by Jory Strong
Her cunt lips grew flushed and swollen imagining herself there with Cathal, seeing the gleam of sweat on his back as his muscles rippled and hips pistoned as a fire blazed in the fireplace.
A shiver of need went through her. A flash of want. Arousal soaked her panties and wet her inner thighs.
Since she’d arrived at his club, he’d maintained near-constant physical contact with her. That she liked it so much should have made her want to bolt.
He turned into her, running his hands down the length of her back. “Like what you see?”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll have to convince you otherwise.” His smile was wickedly sensuous, dark sin and carnal taunt. His hand bold decadence as it moved from her bare leg, then up, forcing its way between her thighs and underneath her skirt. Finding her wet there. Hot and needy with her clit swollen and firm.
He cupped her mound. Pressed the heel of his hand to her clit, eliciting a soft whimper.
“Deny that I satisfied you earlier. Deny that you want me again. Here. Now. Any way I want to take you.”
His voice was husky, revealing just how affected he was at finding her wet and ready for him.
He bit down on the sensitive skin beneath her ear, warning and dare alike when it came to answering with a lie.
This time she was the one to discard her purse and jacket then pull her skirt up, leaving his zipper and the minuscule panties the only barriers to penetration.
“Etaín,” he said, moving into her until the wall blocked any further retreat, the raggedness of his voice pleasing her, too.
“What happened to your promise not to fuck me against the wall the moment we got through your front door?”
She knew she was playing a dangerous game with him and with herself. He was like a drug delivered straight to her bloodstream, a growing addiction she couldn’t afford, just as Eamon was.
Cathal forced himself to step back though he couldn’t break the physical contact. A few seconds longer, enough time to free his cock and rip those panties downward, and it would have been too
late.
Fuck, he could come just looking at her standing there with her skirt hiked up, displaying a tanned, flat belly and a cunt covered by his hand and lacy strips of nothing.
“You’re right,” he said, smoothing his palm over her clit and reveling in the sharp catch of her breath and little mew of pleasure.
Somehow he managed to draw his hand away. A tour was out, not that he’d managed to give her much of one at the club either when she’d first arrived.
“This way,” he said, taking a straight path to a garden made private by tall hedges.
The stars and moon were bright, perfect for enjoying the night, but he didn’t need any of it with Etaín. At the club, inside his front door, he’d rushed, but outside, steam rising from the water after he removed the hot tub cover, he found the patience to take his time with her, to savor and memorize everything about her.
“Take the blouse off,” he ordered, denying himself touch in favor of solidifying his control over himself.
Her smile said she guessed at the reason behind his command. Or maybe it was only an acknowledgment she could play this game, too.
Her fingers went to the top button, slowly freeing it before moving to the next, and the one after that in a strip tease guaranteed to bring him to his knees by the time it was done. Arousal escaped, wetting the tip of his cock as he waited for the first sight of her naked breasts, wondered at the color and size of her nipples.
Her blouse fluttered to the ground and he nearly dropped his hand to his erection in case he needed to use a painful grip to keep from taking her down then and there. The bra matched the panties, revealing almost as much as it concealed.
She was beautifully formed, everything about her pure seduction. She was a siren capable of leading a man to his destruction.
Words caught in his throat but he didn’t need to command her to take the bra off. Fingers smoothed over the front clasp, teasing him, tormenting him. Her expression sultry and knowledgeable, promising pleasure and delivering a small measure of it when the scrap of material followed the blouse to the ground.
The sight of her mesmerized him. He couldn’t look away. Could barely breathe when she cupped her breasts, brushing her thumbs over dark pink nipples that begged for a man’s mouth to capture and suck them.
His cock throbbed. His testicles felt full and heavy with the need to come inside the hot, wet clasp of her channel.
He didn’t want to wear a rubber. He didn’t want anything separating him from the ecstasy to be found in her body.
She licked her lips. He thought he’d lose all control if he saw her touch either mouth or tongue to her nipples.
He grabbed her wrists. “Now my shirt.”
She took her sweet time about it. Peeling his shirt away as slowly as she’d done her blouse.
It fluttered to the ground and she combed her fingers through the hair on his chest. He moaned when she zeroed in on his nipples, rubbing and tweaking until his breathing was little more than shallow, quick inhalations of air.
His hips jerked when she touched her mouth to first one nipple and then the other, wetting them with her tongue as her hands slid downward to his pants.
He didn’t stop her from freeing his cock. Only toed off his shoes and socks before kicking away his fallen trousers and Jockeys.
At her sloe-eyed look of appreciation, his cock strained toward her, begging for her attention. She gave it, taking him in hand, filling his head with the roar of lust as the fingers encircling his shaft moved up and down on it.
He nearly begged her to put her mouth on him. Only managed not to because he knew it would be all over the instant her lips and tongue touched him.
He forced her to halt by once again securing a wrist. “The rest of it comes off first.”
She reached behind her with her free hand. A tug of the zipper and she stood in short boots and panties.
He couldn’t take any more. Patience and the willingness to delay sexual gratification went up in flames. The only thing mattering was touch and taste and getting inside her.
