Chapter Nineteen
One night. Just give me one night. The silent plea was all she had. Nick had been right. She couldn’t be alone. Not tonight.
She wanted one night with him. One night to forget. One night to discover. One night to silence all the questions she’d been asking herself lately about what could have been if either of them had been brave or foolish enough to cross the line.
She still didn’t know if this was brave or if it was completely and utterly stupid, but in Nick’s arms, she couldn’t think about tomorrow. She was blind to the consequences when every fiber of her being was saying yes.
He set her on the bed, their positions reversed from the night this had all started, the night he’d been loopy on muscle relaxers and she’d realized that her attraction to him had taken off. Her feelings for him had always been larger than life. Yet that night, she’d seen him through new eyes.
He looked down at her now with heat stirring in his gaze. Her thighs quaked as he reached for the snap of his jeans.
She quickly mirrored the motion, in a hurry to know him in all the ways she didn’t already. Wriggling out of the loose-legged coffee-hued trousers, she kicked them over the edge of the bed.
His stare went to the vee between her legs, covered only by the lacy swath of her black panties. No sooner had his jeans hit the floor and he’d wrestled his shirt over his head than he gripped her underneath her knees and dragged her to the edge of the bed.
She wanted the silk shell she’d worn underneath her blazer gone. It rode halfway up her belly, but he went down on one knee. Then two, draping one of her legs over each of his shoulders. She gripped the quilt squares. “Oh, God, Nick.”
The tip of his nose brushed the seam of her through the thin panties. She arched toward him, desire a furnace at her core. He breathed on her and she nearly came out of her skin.
“I’ve dreamed about this,” he groaned, need a fervent bar across his brow. “How you’d look… How you’d sound… How you’d taste…”
She dropped her head back to the bed as he spread kisses over the insides of her thighs. He could find out if he’d just…
His lips closed over her, the dampness of his mouth easily penetrating the lace and lighting her up.
As he suckled, she arched up to meet him.
Every pulse of his tongue, she answered until his hands cupped the underside of her hips in support.
The barrier of lace drove her to madness.
Impatient, her fingertips sank beneath the waistband to bring herself further up to climax.
He made a noise of dissent, pulling her hand free, replacing it with his own.
As soon as his touch lit across her clit, he set her on a collision course with climax.
He groaned against the lace, the noise vibrating across the bundle of nerves his fingers worked with precision, and she was helpless in the face of free fall.
She dug her heels into his shoulder blades and screamed in abandonment.
By the time she came down, he was braced on hands and knees above her. His chest rose and fell in quick succession, as if he’d run a marathon. She saw the flush of color on both sides of his neck and reached up to trace it as she rasped, “I’ve…never come that fast before.”
His dark eyes glimmered with excitement.
“Get used to it.” Then he kissed her, going down on his elbows to give her mouth the same amount of devotion.
She lost herself in the kiss, in his hands as they crept beneath the silk shell to coax the skin of her ribs, her breasts.
He circled her nipples. Her hips arrowed up to meet his.
She felt him, ready and hard—so hard, her desire sharpened. “Undress me,” she demanded.
“Not yet,” he groaned into her mouth, as lost in the kiss as she was.
She ran her nails up his ribs then down, thrilled when gooseflesh pebbled under her roaming touch. “I want to know you.”
He sipped at her lower lip like he was sampling a dessert wine and he couldn’t part with just one taste. “You know me,” he replied. “Better than anyone.”
Would he make her spell it out? “I’ve dreamed of this, too. How you would feel. How we’d feel together.”
He seemed to lose his breath, touching his brow to her temple. “Sassy,” he breathed.
“Let me feel you,” she pleaded, wrapping her legs around his waist. She touched her heels to the base of his firm buttocks and spread her knees, bringing her core up to meet him. “Please, Nick.”
He cursed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, bracing himself on his elbows once more. “I don’t… I didn’t plan this, and I just realized I don’t have protection.”
She nearly wept. “Neither do I.”
