stared at her for several long minutes, but didn’t make a move forward.
“I was just looking around,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Get out.” He pointed toward the door.
Anger flamed into rage. If he thought she was going to take off running because he was a big bad-ass with a deep voice, he was wrong. She didn’t back down from bullies.
“Hey!” She closed the distance between them and poked a finger into the middle of his chest. “You need to back off, Jack.”
She might as well have poked her finger into a steel plate.
He continued to stare, his brows thickened by a frown.
“Benjamin,” he said.
“Huh?”
“My name is Benjamin.”
She narrowed her eyes and dropped her arm to her side. Was he screwing with her? He actually sounded serious. “I know.”
“You called me Jack.”
He was serious.
“You don’t get out much, do you?”
Unsure if he was about to bellow another order or physically toss her out, Star watched, prepared to yell back or defend herself. Instead, he took several steps backward and returned to his position before the fire.
She stared at his wide back for a few moments, dazed, then turned and ambled toward the paintings. She’d leave the room in her own sweet time. Stopping in front of the oval portrait, she asked, “Who is this?”
He glanced over his shoulder and spoke with his back to her as he moved logs around. “One of my ancestors.”
“Looks just like you.”
“So I’ve been told.” He rose, picked up a pipe from the mantle, and packed it with tobacco from a leather pouch. He watched her from the corner of his eye.
“Who painted these?”
He struck a match and held it to his pipe. “Another ancestor.”
God, he looked like a duke or something standing in front of the fireplace wearing a coat from another century and kneehigh black boots. She’d never met anyone quite like him. Again, her belly quivered, and she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t actually afraid of him. At least, not much.
“So this is like your family home, huh?”
He nodded as he drew on his pipe and puffed, filling the room with the sweet smell of pipe tobacco.
“You stay here all by yourself?” She couldn’t imagine living in a place the size of a hotel and not having it stuffed with people.
“At times.”
“A lot of space for one guy.”
He didn’t rise to the bait, and her anger faded. Maybe if you were raised in a place like this, you didn’t even know there were people out there living in cardboard boxes.
“Your ancestor, the captain, was he the one who built this house?”
“Aye.”
“How did he end up here?”
Benjamin studied her long enough to make her uncomfortable, then rested his pipe on the mantle, turned, and sat on the edge of his desk. “He was shipwrecked on the rocks just beyond the point, and nearly lost his life. No others survived. The captain was nursed back to health, and could never bring himself to leave. He started building the house a year later.”
“Who nursed him?”
“No one knows for certain.”
She searched the portrait for any sign of tenderness in the captain’s cold black eyes. “So, maybe it was some Native American woman who helped him and he fell in love with her. Maybe this place is the result of a fairy tale romance.”
She glanced at the modern Benjamin, who watched her intently with identical black eyes. Heat rushed through her and she swallowed hard. “Too bad fairy tales aren’t real.”
Dragging air into her lungs, she turned toward the door. “I guess I better see if the others are back.”
“They are,” he said.
She took one more look at him and nodded, then left the room.
Once she was hurrying down the dark hallway, she realized her hands were shaking and she couldn’t quite catch her breath. The man had a strange effect on her. Working hard to calm her nerves, she continued to the first floor and found it, too, dark.
“Wendy? Jack?”
A hint of music drew her toward one of the guest rooms where she found the three. Wendy had hooked up her MP3 player to tiny speakers and had strip music vibrating off the walls. Star closed the door behind her.
Wendy, dancing in front of the fireplace, winked at Star before turning her back on the two men. She was already down to her T-shirt, thong, and heels, and slowly, teasingly, drew her shirt up to her shoulders.
Jack lay back on one elbow, rubbing the bulge in the front of his jeans, and Kyle groaned.
Star sat in an armchair in the corner.
Wendy had wonderful skin, smooth and lightly tanned. The tat just above her butt was actually well done, not heavy-handed like the usual tramp stamp. And the woman knew how to move. Back at the Kitty Klub, she’d been the highest grossing stripper. No doubt Bud was missing her about now. He’d probably lost half his business when Wendy took off.
Her long, fluid movements in time with the music were perfect as she pulled off her shirt and dropped it to the ground. Then she turned, her breasts squeezed between her arms, and leaned over as she ran her hands down the front of her thighs and back up the insides. Her parted lips and heavy eyelids suggested she was halfway to an orgasm already.
“Oh, shit,” Kyle moaned. He reached inside his pants to straighten his swelling prick.
Wendy hooked her thumbs in the sides of her thong, stretched it out, and wriggled it down her legs a little at a time.
“Yeah, baby, take it off,” Jack said.
She stepped out of the thong and shot it like a rubber band at Jack’s face. He laughed.
Wendy used the post at the corner of the bed like a strip-club pole, straddling it and riding slowly up and down with the beat.
Kyle shed his pants and then his shirt and patted the bed beside him. “Come on, Wen. Let’s get to the contact phase of this dance.”
Wendy raised one foot and placed it on Kyle’s leg, exposing her pussy to his view and marking his skin with the spike heel. Ignoring the spike, he reached out, grabbed her ass, and planted his face in her crotch. Grinning, she pushed him away.
“Damn,
