Page 20 of Untether

The slippery heat of her under my fingers. Around my fingers.

Her little mewl of surprise against my mouth when she reached her violent, shuddering climax.

Sharp nails digging into my shoulder like spurs against the flanks of her favourite racehorse, driving him on towards the finish line.

The memories accost me—a glorious carousel of images that sear into my consciousness, despite my desperate rampage at Alchemy afterwards.

So fucking responsive.

She was a little beauty.

My evil plan for our ‘date’ may have included the intention of creating some ice-breaking mischief if I saw an opening, but even I didn’t see that one coming: Aida Russell hurtling towards orgasm in my arms as I finger-fucked her in the depths of a club.

I have an Aida-shaped hangover this morning. I was tickled, for want of a better word, when Gen pitched this documentary to me. Tickled. Intrigued. In my head, she wasn’t a real person. More a celebrity trophy to smash and grab, if I’m completely honest with myself.

But she’s fucking real, all right. My formless, harmless schoolboy-level crush on her is taking shape. It’s growing substance, a little kernel of desire building inside me. Because we’d be good together. Wearegood together, even if our antics were positively chaste as far as my standards go. For a hookup where I didn’t even get off, its memories have teeth. Teeth far sharper than the memories of the women inside whose bodies I got my end away afterwards.

I certainly delivered a killer audition. I suspect I did her a favour last night by blindsiding her into third base before she had time to get nervous.

But it didn’t feel like a favour.

Nope.

Her sharp intake of breath as I slid my lips along her jaw and an ice cube up her leg?

That was nothing short of typical Callum-Sinclair-level self-indulgence.

‘I needto chat to Cal about the Masked Ball,’ Maddy announces as our morning meeting draws to an anticlimacticclose. She gets up from her cosy spot beside Zach, where she’s been surreptitiously holding his hand for the past twenty minutes, and plumps herself down next to me.

My mate shoots me a suspicious look before Maddy blows him a kiss. ‘Put the kettle on, babes? I’ll be through in five,’ she tells him, which seems to pacify him somewhat, and he trails forlornly towards the open double doors that separate this meeting room from our desk area at the rear of the fuck-off Georgian mansion that houses Alchemy.

His black lab, Norm, looks at his master and then back at Maddy before plodding towards us and dropping at her feet.

Poor bastard.

Zach, not Norm.

I adore the relationship I have with Mads. I’m pretty sure she adores it too. The only person who doesn’t adore it is Zach, because I may have fucked her in the club after a particularly hot Unfurl session with Rafe and his now-girlfriend, Belle (who, incidentally, was the mystery virgin in last night’s little bedtime story).

Yeah.

Told you the women I fool around with end up with my mates.

Anyway, that time with Mads was a one-off, and it happened way before my grieving, walled-up best friend was ready to admit to himself or anyone else that he had feelings for her.

Boy, did those feelings turn out to be big ones.

I’m also pretty sure that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time Zach knows he’s won the lottery with her and is equally confident of her love for him. You only have to look at the two of them together to see her adoration. The girl’s in deep.

But it’s sweet that he feels so possessive of her, and no wonder. She is, objectively speaking, a knockout, especially in today’s combo of killer heels and a clingy black dress that leaves little to the imagination.

My mate’s a lucky man these days, and, God knows, no one deserves luck more than him. Together, he and Maddy are the most farfetched, and yet perfect, combination I can imagine.

Maddy’s best asset, though, is her dazzling smile and cheery personality. No wonder she coaxed the grief-stricken shell that was my friend back to life, and for that we’ll always be grateful. She may have been a fantastic fuck—she’s one of the most sexually liberated women I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something—but these days we have a brother-sister relationship, and it really, really works.

She twists her body towards me, one elbow propped up on the back of the sofa so she can cradle her face in her hand and the other dangling by her side, a welcome licky-toy for Norm’s enormous tongue.

‘So,’ she says as soon as Rafe’s pulled the doors closed behind him. ‘Shoot.’ She wiggles her eyebrows, and I can’t help but laugh.

---