If this was the power of an orgasm she could do without.
‘No,’ she muttered, her head tossing from side to side, her
eyes shut fast. She didn’t want this. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Tuck said, sensing that most of the battle was inside
Cassie’s head. He held her fast and sucked down hard on her clitoris. ‘Stop
fighting it, Cassie,’ he said when he finally lifted his head.
Cassie shook her head. ‘No,’ she muttered as sensations rose
and she pushed them back.
Tuck grimaced. He knew she was there, that she was on the edge,
so close.
Goddamn it,
he’d never met a woman so
averse to a good time in his life.
‘Yes,’ he said, shifting his hand off her belly and using it in
tandem with his tongue, stroking his index finger up and down her centre as his
other hand ministered to the tight pucker of her nipples.
She didn’t need to have this in her life—to change everything
she’d thought she knew. She knew what she wanted. And it wasn’t the total
consuming vortex of sex.
Tuck urged her on, pushing a finger inside all her tight, slick
heat. And then another.
Cassie gaped at the invasion. Something started to pool and
ripple, down low and deep, and hot urgent fingers dug into her buttocks and
thighs. But she clamped down hard against it, pushing it back. Her heels drummed
against the mattress. Her head rocked from side to side.
Tuck looked up at her. Her head was thrown back, her mouth
open, gasping with every thrust of his fingers. ‘I can show you some stars,
darlin’, like you’ve never seen before,’ he murmured. ‘You just gotta let
go.’
Cassie whimpered.
Let go?
What did
that mean? She didn’t know
how
to let go.
‘Relax, let it take you,’ Tuck soothed as she cried out in
obvious conflict.
Cassie sobbed as the effort to push back the looming tide
threatened to overwhelm her. Nothing was familiar. Nothing was the same.
Everything was coming apart around her as a swirling, sucking sensation deep in
her core obliterated all thought and consciousness and finally pulled her into
its abyss.
Tuck felt her clamp tight around his fingers and knew she was
finally there. He dropped his head and lashed his tongue back and forward over
the nub that had grown impossibly hard. Her back arched off the bed and he
squeezed her nipple between his fingers.
Cassie cried out as her mind left her body and flew. Tuck had
promised her stars, and as deep, unremitting pleasure drenched her she floated
through a cosmos of colours, with a kaleidoscope of shooting stars bursting
around her like fireworks. She was actually amongst them—not just observing them
from afar. Reaching out for them. Basking in their heat and absorbing their
incandescence into her soul.
Tuck did not let up, feasting greedily until Cassie’s muscles
stopped contracting around him and the cries and the wild bucking of her hips
started to settle. He gently withdrew his fingers from her, propping his chin on
her belly as he watched them die to a hush, waiting for the moment that she
opened her eyes.
And he wasn’t disappointed. When she finally lay spent and
still on the mattress, and her eyes eventually fluttered open, the blue-grey was
practically slate with drunken satisfaction, her pupils big and black, her focus
obviously not quite twenty-twenty as she blinked at him rapidly.
‘Tuck?’
Now
he could pick her out of a
line-up.
Now
she didn’t even look as if she
could
spell
the word
paper.
‘I… I…’
Tuck smiled at her utter bewilderment, but it grabbed a big
handful of his gut and squeezed hard. He grinned, crawling up her body, dropping
a kiss on her belly, and one between her breasts and the hollow at the base of
her throat, before lashing her mouth with a deep, wet kiss, his erection surging
as it pressed into her thigh.
‘Hold on, darlin’,’ he muttered against her mouth as he reached
for a foil packet, ‘we’re not done yet.’
Cassie watched, still in a daze, as he tore at the packet with
his teeth. There weren’t a lot of coherent thoughts in her head, but her stomach
clenched at the sight of him, hard and ready, and once again her brain went on
vacation as her body responded to the primal cue to mate.
