HoldingtheCards Read online

  Josh swung up in front of her, ready with a peanut as Isabel lifted her trunk up to him to retrieve the expected treat.

  “If it pleases the lovely lady,” Marcus observed, “we might go to the beach first. Mornings are the best swimming times.”

  “It pleases me,” Lauren agreed, running a fingertip along Josh’s bare spine and enjoying the reaction of goose pimples along his flesh.

  God, she had locked down her hormones for nearly a year, since Jonathan, and now she couldn’t keep her hands off this man. Maria had warned her that celibacy for one of her sexual nature would result in an explosion of “felonious proportions”. Lauren had laughed at her, until now.

  However, Josh didn’t appear to be objecting to her attentions. She recalled with a flush of heat the impressive evidence beneath her hand, matched by the heated steel of his eyes.

  “Beach, Isabel,” Josh requested. The elephant agreeably started down the steep drive to Lisette’s home. Lauren laid her hands on Josh’s waist just above the line of his jeans and observed that she had an excellent view of his ass because of the way they rode low on his hips. Definitely not the gross exhibitionism of an overweight plumber. More like the provocatively loose “modesty” drape around the hips of a young Roman god.

  Isabel reached the bottom of the drive, but instead of continuing down the slope, she went right and onto a narrow trail that began to climb upward.

  Josh’s shoulders lifted in a sigh. “New York taxi driver,” he reminded Lauren.

  “I almost prefer her to take the circuitous route,” Marcus chuckled.

  His voice came from somewhere below her, rather than under her ear as she expected. Lauren twisted about to see him lying on his back, his long legs bent and swinging just behind hers to keep his balance. Lauren considered the way his posture strained the twill of his shorts over his groin and then, in the leisurely manner of a true sensualist, let her eyes graze up the equally appreciable ground of his bare, muscular chest. He was bronzed, not quite as dark as Josh, but still a nice compliment to his dark silky waves of hair.

  He glanced down the line of his body at her, making it clear he knew what she had been doing, and grinned. He extended a hand. “Come down here. See why Isabel is smarter than the rest of us.”

  Lauren agreeably lay back; letting his hands on her shoulders guide her. She giggled as he snorted, caught her under her armpits and hauled her back about half a foot. “It may feel like a comfortable cushion at the moment,” he said sternly, “But that’s not the best place for your hard head. It makes a better neck rest.”

  Lauren nestled the back of her skull into the lower part of his abdomen, still smiling. She settled her hands on the armrests his thighs provided and followed the direction of his pointed finger.

  A canopy of vines stemmed with broad leaves wove above her in various shades of green, from mint to a rich dark color that was almost grape. Spreading branches displayed splashes of color, the exotic blooms of a jungle environment. The rising sun sent streaks of light through the foliage to illuminate the pockets of light morning mist in the close air of the forest. One moment the early breeze shivered across her skin, and a breath later, a sunbeam stroked it away.

  There was noise. No, that was wrong. Noise meant chaos, jobs, streets, cars, and too many people, all wanting something. This was a rhythm, like the movement of waves, a serene pattern expressed audibly, in the conferences of birds, the rustle of the tree dwellers, creatures foraging and chattering. Beneath the sounds, there was a hush, a cavern of noiselessness that Lauren associated with a Presence, something that lived quietly in Nature, but spoke only through its creatures.

  It was like being in a church, she realized. It was spiritual.

  “Come down here,” she reached for Josh. He obliged, adjusting forward, so when he lay back between her spread thighs, his head rested just below her breasts. His hands, like hers with Marcus, slid down to rest on her thighs for stability. The base of his neck pressed against her crotch, and that pressure sent a pleasurable spiral through her belly beneath his head. She raised one hand from Marcus’s leg and laid it on Josh’s shoulder, stroking his hair and the side of his throat as Marcus did much the same to her. Marcus was a true Dom, assuming all within range of his fingers were subject to his fondling, but she wasn’t complaining. He would have made a good sheik, she’d warrant. She liked the feel of his long fingers stroking her hair. She ran her knuckles along the ridge of Josh’s shoulder, drew a circle on his pectoral, idly traced his jugular. It pleased her when he raised his chin to give her better access. She kept up the motion, all the while looking up at the world above them. It was a world that existed without self-analysis, falling into a natural pattern without question of that pattern, of the wrong and right of it. It was much how this felt, the three of them together, part of it, and at least for the moment, Lauren knew peace.

