Nobody's Baby but Mine(77)

Even as he grasped her hips, he didn’t try to force her into his rhythm but let her find her own. She raised and lowered herself upon him, rubbing the tips of her breasts against the soft hair of his chest and returning his deep, devouring kisses. She felt strong and sure as she met his passion. Sensation built upon sensation until reality slipped away and she felt as if she were being hurled through a supercollider, flying past the speed of light through a narrow underground passage toward the place where everything came apart.

And then she cried out as all the molecules that made up who she was fragmented: atoms dissociated, nuclei detached, everything broke open, shattered, and, at the end, left her more complete than she had ever been.

He went rigid with her cry. His teeth sank into the side of her neck, not hurting her, but holding her as he spilled himself within her depths. For a fraction of time she felt his utter defenselessness, and she sagged forward, protecting him as he found his ease.

Their hearts thundered together, one pressed against the other. She turned her lips to his hair.

Finally he stirred beneath her, a shift of his hand, a movement in his leg. Only gradually did she grow aware of the strain in her splayed thighs and the cramp in her calf. The air inside the car was so thick with heat it was hard to draw breath, but she didn’t want to move. This intimacy was too precious to her.

“What am I going to do with you?” he muttered against her breast.

You could try loving me.

The unspoken thought jarred her, then filled her with dismay. Was this the destructive path her subconscious was taking? She wanted him to fall in love with her? When had she lost touch with reality? What made her entertain, even in her fantasies, the notion that this man who wanted no attachments could love her, especially when no one else had ever been able to?

“You’re going to take me home,” she said briskly. “That was quite pleasant, but I have a great deal of work to do tomorrow, and I need my rest.”

“Quite pleasant?”

It had been earth-shattering, but she could no more confess that to him than she could explain how their coming together had given her an entirely new understanding of high-speed subatomic particle collisions.

God. Why was she thinking of that now? Everything people believed about her was true! She was a complete geek.

She reached for her clothes. Her panties were lost somewhere in the dark, so she drew her jeans on without them, pulling them up over her wetness.

He threw open the door, and as the dome light flashed on, she drew her blouse across her breasts. He glanced down at her as he zipped his jeans. “You’re not bad, Professor, for someone who isn’t a big-time player.”

His casual dismissal of what had been so important to her made her want to weep. Fool! But what did she expect? Did she think he was going to declare his undying love for her simply because she’d finally given him what he must have known he’d get all along?

They rode home in silence. He went into the house with her, and she felt his gaze as she climbed the stairs to her room.

She hesitated, then looked down at him watching her from the foyer below. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

She’d meant to sound brisk, but her words had a wistful quality. She didn’t want the evening to end this way. What if she held out her hand and invited him into her bed? The idea chilled her. Was that the only way she could keep him at her side?

He slouched against the front door and looked bored. “Yeah, it was great.”

He couldn’t have found a clearer way to tell her he was finished with her. With a man like Cal Bonner, she realized, the game was everything, and once it was over, he lost interest. Heartsick and angry, she turned and headed for her room.

Moments later, she heard him drive away.





Pleasant! She’d said it was pleasant! Cal sat at his favorite table in the corner of the Mountaineer and brooded. Usually there weren’t any empty seats around him, but tonight everybody’d seemed to realize he had a giant mean-on, and they’d given him wide berth.

No matter how easily she’d dismissed what had happened between them, he knew Professor Rosebud had never had a better lover than she’d had tonight. There’d been none of that nonsense they’d gone through before, with her pushing his hands away. No, sir. He’d had his hands all over her, and she hadn’t uttered a single protest.

But what stuck in his craw—what really stuck like a big old chunk of hard-boiled egg—was the fact that he’d just had some of the best sex of his life, and he’d never felt more unsatisfied.

Maybe it was his fault for getting cute. Why hadn’t he just grabbed her right there in the house, carried her upstairs, and romanced her in his bed with all the lights on and that big mirror overhead? He could have done his best work there, not that he hadn’t been pretty damn good tonight, but if they’d been in his bed, he would have seen everything he wanted to see. In duplicate.