by Stacey Keith
When you loved someone, there was no holding back. No playing it safe. There could be no half measures.
The elevator pinged and the doors glided open. Maggie barely broke contact. Even with her mouth on his, insatiable and devouring, her fingers swept up the inside of his turtleneck and slowly started peeling. Impatiently, he finished pulling off his sleeves, dropped the turtleneck on the floor, and then her hands were tugging at the zipper of his pants. Every time she brushed against him, he lost a few more brain cells.
The idea that Maggie baked cookies and cuddled babies during the day but had all these wicked, wanton urges at night made it a thousand times hotter. He didn’t know where to start with her, toes up or lips down. Reaching for her chin, he slipped his tongue inside her mouth, gently sucking her tongue and biting her lips so softly. Her little whimpers brought out the animal in him, made him want to go faster, harder. Made him want to demand. But he had to curb that instinct. He had to keep things slow and gentle while still holding nothing back.
They were in the living room now, continuing to shed clothes, shoes, socks. While he still had his jeans on, he dragged her into the bedroom, hit a wall switch, and heard the raised fire pit in the center of the room erupt in flames. Maybe it was a bit obvious. He didn’t care. Maggie would like it and she was all that mattered. If she’d told him she wanted to make love inside the Eiffel Tower, he’d have bought it for her.
Sweat built on his skin as he slowly undid her blouse and then pushed it down her shoulders. He trailed his fingertips across the tops of her breasts, which spilled out of a white satin bra. Still the good girl, his Maggie, with her prim, innocent colors. He’d see what colors she liked after he got through with her tonight.
She watched him watch her, and he was fascinated by how her eyes darkened, how she bit her lip so delicately. Helplessly. The scent of her arousal filled his head, driving him a little crazy. Reaching inside her bra, he drew out one soft breast, teasing it, licking and nibbling, knowing she couldn’t stop the needy noises that escaped her. While his lips grazed one nipple, his thumb and forefinger pulled the other. And there she was, barely able to stand, her breasts displayed before him.
Heat rushed through his body when he unclasped her bra. He couldn’t keep his eyes or hands off those dusky pink nipples, marveling that with one pass of his thumbs, they instantly sprang to attention. They were warm and supple and he loved how her eyes closed and her head dropped back. He wanted to learn her body, to study it like a map and navigate its waterways.
Jake didn’t know for sure, but he bet her ex sucked in bed.
Well, good. More for me, he thought hotly. All for me.
Her eyes opened, dazed and foggy, to watch him push her breasts together so he could work on them at the same time. When she met his gaze, heat exploded between them. His body tightened in one long erotic pulse. And Maggie was so overloaded with sensation, she cried out, which made him suck harder.
But she had on too many clothes. Jake found the zipper on her skirt and skimmed it open, exposing more of her body to his hungry gaze. She wore white lace panties. Somehow they didn’t seem so innocent now.
He left the skirt on the floor, the last in a trail of clothing that led out the door. The bed was only a few feet away. He had no time to consider how they got there because Maggie came alive in his arms, her lips searching his, her palms on either side of his face.
“So beautiful,” he murmured after laying her on the big mattress. Her hair was flung across his pillow, her eyes glowed, and he continued kissing her mouth, her throat, her collarbone, while throbbing against his inseam. He couldn’t get enough of her. As much as he needed to be inside her, he just as selfishly wanted to keep stroking her silky skin, so different from his own, smooth where he was rough, soft where he was hard.
Supporting himself on one elbow, he grazed her nipples again and then wended his way down to those wispy little panties that he could have torn off with one flick of his hand. She was writhing, clearly not meaning to, thighs rubbing together, legs pedaling. Watching her made his entire body go up in flames.
She was just so willing—as honest about her needs as she was about everything else. He wasn’t used to that. The women he’d slept with may have been familiar with the mechanics of sex, but what they gave wasn’t much. Maggie gave it all—heart, body and soul. When she reached for him, just the touch of her hand sent an earthquake through his body.
“Not yet,” he told her. “Ladies first, remember?”
It wasn’t easy not to rip and rip and fuck and destroy. He wanted to rut her until the world burned. Instead, he slid his hand across the gentle swell of her belly and then dipped it inside her panties. Her breath caught. She opened her eyes and gazed at him with something like wild, delirious hope. Her eyes were dark, surrounded by feathery lashes, and the trust he saw there—trust that he would and could complete the mission—filled him with determined pride.
I know where you live, he told himself. I never stopped thinking about it.
Electric sparks raced up his spine when his fingers coaxed her apart and he made contact. God, she was wet. She coated his fingers, which made it easier to do what she needed him to do. He watched her, seriously worried now whether he was going to make it all the way to the sex part. Scorching wetness surrounded his fingers as he rubbed and teased, sometimes fast, sometimes just skimming the surface of those slick folds. But seeing her pelvis roll as she tried to control the relentless onslaught of sensation was almost more than he could take. That naughty pink tongue of hers touched the center of her upper lip. As badly as he wanted to get inside her, he didn’t want to miss this: Maggie twisting and moaning because he had her world in his hand. He had to clench his jaw just to stop himself from coming. One tap against the bed and it would be over.
