Chapter Six

 

- MASON -

 

As I thump on her door, the smell of fresh chopped basil and roasted garlic assails me.

God, I love the way Freya cooks. Of all the things I’ll miss about Annapolis when I leave at the end of the week, I think home-cooked dinners with Freya will be at the top of the list.

“Come in,” I hear her call through the door, and I slip my key into the lock. Now that I’ll be leaving town, I guess I should give it back to her. She’d given it to me several months ago when she went on a trip to see her parents in Florida and needed me to check on her parakeet a few times. And for some reason, it just sort of stayed attached to my key ring.

“I smell chicken parmigiana,” I say, my mouth watering like a Pavlovian dog as she hands me a beer.

“I’m just about to put it in the oven.”

“It smells incredible.” I eye her as she arranges the crispy chicken breasts on the glass pan. I’d give anything for this recipe because the idea of being down in Little Creek in a few days without her chicken parmigiana anytime in my future leaves me bereft. “When do we eat?”

“About twenty minutes,” she replies, sliding it into the oven.

My stomach growls in reply. “Okay. So what do you need help with? Got something new you want me to read?”

“Um, no.” Glancing up from a steaming pot of spaghetti, she bites her lip. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Then why’d you make me chicken parmigiana?” I peer into her parakeet’s cage and give the bird a little whistle. “There’s usually something tied to it.”

 “I, uh—”

Her voice quivers just enough for me to turn away from her bird and look at her. She’s practically cringing.

“I need you to tie me up.”

“You want me to what?” Voice cracking like a twelve-year-old, my eyes bulge. I’m sure I heard her wrong.

“I want you to tie me to the bed.”

At my silence—I mean, seriously, how am I supposed to respond to that?—she raises her hands in defense.

“Look, I know it sounds weird,” she tells me, “but it’s pretty hard to write about something that I’ve never done. I just want to know what it feels like to be—” She pauses awkwardly. “—restrained. And I can’t tie myself up, can I? So just tie me up. Let me lie there for a minute. And then untie me. Then we eat. Simple as that.”

I swallow. Hard. I had a girlfriend who was into that sort of thing, even though it never really did a damn thing for me. I’m a guy. Once I get a girl horizontal, the last thing I want is to add more steps to foreplay.

I glance around the room. “With what?”

She walks into her bedroom and I make the wrong move by following her. She hands me a couple pairs of pantyhose.

“Pantyhose?” I didn’t even know women still wore pantyhose. I had thought they were a relic of the 80s right along with the shoulder pads and permed hair that my mom has in photos from before I was born.

“Best I can do,” she answers. “I wasn’t exactly prepared for this.”

I can see that. Tempted to refuse, my nose is tickled by the scent of dinner in the oven.

Damn her. She’s holding that chicken hostage till I get the job done.

 “Okay, fine. Lie down,” I command, but not in the tone she probably wants to get in the mood for this. “You’re such a freak,” I add, needing to convey my complete disdain.

I tug the pantyhose from her and wrap them around her first wrist. She’s got the right headboard for this sort of thing, with old-fashioned-looking spindles, making me bet it was a hand-me-down from her grandma.

Oh, if only her grandma knew what was happening in her bed right now.

Giving a grim shake of my head, I tie the next one and look down at her dourly.

Her gaze is fixed on the ceiling above her—probably because she can’t look me in the eye right now.

“Happy? Satisfied?” I ask, standing quickly and propping my hands on my hips. I’ll probably be on the couch of a psych in my next job just to recover from this. Because the truth is, her lying on that bed—tied up or not—is actually doing something to me.

“I don’t get it.” Her voice is dejected.

A sigh escapes me. “What don’t you get?”

She’s silent for some time, lying there, her face strained slightly as though she’s thinking way too hard. Unless I’m on a mission, my brain usually shuts down by the dinner hour and I’m going on auto-pilot. Freya should totally try that.

“Well, I’m trying to understand why anyone would enjoy this. I mean, how is this supposed to make sex… better? How is this supposed to give my character a thrill? I mean, my wrists are uncomfortable, my hands feel awkward and they’re losing blood. And my shoulders feel like they’ve been twisted in a way they’re just not supposed to go. I mean, they hurt.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.”

“No. Don’t be. But is that the turn on? Am I the only woman on the planet who doesn’t want her joints to ache like a geriatric patient during sex?”

I can’t help laughing at that. “No, I think you’re missing the point.”

“And that point is?”

“The whole tie-me-up thing doesn’t have to be about pain. I mean, maybe for some people it is. But there’s a way you can do this and it’s—tasteful, you know?”

Her eyebrows rise. “No, I definitely don’t know. And don’t say I’m vanilla.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you do. Constantly.”

