“Hard,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. There. There was one of those wicked grins. He was pleased with her answer. “I like it hard,” she said again.
“God,” he groaned. And with a mighty push he was back inside her, and his hand was moving over her clit again.
It was all it took. She was finally at the edge of that cliff, and she couldn’t have stopped if she tried. She screamed, feeling like every muscle in her body was spasming as a tidal wave of pleasure battered her.
“Fuck!” Dax shouted, as his hips started to jerk, but this time in a wild, irregular rhythm.
“Yeah.” Amy smiled as his body went limp. She ran her hands over his sweat-slicked back, unable to hold back a giggle. “We totally did.”
…
“I’ll finish up in here,” Kat said after Dax had placed the last washed dish in the drainer to await drying.
“You had a baby two weeks ago. Shouldn’t we still be waiting on you?”
“Nah,” Kat said, her eyes dancing. “Turns out I’m a natural at this motherhood thing. Who’da thunk it?”
It was true. Dax pretty much thought his sister could do anything, but she really had taken to being Gloria’s mom like it was meant to be.
“Go back in there and make sure our mother isn’t terrorizing your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
Kat tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “I dunno. You guys went canoeing today. Then you brought her to Sunday dinner.” She grinned. “The only thing missing is fornication.”
Dax schooled his features into what he hoped was a neutral expression. God, if only she knew. “Fornication? Have you been reading the Old Testament along with all those baby books? Anyway, you’re the one who invited her tonight.”
Kat stuck her tongue out at him and tried to slap him with her dish towel.
“I’m going!” he said.
“Looks like a duck, walks like a duck,” she called after him in a singsong voice.
Ignoring her, he rounded the corner from the kitchen and paused at the threshold to the dining room, where Amy and his mother were bent over the stack of house sale ads Kat had printed out. Kat and Amy had combed through them before dinner and made a short list of places to go see, and it appeared his mother was now opining on them. No one had sensed his arrival, so he watched for a moment. To think, a few short hours ago, Amy had come apart in his arms. Or had it been him coming apart in hers? He hadn’t meant to lose his cool like that. It was a little unsettling, truth be told. All those years he imagined what it would be like to be with Amy. He’d had no idea.
“Dax!” She’d spotted him, gracing him with one of her huge, guileless smiles. He shifted a little, praying his parents wouldn’t notice the…effect she had on him.
She waved him over to the table. “It turns out your mom has a lot of thoughts on Kat’s housing situation.”
He pulled up a chair. “What a shock.”
“So I was thinking, maybe we could use your mom for the McQuade development.” She turned to his mother. “I work for a real estate development company. We’re working on a mixed-use development—retail, including probably a couple big anchor tenants, like a grocery store and a movie theater. There will be several condo buildings.”
“And…” Where was she going with this?
“We won’t develop the condos ourselves—that’s not our thing. We’ll sell to other developers, but one of the things we always try to do is make sure we have the right mix of stuff to appeal to the sorts of people who are going to buy the condos. We do a lot of market research.”
“You do?” He’d never heard of that. But then, when he and Jack hung out, they tended not to talk shop.
“One of the market segments condo developers are always after is active retirees.” She beamed at his mother. His father, who had been sitting off in a corner reading, lowered his newspaper. “Your mom is really good at this.” She tapped one of the house ads. “She can see faults I never would have.”
Dax didn’t doubt that. His mother could find fault with the Baby Jesus dressed in christening gown made of flawless diamonds.
“So I was thinking.” Amy turned to address his mother directly. “Maybe you could come and look at the site, give me your thoughts. Then we could visit a few comparable places that are already developed—the Shops at Don Mills, for example. You can tell me what you like about them and what you don’t.”
Holy crap. He knew what she was doing. Damn, she was good.
Then she delivered her final pitch, guaranteed to find favor with his mother. “You’d be doing me a huge favor, actually.”