When she shivered again, Bishop smiled again. Slowly. In a way that gave her goose-b.u.mps on the inside as well as the outside, a way she'd never dreamed she might goose-b.u.mp at the urging of Bishop McBride.

His smile twitched. It widened, and along with the twitching-widening, took on a sudden ravenous look. A burning and self-consuming hunger whose existence she realized only now she'd seen there before. Though she'd never admitted seeing it before.

Because admitting automatically meant...

Something turned over inside her heart again.

She'd known Bishop for as long as she'd known herself.

Lingering still, his hands began to push. Down, and down.

The intrinsic fire in his touch meant obviously to subdue her.

And he succeeded, the slow-rolling of her heart stopping almost at once as he exerted his urging pressure.

In the very next instant her heart took up a hitching-and-hammering pulse that must surely be visible in the suddenly agitated rise and fall of her vibrantly purple necklace with its vibrantly watching green-jade eye.

Just as suddenly, the necklace seemed to weigh about a ton 20 eXtasy's Collective Mind and a half.

Turning her head, half-turning her upper body so that she could look directly into Bishop's face without having to resort to the mirror...as if the mirror might be lying...Twila caught her breath in the same sort of hitching, hiccoughing catch she felt inside. She caught her breath around a madly insistent fluttering that would not leave her a moment's peace.

She tried to say something.

Nothing came.

Apparently seized by the same sort of internal disturbance, Bishop's arms and hands jerked when he moved suddenly, to swing the viewing divan around on its smooth-rolling casters.

Salon Delice employed special chairs for its patrons to view the creations wrought by its elite corps of stylists. Creations advertised discreetly to an exclusive and in-the-know few as 'unbidden pleasures.'

Unlike the styling chairs, which were the kind of standard low-backed chairs, although expensively appointed ones, that a person might find in any salon, only the viewing chairs faced mirrors. Only the viewing chairs in their small and private rooms offered the chance to look upon oneself, and revel in one's newly created glory.

The viewing chairs were...otherworldly. To say the least.

Not really chairs in the truest sense of the word, they were wide and circular divans, and one lounged upon them rather than sat. High backs lined in deep-tucked purple plush and rimmed with curving lengths of the same common gray-steel pipe that edged the mirrors, were specially designed to be the perfect backdrop for all that Soho-edgy glory.

Torn abruptly away from her own reflection, Twila's gaze found Bishop's and held it. Just as his held steadfastly to hers.

She did not breathe, wondering why she'd never noticed him 21 Violet Visions before.

"Did you lock the front door?" she quavered without warning, never knowing she was about to say it, yet forced to concede the perfection of each and every word once she did.

"Of course. When do we ever leave it unlocked after hours?"

"And the viewing room door?"

"Why bother?" His gaze glittered for a moment. Strangely.

Almost purposefully, before his smile widened and glistened, and he came to her.

His movements were quick. Fluid.

He mounted the divan with such ease that Twila wondered how many times he'd done it before.

Surely a good-looking black-haired and indigo-eyed man...a very good-looking one famous for finding enormous delight and pleasure in both s.e.xes...had had more than a few chances to practice that very fluid and unnerving move.

"Why?" he asked around a small, entirely inflammatory laugh.

"Are you expecting something?"

"Should I be expecting something?"

He only laughed again. And pushed her back. Very definitely pushed her this time, though very carefully. He pushed her back so that she lay spread-eagled, her legs automatically arranged in the proper position for whatever seduction he had in mind.

"Sandra should be here," he murmured as he located the Velcro fastening of the short-short black pleated skirt she wore over her body stocking. And separated it.

"Sandra?" Twila groaned, almost lost in the delight of his hands brushing across her repeatedly, even through the delicate but firm layers of fabric that all too tragically separated them.

"Why on earth..."

"Sandra could teach you a few things."

"What..." Twila had to pause to breathe when Bishop 22 eXtasy's Collective Mind pressed a heat-inducing kiss to the flesh previously concealed by her abbreviated pleats. The still net-and-nude concealed flesh between her thighs. "...th...things?"

His laughter turned as wicked and knowing as his gaze had been earlier. "I know exactly where you've been, Twila. I know exactly everything you've done or tried."

Shuddering, Twila had no doubt he did. She'd never tried to keep secrets from him, never tried to...

"You've never made love with a woman." His voice was silken. Smooth. "You have no idea how exhilarating it is to have a member of your own s.e.x lavish mindless acts of affection upon you." His fingers tugged at the not-so-st.u.r.dy-after-all fabric of the body suit. Searching, determined, they penetrated the filmy mesh and lining. They tore and shredded in their wanton eagerness, so that Twila heard the fabric separate.

Felt it separate.

Felt, too, the inrush of silken air that stroked tendrils of pure, unadulterated fire through the steaming folds beneath...folds revealed now entirely because she wore no undergarments beneath the body suit. Never had, never did, never would.

Instantly, Bishop bent over her. To lap delicately, diabolically at what he'd exposed.

Twila's body leaped instantly to life. Fervent life, responsive life.

Every one of the exposed and then not-exposed folds of instantly misting, instantly aroused flesh with which Bishop's searching mouth came in contact, sent up a separate, unmistakable signal of its own. Signals almost painful in their sudden, urgent need to have exactly what they had been designed to want and to have.

She cried out. Not alarmed. Delighted.

"I'd like to watch while Sandra makes love to you." And then 23 Violet Visions there was no time for words. No opportunity. Then Bishop closed his mouth over her suffering folds, and made them his captives.

"I want to watch your eyes. I want to see the look in them the first time you make love to her."

Her cry was thin. A deranged warble expressing all possible forms of deep-seated and agonized pleasure that words could not.