“Okay, sorry about that, too.” I can’t believe I’m the one apologizing to her when I’m going way out of my comfort zone by doing this. I’ve never been a believer in that whole idea that men and women can’t be friends. But there’s an unwritten rule that if they are friends, then they shouldn’t tie each other to beds.

Or at least there should be a rule like that.

Glancing around her room, I spot her manuscript sitting on her desk. I stride toward it and thumb through to the first sex scene. It’s easy for me to spot seeing as I’ve read this book so many times.

Sighing, I sit beside her. “Listen to what you wrote. ‘Zander caressed her cheek, stroking along the delicate line of her jaw downward to her collarbone. As his lips met her there, she splayed her hands on his back, kneading the hard muscles beneath his hot skin…’”

I’ll admit that her words do something for me, as I read the next several paragraphs sitting on her bed alongside her, with her tied up and prone in her cute shorts and tank. It’s pretty fucked up—the scene we’re setting here, me reading her erotic words that she wrote, while all the blood is draining from her hands next to me.

Still, she needs to learn this. So I continue, “‘She reaches for him, cupping his cock in her hands…’”

Okay, I need to stop right now. “See? Every other sentence is about what she’s doing to him. If she’s tied to a bed, then everything is being done to her. Every touch is a surprise. Everything you write needs to be about what she’s experiencing, not what she’s doing. So you need to rewrite it like that. You have to make her feel… I don’t know…”

“Anticipation,” she finishes for me. “She can’t guide his hands to get him to do what she wants him to. And she doesn’t have any clue what he’ll do next until he actually touches her.” Her eyes are lit at the revelation. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of it that way?”

Because you’re too vanilla, I nearly say. But I clamp my mouth shut. “Same goes for the whole blindfolding thing. Then she can’t even watch to see where his hands or mouth are going.”

Shit. My cock goes completely hard when I say the word mouth. Huge mistake. If I stand up right now with my dick tenting out from my shorts, she’s going to never let me hear the end of it.

Instead, I grab the pajamas that she’s got at the side of her bed and lower them over her eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Blindfolding you,” I inform her, trying to keep my voice stable. “Kind of, anyway. So that I don’t have to haul my ass back here when you ask me to do it tomorrow.” I can’t exactly tell her that I’m covering up her eyes so that she can’t see that after two years of being just friends, my dick has suddenly developed an interest in her.

“Good point,” she replies.

I stand up now, putting a couple feet between her and me. I think about baseball, like they always say to, but it has no effect on me. So I try thinking about golf, and that does the trick. I hate golf. No one can have a hard-on when they think of a bunch of guys chasing a tiny ball around for four hours.

I’m feeling some semblance of control again, with the stiff khaki material of my shorts a little less tight in the crotch till her voice destroys any progress I’ve made with five little words:

“But you’re not touching me.”

“Huh?” I swallow.

“I mean, this is all fine, being tied up with pantyhose and with pajamas over my eyes, but I can’t really get the feel for what she’d be thinking if you’re not even going to lay a hand on me.”

“Use your imagination.” My voice is gravelly and there’s a level of implicit threat in my tone.

“If my imagination was that great, I wouldn’t have needed you over here.”

She has a point. I stare at her in silence for a moment, my eyes drawn to her lips peeking out from beneath the pink material of her pajamas.

I clear my throat. Suck it up, Sailor. It’s for a friend. “What makes you think I won’t touch you?” I ask, my hand tracing along her forearm.

She giggles. “Don’t—that tickles.”

Leave it to Freya to be tied up and blindfolded and complaining that something tickles. But as I see the bright smile perk up beneath the folded pajamas, my body heats and I feel the challenge of making Freya feel something other than a damn… tickle.

My fingers move to the line of her jaw and I trace the soft angle of it down to her neck, brushing just past the curve of her breast. She falls silent and the smile dissipates. I reach to both sides of her, my hands giving a gentle squeeze to her waist before traveling downward to her legs. They’re smooth as silk, and I can’t help remembering how she’d once confided in me that she only shaves for a man if she wants to have sex with him.

Why the hell did I have to remember that just now?

Does that mean she wants to have sex with me?

I stroke her calves and fight the urge to make a different path up her legs along her inner thigh. That would be pushing things.

But I want to push things right now, as I watch her breath quicken, breasts rising and falling. She doesn’t know I’m staring at her this way, and it’s empowering me to do it even more, my eyes feasting on her in ways that they simply hadn’t before.

Shit, I never had this kind of reaction when my ex had me tie her up. Back then I was more focused on getting her off in the quickest way possible, so that I could sink myself inside of her and get my own satisfaction.

Yet with Freya, I feel this urge to just savor the sight of her, pleasure in the stunned silence that my touch seems to bring her.

“Is that enough?” I ask her, reminding myself that this is nothing more than research for her. For her book. Her book that I’m personally hoping she’ll write a sequel for right now.

