“Oh, stop it,” she muttered, charmed into smiling at him in spite of herself. He was giving her that unbelievable, radiant, devastating grin. It was a fucking lethal weapon. He should be charged with carrying concealed.
“I didn’t want to go either,” he admitted. “Then yesterday I started to imagine how it would be to go with you.” He slid his arms around her waist, pulling her back against his scorching heat. The blunt end of his phallus prodded between her thighs. “I started to think jeez, this might even be kind of fun. I’ve forgotten what fun felt like, if I ever knew. But to have a beautiful date who makes me sweat every time I look at her lips, or her ass, or her toenails, mmm. Big fun. Hot fun.”
“Stop it,” she snapped.
“Nah.” He kissed the sensitive spot where her throat and shoulder joined. His breath whispered across her skin like a silk scarf. “Picture it. Dancing to a hot band, eating a fine meal, getting buzzed on expensive booze while everybody kisses and hugs and loves it up. We let everybody check you out, and then it’s off to our room with the private deck and the hot tub. Champagne chilling in the ice bucket. I’ll dribble it down into the hollows of your body and then lap it up for hours on end.” One of his hands covered her breast, hefting it.
It did sound nice. It sounded romantic, sensual. Lighthearted.
She tried again, with less conviction. “It’s just the timing—”
“It’s perfect.” He slid his other hand into her muff, seizing her clitoris tenderly between his index and middle finger. Kneading it, slowly circling. He was so good. Practically better than she was herself. “So wet…and soft…and ready for me. Give me this, Becca. It’s not much. Just one night when I don’t have to worry. One night someplace safe, where I can just relax and enjoy you. Enjoy this. And then I swear I’ll be good. I’ll get right back down to business.”
She got the feeling he was talking to himself, from the faraway look in his eye. He grabbed her hands, and placed them on the edge of the counter, then pulled her hips back to get the angle right before he prodded the blunt bulb of his penis into her opening. They stared at each other in the mirror. She was shocked by her own face. It was so different, when he turned her on, as if she were lit from inside. Her eyes were wide, pupils huge, her mouth still had the remnants of Diana’s lipstick, a matte red stain on her kiss-swollen lips.
She braced herself against the sink, and pressed back eagerly to take him inside. A long, slow, stretching glide that pressed all those intensely sensitive spots that pulsed and glowed and melted around his thick shaft. He had changed her, inside and out. Her body, her mind, she didn’t know if there was any separation. She’d been rewired. Pleasure no longer had to be anxiously sought or chased, or pinned down by force. With Nick, it rose up to meet him, it enveloped him, it welcomed him in its melting, pulsing clasp, it celebrated him.
It could not be kept down, could not be denied. Or controlled.
A slow, slick, pulsing slide. In, out. Their eyes were locked in the mirror. “Nick.” She licked her lips. “You’re not wearing a condom.”
“I won’t come. Just…a few. I meant to do just one, but it feels…so fucking good.” He drove in again with a ragged groan, the jolt making her gasp, pushing her closer. In and out, in and out, slow, twisting, pumping thrusts. She shook with desperate excitement. So close to that piercing rapture. She wanted it. Now.
He stopped, rested his hot face on her shoulder, panting. She looked around at him. “Well? Get a condom. Finish what you started.”
He shook his head, without looking up. She was getting alarmed. “Now, Nick. Or I won’t answer for the consequences,” she warned.
He dragged his cock out with a ragged gasp of effort. “Sorry, babe. I’m all out of condoms. We’ll have to save it for after the party. On the deck. With the champagne. And the hot tub. I’ll make it up to you.”
She gasped with outrage. Teasing cheat. “You bastard! You’re kidding! You can’t do this to me!”
He licked sweat off her shoulder. “I’ll suffer right at your side,” he offered. “And my suffering is visible to the naked eye.” He gestured at his engorged penis. “Everbody will know how desperate I am.”
