Whispers at Midnight (18 page)

Looking at him, which she had counted on to shock her back to good sense, was unfortunately having the opposite effect, she realized. What she’d hoped would be the solution was, instead, the very core of her problem: Yes, indeed, he was still the same old Matt. But instead of thinking
no good dirty rotten son of a bitch
when she looked at him, what she thought was,
it’s Matt,
almost with wonder.
It’s Matt,
still handsomer than he had any right to be and still sexier than
hell and still seeming to know more about how to please a woman than any man she had ever met.
It’s Matt,
so achingly familiar that lying in his arms like this just somehow seemed right.

“I forgive you,” she managed, caving in sheer self-defense, knowing that what she was on the verge of doing was the absolute wrong thing to do and digging deep to try to summon the strength to pull herself out of his arms before she did it. They were almost nose to nose in the big chair, lying sideways, wedged tightly together. He was holding her, his hands on her back pressing her close, but it would have been an easy hold to break. Sitting up, standing up, walking away—nothing could have been simpler.

She couldn’t do it, she realized glumly. Soon, maybe, but not—quite—yet.

“Ah,” he said, and smiled at her. Watching the slow curve of his lips, Carly felt her blood heat. She inhaled, met his gaze. His eyes flared, and he kissed her again, still soft, still gentle, but so thoroughly that she was dazzled. Dimly she realized that his restraint was probably deliberate, that she was being tantalized right past the roadblocks her good judgment would normally throw in his way, but by then she simply didn’t care. The stubble on his jaw felt rawly masculine as it brushed against her cheeks and chin. His body against hers felt firm and hot and unmistakably masculine too. And good—he felt so good. She quivered a little at the sheer goodness of it.

He must have felt the tiny tremor that went through her limbs, because all of a sudden he stiffened and his breath seemed to catch. Then, without any more warning than that, he was kissing her like she wanted to be kissed, like she needed to be kissed, like she had dreamed of being kissed over years of lonely nights. His tongue invaded her mouth, hot and wet and hungry, filling it, moving against hers, stroking the roof of her mouth and the inside of her cheeks and lips, provoking a mind-blowing response. The heat that was already smoldering inside her blazed up like grease on a griddle. Sliding her arms around his neck, she closed her eyes and curled her toes and kissed him back and
enjoyed,
promising herself that she would call a halt right—after—this.

But then his hands moved again, sliding right on down inside her
pants until his fingertips reached the first gentle upward curve of her cheeks. There they stopped.

Oh, God. Her heart pounded. Her breathing suspended. Her nether regions, already well aware of what was going on, segued in an instant from a pleasant throbbing into a full-blown, gotta-have-it kind of quake. His hands were long-fingered, broad-palmed, strong, searing their imprint into her flesh.
She wanted them cupping her butt.
She wanted it so badly that it was all she could do not to reach around and guide them to the right place. Tightening her arms around his neck, she kissed him with feverish intensity, moving against him, rocking with newfound abandon against the swollen hardness at the front of his jeans.

He lifted his head, breaking the kiss. Feeling almost drugged by desire, Carly opened her eyes to discover that he was watching her. He was breathing heavily, his eyes were hot, his chest heaved against her breasts, and his arms as they curved around her had grown hard. His entire body seemed to pulse with a kind of hungry urgency that left her in no doubt about just how aroused he was.

“Probably this isn’t such a good idea,” he said. His voice was hoarse, raspy. Despite his words his eyes blazed at her, and he showed no inclination to let her go.

Just looking at him looking at her like that got her so turned on that she had to take a breath before she could talk.

“Probably not.”

“We should just—” He broke off as his arms tightened, pulling her closer yet in a silent contradiction of his words.

She tried not to pant. “Yes, we should.”

Even before she finished speaking, his hands were on the move again, sliding down over her butt cheeks at last. Carly gasped, trembling with pleasure. The hot abrasion of those long-fingered hands molding her curves sent pure fire licking out along her nerve endings and reduced her bones to Jell-O.

“Oh, God, Matt.” It was all she could do not to come right there and then from the sheer intensity of the sensations that were rocketing through her. But she fought the good fight, holding off, not wanting the most mind-blowing Big O that had hovered on her horizon
in years to be over with so soon. Beneath her passion-weighted lids she saw that he was watching her with eyes that suddenly glittered. She remembered that he’d always had a pretty good idea about what was running through her mind. At the idea that he knew exactly just how turned on she was, she felt a thrill shoot clear down to her toes.

“You’re not wearing panties,” he said. It didn’t sound like his voice at all.

Carly breathed. She was too far gone now to talk, to explain that she never wore panties with pajamas. She just shook her head.

His jaw tightened, and his hands tightened too, gripping a smooth, round cheek in each one as he pulled her slowly and deliberately up against him.

Carly gasped and trembled and closed her eyes. She was on fire, weak with need, burning up with it. Every last scrap of reason she possessed was lost, blocked out by a tsunami of good, old-fashioned lust. Tightening her arms around his neck, she lifted her face and met his mouth as it descended and kissed him as if she’d die if she didn’t.

He kissed her senseless, kissed her until her muscles dissolved and her head was whirling and her body was flaming and throbbing and absolutely his for the taking. Then all of a sudden he stopped kissing her, for no earthly reason that she could fathom, just pulled his mouth away from hers and lifted his head. His hands let go of her butt and slid out of her pants and his arms, which had been hard and tight around her, loosened so that they no longer even seemed to be holding her.

Bereft, bewildered, and breathless, Carly opened her eyes to see what he was doing. It took a moment—she was so turned on it was hard to focus—but she saw that he was looking down at their entwined bodies with a frown. She followed suit, and discovered that his hands were on the outside of her pants now, tugging at them, trying to pull them off, wanting to make her naked. She wanted that too, she realized with a swift upsurge of heat, wanted to be naked with him, wanted him naked and on her and in her….

