Intimate Knowledge

by Julie Miller

  “I rub my hands across your chest.” Logan touched his fingertips to an aroused male nipple. “The crisp hair teases my palms.” She caught a ragged breath. “Do men like to have their nipples touched?”

  Logan nodded even though she couldn’t see. “Put your mouth on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Describe what you’re doing to me, Grace.”

  “I lick it. I take it between my teeth and nibble.”

  “Oh God. Gracie.”

  The electric current zinged off the scale.

  “Now I’m inside your pants and I touch your…your…”

  Logan freed himself through the slit in his briefs. “My what, Grace?” Electricity targeted the spot like a lightning bolt. “Say it. My shaft? My penis?”

  “Yes, I’m—”

  “Say it.”

  “I touch your…penis. It’s straining. And damp. Like me. I rub my hand up and down its length. I squeeze the end, just to lubricate my fingertips. And then I…”

  Her seductive voice changed to innocent again. “Is that all right?”

  “Yeah, baby. Just like that.” Logan thrust himself against the pillow. “What else do you do with your hands?”

  “Now I touch your…”

  He imagined the blush staining her cheeks and helped her along. “My balls? Is that what you want to touch?”

  “Yes. I just squeeze—”

  “Go easy, baby.”

  Hell. Who’d have thought Grace would be so good at this?

  “I run my fingertips lightly beneath them. I flick my fingernails just so.” He groaned.

  But Grace was starting to get into it. Her voice dropped an imperceptible level in pitch, aligning every husky word to the frequency of desire racing through his veins. “Do you like that?”

  “Oh, yeah, sweetheart. You’re making me crazy.”

  “I am?”

  “Definitely.” It was time to give his talented pupil a taste of her own medicine. “You want to know what I’m doing while you’re stroking me?”

  “I, um, I don’t think—”

  He pressed his lips together at her nervous hiss of breath. “I’m kissing you. My tongue is in your mouth. Pushing in and out, licking the outside rim. I’m doing everything to your mouth that I’m soon going to be doing somewhere else.”

  “Logan.”

  She was breathing hard now. Was she touching her lips? Stroking her fingers around their lush contours and then darting inside to suck on them? Or was her hand still between her legs? Was she already doing those things to herself down there?

  “You like that? I’m kissing you again. Deeper this time. So deep and hot and wet and wild that you don’t think it’s ever going to stop.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  Could her sexy voice sound any more turned on? “Where do you want my hands?”

  She hesitated. Was she going to give up the game? Maybe he should. This had gotten way out of hand. He could finish himself if this was too much for her.

  But he’d forgotten about Grace’s determination to see a thing through to its end. “I want your hands on my breasts. No, my butt.”

  Logan smiled and squeezed the pillow and the phone in his fists. “I’ve got them both. I’m squeezing your butt with my right hand. With my left hand I’m squeezing your breast. God, baby, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world to watch how it reacts to my touch. I’ve got the nipple between my thumb and forefinger, and I’m rolling it, squeezing it, pulling it.”

  “Logan.” She squeezed his name out on a breathy moan.

  “I want to rub my erection against you, baby. Is that okay?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Can I put it in you?”

  “No. Not yet. I…I want you to kiss my breast.”

  “I am. I’m kissing your breast. It’s sweet and pebbly and hot inside my mouth. I’m sucking it hard.”

  Her husky moan vibrated through his straining arousal like a tiny electrical shock.

  He wanted to feel it again. He wanted her to feel it, too.

  “I’m putting my hand where yours is, Gracie. Right between your legs. Do you feel me?”

  “Ye… Yes.” Was she touching herself? Was she pressing her hand against her swollen, fragrant channel?

  “I’m slipping my fingers inside you now. One.” She moaned. “Two.” He moaned. “Open for me, baby. I’m pulling you open.”

  “Logan…?” Her rapid, erratic breathing fueled his own. “I need… Damn it, how do I…?”

  He was about to go over the edge, too. “Talk dirty, baby. Say it dirty.”

