Great-Aunt Sophia's Lessons for Bombshells by Lisa Cach Read Free Book Online Page A

you can feel it elsewhere.”
    She opened her eyes in alarm.
    “It’s mostly nonsense, of course,” he said, stroking the spot on her foot with exquisite tenderness.
    “Of course,” she echoed weakly.
    “You don’t feel this anywhere else, do you?”
    “Like where?” she squeaked.
    “Oh . . . your spleen. Your small intestine. Maybe even . . . your pituitary gland.”
    She chortled in relief. “No.”
    “Good. I wouldn’t want you to think I had intentions on your pituitary gland.”
    She stared at him in the dark. Did he know what he was doing to her?
    He found her other foot and brought it to join the first in his lap, both his thumbs working on that spot in slow, short strokes. Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes rolling back in her head. Oh God, it feels so good. . . . It really had been too long since she’d been touched by a man.
    She felt a moan of pleasure start in the back of her throat and swallowed it. But those strong thumbs, stroking her just there. . . . Distraction! I need distraction! “You never answered why you’re sleeping on the couch,” Grace said hoarsely. “Don’t you have a home to go to?”
    “In San Francisco. Surely you don’t think I should drive there in my present condition?”
    “How drunk are you?” She couldn’t smell anything on him.
    “Enough to sit here with you.”
    She couldn’t claim the same excuse. “How did you meet Sophia?”
    “I have football to thank for that.”
    “Did you meet at a game?” It was hard to picture Sophia in the stands, face painted in team colors, yelling whatever people yelled at football games.
    “No. She was friends with one of my football coaches at USC. She used to have a house in Beverly Hills, and when she needed a couple of young, strong, good-looking guys, she called Coach Griggs.”
    “Needed good-looking guys for what? Her harem?”
    “Your mind sure runs easily to sex.” He slid his palm up her calf, inside the leg of her pajama bottoms, and gently played his fingertips against the delicate skin at the back of her knee. He was turned sideways toward her, his dark shadow hovering over her. “I may have to take another look at what goes on in Women’s Studies programs.”
    “What are you doing?” Grace breathed, hyperaware that she wore no underpants and that there was no obstacle, however flimsy, on the path between his hand and . . . everything else.
    “This is supposed to be good for your, uh, liver,” he said, fingers stroking with hypnotic regularity on the tender, soft skin behind her knee.
    “You’re making that up.”
    “Does it feel bad?” he asked. “For your liver, that is.”
    “N-n-noo . . .”
    “Waiting tables.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what Sophia would hire us for. She threw lots of parties and was on committees for various fund-raisers, and she liked to hire us to serve. She said she preferred our brutish self-obsession to the arty-farty self-obsession of unemployed actors.”
    “How kind of her.” She felt him shove up the other leg of her pajamas and stroke her from ankle to knee. She supposed she should stop him, but it was harmless, wasn’t it?
    “It was kind of her. It didn’t take long to figure out that Coach Griggs must have given her a list of the guys who were broke. Like the other guys she hired, I had a full-ride football scholarship, but nothing else. Sophia paid us each a couple hundred bucks for a few hours’ work, and let us take home as many leftovers as we could carry. We loved her for that. Do you have any idea how much a twenty-year-old football player eats? We’d carry off plastic grocery bags sagging with beef tenderloin. Shrimp. Enough cheese and cured meats to make sandwiches for a month.” His fingers slowed on her skin as he lost himself in remembrance. “I can still taste that beef, dumped straight out of the catering pans and into a plastic grocery bag, dribbling juices out of a hole in the bottom all the way home. Blue-red in the middle, rare enough to