Fast and Loose Read online

  On the other hand, Crowley loved a good story, and this had the potential to be just that. If only I could take out the potentially embarrassing nature of the material…no. It couldn’t be done. I’d have to fob him off.

  ‘Come on then, Coxy,’ he said, handing me my second vodka. ‘Get it down you. I can’t have you holding out on me.’

  ‘Is this a double?’ I said, squinting at the clear, slightly effervescent liquid.

  ‘Might be. Who do you want to track down? An ex-lover? A potential future one? A long-lost family member? I’m intrigued – and you can’t intrigue Tom Crowley and expect him to leave it there. Sorry, but my professional pride won’t stand it.’

  ‘Professional pride,’ I snorted. ‘Professional sticky beak.’

  ‘Same thing. C’mon. Who’ve you been in a Twitter storm with? Who’s been viewing your Facebook profile?’

  ‘Shut up,’ I moaned. ‘Talk about something else. Who’s up for the deputy editor job? Have you heard anything?’

  ‘Nice try, but if you want me to shut up, you’ll have to shut me up.’

  I took a deep breath, downed the vodka in one and turned back to him.

  ‘Ask me one more time and I’ll –’

  ‘I won’t stop badgering you all night. And you can’t even run away from me. So just give it up, girlfriend.’

  I gave it up. I took his face in both my hands and fastened my lips on his, as assertively as I knew how. I was answered by a growl low in his throat and the secure tightening of his arm around me, one hand on the back of my neck.

  I’d forgotten how brilliantly he could kiss. He did it with one hundred per cent commitment, like a drowning man clinging to you for your life-giving snog. Everything in me that was tight slackened, everything that was defensive collapsed. Why would I fight something so sublime? It was like running into battle against an army of cream cakes and kittens. Embrace it, for God’s sake. It won’t hurt you.

  Ah, what a deceptive voice that was.

  But it entirely shouted down the other voice, the one that nagged faintly from its crushed position about how he wasn’t to be trusted and he would let me down and break my heart and so on and so forth.

  Shut up, nagging voice. I don’t care about that. Let me have this moment.

  I let my head slide against the back of the banquette, opening my mouth to let his tongue inside. I pushed my cheek against his, revelling in the slightly fuzzy warmth of his skin. I was drinking him in, and pouring myself back in return.

  His hand – the one that wasn’t holding me in position by the neck – started fidgeting with my fussy fishnetty bits. He moved skilled fingers inside my velvet and lace bra top and, although it only covered more fishnet, he found the outline of my breast and traced it through the diamond pattern. My nipple protruded, stiff and enlarged, straining against the mesh. It would be patterned too if it didn’t subside soon. Crowley’s thumb found it and rubbed it. The gentlest pressure was shocking enough and waves of overstimulation coursed through me. I clamped my thighs together, feeling a steam heat between them.

  Tom Crowley was playing with my nipples, here in a public bar, and I had absolutely no problem with it. Good manners and decorum were for other girls. I was just a horny slut, and he knew it.

  The increasing fever of our embrace was causing my legs to squirm and twist, which hurt my ankle.

  I whimpered into his mouth, hoping he would recognise pain rather than pleasure, but it only seemed to drive him wilder, so I had to put my hands against his chest and push him away forcibly.

  ‘Wha–?’ he said, and I wanted to kiss him again immediately, in his rumpled, lustful confusion.

  ‘My ankle. I’m getting all twisted up and it hurts.’

  He let out a few heavy breaths before making a response.

  ‘Shall we leave?’

  I misunderstood him for a moment. He was pissed off that I’d complained and wanted to walk away?

  ‘Come on,’ he said, pushing away his half-drunk pint. ‘I’ve seen more than enough to scribble a paragraph. Let’s get out of here.’

  He helped me out of the booth and then, unexpectedly and dizzyingly, swept me up into his arms. The continuing throb in my ankle dulled in comparison with the unmatched thrill of sailing through the dry ice in Crowley’s arms, cutting a swathe through the top-hatted and veiled clientele.

