A Fine Specimen (20 page)

He put his hands on her
knees and gently pressed her legs apart. Ah. She opened up like a little
flower, pink, puffy girl flesh, already shiny and slick and he hadn’t even
touched her there yet.

The color of her little
cunt was delightful—a deep rose matching the color of her nipples and mouth.
Everywhere else she was as pale as moonlight but here, oh yeah. Here she was
the color of passion.

Unable to resist, Alex
bent and put his mouth on her, feeling her jolt with surprise. He drew in a
deep breath, nearly dizzy with delight. Caitlin always smelled good but
here
,
her scent was wild, concentrated. When they had sex, their smell had a sweet
undertone—and it was all her.

He tasted her, an experimental
lick, holding her down easily as she nearly came up off the couch. God he loved
how incredibly responsive she was. So prim and proper and scholarly outside the
bedroom—or in this case the living room—but wild in his arms. She tasted
wonderful, like sunshine and honey. He didn’t usually like going down all that
much—it was awkward and uncomfortable—but right now he was as excited as she
was.

He kissed her cunt
exactly as he’d kiss her mouth, tongue deep inside her, swirling and licking
like she was the world’s most delightful lollipop. He was enjoying it so much
he relaxed into it, completely forgetting about himself and his hard-on. He
just dove into her, listening to the small moans she was making, feeling her
thighs tremble.

He licked and sucked to
his heart’s content, stealing glances up at her face now and again. She was
bright pink, the blush extending down to her beautiful breasts. He sucked
gently at her clitoris and felt her tremble sharply, her hands suddenly in his
hair, pulling, panting wildly. He sucked just a little harder and she gasped,
her cunt contracting sharply. In a second she’d be coming…

Alex quickly pushed her onto
her back, opened her with his fingers and pushed his dick inside at the
exact
second she started coming in sharp little contractions, groaning in his ear.

The plan had been to
stay still until the climax ended then start moving, but the plan was blown out
of the water by the feel of those tiny muscles milking him, her arms and legs
holding him tightly, long neck thrown back…

Without moving a muscle,
just by being inside her, he went off like a rocket, pushing hard against the
arm of the couch with his toes so he could get inside her as far as he could
possibly go, feeling every inch of her climax against the super-sensitized skin
of his cock. His climax was so hard it was entirely possible he spurted every
ounce of liquid in his body into her, because when it was over he collapsed on
her, utterly spineless.

They lay there until the
light had drained from the sky, the only illumination in the room coming from
the streetlight outside. Caitlin’s wriggling shook him out of his near coma.

“Alex.” Her voice was
breathless. She pushed at his shoulders without budging him an inch. “Get up.”

Get up? Why? Things were
absolutely perfect exactly as they were. He loved lying on her soft, slender
body, lips against the skin of her throat. It was his favorite position in all
the world.

“Mm.” He was playing
possum, but he genuinely didn’t want to get up. She wriggled some more and his
dick started growing again inside her. She wanted more? Oh yeah. Just give him
a minute here…

“Alex.” Her voice was
sharper now. “Get up, please. I need to shower. I need to…to go to the
bathroom.”

Ah Christ.

He placed both palms
flat on the couch seat and lifted himself up. She scooted out from under him
and he mourned the cool air that hit his dick. It had been way more
comfortable, snug and warm inside her.

She disappeared into the
downstairs bathroom and he didn’t stir for a long, long time, thinking nothing,
just feeling.

He looked at the heap of
their clothes, his on top of hers. She was going to come out naked from the
shower. His dick hardened happily at the thought.

Waiting for her, he
looked around his living room. Caitlin’s presence in his house had changed it
almost beyond recognition.

She had cut some branches
from the shrubs in his backyard and put them in vases. The effect was odd but
dramatic. Her laptop had taken up residence on his desk. Her books were
scattered over the coffee table and her papers were piled on every available
surface—the seat of a chair, on top of the entertainment center, under the
phone.

Yesterday’s cotton
sweater was still hanging over a dining room chair and one of her slippers
peeped out from under the couch. God only knew where its mate might be. Knowing
Caitlin, it could be anywhere from the bathroom to the bedroom, or even in a
corner of the kitchen.

He hardly recognized the
place as his own. His house usually looked as if no one lived there. Now the
house looked messy—but lived in. The house looked like a home.

Caitlin was, hands down,
the most low-maintenance woman he’d ever met. She didn’t require constant
attention or flattery or enormous amounts of money. He hadn’t once heard a
version of “how do I look in this?” The eternal question that was such a
freaking minefield.