“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you? Get out!” She shoved him out the bathroom door. “You dog! Go!”
She finally managed to shove his big body out the door and shut it. She locked it, too, on principle. She was weak in the knees, wound up like a spring. That bastard. How could he. Whipping her up into a state…and just leaving her there. Shaking with lust. Argh.
She showered, shampooed, and stomped out to rummage for the jeans, T-shirt and sneakers she’d packed into her suitcase. She pulled them on, without looking at Nick. Evil.
“I assume you’ll be getting dressed at the lodge.” She knew him well enough now to hear the steel underlying his quiet tone. “Because that’s where you’re going. Are you ready?”
There was no point fighting it, she thought. It was silly, resisting for resistance’s sake. God knows, she had nothing better to do. And she felt a hundred times safer with Nick. Even when he drove her crazy.
“As I’ll ever be,” Becca said, resigned.
A quick stop at a breakfast drive-thru, and they were on the road, speeding down the highway in Nick’s big predator pickup, on the way to Three Creeks Lodge. Becca stared out the window at the highway speeding by as she nibbled her ham and egg bagel. She was dazed by the unexpected U-turn her life had taken. She fished her telephone out of her bag, thinking about Carrie and Josh with a stab of uneasy guilt.
But what could she say? That she’d been fired from her job? That she was running away with a tall, dark stranger? They would just panic and get on her case, the nosy little stinkers. She’d never had much luck at teaching the two of them manners or boundaries. She’d always been a cream puff when it came to discipline. Hell, no one was perfect.
She couldn’t face them yet. She would call them both tonight.
Nick drove the truck the way he did everything, balls out. Which left her nothing to do except think about her problems. She had her choice of things to stress about. Being poor again? Career shot to hell? Carrie and Josh taking you-want-fries-with-that jobs? An ugly death at the hands of a mafiya thug?
And if that wasn’t enough, there was always the niggling little matter of exactly how long it had been since her last period.
She needed a distraction, fast. She looked over at Nick. “Um, do you ever talk?” she asked him. “You know…converse?”
“I talk all the time with you,” he said guardedly. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much in my life. My throat hurts from talking so much.”
“Oh, really? Then why is it that I know so little about you?”
He slanted her a narrow look. “I decline to answer that question.”
“Oh, really? And why is that?”
“It’s a trap,” he said. “I know a trap when I see one. Ask me straight questions, if you’re curious. I’ll answer them. If I can, that is.”
“Oh, of course,” she muttered. “Mr. Control Freak has got to cover his ass, at all costs.”
“Stop snarking, and ask your fucking questions, already.”
Now that he was actually willing to answer her, she was caught unprepared.
“Um, where did you grow up?” she ventured. Lame, but it would do.
“Waylon, Wyoming. Otherwise known as the ass end of nowhere.”
“Good start,” she said, cautiously approving. “And your parents?”
“Dead,” he said.
She waited. “Oh,” she said delicately. “I don’t suppose you could elaborate on that? Do I get to know anything other than the fact that they’re dead?”
His face in profile looked clouded and sulky. “Like what?”
Becca sighed. Maybe stressing about her problems would be more restful. “Your mother, for instance,” she said patiently. “How old were you when she—”
“Twelve,” he said. “Breast cancer.”
Becca had to look away for a minute and wait for sudden tears to ease down. She swallowed, willing them away. “That’s awful,” she said, thinking of the hospital bed, the bedpan, the smell of disinfectant. The constant ache of grief. “We have something in common then.”
He frowned out the windshield. “How’s that?”
“I lost my dad when I was twelve, too. Pancreatic cancer.”
He let out a long sigh. “Sucked, didn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Big-time.”
“How about your mom?” he asked abruptly.
She was unprepared for him to take the initiative, and had to gather her composure. “Suicide, five years later,” she said. “She never got over Dad. She swallowed all of his leftover pain pills one night. I found her.”