He ripped her panties downward, baring her except for the boots with their thin, fuck-me heels. The image of her standing like that burned into his memory, an erotic centerfold to revisit time and time again.
As he’d done in his office, he crowded her until she was pressed against a wide padded ledge circling the hot tub. She sat as she’d done on the desk, thighs splayed, willing to take him between them.
The sight of her parted folds and glistening slit reinforced a primal imperative, this time he wouldn’t settle for less than everything. He grasped her thighs, holding her open as he lowered his mouth to her.
The scent of aroused woman filled his nostrils, the scent of her. A small triangle of rich gold pointed downward but he didn’t need the direction. Pink wet flesh and an engorged clit begged for the stroke of his tongue and feel of his lips.
He moaned at the first taste of her, sweet honey and addictive spice. Grew more excited with each lift of her hips as she pushed her clit between his lips, as she forced his tongue deeper into her channel.
She was so uninhibited and responsive, giving him everything. The sounds she made a stroke to his ego, an acknowledgment of the pleasure she found with him.
They were a declaration she didn’t care if the neighbors heard and knew how thoroughly he possessed her. Crying out, she came and he was helpless against the roar of lust, the heated demand of his cock to claim her.
He tumbled her backward, pausing to tug the boots off before coming down on top of her. “Tell me you’re on the pill,” he demanded. “I’m safe. Tell me you are.”
The hungry clamping of her channel brought with it the same raw need Etaín had experienced with Eamon. It overrode a lifetime of never letting any lover—even those she’d taken during her drug-ridden teen years—enter her without a barrier between them.
�
��I’ve only been with one other man that way. Eamon.”
Cathal’s expression turned dangerous at hearing the name, at being reminded she’d been with another man the night before. A little thrill went through her at seeing the savage intensity, the smoldering emotion before his mouth took hers in a hard kiss, sharing the carnal taste of her own arousal as he found her opening and pushed inside with nothing between them.
She shivered as waves of ecstasy rippled through her. It felt so good. So right.
Her arms and legs tightened around him. Her tongue met his thrust for thrust, her hips lifting with the desperate need to take him deeper.
She expected a fast hard fuck given the jealous fury radiating from him. She wanted it.
But he gave her slow. Drawing it out. Making her plead with her body and her voice, making her clamp down on him in release before he let go, pounding with a relentlessness that drove her up and over again, the third time opening the floodgates of exhaustion.
Without him lifting and sinking into the hot tub with her settled on his lap, she doubted she would have been able to summon the energy to roll into the water. “This is nice,” she said, cuddling against him, her palm resting against his chest, her fingers combing lazily through the thick mat of hair, pausing to circle a small brown nipple.
She was totally sated, tired to the point of being unable to keep her eyes open. She was at her weakest in terms of having any control over her gift.
Usually she avoided touching the men she’d been with when she felt like this. She knew too well the cost of it, had learned that painful lesson when she was a teen, unwittingly stripping a boyfriend of his music the night before he was supposed to play to an audience.
It should be easy to pull her hand away from Cathal, to quit petting him. Fear should have made it an imperative, but the hum of contentment overrode it. It was a continuation of what she’d felt earlier, only muted and mellowed, a low-level buzz of desire creating an electric heat, an internal barrier she was coming to believe would keep him safe from her gift.
Conversation was beyond her. She let herself drift, her reality filtering in through her senses. Hot water and cold air. Cathal and the scent of jasmine. The caress of moonlight and the brush of his lips against her neck, her ear.
“You’re falling asleep on me,” he murmured, the purr of masculine satisfaction in his voice making her smile.
“And you don’t bear any of the responsibility for it?”
He laughed and stood, holding her in his arms as if it were nothing and then setting her on the ledge where he’d stretched her out earlier. “Time for bed. There are towels in the deck box between the lounge chairs.”
Her skin pebbled with goose bumps. She slipped off the ledge and went to the cluster of patio furniture, getting towels for both of them as he covered the hot tub.
They dried off, gathering their clothing before going inside. Cathal took her hand, guiding her up a curving staircase and into his bedroom.
Like the rest of what she’d seen of the house, it was high-ceilinged and open. Sconces provided muted light and the moon did the rest, pouring in through bay windows running the length of a sitting area and encompassing all but a six-inch strip at the bottom and top of the wall.
She looked longingly at the bed, a king positioned in a windowed alcove more narrow than wide. “I need to dry my hair.”
Cathal pressed kisses along her shoulder. “Sit on the bed. I’ll get the hairdryer.”
A tug and he took her clothes with him when he left, leaving her standing naked and feeling vulnerable. It brought the urge to bolt for the safety of her apartment.
The intimacy unnerved her, the aftereffects of allowing him inside her without a condom. She was self-aware enough to know that and yet she couldn’t look away or stop herself from wanting him again when he returned.
He was naked, masculine perfection. Primal man with his dark mat of chest hair, his cock and testicles on display.
Cathal felt himself hardening as he walked toward her. There was no hiding the power she wielded over him, the fuck-me expression that became a command his body couldn’t refuse.
“Get on the bed,” he said, fighting the urge to wrap his hand around his cock when she obeyed with a sloe-eyed look, testing his control.