  Chapter Twelve

  Isabel eventually decided to turn and head down from the higher elevations of the island. Lauren sat up at Josh’s urging when they reached a clear spot, in order to see the panorama of ocean stretching out below them, the sun glittering off the waves.

  Lauren slid her hands around him and scooted up close, outlining his hips and thighs with the lengths of her own. She was gratified when he laid his hands over hers on his chest and tugged her a bit closer, so her breasts were shelved against his bare back.

  “Wow,” she said, of the view before them.

  His fingers tightened over hers and he nodded.

  The ocean stretched below them, the perfect blue of postcards but even more vibrant. Its white foam was the same crystal sparkle as snow. As her eyes traveled to the horizon, the green-blue glass darkened into turquoise, sparkling in a dazzling tapestry of light, paying homage to the sun. It was perfection in the way only Nature could pull it off. The air brought her the smell of brine and seaweed, contributing to the view’s arresting impact.

  “Makes you wish they had never eaten that damned apple, doesn’t it?” Josh murmured.

  She pressed her chin to the point of his shoulder. “Do you believe that story?” she asked.

  He lifted her head with a shrug.

  “Sounds just like us,” he said.

  Lauren couldn’t help but agree. Unable to accept Eden, man had to delve into its one place of darkness and try to prove his mastery.

  She spent a great deal of time analyzing the art forms of power. She had learned that domination could and did sculpt the factors within one’s control for pleasure, but mutual pleasure was the ultimate prize. If done right, the Master or Mistress reached a point where he or she could let go, and magic took over. Then there was no more need for games or thinking, just simple existence. That had been the miracle God gave Adam and Eve in Eden, dominion as a gift, not a tool.

  “It makes a person feel…so small,” she said. He brushed her cheek with his jaw.

  “But in a good way,” he echoed her feelings. “Like there’s nothing you’ve done that can’t be fixed.”

  “Or forgiven.”

  “Or healed,” Marcus suggested. Lauren twisted to see him sitting up, his arms braced against Isabel’s rump to prop him while he watched their interplay with as much aesthetic appreciation as Lauren had displayed when gazing at the view before her. “I brought sand buckets, by the way.”

  He had the face of an angel and the mind of Lucifer, she decided, with a quick grin. “Plastic shovels too, I hope.”

  “Of course. No trip to the beach is complete without them.”

  Lauren turned back and squeezed Josh to her, pressing her palms over his rock hard abdomen. He worked his fingers around one of her hands to lift it and surprised her with a tender nip on her knuckles. The moment needed nothing more.

  Isabel raised her head and trumpeted as they gained the beach, like a bus driver announcing a stop. Marcus slid off first and Lauren slid down into his grasp, holding onto Josh’s forearm and bringing her knee back over the elephant’s back. Once having her, howeve
r, Marcus did not put her down, instead tossing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry with surprising strength. He clasped his arms over her thighs to keep her struggling body in place as he backpedaled.

  “Got to catch me to get her back, Josh,” he cheerfully challenged the man still up on the elephant.

  He pivoted and took off, more bloody quick on his feet than a New York art dealer had the right to be, proving he hadn’t lost his Iowa farm boy roots, though an Iowa farm boy would have given her an advantage by wearing underwear. She could have caught the elastic under the loose, twisting waistband of his jeans and yanked the fabric up to constrict his balls and make it a more uncomfortable run.

  Even without her sabotage attempt, Josh’s long legs and athletic build, and the extra weight Marcus was carrying, were eating up the ground between them. Rescue was imminent; though she was laughing so hard she was afraid that would do her in first. Then Marcus feinted right and heaved her into the air. Lauren had time for a short scream before she landed with a resounding splash in a crashing breaker. The two men dived under it on either side of her.

