Harleigh House Ch. 02

For the next few days, Rose stepped warily around the house; but she didn't need to, because Ryan was avoiding her with equal diligence.

"What's wrong with you?" Lynnette snapped at her on the fourth day. "You jump every time someone comes in the room."

What was wrong was typical—typical enough that it made Rose feel foolish, more idiotic than she already did for having slept with a married man in the first place. She couldn't get the man out of her head.

That night, she and Ryan had lain naked together on the carpet of his office for a full four hours, kissing and talking and fucking until it had gotten very dark and Rose's phone had begun to buzz with text messages from worried housemates. He had drawn into himself, as they'd gotten dressed. She could still see the hunted expression on his face as he'd seen her to her car and watched her pull through the gates of his house out of the driveway.

" You're not going to last very long like that once Jillian gets back." Rose started at Lynnette's warning.

Jillian was on a week-long trip to visit friends in northern California; but Rose knew Lynnette was right. When whirlwind Jillian stormed back into the mansion, in a blaze of rage and self-importance, Rose's nerves would shatter. And she was dreading that moment.

But then, too, some part of her—some small, petty part—was looking forward to Jillian's return, to the secret that she would have that would blunt the worst of Jillian's grandstanding. She had heard Jillian's husband's whispers—curses, litanies—while he'd been pumping away inside her, and seen in his eyes a—she thought to herself—a... dawning, of some kind.

But maybe she was just flattering herself. He hadn't so much as looked at her all week.

"I'm—I'm fine," she told Lynnette. "Just haven't been sleeping well. And that morning commute drives me crazy."

"It's a nightmare," Lynnette agreed. "You wouldn't catch me dead on the Edens at morning rush hour, that's for sure." She ruffled through the papers in her folder and fished out Rose's daily task sheet.

"Special cleaners are coming this afternoon at two to wax the basketball court, and I'll need you down there to supervise them. I also need you to inspect all of the pool tables to see which need to be re-felted, and whether any cue tips need replacing. And then you can get back to work cataloging the service numbers for the electronics in the guest houses."

"Right," Rose took the paper, picked up her notepad and clipboard, and was off to the rec room to do a job that she ordinarily would have had little patience for—seriously, re-felting two-year-old pool tables?—but which, in this world, was a perfect par for the course.

What will I say when I do see Ryan? she was wondering, as she walked down. Will he speak to me? When I ran into him in the garage on Monday, he just clenched his jaw and looked away, and it was so clear he was waiting for me to leave. She rolled her neck, tense from days of worrying about the wisdom of the sex she'd had on Ryan's office floor. Some of her muscles, in her stomach and back, were still sore from the sex itself. I hate myself for how much I want to see him. For how much I just want him.

She pressed the entry code for the rec room automatically, and then used her hip to open the door. And then gasped and dropped her pen and clipboard in a clatter at the same moment the crack of a cue ball against the thirteen sounded.

"Ryan," she breathed, letting her eyes drink him in for a moment before she blinked and composed her expression. "I mean—Mr. Harleigh."

Ryan had tensed when she walked in, but now moved to lean back against the wall behind him, his arms crossed over his chest, pool cue in hand like a spear. But if his posture was defensive, his words were not. "Ryan," he corrected her, almost gently. "A name you know perfectly well you can use, Rose."

Because you screamed it when you came, they both silently added.

"I... right. Ryan. I need to inspect the pool tables for re-felting," she told him crisply.

Ryan frowned. "The damned things were new two years ago."

She almost laughed, at that. "No kidding." She drew in a short breath, and then the tension just flowed right out of her. She and Ryan were here, now. She grinned. "I don't know if you've noticed that my whole job is built around the idea that every physical thing in your house is being held together only by the ineluctable force of Lynnette's foresight."

He grinned at that, and let his arms fall to his sides. "I was wondering why we needed an estate manager." He shrugged. "But when Jillian insists..."

Both of them froze as his wife's name fell on their ears.

Rose tried to recover. "Yes, well. She's definitely a force of nature..."

They went silent, at that, contemplating each other for long moments. And then they both spoke at once:

"I'm sorry—"

"Do you reg—"

Ryan cut in. "Do I what?"

