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“Wrap your legs around my waist,” he said, pushing her shoulders against the wall, “and grab the clothing rods.”
Heart pounding, she did as he asked. One hand wrapped around the hanging rod on the right, the other on the left, her legs serpentined around his hard waist. She could feel the tip of his penis throbbing against her bare buttocks.
She felt like an acrobat, a trapeze artist. It added to the excitement.
Carefully, he entered her warm wet center. She could feel the material of his pants rubbing against her thighs as he moved. Katie reflectively closed her eyes, gasping in reverence.
What an incredible sensation.
She was entranced, filled up by him. She relished the wonder of his body, the excitement of her fantasy, of the life force pulsing through him and into her and back again.
He pushed into the hilt.
And then he began a slow, meticulous thrusting.
Swept away, she matched his tempo, arching her back, pushing against him, using the hanging rods as a fulcrum, increasing the tension. The rhythm between them was quite extraordinary. They were so in tune with each other.
He thrust, she parried.
It was almost mystical.
This slow, sweet journey. The intensity rising and swelling, dropping and climbing.
“More,” she gasped, barely hanging on to her French accent. “I’ve got to have more.”
“Greedy,” he accused.
Yes, yes, she was greedy and not the least bit remorseful.
Biting need flowed through her body. She needed this intimacy, needed him. Her legs were wrapped around his waist and she held him tightly.
The orgasm rose in her, in a hot, loud knot. She let go of the hanging rod so she could stuff her right fist against her mouth to hold back her cries of ecstasy.
He gave one last thrust and his body twitched with the power of his own climax. The sound of his breathing was rough against her ears.
And just after his release, she came as she’d never come before. Wave upon wave. An entire ocean crashing through her.
He held her as she shuddered in his arms. Then, after they’d recovered, he dressed her in the dark, tenderly slipping on her stockings and her shoes. When he was finished he pulled her to his chest and kissed her softly one last time.
“Oh, Richard.” She breathed. “You were magnificent, as I knew you would be.”
He made a startled noise and stepped away from her.
“What’s wrong?” Katie felt his alarm. Hurriedly, she pulled the mask that had gotten pushed up on top of her head back down over her face and quickly adjusted her wig.
“Richard?”
He did not answer, but the coats mumbled as he brushed past them in his effort to get out of the closet and away from her.
Katie fumbled on the wall for the light switch and found it just as he opened the door.
The closet was bathed in light.
Their eyes met.
The pirate captain raised his palms. Katie found herself staring at the barbed-wire tattoo encircling his left wrist. Alarm shot through her, but her brain was still not processing what her eyes were telling her.
This man was not Richard Hancock.
This man was Liam James.
With dawning horror, Katie gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. She’d just had sex with her sister’s boyfriend!
STUNNED, Liam could only stare as the woman in the French-maid costume almost knocked him down getting past him. In the stark glare of the closet light bulb, he saw her auburn wig was knocked askew, blond curls were peeking out around it.
“Wait,” he called.
She tossed him one last panic-stricken look over her shoulder. Even with the mask covering most of her face, she seemed oddly familiar. Did he know her?
He shook his head to clear it. Who?
Brooke. She reminded him of Brooke Winfield.
The synapses in his brain fired rapidly as alarming thoughts crowded in. Had Brooke dressed up in the French-maid costume to seduce him at the party? But Brooke had brown hair and she was taller than this woman.
And then it dawned on him and he recognized where he’d seen that saucy little walk before.
She was Katie Winfield. Brooke’s baby sister.
Shoving a hand through his hair, Liam groaned aloud.
He had to go after her, had to explain himself. Had to justify what he’d done. Had to make sense of what they’d done together.
Liam took off after her, but she’d already disappeared in the crowd. People were staring at him, pointing and tittering. Agitated, he glanced down and saw that his bare chest was exposed from where Katie had ripped the buttons off his shirt and that his pants were unzipped.
Frantically, he tugged up his zipper as he ran. He was desperate to talk to her before she got away. But by the time he reached the front door, she’d already fled to the parking lot.
“Katie!” he yelled as he stumbled down the stairs and out onto the asphalt road, just as her red BMW convertible sped past him.
All he saw were her taillights disappearing into the darkness, leaving him feeling like the world’s biggest jerk.