  She surfaced, snorting water and chuckles, and pounced on Marcus as he emerged, shoving him back under. His hands gripped at her swimsuit and she shrieked and twisted away, but not before he got hold of the back of her and, in a deft move, unhooked the fastening.

  Lauren spun away from him, and backed into Josh. He caught her about the waist, not realizing her predicament, and his knuckles beneath the water grazed the bare undercurves of her breasts. His touch stilled and Lauren stopped breathing, stopped moving, waiting to see what he would do.

  His hands left her rib cage, moved upward. She felt their movement by the flow of the water, like fish gliding around her, just above the surface of her skin. He found the floating fabric of her bikini top, while his cheek pressed against her temple. Lauren leaned back against him as he pulled the fabric back down, fitting it into place by light, maddening touches on the sides of her breasts. His grip slid to where the two portions of the clasping straps came out of the triangles and he pulled them around her, nudging her forward, and re-hooked the suit at the center of her back. His fingers lingered there, on the sensitive indentation of spine.

  “Now, Josh,” Marcus winked at her. “She might be a European girl. You never gave her a choice.”

  Lauren splashed at him and moved away from them both, turning so she could float on her back in the water. “This is incredible,” she murmured, trying to take her mind off the raging inside her body and the unsettling mystery of the man causing it. “How can you bear to go back to New York, Marcus?”

  “I use this place as my reward for good behavior. And since I am rarely good,” he tugged on her foot and she kicked playfully at him, “I don’t deserve to be here for more than a short time anyhow. However, keep in mind, dear heart, that one man’s Eden,” his gaze flicked to Josh, “is another man’s self-imposed Purgatory.”

  “Surf with me until we’re hungry enough for lunch,” Lauren said, not wanting the shadow that crossed Josh’s face to linger. “And no adult thoughts,” she decided, shooting Marcus an emphatic look. “You’re six, I’m seven, and Josh is five. We have no responsibilities, no past, no history, no baggage. If we had any white sunblock, I’d paint it on all our noses.”

  “And there are so many other fun places to put it,” Marcus chided. At her quelling look, he grinned. “I’m a rather mature six year old. Do we get to make sand castles?”

  “Absolutely.” She dove into the next wave and then swam away from them like a dolphin. Her ankle still hurt, but in the buoyancy of the water, she felt unencumbered by the injury and more certain of herself. She spent the next hour playing tag, dodging under waves and enjoying impromptu splash fights until her ploy succeeded and they were all three laughing, red-eyed and relaxed as children in truth. Even the sexual tension melted away before the joy of pure play.

  She couldn’t outlast their energy, though, so when she was doing more floating than swimming, Marcus made the suggestion they retreat to the beach and open their picnic basket. Two wet men, bronzed and muscled in shorts plastered to their bodies, made an agreeable escort to shore. Per her request, they let her limp, testing the strength of the ankle, but they stayed close. Their readiness to catch her if she toppled one way or the other both amused and touched her.

  Marcus had pulled the blanket from Isabel’s back before she wandered back into the forest on more elephantine pursuits. Now he spread it out to form a table for bread, cheese, wine and grapes. There did not seem much need for conversation, all of them wet and panting from their exertions in the water, so they ate, gazing out to the sea with their own thoughts for awhile, and listening to the random cries of the few seabirds keeping them company on the beach. Lauren reflected that she had not felt so relaxed in a long time, and watched idly as Josh picked up a handful of dry sand and let it trickle over her calf, following its progress until he had created a small cone leaning against the relaxed calf muscle.

  Marcus’s attention was drawn to it as well, and a light came to his eyes that Lauren was beginning to anticipate, with a mixture of delight and trepidation.

  “I’m ready to build a sandcastle now,” he announced, taking a swallow of wine.

