Old Temptations: Dad's Best Friend Romance Novella (Experienced Men Book 1) Read online

  The music suddenly morphs into a slow number and the floor fills with couples getting into the smooch, penning us in. I'm certain I feel a swelling against my ass and push back to grind against his mound but Carl unwinds me from his hold. We're facing each other, his one hand still clasping mine leaving me speechless. Our eyes meet and his traps me with his challenge buried there. Asking. He knows what he wants and he wants to know what I want.

  “Finally I get to go cheek to cheek with the most beautiful girl.” He reels me in and I don't resist one iota. The current of electricity passes back and forth between our hips the instant I step into his embrace and feel his arms swirl around me.

  He settles me then pulls me gently in, that bit closer to his solid wall of chest as the jagged shock of him flies through my center. A collision of sensations hits me all at once, powered by the aroma of his skin as I settle my face into his neck. He bends our joined arms at the elbow to rest out entwined hands on the pillow of my breast. I hitch a small gasp at his fingers crushing around mine positioned so close to the animated nipple.

  His breath snags against my chest and I realize I've been holding mine taut since this slow dance began. Eager to feel him. The secret part of him. The part I want to possess as mine and only mine. The fingertips of my free hand curl at the back of his neck, softly stroking the taut thick skin where his hair meets the sensitive part. It seems as intimate as touching that same area in his pants. I shift myself slightly to settle closer against his powerful body and my thigh brushes against the enormous bulge he's rocking.

  I only have a second to feel enthralled that he still gets that way. For me. When he immediately shifts smooth as ever away from the connection. Showers of bright sparks descend through my body to settle between my legs. I have to make my desire known to him because he won't take the initiative. He'd never try to take advantage of his baby's feelings. The time is now.

  Hidden by the crowd of swaying couples all around us, cocooning us in our secret world, I tilt my pelvis firmly forward to connect to his enticing swell which is rock hard now. I feel delicious pulsing from the bulge, surely craving release. I did this. This is all me. I press harder against him and inhale his dusky scent.

  “Blair,” he rasps in a tone that gets caught in his throat.

  He sounds dangerous. Like he's sending a warning to back off and yet his arm betrays him, encircling me just that bit tighter, tugging me closer. His hand slides lower down the hollow of my back, halting where my crevasse opens and barely catching itself from cupping my full ass cheek. I swallow the party of crickets in my throat as he squeezes my trapped hand.

  As we sway, the back of his wrist grazes the side of my breast and sends pulsations of need to the nipple which I press out more intently against his solid chest. Fuck, I wish he'd take the entire mound in his fist and squeeze out the hungry pressure. I need him to pinch out the tingling rise in the peaks.

  “Carl,” I whisper and inhale a long long drink of the oaky smell of his skin lying rampant beneath the heady cologne. The pheromones gush through my senses lifting me to a pitch of euphoria. Certain male perfumes elicit the desire for sexy times. The aroma of Carl's skin does that for me.

  “You know what you're doing to me now,” he moans, his breath laboring. “You aren't a little girl any longer.”

  “I knew then,” I say. “If I could have enticed you into stripping me naked the last time we were on a dance floor I would have done it without a single hesitation.”

  “You could have enticed me. That was the fucking problem.” he grits out, shifting his head side to side to nuzzle through the strands of hair and connect to the skin behind my ear. When the side of his fat upper lip brushes my flesh, the electrical sparks are breathtaking.

  “I never knew desire between two people was a problem,” I murmur. I have never felt so lightheaded. Carl's physical power is holding me motionless in his hold.

  I can only move when he permits it. He needs to be directing more intimate shifting. The kind I only dreamed in my fertile imagination without ever truly believing it could morph into reality. He's leading but I have full control.

  The floor is mine as they say and I'm going to take advantage this time. I feel a rush of confidence that almost makes me beg him; Take me out of here. I need your dick sliding deep into me. I need your mouth covering my hole. I need your cock circling in my lips. I've needed it all for the last five years and I can't wait one more minute.

