Naked, he stood very still, his body rock solid while sexual tension rolled off him in waves. His hands slid into her hair. By this time it was loose, falling around her shoulders, and she could feel the tug at the roots. She knew he was watching her because she could feel the weight of his eyes. She wanted to make him come, and would have done it, too, if in the nick of time he hadn’t freed himself and picked her up by the waist and tumbled her back on the bed. He pushed inside her instantly, thrusting deep, and she cried out.
He kept driving into her, hard and fast, and kissing her breasts and then her mouth, while she wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and let the delicious waves of dark, hot passion catch her up until at last they broke and he came and she came for him again.
After that, she lay boneless and pleasantly drifting in his arms as they talked about everything and nothing, really. Until he turned her onto her stomach, and brushed her hair aside to kiss the nape of her neck, which made her sigh a little because she liked the way the touch of his lips on her skin made her feel. He followed that kiss with another, and another, until he was trailing kisses down the length of her spine, licking and nibbling, tracing its curving pathway with his mouth all the way to the cleft in her butt. Then he kissed her bottom, too, his mouth crawling over every inch of the soft round curves until he had her squirming against the mattress and digging into it with her nails. Finally he spread her legs and knelt between them, and pulled her up to meet him. He entered her that way, with fierce demanding strokes and his hand between her legs.
She came so hard for him then that she screamed his name.
“Michael! Oh, my God,
Michael
!”
Lucky no one but him could hear.
Afterward, he pulled her against him, and kissed her mouth. She kissed him back, all languid heat now, then settled in with her head on his shoulder and a hand resting in the center of his wide chest, while his arm curved around her keeping her close. Already she could see, through the open window, the first pink fingers of dawn creeping across the dark sky. It was beautiful, but as she watched it her heart hurt.
A glance at Michael’s face told her that he was watching it, too. The chiseled planes and angles were gorgeous as ever, but there was a bleak cast to them that said he was as aware of the passage of time as she was. Then he must have felt her eyes on him because he looked at her, and rose up on an elbow so that his powerfully built torso blocked out most of her view of the window. She had just a second to absorb the fact that his beautiful mouth was hard now and that grimness lurked behind the hot dark gleam in his eyes before his mouth was on hers and he was rolling on top of her and pushing inside her again.
There was a fierceness to their lovemaking, because they both knew that they would have only this one night, and it was drawing to an end.
She came with a hot rippling pleasure that had her gasping and trembling, and, finally, made the night explode like fireworks against her closed lids.. He came with his mouth pressed to the tender curve between her shoulder and neck, and a groan that was muffled against her skin.
When the alarm on her phone went off, it wasn’t like it was unexpected, so Charlie didn’t know why the sound jolted her so. But it did, catapulting her out of the unlikely sanctuary she had found in his arms, jarring her senses, making her heart leap.
“Michael—” Her eyes flew to his face, but even as his widened and his arms tightened around her the room seemed to fold in on her. Everything went black as she was buffeted by a blast of cold wind. She lost all conception of time and space until she felt a sudden jarring impact. Her heart leaped, she sucked in air, and then her eyes snapped open.
She was in the bathroom, lying curled on the floor in front of the tub, with only the fluffy white bath mat protecting her face from the tile. The bathroom was dark, not black but gloomy, and there was a rushing sound that she couldn’t quite place. For a second she blinked at her shoes, which were under the sink directly within her line of vision, and she recalled kicking them off sometime during last night’s long vigil. Then she remembered the candles, and pushed herself into a sitting position to check: sure enough, there they were on the counter, flames now out. The wicks were black and burnt, and from the hollowed-out look of the candles they had guttered on melted wax.
The rushing sound came from the water still running in the sink.
She must have made some small noise, because all of a sudden there was Michael barging through the bathroom door then stopping to look down at her as she sat on the floor. From the speed with which he had arrived, she thought he must have rushed to find her there. For a moment she detected a flicker of relief in his eyes—probably he had been worried about where she had gone when she had vanished from beside him—but then he simply looked grim. She guessed that he was wrestling to come to terms with the fact that their idyll was over, just as she was. They were on different sides of the barrier again. Looking at him, she felt an aching sadness, as though she had lost something precious. Their relationship had been impossible from the first, but knowing that there was no future in it was even harder to bear now. Her heart stuttered as she considered that any physical contact between them was quite possibly over forever, unless she learned how to control the astral projection thing, which was clearly what she had done again last night. But before she could decide if trying to become an expert at astral-projection-on-demand was even something that she wanted to do, much less if it was feasible, she realized exactly what she was looking at, and blinked.
Michael was naked.
Michael was gorgeous.
As her eyes slid up his long, muscular legs, paused for a second to register once again how impressively well endowed he was, then moved on to admire his washboard abs and wide chest and heavily muscled arms and shoulders before stopping on his hard, handsome face, she felt her pulse pick up the pace and her body, which had been feeling a little cold from lying on the floor, start to get warm again. After the night they’d just spent, she would have thought she’d be past getting turned on by anyone or anything for a good long while, but she would’ve been wrong. Simply looking at Michael was enough to do it. And not only because naked—or not naked, for that matter—he was the hottest guy she had just about ever seen. There was something between them—a sizzling chemistry, a potent sexual attraction—that had been there from the beginning, when she had conducted her first interview with the scary, insolent, way-too-gorgeous convict in chains.
