Page 9 of The Moon & His Tides
“I’ve offended you.”
“I’m sure a lady such as yourself hasn’t had reason to fraternize with poor boys much, but not all of us succumb to turning tricks to earn a few pounds,” I educated her between clenched teeth.
“Believe it or not, I used to be poor,” she said softly, apology threaded through her words like a pretty ribbon as she offeredher gift up to me. The gift of insight into her true self, a gift I was eager to tear into with my fingers and teeth.
“You don’t smell like it,” I told her, peering into the rearview as we waited at yet another backed-up traffic light.
She was quiet for a minute, and I wondered what she was thinking. If she had been poor, there was no way she could misinterpret my statement. Everyone who’d experienced it knew that true poverty had an odor. It was hot like scorched pavement and sharply sweet like overripe fruit burst open and left exposed too long in the tropical heat. The heat was flavored with shame, with the anger that would crop up and hit you over the side of the head when you dared to question,how was this fair, why me, will it ever end? It was the sweetness that invaded the senses, though. Close to putrid, it denoted the stink of hope gone rotten.
Sometimes, I showered twice a day to rid myself of the stench I still imagined lingered deep in my pores.
“I have some keepsakes,” she murmured finally. “I don’t know why I keep them when the memories haunt me, but sometimes when I get stuck in the mud of my past, I smell them.” Her eyes tipped up beneath painted lashes to latch onto mine. “They still smell the same, even buried deep in the heart of my walk-in closet in my multimillion-pound Chelsea townhome.”
“Stink like that never goes away,” I told her even though, after what she had just shared, I knew she understood that already.
“No,” she said, even quieter, her gaze straying out the window.
We were quiet then, only the emotional swell of Chopin’s third movement sweeping through the cavernous Rolls Royce. I was disappointed that her sweet, flirty mood had sunk into post-tipsy contemplation, yet I was also weirdly grateful to know thatbeneath the silken class and studied manners, Savannah Meyers was just as human as me.
“Sometimes I miss it.”
“The stench?” I clarified.
“Maybe. I grew up in the poor South, in a small town like a wet spot on a map in Alabama. Sometimes I miss the wet heat, how it stuck my clothes to my body and made everyone smell ripe in a way that was base and somehow intimate. The weather made everything bare and sultry. People passed the time fucking in long, damp grass and dunking naked and entwined in cool ponds. They escaped the heat by getting drunk on cheap clear booze and stomped out their crazy on wooden floors in dirty bars listening to George Strait. Most of my friends got pregnant too young or dropped out of high school before the ninth grade.”
She paused to drag a deep breath into her lungs and blink dazedly at whatever past she pictured that played out the window.
“We were animals, basically. We didn’t think about the consequences. We just lived and acted on all our impulses… That’s it. That’s what I miss.”
My mind whirred with images of Savannah on her back in green Southern grass, her pale skin slick with our sweat as I beat into her clutching pussy like a beast. Savannah in my arms, hefted up against the inside of the bar bathroom door, my hand over her shouting mouth as I fucked her drunk, driven to come. The idea of this lady stripped of her varnish and bare beneath me had my dick hard as a fucking rock in my pants.
Impulsively, I flicked the indicator and pulled over onto the darkened curb beside Regent’s Park. Savannah watched me under hooded lids but didn’t protest.
“Lift your skirt,” I told her, confident enough to be convincing without ordering.
If she didn’t want to play this game with me, now was the time to say so.
She bit the edge of her perfectly shaped lower lip, then sucked it into her mouth as she deliberated. I groaned at the sight, and she jerked her eyes to me, her wet lip popping out into a shiny, tempting pout.
“Lift your skirt and spread your legs for me,” I repeated, and it was an order this time.
A delicate shiver rattled her slim shoulders, and for a minute, I thought she wouldn’t do it. I was basically a stranger to her. More than that, she was technically myboss, years older than me, and fuckingmarried.
It wasn’t my first time seducing a taken woman or an older one, but something about Savannah’s class was so fucking pure that my fingers on her skin seemed wrong like an oily handprint on a pristine pane of glass.
I held my breath as achingly slowly Savannah’s sweet thighs parted beneath the rippling silk of her dress. The fluid material rode up her thighs until the shadowed apex of her thighs was visible to me.
“Wider,” I said, and it came out harshly, whipping against her exposed flesh so hard she flinched, then blushed brightly.
Without hesitation, she pushed her thighs farther apart with her palms on the inside of her knees. She wore nude thigh highs trimmed in a thick edge of lace and attached to flimsy-looking white garters.
My mouth was dry when I commanded, “Show me your breasts.”
Savannah’s throat worked rapidly as she swallowed back her unease and slowly exposed each milky breast, the fabric beneath propping them up so they were beautifully plump and high.
The desert in my mouth flooded at the thought of taking those sweet pink nipples between my teeth.
“Play with your nipples.”