Alex’d had a couple of
affairs that had spilled over into temporary living-together arrangements and
he still shuddered at the memories. He’d felt hunted in his own home, required
to constantly dance to the women’s moods and thoughts and whims. Making an
effort and always coming up short.

Caitlin was the
opposite. Give her a table, a chair, her laptop and a book and she immediately
sank into a study coma. Went a million miles away. If anything, Alex sometimes
found himself making noises or even once harrumphing, simply to get her
attention. He felt like a high-schooler doing handstands to impress the pretty
new girl in school.

She came out of the
shower, smelling of his soap and Caitlin.

“Tomorrow night,” Alex
said, picking up her tee shirt, slipping it over her upraised arms, “let’s see
if we can make it to the bedroom.”

“Sounds enticing.”
Caitlin lifted the heavy mass of her hair and let it spill outside the shirt.
“But I’ll be busy tomorrow night. Or rather, tomorrow afternoon. I don’t know
how long I’ll be, so maybe it would be better not to plan on dinner.”

His hands stilled but he
kept his voice casual. “You’ll be busy?”

“Yeah.” Caitlin’s voice
was muffled as she bent down to find her shorts and flats. “I have an
appointment with a real estate agent at three. I’ll start house-hunting
tomorrow. I’m going to have to hurry because I’ll be starting my new position
next week and I’d like to have found a place to stay and be settled in.”
Caitlin shifted some papers on the coffee table, a wry smile on her face. “The
sooner I get out of here, the sooner you can go back to having a neat house.
I’m pretty hopeless at keeping things in order.”

“I’ll come with you.”
Alex stood to pull on his jeans.

“You’ll what?” Startled,
she let the papers drop again.

Alex patiently picked
them up. “I’ll come with you. I know this town inside out. I can help you find
something suitable.”

“That’s nice of you,
Alex,” Caitlin said, looking up at him uncertainly. “But really, there’s no
need for you to go out of your way. You’ll be busy. You have this pesky thing
known as a job.”

“I can take some
personal time off. No problem. I’ll help you look for a new apartment,” he
said.

Over my dead body
, he thought.

“Well, you’re no help,”
Caitlin grumbled three days later as she and Alex walked into Alex’s house.

She’d received official
notification of the fellowship from the Frederiksson Foundation and was due to
start the following Monday. The good news was that the Foundation was going to
pay her an extra ten thousand as a housing allowance—and the bad news was that
she didn’t have a house to rent yet. After three exhausting days of house-hunting,
she was no nearer to her goal that she’d been at the beginning.

It was after eight and
she was tired and dispirited. She dumped her purse and a bag of groceries on
the kitchen counter.

“How can you say that?”
Alex asked reasonably. He ferried in the rest of the groceries from the car and
started putting them away. “I saved you from making some huge mistakes.
Remember that split level in the boondocks? I swear you could hear the coyotes
howling. And what about that apartment over on Southside? You practically
needed a passport to get there.”

“Well, okay,” Caitlin
conceded. “A few of the properties were a little out of the way, that’s true.
But come on, Alex, Baylorville isn’t L.A. Everything’s reasonably close to
everything else. And anyway, all the apartments were close to bus stops and I intend
to buy myself a car soon anyway. What about that last apartment? That was smack
in the center of town.”

“That last apartment we
saw had termites, I’m sure of it. I could hear them crunching. Speaking of
crunching, what’s for dinner?” Alex asked. When she glared at him, he shrugged
and started setting the table.

Caitlin planted her
hands on her hips. “Alex, the building was made of brick and steel! How could
it have termites?”

“Insidious little
creatures,” Alex agreed. He folded the napkins and brushed his hands. “Probably
mutants. Hey, didn’t we have some beer around here somewhere?”

“I put a six-pack in the
fridge behind the lettuce. Stop changing the subject, Alex. Do you realize that
we’ve run through three real estate agents in three days? I start at the
Frederiksson Foundation on
Monday
. I’m never going to find an apartment
at this rate.”

“We’ll find something,
don’t worry,” Alex soothed. He brushed her cheek with his lips and pushed her
glasses back up to the bridge of her nose.

She rolled her eyes.
“Not like this. Not if you keep nitpicking. Nothing the agents show us is good
enough. The apartment’s either too hot or too cold or too expensive or too big
or too small.”

Alex clucked and shook
his head. He reached into the fridge, grunting with satisfaction when he found
the six-pack. He cracked one open and took several slugs from the can. “I can’t
help it if there are so many lousy properties on the market.”

