Hard Bargains Read online

  Result, she thought brightly. She kept her smile tight as she appraised him with cool regard. ‘I think I could enjoy that,’ she murmured. ‘Are you staying here at the hotel?’

  ‘I have a room here,’ he admitted. ‘Do you fancy a drink first, or would you like to sample my stamina immediately?’

  The muscles at the tops of her thighs trembled. Her sex grew moist with greedy anticipation. She caught her breath, fearful that if she spent too long brooding on how to respond she would begin to dissolve into a puddle of her own arousal.

  ‘I’d like to sample that stamina as soon as you can deliver,’ she breathed. She glanced around the deserted gym, confirming that they were alone, and then knelt down in front of him. Keeping her gaze locked on his, Emma stroked her fingers against his thighs.

  He released a soft, guttural sigh.

  She didn’t waste time fondling him or exploring his shape. The urgent need of her arousal wouldn’t allow her to play such games. Instead, acting on an instinctive desire that threatened to overwhelm her, she teased down the waistband of his shorts and exposed the swollen tip of his glans. The end was large and meaty and a pearl of his precome glistened in the slit.

  She tapped her tongue against him and sampled his flavour.

  The inner muscles of her sex clenched in a light spasm that felt close to orgasm. She panted heavily and said, ‘That tastes good.’

  He stroked a hand against her face. ‘Emma?’ he asked doubtfully. ‘Is that you?’

  She almost stumbled away from him. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment as she tried to work out how he knew her name. The revelation came in an instant. It hadn’t just been that the man bore a passing resemblance to the first boy she had ever kissed.

  It was him.

  ‘Benny?’ She had to stop herself squealing. ‘Little Benny Davidson?’

  He grunted a soft chortle of laughter. ‘Not so little nowadays.’ He nodded at the tip of the erection she had been licking.

  She found herself laughing with him and then shook her head. Her laughter dissolved as she realised this was disastrous. Admittedly, in relative terms, Benny was a stranger to her. She couldn’t recall seeing him once in the past two decades and had no idea what he had been doing with his life or anything else of any importance. But she knew, if she added Benny to her tally of conquests for the evening, and if Will then discovered that Benny was her first kiss, he would rightly argue that the man could not be properly classed as a stranger and she would forfeit any victory that came from her actions.

  Her shoulders slumped.

  She suppressed the urge to groan with frustration.

  She gave Benny an apologetic smile. ‘Carry on exercising,’ she told him. ‘You and I can catch up some other time.’ She shook her head as though contradicting herself and said, ‘No. You and I will catch up at some other time.’ She took a card from her purse, placed it in his hand, pressed her mouth to his and savoured a long and lingering kiss.

  Benny had been her first kiss. In truth, she couldn’t remember much about the experience. But this kiss was a powerful experience and she suspected little Benny Davidson had been practising his skills since she last saw him. She needed to find out what other skills he had been practising.

  Benny looked puzzled by her sudden rejection.

  Rather than develop her explanation, Emma gave him a reassuring smile and walked away. She rushed upstairs to the hotel’s ground floor and hurried through the bar, trying not to notice that Will was sitting between two brunettes who were both laughing enthusiastically at some quip he’d clearly made.

  He held his fingers slightly apart and their laughter grew louder.

  Emma’s cheeks flushed.

  She knew he was giving them the line about his penis being microscopically small. It was not the most sophisticated chat-up line in the world but she had seen him use it effectively more than a dozen times to powerful effect. He had even used it on several of his models.

  Within the next couple of minutes one of the brunettes would sneak a hand to his groin to find out if he had been telling the truth. When she discovered the substantial girth he had down there, Emma knew it would only be a matter of moments before she was wanting to sample his talents and Will would be chalking up another victory for the evening.

  He’s going to win again, Emma thought miserably. And that’s going to mean another holiday of snow, ice and freezing cold mountains.

  The prospect was so bleak she struggled to hold back a tear.