"Sandra could teach you how," he murmured, releasing his hold upon her far too soon.

"B...but Sandra's a l...lesbian."

His laughter turned silky. Seductive. Coaxing and almost, alarmingly, convincing. "She's not. She's like me. She doesn't believe in cutting her enjoyment in half. Not when she knows there's as much delight with her own kind as there is with the opposite."

"B...but I'm not. L...like...like...like..."

At some point Bishop had freed himself of the snug-fitting jeans with which he made it a practice to conceal not a one of his considerable attributes. At some point he'd freed those very attributes, though Twila had never been aware of it until he moved forward. Until he moved upward, grazing the tip of his fully engorged c.o.c.k along the heated, tingling flesh of her inner thigh.

Bishop gained access. In a long and stroking, molten-gilt glide that yet posed some difficulty because of the confused and uncertain resistant drag of her own flesh, his c.o.c.k parted her successive layers. He filled her. So completely and with such not-to-be-resisted skill, finding some hidden inner core of delight she'd never suspected of herself that her head and feet lifted of their own volition.

Her hands raised as well, and pushed with their last feeble remnant of strength against the front of his shoulders.

24.

eXtasy's Collective Mind The effect was a wriggling sort of denial that resulted in exactly the kind of opening and welcoming that Twila had never foreseen. The kind of welcoming it was all too obvious Bishop had counted upon.

Her stunned body accepted his. Her body accepted the entirety of his impossible length and circ.u.mference, tearing slightly with a burst of distressed pain before it settled down.

Before some other, much more basic part of her welcomed him with an instinctive soft release. And an easing burst of readying moisture at its discovery of him lodged there.

Bishop ground down upon her, man claiming woman and woman opening readily to man exactly as nature had always intended. Exactly as Twila had always known it would be if Bishop McBride ever desired it to be.

"Sandra's highly attracted to you, Twila."

His escapades meant nothing to her. None of them. None of the openly flaunted love affairs with men, or with women.

That was simply the way Bishop was. That was the way he had always been, and Twila was smart enough to accept it and respect it. But the notion that she might, could...

That wasn't easy to accept.

That wasn't easy to accept at all.

"I didn't..." Twila's voice faltered. "...didn't know..."

"She's told me so." Bishop never ceased his pushing and grinding. Deep inside her, plunged to the absolute limit of her, he pressed in a new way against her. He deluged the awakened inner reaches of her with sensation from a thousand and one varied, sometimes impossible angles. He urged never-before-touched parts of her to react almost violently with his promises of heat to come and satisfaction to be bestowed.

Thrills swept her. Thrills, vanquishing the last of her hesitance, the last of her uncertainty, igniting as they did 25 Violet Visions impending excitement beyond her most vividly fevered of deep-night dreams.

Bishop aroused her.

Responding, her body became molten-gilt. Her body and her self, every part of them, poured themselves onto him. Around him. Seething mists rose in instantaneous reaction to, instantaneous and undiluted approval of, every touch he granted her. Rising, mysterious, that initial mist did not last long. It was not destined to as swiftly, profoundly, it mutated into something more substantial. Into clouds of shimmering, hidden vapor that once released could not be diminished.

They merged. Fused. Became as close to one with that merging and that fusing as two separate beings had ever been meant to become.

Delight murmured through her.

Physical pleasure and delight, just as the name of the salon...Delice...had promised all along. From the very beginning.

She no longer tried to hold Bishop away. If she ever truly had.

Now she wrapped herself around him. She enfolded him with all of herself, using not just arms and legs but the entirety of that molten-gilt she'd long since begun to harbor inside.

She released herself upon him and to him, certain she must cease to exist soon. Or at the very least to exist as herself, the self she had always known or thought she'd known.

In the end it might not matter at all if she did take Bishop up on his decidedly intriguing, exotically exotic and increasingly tantalizing suggestion.

"Me and..." She gasped. Took a full second, maybe longer, with her heart hammering more of its painfully rapid and terrifying rhythms in her ears, to collect her wits for the second half of what showed every indication of being a couple of short 26 eXtasy's Collective Mind but utterly significant sentences. "Me and S...Sandra. And you?"

"What about me?" Bishop's movements remained sure and confident, firm and unswerving as he thrust forward and dragged back, ever and always readying himself for the next, even more searing and enticing plunge.

Twila wanted to express her delight. Her full acceptance of delight as he offered it. But she lacked the strength.

Her body continued to melt in upon itself, and beneath the weight and the stress of that melting, there was strength only for the most automatic of reflexive functions...for heartbeat, for breath, for tears and the p.r.i.c.kling of every centimeter of flesh as her end, and their mutual end, drew inexorably near.

Twila wanted to scream. She wanted to cry out. But the most she could do, the best she could do, was to lie very, very still beneath Bishop. With sweat-slicked palms pressed against quilted plush, panting audibly. Half-moaning a long and escalating series of soft 'chuffa-chuffa' sounds.

"Why didn't we do this a l... long time ago?" Bishop managed to sound in control still, though his voice was growing more and more ragged, and his slight stumble over one simple word gave away his inner turmoil.

"You never... chuffa... paid any at... chuffa... tention to me bef... fore."

"Not that I didn't want to." His arms threatened imminent collapse when they began to shake. Violently.

Twila groaned again. "Then why... chuffa... d... didn't you..."

Bishop didn't answer.

She supposed he couldn't answer.

His trembling increased. Tenfold... a thousand-fold. He became so suddenly unstable that for an instant Twila thought...

knew... he was not going to be able to finish. Anything.

27.

Violet Visions Sharp and stabbing, disappointment welled.

She wanted what he had promised. She needed all he had promised, in every way he had promised.