She apparently had plans of her own though because she reached inside his open fly and pulled him free. He was hard, throbbing hard, and when her fingers closed around him, a wave of such intense heat crashed over him, he groaned out loud.
He kept his fingers circling the pearl at the top of her wet pink flesh, lightly, lightly, although the control was costing him. Pressure built inside his cock. She gazed at it, lips parted, and then her back arched off the bed and she cried out.
Watching her come was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. She contracted, pulsing, and practically gushed over his hand, nearly setting off his orgasm, too. Her breath whooshed out in choppy bursts. Her feet arched. He let her ride it out, which she did. Fiercely. No attempts at sexiness, just naturally so fucking sexy.
He’d never been so moved before. Crazy fantasies he’d had about her, sure. But he never expected to feel this sense of love or worship, the trust that she alone had given him.
She looked at him hazily, her cheeks flushed, nipples taut, her hand full of the thick column of his damp, pulsing flesh. Then she lifted onto one elbow, inched down the bed and took him in her mouth.
He almost died on the spot. Sensations sparked all the way up to his stomach and flared to his overheated pulses. His good girl was doing something very, very bad, but Jesus Christ, was it hot. So hot.
Mind blown, he watched her close her mouth over him, surging up and down his shaft. She rubbed the head with her puffy lips and then sucked some more.
The vision of him filling her mouth was burned into his mental flipchart of Sexiest Things Ever. His heart pounded in a fast, uneven rhythm. Then she locked eyes with him, sheathing just the tip of his aching cock. Slowly, slowly she stretched her mouth over him and he made some kind of unintelligible noise in the back of his throat, all his attention on the intense drugging pleasure she was giving him. He crushed the bedcovers in his fist while her tongue dipped down his length and then swirled around the head.
But when he gently thrust inside her mouth, his inner warning bells went off. It might take all the willpower he had, but he was just too close. This had to s
top.
“Not like this,” he said in a strangled voice.
She pulled back, her lips deliciously swollen. “But I want to,” she said huskily.
Baby, you are digging my grave.
He hauled her up and rolled his hips against hers, his balls so full they ached. Why were her panties still on? After stripping them off and throwing them aside, he yanked open the nightstand and scrabbled around in the drawer for a condom. He needed something to slow him down anyway. She watched, panting a little, as he fitted it over the head and then smoothed it all the way to the base. He balanced his weight on his knees, positioned himself at her soft wet entrance and in one long push he was in.
He looked at her beneath him, her eyes glazed but mutely pleading. He vowed to make her come again. A thousand times. Until she combusted. But she was so slick and tight, and as he went deeper, pleasure surged through him in waves. Her breasts quivered with every thrust.
She was beautiful. Warm. Alive. And he knew then that he didn’t have to hide from her. He didn’t have to put up any walls. For the first time in his sad, peculiar life he wanted to say how he felt. He wanted to tell her everything. Give her everything. It was safe—not safe in a boring way, but safe in a way that made everything, everything possible.
Bracing his weight on his elbows, he moved higher so there was contact with her clit. She dug her nails into his shoulders, hard enough to make him wince. He loved it. That’s right, baby. Dig in.
She whispered his name, moaned it, and he increased his rhythm, plunging in and out, feeling her squeeze him like a fist.
Then she came, fluttering around his cock, back arching as she strained against him. He buried his face in her hair and he came, too, burst after burst of soul-wrenching pleasure, his hoarse cries mingling with her softer ones.
Even as they collapsed on the bed together, all he could think was more.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
What the hell just happened?
Jake found himself puzzled and awestruck by it. But he was so happy.
For starters, he’d never let any woman sleep over before. It had all been drive-by sex or sex at her place or sex at hotels. This morning, he’d woken up with Maggie warm and delicious in his arms. He couldn’t stop touching her. Breathing her.
The second first was a home-cooked breakfast, which she made while wearing his T-shirt. A good thing, too, because his cooking sucked. He’d been so turned on by the sight of her long smooth legs, what the hem of his shirt barely covered, they didn’t even make it all the way through the meal.
But the hardest first, the one that cost him, was what happened after they’d wound up in bed again.
In his post-coital haze, he’d told Maggie damn near everything there was to tell about his ugly past. He had to. He knew that if he told her the truth, he stood a chance of putting the past firmly behind him. If he lied—or lied by omission—not only would it become a part of his future, but a part of their relationship.
So with Maggie’s head on his shoulder, he swallowed his pride and gave her a rough sketch of the basics.
He told her what it was like growing up in a trailer park with his mom and his brother. The times the water got shut off because the bill wasn’t paid, and he and Dillon walked the quarter mile to the gas station, often in the dark, to fill plastic water jugs at the bathroom sink.
He told her about making Ramen noodles in a coffeemaker. How often Cheez Whiz and crackers were all they’d had for dinner. Then, feeling her body tense, he told her even darker truths about the drunken fights his mother had with her boyfriends. The night one of her boyfriends came staggering into the bedroom Jake shared with Dillon. The panic and fury he felt knowing what that mean-eyed sonofabitch was there for. How he’d sprung out of bed, slapped on the light and started shouting.
