Girl Least Likely to Marry

by Amy Andrews

  He brought his free hand up to cradle her jaw. Her pupils were large and dilated, the sound of her breath was rough in his ears, her nostrils were flaring, her mouth was parted. Tuck knew all the signs of an aroused woman. And any other woman would be plastered all over him by now, eager to fulfil his every whim.

  The fact that she wasn’t was sweet and quaint and endearing. And vaguely thrilling.

  Not that he had any issues with sexually aggressive women. He loved confidence and strength in and out of bed. But this—having a woman waiting for his move for a change—was, strangely, a real turn-on.

  Cassie swore she could hear the sluggish grind of gears as time seemed to slow right down. Her head spun with the smell of him and she wanted him to kiss her so badly she didn’t even recognise the woman she’d suddenly become.

  ‘Tuck…’ The word spilled from her lips on a desperate whisper she had no conscious control over.

  Tuck sucked in a breath. The volume of want in her voice was lashing him with an identical desire. His fingers speared into her hair, his thumb brushing her temple. ‘What do you want, Cassie?’ he asked, his lips slowly descending towards hers.

  Cassie was reeling. She could barely think through the fog of pheromones addling her senses, intoxicating her. ‘I want you to kiss me,’ she whispered, the words flowing thick and heavy like syrup from her throat.

  Tuck didn’t need it. He swooped the last few centimetres and crushed his mouth against hers. Her lips opened on a whimper that speared straight to his groin, and when her tongue tentatively touched, his heat traced its way there too. He groaned as her mouth opened more and her arms slid around his neck. He pulled her closer, until not even his platinum credit card could have been slipped between them. His hand dropped to her shoulder, skimmed her breast, moulded her hip, and then both his hands moved in unison to the cheeks of her butt hidden beneath layers of fabric.

  He pulled her hips in hard, grinding his erection against her. She broke away, gasping, but his lips refused to let her retreat, following and claiming hers again in another hot lashing of lust which she opened to on a tiny little whimper that lit fires in all his erogenous zones.

  His hand slid under her shirt, his palm fitting into the small of her back, then moving up the contours of her spine. Up, up, up. Her skin was hot and smooth to touch. The arch of her back, the dip of her ribs, the absence of bra strap fuelled the fever thrumming in his blood. Lust jabbed him in the solar plexus and he jerked her harder against him.

  He needed her naked. He needed her laid out on his bed. He needed her calling his name and scratching her nails down his back. He dragged his mouth from hers.

  Cassie swayed at the sudden loss of her anchor. The mewing noise coming from somewhere in her throat was totally foreign to her ears. His scent filled her head and drummed against her body like fat drops of sweet, sticky rain.

  She couldn’t think. All she could do was feel as her senses took over. Taste, touch, hearing, sight, smell.

  Dear God, the addictive scent of him.

  She blinked up at him. ‘Wha…?’

  Tuck’s groin surged at her bewildered look, at the arousal dilating her pupils with undiluted desire. ‘Bed,’ he said, his hands sliding down her arms, his fingers linking through hers as he tugged on them gently, pulling her forward as he walked backwards.

  The backs of his calves hit the mattress and he stopped. The soft downlights over the bed glowed across her flushed cheeks and glittered in her lust-drunk eyes. Some of her hair had loosened from its ponytail and she looked a little wild. Her ravaged lips and the way they were parted in silent invitation pushed her into wanton territory.

  She looked one hundred percent into him and he couldn’t remember the last time a woman had looked at him like that—for what he could give her in that moment as opposed to the rest of her life. Not even his ex-wife April had done that. There was no agenda, no artifice. Just a woman who wanted him—Samuel Tucker the man. Not the star quarterback.

  Not his money. Not his ring. Not his babies.

  Just him.

  Frankly, he’d never been more attracted to a woman in his life. He smiled at her as he drew her close, his hands cupping her face again. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ he said.

  The words flowed right over Cassie. She didn’t care about that. Beauty was superfluous when the attraction was chemical. She didn’t need it. She just needed the smell of his skin, the thud of his pulse, the primal act of joining.

  He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to her eye, to her cheek, to her temple, his hands dropping by his sides. Cassie turned her face, her cheek brushing the roughness of his. A gust of his earthy male essence fanned over her like a hot dry wind. He kissed down her neck and her nose brushed the angle of his jaw. His aroma intensified. She pushed it against his skin and breathed in long and deep.

  Her belly clenched and she groaned out loud. ‘You smell so good,’ she muttered.

  Tuck lifted his head. Her pupils looked even more dilated than before. She was really getting off on those pheromones. He grinned. ‘You smell pretty good yourself.’ And he dropped his head again to claim her mouth.

  But Cassie was suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to smell him. All over. To push her nose into the fat pounding pulse in his throat, to sniff at his temple, to smell his hair. To explore lower—to know the scent of his chest and his belly and his thighs.

  To suck in great, big, dizzying lungfuls of him.

