Four of Hearts Read online

  “Hmm?”

  He pushed her shirt over her head and went to work on her shorts. “You said you love. . . something. What do you love?”

  “Oh,” Candace tried to focus on the conversation. “I love to watch you come.” Her shorts slid past her ankles, followed by her panties. Ryan settled between her thighs, pushing her knees up and wide apart. He nuzzled her and touched his tongue to her clit. Candace rose to meet his questing mouth, and completely lost track of the conversation. Nothing mattered except the way Ryan touched her, the way he touched off a firestorm of need inside her.

  The warm night air caressed her naked body. Nothing could have been more romantic than the soft music of the outgoing tide, the ink black blanket of sky dotted with twinkling diamonds and two lovers in perfect harmony. When Ryan finally entered her, Candace welcomed him in. She held him tight within her circle of love, and with every stroke, he whispered the thoughts of his heart into her ear.

  Ryan coaxed her to the edge of the horizon, and pushed her gently over. Her heart swelled to bursting with love for him, and when he slipped over the horizon moments later, she held him close to her wildly beating heart.

  They swam up together, floating slowly back to the solid beach beneath them. Ryan pushed to his forearms and kissed her lips like she was expensive candy to be savored. “I like to watch you come too,” he whispered against her lips. “I love you, Candace.”

  “I love you, too.”

  * * * * *

  Ryan dreaded the morning. He’d emailed Richard earlier in the week, postponing yet again the Employee Performance Reviews. Richard had been livid, and insisted on a meeting when he and Fallon returned to the island on Friday. How did one go about apologizing for the sordid laundry list of sins he’d committed against his wife and their best friends? Candace insisted there wasn’t anything to apologize for, that they were all adults, and they’d done what felt right at the time.

  “Still worried about tomorrow?” Candace asked. She placed a cold soda on his desk and curled onto the futon near the open patio door.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I think you’re blowing this all out of proportion. Anyway, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, something I want you to think about before they get here.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just don’t say anything until you’ve had a chance to think about it. Okay?”

  Dear God. If it was going to require withholding comment until he’d thought about it, he probably didn’t want to hear it in the first place. From the first moment he’d met her, Candace had knocked him off balance and he hadn’t found firm footing yet. “I’m not making that kind of promise, and you know it.”

  “I know. But, Ryan, please, hear me out before you answer,” she begged.

  He took a deep breath and let it out before rocking back in his desk chair and clenching his hands around the arms. He had a feeling he was going to need something solid to hold onto very soon. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Good.” Candace sat up on her knees. She almost bounced with her enthusiasm. He really needed to get her a cheerleader uniform. “You know how you said you liked to see me come?” He nodded, not liking where this was going at all. “Well, I got to thinking about it, and I realized all you’ve ever really seen is a small portion of me. You can see my face, or my. . . well, you know, but you’ve never really seen all of me when I come.”

  “Candace,” he warned.

  “No. Don’t. You promised to listen.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Please?” Damn. He had no willpower against her when she looked at him that way, as if he held her heart in his hands and might crush the life out of it if he said no.

  He sighed and gripped the arms of the chair tighter. “Go on.”

  “So, I was thinking. . . I’d like to give you that, as a gift.”

  He knew he didn’t want to know the answer to this question, but she was waiting for him to ask it. “How?”

  “Ask Richard to make love to me.” His blood pressure dropped and the flash play of images firing through his brain almost made him miss the rest of her insane plan. “You’ll be there too, right beside us, so you can see everything. You can watch what my body does when I come.”

  Asking him to withhold comment hadn’t been necessary after all. He couldn’t grasp a single word, much less string any together and force them past his lips. He wasn’t sure he was breathing. His fingers hurt and he glanced at his hand curled around the arm of the chair. Something solid. An anchor in the storm raging inside him. She’d lost her mind. She thought he’d lost his too, apparently. Maybe he had. As appalled as he was by the idea, a spark of something flared inside him, and his oxygen-deprived brain might have actually been considering the idea.

  “Ryan?” Her voice snapped him out of his stupor.

  “Couldn’t we just get a video camera?”

  “Sure, but what fun would that be? Fallon could watch too. Maybe—.”

  “Don’t! Don’t go there, Candace.”

  “But, if you did, then I’d be able to watch you too.”

  Ryan groaned and peeled his numb fingers off the chair. “No. No, and no.”

  “But—.”

  “But, nothing.” How in the hell was he going to face Richard and Fallon tomorrow with this idea in his brain? “Go away, Candace. I have work to do.” He hoped to God she didn’t come around the desk and see how interested his body was in her proposal. She’d take it as an indication she’d come up with a fantastic idea, one he was as enthusiastic about as she was.

  Candace headed for the door, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then she stopped on the threshold, turned and flashed him that look—the one that made him want to leap over the desk, pick her up and drag her off to his cave. “Talk to Richard.” Then she wiggled her crazy sweet ass out of his office.

