After Hours: Midnight Oil / Midnight Madness / Midnight Touch. Karen Kendall

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

      THE NEXT DAY Troy stood in the baking afternoon heat and listened to Joe Vargas give him the rundown on Pop Warner football. The man’s wedding ring gleamed in the sun, accentuating his wholesomeness and making Troy feel like even more of a drinkin’, fornicatin’ bottom-feeder.

      He had been up all night having sex with a woman he needed to betray for his own ends. He was a complete shit-heel. What business did he have trying to be a role model for a group of kids?

      Worse, he wanted to see Peggy again in the worst way. And he couldn’t do that. He really, really couldn’t.

      “So the secret is,” declared Joe, “you’ve got to find the fine line between tough and supportive. You can’t push them too hard—they’re only eleven years old. It’s a lot more important at this stage that they learn good sportsmanship than that they win the game.”

      Troy nodded as if he were absorbing pearls of wisdom. Surely this was just common sense?

      The kids on the field were scrimmaging in an enervated formation, wilting in an early burst of summer.

      The air was hot, stagnant vapor without a single breeze. It hung over them like a vast, wet cloth, smothering anyone who tried to suck oxygen from it.

      Vargas had gone into the politics of the team, specifically what the parents were like and how that affected their children’s attitudes and behavior. Troy tried to focus and retain what he said.

      “Bobby Pitkin, now, his dad’s a real problem. Wants his kid to be the star no matter what, even if another kid gets hurt. You gotta watch him and step carefully. On the other hand, Aaron Tate’s parents don’t want him playing football at all—it’s his grandpa who signed him up. The father is a musician and worries about Aaron’s hands….”

      By the time the boys were through with their warm-up, Troy had the goods on everyone. He and Vargas took them through some simple running plays together, and then had them play a nine-on-nine game: shirts against skins.

      In the middle of it, Bobby Pitkin’s dad showed up, veering erratically in his red SUV, and climbed out to entertain himself by causing trouble. He started yelling instructions and other things from the sidelines, annoying the group of moms who sat in the bleachers.

      Joe growled under his breath, “Guy’s a prize jerk. Owns his own construction company and shows up here a lot after having a few Jack Daniels for lunch.”

      Troy listened to him for a while, his disgust growing. “I’m not putting up with that guy.”

      “Watch it. He’s connected around town and he could cause trouble.”

      “I don’t care.” Troy strolled over to the man. “Hi, I hear you’re Bobby’s father.”

      The man was clean shaven,