Seducing Kate Read online

  He reached down and smacked Kate’s ass again, and I balled my hand into a fist. I wanted to punch that fucker so hard his head bounced off the cabinets. Not only had he slapped her ass twice in front of me, but now he was being outright disrespectful toward her.

  “That’s enough.” She pushed his hand away. The amusement on her face was gone. Her eyes looked angry, and her cheeks were flushed. She looked humiliated, and that pissed me off.

  “What the hell is your problem?” John asked.

  “You just met him,” she said. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “He knows I’m kidding. Don’t you, Carl?”

  “Kyle.” I used the same bored and disinterested tone Justin had used the night before.

  “Whatever. I’m just kidding.” John pushed himself upright and slapped me on the shoulder. “But don’t ever let a woman tell you they don’t like it in the ass. They all do.”

  What a motherfucker.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said when John left the kitchen. “He usually saves the bad jokes for his friends.”

  I exhaled slowly as I focused on the turkey again. I didn’t trust myself to not say something crude about John, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Now I understood why Justin had so much hatred for the guy. He treated Kate like his own personal whore. Why the fuck would she put up with that?

  Kate moved to my side, standing close enough I could smell her. It wasn’t strong like perfume, but a mild sweet smell. I inhaled deeply and let the scent take the edge off my anger.

  “Kyle?”

  I stopped digging for turkey guts and looked at her. My name whispered from her lips would have sent a thrill through me just a few minutes before, but I was too pissed to revel in it. “Look, I don’t know you, Kate. But I know men shouldn’t treat women like that. You deserve respect.”

  “He was kidding.”

  “Well, he’s not very funny, is he?”

  She lowered her eyes, and I sensed that I’d ticked her off. Maybe because I’d crossed a line, or maybe because I’d said something that she knew was true but didn’t want to hear. Either way, when she looked at me again, she seemed distant.

  “Why don’t you go see what Justin’s up to? I can handle dinner from here.”

  “Sure.” I washed my hands and dried them on a towel. I left Kate standing by the sink without looking back. Instead of waking up Justin, I went into the guest room and flopped onto the bed.

  “Fucking dick,” I said, thinking of John again.

  I dug my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through social media, trying to get my mind off what had happened in the kitchen. The distraction didn’t help. All the stupid posts about people being thankful just put me in a worse mood. I was beginning to regret agreeing to come home with Justin. I closed the application on my phone and stared at the ceiling, debating whether I should tell Justin about this morning. Maybe we could tag-team each other while kicking John’s ass later.

  “Yeah,” I said when there was a knock at my door. I was expecting Justin to come in—instead, it was Kate.

  “Hey,” she said from the doorway. She leaned against the frame and gave me a smile that was probably meant to reassure me, but it didn’t. It just made her look sad. “He’s an ass. I know that, but he actually does have some good qualities. He just doesn’t like to show them off.”

  I sat up. “I have sisters. I’d kill anybody who said that shit about them.”

  “They’re lucky to have you looking out for them. So am I, but John’s my problem, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to get Justin up. People will start getting here in half an hour or so. You ready to meet your roommate’s insane relatives?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Okay.” She started to step back into the hallway but stopped. “It’s nice to know there are still guys out there who respect women.”

  She was gone before I could respond.

  Kate’s warnings about her family had me a bit concerned, but it turned out they were hilarious. Her mother, decked out in sequins from head to toe, drank more beer than all the men combined and cussed like a sailor. Kate’s younger sister, Maggie—who was cute but not nearly as much so as Kate—was constantly crossing herself and complaining that her mother was going to burn in hell. In contrast, Maggie’s husband Ed was nearly as drunk and foul-mouthed as Grandma. Maggie and Ed’s sons were loud and obnoxious preteens who spent as much time checking out Kate as I did.

  Justin kept nudging me and nodding toward his grandfather, who had a tendency to doze off between bites during dinner.

  After we ate, the crowd made their way to the den. It wasn’t long before John looked annoyed and went upstairs. Kate disappeared a few minutes after he did. I snuck out as well to go in search of her. I found her bent over the table, wiping it clean. The way she was leaning gave me a perfect view down her blouse.

  Her tits jiggled wildly in a lacy bra as she tried to scrub something off the table. I would have been perfectly content to stare at them all day, but she stopped moving, snapping me out of the daze I’d fallen in. I lifted my gaze to her face and realized she was staring at me. A slow grin curved her lip, and I cleared my throat. Shit. She’d once again caught me checking out her tits.

  “Uh…is it, uh, okay if I make some coffee?” That was lame and I knew it.

  “If you want to give me a minute, I’ll make it for you.”

  “No, it’s all right. I can do it.”

  I walked past her, ignoring the way she was watching me cross the room with an amused smile on her face. I silently cussed myself as I got a mug down and found a pod for the single-serve machine.

  “Would you make me one too?” Kate asked, coming into the kitchen behind me.

  “Sure.” I got another mug down and was waiting for the first cup to finish brewing when she stepped beside me.

  She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. “What do you think of the family?”

  I grinned. “I like them. Grandma especially. She’s pretty cool.”