  She evaded his mouth as it descended, her nose finding the steady beat pulsing along the hard ridge of his throat. It was warm, and his whiskers prickled her skin, smelling sweet yet somehow utterly male. She sucked in big deep breaths, each one washing over her in hot, satisfying waves. But it wasn’t enough. She moved up, following the dips of his trachea to the pulse that beat where throat met jaw.

  She inhaled deeply there too, dragging in his essence, feeling it lighten her head and tighten her belly. She

  meandered left along the line of his jaw, breathing him deep into her lungs as she went, and when she reached where the angle of his jaw met his ear she moaned involuntarily as heat bloomed through her pelvis.

  Tuck’s hands tightened on Cassie’s waist as her moan filled his head. His eyes had shut as she’d explored his neck. Her nose and lips buzzing up his throat had sent heat to far-flung areas of his body. He pulled away from her, his heart pounding in his chest, the need to kiss her, to taste her mouth again, too powerful to resist.

  For a second they just looked at each other, only the sound of their uneven breath between them. Then her nostrils flared, and her tongue darted out to swipe across her bottom lip, and lust kicked Tuck hard in his gut.

  ‘Cassie,’ he muttered, his head swooping down to claim her mouth again.

  But Cassie evaded its trajectory, her head filled with one blinding imperative. His scent.

  ‘Cassie?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her chest rising and falling with difficulty, as if every oxygen molecule inside her was drenched in the sticky seduction of his pheromones. ‘Can I just…sniff you for a while?’

  Tuck laughed, but it died a quick death when he realised she was serious. The woman was definitely getting off on the smell of him. It was such a completely innocent thing to want amidst the carnal lure of lust surrounding them. And God knew it was a lot more satisfying than the women who got off on his fame, or the idea they were going to be the next Mrs Samuel Tucker.

  She was looki
ng at him with uncertainty clouding her blue-grey eyes and he wanted the breathy, needy Cassie back. He put his hands up in surrender. Cassie obviously had some kind of itch she wanted to scratch—he was just pleased she’d chosen him to relieve it.

  ‘Whatever floats your boat, darlin’.’

  Cassie didn’t hesitate. His heady aroma was drawing her back to him with all the power of a magnetic force. She pushed her nose back into his neck, greedily refamiliarising herself with his thick, luscious tang.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered as she moved down this time. ‘Yes.’

  Tuck swallowed as her breath licked heat down to the hollow at the base of his throat, her moan as she inhaled there fanning his arousal. She lingered for a moment or two, then travelled lower, her nose invading the soft towelling of his robe, moving it sideways as she followed the hard ridge of his collarbone. She reached for the belt of his robe and tugged. When the robe gaped open his erection bucked against the confines of his underwear and he grasped her hips for stability as a wave of red-hot lust almost brought him to his knees.

  He hung on silently and waited, his erection aching as she stared at his chest, her nostrils flaring. Then she lifted her hands and pushed the robe off his shoulders. He shrugged them and it fell to the ground, and when she buried her face in the centre of his chest it took all his willpower not to envelop her with his arms, to remember this was her show.

  After what seemed an age she lifted her head and said, ‘Back,’ as she pushed on his chest.

  Tuck let her push him onto the bed and sat on the mattress looking up at her as she stood between his spread thighs, looking down. Her cheeks were flushed and something base glittered in her eyes.

  ‘All the way,’ she muttered, and he obediently fell back against the mattress, his feet still firmly planted on the floor.

  He didn’t care that he was in nothing but his underwear, with a monster erection threatening to bust free. She was staring at his body with carnal intent and he was totally in her thrall.

  ‘Take your hair down,’ he murmured.

  Much to his surprise she did it without argument, obviously automatically, with her mind on other things. She was blissfully unaware of how sexy it was, cascading around her shoulders. He smiled at the economy of movement. Other women would have given it a sexy little shake, or piled it up high on their heads and let if drift down as they shimmied about seductively.

  But not this one.

  Cassie didn’t even know where to start as she stared down at him. She was blind to the dips and hollows, the planes and angles, the magnificence of him on anything other than a primal level. How biologically defined he was to hunt and protect. To mate. To procreate. Not even the erection straining his underwear registered on anything other than a scientific level.

  She couldn’t think past the scent of him—as if it was made specifically for her DNA to recognise and she was the only one who could smell it. Respond to it. His chest pounded with the thump of his heart and his belly bounded to the corresponding pump of his aorta.

  Her nostrils flared. There. Right there.

  She nudged her knee on the bed between his legs and barely registered his sharp intake of breath as she bent over his belly and nuzzled the firm flesh covering the jump of his abdominal pulse. She moaned as her senses filled with him.

  And then it wasn’t enough. She needed more. She needed to know all of him. She drifted up the centre of his belly, meandering her nose and mouth across his nipples and then drifting further, pushing them into the clean scent of his armpits, feeling the light caress of downy hair against her face. He smelled like soap and deodorant and the scent she was recognising as pure Tuck, and her breasts tingled in response.

