She was looking at him with uncertainty clouding her blue-grey
eyes and he wanted the breathy, needy Cassie back. He put his hands up in
surrender. Cassie obviously had some kind of itch she wanted to scratch—he was
just pleased she’d chosen him to relieve it.
‘Whatever floats your boat, darlin’.’
Cassie didn’t hesitate. His heady aroma was drawing her back to
him with all the power of a magnetic force. She pushed her nose back into his
neck, greedily refamiliarising herself with his thick, luscious tang.
‘Yes,’ she whispered as she moved down this time. ‘Yes.’
Tuck swallowed as her breath licked heat down to the hollow at
the base of his throat, her moan as she inhaled there fanning his arousal. She
lingered for a moment or two, then travelled lower, her nose invading the soft
towelling of his robe, moving it sideways as she followed the hard ridge of his
collarbone. She reached for the belt of his robe and tugged. When the robe gaped
open his erection bucked against the confines of his underwear and he grasped
her hips for stability as a wave of red-hot lust almost brought him to his
knees.
He hung on silently and waited, his erection aching as she
stared at his chest, her nostrils flaring. Then she lifted her hands and pushed
the robe off his shoulders. He shrugged them and it fell to the ground, and when
she buried her face in the centre of his chest it took all his willpower not to
envelop her with his arms, to remember this was
her
show.
After what seemed an age she lifted her head and said, ‘Back,’
as she pushed on his chest.
Tuck let her push him onto the bed and sat on the mattress
looking up at her as she stood between his spread thighs, looking down. Her
cheeks were flushed and something base glittered in her eyes.
‘All the way,’ she muttered, and he obediently fell back
against the mattress, his feet still firmly planted on the floor.
He didn’t care that he was in nothing but his underwear, with a
monster erection threatening to bust free. She was staring at his body with
carnal intent and he was totally in her thrall.
‘Take your hair down,’ he murmured.
Much to his surprise she did it without argument, obviously
automatically, with her mind on other things. She was blissfully unaware of how
sexy it was, cascading around her shoulders. He smiled at the economy of
movement. Other women would have given it a sexy little shake, or piled it up
high on their heads and let if drift down as they shimmied about
seductively.
But not this one.
Cassie didn’t even know where to start as she stared down at
him. She was blind to the dips and hollows, the planes and angles, the
magnificence of him on anything other than a primal level. How biologically
defined he was to hunt and protect. To mate. To procreate. Not even the erection
straining his underwear registered on anything other than a scientific
level.
She couldn’t think past the scent of him—as if it was made
specifically for her DNA to recognise and she was the only one who could smell
it. Respond to it. His chest pounded with the thump of his heart and his belly
bounded to the corresponding pump of his aorta.
Her nostrils flared.
There.
Right
there.
She nudged her knee on the bed between his legs and barely
registered his sharp intake of breath as she bent over his belly and nuzzled the
firm flesh covering the jump of his abdominal pulse. She moaned as her senses
filled with him.
And then it wasn’t enough. She needed more. She needed to know
all of him. She drifted up the centre of his belly, meandering her nose and
mouth across his nipples and then drifting further, pushing them into the clean
scent of his armpits, feeling the light caress of downy hair against her face.
He smelled like soap and deodorant and the scent she was recognising as pure
Tuck, and her breasts tingled in response.
She moved up to his throat and jaw again, brushing his temple,
rubbing her face in his hair, where something fresh and woodsy flared her
nostrils and undulated along her pelvic floor.
Then it was time to head south again. Her nose brushed his, his
husky breathing in time with hers, she buzzed his mouth and smelled beer, and
felt the rush of air and heat as a low moan slipped from his lips. She went
lower, back down his throat, his chest, his belly. It clenched beneath her
ministrations and she looked up at him. His eyes were closed, his mouth parted,
his fingers clenched in the sheet beside him.
Her chin brushed material as she looked down at the final
frontier. She wanted to know what he smelled like
there.
She stood back on her feet and reached for the band of his
underwear.
