Goes down easy(16)
No, what he was was all hard body. His arm, his chest, his leg. And then there was the other hardness pressing into her hip. The one reminding her she hadn’t done this in a very long time. The one she couldn’t ignore.
“I don’t perform on command.” She drew up her knees, knocking his leg back to the bed. “I need…inspiration. Or the promise of a reward.”
“What if I give you both?” he asked, his voice dropping to a husky growl.
She wanted him in ways that frightened her. She’d never known this overwhelming physical need. And she couldn’t help but wonder if what she was feeling went beyond wanting what he could do to her body.
She turned her head on the pillow, seeing little beyond the form of his head, and a tiny light she thought might be his eyes. Her voice shook when she said, “Actually, I’d like that more than you can imagine.”
He leaned over then and kissed her. Just touched his mouth to the corner of hers, left it there and breathed deeply, doing nothing else.
The hair on his chest tickled her shoulder, but the contact was nowhere close to being enough. She wanted more. She wanted everything. She just didn’t know where to start.
As if reading her mind, he pulled her up to a sitting position, taking over the way she wanted. He peeled off her tank top, leaning against her when she lay back down, brushing her breasts with his chest’s soft hair, pressing himself close. His pecs were firm, his stomach solid.
His T-shirt had teased her, hinting at but never revealing his body’s truth. He was fit, his skin smooth, his flesh resilient. She ran her palms over his shoulders and down his back, slipped her fingers beneath the waistband of his boxers and teased him there.
“If those are in your way, I’ll be glad to take them off,” he said, chuckling deep in his chest.
The vibrations tickled, and she smiled. “I’ll let you know when they get to be a problem.”
“Are you sure they’re not a problem now?”
Men. So predictable. But with this one she wouldn’t change a thing, she mused, pulling her hands from his waistband to trace her way up his spine. She fingered the scar she found on his shoulder blade, a deep crescent carved into his skin, but stayed silent when he stiffened at her touch.
He slid lower on her body, kissing the valley between her breasts, stopping just above her navel to ask, “You don’t mind if I get rid of yours, do you? They’re definitely in my way.”
She nodded. She shook her head. She wasn’t sure which answer was the one he wanted, or even what she was trying to say. But when his hands gripped the fabric, she stopped thinking and willingly let him strip her bare.
“Mmm,” he murmured, back to kissing her now. “I like the way you smell.”
She closed her eyes, flexed her fingers into the sheet at her hips. She didn’t know if he was talking about her soap or her perfume or the scent of her arousal, so she didn’t respond. Except that wasn’t exactly true.
Her hips came up off the bed, and her legs opened. She wanted him there desperately and was ready to beg, but he settled between her thighs before she had to, and kissed his way from her belly to her sex. His tongue was wet and warm, and she shivered.
His hands were broad where he slipped them beneath her hips and squeezed. When he drew her clit between his lips, she gasped, shuddered and moaned from the exquisite sensation. She felt herself open, felt herself weep as her body grew ready to take him.
He slid a finger inside her, added another, pushed deep while he slicked his tongue through her folds. He stroked, his fingers moving in and out. He sucked, the pressure of his lips light, the swirling teasing tip of his tongue an elegant torture.
It was too much, and it had been so long, and she cried out, letting go. Spasms ripped through her, a sweet singing bliss, a release that swept through her like a flood after rain. He stayed with her all the way, fingering, kissing, pressing against her as she came.
And then it was over. She was done, boneless and weak, exhausted and spent. Her body finished thrumming, the burning eased, and she settled into the mattress like a big fat cat taking a nap, barely aware of Jack settling in beside her as she slept.
8
THE NEXT TIME she opened her eyes it was eight o’clock. She wasn’t due at work until ten. For the first time in her memory, she considered calling in sick.
She wouldn’t, of course. And she wasn’t. Unless too little sleep and an orgasmic hangover counted.
