by Brandi Evans
She nodded, smiled, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. He wished he had the words to assure her, but they eluded him. So he did the only thing he could think of. He’d use his body to show her he loved her more than anything else in this fucked-up world.
Between one heartbeat and the next, he flipped her beneath him and, pressing hot, open-mouth kisses down her body, pushed her legs wide. As he neared her sex, the sweet-musk of her arousal teased over his senses. His mouth watered, and he drew in a deep breath, held her scent in his lungs.
Glorious.
When he couldn’t hold his breath a second longer, he pushed her labia apart and blew the air directly at her clit.
“Mmm,” she moaned, rolling her hips. “Do that again.”
He did. Over and over. Until he felt lightheaded. God, he fucking loved how responsive she was to him. He doubted he’d ever get tired of drawing pleasure from her.
Or momentarily denying it.
The only thing sexier than giving her pleasure was when she begged for it. He liked that she didn’t hold back. She let him know exactly what she wanted, what she liked and didn’t like.
He suctioned his lips over her clit and drew the bud into his mouth. He kept the pressure constant, drawing blood to the surface, plumping her clit until it felt thick and heavy against his tongue.
“More,” she whimpered. “Please. Yes. Just like that…”
Bret smiled into her wetness and flattened his tongue against her clit, creating a flat surface for her to grind against. He licked, sucked, going back and forth, back and forth until she was visibly shaking and clawing at him, begging him to make her come.
He pushed her labia wider, the move exposing her swollen clit even more and giving him more surface to play with, and man, she seemed to like it too. She started thrashing, whimpering. Oh yeah, one more good suck and—
“Bret!” she screamed, muscles quivering, body jerking. She’d lost complete control. “God yes!”
Her passion-soaked cries were music to his ears, and he prayed this wouldn’t be the last lazy morning they shared.
Chapter Four
Sophia dug her fingers into the mattress, so flooded with whatever hormones the body released after orgasm that she could hardly breathe. Bret had already given her two orgasms, and he didn’t seem in a hurry to stop. He lapped at her clit like he was getting his first drop of water in days and he didn’t want to miss a drop, but then, he shifted his attention to her opening and she found another use for his incredible tongue.
She looked down at him. “Bret,” she said, her breath ragged. “Your mouth’s, shit, incredible, but I can’t, can’t—fuck. My legs are, are starting to cramp.”
“One more orgasm?”
She shook her head. “Leg cramps. Need massage. ASAP.”
“All right.” Chuckling under his breath, he kissed her sex one more time. “But I quit only under extreme protest. I was thoroughly enjoying the way you quiver when I make you come. Talk about sexy.”
His words made her shiver all over again. Would she ever get enough of this man?
She held her arms out to him. “I didn’t say you had to stop stop. My legs were just cramping.”
“In that case…” He kissed her jaw, her neck, her breasts, slowing working his way back down. “I’ll just go back to eating your pussy until I leave then. I’ll walk out the door smelling like sex, your flavor still on my lips.”
Fear swirled through desire. The thought of him leaving for a war zone scared the shit out of her, but knowing he’d be going with her juices on his lips as if she’d claimed him, she’d lie if she said she didn’t like that.
Bret pushed off the bed and headed for the door. “Be right back, babe.”
She sat up and rested on her elbows. “Where’re you going?”
He didn’t answer.
The sweet bastard.
Grinning, she collapsed back against the mattress. Bret wanted her the same way she wanted him. How often did that happen? Not as often as fairy tales led people to believe.
Something small landed the bed beside her. What the…?
She opened her eyes just as Bret strolled through the door—and then launched himself at her. Practically squealing she was laughing so hard, she pulled her hands up to protect her face as Bret crashed onto the mattress. The bed made a screech of its own too.
She playful punched his arm. “What’re you trying to do? Break my bed?”
He wagged his eyebrows and climbed on top of her. “I can think of much more exciting ways to break a bed than simply jumping on it, can’t you?”
“No.” But she betrayed her words by wrapping him in a full-body hug, catching his cock between their pressed-together bodies. She rocked against him. Could she get him off like this, without any actual penetration? Who knew. But it’d be fun to try!
A moan echoed deep in his chest, and he pulled back. “Easy, girl.”
“Easy?”
He grabbed the object he’d tossed on the bed waved it at her. It was a bottle of massage oil. “I thought someone needed a leg massage. Or were you just trying to find an excuse to change positions and ravish me?”
“Of course not,” she answered with a smile. “I have no clue what you could possibly be talking about.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He tossed a pillow at her head. “Get comfy, sugar.”
He grabbed a second pillow and shoved it under her ass. The position bowed her low back and forced her knees to fall wide. It was strangely comfortable, well, at least until Bret settled between her splayed legs and comfort turned to desire.
He lifted her right leg and positioned it so her ankle rested against his shoulder, her knee bent slightly. “Now relax, Soph. And let me take care of you.”
Relax? With Bret naked between her legs? Yeah, she’d get right on that.
