by Amy Andrews
Cassie froze. No! This wasn’t what this was about. It was about exorcising the power of her hormones, satisfying her libido and then moving on. Getting it out of her system. Her hormones had demanded she mate—she was mating.
It was biochemistry. Biology.
It was business. Not pleasure.
Not that pleasure had ever been a possibility for her. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to open herself to that dry old argument when she had a paper to get back to.
‘No,’ she gasped against his mouth, pushing his hand aside as she grabbed his erection. ‘I need you in me now.’
She did. She really did. She needed to shut her hormones up for once and all!
‘But I want to—’
Cassie cut him off with her mouth, slamming a kiss on his lips that left them dizzy and clinging to each other. Who knew she could kiss like that?
‘Damn it, Tuck,’ she said, breaking away as her hormones screamed at her for fulfilment. ‘Now!’
Tuck was too far gone. Her kiss, and her brand of innocent seduction, and most especially her hand kneading his erection were too, too much—and her whimper when he broke away was a potent aphrodisiac.
‘Tuck,’ she moaned, grabbing for him.
‘Condom,’ he said, reaching over the side of the mattress into his bag, locating one in the side zip pocket and quickly donning it.
And then he was back, and Cassie was reaching for him, opening her legs and lifting her hips in invitation, and he took what she was offering, so utterly free of any agenda, and drove himself into her in one easy thrust.
Cassie’s gasp was loud in his ears and he stopped abruptly. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, looking down at her. Her face was scrunched up.
She wasn’t a virgin, was she?
Cassie could feel the hot length of him hard inside her and doubted she’d ever been filled so completely. It hurt so damn good she swore she could hear her libido sigh.
Yes. Ahh. Yes. That was it. This was what she needed.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Yes, yes, yes. It would be over in a minute—two at the outside if Len was any litmus test—and then she’d be free to get on with her life, with her pesky libido back in its box.
She shifted restlessly beneath him. ‘Don’t stop.’
Tuck obliged, rising up on his elbows, looming over her as he began a slow, teasing thrust guaranteed to satisfy. Arousal streaked hot fingers into his thighs and buttocks as her tightness massaged and squeezed the length of him, and he knew he was going to need all his staying power to hold out for her.
Cassie moaned. She might never have found sex to be personally fulfilling, but she’d always enjoyed the feel of a man inside her and got satisfaction from the pleasure her partner derived from it. As if she’d engineered a successful experiment. And she was determined that today would be no different. Tuck would find his release soon and she could bask in the happy glow of a job well done.
And so, damn it, could her libido.
Of course it was hard to concentrate on the end game when Tuck insisted on such slow, rhythmic thrusts. She didn’t like the feeling of pressure building in her pelvis. She’d been there before and knew it never amounted to anything—that it only ever got so far and no more.
Tuck adjusted the angle of his thrust as Cassie lay passively in his arms. He smiled down at the look of concentration on her face. ‘Stop thinking,’ he growled, leaning in to press a hard kiss on her mouth. It was satisfying to see when he pulled away that he’d kissed the lust back. ‘Stop thinking,’ he reiterated.
Cassie shut her eyes briefly as he picked up the pace and something stirred deep inside her. Something she didn’t like. Something that she knew intuitively she’d never be able to contain.
And that just wasn’t part of the world she lived in.
It reminded her too much of a time during her teenage years when her grip on the world had loosened and things had rapidly spiralled out of her control.
A place she never wanted to revisit.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ she dismissed. ‘I may take for ever.’
Tuck grinned. ‘We’ve got all night. And I’m not going without you, darlin’.’’
Cassie knew with sudden clarity that he was telling the truth, and a surge of dread rose in her chest. For some strange reason she didn’t want to appear sexually inadequate before him. But just thinking about the impossibility of it all made her instantly tense.
Tuck groaned, dropping his head to her neck. ‘God, you feel so tight,’ he muttered, dropping kisses on her throat.
Cassie sighed. There was only one thing for it—and she thanked Gina and Marnie and Reese for making her watch that movie where the actress faked an orgasm in a coffee shop, because at least she had some clue how to go about it.
She shut her eyes and started to moan, softly at first, then picking up, adding in some panting—and didn’t she remember seeing another film with the Awesome Foursome where the actress dug her nails into the
actor’s back a lot, even scratched them down? She threw that in for good measure.
Tuck felt the bite of Cassie’s nails right down to his groin, and cried out as her moans and pants pushed him closer to the edge. He picked up the pace, dropping his forehead against hers as their orgasms built and built. Cassie’s cries got louder, and when she reached for his buttocks and squeezed tight his orgasm hit warp speed.
‘Yes, Tuck, yes,’ Cassie croaked in his ear, knowing he was close and gasping her pleasure, no matter how fake, right into his ear.
She was too busy concentrating on faking it to be in tune with the buzz going on inside her, but that was okay. If Tuck’s big hard body pounding into hers hadn’t satisfied her libido than nothing would.