  Then Carl's lips brush the folds of my ear with regret. “It is when one person is old enough to be the father and one is like a daughter.”

  “But I'm not your daughter,” I protest. I'm not letting this moment get away again.

  “No you’re a stunningly beautiful and talented woman with her life ahead of her.”

  “Likewise. I can't believe someone hasn’t snapped you up in the last five years.”

  “You ruined me for any other woman. Blair. Stop. We can't do this.”

  “Seems like we're already doing it.” I thrust a little harder against his amazing solid mass that hasn’t receded in all these minutes and if anything has become more urgent and insistent.

  “Fuck, you are driving me insane,” he groans lightly into my hair.

  “Likewise. I've spent the years waiting for a man like you to come along.”

  “You have no idea how long I've been waiting,” he burrs into my hair.

  “Fuck, I wish I was wearing a sexier outfit.” That might tip the balance to convincing him.

  “I wish you weren’t wearing any outfit but your skin. Even your hand is as soft as habotai silk.”

  Only a man as hip as Carl would know how to distinguish between types of silk.

  “This is the first time you've ever touched more than my hand,” I murmur. His lips on my neck are driving direct between my legs and the throbbing there is like a jackhammer of desire.

  “I wish I could touch every part of you. I want to slide against every beautiful pore of your perfect silky body. Inside and out.”

  Oh Christ, what have I done?

  Carl just said he wants to feel my insides. I almost drag him off the floor right there. Like girls from my class do with guys at parties, just pull them into a bedroom, a bathroom, a semi-darkened corner to take care of overwhelming need. I totally get it now.

  The urge becomes so hungry it demands an immediate fix. Carl isn't the kind of man you bang in a hotel john. I could never pull up my underwear and come back to a party after fucking Carl Hardison. I need him pressed skin to skin for an entire lifetime.

  “This is definitely as much fun as we could have with our clothes on,” I quip, “but I'd like to get to option number two soon.”

  “I need you alone where I can explore what I've been missing,” he growls.

  The lights come up halfway and the band is already packing up like they can't wait to get out of here. I know the feeling. I need to grab my own gear and be with Carl someplace where I can jump his bones. And he can explore literally everything he's missed.

  We unpeel and I eagerly ask; “Where are you staying?”

  The lust in his half-hooded eyes recedes faster than a man caught red-handed.

  “With your father,” he says at exactly the same moment the man appears beside us.

  “Put my daughter down, you dirty old man and come over here.” My dad claps his hand on Carl's shoulder, wresting possession away from me. “There's someone I want you to meet,” he says.

  Carl does as ordered and drops my hand like it's a hot potato on the fourth of July. When he walks away from me, the place at my tail still sears with his hand print.

  I watch as my father pulls Carl to join the two twenty-year-olds he was seated beside for the ceremony. Daddy's as bad as the bridesmonsters, selecting their night's entertainment. A sharp pang of loss hits me in the stomach but I know Carl wouldn’t be attracted to either of the simpery giggling women he's politely greeting with a grin that doesn’t reach the eyes. They belong to me and drag b
ack to possess me. I flash a smile. But Carl looks away quickly and avoids finding our exclusive gaze again.

  What the fuck?

  I can hardly go over there and claim my man from under my father's nose. Nor can I loiter around the hotel ballroom which has emptied out with people falling into each other in their haste to get somewhere and get naked. Filled with misery, I haul my camera bags out to the parking lot elevator and head down to find my car. I'm trudging across the lot weighed down by so much more than my equipment when the bag in my hand is lifted. I turn to Carl, as he lifts the second sack from my shoulder.

  “They're heavy,” I mutter, forgetting the strapping arm muscles for an instant and feeling idiotic as he tosses them over his back like they're empty.

  “I think I got it.” His smile stretches and he takes possession of my hand to walk me across the basement lot.