He’d been ten years old then. He stole an ax out of a neighbor’s yard and kept it under the bed from that moment on. He and Dillon slept with a chair wedged under the door handle, sometimes huddled in the bunk bed while their mother screamed and glass shattered and the neighbors did nothing because there were times when they fought like that, too.
Jake made it clear to Maggie that he didn’t want sympathy. He just wanted her to hear him out. He wanted her to know why he was the way he was. But the whole time he told her, he was shaking inside. And God, how he fucking hated that.
He knew she could never understand, not even if she wanted to. He’d seen her family—the way her dad adored her, how devoted her mom was to all the girls. No one drank. No one came home from school, found their mom passed out, and an ambulance idling out front. Maggie could never really know what it was like to live in squalor and in fear.
He clasped her hand, which she’d rested gently on his chest. His mind told him that Maggie was the last woman in the world who might think less of him for having come from trash, but his heart shriveled in fear. He felt as though admitting the truth, saying it out loud, was the starkest form of betrayal. That the hand of God would smite him—not only for confessing to a weakness, but for pulling back the curtain on his drunk, bitter, foul-mouthed mother.
But Jake wasn’t someone who left things half done. He took a deep breath and told her the rest.
There were beatings. Until he was thirteen, he did the best he could to endure them. Then one day when Loretta went after Dillon, Jake stopped her the only way he could: grabbing her shoulder and flinging her away from his little brother. She’d crashed into a wall.
She feared him after that. Her fear became a slew of abusive, horrible words. Words that were her only weapon. Even now, Jake knew those words had hurt him in ways her fists never could.
“Aunt Pearl and Uncle Marty had a farm with horses,” he said. “The best moments of our childhood were spent there. They tried to get custody of me and my brother, but you know how that goes. After Loretta won in court, she wouldn’t let us see them for two years.”
Maggie slowly drew circles on his chest. For once, he was glad he couldn’t see her face. He could feel her muscles stiffen during certain parts of the story. He knew how hard it was to hear this shit.
“That’s why I promised myself I would do everything within my power to never be poor again,” he said. “I will never live like that. I will never put another human being through the crap I went through.”
His shoulder was wet. She was crying. He didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s feelings. But now that he’d done the right thing and told her, they could put all this shit behind them. They could go on with their lives and their relationship. Maggie could never accuse him of not opening up to her. He’d done more than open up. He’d sliced open a damned vein.
“Thank you for telling me,” Maggie said softly. She turned his face toward hers and slowly, tenderly kissed him. There was heat to the kiss, and he found himself being pulled under deeper than he’d ever been before.
The rawness in his chest felt a little scary. It took him a second to realize what it was. Love. He loved her. As much as the truth baffled him, it also filled him with a sense of protectiveness and the need to make her happy. That need was so overwhelming, it almost drowned out the fear of having it.
But he couldn’t take the final step and tell her that his mother was dying. He couldn’t risk having Maggie think less of him for refusing to go see Loretta. She’d never forgive him. To Maggie, it was family first, no matter how awful that family might be. He knew that.
Then as the kiss went from sweet to scorching, he let the thought go and sank into all that blissful heat.
* * * *
“Let’s go to Paris,” Jake said. “I just bought a hotel there and I think we should go check it out, don’t you?”
Maggie shoved herself up against the headboard of the bed and pulled the sheet along with her. Paris? It was hard to think clearly. They’d barely come up for air this morn
ing. She hadn’t even seen his house properly and—Paris?
Before last night, it would have seemed like one more crazy sexy dream. Now it felt as though anything were possible. Still, there were logistical issues that she was too muddled to work through right now.
“I can’t go to Paris,” she said. “I have a bakery to run, remember? Those cakes aren’t going to bake themselves, you know.”
He rolled over on his stomach and grinned up at her, that boyish grin she knew was especially for her. “So ask that woman who works for you.”
“Coralee?” Maggie bit her lip. Could Coralee look after the bakery? Did she even want to?
“Call her.”
Maggie thought about romantically lit cobblestone streets, quaint restaurants and outdoor cafés. The Seine glittering in the moonlight. That bridge with all the locks on it. How many times had she watched Gene Kelly in American in Paris? How many years had she wanted this?
The whole thing was nuts, of course. But then, so was last night. So was coming to Dallas. So was dating Jake. And look how stupidly happy it had made her so far.
She grabbed her cell phone and speed-dialed Coralee’s number.
Coralee picked up on the first ring. “There’s a UFO cake in the pantry!” she crowed. “It’s the best cake I ever laid eyes on. I don’t care who you made it for. I wanna buy it.”
“What were you doing in the pantry?” Maggie asked. “Today’s your day off. The cake was supposed to be a surprise.”
“You mean it’s for me?” Coralee gabbled something unintelligible to whoever was in the room with her. Maggie assumed it was Ed. “Good. ’Cause I already took it home with me. I came in this morning to see if you needed help with the inventory. Then I laid eyes on that cake and I just been in a state about it ever since.”
“Why didn’t you call? I could’ve told you it was yours. If it has an alien on it, of course it’s yours.”
