After Hours: Midnight Oil / Midnight Madness / Midnight Touch

“C’mon, I’m just brave enough to verbalize what we’re all thinking. How many times have you sat opposite a woman and thought, Christ. I already know I can’t stand her but I have to sit through two more hours of this and then pay for her dinner and drive her ass home.”

Troy couldn’t help but laugh.

Peggy continued in a parody of a man’s voice, “And I probably won’t even get a good-night kiss for my trouble, much less get laid.”

This went so far as to get a pig snort out of him while he tried to catch his breath. Finally he said, “You are not a nice woman.”

“I agree. But am I accurate?”

“Maybe.”

“So why don’t we have that drink at either your place or mine and not play the games?”

“All right, all right. We’ll go to yours. Mine is a wreck, since I’m in the middle of remodeling.”

“Great. Take a left up here, and then an immediate right…. By the way, I’m not a slut. It’s just that you’re…different.”

He hooted. “If I only had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that line from a woman.”

Peggy seemed nonplussed.

“What, no caustic comment? As long as we’re being up-front and not playing games, darlin’, I’m fully aware that it was my wallet and my job that were ‘different,’ not me.” But those days are gone, Troy thought gloomily. Now I’m chopped liver.

“I’m not impressed by money,” she said stiffly. “And I’m not impressed by your former football stardom, either. I made my college team and started, too.”

Silence fell in the car.

“You what?” Troy asked. “Was it a women’s college?”

“No,” she said icily, “it was not. It was Bryce University.”

After a stunned moment he said slowly, “I remember reading about it. How a girl fought her way onto the team, a placekicker. That was you?”

“That was me.”

He looked at her with new respect. “I’ll be damned. What was it like for you? To be the only woman in that sea of testosterone?”

She avoided his eyes. “Let’s just say that I had my highest highs and my lowest lows during the season I played.”

“Why didn’t you go back?” Troy pulled the Lotus into the parking lot behind an apartment building. He was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that question. The guys would have made it miserable for her, and even male placekickers weren’t viewed with respect. They weren’t considered “real” players, didn’t go through the same drills or practice plays.

She avoided the question by getting out of the car before he’d cut the engine, not waiting for him to open her door. Her hair fell down her back like a coppery waterfall, ending just above a neat little waist and a spectacular ass. Those legs were solid with muscle, only the inner thighs soft and welcoming.

Troy liked the way the moonlight softened her, bathed her in a gentle glow. He tried to divert himself from the thought that she was bare to the air under her black cotton miniskirt. He’d ripped the panties off her, after all. She couldn’t possibly have salvaged them.

Peggy tossed him an impatient glance over her shoulder, unaware that despite his words about getting to know her he’d have loved nothing better than to bend her over the hood of the Lotus, soft and willing and even begging for the release he could bring her.

He groaned inwardly as he imagined her spread-eagled on the car, lush breasts flattened against the warm metal, hair tumbled over her naked back and that sweet ass, among other things, bare to his gaze. He’d wanted to do all kinds of dirty things with her, ever since he’d seen her from the parking lot that first night.

Obviously, something about her just brought out the pervert, if not the stalker, in him. He’d better get a handle on his fantasies.

He caught up with her in three long strides and reminded himself that he couldn’t get involved with this girl. What was he thinking? Hadn’t he been delivered a four-inch stack of city regulations? Didn’t he, right at this very moment, have notes in his pocket on possible violations After Hours had committed?

He felt sleazy. Yeah, you’re some gentleman, big guy. No doubt! You seduce her on her own massage table while you’re planning to kick her off the premises. Nice.

But he fixated on her miniskirt again. He wanted to chew it off like a goat.

PEGGY UNLOCKED her apartment door with difficulty, since Troy’s mouth was doing incredibly sexy things to the back of her neck and her ears, while his hands were unashamedly roaming over her breasts, peeling back her bra to cup them and teasing her nipples exquisitely.