  “I want you in me. Now. All of it. Long and hard. Now!”

  “It’s in there baby. You’re so slick and hot and perfect.” He crushed the pillow in his lap. “I’m pushing in once.”

  “Now.”

  “I’m sliding out and pushing it in again.”

  “Logan—”

  “This is it, baby.” His hips bucked. “Gracie.” They bucked again. “Sweetheart.”

  He heard a muffled scream, as if she’d pressed her fist to her mouth. Logan’s hips rocked. He surged against the pillow.

  Logan collapsed back on the bed. His mind numb. His body spent. His soul oddly longing for something more.

  As the pounding in his ears receded, he could hear Grace’s husky little whimpers calming into longer, steadying breaths.

  “Did I do okay?” she finally murmured.

  If she was any better at this, he’d be in the hospital. “You’re a natural.”

  “Logan?”

  “Yeah?” He didn’t think he had the strength to talk any more right now.

  “Will I have to talk this way to Harris Mitchell?”

  If one thing could douse the euphoria of having perfect phone sex with Grace, that was it. For a few moments he’d lost himself in the fantasy of her beautiful body and lusty voice and carnal instincts. But it seemed reality was destined to intrude and spoil his time with her. “I don’t know.”

  It was an honest answer—halfway between the false platitude of No, the sex maniac wouldn’t want anything like that and his own, possessive gut reaction of Hell, no! I’m the only man you do this with.

  Grace’s answering silence made him wish they weren’t separated by a phone line, that she was right here in bed with him. Even if she hadn’t just given him mind-blowing sex, he wanted to hold her and to reassure her with one of those quiet little conversations that made a couple truly intimate—the way they’d been talking before this had all gotten out of hand. He needed to hold her. To reassure himself that she was okay, that he hadn’t just made her life a whole lot tougher.

  He should have told her something. But he had no reassurances for her.

  In the end, it was Grace who spoke. “See you in the morning.”

  Logan listened to the silence after the click for half a minute before he found the strength to rouse himself.

  He hung up the phone and sat up, his frustration simmering even worse than before. The stain in his lap brought him completely back to the futility of his growing need for Grace Lockhart.

  He wanted her in his bed. The real woman, not just that voice.

  And he sure as hell didn’t want to share her with Harris Mitchell, or any other man.

  Yet his job was to do just that—to make her sexy, to make her savvy, and then to send her into the arms of another man.

  Logan stripped off his pants and briefs and walked into the bathroom to take the coldest shower he could stand.

  SO NOW she’d had two orgasms.

  With just some touching and talking. Okay, so it was a lot of talking. Graphic, dirty talking. Logan said talking like that was a turn-on for men.

  What a horrifying discovery to learn she liked it, too. So much for her misconceived ideas about sex.

  Joel Vitek’s idea of sex talk all those years ago had been a few grunts before crying out her mother’s name.

  She’d had no idea.

  It boggled her imaginatio
n to think how she might re-act if Logan was actually doing half of those things he’d described over the phone last night. Words like conflagration popped into her mind. Explosion. Meltdown.

  Maybe if he hadn’t started with that quiet little conversation first. The one in which he’d tricked her into talking about herself. Snuck around her sleepy defenses with that deep, drugging voice of his.

  That wasn’t exactly fair, she conceded. He’d made her feel safe talking about her insecurities by talking about his own.

  He’d made her feel safe and cozy. And sexy and strong and wild…

  “Damn.” He was her partner. Her Bureau partner. Whatever was going on between them—it was business.

  Yet last night she’d been rolling around on the bed, touching herself at the seductive insistence of his voice.

  That just wasn’t her. First of all, Grace Lockhart took her job seriously. Grace Lockhart didn’t have orgasms.

  What was wrong with her?

  She rolled the waistband of her sweatpants down around the waist of the mint-green leotard she wore and studied her reflection in the locker-room mirror.