‘Tuck,’ she cried. ‘Tuck. I’m… I’m…’
Tuck’s belly pulled taut and red-hot pleasure eddied and swirled just out of his reach as his orgasm bubbled to the surface. ‘Yes, Cassie, yes. Let go. I’ll come with you.’
Cassie cried out in what she hoped was a fairly accurate rendition of an orgasming woman. It certainly seemed to convince Tuck, who groaned her name as he thrust and thrust and thrust, causing a little more tension to gather in her pelvis.
Cassie let her cries die down in pace with his as he collapsed on top of her. She might not have been satisfied in the strictest sense of the word, but there was something very primitive and sating about being possessed so utterly.
Something carnal. Hormonal.
Tuck stirred, kissing Cassie’s neck, her collarbone. He rolled off her onto his back with a long contented groan, his heart still pounding like a train, his head spinning from one of the most forceful orgasms he’d ever had. For long moments he couldn’t even move.
When he was capable of stirring he rolled up onto his elbow and looked down into her face, needing to know that it had been as good for her. To see that look he knew so well. That Paper? What paper? look.
Instead she smiled at him and patted his biceps. ‘That was nice,’ she chirped.
Nice? Tuck eyed her suspiciously. There were three things he was good at in life—football, math and sex.
And there was nothing nice about his brand of sex.
He’d slept with a lot of women—which wasn’t necessarily something to be proud of, but he knew for a damn fact not one of them had left his bed anything other than one hundred percent satisfied. He was satisfaction guaranteed. And as such he knew the signs. Could read it in the
ir eyes.
Hell, he could pick a sated woman out of a line-up at fifty paces.
He would not have picked Cassie out of a line-up.
‘Oh, my God,’ he murmured. ‘You faked it.’
FIVE
Tuck flopped on to his back. No one had ever—ever—faked it with him. That wasn’t arrogance or conceit—it was the damn plain truth of it.
It was ironic that he’d just had one of those oh-my-god moments and she was lying there all that-was-nice. He stared at the ceiling, trying to decide whether he should be insulted, but he found himself laughing instead.
Somehow it seemed par for the course for this very bizarre seduction.
Cassie felt his low laughter stroke deep inside her to muscles and tissues that still seemed tense and excitable. She frowned. They weren’t supposed to be like that—they were supposed to be loose, limber.
Done. Content. Over.
Gina’s warning that once might not be enough came back to haunt her. Well, too bad! She’d given in to the insanity of her libido and now she wanted her brain back!
Tuck shook his head, still contemplating the ceiling. ‘I can’t believe you faked it.’ And he laughed again.
‘Look, it’s okay,’ Cassie assured him, eyes also firmly trained on the ceiling as she went into the familiar patter. Len had required a lot of reassurance in the beginning too. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s me… I’m just not physically capable of climaxing. It has nothing to do with your technique…or your speed—’
Tuck laughed harder, interrupting her clueless critique. He rolled up on his elbow again. ‘Darlin’, you are hard on a man’s ego.’
Cassie blinked and her nostrils flared as a heady dose of pheromones engulfed her. Those muscles inside her snapped to attention, pulling taut and sizzling with tension.
No. No, no, no.
Concentrate. Soothe the man’s ego and then take your libido far, far away. Take it to Cornell and bury it in a PhD.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean… Look, it just doesn’t happen for me. It’s a…a thing.’
Tuck saw her pupils dilating again. Interesting. ‘Like a medical condition?’ he asked innocently as he nuzzled her ear.
Cassie swallowed, her eyelids fluttering closed. ‘Kind of.’
He dropped a kiss on her temple. ‘Sounds awful,’ he murmured.
‘Oh, no, it’s fine,’ Cassie said, shaking her head, trying to clear the fog filling it as his scent wrapped her up in seductive thread. ‘I don’t need it.’
Tuck smiled against her hair line. If anyone needed an orgasm it was Cassiopeia. ‘Honey,’ he said as his mouth zeroed in on hers, ‘everyone needs a little bit of it sometimes.’
Cassie opened her eyes to deny his statement just as his mouth made contact with hers, and a wave of longing for it crashed over her. It was impossible. How could she crave something she’d never had? Miss something she didn’t know? Want something she didn’t need?
Where was the logic in that?
But his kiss laid her bare, plundering her mouth, flaying her with heat and pheromones, demanding that she kiss him back with equal vigour. And she did—clinging to him, twisting her arms around his neck, attacking his mouth with a savagery utterly foreign to her.
A sense of falling gripped her when he finally pulled away, and Cassie was grateful for being horizontal and anchored to him.
Tuck looked down into her flushed face. She was breathing hard. They both were. They were going again—and this time she was coming with him.
He pulled away. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he said.
Cassie watched him climb out of the bed in a stupor, her head spinning from the kiss and the dizzying essence of him spinning her in its web. She struggled against it, her brain urging her to be sensible.
She levered herself on her elbows. ‘I should go.’