And then he was over her, and in her, his mouth drugging her
with kisses that took her back to that place amongst the stars, and his erection
was stroking inside her, reviving tissues that were already in a dangerously
excitable state. And she was flying again, but it was better this time because
he was with her, and she held on to him tight as they astral-planed through the
cosmos, revelling in the shake and the shudder of him, his guttural cries in her
ear ratcheting the pleasure up, taking her higher and higher and higher.
Cassie didn’t know how long they were gone for. Or how
long it took to come back down to earth. Time ceased to exist and the awareness
of her surroundings crept back very slowly. The mattress beneath her. The weight
of his body on hers. The sound of their breath as they lay together,
gasping.
All these years and
that
was what
she’d been missing out on?
At some stage Tuck rolled off her, getting up to dispose of the
condom, then rejoined her, lying down next to her as she stared at the ceiling,
contemplating the magic that had just happened.
When she finally got her breath back she said, ‘Please tell me
you can do that again.’
Obviously her brain was still missing in
action.
Tuck rolled his head to look at her and laughed. It looked as
if one round of good sex had turned Little-Miss-Brainiac into
Little-Miss-Nymphomaniac. ‘I may need a moment or two.’
Cassie was pretty sure she was going to need some recovery time
too. She turned on her side, her gaze roving over his face. ‘Is it…is it always
like that?’
Tuck nodded, but he knew that wasn’t true. What they’d just had
wasn’t like anything else he’d ever experienced. Sex had always been good, but
never like this. Not even with April, whom he’d thought he’d loved. Or tried to
anyway.
The knowledge was unsettling.
He rolled his head back to stare at the ceiling again. ‘It is
with me, darlin’,’ he said, keeping up his usual patter.
Cassie got goose bumps as the low, slow drawl of Tuck’s accent
whispered across her skin and stroked those muscles inside her that didn’t seem
to be able to get enough of him. Her gaze was drawn to the rise and fall of his
chest and she actually reached out and trailed her fingers down it—something,
prior to yesterday, she would have thought she’d need a frontal lobotomy to
do.
Her cheek rested on his biceps and his scent tickled her senses
again. She pressed her nose into the warm bulk and inhaled him deep inside her
body. A blast of his natural essence invaded her cells again and stirred the
embers of her orgasm.
Tuck smiled. ‘I could bottle some of those pheromones, if you
like?’
Cassie dragged herself away. Why bottle it when it was right
here? In the flesh? Gina
was
right. Maybe she needed
a little time? Like a whole night?
She was leaving in the morning—hopefully with her brain
returned—why deprive herself?
‘Direct from the source is always best,’ she said, trying to
sound scientific and factual when she felt tongue-tied and unsure of
herself.
Tuck grinned as he looked down at her. ‘Don’t you have a paper
to get back to?’
Cassie nodded. She did. She really did. But she was pretty sure
even simple words were beyond her at the moment, let alone complex analysis of
weather patterns on Jupiter. Not to mention the fact that for the first time in
her life she actually didn’t
care
about the complex
weather systems of Jupiter.
‘I’m not sure I’ll understand it. I think I just lost a hundred
IQ points.’
Tuck chuckled. ‘Welcome to being average. I hope you enjoy your
stay.’
If this was how average people passed their time Cassie was
beginning to think that being a genius was the dumbest thing anyone could
be.
‘I’m leaving for Cornell in the morning,’ she said. She had no
idea where it had come from, but there was obviously still one functioning brain
cell somewhere that seemed to remember what had been
the
most important thing in her life
until half an hour ago.
Tuck rolled up in one swift movement, settling himself into the
cradle of her hips. ‘So tonight we’ll just play dumb. How’s it been so far?’
Cassie blinked. ‘Very…educational.’
‘Oh, so you approve of my copulation techniques?’ he teased.
‘Your libido has been adequately serviced?’
Cassie might have been clueless about a lot of things but,
having read a lot of textbooks and seen a lot of nature shows, even
she
was aware that what they’d just shared was nothing
to do with the slaking of a biological imperative.
‘Well, I have minimal comparative data, and no blind studies
to—’
Tuck’s mouth cut her off and she lost her mind for a while as
his scent filled her up with heady need. When he pulled back they were both a
little out of breath.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I’ll try harder.