  “Mmm.” Her eyes were half closed behind her sunglasses as she turned her head to look at him. They had let the blanket be the table, but she had passed on the folding beach chair he had brought in a duffel bag. Instead, she lay stretched out comfortably on the sand, wiggling until its hills and valleys supported her concave points comfortably. “I’m taking a nap.”

  “Excellent.” He rummaged in the bag and produced a large purple plastic sand bucket with a bright yellow handle. Lauren chuckled. “One of Lisette’s?”

  “No, my dear girl. I bought it at one of those tacky little beach places before I came across. You can’t be at the beach without a sand bucket.”

  “You know,” she said, “They have those molds now that are shaped like castles.”

  Marcus made a horrified face. “Cheating. As blasphemous as copying the Mona Lisa. Every work must be an original to be called art. It’s like re-creating a movie or song someone else has made famous. I have more respect for an original piece of crap than I do for someone trying to ride on the coattails of someone else’s success. At least they made an effort to create rather than being an artistic copy machine. It’s just re-manufacturing, piggybacking the genius of the original artist. Parasitic art industry, not worth our notice.”

  He stomped toward the ocean.

  “You know, he should open up more,” she commented. “Express how he really feels.”

  Josh chuckled somewhere to Lauren’s right. “I keep telling him that.”

  Lauren slanted him a glance over her glasses and grinned. “But not everyone can be as talkative as you are.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Here we are,” Marcus returned with a bucket sloshing seawater. As he placed it on the sand, Lauren saw the bucket was a half-and-half mix of sand and water. Her scrutiny turned to wariness as Marcus dropped to his knees beside her.

  “You said I could make a sand castle,” he reminded her. “I’m partial to drip castles.”

  Lauren caught on and scrambled to a sitting position. “Oh no,” she shook her head. “You’ll get my swimsuit all nasty.”

  “So take it off.”

  The trap closed with an audible snick, reflected in the devilish challenge in his eyes. Lauren glanced at Josh. She couldn’t see his thoughts behind his sunglasses and she reached over, drew them off with both hands so her fingers brushed the soft hair at his temples. His gray eyes were almost as opaque as the lenses. “Do you like to make drip castles, too?” she asked, eyebrow raised.

  “I’m developing an interest.”

  The warm breeze from land whispered up the column of her spine, lifting her hair off her neck and spilling it forward, over her breast. His eye followed it, and her nipple tightened at his regard, hardening and
lifting further at the responsive darkening around the pupil.

  Lauren drew in a breath and looked out at the sea, that blissful scenic reminder that she was in a different place, could be whoever or whatever she wanted to be here. She didn’t have to be afraid. After all, she was the one holding the cards. They had both said so.

  “Okay,” she said. “But you better not let me get sunburned.”

  Marcus chuckled and lifted her hair, giving her hands the freedom to work off the tie at the neck. “Believe me, dearest, I’m sure neither one of us wants to slick your bare body down with aloe vera gel at the end of the day.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said dryly. “Just keep in mind how much fun it will be, oiling me down while I’m screaming, ‘Ouch!’, ‘stop that’, ‘No! Don’t touch there!’“ She felt Josh’s hand on her back, unfastening the strap, and shivered as his fingers touched her skin.

  She closed her hand on the front of the swimsuit as it came loose, but only to deliberately pull it away from her body and rise.

  “If you’ll allow me,” Josh nodded at her bikini bottoms and shorts from his kneeled position. “I can take those off so you won’t have to put so much weight on your other ankle.”

  Lauren pivoted partially toward him, to study his face and to give him her profile, her raised chin, the curve of her throat, the sun gleaming on the spherical surface of one bare breast. She nodded her permission.

  He stood up on his knees, which brought him just above eye level with her chest, so close that his breath touched that bare breast and rippled across the skin, raising the fine hairs on it. He gazed at her breasts a moment, unmoving, content to look with silent, obvious pleasure at their weight and shape. His attention slid along the outer curve of the right one, from where it began its crescent just at her armpit, down to its fullest point, resting on her rib cage, the dark mauve nipple full and soft as a pussy willow bloom.