  Talk to Richard. Yeah, right. Ryan wasn’t ready to die, and telling Richard about Candace’s insane idea was a sure way to get him a condo for one, with no view. To her credit, Candace didn’t bring the subject up again, and by the time Richard and Fallon arrived on Friday, Ryan had almost convinced himself that she hadn’t said anything at all.

  Candace greeted Fallon effusively. The two women hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other in a year, instead of a few days. Ryan shook hands with Richard, and brushed a brotherly kiss on Fallon’s cheek. As he pulled away, her eyes met his, and for a nano-second he had the feeling she was sizing him up. It has been a long time since a woman had looked at him that way, and it scared the shit out of him.

  “You got a new manicure!” Candace took Fallon’s hand in hers. “I haven’t had a manicure in ages!” The women put their heads together discussing the new manicurist at the Lothario’s spa as they wandered away, leaving Ryan alone with Richard.

  He pulled two beers out of the fridge and handed one to Richard. “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said.

  “Damn straight,” Richard agreed.

  Ryan took a swig. He needed all the help he could get to apologize for what happened the previous week. “Let’s go for a walk,” he invited. “The girls are going to be discussing the latest nail polish colors. They won’t miss us.” And if Richard was inclined to kill him, it would make less of a mess on the beach.

  “I’ve got a couple of matters to discuss with you,” Richard said.

  Ryan led the way to the stretch of open beach he’d used daily as a running track since he’d first moved to the island. It was out of sight of the house, and quiet, even when a shipload of tourists inhabited the other side of the island. The sun blazed, reflecting off the water and sand. It was warm for this early in the day, and promised to get hotter. The men walked barefoot along the surf line. Ryan finished his beer, and plunged in. “About last week—.”

  “Stop right there,” Richard said. “We have more pressing matters than what happened last week.”

  “But—”
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  “Look, Ryan. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it, straight out.”

  Here it comes. Richard wants out of our partnership, all because we crossed the line as friends. Ryan took a deep breath. His brain went into problem solving mode. He had to come up with a way to talk Richard out of leaving.

  “Fallon wants to sleep with you.”

  His feet refused to move. His lungs seized. His knees gave out.

  Ryan sank to the sand and dug his heels in. He propped his elbows on his knees and used his hands to keep his head from falling off his shoulders. This couldn’t be happening.

  Richard took a few steps, realized Ryan wasn’t keeping pace, and turned back. Ryan sensed his friend beside him, but didn’t dare look at him. “This is so fucked up.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Richard said.

  The rising tide crept close to their feet. Ryan briefly considered letting the tide wash him out to sea. It might solve all his problems. “How do you know?”

  “Know my wife wants to sleep with you?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “She told me.”

  “Maybe you misunderstood.”

  “One thing Fallon is good at is expressing herself. I didn’t misunderstand.”

  Damn. “I didn’t have anything to do with that, just so you know. I’d never make a move on your wife.”

  “I know. She has this crazy idea that there’s more going on between the four of us than friendship. She even has a ten dollar word for it—polyamorous.”

  Ryan snorted. “Leave it to Fallon to put a shiny label on screwed up.”

  “She does have a way with words.”

  Ryan got to his feet and Richard followed. “I spent the last few days worrying about how to apologize for what happened. If Candace hadn’t started this ball rolling with her request to be tied up, we never would have gone down that road. Then you come out with this. I don’t know what to say.”

  Richard stopped well back from the surf and sat. Ryan joined him. There wasn’t any use going back to the house until they had a plan. “I have to tell you—Candace said the same thing about you. She thinks I’d enjoy watching.” Ryan lay back. An ancient palm arched over the beach directly above them. A plump group of coconuts clung to the top. “Why can’t a coconut fall when you need one? Right here, right now.” He tapped a finger on his forehead.

  “Don’t ask for things you can’t control. Given our present luck, it might not fall where you want it.”

  “What are we going to do, Richard?”

  “I don’t have a clue. Fallon seems to think this isn’t unusual. She says people love more than one person all the time. If you have a dozen kids, you love all of them. Same goes for brothers and sisters. She says it’s only society that says you can’t love more than one person in a sexual way. When she says it like that, it makes sense.”

  Ryan let the idea roll around in his head. “It doesn’t make our situation any less fucked up.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Ryan gave up on the coconut ending all his worries and sat up. “No offense intended, but I don’t love Fallon. At least not, that way. I love her like. . . well, I was going to say a sister, but that isn’t right either. I’m sure I’d have no trouble having sex with her, but love her? No.” He shook his head to emphasize his point. “Not like I love Candace.”

  “I understand. No offense taken. I feel the same way about Candace.”

  “So what are we going to do? Ignore the wives? Neither one of them are the type to let something go.”

  “We could do it. All at once. Together. Maybe once would satisfy their curiosity and then we could go back to normal, whatever the hell normal is. How would Candace feel about you. . . you know. . . with Fallon?”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Ryan took Richard’s silence as an affirmative. “You’d have sex with Candace? And you’d let me have sex with Fallon?”

