Beauty and the Baritone Read Free Page A

enough.

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    Once upon a time he had been Mateo Lopez. He hadn’t questioned why women were with him or why he was with a woman. He was famous, he was celebrated and women wanted him. He had his choice of women also and he indulged.
    He’d been in love a few times but love was the same luxury as a vacation or a bottle of wine. It all ended. Bottles were emptied, vacations were replaced by jobs and commitments. Love was brief and forgotten in the next rush of celebrity or between the thighs of another.
    “You are not the first woman since my accident.”
    He hadn’t meant to say it.
    “I’m glad to hear it.”
    The woman was determined to confound him.
    She was sitting on the edge of his bed, completely naked yet demure. Her feet were on the floor, her hands folded on her lap.
    He was still wearing his clothes. What was he supposed to do?
    “Do you want me to undress you?”
    He’d never questioned what to do with a woman before. She wanted to be used yet he had no idea any longer how to use a woman. She would be disgusted with him. She might not have turned away from his face but there were scars on his body that she’d see. Scars that shamed him.
    He stood too long, indecisive and then she stood. She was beautiful in the most basic feminine way. He wished he was the man he’d once been so he could take her without hesitation.
    In her bare feet she was almost as tall as him. Her hands came to rest on his chest, feather light. He felt her breath, warm and soft on his skin.
    He’d been with a prostitute, he wanted to tell her. Not once but twice. There was no satisfaction with them, no warmth, no passion. It had been his way to prove he was still a man. The shots his doctor had to give him proved further he was capable of sex as well as stupidity.
    His shirt was peeled off his shoulders and he watched her face as she examined his body. “My leg,” he said and then stopped.
    “You were hurt.” She traced the scar that puckered his shoulder. “So badly hurt.”
    He thought she meant to kiss it as she leaned in but it was her tongue, tracing the line of it from his shoulder to his chest. Scars crisscrossed his chest and her mouth traversed the path they created.
    She was working her way down and he stood, his belt loosened and his trousers pulled down.
    He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever been undressed by a lover. Not like this; completely stripped and left standing and she used her mouth to caress those parts of him he despised.
    She nuzzled around his penis, touching it with whispers of breath, a brief kiss, the silken touch of her hair. She dragged desire up from him. He thought it had been broken also, destroyed with his body but his penis hardened and his body quickened with need.
    She was brave but not skilled. Carolyn told a story that drew her as a woman with more experience, more technique than what she showed. Her kisses though brave were not bringing him to the peak of desire. Her touches did not make him forget the soreness of his muscles.
    Even when her mouth closed on his cock, when the soft, wet wonderland of her embraced and sucked his hard flesh; his leg throbbed with ache. He’d stood too long; his muscles were bunched and sore.
    He fisted her hair and roughly drew her head back. Her face was rosy, her lips wet and slightly swollen.
    “Go to your room,” he said roughly.
    “I don’t understand. I can make it better.”
    “No more. Leave me now.”
    He saw the shame that flushed her face. Her expression shuttered, brittled.
    Standing she was still glorious. How he wished he could be the man he’d been. He might once have satisfied her, But now he needed to sit, to get the weigh off his clenching muscle.
    He sunk onto the bed as the door closed and pushed his fist into his leg. There was still so much pain.
    There would always be pain.

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    There was a television hidden in a credenza. Her e-reader was fully charged as was her phone and tablet. There were any