Mother Hostile Makeover Ch 03

Lauren met Stefan Novak at Pho Real, a Vietnamese place in downtown Carlyle. He was not alone. "My attorney, Claire Henderson," he introduced the redhead seated across the sidewalk table from him. "Claire, this is Lauren Chase, Director of Operations for Blue Oasis."

"Director of--oh, I thought you were a model. Weren't you in those ads last year? The Ageless Face of Natural Beauty, right?" Claire quoted the hated campaign tagline. She looked to be about Lauren's age. Despite her conservative hair and dark professional skirt suit, she exuded a startling sexual energy.

Lauren reddened. "That was the launch for our private label botanical skincare line. Using me in the spots was one of our last agency's less inspired notions. They thought they could hold onto the account by flattery. Wrong."

"Well, it sold me. I use your moisturizer every night." Lauren wondered if Claire's obvious satisfaction at putting her off balance were an occupational reflex.

Taking in the café's upscale vibe, Lauren said, "Nice place But I kind of hate to see Sherill Cross getting gentrified."

"You from the neighborhood? I used to live here, myself."

"I waited tables at Nick's Diner when I was in school. Right down the block. Twenty-four-hour place. Oasis couldn't support the four of us and keep the lights on, in those days. Nick let me set up a playpen in the office for my son."

"Nick's place is still there. I eat there a couple of times a week. He's retired down south, though."

Vanity was the most insidious sin. Having rebelled against using her feminine wiles on Stefan, now she felt drab next to Claire. Her hair was flat and she was wearing the same cropped yellow leather jacket, chalk-striped jeans, and suede flats that she'd been living in since yesterday morning. At least she'd grabbed a new black tee at the airport shop.

She was relieved when Claire took Stefan's arm and stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye. "Take care of business, deary. I'm already late. I keep Burke Chandler waiting at my peril."

"She's a very good attorney," Stefan offered after Claire had disappeared amidst the potted palms surrounding the patio.

"She's certainly aggressive."

"A little protective, perhaps. One might say 'motherly.'" Stefan pulled out a seat for Lauren. "I appreciate you coming so far on no notice at all. I'd like to have seen your offices, but I have only a brief stop at LAX tomorrow to pick up a friend."

"I imagine that you're very busy, Mr. Novak."

"Stefan, please. My friend in Los Angeles is very busy. She happens to have a brief break in the middle of a film shoot, which she's kind enough to spend with me. As for me, I'm very much at liberty."

Stefan Novak could have been in movies himself. Definitely the romantic lead, tall and athletic with searching blue eyes, straight nose, and a bold chin. He was thoroughly tanned, his thick chestnut hair bleached nearly white in streaks from living a life in the tropic sun. Lauren guessed he was about Ethan's age, and he reminded her of her son--relaxed, amused but holding himself a little apart from the world. His tieless, gray linen suit softly draped and accentuated the breadth of his shoulders and big chest.

A waiter took their orders. "I'll admit I'd never heard of Kai'ulau until a few weeks ago," Lauren confessed, hoping to draw Stefan out. "Didn't the French colonize that whole region? You're...

"Not French, no." Stefan smiled. "They gave up on the place in every way except on paper, back in the nineteenth century. But the British Expeditionary Force set up a listening post there during the Second World War. Grandfather was stationed there near the end of the war. He'd enlisted with the Royal Navy after the Germans occupied his own homeland. He liked the island. He stayed on after the surrender."

Lauren's experience had been that if you got people to tell you their family stories, you found out a lot about who they were and what mattered to them. Stefan was a toughie. He responded without pride or anecdote, almost as if reciting in a classroom. He didn't come across as shy or secretive, but simply as not concerned with the impression he made. He was willing to let others make whatever they might of him.

So maybe she'd unfairly prejudged the young man. Her skepticism toward Novak Global needn't extend to him personally. At least, not yet. She leaned across the table.

"Let me be honest, Stefan. I don't want to waste your time. My partners thought I ought to come out here and try to get a read on the spirit of your offer. Mainly I'm here to humor them. In other words, stall."

"I see." Stefan showed no trace of either surprise or disappointment.

"I'm going to make them unhappy, and you too, I'm afraid. As far as I'm concerned an ownership stake in Blue Oasis isn't on the table. Certainly not at the price you're offering."

"Then there is a price?"