  She even looked different. The glasses that had once masked her face had been replaced by contact lenses, leaving her doubt-filled expression open for all the world to see. Her hair was a riot of strawberry-gold waves, bouncing around her ears and curling onto her cheeks. And the tight fit of the leotard clung to her top-heavy curves in a way her old T-shirts never had.

  Where was the old Grace? The one who thought things through before she acted. The one who was in control of her environment and her future. The one who would never have talked sex with a man in the middle of the night. Much less enjoyed it.

  The woman in the mirror looked nothing like the computer-whiz who put her job before her personal life and demanded that men pay attention to her brain instead of her body.

  She didn’t look like the Grace she knew anymore.

  She looked like her mother.

  Grace’s jaw dropped open at the unsettling discovery.

  Twenty-two years ago Mimsey had achieved cult status in the sci-fi thriller, Vampire Women of Asteroid X, wearing an outfit much like this one. Change the black cotton terry to black leather and strap an Uzi around her waist, and she’d be a dead ringer for her mother’s pre- “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” role.

  Add the makeup artist who’d been Mimsey’s lover for six months after the movie was wrapped, and it would be as if time had stood still.

  Grace groaned and tore her gaze away from the image in the mirror. “I am not my mother.”

  Another female agent walked past on her way from the gym to the showers. “Don’t I know it.” She patted her hips and winked in some sort of secret agreement. “Every year it gets harder to stay in shape.” By the time she’d moved on, Grace’s cheeks burned a hot shade of pink.

  She’d been reduced to talking to herself in a mirror. She’d lost her focus. She’d lost sight of what mattered here.

  Infiltrating Harris Mitchell’s syndicate and bringing him and his connections to justice was what mattered.

  Her sexual curiosity and repressed fears would just have to wait until she got the job done.

  She only had to play the part of a sexy woman. She didn’t have to possess a wealth of intimate knowledge herself. She’d remind Logan of that fact the minute she saw him.

  And keep reminding herself, too.

  As she walked through the weight room to the exercise mats, though, her conviction got a little sidetracked.

  Logan was already on the mats, moving through his Tae Kwon Do kata. He wore only a pair of black sweatpants that hung low on his hips, revealing a deliciously long serving of that T-bone-shaped back that fascinated her so. With each precise movement, the muscles along his shoulders and spine stretched and flexed. Droplets of sweat glistened at the small of his back. One tiny rivulet trickled down the length of supple skin and was lost beneath the waist of his pants.

  The fluid exertion of strength and control left her mouth dry and her nipples tingling. The tips hardened as though she were chilled. Yet her temperature was definitely rising.

  Too much man. Too sexy.

  Too distracting for her to recall the speech she’d thrown together only moments ago about keeping everything between them strictly business.

  Grace forced herself to look away and to take a deep breath. She crossed her arms over her chest, covering the telltale contours of her body’s reaction to him in a mock suit of armor before speaking. “I still don’t know what a morning workout has to do with my training for this assignment. We’re trying to convince Mitchell I want to be in his bedroom, not his gym.”

  Logan completed a series of movements and bowed slightly to the east in traditional Asian fashion before turning to speak.

  “Good morning to you, too.” His sarcasm was tuned as finely as his body. “I want to see how sharp your self-defense skills are. Backup isn’t always around when you work undercover. You need to be able to protect yourself.”

  He slowly circled around her, scanning her from head to toe in a thorough evaluation. Whatever he was checking, by the time he faced her again, the questioning look in his eyes made her feel she didn’t quite measure up. “We’ll review the basics. I’m one of the bad guys. I catch you rummaging through my desk. I’m going to charge you. Ready?” He wanted to practice blocks and takedowns? “Defend yourself.”

  With no more warning than that, Logan bent his shoulder into hers and snatched her around the waist. She went down with an embarrassing whoosh and a thud, landing flat on her back with her hips pinned to the mat beneath his.

  For a stunned moment he propped himself up on his elbows above her. “You did pass the physical requirements for training, didn’t you?”

