Reckless Road

by Christine Feehan

“Player.” She gasped his name. Pushed back hard with her hips.

  He stayed where he was, allowing her to swallow an inch of his thick, broad length, so that he felt every tight, scorching-hot, silken muscle surrounding that inch like a greedy fist. He could feel her heart beating through his cock. It was insane and surreal. She took him to another world. He leaned forward, refusing to go fast, the way his body demanded. The way she demanded. When he leaned over her, he slid in another inch and she cried out. He wanted to do a little crying of his own.

  Instead, he kissed his way from the nape of her neck down her spine. Slow kisses. Claiming her. From her neck to the small of her back. He meant each of those reverent kisses. He stayed still, watching the flames dance over her while deep inside her body her scorching flames surrounded his cock, threatening to burn him alive.

  Bog, baby. He whispered it in his mind. Aching with his need of her. With things he could never say because he knew she wouldn’t accept them yet. He’d done that, brought them to this place through his own carelessness. Now there were too many other things in their way. He recognized she would never believe he wanted her for her. For her beauty. He’d pushed her away over and over. He would have to find a way to make her believe him.

  “Player.” She wailed his name.

  “Gedeon. You know my name.”

  Her lips pressed together and her lashes swept down. Deliberately he inched with excruciating slowness through her tight folds. Her body reluctantly gave way to his invasion. He felt every beautiful increment of her hot, narrow channel. It was unbelievably sexy. She clutched him in a silken fist, clamping down until it felt as if she were stroking him with a thousand tongues, gripping him with pulsing fingers, until she drove the breath from his lungs and the sanity from his mind.

  He watched her breath catch. Turn ragged. Watched the beauty in her face heighten more. Her body took on a glow. Little urgent moans escaped her throat, sounds that only added to the vibrations playing up and down his cock. Her body shuddered with pleasure. With need.

  “Player.”

  “Say my name.” A long, slow withdrawal while her body tried desperately to hold on to his. The muscles were so tight, dragging over his sensitive shaft, the bundles of nerve endings just there at the vee at the broad head. He inched his way, trying to breathe, his lungs raw. She had so much power.

  “Say it, Zyah. Gedeon. Say it for me. I need to hear you say it.”

  He rubbed her cheek when a sob of need escaped her throat. His fingers slid over her slick entrance where they joined. Circled her clit and flicked her gently. Very slowly he began to enter her again. It was a heady, sensual slide, watching himself disappear into his woman’s body. He kept massaging her cheek gently. Then a little rougher. Sliding a finger across her clit. Circling. Flicking. Never varying the speed as he buried himself inside her.

  “Player. Gedeon. I need you to move in me.”

  “I am moving in you.” He caught her braid in his hand, wrapped the long length of it around his fist. Pulled her head so she was forced to arch her back. “How do you want me to move, baby? Because this feels like paradise to me.”

  “Hard. Fast. I need you to move faster and harder. Take me there.” Her voice went back and forth from pleading to demanding.

  He withdrew again slowly. Fire streaked up his spine. “You feel that? Fire. Flames. Burning from the inside out. Do you feel it the way I do?”

  “Yes.” Her breath hitched. “I can barely breathe.”

  He could barely think, let alone breathe. He leaned forward one more time and pressed a kiss to the small of her back and then caught at her hip, even as he kept her head where he wanted it. He surged forward. Lightning streaked through him. She cried out and pressed back into him hard. They came together, a frenzy of need. Of scorching heat.

  Player wanted the feeling to last forever, but there was no way with the flames licking up his body, from his thighs to his groin. Fire danced over both of them, rolled them in a roaring conflagration until every nerve ending was alive and aware. Living for each other. He took her higher when she didn’t think she could go. When her ragged pleas urged him on and yet begged him for release. He couldn’t stop moving, his body taking on a life of its own, surging into hers, over and over.

  Her body suddenly clamped down on his in a series of vicious, white-hot bites of sheer ecstasy. Surrounding his cock with a silken channel of a thousand tongues licking greedily, determined to take every drop from him. Fingers gripped and milked, squeezed down ferociously to jack every last rope of hot seed from his body. The sensation unleashed a volcano stored inside of him. His cock jerked over and over, hard, brutal, savage, unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

  Zyah’s sheath pulsed and rippled around him as he collapsed on top of her. He was lucky to keep his legs under him. He fought to find air and draw it into his lungs as he lay over her, eyes closed, savoring the feeling of near euphoria. He felt as if he’d been flung into some alternate universe, far out past the stars. It had been like that with her their first night together. Every single time.

  Player breathed the scent of sex and Zyah into his lungs and found he loved the combination. He could live with that for the rest of his life. He felt lust for her like he’d never felt for another woman, but wrapped around that, intertwined with it, was something impossibly tender and overwhelming. He knew he was really falling in love with her. He didn’t want to wear a glove. For the first time in his life, he didn’t want anything between a woman and him. Not one single thing. He wanted there to be only Zyah and Player coming together.

  When her body had settled, he pushed the hair from the nape of her neck and kissed her there gently before slowly straightening. “Are you all right? I got a little crazy there at the end.”