  “She’s interesting, that’s for sure. I fear for Dad, though. One of these days he is going to doze off and drown in a bowl of soup.”

  We both laughed, but then her face grew a bit more serious. I braced myself for what she was going to say. She drew a deep breath, preparing to tell me whatever was on her mind.

  “There you are,” Justin said, coming into the kitchen. “Come on. The guys are meeting up to play some ball. I told them we’d be there in a few.”

  “I was just making some coffee.”

  “Screw that. Let’s go,” he said.

  I handed the mug I’d just made to Kate. “See ya later.”

  “See ya,” she said.

  The rest of the weekend, I couldn’t keep Kate out of my thoughts. While Justin and his friends fooled around playing hoops, I was losing precious time. By the time we’d made it back to Kate’s house Thursday night, she and John were in bed. Friday passed much the same way—we spent almost all day hanging out with Justin’s friends and got home after Kate and John were upstairs.

  However, Kate insisted we have dinner with her Saturday night since we were leaving to go back to school Sunday morning.

  John and Justin had had about as much of each other as they could stand, so John was out drinking with some friends by the time Justin, Kate, and I sat at the table to eat the pizza she’d ordered.

  It was nice hanging out with just the two of them. Justin wasn’t acting like a defensive prick, and Kate wasn’t constantly trying to smooth things over between him and John. She was relaxed, and Justin was acting like himself.

  We filled her in on school, taking turns telling stories, and she told us about her job. She had started a real estate office when Justin was a kid and now had three agents working with her. She enjoyed it, she said, but she wasn’t fond of all the changing technology.

  “I’m too damn cheap to hire a tech guy,” she explained to me.

&n
bsp; “I told you that you don’t need one,” Justin said. “Kyle can help you.”

  Kate glanced at me, as if gauging my reaction, and then looked at Justin. “Kyle doesn’t want to fix my website, Jus.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  “Everything.” She tossed the crust of her pizza slice onto her plate. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and the only agent who knows anything about it isn’t nearly as smart as she thinks she is. It’s a goddamned mess.”

  “Well, let’s take a look.” I dropped what was left of my dinner and wiped my hands.

  “Now?”

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” I reminded her.

  We cleaned up our plates, and I followed Kate into her home office.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” She sat in her chair and pushed the power button on her computer.

  “Yeah, it’s no problem.”

  While the computer came to life, she got another chair and set it next to the high-backed leather chair in front of the keyboard. I sat next to her as she showed me her business’s website.

  “I hate it,” she said. “It looks so unprofessional.”

  I chuckled at her name sprawled across the top in a bubbly, brightly colored font. “It could use some help.”

  I logged in to her web hosting site and took my time altering her page. More than once, she leaned close and pointed to something on the screen. Whenever she did, my eyes automatically cast a sideways glance. She liked to wear low-cut shirts—every time she put her finger to the screen, the white lace of her bra poked out and taunted me. I had no choice but to look.

  “Oh my God,” she said after an hour of working on her site setup. My changes had completely altered her website. She squeezed my knee, and my cock instantly stirred. “It looks so good.” She took her hand from my knee, wrapped her arm around my shoulder, and hugged me.

  Fuck. Her breast pressed into my arm, and her scent surrounded me like a cloud of smoke. All I could feel was the scorching heat of her tit as my head swam in what I thought was vanilla.

  “Thank you so much,” she said.

  I smiled wide. So wide I probably looked like an idiot. “You’re welcome. So you want me to accept the changes?”

  “Are you kidding me? Yes.”

  Once I did, I clicked out of the web hosting page and onto the live site. She gasped and kissed my cheek. Her lips were soft and hot, and even though it was just a peck, it sent my dick into a frenzy. It stood tall, ready for action that I wasn’t going to get until I crawled into bed and, for the third time since meeting Kate, jacked off into a sock.

  I got up early enough on Sunday to catch Kate in the kitchen wearing the same pink robe over another tank top that hugged her breasts and highlighted the peaks of her nipples. She heard me come in.

  “Good morning.” Her voice was thick with sleep.

  “Morning.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  I fixed myself a bowl of cereal while she brewed me a mug of coffee. We sat at the dining room table, me with my bowl and cup and Kate with toast and her own mug.

  “Justin said you did the painting in the guest room.”

  “Oh.” She laughed. “I’m not that good.”

  “I like it. It’s nice.”

  “Thank you. I think it drives Justin crazy that I’m always hanging bad paintings everywhere, but I like to think of it as payback for all those years of having to display stick figures and spelling tests like they were masterpieces.”

  We laughed for a moment, and then she sipped her coffee. She looked at me over the rim of her mug. It was an intense look, like she was thinking something she wasn’t certain she should voice. I got the same feeling I had Thanksgiving afternoon, that she wanted to say something but didn’t quite know how.

  My heart began to thump. A mix of anticipation and fear caused my stomach to tighten a bit. I was certain she was going to acknowledge my inexplicable attraction to her. What I wasn’t certain of was whether she was going to tell me to get over it or admit that she felt it too.

  Instead of doing either, she lowered her mug and pushed her toast away. “I’m going to grab a shower before John and Justin get up and drain the hot water.”