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Tuck said as he strode towards the bathroom to rid himself of the condom. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’
Go! her brain screamed. Go now!
Her brain willed her muscles to move. But her muscles said no. Every cell in her body, drenched in sex, leadened by his command to stay, said no. And then he was back, striding towards her, gloriously naked, stopping to snag some foil packets from his bag and throwing them on the bedside table. And then he was pushing her back, stroking his hands down her body, finger-painting his pheromones all over her. Stupid took over.
Okay, she accepted as she welcomed the heat of his mouth on hers. Slight change of plan. They were going again. She could do that. Obviously another coupling was what her body was craving. She could do it. She could go twice.
And then get back to her paper.
Tuck had no idea what Cassie was thinking as his mouth left hers for parts further south. He was too caught up in being so rampantly hard again, considering what had happened not even ten minutes ago, and he was determined not to waste it. This time it would be about her. No taking.
No faking.
He’d followed the same game plan he always followed when he was with a woman, but had let Cassie’s wild urgings and amazing aptitude for acting distract him from his goal. She was going to be singing the Hallelujah Chorus tonight if it killed him.
Cassie’s head spun and she shut her eyes as Tuck’s hot tongue traced a pathway down her throat. What was he doing? She was ready. He was most definitely ready. Why wasn’t he inside her already? She shifted restlessly against him, spreading her legs to accommodate him, lifting her hips.
Tuck smiled, ignoring her blatant invitation. No way—not this time. He ran his tongue up and over the swell of a breast, and when he reached the nipple he swiped his tongue over it, then sucked it inside, smiling as it leapt to attention in his mouth.
Cassie’s eyes flew open as a jolt of sensation pinged along muscle fibres and nerve-endings already at snapping point. Her nipples were extraordinarily sensitive, and having them fondled during sex had always been irritating. She tried to sit up, to tell him to stop, that it wasn’t necessary, but his mouth closed over her other nipple and she fell back against the mattress on a whimper.
Tuck was obviously determined to go where no man had ever been—the O zone.
‘You know,’ she panted, her eyes shut, her back arching off the bed as his teeth grazed and taunted her nipple—which strangely didn’t feel irritating at all when he did it. ‘You really don’t have to do this. To try. I won’t think any less of you.’
Tuck ignored her. ‘Is that so?’ He sucked on her nipple hard, satisfied to hear a strange gurgly noise at the back of her throat.
Cassie resolutely held on to her sanity—no matter how tenuous it suddenly appeared. ‘It’s really not going to happen, so you might as well just…’ she swallowed as his tongue flicked back and forth over the taut peak he was toying with ‘…get down to business.’
Tuck withdrew his mouth and looked up at her. He could see the moist, puckered stance of her nipple in his peripheral vision, and it was deeply satisfying to know that she was viewing him through the evidence of her own arousal.
‘Wanna bet?’ He smiled, then returned his attention to the nipple, hungry for the satisfying hardness of it against his palate.
Cassie shut her eyes. ‘Is not about chance,’ she said, her breath choppy. ‘It’s statistics. You must understand that, right?’ She raised her head to look at him and was hit by a surge of lust at the sight of his blond head bowed over her breast. She flopped back down, pushing it ruthlessly
away.
Where was she again?
‘I know I’m statistically unlikely to achieve orgasm simply because I never have.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Tuck said, her nipple slipping from his mouth as he left for more southern destinations.
His hand followed, brushing light strokes down her rib-cage to her hip, across the flat of her belly and fluttering down her thighs. His mouth found her belly button and he lapped wet circles around it, dipping in and out as he went.
Cassie felt every muscle fibre beneath shudder in anticipation. She’d never felt this much tension in her belly before. It was heavy—screeching with it.
‘It’s not you.’ She pressed on, for her sanity’s sake if nothing else, as he caressed her inner thigh and she felt it all the way to her centre. ‘I take this medication. It helps me sleep. But it…’ She panted as his tongue moved lower. ‘It suppresses certain other…’ A strangled gasp rose in her throat as she felt a finger brush over the place where everything felt slick and wet and tingly. She gulped for air. ‘Other processes…’
Tuck raised his head to look at her. He could smell her arousal, and his erection kicked at the thought of tasting her.
He made sure their gazes were locked when he said, ‘It just means I have to work a little harder.’ He slipped a finger inside her. Her swift intake of breath and the way her hands bunched in the sheet punched him hard in the gut. ‘I’m not afraid of hard work.’
Cassie couldn’t look away from the compelling determination in his star blue eyes. There were things inside them that she didn’t understand—and didn’t want to either. She shut her eyes, blocked him out. Blocked out the heaviness in her breasts, the tension in her belly, the hard probe of his finger buried inside her.
‘Yes, but how good can it really—?’ Another finger slid inside her and she gasped at its intrusion. It took a few moments for her to lamely add, ‘Be?’
Sensation swamped her, momentarily drowning out the yammering of her brain before she clawed it back.