They don’t call me Mr-Satisfaction-Guaranteed for nothing. Libido servicing is
right up my alley. Are you hungry?’
‘It’s almost midnight,’ she murmured. Cassie never ate after
seven o’clock. It wasn’t good for the digestion.
Tuck shrugged. ‘So?’
Cassie blinked as a huge belly rumble echoed in the space
between them and she realised she was starving. She’d become a truly primitive
woman—utterly biological. ‘I could go for some toast.’
Tuck smiled as he dropped a hard kiss on her mouth and reached
over and snatched up the phone. ‘Trust me—you’ll like what I can do with
strawberries and cream much better.’
Cassie woke wrapped spoon-like in Tuck’s arms at eight
the next morning. It was the second morning in a row she’d woken late. The
second morning in a row she’d woken thinking about him. The second morning in a
row she’d woken with Jupiter as far from her brain as the actual planet
itself.
And the first morning ever she’d woken with a man rubbing all
his rampant male hardness against her. Tuck’s hand was at her breast, and his
essence filled her waking senses with sex and surrender, giving her brain no
chance to switch on.
Tuck sensed the moment she came awake and his hand tightened
around the swell of her breast, his fingers rolling over her nipple. When she
moaned and arched her back he dragged her closer, kissing her neck.
‘When do you have to leave?’ he muttered in her ear.
Leave? Cassie thought hard through the fog of pheromones and
the heavy scent of sex clouding her senses. ‘Whenever I can get a train,’ she
said.
Tuck licked a path from her ear to the slope where her shoulder
met her throat as his hand slipped between her legs. ‘When do you
need
to be at Cornell?’
Cassie shut her eyes as his fingers stroked against her centre.
‘Day…after…tomorrow…’ she murmured, easing her legs apart to give him better
access.
‘So you could stay another night?’ he said, his finger sinking
into the slick heat of her. ‘Just to make sure your libido is well and truly
serviced. I’d hate for that to get in the way of your very important
studies.’
Cassie thought he made a very good point—just as he found the
spot that was screaming for his touch. She gasped. ‘Yes. That would be awful. I
need to focus at Cornell.’ She needed her libido back in its box. ‘I could do
one more night.’
Tuck was too far gone to acknowledge his triumph. All he could
feel was the wet heat of her as he slid his erection up and down the length of
her slick entrance—close, so close.
‘Do you have any condoms in your room?’ he asked.
Cassie squirmed against him, tilting her pelvis, desperately
needing him inside her, not taunting her from the outside. ‘Why would
I
have condoms?’
Tuck groaned, trying to wrestle back control. ‘We’re out.’ And
a place as posh as the Bellington wasn’t likely to have a condom vending
machine. ‘
Somebody
was insatiable last night.’
Cassie blushed. She’d lost count of the number of orgasms she’d
had. They’d all just blurred together into one long brain-incapacitating
event.
Tuck pulled away from her with difficulty. Even knowing he
couldn’t get any woman pregnant, he’d always been a stickler for safe sex. He
reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll ring the concierge.’
Cassie dragged in gulps of air, trying to clear the sexual fog,
but as per usual all she did was drag in more of him and her belly tightened.
She rolled onto her back, her head turning towards him. ‘The concierge will get
you condoms?’
‘The concierge will get a star quarterback whatever the hell he
likes.’
‘Even an
ex?
’ she asked, trying to
imagine a famous astronomer—
real
stars, in her
opinion—getting the same treatment.
Tuck flinched slightly at the
ex.
For well over a decade he’d defined himself by the magic he’d made on the field.
It still cut deep that it had all been snatched away. But he pushed it aside.
‘Yup.’
Cassie tried to fathom the celebrity paradigm, but even that
was too much with her brain gone walkabout. ‘Wait,’ she said as he went to dial.
‘I’ll ring Gina.’
Tuck frowned. ‘Why not the concierge?’
‘Because Gina already knows we’re doing it.’
And the fewer people who knew she’d lost her mind the
better.