  It had been a while since she last smoked a cigarette but she felt so frustrated with the way the evening was developing, she thought it was time she reacquainted herself with the habit. She stepped outside into the cool night air, followed the signs to the smoking shelter, approached the only man who stood there and asked him if he had a spare cigarette.

  His eyes softened with a sheepish apology.

  ‘I’m vaping,’ he explained, showing her the chunky electronic tube he was sucking. He offered it to her and added, ‘You can take a hit from this, if you want. But it’s not quite the same.’

  She thanked him, placed her lips to the offered mouthpiece and sucked.

  She could taste where his mouth had been. The thought was darkly exciting and, for the first time, she took a moment to properly appraise him. He didn’t appear troubled by the light chill of the night’s air. He was tall and dark and dressed stylishly in a floral print Duchamp shirt. He had a muscular chest and his grin was affable. From the way he was considering her she suspected he would be up for whatever she wanted from him.

  Her nipples hardened inside her bra.

  Under other circumstances she might have wondered if that response had come from the nicotine rush of the e-cigarette. But, seeing the glint of approval in his grin, she knew that would be undervaluing the effect he was clearly provoking.

  Her body was responding to him.

  He introduced himself as Caleb and, when she asked, confirmed that he was staying at the spa resort alone for the weekend. Emma moved closer to conduct the interrogation. She used the return of the e-cigarette as an excuse, and then stayed so close she could feel the warmth emanating from Caleb’s body whilst she inhaled the scent of his cologne. It was a manly fragrance with echoes of sandalwood and lime presenting a delightful contrast of the comfortable and the acerbic. She stopped herself sighing with a heightening need for him. She figured she was giving enough signs that he could tell that she was interested in him.

  ‘You remind me of someone,’ he told her.

  Her spirits sank.

  Surely he had to be a stranger. She didn’t want to believe that, this weekend, the spa resort was solely populated by men who knew her. Yet there didn’t seem to be any other explanation. The place seemed to be filled with clients, schoolfriends and colleagues.

  ‘Who do I remind you of?’

  Her thoughts were working overtime as she tried to predict what he was about to say. Had they met before? When? Where? Who the hell was he? What relationship did they have that would stop them from being technically strangers?

  ‘You remind me of that woman from the saucy movie that was all the rage last year.’

  Emma sighed with relief. She knew the movie he was talking about. A handful of people had said she looked like the female lead. She hadn’t thought the movie was particularly arousing but she did like the way Caleb used the word ‘saucy’. It sat well on his lips and made her realise he was delightfully coy.

  She liked the challenge presented by coy men.

  ‘She had legs like yours,’ Caleb explained. ‘And you share similarities in your facial features.’

  ‘You might find that we share similarities in more ways than just that,’ Emma purred. She pulled the e-cigarette from his fingers and sucked lazily on the mouthpiece. Whilst she held it between her lips she met his eyes and stared at him with exaggerated innocence. ‘If you watched that film closely, you might find we share many more similarities.’

  It was
as much as she needed to say to win him over.

  ‘Would you like to come back to my room to discuss this further?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she grinned.

  Ten minutes later they were up in his room. Ten minutes after that they were naked and the sex was proving to be amazing. He was obedient and pliant and eager to have his face buried between her thighs. Down there his tongue chased lazy circles against her wetness.

  She took a handful of photos with her phone, capturing images of Caleb’s head as it pressed against her pussy. She sent the best of the pictures to Will.

  She caught his tongue slipping against her clit.

  She caught moments where his teeth nibbled lightly at her flesh.

  She caught his nose pushing between the moist folds of her labia. Looking at the photos through a veil of quickening excitement, Emma thought they all looked luridly impressive.

  After pressing send, she glanced down at Caleb and thought he looked like he wanted to move his face away. Hurriedly, she pushed at the back of his head and held him against her sex. ‘Suck my clit,’ she hissed.