"I... God, this is awkward. I was going to say... I was going to say, do you regret what happened? And, you know you don't have to worry I'd ever tell Jillian, right?"

Ryan tilted his head at her, squinting, and then shook his head rapidly, as if to clear it. "No, I'm not worried that you'd tell Jillian. You're not the type, obviously."

That word—"obviously"—warmed Rose's heart for reasons she didn't quite have time to identify.

"Besides," Ryan continued, "it probably wouldn't change anything about my marriage if you did tell her."

"Because she's used to you having affairs?"

"No!" Ryan's fist clenched more tightly around the pool stick. "No, I—I've never actually done that before. I wouldn't have thought I was capable. Actually, I'm having a difficult time coming to grips with myself as a person who would... who would..."

"Have sex with someone other than his wife?" He nodded slowly. "Then you do regret it."

"Regret? I wouldn't say that." The pool cue was in both fists now, and his knuckles were white around it. "I do have some regrets." Blue clarity was in his eyes, and now he regarded her steadily above his clenched fists. "I regret that I let you leave instead of keeping you in my bed all that night. I regret that I didn't take photographs so I could look at your beautiful body again—instead of relying on these dreams I keep having, where you come to me, wet and willing, night after night after night! I regret I didn't get a chance on that night to see your beautiful mouth sucking hard on my cock as I struggled not to shove it straight down your throat. I regret that I can't hike up your skirt and pull off your panties and take you on this pool table right now. And I regret," his voice dropped huskily, "God help me, I regret that I'm married." He swallowed. "I didn't just tell you that. Or—I know I did. But you have to know that it doesn't matter. I am married." And a deep breath. "So regrets, or the lack of them, are beside the point."

Rose's knees were shaking slightly as she crossed the distance between them, stopping less than a foot from him—close enough that she could feel his breath on her face.

"In those dreams that you keep having," she said softly, "do I ever hike up my own skirt—pull off my own panties—for you?" She enacted her own words as she spoke, lifting her panties from around her ankles with one finger and then draping them around the pool cue in his hands. "One less regret, Ryan. You can have me again. Right. Now."

The pool cue in his hands snapped in half as he attempted to ease the tension building up in his body. "Don't do this to me. Please." The two pieces of the pool cue clattered to the floor.

"It doesn't have to be about anything other than the fact that we want each other, badly. That we make each other feel..." Rose swallowed the word "whole." "Good," she finished lamely.

His hands clenched around her arms convulsively and he jerked her to him. "Oh, God," he muttered, "just to feel those tight nipples against my chest..." He sucked in a breath of air, and looked down at her. Then another. His chest was almost heaving as he breathed in her lust—and then, very slowly, slid one hand down her body, below the hem of her skirt, and then up. Up to her bare pussy, which was wet and clenched around his finger as he slid it very, very slowly inside her very tight body.

And then out again. "I can't," he said simply, and stepped back and turned around, his shoulders squaring.

Rose was quivering. She'd never been in a state like this before, never been so worked up by a man that she was bare of her ever-ready pride. "Please," she whispered.

Ryan's shoulders sagged. "You have no idea what I owe to Jillian," he said heavily, and so softly she could barely hear him. "To my wife." He rubbed a weary hand over his eyes as though to scrub her image off of them. "I have to go. Believe me, it's for the best." A moment later, the door clicked closed behind him.

Rose stood, her mouth hanging open, staring at the closed door behind him for long seconds. Then she recovered herself, stepping quickly and embarrassedly back into her panties, surveying the broken pool cue in disbelief. She picked up the pieces.

"Well, at least there's something down here that actually needs to be fixed," she muttered.

There was also something low in the pit of her stomach that was anxious and thrilled. Whether or not he'll take me, he wants me, and badly, she told herself. It was a kind of consolation, the kind that eased her. At least, eased her mind.

Ryan was staring out the window of his office a little after three p.m. when he saw the floor cleaner's truck pull away. He'd known they were coming because lately, every morning, he checked the house's domestic calendar electronically. "I'll go see how they did on the court floor," he decided. It wasn't like he was getting any work done in his office, anyway.