He’d make her wait this time. He’d make himself wait. Prove to himself he could, that he didn’t have to give in to the craving, the clawing, almost constant desire for her.
“Turn around,” he said, kneeling behind her.
He’d intended only to retrieve the hairdryer and a brush for her to use. Now he took care of her hair himself, performing a service he’d never done for another woman.
Intense satisfaction surged through him at the way she enjoyed his tending to her, in how trusting and vulnerable she seemed in the intimacy of it.
Possessiveness gripped him with the thought of her starting the day in Eamon’s bed. Fear trickled in. A warning he was getting in too deep and losing sight of his reason for being with her. He suppressed both, rationalizing away his unusual behavior and feelings as normal. She was beautiful and the sex was the best he’d ever had. She was a challenge and he didn’t like to lose.
When her hair was dry he stretched her out on his bed, the soft invitation in her eyes an enticement, a reward, her splayed thighs a beckoning he couldn’t resist. With a quick thrust he entered her, swallowing her gasp of pleasure, her low moans as he moved in and out, bringing her to climax before giving himself over to the same.
Fourteen
Dreams followed Etaín into a hazy precursor of wakefulness. They blurred the lines between real and imagined, coming with confusion and tumultuous emotions.
Despair and hope. Rage and guilt. Desire bathed in beautiful light, and desire that was dark obsession, making her skin crawl and her heart beat as if it belonged to a trapped, cornered thing.
Flames melted tearful clowns into grotesque mirror-house distortions, turning them into dark puddles that gave birth to demons, a twisting mass of faces with their mouths open, inhaling souls and feeding on terror. A knife slid through flesh while jagged red lightning bolts streaked downward and swastikas spun like martial arts stars, striking shadowy figures to the ground.
She shivered, recognized the images, all of them related to ink and her connection to it.
Heat seeped into her. Comforting. Calming. Like the swipe of a warm, soapy bath sponge across her psyche, cleansing it of toxic debris.
She pressed more tightly to the warm body lying next to her. A fresh image came then. Teresa, the young mother at the shelter. It was followed by the picture of her son, Lothar, with sigils of strengthened resolve concealed in his hair, and others, fortifying resistance to temptation and bad influences in his lips.
Her fingers twitched and moved, capturing the lines in muscle memory. She wasn’t aware she sketched out Lothar on the rough texture of a masculine arm until another image followed, one coming with the memory of those first moments after Cathal had entered Stylin’ Ink and introduced himself.
Heat pooled in her belly, waking her fully and bringing with it the desire to feel him inside her again. She opened her eyes and looked downward, at Cathal’s arm draped across her stomach, her fingers tracing a pattern on his skin, honeysuckle and thorn, stylized, more symbolic sigil than literal interpretation, a tattoo that would pass as tribal art.
The design still wasn’t complete but more of it was there and she knew it wasn’t something to be inked on with the machine, but done by hand, like those she did at Justine’s request and the eyes she’d placed on her own palms.
It wouldn’t matter that the dark hair on his arms would grow back, partially obscuring the details. His willingness to accept the ink and her being the one to put it on his inner forearms were the only things bearing any importance.
She sat up, her instinct to reach for the tablet and pencils she kept next to her bed. A precaution. A habit. She wasn’t overly worried about forgetting either design.
A scan of Cathal’s bedroom revealed there was nothing she could use to write on. “Bad dreams?” he asked, sitting as well, his hand going to her breast while his lips pressed kisses along her neck.
A small shrug. “There are always dreams. One of them was a tattoo for you.”
“Not happening.”
The certainty in his voice made her smile. “Never say never.”
“Some things are an absolute certainty.”
His hand moved from her breast, smoothing downward over her belly and pushing between her thighs.
She parted her legs willingly for him and he cupped her mound, burning her with the heat of his palm.
“Like this,” he murmured, stroking the underside of her clit and sliding two fingers into her slit. “Wanting you again is a definite yes.”
With wakefulness came obligations. Responsibility weighed too heavily on her to stay and play all day though she found she wanted to. Too much.
She avoided analysis with thoughts of what she had to do. She needed to collect her kit from Derrick’s and change clothes. She needed to show Derrick the demon images she’d stolen from Tyra’s memory then stop by the shelter to tattoo Teresa. And after that, visit other artists to see if any of them recognized the art the Harlequin Rapist wore.
“Once more and then I need to leave,” she said.
“Once more won’t be enough.”
“It’ll have to be. I’ve got promises to keep.”
So do I, Cathal thought, unwelcome reality crowding in, the firm resolve in her voice tightening his chest with a reminder of the last conversation he’d had with his father. “Make one of your promises that you’ll eat breakfast with me this morning.”
“Where?”
The lack of an immediate yes was like sandpaper over nerve endings. Since grade school he’d had members of the opposite sex fantasize about playing house with him and being Mrs. Cathal Dunne.
He rubbed a stubble-rough cheek against her neck, finding raw pleasure in the way it abraded her skin, leaving a mark. Not here, he realized. He didn’t want his father and uncle seeing her in his home, a place they knew he rarely brought women. He didn’t want a new round of law enforcement agencies taking an interest in him.