  The doormen said goodnight to us at the top of the stairs, and he bore me onwards to the taxi rank while I clung on for dear life, dreading that, at any moment, his arms would give and I’d end up amongst the KFC cartons and trodden-in gum that constituted pavement furniture around here.

  We made it on to the smooth back seat of a cab in the nick of time.

  ‘What’s your address, Foxy?’ he said, sliding in beside me.

  ‘Rutland Avenue. And what did you call me?’

  ‘It’s what they call you in the office,’ he said, without apology, having given the cabbie his instructions. ‘Foxy Coxy. Well, the polite ones do.’

  ‘And what,’ I said, after a pause to register this, ‘do the rude ones call me?’

  He gave me a sympathetic smile and rubbed my knee. ‘Ah, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before,’ he said. ‘You’ve lived with that name all your life.’

  ‘Cocksucker,’ I said resignedly. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Ironic,’ I replied. ‘Given that you’re the only one in a position to know whether or not it’s accurate.’

  He smirked.

  ‘Mm hmm,’ he said smugly. His fingers made a light but devastating return to the back of my neck. ‘If it weren’t for your ankle,’ he whispered into my ear, ‘I’d have found the darkest corner of that bar and had you right there, against the wall.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Can’t resist you.’ He kissed the spot beneath my ear. Dire peril. I loved being kissed there.

  ‘You managed…pretty well…for six weeks,’ I gasped. The ear-kissing was ongoing and had spread to the delicate skin of my neck.

  ‘I’m a fool,’ he breathed. ‘I wanted to call you. But…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Thought you’d say no.’

  ‘Well, what a shit journalist you are, then,’ I said, and he left off the kissing and sat up, blinking madly.

  ‘Ella!’ he protested.

  ‘That’s such blatant bull,’ I continued. ‘You’re trained to deal with people saying no to you. And you’re trained to carry on knocking at doors that get slammed in your face. If you’d wanted to see me again, you’d have called.’

  He looked away at the spattering of raindrops on the dark window, then back at me.

  ‘I’m sorry, then,’ he said. ‘And I’ll be honest with you. I fucked you because I fancy you. Nothing complicated about it. And I still do. So…?’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Well, same here, essentially,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I was the new girl and you were the old hand with a reputation I didn’t know about at the time. I was vulnerable and I needed a friend, and you made me feel like a twat. Well, not you, to be fair. Everybody else. All I got all week was “Oh, God, you let Crowley charm your pants off. Well, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last.” Really lovely introduction to my new career, that was.’

  Contrition was written all over his face, with its drooping mouth and its glistening eyes. I wanted to reach out and stroke his cheek and say, ‘There, there.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, holding out a hand and taking one of mine, ‘I wanted to call you. But you seemed pretty anti. Well, once Tilda and Miles got their hooks into you.’

  ‘They only told me what you were like. Don’t blame them.’

  ‘What, you don’t think they might have their own agendas? Tilda’s my ex, and Miles fancies you.’

  ‘What?’ I hadn’t been party to either of these nuggets of information.

  ‘She won’t talk about it, and he won’t admit it, but come on. Isn’t
it obvious?’

  ‘To you, maybe. But you’re a dirt-digger. You see sleaze in everything.’

  ‘I see what’s in front of my nose,’ he said. ‘And right now, my nose likes what it’s seeing.’

  I laughed despite myself. Tom had just shifted my perceptions of all my office relationships, but he’d done it very charmingly and I was less dismayed than I might have been.

  ‘So all that…was a misunderstanding, then?’ I said, wanting to believe it.

  ‘Classic romcom,’ he said. ‘She thinks this, he thinks that, neither of them are right, it all works out in the end.’

  ‘And is this the end?’

  ‘This,’ he said, kissing my knuckles with a decorous flourish that went well with his Victorian-style outfit, ‘is the beginning.’

  Chapter Three

  I won’t lie. I had considered the possibility that Tom might end up in my room and had set-dressed accordingly. My supermarket magazines were all in the recycling, replaced on the bedside table by a selection of intellectual heavyweights from my university reading list. All discarded, inside-out garments had made it into the laundry bin, and my perfumes and makeup were impeccably arranged on the dressing table, with no open eyeshadow trays or capless lipsticks.

