Pure Lust (Lust for Life) (9 page)

Suddenly he clutched at the back of her hair and whispered,
“Stop, stop, stop.”

Before she could ask if she’d done something wrong he’d
steered her head to his and laid siege to her mouth in a way that wiped out her
last rational thought. She heard crinkling and realized he’d gotten another
condom out of his jeans pocket.

“Why did we get dressed again after we fucked against the
door?” he asked breathlessly when she took his cue, raised up on her knees and
whipped off her shirt. He set the condom aside and pushed his jeans the rest of
the way off his legs.

“You never took your pants off in the first place,” she
reminded him, standing long enough to push her panties to the floor. “And
eating naked is weird.”

“Not for me it isn’t,” he said, giving her a lopsided smirk
as he quickly put the condom on and reached for her as she straddled him with
him still sitting up. “Shouldn’t be for you either.” He kissed her nipple and
gripped her hips. “Not with that fucking amazing body.”

The way he said it almost made her believe he knew what he
was talking about.

She took him in hand as she lowered over him on her knees.
Her pussy instinctively tightened around him as she sank onto his cock slowly
but completely, letting him fill her with a rush that caused goosebumps to
ripple over every inch of her skin.

“My God you feel amazing,” she heard herself whisper, her
forehead touching his as she fought to get her bearings.

But he sent her into another heady tailspin with a long,
deep kiss before he breathed out a ragged, “Good to know it’s not just me.”

She didn’t have time to get all big-headed over him saying
something like that because he put one arm around her hips and the other hand
came up to hold her between her shoulder blades in that way he had of making
her feel delicate.

He leaned forward, forcing her to lean back in a way that
increased the pressure on her clit where they were connected, kissing her neck
lightly as he did. He kept leaning forward until her head fell back, but his
hand was right there holding her up, supporting her as his mouth sought out her
nipple and caused that delicious thrill that went straight to her throbbing
clit.

She twisted her hips in small circles as the rising pressure
became increasingly insistent that she do something. Diego brought her upright
and she braced her hands on his shoulders, rose up and started to ride him like
a woman possessed.

“That’s right,” he gasped, then bared his teeth as he braced
his hands on the floor behind him. “Take what you need, Claire.”

Spurred on by his words, by the fast pace of his breath and
the color rising in his chest, his neck, his strained face, she did exactly as
he’d said—she took. She rode him until her thighs were burning with the effort,
fueled by the sounds he was making and the promise of the mind-blowing orgasm
bearing down on her.

They were both crying out with every downstroke by the time
it hit her head-on. She slammed down onto his lap one last time, her hips
moving in wild circles over his impossibly hard cock, her throbbing clit
grinding against the root of him. She was vaguely aware of the feeling of his
fingers digging into her ass again, and then she could hear his long, deep moan
as he followed her lead, pulsing inside of her as he came as well.

“Goddamn, that was fucking amazing,” he said, wrapping his
arms around her, eyes still closed, seeking her mouth for a kiss.

Amazing might have been an understatement, but she was in no
mood to argue.

When her heart started throbbing in a way that had nothing
to do with physical exertion, Claire knew she was doubly fucked. Literally in
the best way possible—because wow, just wow—figuratively in the absolute worst.

Her scientist’s mind knew it was completely irrational to
feel so much for someone so fast based on what was basically two days of
amazing sex, but her heart suddenly didn’t seem to give a flying fuck about
what did or did not make sense.

“There you are, motherfucker,” Diego muttered quietly to
himself, rolling Claire’s garbage can to the end of her driveway, trying to
look casual as he scanned the street.

They’d just wrapped up work on her bathroom, something he’d
been helping her finish throughout the past week and a half between marathon
runs of seriously amazing fucking, locked in her bedroom to keep the cat from
trying to kill him for touching her. Diego had promised he was just going to
take out the trash, then join her for a bath in the huge clawfoot bathtub that
somehow fit very well in the small room. He’d felt a tingle of…something as
soon as he’d started to roll the large recycling container away from the side
of the house, and sure enough, there it was.

Down the block, parked behind a minivan on a slight curve in
the road, was the old Buick that had been waiting for Claire that first day in
the hospital parking garage. Diego knew deep in his gut that asshole Steve had
been the guy who’d frightened her by picking the lock on her back door, then
leaving both doors standing wide open for her to find when she came home that
morning.

She’d finally confessed the night before—after Diego found
half of the flowers under the kitchen window at the side of the house
trampled—that she’d thought she’d heard strange things outside in the middle of
the night once or twice on the couple of nights they hadn’t spent together.

The first time she’d looked at the recorded feedback from
her front and back door cameras and hadn’t seen anything. The second time
showed a very brief moment where she could see someone come through the high
evergreens between her and her neighbor’s front yards, then disappear by the
side of her house.

The security company had tried to get a clear image so she
could positively identify whoever it was, but the man had been careful to not
show his face to the camera. Diego and Claire both knew without a doubt it was
Steve, but without a positive ID, the police told her there wasn’t much that
could be done when she called them about it.