Tuck’s eyes flew open as he grabbed her hand. ‘Oh, no, you
don’t,’ he said, looking at her through a haze of lust. ‘I’m down to my
underwear and you’re still fully clothed. Time to level the playing field, don’t
you think?’
Cassie blinked. Tuck’s Texan drawl seemed even more pronounced
now it was all husky to boot. She looked down at herself. Her state of dress had
been the furthest thing from her mind. ‘Right,’ she said.
Another woman would have felt shy about getting naked before a
man for the first time, but Cassie didn’t have a problem with it. Hers was just
another female body, after all. Just like every other woman’s on earth.
Just biology.
She quickly shrugged out of her shirt and shimmied out of her
leggings with Tuck watching every move. When his breath hissed out she looked up
to find him staring at her, his gaze firmly fixed on her naked breasts. Her
nipples beaded beneath his scrutiny and muscles deep inside her clenched
hard.
His gaze drifted lower, to her underwear, and the juncture of
her thighs burned and tingled as if he’d blasted her with a hot blue laser beam.
She struggled to rein in her choppy breath.
His hoot of laughter was quite unexpected.
‘
“Talk nerdy to me”
?’ he asked.
Cassie looked down at the logo on her underwear. Again, not
something she’d thought about changing. Not that she’d brought anything sexy to
change into. Not that she owned anything sexy in the underwear department.
‘Let me guess. Gina?’
Cassie shook her head. ‘Actually, these are from Reese.’
Tuck laughed again, letting his head fall back against the
mattress. Which was all the invitation Cassie needed. He’d wanted a level
playing field—he’d got it. Now she wanted her pound of flesh. She looked down at
his underwear, her gaze snagging on the erection, and her mouth watered.
She placed one hand on the bed beside him and used the other to
reach for the band of his underwear. He sucked in a loud breath and lifted his
head off the mattress. Their gazes meshed. They didn’t say a word, but he lifted
his hips and Cassie stripped his underwear away, pulling it off his feet before
coming close again, looking down at him.
Cassie had seen her fair share of penises in her life. She’d
known a few intimately. Although none had managed to produce anywhere near the
screeching level of arousal that Tuck’s had—especially from sight alone! And
she’d seen them in all their variation in hundreds of textbooks over the years.
She’d never found them particularly attractive, and had pretty much felt that
one wasn’t that much different from another.
Which just went to show what kind of a
freaking genius she was!
Tuck’s was the most beautiful specimen she’d ever seen. Long
and thick, nestled in light curls, and lying hard and potent against his belly.
A fat vein ran up the middle, and once again her mouth watered.
She dropped to her knees without thinking, kneeling between his
as she pushed her face against it, running her nose up and down the length of
the vein, inhaling its essence. Musk and man.
Tuck’s groan, his hand in her hair, his strangled, ‘Cassie…’
drove her on.
She shifted from the rampant thrust of him to the flat of his
belly beneath, and further afield to the heat of his groin, dragging the scent
of him inside her as she went. But it was inevitable that she’d return to his
erection—as if that was the source of his pheromones, the mother lode—and she
inhaled deeply as her lips brushed his girth. She followed it all the way to the
head, marvelling at how the skin could feel soft like a rose petal but the core
as strong as steel.
A bead of fluid at the tip wafted more musk her way and without
conscious thought her tongue dipped into it, savouring its tang as it joined the
heady mix intoxicating her senses.
Tuck reared up, cursing. ‘Okay—no,’ he said, dragging her up
his body and falling back with her, rolling so he pinned her to the bed.
A man could only take so much.
‘Enough,’ he growled. ‘My turn.’
And he flayed her mouth with a kiss full of heat and want and
something else he wasn’t familiar with and didn’t care to know about.
Cassie just held on as his kiss spun her onto another plane.
Heat swept through her body and she welcomed it. Yes.
This
was what her body was craving.
This.
Primitive. Base. Primal.
His hands pushed at her knickers and she helped him, wriggling
and kicking until she was free of them, desperate to have him inside her, to
quell her hormones for once and for all.