SIX
Cassie and Tuck
stayed another
two
nights. Just to be sure her libido was well and truly
serviced. They rose late on the third morning, had a dirty shower and, unable to
avoid the phone calls and text messages from
her gal pals
any
longer, Cassie joined them in the dining room for a late
breakfast.
‘Well, well, well,’ Gina drawled as Cassie sat down. ‘Never
thought I’d see the day. Cassiopeia Barclay all loved up.’
Cassie snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Love is a romantic
construct—’
‘Perpetrated by romance novels and Hollywood with no sound
scientific basis,’ Gina finished.
Cassie shot her a sheepish look. ‘Exactly.’ She fiddled with
her cutlery. ‘Tuck and I are just—’
‘Copulating?’ Reese said, winking at Gina.
Cassie nodded, even though she knew they’d moved far beyond
copulation. Beyond scratching a biological itch. Her libido had been well and
truly satisfied after the first twenty-four hours—it was just being plain greedy
now. ‘Yes.’
‘And has Tuck copulated his way through my box of condoms yet?’
Gina asked.
Cassie almost said he’d copulated her brains out as she thought
about how many of those condoms they had used. Their wet, slippery shower sex
this morning stirred her olfactory centre and she blushed under the scrutiny of
three sets of eyes. She’d blushed more in the last three days than she had her
entire life.
Three things she didn’t do was blush, swoon or cry, and she was
two out of three at the moment. It was just as well she was leaving today and
could get back to being someone she recognised.
‘Not quite,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe you and Tuck…’ Reese shook her head. ‘I
thought for sure he was bound to date blonde airheads for the rest of his
life.’
‘April wasn’t blonde,’ Marnie said. ‘Or an airhead. She was a
nurse, wasn’t she?’
Reese nodded. ‘They met while he was having his knee
reconstruction. She was nice…sweet. But they were married for less than
two years.
And now he’s back to dating surgically
enhanced pneumatic blondes again.’
‘Except for Cassie,’ Gina mused, and all three women looked at
her again, sitting at the dining table in a baggy T-shirt proclaiming
‘Geek is the new sexy’
, her long straight dark brown
hair scraped back in a low ponytail and Alice band, her messy eyebrows knitted
together.
‘We’re not dating,’ Cassie reiterated. ‘We’re—’
‘Copulating,’ her friends said in unison, then laughed.
Cassie smiled at their infectious happiness. ‘Well, we’re not
even doing that any more. I’m leaving today, and nothing is more important to me
now than finishing my PhD and being on that plane to Antarctica next year.’
‘Good for you,’ Marnie said.
‘Make sure you talk to me before you go. A designer friend of
mine is making a huge splash in sexy thermalwear,’ Gina said, raising her coffee
cup.
Cassie blinked. ‘I think they issue us with thermals.’
Gina shuddered. ‘I can just imagine what
they’d
be like.’
Reese laughed at the blank look on Cassie’s face. ‘How are you
getting to Cornell?’
‘Tuck’s giving me a lift to New York and I’ll get a bus to
Ithica from there.’
Reese raised an eyebrow. Mr Love-’em-and-Leave-’em, who’d told
her a few days ago he was staying on at the Hamptons at a friend’s place for a
week, was dropping his plans and heading back to New York?
Interesting.
Very interesting…
In the end Tuck insisted on driving her all the way to
Cornell in his big black BMW. She’d protested about the distance, but he’d just
shrugged and said he enjoyed a road trip. It took five hours from the Hamptons,
and there wasn’t one minute of it when Cassie wasn’t aware of the length and
breadth of him, of his heat, of his scent.
The aroma she’d come to recognise as pure Tuck—
to respond to like Pavlov’s dog—
filled the inside of
the cab, completely obliterating the luxury car smell and enveloping her in a
hormonal fugue all the way to Ithica. She vaguely remembered them talking about
her study and about his app, but the details were fuzzy.
It was late afternoon when they arrived—not that the long
summer day gave any indication of the hour. The campus was surprisingly bustling
for the mid-year break. Young people were laughing and smiling in groups,
carrying books and laptops, or sitting on the grass under shady trees, engrossed
in their phones or other electronic gadgets.