Diego forced himself to keep looking up and down the street,
trying to appear casual so the guy wouldn’t know he’d been spotted. He didn’t
have a plan. All he knew was he needed to talk to the guy, make it clear what
he was doing was scaring the living shit out of a woman Diego had grown to care
a lot about in the past week, and he wasn’t going to get away with it any
longer.

Having the advantage of the minivan partially blocking
Steve’s line of sight—or so he hoped—Diego pretended to wave at someone across
the street, although there wasn’t really anyone there. He crossed as if he was
going to talk to that nonexistent person, then quickly jogged halfway down the
block to the Buick.

He moved quickly between the van and the car, and suddenly
he was face-to-face with Steve—a surprisingly good-looking guy for being such a
fucking creep.

“Hey, old buddy,” Diego started cheerfully, resting his
forearms on the open window. “You and I both know Claire has told you she’s not
interested, so I’m here to ask you, man to man, one time and one time only, to
leave her the fuck alone. Your stunt last week with opening her doors wasn’t
especially impressive, and it certainly isn’t the way to win over a girl’s heart.”

The man’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “You have no idea
what you’re talking about,” he said, his tone neutral but his eyes full of
hate.

Every muscle in Diego’s body primed for a fight at the
sound. There was a time when he would have pulled the guy out the open window
and beat him down in the middle of the street just for lying, but those days
were a good fifteen years behind him.

“No? Then let me be clear. I now have your license plate
number. It’s only a matter of a phone call to find out your name and address
and get friends of mine on your ass every time you so much as think about
cruising through this neighborhood.”

He’d called a buddy of his who was a cop they day they’d
come back from Chicago—something he wished he’d done the moment he’d left the
parking garage that first day—but he knew they couldn’t be there
twenty-four-seven.

Steve said nothing, just continued to glare.

“And if that isn’t enough to keep you away, understand that
I will beat your ass down if I ever catch you around her again.” He gave him
his biggest, most sincere smile. “We on the same page, champ?”

“Get the fuck off my car,” Steve demanded through clenched
teeth.

“You got it,” Diego said cheerfully, then slapped his hand
hard on the hood as he backed up and out of the way. He stood watching as the
guy started the engine, whipped the wheel hard to the left then swerved onto
the road, narrowly missing another parked car across the street as he sped away
on squealing tires.

A chill shot through Diego as he realized his epic fuck-up.
He’d just provoked a man without knowing how dangerous he really was, and he
was only going to be around three more days to protect her. After that he would
be on the opposite side of the country, leaving her more vulnerable than she’d
been before she’d ever met him.

He bit out a harsh but quiet, “Fuck” as he crossed to the
sidewalk on her side of the street and walked back to her house. He went back
in the back door and locked it behind him, peeled off his clothes as he made
his way to the bathroom and found her lounging in a full, fragrant tub, eyes
closed and head resting on the wide edge.

“Took you long enough,” she said with a lazy smile, not
opening her eyes.

Diego lifted Popeye out of the sink, gave him an
affectionate scratch on the neck—because the cat liked him just fine as long as
he wasn’t naked on top of Claire—and put him in the hall. Popeye, who’d gotten
used to being temporarily shut out of rooms, stuck his tail up in the air and
headed for the main part of the house.

The regret of his mistake started to lighten as he eased his
body into the space she made behind her, the combination of hot, berry-scented
water and her silky wet skin a welcome distraction. He’d done what he could by
taking her to a gun range to show her how to shoot, then installing a
quick-access gun safe under her bed. All he could do now was pray she didn’t
have to use it.

He brushed her hair back from the side of her face, kissed
her neck when she leaned back, and was struck by just how much he was going to
miss her after he left.

Ignoring the fact that his heart suddenly felt as if it was
being squeezed in a vise, he told her, “Great bathroom.”

He’d been skeptical when she’d opened the can of yellow
paint, but it worked. It brightened up the small room, made it warm and
welcoming, not headache-inducing the way he’d imagined. With the linen closet,
medicine cabinet and cupboard under the sink now stripped and stained in a rich
oak finish, and the subtle light-green, gray and white accents, it was a great
place to take a bath with a sexy-as-hell woman.

“It would have taken me three times as long to finish if you
hadn’t bullied your way into helping me,” she said with a smile, turning her
face toward him for a kiss.

His already half-hard cock stiffened even more when the kiss
lingered.

“You’re welcome,” he said when she rested her head on his
shoulder and relaxed against his chest.

“Thank you,” she answered with a quiet laugh. “We make a
great team.”

He hated to admit it, but she was right. They had a kind of
synchronicity when it came to working together on her home projects. She would
tell him her plan and they would somehow manage to get the work done together
in the small space.

And they always seemed to want to stop at the same time—to
eat or fuck, or fuck for hours before getting dressed and going out to eat,
where they would grin at each other over the table the entire time like a
couple of lust-struck teenagers.

Diego spread his hands over her belly. “For the record, I
didn’t bully my way in.”