Their eyes met as she reached down to help. His were narrow and as black and glittery as onyx. He was breathing like he’d run for miles,
and his face was dark with passion. Just looking at him like that made her melt, made her want him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. He must have seen something of what she was feeling in her expression because even as she fumbled between them he shifted positions, moving her with him, lifting her on top of him, yanking urgently at her pants. Thrown off balance, she slithered down his other side. He grabbed at her to steady her and then somehow, just like that, they rolled out of the chair and crashed down onto the floor.

It wasn’t much of a fall, and she landed on top of him, no harm done. Still, it was slightly disorienting to say the least and it took her a minute to recover and get her bearings. When she did, she lifted her head and looked at him. He lay flat on his back on the carpet with her sprawled chest-down on top of him, her chin at the approximate level of his breastbone, his hands resting on her waist. His eyes were open, too, she discovered. He was looking at her and breathing hard, but he made no effort to take up where they had left off.

“It’s a drawstring,” Carly murmured helpfully as she wriggled up his body, glad to have suddenly recollected the underlying cause of the fall. His hands moved then, closing over her hipbones, hard and purposeful as he arrested her upward journey. When he didn’t answer but continued to look at her with what she assumed was passion- or fall-induced incomprehension, she elucidated. “My pants. They’re tied with a drawstring. You just need to untie them and—”

She broke off as he frowned, clearly still not back with the program, and reached down to untie the drawstring herself on the theory that just doing it was worth a thousand words. Besides, the idea of kicking off her pants and lying on top of him naked from the waist down while he was still fully dressed was kind of exciting. In fact, as she considered it she discovered that it excited her more than any erotic thought she’d had in years. She would—

“Wait. Stop. No.” His protest was slightly disjointed but forceful. He caught her hands even as they found the drawstring, imprisoning them in his, holding them immobile. Carly looked at him in surprise. He met her gaze. His eyes were dark with passion. His face was flushed with it. His hands tightened on hers—and then he rolled
with her so that all of a sudden she was no longer lying on top of him. She was sliding—and then she was on the rug, lying on her side facing him, close still but with their linked hands the only points of actual contact.

Carly had a funny feeling that this might not be a prelude to some sexy new position.

“Matt?”

To her dismay she discovered that he was grimacing. His brows met over his nose in a pained-looking frown, and his lips were drawn back to reveal clenched teeth.

“We’re not doing this,” he said after a second, sounding strained but also sounding as if he really, truly meant it. “We—are—not—doing—this.”

With that he let go of her hands, jackknifed into a sitting position and got to his feet. Too surprised to even try to stop him, Carly sat up, gaping at him, her hands resting on the smooth flat wool on either side of her thighs, her legs stretched straight out in front of her.

“Matt…” She had to look a long way up to meet his gaze. He moved restlessly, as if her uncomprehending regard made him uncomfortable, then jammed his hands into his pockets and took a step backward.

“Look, we already made this mistake once.” His expression as he looked at her was as wary as if he’d suddenly discovered that she was stuffed full of explosives. Disbelieving, she realized that he was continuing to back away. “We’re not making it again. We’re friends, Curls.
Friends.
This isn’t us.”

“What?” She still didn’t understand.

“Hell, you’ve been mad at me for twelve years over the last time.” Talking faster now, he reached the door and felt behind him for the knob. “I care too much about you for this. There are lots of girls I can fuck. You’re my only girl
friend.
”

“What?”
Now she understood. He was leaving her high and dry, the no good dirty rotten son of a bitch.

“I want to keep it like that,” he said, opening the door. “You will too, once you think about it.” Then, backing out into the cave-dark
hall, he tacked on a soft, “Later,” and closed the door in the teeth of her sputters.

Just like that.
Click.
No more Matt.

Carly couldn’t believe it. He was gone, leaving her all on her lonesome in his dark bedroom, sitting stunned in the middle of his ugly beige carpet, her body still throbbing with need, her cat peering out at her from under the bed. It took several minutes for the shock to subside enough so that she could even start to get mad.

13

B
Y THE TIME CARLY
headed downstairs the next morning, mad didn’t even begin to cover how she felt. The good news was, being dumped like that had almost completely erased from her mind the night’s assorted other traumas. The bad news was, she was so furious at Matt that she had spent the rest of the night fuming instead of sleeping. It didn’t help that poor shell-shocked Hugo had persisted in curling up right on top of her every time she’d stretched out on the bed, seeking to soothe his inner kitten by kneading her with needlesharp claws whenever she was just about to nod off. It also didn’t help that her clueless body still tingled and throbbed, hankering after Matt. To make matters worse, she was almost as mad at herself as she was at Matt. She’d
known
he was a handsome skunk, a sexy jackass, a no good dirty rotten son of a bitch. What had she been thinking?

The depressing, embarrassing, infuriating answer was that she hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d been too busy feeling. Which was, she supposed, the all-too-predictable result of letting herself get into a state where she was practically re-virginized again.

Along about eight
A.M.
, when she’d all but given up trying to get any more sleep, it occurred to her that she was in Matt’s house. It stood to reason that she could therefore expect to see Matt when she went downstairs. At first the idea horrified her. Her bottom line was,
she never wanted to see the no good dirty rotten son of a bitch again as long as she lived. But the more she thought about it, the more she decided that that was a crock. Never again was she going to simply stew in silence while catching occasional distant glimpses of the object of her ire. Oh, no. That was a different Carly. This Carly, this new mad-as-hell, not-going-to-take-it-anymore Carly, was going in a whole nother direction. She was going to be up front, in your face, visibly, verbally, violently mad.