  “I think so. I’m sure I could hold up my end of the bargain with your wife, but at this point, I can’t guarantee I won’t kill you for touching Fallon.”

  Ryan nodded. He hadn’t expected anything less. “Ditto. And I have no idea what Candace would think about me. . . ” he waved his hand in the air, “you know. . . with Fallon. I guess I’ll have to ask her about that.”

  They sat in silent contemplation for a long while. Finally, Richard spoke. “Next week? You two can come aboard when we stop at the island, that is, if Candace agrees to the plan. We’ll work out the details then, but I think we could get the deed done before we get to Miami. Then you and Candace can get off there.”

  “That sounds cold.”

  “What did you expect? I didn’t bring flowers and chocolates to seduce you with.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never planned a wife swap before, so sue me if I find this approach a bit calculating.” He shook his head. It was all too fucking unbelievable to be real. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this. Look, let’s get this clear. This is a personal deal. It has nothing to do with us as business partners. No matter what happens, we can’t fuck up that relationship, too.”

  “Agreed.”

  The tide crept closer and they got to their feet and continued down the beach. “What else did you want to talk about?” Ryan asked.

  “I don’t know what this means, but Bree got an email from one of her friends at the FBI. It seems they’ve lost track of Vernon Cannon.”

  Ryan went on alert. Vernon Cannon was anything but stable. Ever since the Lothario’s maiden voyage, he’d been trying to get them to sell the ship to him, and he wasn’t subtle about it either. He’d hired arsonists and a computer hacker to do their worst, hoping he’d drive them to sell, and bring the price down at the same time. Nothing about this sounded good.

  “Lost? How do you lose an Oklahoma oil baron?”

  “I don’t know. He could be vacationing some place off the grid, or he could have gone underground for another reason. Until we know more, I thought you should know.”

  “Thanks. He’s never been one to do his own dirty work, but I’ll be extra vigilant, just in case.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. Don’t say anything to Fallon about this. I don’t want her to worry.”

  “I won’t, which means I won’t be telling Candace. She has a direct pipeline to Fallon.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Fallon looked up from the decorator’s interior sketches of the new resort as Richard and Ryan returned from their walk. Ryan’s face was a blank mask and told her nothing. She let her eyes move to her husband, walking a pace behind Ryan through the patio door. He smiled, winked at her and held up four fingers low enough Candace probably wouldn’t notice. Fallon smiled back and ran to throw her arms around Richard.

  “Really?” she asked against his neck.

  “Uh huh,” he confirmed and pulled her outside with him for a thorough kiss. “Next week, if we all agree.”

  “No problem. Candace is okay with it.”

  “You told her?”

  “Of course I did. I couldn’t keep it from her, she’s my best friend, and I love her.”

  “Did she tell you what she wants?”

  “Yes, she did. I can’t wait. I want to see you with her. Are you going to restrain her? I think she’d like that, maybe just her wrists. . . ”

  “Whoa! Hold on a minute. We have to think about this. Damn, it never occurred to me that she might want something more. . . something kinky. Shit, Fallon. What do you want from Ryan? I don’t think I like the idea of you submitting to him, not the way you do with me.”

  Fallon wrapped her fingers around Richard’s arms and rubbed her hands up and down, soothing as much as she could. “It’s okay. I don’t want the same kind of sex with Ryan that I have with you, and I don’t think Candace wants the same kind she gets from Ryan either. If you two were alike, it wouldn’t be so exciting to swap. I want to see what she has with Ryan, and she wants to se
e what I have with you, so show her a little. You don’t have to take her into subspace, just give her a taste. Dominate without taking her deep into the lifestyle. She’s too green for that anyway.”

  Richard stilled her hands, clasping them in his own. “I can do that. She responded well to the rope bondage, but it will be different when the man in charge isn’t her husband.”

  “I’ll be there for her, and so will Ryan.”

  “Who’s going to be there for me?”

  “Me, who else? I love you. I love you so much, I want to share our love with our best friends.”

  Richard’s eyes held hers for a long moment. She knew him well. He had reservations about this, but he trusted her judgment too. “I love you too. I love you enough to share our love, but I don’t want you to get hurt. There’s no guarantee that Ryan and Candace will return your feelings. Have you given any thought to what that will do to you, to them, if they don’t feel the same way?”

  “I’ve thought about it. We should probably all sit down and talk about our expectations before we take our clothes off. That way, if anybody wants to back out, they can.”

  Richard groaned.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Fallon asked.

  “Men don’t talk about sex, they just do it.”

  “Well, this time I think you’ll have to talk about it. It’s the only way we can proceed. We all have to understand what we’re doing.”

  “I know how to fuck.”

  “Don’t be crude, Richard. You know I’m right.”

  “Yeah, I know you’re right, but could you just pull out my toenails with a pair of pliers instead?”

  Fallon took a step back, her hands still encased in Richard’s. She tugged him forward. “Let’s go talk to them then. Lunch is ready. We can discuss it while we eat.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. I want to get this out in the open so we have time to think about it. That way, when they come aboard next week, it won’t be awkward.”