  I pop the trunk of my less than shiny vintage orange Datsun and see Carl looking at it with his usual amused interest. He takes in everything going on around him. I haven’t seen him distracted by his phone updates once all night. He carefully stows my equipment then turns all that focus on me.

  “Where to now?” he asks. Then he leans down, his mouth coming about three inches from mine so I am that far from pulling his lips between mine and sucking that full top one into mine. My breasts crane towards him, demanding to be rung in his grip.

  “Asking for a friend?” I reply.

  Is this something more? Is he suggesting he come back to my studio apartment in downtown that is covered with pages torn from magazines, notes, ideas, and general crapola where my mind is too interested in creating to remember cleaning?

  “I think there's something we need to discuss,” he says.

  “There is something we need but talking hardly covers it,” I say, filling my gaze with meaning, challenging him to meet me on this.

  It's okay.

  I'm not a teenager. Just.

  This has been going on too long and we both know it. Where ever he's got to get back to, I want to claim him before he escapes again. I hope he's forgotten my father because I certainly have. This is something I've wanted for years and I do not intend to let him get away without fulfilling my fantasy even for one night.

  If he's going to do another post-wedding disappearance, I need him to satiate my agony of hunger first. His eyes are holding me in a lock as tight as his slow-dance embrace. The lust is stamped across his pupils pummeling into mine and I'm about to reach both hands to drag his face down to mine when someone calling my name from across the lot snaps me out of that delicious fantasy yet again.

  “Blair, wait up.”

  Shit.

  I forgot Josh needs a ride home.

  Chapter FIVE

  “Carl Hardison, Josh Hyslop,” I make the introductions, wishing with every mean bone in my body that the earth would crack and swallow one of them up.

  “Good evening Mr Hardison, Sir,” Josh sticks out a hand like he's meeting my father and it hits me that he's again put Carl into that bracket of older men requiring respect. Even though it's tinged with a touch of disdain, the false esteem, calling him 'Sir' like he's the school principal. Josh doesn’t even call our professor 'Sir'. He uses his first name, Pablo.

  Carl has never had an age for me. When you're a kid I guess all adults are just that, grown up and different, not segmented into decades. He was always just the glamorous, self-assured, delicious man that came to our house and gave me a ton of attention, making me feel like a star in the heavens whenever he looked at me.

  Now I notice the difference between the two men. Carl's skin doesn't have that apricot bloom and his eyes have small crinkles at the corners from where he laughs at life so much. Josh has recently grown a lumberjack beard halfway down his chest, same as many of the guys in class are wearing. While Carl has a rough scrubble cutting across his cheeks that extends to a trimmed goatee on his chin. It covers the dimple I remember dipping my little fingers into. His hair is thick, brushed back and not at all receding, free of the gray my father is starting to sport. There's only a tuft of steel at the point on his chin, the source of all my lust, that makes him even more rugged.

  There's just no comparison and when my eyes glance down across the two tense bodies, only Carl's sends shock-waves through me. His solid muscle is well entrenched with age, like giant iron chains holding a tanker. He's had the same burst of force rising from his narrow waist my entire life. The same round ass cheeks snug in designer suit pants. And Josh is as slender as a girl all the way down. Not a single bulge at the biceps. Or anywhere else.

  It isn't Josh's fault that he doesn't have the movie star looks and worldly experience that Carl rocks so effortlessly but for me there's no contest. I know that whatever happens this weekend, as long as I live there will never be another man like Carl for me. Josh stands there filled with the arrogance of all men his age, assuming they're the young studs ready to take over running the show now.

  Carl looks at him with amusement but takes it in his stride. He pumps Josh's hand with a manly shake then turns back to me to revive our plans. But Josh doesn't pick up on the dismissal. He doesn't walk away. He doesn't budge and in fact I see he's waiting for Carl to leave. Like Carl's done his gentlemanly duty for his friend's little girl, while Josh has some sort of pre-arrangement with me other than a ride. As though to cement the deal Josh yawns.

  “We ready to go home, Babe,” he says to me. “I'm bushed.”