  “Mmm. Just fine.” Zyah didn’t move, and she didn’t open her eyes. “I’m just going to lie right here and go to sleep.”

  He laughed softly. “There’re three bedrooms in this house, baby. I think we can find you a much better place to sleep if you’re tired.” He kissed his way down her spine to her lower back before slowly and with great reluctance withdrawing. Just that movement triggered a reaction in her body. He felt it as he withdrew, and she smiled and moaned softly, shifting her hips.

  “I like that.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” He knotted the condom. He hated the damn things now. They protected her but kept him from really feeling every inch of her, and he wanted that. “Baby, are you on birth control?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m clean. I haven’t been near a bi . . . a woman in months. Years, really. Not inside her. I had blow jobs, but not inside her. I wouldn’t lie to you. I detest using condoms with you. I’d much prefer to go without a glove. Think it over, will you?” He rubbed her bare cheeks.

  “If you haven’t been with a woman, why do you have condoms everywhere?”

  “I don’t know. Hopeful, maybe. I saw Reaper and Ice find their women. Steele, everyone knew it was Breezy, but then Absinthe found Scarlet. We all thought maybe there was a chance for the rest of us. I wanted to make certain my woman was protected. Now I kind of wish I hadn’t done so much overthinking.”

  She laughed softly and his stomach had that peculiar reaction of a serious flip. Bog, he was bordering on sheer insanity when it came to her.

  “I’ve been thinking about this room, Player. I think I’m really fond of it.”

  He helped her to stand straight. “I was hoping you’d give your approval of the dining room.” He ran his finger from her collarbone to the tip of her breast. He liked to see the marks of his mouth and fingers on her skin.

  A slow smile lit her eyes. “I especially love your dining room.”

  “Good, then. Let me show you the rest of the house. There are actually two kitchens inside the house. One outside. A smokehouse and a wine cellar. I like cooking, so it’s my kind of house.” He fla
shed a grin. “Considering I have a few fantasies of eating food off your body, I think it’s fair to say we might need more than one kitchen.”

  “You do?” Her eyes widened. “Have a few fantasies? Not just one?”

  He laughed as he beckoned her to follow him through to the kitchen. “You should know me better than that by now. I have all kinds of fantasies, my little innocent. We’re going to need a weekend—or maybe a week—to show you a couple of kitchen fantasies.”

  She nodded. “If Inez ever approves of someone to give me some actual time off, I’m all over a weekend with you.”

  He stopped abruptly. “Lana is your backup.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Honey. Really? I love Lana. She’s sweet, she really is, and I’m certain as a backup for a million other things, she’s your bestie, but retail, commercial, anything with putting that woman in an actual store and making her stand behind a counter and deal with customers all day, not on your life. She’d decide it was the perfect day to watch the whales go by when it wasn’t whale season, and you know it. She’d close the store.”

  He shrugged. “What’s the big deal? We could close it down for the weekend.” He kept her walking through to one of the kitchens where the center island, with its freestanding counter space, had given him all sorts of ideas when he was making meals long before he met Zyah. He knew what he would do if he was ever lucky enough to find a partner and share his house with her.

  “You can’t close a grocery store for a weekend. Customers depend on the store, especially over the weekend. Your club is very lucky you went into business with Inez and then you hired me. You’d go broke the first month without us.”

  He wrapped his arm around her. “That’s probably true. See this island? It’s just the right height to put you on when I get hungry while I’m working.” He turned her to indicate the corner, where there was a small little table with two chairs. “And that’s the perfect corner to put you in when you need to get on your hands and knees and wait for me to come over and see what I might want to do to punish you when you’ve been a very naughty girl like you so often are.”

  “I see.” She laughed and pointed to the little bench with a thick cushion on it. “And that?”

  “That’s obvious. When I’m working, you can give me the blow job of the century. I recognize there’s a lot of me, me, me in here, but chefs need a lot of encouragement while they work the long, thankless hours they work.”

  “I get that.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll have plenty of ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate, and just about anything else I know you like stored in the fridge to keep your strength up.”

  “Nice. Very thoughtful.”

  “I’m a very thoughtful kind of man. Let’s go take a shower. It will warm you up, and I can show you the master bedroom.”

  He led her through the other rooms and quickly down the hall to his room. He’d done the most work there. The master bedroom was the only one of the bedrooms that was really enormous. With the same wood floor, the walls had been white, the windows long, almost floor to ceiling, to give a view of the trees and shrubbery from two sides. The ceilings were vaulted, and the room stretched to add a sitting area and then grew to accommodate a master bath.

  To Player, the room had seemed as if it were more suited to a woman than a man. He had changed the colors in the room from white to muted grays, beiges and blacks. He’d treated the master bath the same, adding in a Moroccan touch, with dark wood cabinets and black vessel sinks with wood countertops. The tub was a deep black bowl with all fixtures in gold. The shower was a masterpiece of gold and black, with heated stones and jets to rinse every part of a sore body after bending over for long hours of woodworking. Heated towels waited when he stepped out on heated tiles to dry off.

  “Player. I love this. I really do.”

