Damn it. She had to at least try to resist him. On principle.
She felt the change in his face against her breasts as he smiled. “I hear you,” he said. “So? What do we do now? We’ve done the food thing, so what’s left? Arguing about money? I’ll give you shit about your credit card bills and you can bitch me out about my speeding tickets.”
“No, thanks.” As if she were going to play-act at being a real couple with him, even as a joke. The very suggestion seemed freaky.
“How about we bleach your hair?” he suggested. “I’ll go get you a box of the stuff at the RiteAid.”
She recoiled. “You are never laying hands on my hair again!”
“OK,” he said meekly. “So? Dominoes? Got a Monopoly board?”
She didn’t have the heart to throw him out, after that halting heartfelt confession. She was such a fool for the fluttering combination of anticipation and doom. The glow of hot excitement between her legs.
“You can watch some TV with me,” she conceded. “It you want. Something bland and undemanding. But don’t try any funny stuff.”
“OK. No funny stuff. Roger that. I love TV.”
His suddenly cheerful tone told her that he’d reached the same conclusion she had. He was over the hard part. It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment now.
He was home free, the arrogant, manipulative jerk.
Chapter
16
H e followed her into the living room, where her TV glowed and chattered in the dimness, and sat down smack in the middle of her couch, slouching his long body with lazy grace. Leaving her no place to sit but beside him. She tried to leave a minimal safety margin between them when she set her butt onto the cushion, but the laws of couch physics changed in Nick’s proximity. The weight and mass of his big body bowed the springs, and she slid straight into the magnetic pull of his body. Wedged against him. Thigh to thigh.
He was so hot. The gravitational pull of his body so powerful.
His muscular arm had been draped lazily over the back of the couch, but now it was draped over her shoulders. The side of her face was pressed against the fresh-smelling cotton of his black polo shirt. She identified aftershave, detergent, a tang of salty male sweat, and oh, dear, oh gosh. She was in big fat trouble. The whole side of her thigh had gone nuts and was having a shivery little mini-orgasm. Pleasure rippled down her leg, up her side, just from the hot contact.
His hand, too, curled around to cup her shoulder, stroking her. Trying to calm her down, lull her into docile complacency. Hah.
She jerked forward, struggling out of his octopus grip, grabbed the phone from where it lay on the floor and put it back into its charger stand. Then she groped for the remote and stuck it into his hand, just to give him something to do other than pet her and hypnotize her with the force field of his seductive, restless male heat.
“Pick something,” she ordered him. “As long as it’s not sports.”
He clicked around with a swiftness that made her dizzy, and found something on the science channel about volcanos.
Volcanos, for the love of God. She wanted to make a snide comment about it, but the words muddled in her mouth as he began to stroke her shoulder again. “Hah. Very slick,” she said, breathlessly.
“Is it?” His teeth flashed in the gloom. “I haven’t used tricks like this to get my arm around a girl’s shoulders since junior high school.”
“Oh, no?” She tried to laugh. “I suppose you no longer needed to, after, hmm? At that point, they all started flinging themselves at you?”
“Pretty much,” he said blandly.
“Spoiled rotten,” she muttered.
He slid deeper into his careless slouch, pulling her tighter against the sinuous length of his body. Drawing attention to the very long, thick bulge in the front of his jeans. Not trying to hide it in the least.
She tried to ignore it, but it was so blatantly evident, lit up by the TV screen images of Hawaiian volcanos spurting magma. Rivers of lava. The scientist narrator droned on. She was motionless, unable to breathe. Hypersensitive to every breath he took, every shift of his weight.
She pretended to watch TV until she was an electric, shivering mess. A morass of emotion. His other hand was now resting on her thigh, and was caressing it, in a slow, sensual rhythm that made the fabric creep and bunch up above his hand, moving by tiny, steady increments.
“You think you’re so sneaky,” she whispered. “I see exactly what you’re doing. It won’t work.”
