Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) Read Online Free Page A

border. All this, combined with the wide-brimmed straw hat which he usually wore while working, would have excluded him from the pantheon of most women’s fantasy objects. And yet this specimen of a mortal man is what my imagination had to work with this particular afternoon just a few days shy of my cycle, when I typically get the craving.
    I hurried from my desk in the living room to my bedroom. From here I had a good view out over the back of the house and, more specifically, the pool. The van said
Gabriel’s Pool and Water Gardens
on the side and wore on its back doors the slightly larger-than-life size photo of a smiling blonde man, likely Gabriel’s boss, and probably even more likely Gabriel’s boss as he must have looked at the beginning of the expansion of his sad little empire sometime in the early 1970s—judging from the haircut and the clothes of the painted cutout. In fact, Gabriel was probably dead, if he ever existed at all. Still, it was the name
Gabriel
I gave to the pool guy as he donned his straw hat and lugged his equipment from the rear of the van. Gabriel the cut-out waved to me, still as can be, a pool net clutched in his hands. Then the door closed and
my
Gabriel carried his equipment to the pool.
    It would be a few minutes before Gabriel began skimming the leaves off the surface of the pool. And I know, I know, how original: a pool boy fantasy. It sounds like another cliche of fiction. So let’s get it out of the way: I don’t have sex with him.
    On two previous occasions, however, I’d gotten myself to a state thanks to Gabriel, and this time started no differently. I pulled my jeans down to my ankles and hiked up my T-shirt and lay on my bed, propping myself up with pillows so I could see out over the top of Gabriel’s van and to the pool and back of the house. Now, I’ve read a few depictions of masturbation, and I’ve glanced at it in a very few adult films, and I’ve had a few discussions about it with friends over the years, but I don’t really know how the average reader, you, for example, goes about it. And so part of me wants to just skip this scene in case it makes you cringe with embarrassment for me. Or, rather, I feel like skipping this scene simply because it makes
me
cringe just contemplating setting it down. Because, let’s face it, masturbation is just plain weird. We go about life ignoring our little pains and heartaches, we are too often unkind to our waistlines, our lungs, our livers. We’re killing ourselves, shaving years off the seemingly distant end of our lives. But then there’s this sudden accretion of minutes where we literally can’t get enough of ourselves. We just can’t get enough. We love ourselves like crazy. So. Exhibit A:
    By the time Gabriel had reached the pool, I was running my fingertips up along the inside of my thighs, around my admittedly unshaven bush and up to my nipples. I wet my index fingers with my tongue, crossed my hands at the wrists and played with my nipples until I felt whatever strange electricity they generate conduct its message both up to my head and down to my legs. I kicked of my jeans and underwear. By the time Gabriel was emptying his first net of leaves from the large sycamore, I was wet and my fingers had worked past the hedgerow of hair (and my mental note to shave, and my second mental note that what, exactly, was the point when my fingers would be the only ones to see this hair) and I carried the wetness up with my fingers to my clitoris and then I dug my heels into the bed and rubbed and rubbed and watched sweet, sweet Gabriel. And then the phone rang and I immediately saw it in my head: that red block on my calendar, the phone conference I’d forgotten to join.
    I picked up my phone, apologized, and moved back to my desk as I simultaneously put on a robe. And while the temptation to continue stroking myself was there, it was killed by the lethargic voice on the other end, an editor and an author who, after a long