Now, merely the sight of him was enough to make her heart go pitter-pat. Charlie would have told him so if some tiny, self-protective part of her hadn’t warned against it: no point in taking this debacle in the making any further than she already had. So if she wasn’t going to say something on the order of
every time I look at you I get turned on,
she realized as she met his gaze that she was at a loss. Because, really, what do you say to a naked man you have no future with after a night of truly epic sex with him? She had no clue.
He saved her. Having spent much less time looking at her than she had spent looking at him—she guessed that, in her crumpled red dress, which covered her from her armpits to her knees, and with her hair hanging down in a tangle around her face, she wasn’t as much to look at as he was at the moment—he had taken in the candles and the running water, too. He knew what they were for; she didn’t have to explain.
“Next time I get sucked in to Spookville, you leave it the hell alone,” he warned again. His eyes had turned unreadable. His voice was hard. His words made it clear: he expected to wind up in Spookville again at some point. The terrible truth was, she expected that he would wind up there again, too. Just thinking about it made her feel all raw and vulnerable inside, so she dragged her thoughts away. “I can take care of myself. And there’s no telling what might happen to you in there.”
Okay, so tender words of mutual affection—or even a classic was-it-as-good-for-you-as-it-was-for-me conversation—seemed to be out. Well, for both their sakes, that was probably a good thing.
“You seemed happy enough to see me last night,” she retorted, glad to skip any emotional heartburnings in favor of getting their relationship back to what felt more or less like normal. Scrambling to her feet, she turned off the tap. A glance in the mirror confirmed it: she looked a mess. Surprisingly, she didn’t feel all that tired. While her spirit was having world-class sex, apparently her body had gotten some rest.
“I wasn’t,” he said grimly.
“Probably it would help if you did
your
best to stay out of Spookville.” The look she gave him was severe. Or, actually, it started out that way, but then the realization that they were having this conversation while he was leaning a broad shoulder against the wall and standing there casually nude affected the quality of her severity a little, so that she had to give herself a tiny mental shake before refocusing. The sad truth was, she could feel herself starting to get turned on
again.
“For one thing, you can’t materialize anymore. Tam said it weakens the bond. That must have been why you got pulled in like you did.”
“Brought the voodoo priestess into it, did you?” The slow smile he gave her made her heart beat a little faster. “You must have been worried about me.”
There was no point in denying that. The evidence was too clear. Besides, he knew.
“I was.”
There was a lot she could have said after that. A lot she would have said if she was foolish, like
I was scared to death that I was never going to see you again,
or even,
Yes, okay, you were right, I
am
crazy about you,
but neither one of those felt smart—in fact, not only did they not feel smart, they felt stupid and even downright dangerous—so she didn’t. Instead she contented herself with a monitory, “Don’t materialize, okay?” Then, with the brisk air of getting down to necessary business she stepped toward him, and the light switch, which she flipped on. The sudden brightness made her squint a little as she looked at him. “We should probably go ahead and do the whole light-the-candle, close-the-passage thing again. Then I need to take a shower. I’m supposed to be out in the hall at seven.” She glanced at his watch, which dangled braceletlike around her wrist. “Which is in forty-three minutes.”
For a moment he simply looked at her. Then he said, “Let me put my pants on first,” which she got the impression wasn’t what he had been going to say at all, but made her think about when he had taken them
off,
until he turned away and she got distracted by the very nice view of his broad back and small, tight butt that she was afforded..
Watching so much flexing muscle and rippling sinew was making her start to feel all soft and squishy inside. Fortunately he disappeared through the door before she got so hot she dissolved into a steamy little puddle on the floor. Opening the door in anticipation of his return, she found him scooping his clothes up from the floor beside the bed.
When Michael returned, he was fully dressed, down to his boots, and she had a glass and a candle ready to light.
“Fuck,” he said, eyeing the setup, and she took that to mean that he was ready.
The ritual went much the same as before, although they were both better prepared for his pain. When it was over, she ordered him out.
“I’m going to take a shower. And the bathroom is still off-limits,” she reminded him, just in case he had some notion that last night had changed the rule. “Shoo.”
The slightest of wicked smiles touched his mouth. “Babe, at this point I’ve seen it all. And touched it. And licked it. And—”
Charlie gave him a withering look. She should have known he wasn’t going to let her simply forget about everything they’d done. “Go, all right?”
Even as she shut the door on him, he grinned at her.
She was in the middle of her shower before she remembered that she’d forgotten to bring her clothes into the bathroom with her.
When, wrapped in a towel with another towel wound around her head, she walked out into the room, it was to find him standing in front of the dark TV, frowning. That frown changed to an interested look as he spotted her, which changed to a hot gleam as his eyes slid over her. It was just as well that she was in a hurry, she thought, because that meant she didn’t have time to respond to the look in his eyes with more than an inner quiver. Which she immediately ordered herself to ignore.
If she was going to get turned on every time she looked at him or he looked at her, this would be bad.
“You know, you
can
get dressed in front of me,” he said dryly when she grabbed clean undies from her suitcase then walked to the closet to extract the clothes she had hung there the night before. “It’s not like I can do anything but look.”
Actually, merely the thought of him looking was all it took to turn that inner quiver turn into a delicious melting quake, which was alarming. Charlie had a sudden terrible suspicion that last night’s sex-a-thon might have conditioned her to respond to him automatically, like Pavlov’s dog.
“Yeah. No,” she said.
“Your call. I’ll still be around when putting your clothes on in the bathroom gets old, though.”