Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

on how he dried her off—and that guy did things with the loofah and towel in the process that Cole was pretty sure loofahs and towels had never been designed to do. Not that he didn’t give the invisible lover points for inventiveness. Eventually, though, the action moved into the bedroom, where things really started heating up.

He’s standing behind me, she wrote. I feel his cock long and hard against my back. He guides me to the bed and tells me he wants me on my hands and knees. I do what he says. He tells me to lower my shoulders to the mattress. I obey him. He tells me to spread my legs. I do that, too. He tells me to spread them wider. I spread them as wide as I can. Then he’s lying on his back beneath me with his head between my legs. His hands hold my hips in place while he lifts his mouth to lick me. As he tastes me there, slowly, deeply, methodically, his fingers venture into the cleft of my derriere and begin to pull me open and stroke me there. Then one finger pushes inside behind me as his tongue moves deeper into my damp flesh…

On and on, she wrote about her lover’s oral and digital skills, until she was coming apart again, and Cole was thinking he was probably going to have to check out his hostess’s pay-per-view selections later. That probably became a hell, yes over the next few pages, because she and her imaginary lover did things for and to each other on that bed that would have them both walking funny for days afterward.

Man, oh, man, he thought when the passage finally—finally—came to an end. Never had she written anything like that in her journal before.

Then he remembered that he’d been reading her journal backwards. So it was really that she hadn’t written anything like that after this particular passage. Meaning she might very well have written something like that before. Considering the comfortableness she’d exhibited with the subject matter, chances were good that she’d written something like that before. Maybe lots of times before. Just how far back did this journal go, anyway?

He actually moved his hand to the mouse to start scrolling backward and had to stop himself from completing the action. Not tonight, he told himself. No more tonight. No man had that kind of stamina. Except, of course, for Delilah’s imaginary lover.

Later, he told himself as he closed the file and powered down the computer. He could read more of Delilah’s, ah, exploits another day. Another night. Another day and night. What he needed now was sleep. Okay, a cold shower, and then sleep. And then maybe, with luck, a dream or two about a beautiful woman in lavender lace lingerie…

Ten

BREE TURNED THE KEY IN HER IGNITION FOR A fourth time, listened to the engine of the dilapidated Honda grind ineffectively—for a fourth time—and pressed her forehead to the steering wheel.

“Dammit,” she said eloquently.

“Let me take a look under the hood,” Rufus said, striding to the front of the little red car.

When no one else had been ready to head out to the parking garage that night, Bree had had no choice but to ask Rufus to do the honors, a request she hated to make. Not just because she didn’t want to have to rely on the guy for anything, but she didn’t want to encourage him in his romantic pursuit of her. That sounded so incredibly egotistical, she knew, but Rufus had made no secret about his feelings for her, so there was no ego involved—only fact. She just didn’t want to do anything that might give the guy false hope when she just wasn’t interested. So she tried to avoid him whenever she could, even when they had to work shoulder to shoulder.

Especially when they had to work shoulder to shoulder.

Because, too often, that was a literal state. And whenever Bree’s shoulder brushed Rufus’s—or whenever her elbow rubbed his, or their hips bumped or any other body parts came into contact, however inadvertently—she was all too aware of him. And aware was a condition she couldn’t afford around Rufus. Too often, awareness led to other -nesses that Bree didn’t want to feel around Rufus. Like attractiveness. And warmness. And keenness. And fondness. She totally couldn’t afford any fondness for the guy.

The guy who was bent over her engine right now, trying to fix her car for her. The guy who always walked her out to the parking garage so she wouldn’t be accosted by any creeps. The guy who’d given her a ride home one night when Lulu couldn’t make it. The guy who, at the last employee Christmas party, put a notice up in the break room saying he’d give twenty bucks to trade with whoever picked Bree’s name in the Secret Santa, then, when everyone was supposed to bring a gag gift that cost five dollars, gave her a dozen roses instead.

No way did she want to feel fondness for a guy like that. Because that way lay another -ness: madness.

Rufus really was a good guy. But he was a poor guy. And he would always be poor. Not because he couldn’t make a decent living if he wanted to, but because he didn’t mind not having money. It was almost like he didn’t even want money. And that, Bree thought, that was just wrong.

“Try it again,” he told her.

She turned the key in the ignition a fifth time, but this time, the engine didn’t even grind. This time, there was just a disconsolate click.

“Do you have Triple A?” he called from behind the open hood.

“No.” For the seventy-five dollar annual fee, she’d figured she could get a week’s worth of groceries. At the time, it had been a no-brainer. Now, though…

Rufus dropped the hood with a loud clang and came back to the