It took them an hour to locate her accommodation block and
check in. Tuck helped her up with her bags. The corridors were buzzing with what
Tuck soon found out to be high school students when he was recognised. He
stopped for a chat and posed for pictures while he signed autographs for some
very excited kids.
Cassie watched on, bemused, as Tuck high-fived and talked about
football and retirement and his knee. The students—from Wisconsin—were doing
Summer College, studying entomology, and he talked to them about the importance
of getting an education. They buzzed around him like the insects they were
studying, and she began to wonder if everything with a pulse was attracted to
his seriously addictive pheromones.
Eventually they let him leave and she found her room, unlocking
the door and pushing it open. Tuck carried her bag through. ‘I can’t believe,’
he said as he set her suitcase on the single bed, ‘you’ve come here for three
months
from Australia
and that’s all you brought.
Most women I know take a suitcase that size away for the weekend. For their
make-up.’
She shrugged as she looked round the small but functional room.
‘I don’t care much for clothes.’
Tuck looked her up and down and chuckled at the understatement.
He’d always appreciated women’s packaging, but after three days in bed with
Cassie he was never judging a book by its cover again.
‘I agree,’ he said as he thought about all the delight hidden
beneath her voluminous shirts and how long it had been since he’d seen it. The
shower seemed a very long time ago. ‘I think they’re highly overrated.’
Cassie felt the drop in his voice’s pitch undulate through the
muscles deep inside her that had already received such an athletic workout back
in the Hamptons. She glanced at him. He had his hands shoved in the pockets of
the trendy three-quarter chinos he wore with a polo shirt sporting some kind of
NFL logo, and a surge of pheromones hit her square between the eyes.
She looked away, her glance falling on the only horizontal
surface in the room—the bed. She looked back at him. She’d spent practically
every waking and sleeping hour of the last three days in bed with the man
looking at her now as if he was calculating how quickly he could get her out of
her clothes.
A shout in the corridor, followed by some heavy footsteps,
yanked her back from the ledge.
Tuck dragged his eyes off Cassie, raking his hand through his
hair. Unfortunately they found the bed. The narrow single bed—staple of the
college dorm all over the country. He’d spent a lot of his college life on a bed
just like it. Or beds just like it, anyway. And he knew from experience they
weren’t made for long, lazy sessions with a woman.
They were made for haste, not finesse, and paper-thin walls
didn’t guarantee ambience
or
privacy. At eighteen
that hadn’t been an issue, but at thirty-three, with a bad knee and various
other aches and pains, he was way too old to fold himself into a bed not fit for
an athlete.
No matter how tempting it was to yank her into his arms and go
hunting for that body he knew was under all those layers. He looked around the
tiny room and thanked God he never had to live like this again.
‘Why are you here? Doesn’t a place as esteemed as Cornell have
some better digs for its PhD students?’
Cassie nodded. ‘Sure. But this is cheap—which is important when
you’ve been a professional uni student for over a decade. These dorms become
vacant over the summer break, so they’re keen to fill them and the price is
right.’
Tuck’s gaze drifted back to the bed as he absorbed her words.
It had been a long time since he’d had to give any thought to the cost of
living. He had more than enough money from his decade-long career, and enough
continuing endorsements never to have to worry about money again. And the app
project promised to be another winner.
There was more yahooing in the corridor, and Tuck turned
slightly in the direction of a
thunk
as someone
obviously hit the wall. A burst of laughter sounded and he turned back to face
her. ‘Won’t that interfere with your study?’
‘No. I’ll be spending most of my time at the Space Sciences
Building or the observatory,’ she said. ‘It’s just a place to sleep.’
Tuck’s gaze was once again drawn to the bed at her mention of
sleep. A vision of her on it, with him, most definitely
not
sleeping, filled his head. His groin tightened and he looked at
her, the same time she looked at him, and the room seemed to shrink even
further.
‘It’s not a very big bed,’ he murmured.