He rubbed the self-warming oil up and down her thigh. Applying even pressure, he kneaded away the cramps with a confident, skilled hand, not that she’d expected anything less. She’d been on the receiving end of many of his foot rubs. Never naked though, so this was a first.
She let her worries slip away and focused on nothing but the soothing strokes. “Mmm…this feels good.”
“Looks good too.” He teased a finger over her labia and then slipped the digit into her sex. The sensation of the heated oil there…
She laughed. “That’s not exactly helping me relax.”
“I know. But I can’t let you get too relaxed, now can I?”
“True.”
Grinning, he withdrew his finger and switched to her other leg.
Something he’d said—more precisely something he hadn’t said—while they’d been making love in her office floated to the front of her mind. “Bret, how long have you wanted to be with me?”
For a long moment, he didn’t answer, and his gaze fused to some point on her lower torso. Most likely her pussy. “Six months into my first deployment, some of the guys in my unit were sitting around and joking about what they’d do if, somehow, they got their hands on a hooker or some otherwise willing woman. Ya know, trying to make light of the fact we were horny as hell at this point. But it wasn’t some faceless woman I wanted to fuck brainless. It was you.” He forced a laugh. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”
She shook her head. Finding Bret pathetic under any circumstances was impossible.
He glanced back up at her. “That was the first time I actually admitted to myself that I wanted to be more than just friends with you.”
She swallowed against the emotion clawing up her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me when you got back?”
“Because of all the shit that happened with your sleazebag boss. He’d attacked you—fucking tried to rape you…” He shook his head as if the memory was too painful to bear. “I just wanted to give you time, ya know?”
And in return, she’d pushed him away. Pushed pretty much everyone away really. The attack had traumatized her. PTSD the psychologist had said.
F
or months, she hadn’t been able to close her eyes without re-living the assault. Her fat bastard of a boss had liked playing grab-ass with his girls, and Sophia had desperately needed the money for her last year of college, so she hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. She made more in two days at the club than she could at any of the other jobs she’d looked into. Plus, it had left her evenings free during the week to study.
So she’d gritted her teeth and tried to ignore his wandering hands, but then one night, he’d pushed things too far. He’d pulled her into his office to inform her that, if she wanted to keep her lucrative weekend schedule, she’d have to do a little somethin’, somethin’ for him. In other words, she had to suck him off before he’d put her back on the schedule. Every week. She’d promptly told him just where he could shove his dick, and that was when he’d grabbed her.
Luckily, he’d been just drunk enough she’d been able to fight him off, and she’d fled the club and went straight to the nearest police station. The next day, she’d met with an attorney and then a self-defense instructor. The self-defense instructor had helped her feel powerful again, and the attorney had helped her sue the pants off her boss and eventually take possession of the club. The victory was bittersweet, one in which her father and the woman she considered her true mother had stood behind her one hundred percent, unlike the she-devil that had given birth to her.
“Did I ever tell you what my birth mother said to me during the trial?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“She told me that unwanted sexual advances were simply a part of the job, and that I should keep my mouth shut and be grateful for the paycheck he gave me.”
“That bitch.”
“Yup.” She paused. “I know this probably sounds ridiculous, but I kept thinking that if she hadn’t cursed me with her beauty, I wouldn’t have been attacked. And for a while there, I actually found myself contemplating ways to make myself uglier.”
His hands stilled. “You…what?”
“I know.” She closed her eyes. “Like I said, it’s stupid, but I wasn’t exactly in my right mind. I honestly thought that maybe, if I was ugly enough, no man would ever attack me again, and it made me hate my birth mother that much more for cursing me with her beauty.”
But her looks were only one of the many things Sophia hated about her birth mother. That hate-affair starting with the way she’d used her good looks to charm and betray Kyle Raines, Sophia’s father. Her dad had been in Brazil for a week-long vacation, and the too-geeky-to-tie-his-own-shoes young man had been no match for the seductress. He hadn’t realized the woman was the devil in a red string bikini—at least until it was too late and the she-devil was pregnant with Sophia.
Bret kissed the outside of her calf. “Now, full disclosure, I admit your looks might have been what first attracted me to you way back when but that wasn’t what kept me captivated all these years. You’re such a genuinely kind person, Soph. You care about people’s welfare. Why else would you have fought so hard to get Exposed Desires and then turn it into a place where your dancers can truly feel safe?”
Love swelled in her chest, and she grabbed one of his hands. He had this wonderful way of boiling everything down to their base elements and making her see the situation more clearly. “I wish I hadn’t pushed you away back then. I might have avoided a lot of pain if I’d have just let you in.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you push me away. I shouldn’t have let my frustration and anger—” He shook his head. “You just started avoiding me, and I thought I’d missed my chance to be with you. And there was Janet. A warm body when I needed one. And for a while, I thought I was in love. Then I got deployed again.”
“And she broke your heart.”
He didn’t respond but his expression said everything.
She tightened her grip on his hand. “Did you suspect her of having an affair before you left?”
She should stop asking questions, but Janet was one of the few subjects they’d never really discussed. During all their long conversations since he’d moved in, they’d always talked around her, but Sophia wanted to know more.