  He heard it in her voice. She really did like what he’d done with the room. It didn’t matter that she was a woman, the colors still appealed to her. “I have privacy screens to keep the light out when I need to sleep in. I haven’t ever used them, but I’m hoping someday I will.” He flashed her a little smirk.

  “It won’t be tomorrow. I really have to work. But I’m okay with going to work without sleep. I already texted Mama Anat. She said Savage and Destroyer were staying with her. Maestro left when we did.”

  “Yeah, he followed us to Czar’s. We usually run in pairs, and since this thing happened”—he touched his head— “Maestro’s really been hovering.”

  She frowned and glanced out the window. “Is he around? I’m totally naked.”

  “First, babe, he wouldn’t be looking. We grew up seeing naked bodies and others having sex. It doesn’t really faze us. That aside, no, he isn’t out there. He’s bunking down in the workroom. There’s a bed there. He texted me when we first got here to let him know if we leave. By now, he’s sound asleep. If it bothers you that he’s on the property, I’ll ask him to leave.”

  Zyah shook her head, wandering over to the bathroom. The doors were really black laser-carved screens. “These are cool. Did you make these?”

  He watched the way her fingers slid over the inside of the shapes in what could only be described as little caresses. She made his heart ache when she did things like that. No one gave him those little recognitions. She probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but to him, those gestures meant something. He came close to her, his hand on the small of her back, gently urging her forward so that she stepped inside.

  The moment she did, automatic lights came on. Muted. He never had liked bright. He might rethink bright, a single spotlight over the bed to shine down on Zyah when he had her spread out, her long hair everywhere and her body undulating with heat and need. Or maybe he needed a room of mirrors to reflect every single expression on her face, every ripple of her body . . .

  Zyah laughed and turned to him, her arms sliding up his chest, hands linking behind his neck, fingers teasing his hair. “You’re becoming obsessed with my body.”

  “Baby, I’m way past obsessed. Water on. Isn’t every man obsessed with your body?”

  “Most definitely not.” She turned at the sound of the water pouring down. Steam rose. The inside of the shower was all rock, smooth so it was easy to walk or sit on the stone bench, but it looked like one was walking into a large cavern. The rocks were various shades of brown, black, gray and white.

  Once they stepped into the structure, water swept over them from various directions. Player pulled Zyah back to him, protecting her from one of the jets so he could adjust it better to her height. “Is the water too hot?”

  She shook her head. “It’s perfect. I like hot water.”

  They were compatible in every way. She was adventurous. Playful. She lifted her hands to her hair as the water cascaded down. Laughing. Uncaring that her hair was going to be soaked even in the tight braid she’d woven.

  “Do you want me to take your braid out?” Truthfully, he wanted to take it out more than anything. He didn’t get many chances to play with her hair.

  “Not unless you have a blow-dryer in this house.”

  He grinned at her and reached for the end of that long, luxurious, very thick braid. “Have you taken a look at my hair? I have one, I just don’t use the thing. Lana got me one. Then Alena did because she thought I didn’t like the first one.”

  Zyah’s soft laughter made him happy. She drove away every demon just with that genuine sound. She let him wash and condition her hair and then her body. He took his time, using the gel to wash every inch of her. She took her turn, washing and conditioning his hair and then washing his body, paying attention to every nook and cranny. Zyah wasn’t shy about the human body, and he liked that.

  It did occur to him that she might not be the kind of woman who would ever enjoy the kind of parties Torpedo Ink had, where the men and women often had open sex. They tended to feel much freer whe
n their brethren were around to protect them, when they had eyes watching to ensure no one could harm the ones they loved. They all felt a little vulnerable when they had sex without someone watching their back. Zyah most likely would have a difficult time understanding that. He was already going to be asking her to forgive too many sins and understand too many of his issues to add that one to the list right at this time. He’d put it on the back burner.

  “Where’d you go, honey?” Zyah asked as they stepped out of the shower.

  “Water off,” he ordered. At once the water went off. He handed her a warm towel to wrap her hair in and another one to dry her body off with. She smiled at him when she put her feet on the warm tiles. For just that smile alone, he was glad he’d spent the extra money to put in the heating.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this, Zyah, and very grateful to you that you’ve stuck it out with me. I know you didn’t have to. It’s important that you know how much I appreciate you sticking with me, trying to sort out the bomb business as well as going to Czar.”

  She looked up at him, and then unexpectedly touched his mouth with the pads of her fingers, an intimate gesture, tracing his lips. “We’re in this together, Player, all the way until the end. I’m not deserting you. And tonight is our night. Everyone else can go away for tonight. Agreed?”

  Damn straight he agreed. A slow smile spread across his face until it almost hurt. “Agreed. Come on, I’ll show you the living room. There are two. They sort of flow into each other. The large one, I suppose, was originally designed for entertaining, and the smaller one would be more intimate, for friends and family. Since I have rowdy friends and a lot of them, the larger of the two rooms, which would be more formal, is the one I use when they’re over. I prefer the smaller of the two rooms, which is strange because I like wide open spaces.”

  “I have to dry my hair, crazy man.”

  “We’ll dry it in the other room. Both have fireplaces. I’ll bring the blow-dryer as well and the brush and comb.”

  “Are we just going to walk around naked?”