‘Yes,’ she said against his mouth. ‘Now.’
Time to do it. To do what she’d come to do. To get it over
with. She’d had her fill of his pheromones. Now it was time for more.
To couple. To mate. To copulate.
Tuck’s mind was spinning into a quagmire of lust and desire he
could barely find his way out of. He had to slow it down or he was going to
explode.
‘Slow down, there,’ he murmured as he eased a hand between her
legs.
Cassie froze.
No!
This wasn’t what
this was about. It was about exorcising the power of her hormones, satisfying
her libido and then moving on. Getting it out of her system. Her hormones had
demanded she mate—she was mating.
It was biochemistry. Biology.
It was business. Not pleasure.
Not that pleasure had ever been a possibility for her. And she
sure as hell wasn’t going to open herself to that dry old argument when she had
a paper to get back to.
‘No,’ she gasped against his mouth, pushing his hand aside as
she grabbed his erection. ‘I need you in me now.’
She did. She really did. She needed to shut her hormones up for
once and all!
‘But I want to—’
Cassie cut him off with her mouth, slamming a kiss on his lips
that left them dizzy and clinging to each other.
Who knew
she could kiss like that?
‘Damn it, Tuck,’ she said, breaking away as her hormones
screamed at her for fulfilment.
‘Now!’
Tuck was too far gone. Her kiss, and her brand of innocent
seduction, and most especially her hand kneading his erection were too, too
much—and her whimper when he broke away was a potent aphrodisiac.
‘Tuck,’ she moaned, grabbing for him.
‘Condom,’ he said, reaching over the side of the mattress into
his bag, locating one in the side zip pocket and quickly donning it.
And then he was back, and Cassie was reaching for him, opening
her legs and lifting her hips in invitation, and he took what she was offering,
so utterly free of any agenda, and drove himself into her in one easy
thrust.
Cassie’s gasp was loud in his ears and he stopped abruptly.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, looking down at her. Her face was scrunched up.
She wasn’t a virgin, was she?
Cassie could feel the hot length of him hard inside her and
doubted she’d ever been filled so completely. It hurt so damn good she swore she
could hear her libido sigh.
Yes.
Ahh.
Yes. That was it.
This
was what she needed.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Yes, yes, yes.
It would be over in
a minute—two at the outside if Len was any litmus test—and then she’d be free to
get on with her life, with her pesky libido back in its box.
She shifted restlessly beneath him. ‘Don’t stop.’
Tuck obliged, rising up on his elbows, looming over her as he
began a slow, teasing thrust guaranteed to satisfy. Arousal streaked hot fingers
into his thighs and buttocks as her tightness massaged and squeezed the length
of him, and he knew he was going to need all his staying power to hold out for
her.
Cassie moaned. She might never have found sex to be personally
fulfilling, but she’d always enjoyed the feel of a man inside her and got
satisfaction from the pleasure her partner derived from it. As if she’d
engineered a successful experiment. And she was determined that today would be
no different. Tuck would find his release soon and she could bask in the happy
glow of a job well done.
And so, damn it, could her libido.
Of course it was hard to concentrate on the end game when Tuck
insisted on such slow, rhythmic thrusts. She didn’t like the feeling of pressure
building in her pelvis. She’d been there before and knew it never amounted to
anything—that it only ever got so far and no more.
Tuck adjusted the angle of his thrust as Cassie lay passively
in his arms. He smiled down at the look of concentration on her face. ‘Stop
thinking,’ he growled, leaning in to press a hard kiss on her mouth. It was
satisfying to see when he pulled away that he’d kissed the lust back. ‘Stop
thinking,’ he reiterated.
Cassie shut her eyes briefly as he picked up the pace and
something stirred deep inside her. Something she didn’t like. Something that she
knew intuitively she’d never be able to contain.
And that just wasn’t part of the world she lived in.
It reminded her too much of a time during her teenage years
when her grip on the world had loosened and things had rapidly spiralled out of
her control.