“It won’t?” He reached the hem and placed his hand below it, on the bare skin of her thigh. Her muscles jerked in response. “My reasoning was, if you don’t notice, then it’s working. And if you do notice and you don’t stop me, then it’s also working.”
“Oh, please. You are such a—”
Her words choked off as he kissed her.
She stiffened, but he held her face and insisted, his warm lips exploring hers with slow, pleading gentleness. Not opening or invading, just offering her a reverent intimacy that she could not resist.
Her eyelids fluttered, her body was racked with a shudder of surrender, and she arched, relaxing into his grip. Her head dropped back into his waiting hand as the kiss changed, became hot and hungry and clinging, making her gasp for breath, gasp for more. It might be smoke and mirrors, might be just a cheap illusion of the tenderness she needed, but it didn’t matter. She would take it. She ached for it.
He slid off the couch, swinging around so that he kneeled in front of her, pulling her face forward so he could keep kissing her with all the sweet intensity she longed for. He shoved the coffee table away to make room for himself, and pressed her knees open so he could scoot closer.
She was seduced utterly by his sensual gentleness, his generosity. He had won, but she didn’t care, because the kiss had its own wonderful momentum, its own agenda. There was no way to tease apart who gave, who took, and the sheer beauty of it was so keen, it made her shiver and ache, with the longing to surrender everything to him.
He lifted his head slowly, eyes hooded and dilated, and dragged his hand roughly over his mouth. His breath was hard and ragged.
“How’s your clit?” he asked.
The question jolted her out of her sensual haze with a painful bump. “Good God, Nick, that was blunt!”
He grinned. “Hey, why beat around the bush?”
She actually laughed at the lame pun before she could stop herself. “Oh, please. What a comedian. Don’t quit your day job. Oh, wait. I take that back. Do quit your day job. Please. I hate your day job.”
He ignored that, stroking her knees, his eyes intent. “Well? Last time it was too sore to touch. Is it better?”
A flush of anticipation turned her cherry red, flustered and dizzy. Her thigh muscles clenched and released beneath his warm, stroking hands. “I told you we weren’t going to…ah…”
“For fuck’s sake, what does a guy have to do to get a straight answer out of you?”
She winced. “Um, a guy has to ease off a little,” she whispered.
He rolled his eyes. “What did I say this time?”
“It wasn’t so much what you said. It was your tone. So matter of fact. How’s your clit? The same way you would say, how’s your sciatica? How’s your bunion? How’s your Great Aunt Edna?”
He leaned forward and pressed his face against her bared thighs, shoulders vibrating startled laughter. “Oh, babe. You kill me.”
“I certainly hope not. Please don’t laugh,” she said, in a small, stiff voice. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just nervous, that’s all.”
He lifted his face. “Nervous?” His voice was incredulous. “With me? After all we’ve been through? Why, for Christ’s sake?”
As if she should have to spell out why a gorgeous, mysterious, insatiable sex god who had saved her from an unspeakable fate might make her, well, nervous. Hah.
He lifted up a wad of the billowing skirt of the nightgown. “I love this thing,” he said. “It smells like…mmm. Like…”
“Fabric softener?” she suggested.
His teeth flashed in that seductive grin. “It’s sexy.”
She looked down at the thing, her mouth twitching. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “You are lying. Like a rug.”
“Speaking of rugs.” He hoisted her nightgown up over her waist, then her breasts. “You never answered my question. About your clit. Oh, man. Look at you. I’m not lying now. So fucking sexy.”
She was naked beneath the nightgown. Faint with gratitude that her most recent comfort ritual had involved shaving her legs and slathering herself with lotion.
“It’s better,” she confessed breathlessly “Almost, um, normal.”
Right. As if normal was a word that could describe how her crotch felt right now when he smiled like that. That hot, tingly glow was about as far from normal as it was possible to get.
