Explosive - Page 30

Sophie’d had enough. Even if he hadn’t.

He winced as he came, careful to keep the erupting semen from soiling her sheets. When he heard the shower shut off, he reached for some tissues from the bedside table and cleaned himself off. He’d thrown away the tissues and gotten back in bed by the time she came out of the bathroom.

She believed he was sleeping, he realized, as he watched her pad quietly toward the bureau. She carefully opened the top drawer. He said nothing, enjoying the chance to observe her while she was unaware. She dropped the towel that she’d wrapped around her. His eyebrows went up in interest when she bent to lace her feet through some clean panties. She silently opened another drawer and started to withdraw a T-shirt.

“Uh-uh. Come to bed, Sophie.”

She started and looked over her shoulder. She set the shirt on the dresser and walked toward him. He watched, appreciating the erotic contrast between her round hips and narrow waist . . . the slight sway of her breasts as she moved.

It was a good thing he had masturbated, he thought wryly as she slid beneath the sheet. She switched off the lamp and he pulled her into his arms, appreciating the shower-warmed softness of her skin in the air-conditioned room. The odor of some kind of fruity soap or lotion and Sophie just beneath it filled his nose. He settled her back against his chest and kissed the top of her head. Her soft sigh brushed across his forearm, making his skin prickle.

It didn’t matter that he’d just come. He wanted her again. Some powerful combination of grief, anxiety, and Sophie Gable had transformed him into something insatiable.

He determinedly closed his eyes and let the exhaustion that was never too far from the periphery of his consciousness claim him.

He dreamt of the summer following his parents’ murders—the summer he’d gone to live with the Carlisle family. In his dream, Rick and he were kids again in the outfield at Briar Park on a muggy summer day. Joseph—their Little League coach—was in the dugout, a powerful presence always at the periphery of Thomas’s awareness.

Thomas’s depression and grief over the sudden, inexplicable loss of his entire world had taken the form of surliness and anger. At ten years old, Thomas more resembled a teenage rebel than the vulnerable child that he was. Joseph had recruited him onto Rick’s baseball team in order to give him something to focus on other than the empty hole that had opened up in the center of his chest.

The only person in the Carlisle household he didn’t cop an attitude toward was Joseph. In the beginning, Iris Carlisle, Joseph’s wife, seemed at a loss for how to reach him. He’d wanted nothing to do with her maternal warmth and kindness. She wasn’t his mother, and Thomas resented her for reminding him of his mom with her concerned eyes and soft touches.

Joseph, on the other hand, had been a good decade and a half older than both Iris and his own parents. His thick mane of iron-gray hair, broad grin, and sparkling blue eyes made Thomas associate him more with a grand

father or uncle than the father figure he would have likely rejected out of grief from missing his own dad.

His adoptive father took pride in his working-class roots despite having risen through the ranks of the business world to be the owner of a large, prosperous trucking company. Joseph Carlisle was a man’s man, and it didn’t take a young Thomas long to discover that Joseph was impatient at Ricky’s lack of interest in sports and other stereotypical boyish activities. Ricky had no talent for sports, and that simple fact acted like a splinter under Joseph Carlisle’s skin.

Rick had been a year older than his adoptive brother, but Thomas was bigger, even when they first met. Not in weight—Rick actually still carried his baby fat, which he never lost until adolescence—but Thomas was the taller of the two. Thomas possessed a whole different set of genes than Ricky, genes that had made him enjoy and excel at the things Joseph Carlisle found worthwhile like sports. Ricky, on the other hand, would have been happy to be left alone, reading his novels of high adventure or dreaming up his own stories, which he recorded in a black notebook he kept carefully hidden beneath his bed.

Joseph Carlisle’s square jaw would have clamped tight and his eyes blazed with anger if he’d ever discovered that notebook full of his son’s dreams.

You need to get out of the house, get some fresh air . . . run around like a normal boy, Joseph used to growl in frustration. In his first few months at the Carlisle house, Thomas had smirked every time he’d heard Joseph admonish Ricky. He’d been so confused and bitter by the abrupt absence of the two pillars that had previously held up his entire world that he’d taken a kind of sick satisfaction from seeing the pinched, pained expression on Ricky’s face when he heard his father’s familiar litany.

In Thomas’s dream, he stood on the pitcher’s mound and followed a fly ball headed toward right field. Ricky staggered around on his chubby legs, trying to follow the ball as he squinted into the bright sunlight. Thomas’d once heard Joseph tell one of the assistant coaches that since Ricky was their weak spot, they’d put him in right field to diminish their losses.

Ricky looked sweaty and slightly panicked as the ball arced downward out of the sky. The back of Thomas’s neck prickled with the awareness of Joseph Carlisle’s observance from the dugout.

In the dream, he was able to sense his adopted father’s thoughts. Joseph knew his son was going to drop the ball. Thomas knew it, too.

A deep, nameless dread filled him.

“You can do it, Ricky! Concentrate,” he shouted at the dark-haired boy. In the dream, time stretched. Ricky glanced over at him. He seemed to gain confidence at something he saw. A smile tilted his lips.

He looked up and caught the dropping ball. Thomas whooped loudly.

“I’ll practice hitting with you later on,” he shouted when Ricky joined him at a jog, still clutching the ball victoriously. Love for his brother felt like it’d burst from his chest.

“You will? Really, Tom?” Ricky asked, surprised by his unexpected generosity. A flash of guilt stabbed through him. He’d been so rude and sarcastic to Ricky since he’d arrived at the Carlisle house, feeling like an unwelcome guest, an ugly, pulsating blemish on the smooth, lovely façade of the Carlisle family.

“Sure,” he assured Ricky as they ran toward the dugout and a watchful Joseph Carlisle. Thinking about Joseph’s reaction to Ricky catching the fly ball made him beam with happiness. “We’ll practice out back after dinner. I don’t care how many nights it takes. You’re gonna hit the ball wherever you want.”

Thomas started into wakefulness, the image of Ricky’s dawning smile fresh in his mind and spirit. He stared blankly out the curtained window, seeing the gray light of dawn. It took him a moment to recall where he was, but then he inhaled Sophie’s scent combined with that of the clean cotton sheets.

He just lay there for a few seconds, letting his pounding heart slow, allowing Sophie’s fragrance and the sensation of her warm, even breath falling on the skin of his chest soothe him.

What had occurred in the dream had never happened in real life, and that was what pained Thomas in that moment more than anything. In reality, he’d been rude and sullen to a hopeful, eager Ricky for over a year before he ever came out of his shell and befriended him. Thomas’d watched for nearly two whole summers while Ricky suffered during baseball season under the eye of his irritated, disappointed father.

Why had the ancient, nearly forgotten childhood regret risen so powerfully tonight?

Tags: Beth Kery Erotic
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