"If you're going to suggest that

everything

has its price, I'll be disappointed."

"That, I would not want." Stefan stirred his soup with a porcelain spoon. "You're not curious about the product." A flat statement.

She asked herself why it was so important to dislike him personally. That would be easier if he were smug, or lubricious or pushy. A billionaire playboy ought to find being told "No" an unexpected and irritating experience. Stefan Novak was unperturbed. His easy-going manner came across as authentic.

Either that, or he was good enough at negotiating that to let down her guard could be costly, indeed.

"Curious? I suppose," she conceded. "Who wouldn't be? But here are two true things. The first is that we already have warehouse shelves full of extracts and herbs and powders from all over the world that dangle the hope of 'renewed youth and vigor in the bedroom.' All while being careful not to technically

promise

a damn thing."

"And the second?"

"The second is that I haven't even seen a sample of your Libidramine yet. You offered to demonstrate it to my partners if they'd come to you, but I haven't heard a thing from either of them in days. And that doesn't make me curious. It worries hell out of me."

"I would be worried, as well," he said, with a note of genuine concern. "I will call Mother right away and find out what is going on. Also..."

He took a small kraft envelope from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. She felt two small, soft bulges inside. "You have my number if you wish to get in touch. I'll be at the hotel until around eight tomorrow morning. I expect to be in the air by noon."

"Thank you, but I don't think--"

"Whatever you decide, I'm delighted to have had the chance to at least meet you."

"Um, me too. I mean, I'm glad to have met you, too." Lauren settled the check. Stefan held their parting handshake longer than strictly necessary. Or maybe she did that. She watched as he vanished into the midday downtown crowds, and for a while after.

She was not a girl. She was not getting swimmy over a good-looking, charming young stranger who was delighted to have met her. Not a bit.

†††

Stefan was as good as his word. On the ride back to her hotel after an afternoon spent wandering the shops down on Brevard Street, Lauren finally remembered to unmute her phone. Janet had left her a video message about an hour earlier. Rotten timing.

"Laur! I am so, so sorry...infrastructure here is the worst I've ever seen, I can't get a signal half the time. I just got Mr. Novak's message.

"Anyway, Kai'ulau is the most amazing place! And the product? We have to work out some kind of a deal with the Novaks. I mean, we've got to! That's all I'll say, for now--I'll tell you about it, but look, you and Jon need to come out here! Oh, and Ethan too.

Definitely

Ethan. I gotta send this before the network drops again, talk later. Bye!"

Well, that was not weird at all.

Lauren hadn't seen Jan so excited about anything in a dog's age. It looked like she was getting some sun, and she was wearing mascara and lipstick. And where were her glasses, the oversized gold metal affairs with the plastic bridge that she'd worn for twenty years? "They don't break, and they work," was always Jan's response to Lauren's entreaties to freshen up her style. The glasses were nowhere to be seen in the video. All very odd.

Lauren called back and got an automated message saying that Jan's phone was not in service. She figured that Frank would get in touch with Jon himself. Calling her husband was something that she decided could wait until she got to the hotel and found herself a stiff drink.

For the first time, she was more than mildly intrigued by NGT's

"Let's call it a dietary supplement"

sex drug. Maybe it was just the power of suggestion, but just maybe Libidramine had put a little fire back into the Palmieris' relationship. That could explain Jan's giddy distraction and unavailability. Lauren remembered well the extremes that her old friend had once been capable of when in heat.

In her room, Lauren tore Stefan's envelope open and shook two translucent amber caplets into her hand. Was the dosage one or both? Silly question. It wasn't like the stuff was penicillin. Hell, it wasn't even Tylenol. Swallowing both with a gulp of cold morning coffee, she lay down on the bed without bothering to undress, and waited.

Christ, she was tired.

Okay, Stefan, do it to me. Rev me up.

Half an hour passed and she felt no difference. It was what she'd expected, but disappointing nonetheless.

She replayed Janet's message. The blonde was more like the Jan of their school days when her shy and bookish personality had barely concealed a sizzling, impish energy. She was downright bubbly in the video. Her insinuating tease about Ethan, if that was what it had been, irked Lauren...but that, too, was vintage Jan.

Well, maybe a South Pacific idyll did that for the kind of all-work-no-play woman that Jan had become. If so, then hopefully Frank was feeling some of it too. He could stand to unclench.