  “Of course, I did.” She pushed at his chest, indignant to read the doubt flickering in his eyes. “I just wasn’t prepared. When you said workout, I thought we’d be lifting weights or running laps.”

  “Let’s try this again.” With an easy grace belying his size, Logan rolled off her and pulled her up to her feet in one motion.

  He backed off a few steps, assumed an attack stance, then relaxed. “Don’t stand like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “With your arms crossed.” He pulled her hands from her shoulder and waist. “You’re hiding your figure again.”

  Grace tugged her hands from his grip. “This isn’t what I’m used to wearing for physical training. It’s a little revealing.”

  He hesitated a moment before his expression hardened like granite. “You can’t be self-conscious about showing your assets to Mitchell.” The discussion had ended. He retreated into position and nodded. “Defend yourself.”

  This time she got her hands up to deflect his initial charge, but he overpowered her again and pinned her to the floor.

  “My assets make me look like a dough brain. Mitchell won’t hire me if he thinks I’m an empty-headed twit.”

  He helped her stand and indicated they try the move again. Grace put up her hands and glued her eyes to his as they circled each other. “Brains and a bod are not mutually exclusive.”

  “Try telling that to my mother.”

  “Defend yourself.” This time Grace ducked and kicked out, catching him behind the knee and tossing him to the mat. The victory was short-lived, though. Almost as soon as she landed on top of him, he flipped her beneath him. With their legs still tangled together, his thigh insinuated itself between hers. “How did Mimsey get into the conversation?”

  “I look like Colonel Cupcake.”

  “Come again?”

  The heat from their workout seemed to intensify with the conversation. She burned from her crotch to her shoulders. The bare skin on his chest sizzled wherever they touched. She wedged her elbows between them, needing air to cool her body and clear her mind.

  “I look like a sex-kitten mercenary Mother played in one of her movies.”

  Logan grinned. “That is the idea behi
nd this training project, isn’t it?”

  Didn’t he get it? “A helpless, brain-dead sex kitten.”

  “Sex-kitten mercenary,” he corrected, tapping the tip of her nose with his fingertip. “Which film was that? Batamaran?”

  His amusement, and his familiarity with her mother’s ridiculous movies, fueled her temper. Disgusted with the description of what she was evolving into, she shoved him off her, refusing his offer to help her stand.

  “I’ll come from behind now,” he said, circling around her. “No man is ever going to mistake you for an air-head, Gracie. Your body says sex, but your eyes say smart.”

  His unexpected compliment caught her off guard, and he easily took her to the floor. With the wind startled out of her, she pressed her cheek to the mat and tried to catch her breath. She lay on her stomach, and Logan covered her. His hips cupped her buttocks, his shoulders cast a shadow over hers.

  “But who bothers looking above my chest?” she asked between labored breaths.

  Logan grasped her shoulder and rolled her over. “I do.” He slid his fingers into her hair and brushed it off her face. “It’s the whole package that makes you hot, Grace.”

  Hot. Fever crept into her cheeks and down between her legs.

  She mentally forced herself to step back from her body’s immediate, automatic response to Logan’s slightest touch. Was the gentle reassurance just a platitude issued by a coach to his protegée? A pep talk to get her on her game for the sake of the assignment?

  Or did Logan really see her as something more than a by-product of her mother’s legacy? Was he offering her the notice—the respect—she’d fought so long and hard for?

  The seconds that they lay there together, entwined like lovers, suddenly ticked into eons. She jumped from deep in her own thoughts to the here and now, conscious of other agents in the workout area turning curious glances their way.

  Certain that their position looked more personal than professional, Grace kicked and lifted Logan with a twist of her hips. They rolled over, the strategic placement of her knee and his vitals giving her the upper hand. “If I’m so hot, then why do you keep fighting me over my qualifications to go after Harris Mitchell?”

  She hadn’t bested him at all. In a demonstration of his superior strength, he sat up, carrying her along with him on his chest. She slid down onto his lap and he held her there, her bent knees caught between the juncture of his hips and thighs.