“Look, Alex, all I need
is a small apartment. I don’t need the Taj Mahal. What was the matter with that
cute little place on Greenwood?”

“It faced north, honey.”
Alex took another swallow and shrugged. “Can’t have that.”

“Alex,” Caitlin took a
deep breath, “I’m not a
tree
. Moss will not grow on my north side. It
was comfortable and convenient and cheap.”

“You’ll have sky-high
heating bills this winter.”

Caitlin held her breath
for a count of three then let it out slowly. “We’re in Southern California. How
much heat can I consume?”

“What about el Niño?”
Alex frowned, considering. “Or la Niña. Or El Niñito. Whatever. Hey, do we have
any peanuts?” he asked, grabbing a second beer and carrying the cans into the
living room.

“Here.” Caitlin pulled
out a drawer next to the sink. She picked up a packet of salted peanuts and
tossed it at Alex from the living room door. He caught the bag one-handedly,
ripped it open with his teeth and dumped the peanuts into a bowl which he set
on the coffee table. “For your information,” Caitlin began, “el Niño—”

But Alex was gone. As
always when he got home, he ran upstairs and changed into sweats. A few minutes
later, he padded back downstairs barefoot and cleared some of Caitlin’s papers
off the couch to sit down. She walked around the couch so she could see him.

“For your information,”
she continued, “el Niño was years ago and la Niña’s over and el Niñito doesn’t
exist. And what was so wrong with that apartment off Carson?”

Alex thumbed the remote.
“Ah…did you see the color of those walls? Puke
brown. Come on, Caitlin, you would have had nightmares with those walls.”

“Walls?” Caitlin
frowned. The apartment had perfectly normal off-white walls. “There wasn’t
anything wrong with the color. The color was—” But Alex wasn’t listening. He
had settled with a heavy sigh into the sofa and the sounds of baseball
commentary drifted from the TV.

“What’s for dinner?” he
asked over the announcer’s voice.

Caitlin looked at Alex
watching the game, rolled her eyes and gave up. “How about those steaks we
bought? And maybe a salad.”

“Sounds great.” Alex
cracked open another beer. “Well done, please. I hate blood.”

Caitlin turned on the kitchen
radio and started preparing dinner. She marinated the steaks, washed the salad and
made the vinaigrette dressing, her heart heavy.

He hadn’t once asked her
to change her mind. He hadn’t asked her to stay. If he hadn’t asked by now he
wasn’t going to. That was simply a fact.

And it made finding a
new place even more imperative. She was starting her new position on Monday.

She didn’t have great
expectations. Her old place in Grant Falls had been a cheap one-roomer,
masquerading as a studio apartment. Every single property she’d seen in
Baylorville was better than what she had been living in.

She hated not knowing
where she was going to live. It was going to be hard enough starting a new
position, meeting all her new colleagues at the Foundation. Trying to strike
the right note as the new kid on the block who didn’t want to make waves but
who
did
want to contribute. Hit the ground running. She needed a stable
home base. She wanted to have that part of her life settled before facing a new
job and a new life.

She was so rattled, not
knowing from one day to the next what she was doing.

Of course, Alex was
sabotaging her attempts at finding a place to stay, which would have been fun
to watch if the subtext were “don’t go away, stay with me”.But it
wasn’t. He hadn’t once offered to simply extend their live-in arrangement. He
never gave any clue at all that her future plans had anything to do with him.

Every time he passed up
an opportunity to tell her he’d like her to stay, her heart cracked a little.
What was the point of getting straight A’s since she was five, of getting a
PhD, of being really book-smart if she was going to be so dumb about her private
life? She’d been telling herself from day one that Alex was going to break her
heart and then telling herself right back that she was just along for the sex.
Have an affair with a man whose hotness quotient was off the charts, just for
the experience, then leave. She’d lectured herself a thousand times not to get
emotionally involved, but here she was.

Ha, ha.

The eternal tug of war
between head and heart. She was just like so many others in academic life.
Book-smart and life-stupid.

She absolutely loved
living with Alex. Not just for the sex, though that was…yeah. Whew.

It was hard for her to
admit how lonely she’d felt before, but now it was impossible to fool herself.
Being with Alex was incredible, the best thing that had ever happened to her.
It was as if she’d been color-blind up until now, and the world had suddenly
exploded with color.

