed like that, savoring the joining of their bodies.

  Then Quinn made a confession that clearly cost him a fortune in the coin of male ego. “I’m afraid to move,” he said. “One stroke and I’m done.”

  She moved for him, wanting to give him pleasure. Wanting to share the intimacy of seeing him come apart in front of her. She slid her body up his and then took him in again as his hands dug into her hips. His eyes closed. His legs trembled.

  “Gwen,” he murmured.

  She slid up him again and he lost control. He grabbed her and plunged up and into her, convulsing. His breath rasped into her ear; he said her name again hoarsely. His lower body slammed into her almost violently while his arms wrapped around her as if to protect her from himself. He withdrew and then pushed her down onto him again. He bit into her shoulder, hard, as he came.