  The bed was not only made – it smelled of summer meadows. Or so the linen spray I’d used claimed. To be honest, it smelled more like the time I tried to boil up potpourri in a saucepan as a child, to see if you could make soup from it. (You couldn’t.)

  Tom didn’t notice the order of things, though, having eyes only for the fringed shawls pinned to the wall and my unworn Victorian-style corset on its little dressmaker’s stand.

  ‘Whoa, you should’ve worn that tonight,’ he said, supporting my hobbling self over to the bed, where I collapsed gratefully.

  ‘I’m saving it for a special occasion,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t a date with me special enough?’ He turned to me and pouted.

  ‘I couldn’t be sure at the time of dressing,’ I said, smiling crookedly at him. ‘But perhaps it might turn out to be corset-worthy, after all.’

  ‘Oh, the pressure,’ said Tom, swooping down to join me on the bed. ‘I have to be corset-worthy.’

  ‘You have to earn that lovely fob watch you’re wearing, anyway.’

  He took it out and dangled it in front of me. The light from my cheap chandelier twinkled on the gold engravings.

  ‘Got it at the antiques mart,’ he said. ‘Of course, it doesn’t work. But I don’t need a watch to tell me the time.’ He winked and leaned forward to take off his boots.

  ‘Oh, don’t take the boots off yet,’ I said, my voice dying away in embarrassment as I realised how eager I sounded.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Just…you’re so beautifully dressed. It seems a shame to undress in the wrong order.’

  ‘Wrong order? You mean there are rules for Victorian striptease?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said with a giggle. ‘But surely it should be frock coat first, then collar and cuffs, and…so on.’

  ‘So on?’

  ‘I’m sure you can work it out.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, rising to his feet and standing in a louche, dandyish pose in front of me. ‘I’ll undress the way you want. And then I’ll undress you the way I want.’

  ‘Seems fair,’ I said.

  Oh, to have had the nerve to film him on my phone. I thought about doing it all the way through, but I couldn’t quite summon up the nerve.

  I had to make do with trying to burn the memories into my brain instead, in order to rerun the way he shrugged off his coat, unscrewed his cufflinks, wrenched off the lace collar – and all with his eyes fixed uncompromisingly on me.

  My throat was dry by the time the top button came undone, revealing the rest of his neck and his Adam’s apple. At this rate, I’d require intravenous rehydration by the time he got to his trousers.

  The white linen parted slowly, revealing his taut bare chest, then lean but well-muscled arms. He stood with one hand on a hip, twirling the shirt seductively, his mouth curved upwards on one side.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m half-naked. How about you?’

  Boots and tight black trousers advanced towards me, matador-like. He threw away the shirt and pounced, his palms flat on either side of my legs, his forehead touching mine.

  ‘I suppose you’ll need some help,’ he said.

  I nodded, my brow bone pushing at his as I did so.

  ‘Those killer heels first, then,’ he said, positioning himself at the foot of the bed to remove them. I winced and mewled as he released my hurt ankle, then laid it gently back on the bed.

  ‘Looks like a sprain,’ he remarked, frowning. ‘Nasty. Perhaps we shouldn’t…’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s painkillers in my bedside drawer. I’ll take a couple.’

  ‘I like a broad who knows what she wants,’ he said in a cod-noir Noo Yoik drawl. ‘Especially when what she wants is me.’ He pulled off the other shoe, grinning broadly. ‘All right, Foxy. Arms up.’

  The bra top was removed, leaving my fishnetted breasts exposed to his gaze. He made the most of it; in fact, his gaze wasn’t the only thing they were exposed to. His hands got their fair share too.

  He pulled off my elbow-length, fingerless lace gloves, then got to work on my velvet skirt. I had to lie down while he pulled it along my legs, revealing the very pair of knickers Mia Culpa’s first blog post had inspired me to buy. Lace patterned hold-ups were the last item on the dressing-for-sex menu. He seemed to want to keep those on, running a hand along my thigh, tracing the curls and curves of the lace down to my knee and then back up to the garter.