Working there had been impossible since he'd had Rose on the ledge and the floor—his mouth in her cunt, her cunt on his cock. He'd stroked her legs after the last time he fucked her, and she'd told him about how she'd "trained" as a kid for the Tour de France by riding a five-speed around her parents' neighborhood. He'd told her about how he'd rescued the paneling in the room from an old church that had been torn down near Haymarket Square.

He knew he needed to stay away from the room. The memories were sharpest, there, and Ryan had become obsessed with them, poring over each moment, each sensation, every hitch of her breath and tightening of her muscles around his dick that he could remember.

Maybe shooting around a little bit will clear my head up a little.

The court's floor, when he got there, was shiny and even, and Ryan made a mental note to tip the company well when he paid the bill. Or was Lynnette paying it out of household accounts? He never knew, anymore, how the money was flowing inside his own house.

Ryan crossed the court to the equipment closet to dig out a basketball, noting idly that there was a light on under the door. But as he neared, he heard small, muffled sounds coming from the other side.

"What the hell—?" he jerked open the door.

And then his cock hardened instantly. There on the floor, panties off, skirt hiked up again to her stomach, was Rose. And there was—something—there was, oh God, the butt of a pool cue clenched in her hand as she worked it in and out of her vagina furiously.

"Oh, God," she yelped. "Ryan!" The cue fell on the floor, still visibly slick with her juices, as she scrambled to her feet, smoothing down her skirt. "I am so sorry. I was just... I had to... God, I don't know what came over me."

Ryan was staring at the broken pool cue at her feet, mesmerized, but he looked up at her last words. "Don't you?" he asked softly, kicking the door closed behind him and advancing slowly toward her. He put his hands on her waist, pulling down the zipper on her skirt and letting it pool on the floor. "I do." His hands moved, almost mechanically, to the buttons of her blouse, which he pulled off easily before unclasping her bra. "Your pussy got teased earlier," he whispered in her ear, "and it needed satisfaction. Isn't that right?"

"Y-y-yes," Rose stammered. Ryan lowered his hand to his own zipper and lowered it, reaching in to free his straining dick. She wet her lips nervously.

"It just needed," Ryan whispered as he backed Rose steadily to the wall, "to get as close to my cock as it could. Right, Rose?"

Her shoulderblades were pressed flat against the cold concrete wall. His hands were hot on her hips as he bent his knees and then pressed his dick up into her folds, teasing the entrance to her vagina playfully. "Yes," she hissed urgently. "That's what it needed. What I needed. Fuck me. Please, Ryan."

His eyes clouded over, grew tormented for one instant. Then he squeezed them shut, and when they opened again, the shadows were gone. "Yes, ma'am," he said, almost teasingly, and hoisted her up against the wall to a height that suited him before pushing in with one hard thrust.

"AAAAAAAAAAH!" Rose let out a short scream.

"That's it, baby? That's what you needed?" He began sawing in and out, scraping upward along her g-spot, enjoying the wet gush that leaked around him as he did, refusing to think about anything other than the feel of her on his cock, the bounce of her breasts, the look on her face.

"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes," Rose was chanting, almost insensible, as she got fucked exactly the way she needed. He was pushing into her harder and harder, almost angrily. Her body, pinned against the wall, was wholly open; her fingers clenched into his back as he talked to her.

"What if somebody other than me had come in and seen you with that pool cue in your cunt?" She clenched around him, at that, and he bit back a moan, no longer sure he was fully in his right mind. "I won't have it, Rose. You're mine." He swiveled his dick around inside of her, then froze there. "Are you listening to me?"

Her head had fallen back in a low moan, but she raised it now, to stare it him with glazed eyes that showed her past comprehending him. "Please," she whispered.

He let out a breath. "OK. It's OK, baby." He began to move in her again, and her hips bucked between him and the wall. "I know you couldn't help it." He bit her shoulder as he pumped, then drew back to stare fixedly into her eyes. "I know."

And then his mind was lost as well, as they writhed furiously against the concrete, seeking in each other the satisfaction that neither had known before knowing the other, and couldn't live without knowing now.