Chapter 19
Emma
I didn’t have a plan.I hadn’t had one when I got on the plane, and I didn’t have one now. Noah was right—I really didn’t know why I was here. Except when he finished putting the condom on and rolled on top of me, pinning me to the bed, I did know.
Noah always knew what I wanted before I did.
He kissed me deep and hard, and I could feel that he was keeping himself under tight control, his muscles locked as he braced over me. He wanted this as much as I did, and he hadn’t been with anyone else. We hadn’t agreed on that, hadn’t even discussed it, but still he’d done it.
The thought made me bolder. I hooked a leg over his hip and pushed up into him, biting his lip. We’d been a country apart, both celibate, and this was overdue. Neither of us was going to be slow or gentle this time. There would be no games. Noah responded to my boldness by hooking an arm beneath one of my knees and thrusting into me.
The angle was deep, really deep—just what I wanted. I exhaled a breath and closed my eyes as he started to move, sliding slickly in and out of me, barely keeping his control. My skin flushed with sensation, up my belly and my chest, and my nipples throbbed. I could feel every part of myself, my pulse in my throat, my heart pounding, the ache of my inner thigh muscles, the stretch of him, and I realized that for weeks I had been numb. Literally numb. I’d been going about my business, but from the neck down I may as well have been a mannequin. I’d felt nothing.
I felt everything now. The weight of Noah, the press of his hot skin against mine. The friction of him inside me. How this man made me feel so good, I didn’t know and didn’t care. This was what I had come all this way for—this was the only thing I wanted. I was chasing pleasure, and he knew exactly how to make me do it. Exactly how to shut my brain off and make me feel.
He moved deeper, harder, and I felt myself squeeze him. Noah exhaled harshly and paused, bending down to take my nipple in his mouth again. I wriggled at the sensation, my hips moving where he pinned me as pleasure shot through my body, taking me closer. He could nearly make me come without even moving.
When he moved his mouth to my other nipple, still not moving, I let out a sound that was half groan, half frustrated gasp. I squirmed my hips again.
“You think I don’t know what you want?” Noah lifted his mouth from my breast and, still not moving, he lowered his hand between us. I felt his broad thumb stroking my slick clit.
It was so good it almost hurt. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. The world went still behind my eyelids.
The orgasm hit me hard, an explosion of pure sensation. I knew that my body was bucking under his and my nails were digging into his biceps, but that was all. It spiraled on and on, weeks of numbness vanishing in an overload of feeling, and somewhere in the middle of it Noah removed his thumb and started to move, changing the pleasure yet again. He wrung more pulses of pleasure out of me as he moved faster, harder.
I could do nothing but feel him, smell his skin. He came with a long groan and collapsed slowly on top of me, his face against my neck. Both of us were covered in sweat.
“Fuck, we are getting really good at this,” he said against my skin.
I could do nothing but agree as the breath slowly returned to my body.
After a minute, he pulled off of me. He got up, disposed of the condom in the bathroom, and came back into the bedroom, pulling on his sleep pants over his naked body. He didn’t bother with a shirt. He walked into the hall outside the door, where I’d dropped my purse—I didn’t remember doing that. As I propped myself up on my elbows watching him, he picked up my purse as if he owned it and rifled through it, extracting the keys to my rental car.
“What are you doing?” I rasped, thinking belatedly of the in-case-of-emergency tampon I kept in there. If Noah saw it, he gave no sign that he cared.
“I’ll be right back.” Taking the keys, he sauntered off down the hall. I heard the front door open and shut, and a minute later he came back with my huge suitcase, which he’d taken from the trunk of my car.
“You travel with rocks, I see,” he said as he put the suitcase down with a grunt. “Good to know.”
“What are you doing?” I asked again, still stupid from my orgasm.
“You’re staying with me.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Noah, you don’t even know why I’m here in L.A.”
“You came to see me,” he said.
Partly true, but still. “There are other reasons. I’ll get a hotel or an AirBNB. I might be here for weeks.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You really like me.”
“Noah—”
“Relax.” His eyes crinkled in that amused way that was so drop-dead sexy on him. “I’m teasing you, Emma.” As he talked, he dropped the pajama pants again. “You’re likely here on business, probably something to do with Catharine Knowles. I’m a side benefit, I get that. But while you’re here, you stay with me.”
I couldn’t argue, because he was naked and I couldn’t speak. I watched him get back into bed with me, this time with the smooth, satisfied movements of a man who has just been laid. He lay next to me on his back, took pity by pulling the sheet up to his waist, and locked his hands behind his head. “Okay, tell me what’s going on,” he said.
For a second I couldn’t quite believe this was my life. I was in bed with this big, sexy overload of testosterone, and apparently I wasn’t leaving. “Noah, I can’t stay with you.”
“Yes you can. Now tell me the situation.”
I gave in. It was late, I was naked, and I didn’t have a room booked. Plus, he insisted. What was a girl to do?
I sat up, pulled the sheet over my own nakedness, and tucked my knees into my chest. Then I told him about the fact that I hadn’t found someone suitable to work for Catharine, and I’d decided to do the work myself while I recruited someone here.
“Interesting,” he said when I finished. He was still staring at the ceiling, his hands locked behind his head, and I let myself stare at him, taking in every detail of his face. I really liked the way his mouth contrasted with the trim beard around it, the way his hazel eyes twinkled. Even his armpits were kind of sexy. “Catharine is getting the deal of the century,” he said, ignoring my drooling. “I bet she’s happy about that.”
“She played it cool.”
“She would. It’s a good plan, especially if you need a break from New York for a while. Will it be a problem that you’re here over Christmas?”
“No.” I’d already thought about that. “I never make much of the holidays anyway, and I don’t need to be there. I’ll fly to Chicago to visit my parents for a day or two, and that’s all.” I frowned at him, something occurring to me. “Is it a problem for you if I’m here? Do you have holiday plans?”
“No.” He turned his gaze to me. “I’m home alone at Thanksgiving, you may have noticed. I don’t do holidays. I don’t visit my parents because they hate me. Did Aidan never tell you that?”
I blinked at him. He’d said it so matter-of-factly. “No, he’s never told me that. They hate you? Why?”
Noah sighed and ran a hand through his sex-mussed hair. “It’s an old story, and one that doesn’t make me look very good. Maybe I’ll tell you some other time. But Christmas isn’t a thing for me. It’s fine if you’re here.”
It sounded intimate, the two of us being together for Christmas. Like we were a couple. But I knew that Noah and I were on the same page, that we both knew what this was.
It was an affair, that was all. Nothing more.
I pushed down my curiosity about him, about why a man who seemed so easy and sociable on the surface spent all of his holidays alone. There were some kind of depths to Noah that I could only guess at, churning the way the ocean churned with deep, dark water beneath the frothy surf.
But his depths were none of my business. His body was my business, and that was all.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“So I still have work to do,” he said.
I turned and found him looking at me. His hands were still locked behind his head and that gaze was fixed on me. The humor was fading from them and a dark look was replacing it, a look I’d last seen when he’d taken out a blindfold to put over my eyes.
I felt my insides do a slow, delightful turn, excitement skittering up my spine. “What?” I asked, trying and failing to sound like I wasn’t affected. “What are you doing?”
“Getting ideas,” he said.
I bit my lip. The orgasm I’d just had was fading as I started to get turned on again. He’d already made me come in—what, five minutes? Six? It was some kind of record. And now he was heating me up again. “I didn’t pack my blindfold,” I said. “Or my wrist ties.”
“Then I guess I’ll get creative.”