Lauren closed her eyes. What about herself, then? A couple of weeks on a tropic island might do her more good than all the St. John's Wort in the Blue Oasis warehouses. Instead of yakking to her therapist, she ought to hitch a ride on the Novak jet and meet Jan on Kai'ulau. Yeah, if only. She'd wander down to some beach and find a big surfer dude, pull him down on that white sand, and ride him to--

She startled awake, having strayed across the gray boundary between daydreaming and sleep and right into a sex dream. Sweating, she stripped off her shirt and unfastened her jeans, reaching inside the waistband to pull the damp silk of her underpants away from her crotch. Her fingertips brushed against her labia. It felt good. She played absently with herself and thought about Stefan.

So he'd gotten to her. Why not? He was a damned attractive young guy. She didn't suppose that most of his playmates would give him a tumble were it not for his immense wealth, but then what did youngsters really know, anyway?

It was just as well that she would never see him again. However unruffled he'd appeared, he must be annoyed that she'd rejected his overtures--

business

overtures, she reminded herself. So, he'd wasted a morning and all that boyish charisma on a stubborn American woman nearly twice his age, and tomorrow he'd be away to the blue Pacific with some Hollywood actress. Lauren wouldn't see him again after tonight, if she decided to call him. Because she

could

call him...

She was burning up, despite the cool air blowing directly at her from the ceiling vent over the bed. She ought to finish undressing and get some rest. This was all exhaustion. Jet lag. She got up and paced, restless, staring out the window at the fire escape across the narrow alley.

She wondered idly about Stefan's background. With that hair and complexion, one of his parents was probably Polynesian. But those eyes would be the Novak lineage. Those piercing blue eyes, searching hers...

Son of a bitch!

Lauren buttoned her jeans, pulled on her shirt, and called an Uber.

†††

She didn't call ahead, afraid that whatever might spill out would make her sound as big a fool as she knew she was being. She just hoped that Stefan was in his room, and alone. Otherwise, she might well wind up shagging her driver. Or a parking attendant.

Stefan answered the door barefoot in slacks and a half-buttoned shirt. "Mrs. Chase, I wasn't expecting--"

"Damn you!" She pushed her way into the room without reconnoiter, grabbed him by both biceps, and pulled him down into a hard kiss. "You did this to me! Now you deal with it!"

"What do you--"

She kissed him again to shut them both up and yanked his shirt open, sending buttons flying. She backed him across the room and tumbled him onto the bed, kicked off her shoes, and straddled him. He responded instinctively, sliding his hands up the outside of her thighs to her hips. He undid her belt. She pulled her tee-shirt over her head.

While fumbling with her bra clasp she caught a glimpse of herself in the vanity mirror on the far wall: sweating and disheveled, a half-naked madwoman with pale, feral eyes. "I'm sure I'm very attractive right now."

"You are...a revelation." His face was fresh and open in the low warm light cast by the bedside lamp. It jarred her, dragging her back for a heartbeat from that precipice of abandon where she'd teetered ever since his damned pills had begun their work. She'd not given a passing thought to her husband or her business or to the rest of her life. As they stripped each other, laughing together on the crumpled bed cover, all that mattered was getting Stefan's cock inside her.

He was beautiful, lanky, and dark from head to toe. A swimmer's physique, sleek, ripped, and narrow-waisted. He gathered her in his arms and she let him turn her onto her back. He settled his weight atop her, balancing so as not to crush her, the promontories of his hips pressing gently between her open thighs. Young he might be, but not callow.

His fingers plucked at her pointed nipples, which had been hard as gravel since before she'd scrambled into the cab back at her hotel.

They kissed and rocked and humped against one another. Stefan's wet, stiffening penis slid against Lauren's belly. She took hold of his shaft, drawing his glans back and forth across the pearl of her clitoris, then moving lower until it nudged the entrance to her cunt.

"I'm

ready,

already," she hissed. "Fuck now, foreplay later."

She was as wet as a teenager. Stefan's cock entered her with only the slightest shift of his hips. He was big. She could not recall ever having been so filled by a man. Her body yielded and his cock glided in with some resistance. As he moved deeper it was as if his bulk pushed the air from her lungs, forcing a long, moaning exhalation from deep in her throat.