4
KATIE SPENT the remainder of the weekend holed up in her condo. She sprawled out on the couch, eating handfuls of caramel popcorn, guzzling hot chocolate and immersing herself in a romance-classics movie marathon. When Katie was a kid and feeling down in the dumps, her mother would get out the popcorn, the cocoa and the old movies to pick up her daughter’s flagging spirits.
Normally the self-indulgent trick pulled Katie right out of the doldrums. This time, however, it hadn’t worked. For one thing, it reminded her of Daisy and that made her sad. For another, watching lovers repeatedly meet, mingle, mate and marry hammered home what she already knew—sisters don’t stab sisters in the back by sleeping with their boyfriends.
She would never be able to look Brooke in the eye again.
Cut yourself some slack. You didn’t do it on purpose.
No, Katie might not have done it on purpose, but once again, she hadn’t looked before she leaped. Witness the result of her recklessness.
She was so ashamed.
Brooke doesn’t have to know. No one has to know.
Except Liam knew.
Maybe not, she hoped. Maybe he hadn’t recognized her with the costume and the mask. She prayed it was so. But here was the terrible truth: sex with Liam was the best sex she’d ever had, and she wanted to do it again and again and again.
It wasn’t him, she tried to convince herself. It was the masquerade, the semipublic location, the forbidden thrill of it all.
Oh God, she’d made such a mess of things.
By Monday evening, she was so sick of her own company she picked up the phone and called Tanisha.
“How was your weekend,” she asked her best friend.
“Great,” Tanisha purred like a satisfied kitten. “Dwayne and I spent the entire weekend in bed. In fact, he just left. How was your weekend?”
“Sucky.”
Tanisha hissed in her breath. “Things didn’t go so well with Richard?”
“I wasn’t with Richard,” Katie mumbled.
“Oh?”
“I had sex with my sister’s boyfriend,” she blurted.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Katie wailed. “I thought he was Richard. He was wearing a pirate costume. It was an honest mistake but now I feel so—”
“Hold the phone, girlfriend. I’ll be right over.”
An hour later, Tanisha showed up on her doorstep, a bag of takeout from the Chinese restaurant down the block clutched in her hand and a half gallon of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream in the other.
“This sounded like the kind of emergency best soothed by food,” she explained, and breezed into the condo. “Besides, I’m starving. Dwayne and I must have burned up a thousand calories.”
“Braggart,” Katie accused.
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t be doing some bragging of your own if the shoe was on the other foot.” Tanisha dished up sweet-and-sour chicken and several kinds of dim sum on two paper plates. She passed one of the plates to Katie and handed her a set of chopsticks.
The delicious smell teased Katie’s nose and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything but caramel popcorn all weekend long. They sat at the wrought iron bistro table in the breakfast nook.
“Give me all the details,” Tanisha said. “Don’t leave anything out.”
Cringing, Katie told her everything.
“Look,” Tanisha said when she’d finished, “it was a case of mistaken identity. No one can fault you for that. If anything, he’s the one who should be ashamed for sneaking off with someone else when he’s dating your sister.”
“That’s true.” She perked up. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I betrayed Brooke.”
“You didn’t do it on purpose. How serious is Brooke and this guy, anyway? And what’s his name?”
“Liam James.”
Tanisha’s eyes widened. “The real-estate mogul who was nominated Boston’s most eligible bachelor by Young Bostonian?”
“That’d be the one.”
“All I gotta say is, girl, when you screw up, you do it in style.”
Katie groaned and sank her head in her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do anything.” Tanisha shrugged. “Forget all about it.”
“I can’t.”
Tanisha studied her for a moment. “This is really eating you up inside, isn’t it?”
Katie nodded miserably.
“Your guilt only underscores what I was trying to tell you on Friday.”
“Which is?”
“You’re into self-sabotage.”
“You’re probably right,” Katie said glumly, poking at her dim sum with a chopstick. Of all the dumb things she’d done in her life, this had to be one of the dumbest.
“There’s a cure, you know.”
Katie looked up from her plate. “And that is?”
“Give up casual sex.”
Katie arched an eyebrow. “This coming from the queen of casual sex.”
“Not anymore,” Tanisha said.
“Oh?” Katie straightened.
Tanisha giggled girlishly, which was a surprise because she was not the giggly type. She pulled a key from her pocket. “Dwayne gave me a key to his place and I gave him one to mine.”
“Seriously?”