He drew in a breath. “Jesus. That’s bad.”
“Yes, it was. And? That still leaves your father unaccounted for.”
“He died twelve years ago,” Nick said. “Drank himself to death. Counts as suicide. Just slower. He was one tough bastard. He ran a business in Waylon. Sold farm equipment.”
She waited to see if there was more and was on the verge of changing the subject when Nick blew out a sharp breath, shaking his head. “He was a violent, evil-tempered son of a bitch,” he said, his voice harsh. “I was glad when he died.”
Becca was daunted. It was hard to think of a response to that declaration that was not inane or incredibly invasive.
She opted for invasive. “Did he hit you?” she asked timidly.
He shook with bitter laughter. “Oh, hell, only when he was drunk. He tossed me through a plate glass window when I was seventeen.” He touched the scar that slashed crosswise through his thick eyebrow, rubbing it as if it ached. “That was when I decided it was time to beat hell out of there. Before he killed me.”
She winced. “Oh, God. That’s awful.”
He shrugged. “I did OK, once I left his house. Joined the Army. Got sent to the Middle East in the first Gulf war. I made MP after a few years. Suited my personality. I got a degree in criminology and Eastern European studies when I got out of the service. Then I joined the Feds. That’s it. My life.”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “About your dad.”
He acknowledged her words with a curt nod. “As far as crappy childhoods go, I think we’re pretty much neck and neck.”
“I guess so.” Becca gazed at his profile, moved by what he had revealed. It explained so much about who he was. How he was.
The silence between them now felt very different. It was no longer a barrier. They were together in it. Connected by it.
“It’s better in a way,” he went on awkwardly. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry you didn’t have a perfect TV childhood, but at least that means I don’t have to be so embarrassed about my own.”
That held true for her as well. She patted his arm with her fingertips, following the smooth nap of silken dark body hair on his forearm all the way down to his hand.
“Actually, my childhood was pretty good, until Dad got sick,” she said. “And at least I have Carrie and Josh to show for it all.”
“Meaning what?” he demanded. “That I win the crappy childhood contest after all?”
“Yes, but just by a nose,” she told him. “I’m the runner-up.”
“Great. Lucky me,” he said sourly.
It seemed inappropriate to laugh even a little in the face of past tragedy, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“So? Does this meet your high conversational standards?” he asked.
“Actually, it’s more than I bargained for,” she admitted.
He let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Tell me about it. That’s how most women feel after spending time with me.”
That stung her. She glared at him. “Do not lump me in with ‘most women.’ I am not ‘most women,’ thank you very much.”
“You sure aren’t,” he said, after a thoughtful pause. “I’ve never talked about all this stuff with a woman before. Come to think of it, I’ve never talked about it to anyone. At all.”
She was startled at the depth of silence and solitude that admission revealed. “Um, wow. I guess…I should be honored.”
He shrugged. “If you like. I guess it never felt to me like date-type chitchat material. Such a downer. Big conversation stopper.”
“We’ve never had a date, Nick.”
He looked at her sidelong. “We’re having one now, aren’t we?”
“No,” she said loftily. “Going to a wedding is not a date. Going to a wedding is much more demanding, much more public, much more committed. It’s a much, much bigger deal than a date.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well. That makes sense. You’re a much bigger deal than my other women. Maybe that’s why I can’t pull off the charming conversation routine with you.”
“Oh, really?” She squinted at him. “And what routine is that?”
His grin came and went quickly. “Oh, the usual bullshit men say. I was slick, funny, witty, suave. I would compliment them, on their perfume, their earrings, the way their asses looked in their jeans—”
“Oh, shut up, you dog.” She flapped her hands at him.
“I would ask them how they felt,” he went on. “I even pretended to listen to their answers.”
“Calculating bastard,” she muttered, punching his shoulder.
“I controlled my foul language. I was good at that gentlemanly stuff when I wanted to get laid. Before my life went down the toilet.”