In fact, he flattened her body against the door, pinning it with his while his cock nudged the cleft of her buttocks through the thin skirt she wore. He was seeking entry much as she sought the lock with her key.

“The neighbors,” she whispered, feeling his fingers lift her hem. She managed to turn the key, and they almost fell through the door to the beige carpet inside.

Troy kicked the door closed, turned her in his arms and tossed her handbag aside. He lifted her and set her on the seat of the fat, overstuffed sofa she’d bought secondhand. Then he dropped to his knees in front of her and slowly pushed her skirt up her thighs.

He bent his head and kissed each of her knees while she fell back against the pillows, her breathing fast and shallow. He spread her legs and gently, expertly touched his tongue to her, his breath warm and intimate and whispering over her heated flesh.

The sensation was indescribable, and she lost herself to it, their surroundings dropping away until nothing existed except for his mouth and her pleasure.

He slicked over her folds, separated them, licked into her until a thousand nerve endings screamed and begged for more. Any shyness she may have felt was lost to ecstasy and became unimportant.

Troy grabbed her bottom and tugged her forward as she squirmed with the intensity of it, unintelligible sounds finding their way out of her mouth. She was completely at his mercy and she knew it—didn’t like it as an abstract concept, but adored it as a woman.

He left her outer folds to circle inward, closer and closer to her clitoris. And when he found it and sucked hard, she lost control, a cry ripping from her throat as she exploded in his mouth.

She tried to get away from the exquisite torture then, but he gripped her firmly and kept teasing the nub with his tongue until she screamed again and utterly disintegrated into nothing but waves of delicious pleasure—pleasure so intense that it bordered on pain.

“Stop,” she begged him, fisting her hands in his hair. “You have to stop.”

Disbelief filled her as he left his mouth where it was, waiting for her to quiet before he initiated her desire yet again, with slow, patient, featherlike touches at the very edges of her sex. He bit and sucked at the innermost parts of her thighs, the curve of her cheeks. He blew on her clitoris, cooling it in the most erotic way possible. He didn’t touch it, seeming to understand that would be too much.

He began her journey again by focusing on her outer labia, tickling and teasing until the rest of her developed a sensual envy. Exhausted, she arched her back and met him anyway, melted under his touch as he brought her to the peak of climax yet one more time.

Impossible, she realized, but she’d orgasmed three times without him inside her, and they were both still wearing their clothes. She wanted to feel the fullness of his cock, stretching her to capacity and stroking her where his tongue simply couldn’t reach.

She stripped off his shirt—he didn’t exactly protest—and unbuckled his belt. She unbuttoned his fly and shoved his jeans down his hips, freeing his engorged penis. As she took it into her hands he groaned, encouraging her to move her palms against the smooth skin and slide them up and down.

Somehow she wriggled out of her own clothes while he found a condom and rolled it on. She straddled him, rubbing herself against his shaft until he grabbed her hips, forcing them down while he thrust roughly upward. She gasped as he entered her, throwing back her head and experiencing slick, dark, powerful pleasure.

He set a fast tempo that excited her all over again, driving into her with a fierce possessiveness that was purely masculine, primal and urgent.

Troy pulled her shoulders down as he thrust, bringing her breasts within range of his mouth. His bristle scraped the aureoles of her left nipple, painful but erotic. Then it was in his mouth and he was sucking, pulling electricity through her hot spots again and filling her veins with a roar of heat.

He mastered the other breast and then rolled her under him, her wrists pinned over her head, while he thrust again and again. His face flushed dark and his eyes glazed with pleasure, he stole her lips again in a deep, intimate kiss. His tongue in her mouth echoed his cock between her legs, until finally he climaxed in a single mighty stroke and spilled himself inside her, moaning her name into her hair.

She ground herself against the root of him and his aftershocks set her off again, too, melting her in a rush of warm, sweet honey. She had a sinking feeling, as she floated back to the surface of reality, that Troy Barrington had ruined her for any other man.

8