Megan Hart: An Erotic Collection Volume 1 Read online

  As he watched Anne brandish her mug of coffee like it was a shield, he saw something else. Anne wasn’t only angry. She was a little afraid, too.

  He knew how that felt.

  “You don’t like what?”

  “The rules the two of you made.”

  He was on his feet, then, standing close enough to intimidate her, but Anne didn’t back down. He hadn’t made those rules. They’d come from Jamie. But he wasn’t going to say so. It would only make them both look like assholes.

  “Which ones don’t you like?”

  There was really only the one rule. “Don’t fuck her,” Jamie’d said as though it were the simplest thing to avoid. “You can do whatever else you want, but just don’t fuck her.”

  Too bad Jamie didn’t know how many ways there were to fuck a person, some of them having nothing to do with sex.

  He put a hand on the wall beside her head. She smelled good. His cock, which hardly ever could be counted on to respond logically, began to get hard. “Do you not like the rules or the fact you didn’t make them?”

  “You negotiated me like it didn’t matter what I wanted.”

  “You’re right. We should have asked you what you thought. So tell me. What do you think?” He should’ve walked away, but couldn’t make himself move anyplace but closer. “Is it all right if I kiss you? Is it all right if I touch you? Is it all right if I put my mouth on you?”

  Her taste flooded his tongue and he fought a groan at the memory of how hot and wet she’d been. His cock heated, filling, and his head swirled.

  “Anne.” He didn’t trust his voice above anything louder than a whisper. “Is it all right if I fuck you?”

  Please say yes. Irrational thought, led by his cock, leaped into his brain, erasing the rules. Erasing logic. Even, fuck help him, erasing his best friend. Especially erasing Jamie.

  She looked at him, not all of the anger gone from her eyes. “You know it’s not. That’s the one thing he said no to.”

  He had to touch her. No denying it. Her pussy pressed hot to his palm when he cupped her through the thin pajama bottoms. “Then it’s a good thing there are so many other things to do than fuck.”

  And he wanted to do all of them, every single one.

  He lapped at her cunt like a starving man. He drank in the taste and scent of woman and reveled in her softness. Alex often demanded his lovers to look at him, to make that connection with their eyes if nothing stronger than that, but now it was his turn to stare up at Anne. Her face flushed, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, she rocked against his tongue and came on the smile he was unable to hide.

  When she got on her knees for him and took him down her throat, he wanted to shoot right there. He’d had his cock sucked thousands of times, but nothing quite like this. The sound of her breath, the heat of her mouth, tipped him over into orgasm.

  Empty balls gave him a clearer head. This was not just about sex, and he couldn’t convince himself it was. Alex swallowed, still tasting her climax, and held back a shiver. He wanted to kiss her again but did not.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he hadn’t told you. I thought you knew.”

  The lie washed away the flavor of her desire, but he blinked and gave her no sign of it. He didn’t know why he’d said it, other than just once he wanted not to be the one held responsible for the inevitable fuckup.

  “I’m not sure I’m glad I found out. It’s not nice to find out someone you love hasn’t been truthful.”

  “Jamie’s never been a good liar. He’s not a rascal like me.”

  She had no idea.

  “Maybe not, but he’s not as good as he thinks he is, either. I also didn’t know you’d been in touch after our wedding. As far as I knew, you hadn’t spoken since your big fight in college.”

  She knew? “He told you about that? The fight?”

  “Yes. He told me that, too.”

  “And you’re—” Okay with it, he meant to say. You’re okay with the fact your husband once tried to kiss me when he was drunk and called me a faggot and punched me in the face, and that I knocked him through a glass table when he did.

  But the door opened to admit Anne’s younger sister Claire with a family fire to put out, and the moment for truth, if ever there had been one, was lost.

  * * *

  He fell into her slowly, and deep. There’d be an end to it, of course. Things like this only ever worked because they weren’t meant to last. Alex thought Anne knew it as well as he did, even if Jamie didn’t seem to.

  In the beginning, Alex had tried staying away but now it was Jamie who left the house early and didn’t come back until much later. He said it was work, and Alex didn’t believe his buddy was lying. He also didn’t think Jamie had any sort of fucking clue exactly what he was doing by leaving Anne and Alex alone together so often. Putting a cock inside a cunt was the smallest of small things when set beside the very long list of what else was going on while Jamie was at work.

  “Do you love him?” Anne asked in the bed the three of them shared more often than not.

  “Everyone loves Jamie,” Alex said, which was not a lie.

  “Then why are we doing this?”

  He couldn’t stand the hint of agony in her voice, barely covered by desire. A hundred lies tripped to his tongue, and what would one more be on top of all the others? But it was getting harder to lie to Anne about everything. Harder to lie to himself.

  “Because we can’t stop ourselves.”

  They fucked in every way but that small one, and in the end, it wasn’t cock in cunt that mattered. It was mouth on mouth, skin on skin. Breath on breath. It was the way she curled her fingers in his hair and pulled, just right, and how she cried out his name when he put his mouth on her flesh. It was how she clung to him when she wept about the mess her family had made of their lives. It was how she looked inside him, all the way down, and he wanted her to see what was there.

  “This is more than it was supposed to be,” Anne said when the love had been made, all day long, and both of them were boneless and sated from it.

  Alex couldn’t answer her. Words fought to come out, and he bit them back. Lies or truth, in the end it didn’t matter what he said. He could hardly tell the difference, anymore.

  * * *

  He’d always had a knack for hurting someone who loved him. Something in his makeup let him see what would cut the deepest; something lacking had always let him use it. Until now, though, he’d never much regretted anything he’d ever done.

  It would be better, in the long run, for this to end on Anne’s urging. Jamie wouldn’t do it. Alex knew that as well as he knew that Jamie would always go for paper first when playing rock, paper, scissors. And, as the summer got closer to ending, Alex found he couldn’t do it.

  If he’d had a job to go to, that would have helped, but he’d slacked off in his efforts and finding employment. He could live for years on what they’d paid him to buy out Transcom. He didn’t need to work, but he also had no excuse to leave other than overstaying his welcome, and so far neither of his hosts had started grumbling.

  He knew Anne had doubts. She had to. She couldn’t know the story of the fight and its reasons without wondering if somehow, sometime, Alex might choose Jamie over her. Or if Jamie might choose Alex instead of his wife. She wouldn’t have been human if she didn’t wonder.

  It wasn’t easy to ignore her in favor of Jamie the way it would have been had this never begun, but Alex managed. And if there were times when it would have been easier to lead Jamie to know Anne better, Alex chose to follow his friend, instead, and pretend he didn’t know. She couldn’t know how it stung him to watch her shoulders tense when the pair of men started in on the boyhood jokes, excluding her from the secret club they’d formed so long ago. And Jamie, true to form, didn’t notice a goddamned thing.

  “Why don’t you guys ever touch?” Anne, who’d been prickly for days, demanded of them one night.

  Alex said nothing. Jamie sputtered and