  Carl's fists ram into a vise grip and his beautifully stubbled jawline tenses in livid twitches. He looks like he's about to deck Josh for his cockiness toward me. Then his face dawns with a realization I am helpless to counteract at that moment. I can hardly start backtracking, telling him Josh and I are nothing. I may have agreed to a drink this week because I felt bad for hurling him back into the friend zone but one kiss doesn’t give him the right to call me Babe.

  I look at Carl telegraphing my apologies. I wish I could bounce this dude, tell him to take a cab but it would cost a fortune and I know he's not loaded. Too late.

  “Good seeing you Blair, Baby,” Carl grits out, taking back the endearment for himself, with all his self-control firing as he kisses my cheek, barely grazing my skin.

  Then he turns and storms across the lot. I watch him go, every nerve ending craning right behind his gropable ass cheeks. What if this is the last I see of him for another five years? I can't bear the idea.

  “What the fuck was that?” I round on Josh who startles at my sudden meltdown.

  “What?”

  How can he be so dumb as to not notice the crackling chemistry between Carl and I? The air would have ignited like a gas leak if he'd lit a match beside us. It's been like that all night and I came that close to finally getting what I need until this- kid - came along and ruined everything.

  “Since when do you call me Babe like some cocky fucking jock in high school?”

  “Sorry, I was just being goofy. I don't know. Your dad's friend looked as though he was about to get inappropriate.”

  “Who are you to decide what is or isn’t inappropriate in my life?”

  “I was, I dunno trying to protect you I guess.”

  “Well don't.” I storm around to the drivers side of the car, biting back tears for gods-sake.

  I'm so disappointed that Carl was pulled away from me just when I had him so close to where I'd vividly pictured for too long. Now I have no clue whether I'll see him again or if he'll do another of his disappearing illusions and I am actually about to cry. I bite my cheeks and don't speak to Josh all the way to his place. And when he gets out of the car and leans back in, trying to act normal, saying he'll help me edit and develop the photos tomorrow, I reply with a shrug and drive off. Leaving him standing confused on the sidewalk watching the car disappear.

  At the corner, I turn in the direction of my dad's house. Driven by some mad desire to see Carl and tell him there is nothing, absolutely nothing between Josh and me. I'm not sure whether it was possessi
veness that provoked his reaction or the sudden fear over the twenty five year age gap that sits between us. I'm halfway to my old home when it occurs to me that Carl probably went out on the town with Dad and the girls he scored for them. If he did I don't want to know. Knowing would devastate me beyond recovery.

  And if he isn't I can hardly walk into the guest room in my dad's house and throw myself at him. The possibility that one of the gigglers would be there with Carl blasts my self-assurance. I turn an illegal U at the next intersection, too miserable to care about breaking the law. If I'm stopped and hauled off to jail, at least I'll have an excuse to call Carl to come get me.

  I sleep without sleep.

  Like a cat with one eye open constantly on the alert for Carl. Every time my brain jumps out of its light doze, the man is there, trailing tongue circles around my pussy mouth. Or covering my body in full thrust, sliding into me while I grind back and clutch his cock inside me in a secret embrace. When I tug him deeper he gladly obliges, slamming his rigid iron into me again and again until I rake my fingers over his solid shoulder shield and beg him to never stop.

  The disappointment hits me again when I get to realize it's all a delirious heated dream. I don't hear a thing all the next day and my mind imagines the worst. The group sex Carl is having with both wedding bimbos all over my family home, swapping each girl back and forth with my father. The pictures in my head drive me crazy because I have no school on a Sunday and nothing to distract me from suffering my loss.

  After another sleepless night, I call my dad in the morning to thank him for procuring the job.

  “So have you seen Carl since the wedding?” I casually inquire about his friend's whereabouts. I don't know what I expected after that close encounter in the parking lot. I guess I had a crazy idea that he couldn't get through the night without me either. That he'd be compelled to show up at my studio, or wait for me at school or somehow seek me out.