“Not really.” He went back to massaging, slid his hands lower. “Looking back now, I can see the signs. Getting home late from work most nights, talking about ‘getting together’ with friends I knew she hadn’t seen in years, an increase in sexy new clothes—then there’s the fits she’d throw whenever I tried to use her cell phone.”
“I’m sorry, Bret. Life can be a real bitch sometimes.”
A smile played at the left corner of his lips. “And then you marry one.”
“I’m still sorry.” And I swear I’ll never hurt you like that.
She’d almost let the words out, but she still wasn’t sure what Bret wanted from her. He kept avoiding the question of whether or not he wanted a relationship with her, not just a pre-deployment fuck-a-thon. She’d meant what she’d said earlier. She wouldn’t be a distraction to him. She’d let him set the tempo, and then she’d follow along.
“But it all worked out for the best,” he said, smiling at her. “Look where I am now. Between the legs of the woman I’ve wanted most of my adult life.”
Those pesky tears made a comeback, pushing against the back of her eyes.
“And she’s naked too.” He lowered her leg back to the mattress and rubbed her inner thighs, keeping her sex open to him. The fire that had blazed in his eyes during last night’s lap dance was back.
Obviously, he was finished talking.
She let the Janet issue go back where it belonged—on the bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean where it couldn’t cause Bret any more pain.
He pressed his thumb between her labia and stroked her clit. He kept his movement slow, playful, as if he intended to excite her but not bring her all the way to climax. Do enough to help her up the mountainside but not push her off the cliff. Looked like she’d have to take matters into her own hands.
Literally.
She palmed her breasts and squeezed them until they squished. Her nipples hardened beneath her palms, and she caught the peaks between her thumbs and forefingers.
“Damn, Soph. That’s hot.”
“What is?” she asked, knowing exactly what was getting him all hot and bothered.
“You. Playing with your tits.”
She pinched her nipples harder. “So you like watching me play with myself, huh?”
“Fuck yeah.”
His eyes were wide, a kid in an erotic candy store. She fought the smile trying to curve her lips. An ass man and a voyeur. He’d be so much fun to play with, and if he liked seeing her touch her breasts, then he’d love her next move.
She pushed a hand slowly, sensually down her belly. Down, down, down. She kept her focus on Bret as she pushed his hand away then sliced her fingers between her labia and spread her lips wide for his voyeuristic pleasure.
The muscles of his jaw tightened, and with hands against her inner thighs, he pressed her legs even wider. “Finger yourself.” His voice sounded so gruff.
So sexy.
She slid her middle and ring fingers into her slit. The act of self-pleasure might not be a new one to her, but when she usually played with herself, she was fantasizing her fingers—or dildo—were Bret’s cock. The fact he was watching her now?
Hot, hot, so fucking hot.
She fingered herself. In and out, in and out, working her pussy into a frenzy. With every pumping motion, she worked her clit with the back of her hand, and moisture soaked her fingers. Biting her lower lip between her teeth, she pinched her nipple too, upping the sensations. She’d be able to get herself off in no time, but she wanted more than simple release.
She wanted Bret.
Inside her.
Making her come.
“Fuck me, Bret,” she begged. “Make me come.”
The bed shimmied, and he yanked her fingers from her pussy. A heartbeat later, he slammed his thick cock into her and started pounding her pus
sy. He plowed into her with a nearly unrestrained fury that shoved her right to the edge, and the tension she’d wound in her body while fingering herself went critical.
She drew her hands up his sweat-glistened torso and cradled his face. His eyes shown dark with his arousal, his need for her. Restraint played in the hues too, and she knew he was focusing hard to keep from coming before she did. It was such a Bret thing to do and one of the multitudes of reasons she loved him.
As the first flicks of climax heated her blood, four little words slipped out in the monsoon of pleasure. “I love you, Bret.”
Bret fucked Soph harder, her words spurring him into a state of frenzy unlike any he’d ever known.
I love you, Bret.
Arms straining, he held himself over her as he pounded into her. He was so close. Close to coming. Close to begging her to wait for him while he was deployed.
I love you, Bret.
She wrapped her legs around him, steadying him, her hands still cradling his face as her pussy quivered around his dick.
I love you, Bret.
His climax boiling in his balls, he threw his head back. It felt so incredible inside her. Her tight, wet heat encircling his cock. So much hotter than before. She was on fire. He was seconds away from—
Oh fuck!
He froze, his erection buried deep inside her cunt, a hairs breath away from erupting.
She pushed her hands up his arms. “What—what’s wrong?”
“Condom.” As in he’d forgotten to put one on. Shit, shit, shit. He was too primed and hot for her he feared he’d come if he tried to pull out.
Soph laughed. The gentle movement of her body beneath him almost pushed him over.
“Be. Still!”
“No.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and upper shoulders and pulled herself up so he was supporting both their weights. “Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop, Bret.”
She must not understand. “Afraid. You. Pregnant.”
“Then I get pregnant,” she whispered, her voice deep, her hips curling up, rocking up and down his cock. “And I’ll love our child as much as I love you.”