He could feel her low laugh through her back. “No, I woke up
one morning to find you in the backyard, scraping paint off the linen closet
shelves.”

He’d started stripping the shelves as a way to wear himself
out so maybe he could shut off his mind and get some sleep. Before getting out
of bed to start the next project, he’d been lying there wide awake, watching
her sleep so deeply he could barely hear her breathing.

It had unsettled him to feel that feeling he’d been running
from his whole life—the contentment that came with falling into bed and losing
himself in her, then holding her while she fell asleep afterward. He liked her.
A lot. And for the first time in his life he was dreading the moment when he
was going to have to say goodbye.

He ran his hands up to cradle her full breasts. “You didn’t
exactly stop me.”

She sighed and squirmed against him as her nipples tightened
under his attention. “God that feels good,” she whispered. “How do you do
that?”

Diego took her earlobe between his teeth and bit down very
gently as he pinched the taut little nubs of flesh and pulled them slowly away
from her body, pleased when stretching them that way got the wanted reaction of
a sexy, throaty moan. She arched her back and his cock slipped into the seam of
her ass, making her moan deeper a second time, reminding him he had yet to
fully explore her there.

But that was for another time.

Right now she was naked and slick with berry-scented bubble
bath, and he wasn’t sure he had the patience it would take to properly
introduce her to the art of anal sex. Because if he was going to be the first,
the huge egomaniac inside of him wanted to make it so good for her it would
ruin it for anyone who tried to go there after.

Diego’s heart stilled briefly at the thought of anyone else
touching her, of anyone else’s fingers tugging on her nipples to make her
squirm and sigh, of another tongue buried within the delicious folds of her
pussy, making her thighs quiver as she came. Of anyone else getting the
privilege of knowing what it felt like to have her hot, tight cunt milk his
cock of every last drop of cum as she came around him, drawing out a pleasure
he’d never experienced before being with her.

He felt a brief flash of possessiveness, then quickly
squashed it. He had no claim to her, had made it perfectly clear that what they
had was going to end the day he went back to California. And she’d agreed.
Happily.

“Tell me you’re clean,” she said roughly, breaking through
the fog of his thoughts.

He met her gaze as she looked at him over her shoulder.

“Tell me we can do this without a condom, Diego.” The shy
girlish way she said it turned the temperature of his blood to infernal.

“I use a condom every time and I get tested regularly,” he
told her. “I’m clean.”

“I can’t get pregnant,” she whispered. “I’ve been on birth
control for years.”

His pulse stilled a moment.

“You mean we could have been free-styling this whole time?”
he asked dryly.

She looked sheepish. “I didn’t want to get out of the tub
for a condom.”

He caught her bottom lip between his teeth and bit down just
a little roughly.

“I don’t want you to get out of the tub either,” he told
her, sliding his hands all over her body—up her breasts and back down, over her
ribcage and her maddeningly soft belly, teasing a brief touch over the mound of
her pussy before running as far down her thighs as he could reach.

Her tongue slipped into his mouth and he sucked her in, then
chased it with his when she retreated, her eyes closing and that sexy as fuck
whimper of hers racing along his entire nervous system. He brought his hands
back up her thighs and brought them around to her ass, helping to lift her in
the water so she could shift exactly where he needed her. He felt the jolt
throughout his whole body when she reached between her legs, gripped his cock
and guided the head to her, driving him nearly out of his mind when she used
the tip to toy with her clit.

“You are becoming quite the bad girl, aren’t you?” he asked,
and then groaned deeply as she guided him inside her, rocked her hips, and took
him to the hilt.

If he thought being inside of her was exquisite before, it
was nothing compared to feeling her without the barrier of protection he was
used to having. Her pussy was exquisite—slick and silky and tight and so
fucking hot. Diego’s teeth clenched and a shudder rushed through his body when
she raised up and came back down on him, then did it again, making the water
slosh out of the tub.

But it wasn’t enough.

“Turn around,” he demanded, lifting her off him.

She stood and turned, but the tub, big as it was, still
wasn’t wide enough for her to get her legs around him. He stood quickly,
careful not to knock her over in the process, picked her up so she had to wrap
her legs around him and stepped out of the tub.

“The floor,” she said, slightly alarmed, as water poured off
their bodies and onto the newly laid tile.

“If the grout cracks I’ll come back and fix it,” he
promised, going to his knees and laying her on the plush floor rug.

With his hands cradling her head and his weight on his
elbows, he lifted his hips until he could feel her cunt with the head of his
dick. He took her mouth roughly and plunged both his tongue and his cock deep
within her. His balls tightened when she gasped sharply, turned her head to
break the kiss and breathed, “Oh
fuck yes
.”

He crawled upward a few inches, burying himself even deeper
in the heaven of her body. She brought her legs up high, tucked her knees
against his ribs, and dug her fingernails into his ass. It took her mouth out
of kissing range, but he was already almost too out of breath for that anyway.

She looked up at him. “Hard,” she whispered, and he was
instantly lost.