He gripped her hips and pulled until her butt slid forward on the couch, and she sprawled there, helpless and tangled, her head propped up against the sofa back, her nightgown rucked up to her neck in big, billowy folds. A big, gorgeous male silhouetted against the backdrop of the chattering TV screen, staring at her intimate bits. Stroking her, opening her, dragging slow, lazy wet kisses over her trembling thighs, against her mound, teasing and tantalizing—
He lifted his head. “So how is your Great Aunt Edna, anyhow?”
She melted into laughter just as he put his mouth to her and the shock of it set her off, then and there. A long climax wrenched through her, jerking breathless little sobs of pleasure from her throat.
After the spasms had eased down to a delicious glow, he gazed at her for a moment. “Thank you,” he said.
She giggled shakily. “Huh? Me? Aren’t I the one who should be thanking you?”
“No,” he said, still caressing her clitoris with his slowly circling thumb. “You’re so sweet to me. In spite of everything. I don’t get it.”
Tears rushed into her eyes. “Believe me,” she said with total honesty, “neither do I.”
He bent down and went at her again, lapping her, suckling her, sliding his tongue with delicate skill along the involuted folds of her sex, as if hungry for some sustenance he could only obtain by pleasing her.
And he did. He melted her down completely. Moved her, the way he had with that embrace in the kitchen. He knew how to deliver unspeakably sensual pleasure with his licking, lashing tongue, his delving fingers, his clever lips. His tender ferocity unraveled her, but she felt the pleading behind it. Like he was desperate for something, and this was the only way he knew how to ask for it. Or to earn it.
And she couldn’t withhold anything from him. He had her under a spell. She had no choice but to offer him everything, the chaotic glow of her emotions and the desperate eagerness of her response, shining brighter, rising to a crest—
And it broke, and the wave pulsed through her, washed over her, leaving her naked, and brand new. As tender as the dawn.
Time had warped and expanded, into an infinite, dreamlike interval with no beginning, no end. It moved, but like a slow river and they were afloat in it, sometimes dozing, sometimes tossed in the rapids or churned in a pulsing mass of chaotic foam, then floating on in a pool of delicious sloth again. Finally, when she was boneless and spent, he lifted his face, wiped his grinning mouth and grabbed both her hands. He tugged until she was forced to sit, her naked thighs flanking him where he kneeled before her, holding both her hands tightly.
His burning eyes asked a question. No need to put it into words. He pulled a condom out of his pocket, and tucked it into her hand.
“You do the honors,” he said simply.
She stared at him, wondering at his skill, maneuvering her into needing desperately what she’d tried so hard to withhold. Chump that she was. No way could she live without it now. She needed everything he had to give her. A little part of her felt scared and weak and foolish to let herself be used again, but there seemed to be another person rising up inside her who wanted to do the using. Ravenous for Nick’s raw male sexuality. His power and vigor, his life-giving heat.
She leaned forward, slid her hands beneath his shirt, stroking his hard belly, gripping his lean waist. Feeling the smooth, powerful play of the layers of muscle moving and shifting beneath her hands as she shoved his jeans down over his hips and let his cock spring free.
Whoa. It never ceased to amaze her. The sheer size of him, so broad and blunt. She caressed him, admiring every detail, the luxurious suedelike softness of the skin, the distended veins pulsing along the length of the broad shaft. Oh, wow. Perfection.
She loved the heat of him, all that thundering urgency and power held rigidly in check, waiting for the moment to serve her pleasure. She gripped him with both hands and squeezed, stroked, felt him gasp and arch and shudder, groaning at the tight, twisting stroke of her hands.
She ripped open the condom. The phone rang. They froze.
“Let the machine get it,” she told him. “It’s probably just my boss, calling to fire my lazy ass.”
Six rings was too damn long to wait. She had to reprogram the thing for three, now that she was avoiding the whole world. Click, beep, and the outgoing message played. She was changing that, too.
“Becca? Pick up if you’re there. I just talked to Carrie, and she—”