  It wasn’t just that she wanted her clit sucked, although she knew that was going to be pleasurable. She wanted his mouth against her pussy because she was fearful of letting Caleb talk. Given the way the evening had gone so far, she was reluctant to engage him in much conversation for fear of discovering that they had once worked together or he had been a client or they shared some other connection. She felt sure, if they did talk, she would discover they shared a secret history that would mean he wasn’t a stranger.

  Whilst those considerations were rushing through her thoughts, the blistering pleasure that came as he suckled her clitoris pushed her to the brink of climax. Her heartbeat raced and she forced a balled fist into her mouth to stop herself shrieking in response to the pleasure.

  Her phone beeped a couple of times.

  She knew the messages were coming from Will and she knew he was sending pictures. Without needing to look, she figured they would be shots of Will with one or both of the brunettes he had been drinking with. If not those two, Emma figured there would be pictures of Will with some other beautiful woman or women, all of them enjoying a bout of illicit pleasure and proving that Will had better abilities than she did when it came to picking up strangers.

  She ignored the intermittent beeping of the phone and focused on what Caleb was doing as his tongue teased the dewy flesh of her pussy lips.

  It would have been easy, she guessed, to be annoyed by the situation. Will had been able to easily bed his choice of lovers for the night while she had struggled to find someone in the hotel who wasn’t a colleague, client or long-lost acquaintance. She pushed notions of unfairness from her thoughts.

  Even though she hadn’t won the bet, the evening had proved to be a lot of fun.

  Pleasure, blossoming from her loins, began to erupt through her sex and spread through her body. Every nerve ending screamed and trembled. The shriek of satisfaction that wanted to tear from her throat was muffled as she turned her face and buried it in a convenient pillow.

  She clutched at the back of Caleb’s head and pushed his face more firmly against her sex. ‘Suck my clit more,’ she demanded, as the climax continued to rush through her body. She spat the words with the breathless insistence of orgasm. ‘Suck my fucking clit.’

  Caleb did as she demanded.

  Emma had to admit he was good with his tongue.

  She also thought he was equally good when he bent her over the bed later and took her from behind. He rode her vigorously and hard until a second and then a third climax pulsed through her body. His technique was unsophisticated and brutal but, as he repeatedly thrust himself into her, and when his sheathed length finally thickened and then pumped inside her, Emma felt another rush of pleasure through the aching muscles of her pussy.

  She groaned.

  Caleb echoed the noise as he collapsed on the bed beside her.

  Given the way her inner thighs trembled, Emma empathised with his obvious exhaustion. She felt equally spent. The evening was all but over and, although she’d managed to bed one stranger, that wouldn’t be enough to win the bet.

  She tried not to think about their forthcoming holiday of snowboarding and skiing and all those other unrelaxing activities on which Will thrived. The only thing that would make it bearable would be the knowledge that she would be spending it in a ski resort with Will and an attractive group of his friends, all of whom were physically capable to the extreme, and most of whom enjoyed proving their prowess in other, less snow-focused ways.

  It was a thought that brightened her mood a little as she kissed Caleb goodnight and tried to remember which room she was sharing with Will. As she walked along the silent corridors, she checked her phone and saw a series of pictures sent by her husband.

  The first was the one she had seen previously, where Will’s grinning mouth was around a woman’s exposed nipple.

  The second was a more explicit picture of Will’s erect length being held by slender feminine fingers. The nails were painted in glossy scarlet and silver stripes that Emma thought looked quite fetching. She wondered how that design would look on her own fingers and decided to show the picture to her manicurist.

  She flicked through the third picture: Will’s shaft slipping into a luridly glossy pussy. The pussy was trimmed with a scrub of brunette curls. The fourth picture showed a similar image, except this time there was a tongue lapping the wetness from Will’s shaft as it plunged into the brunette. Emma was puzzling out the mechanics of that shot, and had flicked through to the fifth picture, before she realised that Will had clearly managed to get two women into his bed at the same time. Two women at the same time? she thought. He had definitely won the bet this evening. She shook her head with admiration as she crept toward the door of their room and swiped her key-card through the lock.