I expect her to answer in the affirmative, extinguishing this fire in my groin and making me focus more on the impending dinner than on her. I’m here to feast on chicken parmigiana, not on Freya.

Instead, her voice sounds weak as she replies, “Not quite.”

Dinner? What dinner?

It’s all the enticement my hands need to trace upward again, up along the slight rise in her belly. I ache to knead the soft mounds of her breasts with my hands, but I hesitate, knowing that there’s a limit to what she’s looking for from me. Knowing that at the end of this, I don’t want to lose the friend I’ve grown accustomed to these past two years.

But damned if my mouth doesn’t heed the warning from my brain as it moves closer to hers. “How much research are you looking for?” I ask. I can feel her breath reach my lips as she exhales and it makes every hair on my body stand on end.

“A little more than just my friend copping a feel.”

Her snarky tone is so Freya—almost daring me to go a little further—and it annoys me because she has no clue that my cock is granite-hard for her right now.

She doesn’t think I’ll do it. Do anything. She thinks I’ll just whip those pink pajamas off her face and untie her right now. And then I’ll have to listen to her griping through dinner about how I’m not helping her enough.

I’m just pissed off enough at that thought that I press my lips hard against hers, relishing her sharp intake of breath as it steals the air from me.

There’s nothing tentative in this kiss. There’s no need for it to be. I’m just a stand-in for her damn character, and I know it. So I devour her, sliding my tongue along her teeth and tasting her. I never even realized how long I’ve wondered what she would taste like until this moment. She’s been sampling the dinner as she made it, I can tell, with the taste of roasted garlic and tomato on her tongue. And what an appetizer I’m enjoying.

I sense her arms struggling slightly in their restraints—so like her to not be able to completely give in to being taken like this, and I nearly stop, when her low moan urges me to open my mouth to her again, the slide of our entangled tongues making my blood spark with need. I fight to keep my hands at her hips, wishing I could move to straddle her. But if I did, she’d discover just how badly I want her right now. Yet even so, my thumbs can’t resist digging into her, kneading and stroking through the thin cotton on the side of her shorts.

My lips move from hers and she groans in response till she feels their caress along her neck, down just to the bottom of the V of her neckline. I figure any exposed skin must be fair game. But then I see the smallest bit of real estate wide open for my perusal, just at the base of her shirt, baring her tempting navel, and I simply must taste her there. My tongue delves into it, careful not to move her shirt even the slightest inch because the precedence it would set would be dangerous.

I gaze up at her as my mouth suckles on her skin, watching her breasts heave and noticing that her lips are fuller, moist with my own saliva and it makes me want her even more.

Holy shit.

“Had enough?” The words grate from me, forced by some tiny shred of morality that still lingers inside me.

Her silence tells me she’s hesitating, and my own breath is ragged as I wait for her answer. If she asks for more “research,” I’m just at that point where I’d need to strip her bare and there would be no turning back.

I curse that bastard Patrick for making Freya single my final days here in Annapolis.

I curse myself for breaking things off with Greta this week because I need to fuck someone right now so desperately.

And I curse my wretched hands for pulling those pajamas from her eyes right now because I somehow know that when she sees me here, she’ll remember that this isn’t fiction at all. And that if we allow ourselves to go further, we’ll still have to look each other in the eye afterward.

If she wants me to fuck her, I won’t have the control to say no. But I kind of require she knows it’s me doing the honors and not some character in her book.

Her eyes are wide when she finally looks at me, and her lips—those lips that tasted better than anything she could ever whip up in that kitchen—form an adorable o.

“Holy f’ing hell, Mason.” Her tone is breathless at first. Then she repeats those words again, this time with laughter in her voice.

The expletive is just enough to make the pressure in my crotch start to dissipate. “Did that help, I’m hoping?”

“Uh, yeah. You’re so right. I couldn’t do anything. I’d normally be grabbing a guy’s head and holding it against me or grabbing his crotch or something, but all I could do is just lie there and feel the sensations. That’s exactly what I need to focus on in this scene.”

I heave a sigh, reaching to untie the pantyhose. “Well, let me get your hands free in case you feel the urge again to grab a crotch, okay? ’Cause it’ll take whatever action it can get.” I force a light laugh that mirrors hers. She rises from the bed and darts toward her desk.

My eyebrows hike up an inch. “What are you doing?”

“I have to write all this down while I’m still in the mood.”

“What about dinner?” I don’t bother hiding the whine in my voice.

“Just take it out when the oven beeps. You know where the plates are. Beer’s in the fridge.”

She doesn’t even glance my way as I retreat toward the kitchen, feeling the closest I’ve ever felt to being used in my lifetime.

Authors are cold, heartless bitches when they’re in the creative zone.

I vow to never date one.