What a fool she was. In
a fit of optimism, she’d even bought packets of herb seeds to plant then, at
the last minute, had a return to sanity, quietly flushing the seeds down the
toilet before Alex could see them. He’d vaguely mentioned buying some herbs but
he hadn’t. If she planted them herself it was a big fat statement dug right
into his garden that she wanted to stick around.

Everything was like
that, bending over backward not to make a statement, doing her best to leave a
small footprint. She made sure she used as little room as possible in his
closet, kept her few cosmetics in a small bag on the floor of the bathroom,
made sure she didn’t buy any new books because she’d already added too many to
his overflowing shelves.

But you can’t try not to
cast a shadow forever. She was making herself sick trying not to impose on him,
searching his face endlessly for some clue as to what he felt for her, trying
to read his body language. Oh, the sexual body language was easy enough to
read. No problems there. He wanted her. That was plain to see. But sex alone wasn’t
enough.

It was so
hard
playing
it cool. She found herself wanting to talk about her plans with him, what
working at the Frederiksson would be like, sounding him out on the Baylorville
power structure so she’d be better positioned not to step into holes like a
newbie. But of course, planning her future with his advice presupposed he even
cared what her future
was
, which wasn’t a given.

And worse…she’d reach
out to smooth back a lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead, but then
clench her nails into her palms to stop herself. Sex was fine and when they
were in bed, she could touch all she wanted. The more the better. Out of bed,
there seemed to be some moratorium on shows of affection.

It was madness and a
recipe for deep unhappiness. She deserved better.

It was absolutely
impossible to know what Alex wanted.

He wanted nothing at
all, apparently, because he never talked about it. All his discussions were
relentlessly based in the present. He hadn’t shown any signs of tiring of her
presence in his house, but he never talked about the future in any way. It was
as if the future tense had been banished from his vocabulary.

He certainly hadn’t
asked her to leave. But then again, he hadn’t asked her to stay, either.

Caitlin grabbed one of
Alex’s razor-sharp knives. Using it to cut the lettuce was probably overkill
but she had no choice. Alex didn’t have plain old salad knives—all he had were
pricey samurai blades.

She thought of the dull,
cheap department store knives with the faded plastic handles back in her
apartment in Grant Falls. Alex wouldn’t have stood for dull knives. Like Alex
himself, all his equipment was in superb shape.

She should get out of
his house before she dropped one of his expensive knives on the floor or
cracked one of his imported terracotta pots or tipped over one of his fancy
designer floor lamps. She should get out before she ruined something important to
him.

Should I stay or
should I go now?
The song got it
exactly right.

The thought of just
staying on was so incredibly tempting. Alex wouldn’t say no. But Caitlin needed
some stability, her things around her, as she faced her first big, important
job. Just staying, without Alex inviting her, meant she could be out on her ear
in a heartbeat.

And yet, living with him
was just so wonderful.

It was easier than she
would have expected. Though she’d had two affairs with fellow students, she’d
never actually lived with a man before. She hadn’t really known what to expect.

A week ago, the thought
of sharing quarters with Alex Cruz would have terrified her. She had found him
so intimidating, so overwhelming. She could never tell what he was thinking or
feeling. He was this huge, sinfully attractive puzzle, which she was certain
she couldn’t ever possibly solve.

To her surprise though,
he never browbeat her. Incredible as it seemed, he dialed down a lot of that
I’m-King-of-the-Mountain macho authoritarianism when they got home. The small
temporary household they’d created had turned into a participatory democracy
instead of a dictatorship.

Alex wasn’t aggressive
with her, he asked her opinion on things and—miracle of miracles—he picked up
after himself. He even picked up after
her
, being much neater than she
was. And surprisingly enough for a neat freak, he never complained about her
messiness and lack of organization.

The passion that flared
up between them still surprised her. She had never thought of herself as a
passionate woman, but when Alex touched her, kissed her or even looked at her
in a certain way, she melted instantly. They were so big and scary, these
feelings she had for Alex. But Alex wasn’t a forever kind of guy. She had to
remember that, pound it into her stubborn, oh-so-foolish head.

He wasn’t looking for a
life mate or even a short-term partner. She didn’t need for him to tell her
that, it was evident in the way he lived. She had never seen anyone as
completely self-sufficient as Alex Cruz. He didn’t need anyone, for anything at
all.

Ben Cade told her that
it had been years since he and Alex had gone out carousing. No one called in
the evenings. It would have been sad if it weren’t for the fact that it was
clearly Alex’s choice. He could have any kind of company he wanted, whenever he
wanted it.