  ‘Mm, nice,’ he said, bending and kissing the bare flesh between hold-up and knicker edge. ‘You should have come out dressed like this.’

  ‘Er, I’m not sure that would have been a good idea,’ I said, but my breath was jerking the words around. He had his hands on my bum while his mouth and tongue moved ever closer to the inner sanctum inside the knickers.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, raising his face for a moment. ‘I’d have laid you on the table in that booth and given you what-for right there and then.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why,’ I said, but the image was tantalising enough to make me cringe with lust.

  He shimmied up my body until his face hovered over mine, his hands on my breasts, the hardness inside his trousers parked between my thighs.

  ‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have loved it,’ he crooned, dropping lascivious, licking little kisses on my lips. ‘You could have pretended to be a Victorian whore in a dark alley, at the mercy of a vampire lord. Or something. That’s the sort of thing that turns you on, isn’t it?’

  I pushed my tongue into his mouth and grabbed a fistful of his hair. We kissed savagely, our bodies writhing against each other. God, I needed that painkiller, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to stop this in order to get it.

  ‘You have no idea what turns me on,’ I whispered harshly, pushing his face away from mine.

  ‘Oh, haven’t I?’ he said, his eyes shining. He shoved one hand inside my knickers and put his long fingers to work, parting my pussy lips and tracing circles around my clit. ‘You’re very wet, Foxy. How do you account for that, if I don’t know what turns you on?’

  I couldn’t answer, I was all lost and drowning in the way his fingers worked me.

  ‘Mm,’ was about all that sprang to mind.

  Tom laughed, rubbing more persistently, getting the tip of a finger inside me.

  ‘Soaking,’ he said. ‘Getting these naughty knickers in a right state.’

  I squirmed, the lace of my knickers chafing my bottom, getting bunched in between my cheeks. I peered down to look at the outline of Tom’s hand, a busy mound inside the gossamer fabric. Seeing it like that turned me on even more. I jerked my hips upwards, wanting more of his fingers deeper inside.

  He took the hint and sank t
wo of them in, then three. I was exquisitely full, and his thumb still tended to my clit, drawing wave after wave of wetness out of me. I couldn’t have believed I had that much juice in me, if I hadn’t felt it pooling in the crack of my bottom and spreading a damp patch all over the back of my knickers.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I gasped, my heart hammering. I was going to come like this, under the hand of my bare-chested, booted master. Yes, he was the master and I was at his mercy…My mind filled in the details it needed to bring my orgasm closer.

  I shut my eyes and clutched at his arm, needing to steady myself before the wave crashed.

  He pulled his fingers out! All the way out of my knickers.

  My eyes flew open and I stared at him stupidly.

  ‘Wha? Whassup?’

  He leant right over me, his nose touching mine, his eyes demonic, and said, ‘Tell me about your secret computer stalker, Ella.’

  I wailed out my frustration.

  ‘You’re evil.’

  ‘I’m evil,’ he agreed, ‘and I’m relentless. And I want to keep you coming until you can’t see or move any more. But not until you tell me your little secret.’

  ‘This isn’t fair,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and he kissed me hard, flicking the tip of his tongue over mine, pushing it down as if to show me he would do the same to my resistance.

  ‘Don’t make me,’ I said, reaching down for the bulge in his trousers, in the hope that I might be able to distract him. ‘I want this.’

  He batted my hand away and held my wrist tight.

  God, it was turning me on even more. I didn’t remember him being this masterful the first time. Then again, we were both much drunker on that occasion.

  ‘You’ll get it,’ he promised. He kissed my neck, sucking on it, but not hard enough to leave a mark. Just enough to make me want to howl with need. ‘As much of it as you can handle. When you’ve told me what I want to know.’

  He flexed his hips, pushing his hard mound into the junction of my spread legs so that my clit tingled madly.

  ‘Please!’ I said, having to contend with his tongue on my nipples now, its tip probing past the fishnet. He was winning. I wasn’t going to be able to last much longer.