“God dammit,” he groaned into her hair.
Her thoughts exactly. And yet… “I’ve been on the pill since I was seventeen.”
“I know,” he said. “I just figured you’d feel more comfortable if I wore a condom.”
She smiled. That was Nick, always thinking about her comfort first. She raised herself on her elbows to reach his lips with her own, rewarding him with a lingering lip lock. “I haven’t been with anyone since my last checkup. I’m clean.”
That ardent bar between his brows was back. “Same here.”
“Then what’s stopping you?”
His fingers worked at the waistband of her panties, coaxing them down her hips to her knees.
She struggled until she was free of them, then fought with the shell.
No sooner had the air kissed the tips of her breasts than his mouth found them.
With her arms still caught in the shell above her head, she arched her back to meet the promise of wet heat.
Her heart fluttered beneath his ministrations as he dug his knees into the quilt and brought her up to sitting with him.
He continued to suckle, nuzzle, until the yearning took up residence inside her bones and she was no longer herself.
“Look at you.”
She turned her head as he had and confronted the full-length mirror she’d moved. When she stiffened, he ran his hand from the base of her neck to the base of her spine, softening her again with the soothing stroke. “Look at my girl,” he said reverentially.
She saw them together. She didn’t know where her body ended and his began. They weren’t pieces that clicked. They had melded into one. Part of him. Part of her. “Look at us,” she returned.
He made an approving noise. Then he turned his attention to the sensitive underside of her chin, jaw, ear. She watched their reflection as he ran his palm up the length of her thigh before wedging his hand between them to grip his erection.
“Stroke it,” she murmured.
His hand pumped once, twice, again. She felt his body tighten against hers, heat.
“Again, Nick.”
He groaned, his arm working, obedient.
“Again,” she whispered.
He pressed his face against her throat, his neck red as poppies. She could see the outline of a vein. His jaw flared. “You’ve got me too excited. I might—”
She silenced him with a kiss, replacing his hand with hers.
His moans filled her mouth. She echoed the strokes by sliding her tongue along his until he vibrated against her, on the brink of release.
Relinquishing him, she planted her hands on his shoulders.
“Watch,” she said, waiting until his head fell back and his eyes opened to meet hers.
“Watch me,” she said again before she seated herself over him.
She parted over him, and his arm tightened around her to stop him from stretching her more. “Slow,” he ground from between his teeth. “I’ve never… This is a first for me.”
She tipped her mouth away from his. “Nick Malone, if you try to tell me you’re a virgin right now, I’m going to kick your ass.”
His unbidden laugh blew across her cheek. “No, baby. I’ve just never been…bare inside a woman before.”
“Oh.”
He kissed the curve of her cheekbone. “It feels right…you being the first.”
“Yeah,” she said, blinking at the wet sting behind her eyes. She’d never cried during sex. She wasn’t about to start now.
Even if this didn’t feel like sex. She’d had her fun. She knew what being with a man meant. But this… This felt like something else entirely.
A tiny ball of fear rolled through her, picking up speed. She ignored it when his hand closed around the back of her neck and the other settled on her hip, guiding her down over him. He filled her. She felt him pulsing inside her, and her thinking stopped abruptly.
“It’s your turn to watch,” he growled.
She steeled herself to meet his gaze and didn’t blink as he guided her through the first stroke.
His dark eyes dilated, and his lips parted beneath hers.
Sensation chased friction as they rocked together.
She could barely breathe. She arched, he plunged and she cried out in pleasure.
All the while, she watched what their joining did to him, the intoxication that painted his face.
It made her feel drunk on him. She reveled in the sound of their bodies coming together over and over until…
The ecstasy of free fall again. Echoes of a dream.
Only, in her dream, she hadn’t been afraid to fall.
His body stiffened. She felt him spill himself inside her. They crashed to the quilt in an exhausted slump.
As they lay tangled like toppled branches, she realized the fall had already taken place.
And she was afraid. So very afraid she had changed things between them irrevocably.