  “Better hurry,” I said.

  She left the room, and I looked into my mug, again imagining her standing naked under hot streams of water.

  An hour later, Justin and I were standing out in the cold, getting ready to drive back to Chicago.

  Kate hugged Justin and kissed him on the cheek and then didn’t hesitate to move to me. Her arms went around my neck, and she gave me the same goodbye. Before she could lean back, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her completely against me. I crushed her breasts into my chest and inhaled her scent. I wrote the feeling to memory before I whispered my thanks in her ear and released her.

  2

  “Mom needs you to call her,” Justin told me a few days before winter break.

  I hadn’t stopped thinking of Kate since Thanksgiving, and I’d spent a lot of time with a hard-on. Hearing that she wanted me to call, even though I knew it would be about her website, made my dick twitch to life. “Text me her number.” I hoped I didn’t sound nearly as excited about calling her as I was.

  As soon as I got her number, I programmed it into my phone and called her. Justin was on his bed, flipping through a textbook, so I had to try to keep my cool, but when she answered, I grinned like a fool.

  “Hey, Kate. It’s Kyle. Justin said you needed some help?”

  Her voice was as smooth as I remembered. Hearing her talk into my ear made me smile even more. I kept my back to Justin as I connected my laptop to the Internet so I could find her website and see what she was talking about.

  It took about half an hour to fix the problem, and when it was working, she thanked me. I remembered how she’d hugged and kissed me when we were in her office. I wished she could do that now.

  “Are you going home for Christmas?” She surprised me by the personal turn of our conversation.

  “Uh, yeah. I fly out Saturday.”

  “Florida, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “God, you’re so lucky. I’d give anything to live near the beach. I’d never get out of my bikini.”

  Fuck. There went my dick again, coming to life. “Yeah, it’s nice.”

  “Well, have a great break.”

  “Have fun with the big lug over here.”

  “Fuck you, Ky,” Justin muttered.

  “A month of him and John glaring at each other. Should be a blast.”

  My mood instantly deflated. “Sounds like it. Hey, I gotta run. If you need anything else, just call me, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Thanks, Kyle.”

  I hung up and turned to Justin. “John’s looking forward to spending Christmas with you.”

  “That shit will get your ass kicked.” Justin tossed his book at me.

  For the first time ever, I was excited to get back to school. Not for the classes but because Justin had sent a couple texts during break to let me know that John was being his usual dick self and Justin was certain Kate was going to dump his ass any time. Justin was expecting us to have to make a weekend trip to Minneapolis to help move John’s ass out of Kate’s house.

  John hadn’t gotten Kate anything for Christmas. He had blown it off, but Justin said Kate was hurt, and he was positive this was the last straw. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Kate got over it, and John didn’t move out.

  Justin was pissed off enough that when Easter rolled around, he said he wasn’t going to go home.

  Apparently he was serious about it, because the Monday before Good Friday, Kate called me.

  “Hey.” I figured there was a problem with her website again, but when she said hello, it sounded like she was on the verge of crying. “What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry, Kyle. I shouldn’t have called, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  I instantly
thought it was about John. My chest puffed up, and I was ready to kick his ass before I even knew what he’d done. “What’s wrong?”

  “Justin called. He’s not coming home this weekend.”

  “Oh, yeah. He said he wasn’t sure about it.”

  “Would you talk to him, Kyle? Please. He’ll listen to you.”

  “Kate—”

  “Look, I know it’s not your problem, but before long he’s going to be married and have kids, and he’s not going to come home for the holidays. John’s not going to be around. He doesn’t want to see Justin either.”

  She didn’t need to twist my arm. I was just as disappointed as she was because she’d already extended the invitation for me to go to Minneapolis with Justin. He was fucking up my Easter too, goddamn it. I had been looking forward to seeing Kate.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to him, but I can’t promise you anything.”

  “I know. But will you try?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I hung up and immediately called Justin. “Dude, you’re a douche.”

  “What’d I do now?”

  “You told your mom you aren’t going home for Easter.”

  I didn’t know what Justin was doing, but it sounded like he dropped something and then cussed. “She called you?”

  “She’s really upset. She said John won’t be around.”

  “He’s fucking always around.”

  “Well, she said he won’t be. Come on, Justin. She wants you there.”

  He sighed loudly, dramatically. “You still going with me?”

  “Beats the hell out of hanging around here.”

  “All right. But if he fucks with her this weekend, you’re going to be bailing my ass out of jail.”

  “No, I won’t. Because I’ll be right there with you.”

  As Kate had said, John avoided us as much as possible. Of course, that meant he spent Thursday night at a bar and Friday sleeping it off. He got up and left on Saturday before we even saw him.

  It was nice having just the three of us at the house—though it would have been better if it’d been just Kate and me. When Justin and I arrived, she’d hugged me tightly and whispered her thanks in my ear. I’d hugged her back, and it seemed like a barrier between us had been broken. Since then, she’d been much more willing to put a hand on my arm or nudge me when we were laughing. It might not have meant anything to her, but I wrote every touch to memory so I could recall it later.