"P-push..." She heaved against him, palms on his clenched buttocks pulling up, pulling him in. He was not yet completely inside her and she wanted all of him. She wanted every merciful inch of cock he had to give. At last, the satin warmth of his scrotum bumped against her ass. One broad hand slid under her neck to lift up her head and tip it back. His lips found hers again.

It had been years since she had been so consumed by the grinding, sweating, groaning urgency of her own lust. Now was everything. Now, and the man. When had it been this way before? When had a man last fucked into her tightness with such determined desire for her? She was sure that no one ever had. It did not matter. What mattered was Stefan of the searching eyes and hundred miles of cock and scent of clean sweat and soap.

He flexed his legs and pulled out a little way, then drove forward again. Out a bit more and in a little faster on the second stroke, then more and faster with each stroke. His teeth nipped at her throat and at her nipples. She curled one calf across the small of his back, squeezing and trapping him against her with all of her strength.

Close to the edge, she held back. This was new for her, too--climaxing with Jon had become such a rare and uncertain thing that she'd learned to grab it when it happened, lest her peak fade and the opportunity be snatched away. But tonight she delayed as long as she could, her senses dancing on the hot knife's edge of

almost

and

not yet

, wanting it to go on and on and trusting Stefan not to leave her incomplete.

She thrust her pelvis against him in counterpoint to his lunges. The steel of his buttocks tightened and shuddered a warning. His cock throbbed inside her. With a look of absolute concentration he became still and then, touching the edge of her open mouth with one fingertip, he traced the outline of her lush, wet lips. He brought his face close to hers and gently kissed her eyelids. She let go at last, trembling and screaming and twisting. She arched her back up off the mattress. He grabbed her hips and held her ass in the air, her shoulders and the balls of her feet braced against the mattress, and he came inside her as she climaxed.

They lay facing one another. Stefan stroked Lauren's arm, his breath warm on her throat. She watched him through sleepy eyes. So young. It occurred to her that, whatever his family and corporate responsibilities might be, Stefan was in that early part of life when the set expressions and mannerisms of adulthood were still only poses to be assumed to a purpose--masks to be tried on and discarded, in search of those that were both properly imposing and that he could learn to live with. In intimate repose, the disguise fell away.

She did not know how many women he had fucked. He may have been in a clinch with Claire Henderson that morning, an hour before their lunch meeting. But at this instant, he looked at Lauren as if finding himself in bed with her was the most extraordinary and unexpected grace imaginable.

Perversely enough, that troubled her. She didn't regret fucking Stefan. But the fever had broken and caution returned. Her occasional infidelities over the last few years had been anxious bouts of emotional need, defiance and denial and nothing more. Lauren had not asked herself, with the others, what any of it meant. And she hesitated to look into her own heart now--not with all that she knew and all that she did not yet know about Stefan and his clan.

"Well now, Mr. Novak, I can admit when I'm wrong." She patted his chest, adopting her most casual tone. "Your Libidramine is all that you--"

A corner of Stefan's mouth turned up. "Cod liver oil."

Lauren sat bolt upright. "What?"

His playful expression faded at her reaction. "There's, ah, a pharmacy in the hotel. Next to the coffee shop, on the left, as you come into the lobby? They also sell the little envelopes. For keys and coins and such."

"A placebo. You gave me a

fucking placebo!"

He made a short half nod, eyes downcast.

"Why would you do that?"

"W-when I met you, I wanted to be with you. You, as you really are."

"How goddamn romantic. You lied to me out of admiration? That's a line I haven't heard."

"Please..."

"Make a fool of the American woman. Clever seduction."

"Seduction? No!" Stefan touched her shoulder uncertainly. "Listen to me, Lauren. You don't need any drug. You simply need permission."

"Because I'm just champing at the bit here, waiting for your permission to--

"Not mine. Your own."

"Of all the arrogant-- the drug was something

I chose to do.

You tricked me. You lied."

"You would rather I'd drugged you?"

"Fuck. You."

"It was a foolish thing, Lauren. I'm sorry."

"I am going to murder you," She rolled over with a furious shake of her head and got out of the bed. "After I shower."

Slamming the bathroom door behind her, she turned the shower up full blast. The hot needles of water did nothing to soothe her turmoil. She tried telling herself that it wasn't Stefan she was angry with. The hell it wasn't. Okay, so he hadn't actually said "Here, this is Libidramine," but he'd lied all the same. She'd followed his lead.