Cassie shrugged. ‘There’s just me.’
Tuck felt the sudden urge to puff his chest and say something
macho like,
Damn straight, there’ll just be you!
But
then that conjured thoughts of her on this bed by herself, maybe naked, maybe
touching herself while she thought about him
.
Not that she probably did that.
But the thought
stirred the tightening in his groin to a full-blown erection.
His gaze dropped to her mouth and he took a step towards her.
Noticed the flare of her nostrils, the dilation of her pupils, her chest rising
and falling with the same agitated rhythm as the night of their first kiss.
Cassie shut her eyes briefly as her body swayed towards the
chemical cloud she seemed programmed to obey. And she almost took a step too.
But the shrill ring of a phone pierced the sound and yanked her back from his
hypnotic pull.
She looked around, hindered for a moment by sluggish brain
cells and the unfamiliar ring—it wasn’t her mobile and nor was it Tuck’s.
‘Your desk,’ Tuck said, stepping back.
Cassie looked at the desk, pushed into a nook not far from the
foot of the bed. She identified a slimline black telephone and took the three
paces required to snatch it up, grateful for a little distance from Tuck. It was
Professor Judy Walsh, who would be working with her on the completion of her
PhD, welcoming her to the campus and checking she was good to go in the morning.
They had a brief conversation, which Cassie barely took in, conscious as she was
of Tuck prowling back and forth behind her like a caged animal.
Every
cell
in her body, every
hair
covering her body vibrated with his physical
presence.
When she hung up she was angry. With Tuck. But mostly with
herself. Studying at Cornell, the university that had nurtured the genius of
greats like Carl Sagan, had been a lifelong dream and she was letting some weird
aberration derail her pursuit of her goals.
It was a good thing that Professor Walsh had rung when she had.
Exactly what Cassie had needed to refocus. Because the way things had been
heading prior to the interruption had precious little to do with astronomy.
Focus, Cassiopeia.
She turned to face Tuck, staying right where she was. The room
was small, so distance wasn’t an option, but she’d take whatever space she could
get. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t mind I really have to
get settled in. Set up my computer, unpack. Etcetera.’
Tuck regarded her for a moment. Considering the size of her
suitcase, and the fact she owned a laptop, he doubted it would take her ten
minutes to do all of it. So there was only one conclusion to draw.
She was blowing him off.
He was so stunned for a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he
threw back his head and laughed. First she faked it and now she was blowing him
off. Two things
no
woman had ever done to him. She
wasn’t just hell on a man’s ego—she was death to it.
He had thought of taking her out for a bite to eat, but she’d
obviously scratched her itch and was ready to move on. No long drawn-out
goodbye, no clinging to him and begging him to call from Little Miss Mensa.
‘So this is goodbye, huh?’
Cassie nodded. ‘Yes.’
She often felt socially awkward, but this was a whole other
level. She’d never been in the position of having to bid farewell to a man who
had spent a fair portion of three days camped out between her legs. What did one
say in such circumstances?
‘Thank you for…’
For what? For the orgasms? For the copulation? For the
pheromones? For an experiment she’d never forget as long as she lived?
‘Everything,’ she ended lamely.
Tuck grinned as he easily read every thought that flitted
through her mind. ‘Don’t ever play poker, Cassiopeia,’ he murmured.
He reached into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a
card. His real card, with his real phone number—not the one he gave to
hard-to-shake groupies. ‘You could always call me if your libido starts getting
a little antsy again.’
He held it out and she looked at it as if it was a vial of
poison. His grin broadened. Most women in this situation would have begged him
for it. Hell, having his phone number in their hot little hands would probably
be a story they’d tell to the end of their days.
Cassie stood her ground by the desk. ‘It won’t. My brain is
firmly back in charge. And there’s no room for…that.’
Tuck raised an eyebrow at the finality in her words. He had no
doubt she meant it in all those higher functioning areas, of which she had many.
She didn’t strike him as a woman who let anything ruin her focus—especially now
her libido was in check. But it was that little hesitation coming from somewhere
deeper that gave him pause.