The Season To Sin - Clare Connelly

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along her calf. Holy shit, she feels so much better than I’d imagined. So soft and smooth and feminine. I pause in the hollow of her knee, watching her fevered face as her eyes darken and her cheeks glow. I run my fingers higher then, slowly, until I reach her inner thigh and she moans, once again digging her fingers into my shoulder and arching her back.

      ‘Fuck...’ I shove the elastic edge of her underpants aside and, with my eyes holding hers, mocking her for the fact she tried to pretend this wasn’t happening between us, I nudge a finger inside her warm, throbbing heart. She’s so goddamned wet I feel a drop of my own cum spill out, but I don’t stop. I push deeper inside her and she whimpers, her fingers now scratching into me.

      ‘You?’

      She blinks, glaring at me for a second, and then she nods, just a simple tiny movement that is the release I crave.

      Fuck, I needed that. I move my finger around and her breathing gets hotter. I pull my other hand away, but with no intention of ignoring that delicious breast. I drop my mouth to it, taking her nipple into my mouth through the bra, and I use my free hand to jerk her skirt up higher and then one thumb rubs against her clit as my finger moves inside her.

      She is mine within a minute.

      She cries out so hard and loud that I have to give up her beautiful breast and claim her mouth instead, if only to silence her. I absorb her scream and cries as she orgasms around my finger. Her pleasure saturates the room, vibrating around us heavily—it’s heavenly.

      It’s a start, but it’s nowhere near enough...

      ‘It needs to go higher, Mummy.’

      ‘Up here?’ I hook the ornament across and press it into the branch carefully.

      ‘Nooo...’ She sighs with exasperation that defies belief for a four-year-old. Ivy’s mannerisms are captivating, except when they’re frustrating. ‘Way up there!’

      I can still feel tingles in my body, unfamiliar and heavenly all at once, throbs of pleasure like little waves that rock me out of nowhere.

      I blink and see the way he was afterwards. After he’d pulled his finger out of me and straightened my skirt with almost clinical detachment, stepping away from me and nodding, like I was an item on his ‘to-do’ list and he’d ‘to-do-ed’ the heck out of me.

      ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’ That was all. No ‘What time suits?’ or ‘We should talk.’ A directive rather than a question—a decision. A firm instruction.

      And I’d nodded! What the hell had I been thinking? I should have told him no. That we couldn’t see one another again.

      I should have told him how wrong we’d been to do...that. Oh, God. My insides are knotted. I know that when I slip away from Ivy and take a bath, my underwear will be wet with proof of my desire, that my body has been changed by Noah’s possession and he didn’t so much as show me his chest.

      I can’t see him again. I must see him again. I’m so torn. I draw in a deep breath. I know I can’t see him professionally.

      Our relationship isn’t formalised—he hasn’t filled anything out. I haven’t billed him. I sweep my eyes shut. That’s a technicality and I know it. But if I spell it out to him, making sure he understands that I can no longer have him in my office, no longer treat him as a patient, does that leave me ethically free to see him in other ways? And am I really okay with that?

      ‘Mummy!’ Ivy stamps her foot. ‘You’re just staring into space!’

      ‘Sorry,’ I mumble, turning my attention back to the job at hand.

      I loop the ornament on the second-highest branch and, apparently satisfied, Ivy nods before reaching into the box and carefully unwrapping the next one along. Ivy has always been very careful. Even as a one-year-old she would take care when doing anything. She has always eaten neatly, used a napkin to wipe her fingers, placed her shoes side by side at the front door. She is the definition of particular.

      In other words, the opposite to me.

      And her father, come to think of it.

      I have always thought certain areas were black and white, but this is one with many, many shades of grey. Noah came to me for help and, though our relationship isn’t that of patient and doctor, I worry about how this development might affect him. And, yes, I worry about how it will affect me.

      ‘What’s this one?’ She wrinkles her nose—so like Aaron’s—and passes me the ornament.

      I force myself back to Ivy, the tree, and try to ignore the fuzzy worries on the periphery of my brain. ‘Ah. I made this when I was ten years old.’ I stare at the little decoration, the small foam ball that I painstakingly stuck fabric to, then dotted with sequins. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ lounge, my knees covered in a blanket, my hair long around my shoulders, determined to make the decoration according to the instructions. ‘It took quite a long time.’

      ‘Really?’ Ivy probably doesn’t mean to sound so scathing and I can’t help but laugh.

      ‘Yes, dearest.’ I push the ornament into the branches and wait for another decoration.

      ‘Ebony James says it’s too early to put up the tree,’ she says, her eyes darting to mine and then flicking away, as if afraid of the sacrilegious assertion she’s just repeated.

      My smile is kind. ‘Everyone has different traditions. Perhaps in Ebony James’s house they put their tree up later.’

      ‘Do most people put their tree up now?’

      I shrug. ‘They’re up in shops, aren’t they?’

      Ivy nods but looks far from convinced.

      ‘Why shouldn’t we enjoy the tree for a month? Christmas only comes around once a year and it’s such a waste not to enjoy it fully. Don’t you think?’

      ‘I suppose so.’ Her smile is more genuine now.

      She goes back to unboxing ornaments and I go back to hanging them, but my mind keeps threatening to drag me back to Noah, my desk, my office and that pleasure.

      Decorating the tree is one of my favourite pastimes. We have a real tree, but of course it’s too early to have a chopped tree, so ours is potted. I water it every few days to keep it fresh and then, after Christmas, once it’s denuded of decorations once more, I put it on a trolley and push it back into our small courtyard garden. There it remains all year round, dormant and hibernating, waiting for its time to shine—literally—with the strings of lights we weave through its greenery.

      I love doing this, and even more so now that Ivy is old enough to join in with me, but I’m barely in the moment.

      By the time Ivy is in bed, and I have had dinner, I am itching to crawl between my sheets and surrender to the dreams of him that I know will follow.

      I check my emails quickly first—a habit I’ve fallen into since having Ivy and needing to do some of my work from home—and his name is the first I see.

      Noah Moore—Bright Spark Inc

      I click into it faster than I can believe.

      It’s a short email. Just a few words. But they rob me of breath and make my knees sag.

      I can smell you on my hand. Tomorrow I want to taste you.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      HIS EMAIL SPINS through my mind all day. I hear the words he’d written, voiced in his inimitable accent. Australian with a dash of arrogance and a bucketload of don’t-give-a-fuck. I guess having squillions of pounds could give someone that attitude, but I don’t think that’s the beginning and end of it.

      I’d put money on Noah having been like this for

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