  Will was naked in the centre of the bed.

  He was not alone.

  Emma had been incorrect when she thought Will had managed to entice a pair of women back to his bed. There were three women with him.

  Even as she was assuring the women that she wasn’t an outraged wife, on the verge of demanding to know what they had been doing with her husband, she still felt a pang of frustration that Will had been able to succeed at their bet so easily and all she had been able to manage by way of a stranger had been a single fuck.

  She kissed her husband on the cheek and poured herself a bourbon. She was tempted to start undressing and ask if she could join in the fun before they all went their separate ways for the evening, but she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question without sounding needy or depraved.

  ‘You’re back early,’ Will observed.

  She laughed. ‘I’m back early because it was so difficult finding someone in this hotel who wasn’t a stranger. It seems like everyone staying here is either a former client of mine, a schoolfriend or someone I work with. I had a lot of difficulty finding a partner for the evening who wasn’t a stranger.’

  She sipped the bourbon and grimaced at the sharp taste.

  ‘It must be something about this resort,’ one of the brunettes said.

  Will glared at her but Emma encouraged the woman to continue.

  ‘We’re not strangers to Will,’ the brunette explained. ‘We’ve all worked for him as models in the past. That’s why the four of us hooked up here this evening.’

  Emma’s brows narrowed as she glanced at Will.

  Will opened his mouth to say something but Emma wouldn’t let him talk.

  ‘You’ve worked for him as models?’ Emma asked the brunette.

  ‘We’ve all worked for him as models,’ the brunette repeated. She giggled and said, ‘We’ve done other things with him in the past too, although I suppose you’d guessed that much.’

  Emma put her drink aside and leaned close so she could kiss the woman with gratitude. Clearly pleased with this show of affection, the brunette returned E
mma’s kiss passionately.

  Will still looked like he was trying to voice an excuse or an explanation but Emma wouldn’t let him speak. She was looking forward to a night of delicious pleasure with her husband and his three friends. And, afterwards, Emma realised she would also be looking forward to planning a summer holiday where she could bask in the sultry heat of a tropical beach.

  Loving Myself

  Heather Towne

  When Jason died, my life went off the rails.

  Jason and I had been high-school sweethearts, had gotten married (like we’d always planned) the day after graduation. He’d quickly fulfilled his dream of becoming a firefighter in the small Midwestern city we called home. And I’d gotten a part-time job as an assistant at a veterinary clinic, with the goal of becoming a vet when we had enough money to afford the schooling.

  We leased a cosy apartment in a nice neighbourhood only a ten-minute walk from Jason’s parents. Since my parents had both died in a bank robbery when I was young, and I was an only child, Jason’s warm, welcoming family had become mine. I adored his younger brothers and sisters, and got along extremely well with his mother and father. They were a close-knit family, and they wove me into the fabric of all their activities.

  I’d always been kind of shy, with low self-esteem (due to my parents being taken from me so early, I guess). But with my handsome, strong husband looking after me, and as a member of his fun-loving family, I felt, finally, like I actually belonged in the world. They were the most joyous two years of my life.

  And then tragedy struck, again.

  It was only a minor garage fire, easily contained. But the young boy, Evan, whom Jason and his fellow firefighters had evacuated from the attached house, had pleaded with Jason to rescue his dog from the kennel in the garage. Jason loved animals as much as I do, although he was more of a dog person, while I’m more of a cat person (my snowshoe Siamese, Tia, had been my best friend and companion growing up).

  So Jason had shaken off his colleagues’ restraining hands and rushed into the burning garage. He just wasn’t the type to turn down a crying child. He’d located the kennel at the rear of the garage through the flames and smoke and unlatched it. And the dog, a six-month-old beagle (Buddy, who showed up at Jason’s funeral), had raced out of the garage and into the jubilant arms of the boy who’d been calling for him. But when Jason had turned to leave, a heavy wooden support beam had come crashing down, crushing my husband, and almost killing me at the same time.