  She moved up to his throat and jaw again, brushing his temple, rubbing her face in his hair, where something fresh and woodsy flared her nostrils and undulated along her pelvic floor.

  Then it was time to head south again. Her nose brushed his, his husky breathing in time with hers, she buzzed his mouth and smelled beer, and felt the rush of air and heat as a low moan slipped from his lips. She went lower, back down his throat, his chest, his belly. It clenched beneath her ministrations and she looked up at him. His eyes were closed, his mouth parted, his fingers clenched in the sheet beside him.

  Her chin brushed material as she looked down at the final frontier. She wanted to know what he smelled like there. She stood back on her feet and reached for the band of his underwear.

  Tuck’s eyes flew open as he grabbed her hand. ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he said, looking at her through a haze of lust. ‘I’m down to my underwear and you’re still fully clothed. Time to level the playing field, don’t you think?’

  Cassie blinked. Tuck’s Texan drawl seemed even more pronounced now it was all husky to boot. She looked down at herself. Her state of dress had been the furthest thing from her mind. ‘Right,’ she said.

  Another woman would have felt shy about getting naked before a man for the first time, but Cassie didn’t have a problem with it. Hers was just another female body, after all. Just like every other woman’s on earth.

  Just biology.

  She quickly shrugged out of her shirt and shimmied out of her leggings with Tuck watching every move. When his breath hissed out she looked up to find him staring at her, his gaze firmly fixed on her naked breasts. Her nipples beaded beneath his scrutiny and muscles deep inside her clenched hard.

  His gaze drifted lower, to her underwear, and the juncture of her thighs burned and tingled as if he’d blasted her with a hot blue laser beam. She struggled to rein in her choppy breath.

  His hoot of laughter was quite unexpected.

  ‘“Talk nerdy to me”?’ he asked.

  Cassie looked down at the logo on her underwear. Again, not something she’d thought about changing. Not that she’d brought anything sexy to change into. Not that she owned anything sexy in the underwear department.

  ‘Let me guess. Gina?’

  Cassie shook her head. ‘Actually, these are from Reese.’

  Tuck laughed again, letting his head fall back against the mattress. Which was all the invitation Cassie needed. He’d wanted a level playing field—he’d got it. Now she wanted her pound of flesh. She looked down at his underwear, her gaze snagging on the erection, and her mouth watered.

  She placed one hand on the bed beside him and used the other to reach for the band of his underwear. He sucked in a loud breath and lifted his head off the mattress. Their gazes meshed. They didn’t say a word, but he lifted his hips and Cassie stripped his underwear away, pulling it off his feet before coming close again, looking down at him.

  Cassie had seen her fair share of penises in her life. She’d known a few intimately. Although none had managed to produce anywhere near the screeching level of arousal that Tuck’s had—especially from sight alone! And she’d seen them in all their variation in hundreds of textbooks over the years. She’d never found them particularly attractive, and had pretty much felt that one wasn’t that much different from another.

  Which just went to show what kind of a freaking genius she was!

  Tuck’s was the most beautiful specimen she’d ever seen. Long and thick, nestled in light curls, and lying hard and potent against his belly. A fat vein ran up the middle, and once again her mouth watered.

  She dropped to her knees without thinking, kneeling between his as she pushed her face against it, running her nose up and down the length of the vein, inhaling its essence. Musk an
d man.

  Tuck’s groan, his hand in her hair, his strangled, ‘Cassie…’ drove her on.

  She shifted from the rampant thrust of him to the flat of his belly beneath, and further afield to the heat of his groin, dragging the scent of him inside her as she went. But it was inevitable that she’d return to his erection—as if that was the source of his pheromones, the mother lode—and she inhaled deeply as her lips brushed his girth. She followed it all the way to the head, marvelling at how the skin could feel soft like a rose petal but the core as strong as steel.

  A bead of fluid at the tip wafted more musk her way and without conscious thought her tongue dipped into it, savouring its tang as it joined the heady mix intoxicating her senses.

  Tuck reared up, cursing. ‘Okay—no,’ he said, dragging her up his body and falling back with her, rolling so he pinned her to the bed.

  A man could only take so much.

  ‘Enough,’ he growled. ‘My turn.’

  And he flayed her mouth with a kiss full of heat and want and something else he wasn’t familiar with and didn’t care to know about.

  Cassie just held on as his kiss spun her onto another plane. Heat swept through her body and she welcomed it. Yes. This was what her body was craving. This.

  Primitive. Base. Primal.

  His hands pushed at her knickers and she helped him, wriggling and kicking until she was free of them, desperate to have him inside her, to quell her hormones for once and for all.

  ‘Yes,’ she said against his mouth. ‘Now.’

  Time to do it. To do what she’d come to do. To get it over with. She’d had her fill of his pheromones. Now it was time for more.

  To couple. To mate. To copulate.

  Tuck’s mind was spinning into a quagmire of lust and desire he could barely find his way out of. He had to slow it down or he was going to explode.

  ‘Slow down, there,’ he murmured as he eased a hand between her legs.