Page 61 of Holiday Home 4

While she carried away a now empty pizza box and the hand towels they’d used for its grease, he focused on folding up the blanket they’d shared. Only then did his hand find its way into his pocket. Only then did he find a waiting attachment from the incredibly voluptuous professor.

She nearly stopped his heart. It lurched so powerfully that he almost lost control of his faculties. As if it wanted to peek out of his mouth and see the world, which it could, as his jaw had dropped open, it leaped. His phone nearly escaped his fingers, falling to the floor. His breath stopped flowing in or out of his lungs; he needed to survive on what he had. And for his final reaction, and the most expected of the lot, his cock immediately stiffened.

Victoria didn’t have a top on. Lying on her back in a dark environment, his gaze could run up from her navel to her lips freely.Almostfreely.

She didn’t have a top on, but something was covering her breasts. The arm that wasn’t needed to take the revealing picture. Having laid her forearm over her enormous breasts, it stopped him from seeing them wholly bared. It was the only thing preventing such a profound occurrence. Yet, somehow, it made the picture he gaped at just as arousing. Perhaps more so. His imagination was more than eager to fill in the blanks.

It also called his attention to one interesting realization. By virtue of the darkness surrounding her, his insight into where this picture had been taken was somewhat limited. Not only that… butwhenit had been taken was also up for debate. There wasn’t anything that explicitly revealed either of these things. He could make out sheets beneath the glorious curves of Victoria’s sides but not much else.

The differences between early-twenties Victoria and early-thirties Victoria were all but invisible. He had more than a dozen pictures that proved that. This picture could have been taken in a beach house a decade ago, or it could have been taken only an hour ago in Victoria’s current bed. That inconclusiveness made the image even more enticing, he found.

Before Tess returned, Liam hastily typed out the only possible response. In the entirety of the English language, which consisted of hundreds of thousands of words, there were only two that he could use.

Five points.

A little later, just before he and Tess went upstairs and shared a rather lustful shower, which the new picture on his phone inno wayprovoked, he received Victoria’s final message of the night.

It had better be. I’ll see you for your first lesson tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Right Moves

While no one could have matched his excitement when it was time for him to head to Victoria’s home, there was someone who could do it in mirthfulness. Wearing a teasing smile that chased him around her home as he went through his morning routine, Tess made more than a few jokes about how “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” he looked.

“You know,” he growled as he tied his shoes, “this is how everyone else says I look whenever I’m thinking about you.”

His remark led to Tess’s beaming smile, which led to a long delay in her entryway, which led to him being about ten minutes late to his first in-person chess lesson. Fortunately, given that he’d been punctual at all other times he’d visited Victoria’s home, she didn’t seem upset by his tardiness. Even still, he knewthat he was stepping into her class, not just her home, and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make a habit of being late.

Upon opening her door, nothing about how she looked at him would have implied that he’d received such a salacious picture from her the previous night. She still had that same remarkable, collected expression, that same timeless beauty, that same even-handed welcome for him as he entered her home.

Today, the temperatures had skimmed into the sixties, allowing Victoria to wear cutoff jeans, which displayed her long, toned legs. She complemented this selection with a loose-fitting shirt, which a front knot bound together right beneath her cleavage, which was also readily displayed thanks to the top’s deep V. With how much fabric went into that knot, it also allowed him to view plenty of her sides and stomach.

All in all, Liam was glad winter was finally moving away, to be replaced by a much more temperate spring.

“I’ve set up the board out back,” Victoria said, stopping him from removing his shoes. “It’s a nice day out.”

He could agree with that, and he walked behind Victoria, taking a few glimpses at her beguiling figure as she led him into her backyard. It was his first time doing more than looking at it through a window, as there’d been no real reason ever to visit. With that now changing, he swept his gaze across Victoria’s impressively large backyard.

About sixty percent of that backyard belonged to her swimming pool. Unfortunately, it was covered by a necessary tarp, as it hadn’t yet reached temperatures where anyone would consider removing it. On the other side of the smooth, white-colored granite pathways surrounding it, he saw a long stretch of dirt waiting for spring’s proper arrival. Yet even now, Victoria’s garden wasn’t completely barren. He didn’t know much about regular gardening, much less the variety of plants that couldsurvive the winter, but some plants and bushes were buried in the soil on the far side of her pool.

“Right over here,” Victoria said, beckoning toward a patio table to their right. There, dead in the middle, sat a large chess set. Even from a distance, Liam could tell they were neither plastic nor wooden. As he got closer, he could tell they were metal. One set was coppery—maybe just copper—while the other was silver.

The pieces were also different than a usual board, with the pawns represented by Greek hoplites, the knights depicting properly mounted knights, the bishops some sort of high-ranking tactician, the queen a crowned woman with a flowing dress, and the king a crowned man with a cloak and scepter. Only the rooks stayed in their usual form, though they were likewise far more detailed than he was used to.

Likewise, the board had a lot of extra craftsmanship and detail. Curving legs raised it off the table, and it had filigree running along those, the corners, and the outsides of the board itself. Lastly, both sides of the board had pullouts, where each piece could be stored in its own little bed when a game wasn’t underway. Unique pieces, high-quality material, extra details—it had to be expensive.

“So, you really like chess too,” he noted as Victoria walked to one side of the board, then sat in a cushioned chair.

“Tess bought this for my birthday last year,” Victoria revealed. “I’m not sure which of us is happier whenever it gets brought out for one of our matches, so do with that information as you will.”

“So, a gift for she and me,” Liam chuckled, sitting down on the other side of the table.

“More or less,” Victoria said. “It’s used often, at least. Every time she comes over, she finds a reason for us to play.”

“Who usually wins?” he inquired, even though he’d already heard how things usually went.

“The person who purchases chess boards like this one,” Victoria said dryly. “She has her classic wooden set, which is actually more expensive than mine because it's walnut, but I can tell she’s hoping to get one like this—themed and all—as a gift at some point.”

---