She groaned as the guilt hit her, feeling the heat of a blush turn her skin what she knew would be a bright, splotchy red. She had fallen asleep on him. She, the female. A humiliating reversal of fortunes.
Hiding in the closet until he left ranked at the top of her list of escape routes. But first she wanted to know about the scar on his back—where it had come from, how long he’d had it, why he’d turned to stone when she’d discovered it there.
She knew nothing about who he was beyond his being an investigator from Texas. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything.
Lying on her stomach and not wanting Jack to wake, she turned just her head—only to find that he wasn’t sleeping. And that he was looking at her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Good morning,” he responded.
“I’m sorry. About last night. Er, about earlier. I went to sleep.”
“So did I.”
His lashes were so long it killed her. She rolled onto her side to face him. “I know. But I got…you didn’t…”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, understanding what she was trying to say, and also picking up on her angst. “No man ever died from a broken hard-on.”
She couldn’t decide whether to smile or grimace, and ended up doing a bit of both. “That was horrible.”
“I know. A girl I knew in high school used to say it all the time.” He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear; his touch caused her to shiver. “She hung with me and three other guys, and got sick of hearing us complain about being left high and dry.”
“I don’t blame her,” she said, sliding her feet between his. “And besides, she was right.”
“She was right about a lot of things,” he said with a self-deprecating snort.
Interesting—both how he could appreciate a teenage girl’s insight, and his own conceit. “You were close to her, then?”
Toying with her hair again, he nodded, his eyes an ever-deepening gray. “She was like family. Hell, she was family.”
“How so?” she asked, wondering how long it would take him to cut off her prying.
He blew out a deep breath, ran his knuckle over the skin beneath her chin. “During my senior year, I saw more of her and the guys than I did my father.”
She heard the slight catch in his voice, was curious if he’d noticed that his armor had slipped. “Where was he?”
“In and out,” he said with a shrug, toying with the swell of her breast. “He was supposed to be in Austin with me, but he spent most of his time in Baltimore with my mother. My sister was sick, and going through a trial program at Johns Hopkins. She died when I was stationed in Kuwait.”
“Jack, I’m so sorry.” She reached over, caressed his face.
He captured her hand, brought it to his chest and held it there. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago. Hell, sixteen years. It’s over.”
She knew better. She’d lived through a similar blow. Nothing like that was ever over. She threaded her fingers through the hair on his chest and tugged. “Is that where you got the scar? The one on your shoulder? In Kuwait?”
He took so long to answer that she feared she’d hit a nerve still wounded and raw. But then he said, “Actually, no. I was in international waters for that one.”
“Oh.” Lame, but it was all she could think of to say. “I’m sorry.”
His chuckle broke the tension. “You know, you’ve said that three times in the last thirteen minutes.”
“No. I didn’t know.” She glanced over her shoulder at the clock, glanced back. “Are you timing something?”
“Yeah. How long it’s going to take you to find the rest of my scars.”
She waited…waited…until finally she bit. “That sounds like a challenge to me.”
He rolled onto his back, punched a pillow beneath his head, lay propped on his stacked wrists like a king. “I’m all yours.”
She pushed up onto her elbow, intrigued by what he was offering her, and nervous at the same time. “You’ll tell me about any scars that I find?”
He nodded. “The one on my shoulder’s off-limits, but I’ll tell you about the rest. In fact—” he found her hand, guided it to a gouge on his side between two ribs “—this is the one from Kuwait.”
She dipped her finger into the hollow there, felt the jaggedly healed pocket of skin. “A knife?”
“A shiv, yeah. Hurt like a son of a bitch, and I don’t even want to think about where the blade had been.” He shuddered; it seemed an involuntary response. “We did what we could with field dressing and a shot of penicillin, but the damn thing took forever to heal.”
She wanted to ask more—who had stabbed him, why he’d been in such a position, if he’d caught the bad guy, who he’d included in “we”—but he’d moved her hand lower by then.