Tia’s back came up off the bed in one electric moment. She moaned his name into the dark room and he grinned against her mouth. Each moment was long and syrupy as they clutched one another, rising and panting, crazy for it.
When Eli finally slipped her panties down her legs, Tia thought, here it is. The other side. We’re almost there.
But she was wrong. Because he didn’t plunge into her, the way she’d expected. No. He kissed her there, slicked his mouth between her legs.
Tia sat right up at that first sure stroke of his tongue. “Eli—”
But she couldn’t get any more words out beyond the moan that shook her.
“Tell me to stop,” he whispered up from between her legs. “And I will.”
“No,” she moaned, falling backwards again. “I won’t say it. Don’t stop.”
And he didn’t. He ravaged her with his mouth, kissing her passionately, insanely, like a man who would never get enough of her.
Tia was racing on an edge she’d never been before. It was heated and so sharp she could have stabbed herself through the heart with it. She didn’t know if she wanted to leap over the side or just stay there forever. But she didn’t have time to decide, because Eli’s mouth suckled at her and she plunged over the edge. Into the unknown. Into a universe of whirling colors and bright, deep ribbons of sensation. Tia felt as if he was pulling something out of her that she hadn’t even known she’d had. She was tight, straining, exploding. And then, even as she fell limp and panting back onto the bed, exhaustion settling over her like a blanket, he was stoking the fire again.
He pressed a kiss to the inside of one of her legs as he brought his hand to her center, traced her gently, before pressing inside. He kept his face down there, watching each erotic invasion of his fingers. And Tia’s brain struggled to catch up with the moment.
She pushed herself up onto her hands so she could look down. And she moaned with the sight of it. Eli lay with his head on her thigh, two fingers plunged into her, and his eyes glued to the sight.
She followed his eye line and found herself right there with him, riveted. He pressed and plunged his hand, his thumb doing magical things to her on the outside, and Tia felt herself plummeting through the air again. Could she? She couldn’t possibly go through that wildly pleasurable ordeal again so soon. But the real question, she realized, was could he? Could he get her there?
She fell back down onto the bed as she realized with a twisting in her gut, that he absolutely could.
She writhed and clamped down on him and after a few breathless, escalating minutes, Eli rose over her. He pressed his hand into her still, driving her crazy as he reached into her nightstand.
He pulled his hand away from her when she was just a breath away from exploding for him again. She moaned and pressed her legs together against the emptiness he’d left behind.
Eli, on all fours over top of her, his breaths tearing out of him and his eyes a dark gold, held her gaze. “I want to make love to you now, Tia. I want to get so lost in you I can never get out.”
“Yes,” she nodded, reaching up to drag his mouth back to hers. He let it happen, kissing her deeply while he sheathed himself with the condom and drew one of her legs up around his hip again. And even though he’d been inside of her just an hour before, as he started to press inside her this time, it felt like the first time for both of him.
He tore his lips from her and pressed his forehead against hers as he seated himself fully inside her.
Her eyes were bright magic, hypnotizing him as he felt something shake loose inside him. He realized, vaguely, that this was as new for him as it was for her. He’d never felt this way before with a woman. As if he, finally, finally, was whole again. He thrust into her, making both of them groan, and Eli realized that she had a piece of him inside of her. A part of him was living there, inside her, and this moment, this second, so deep in her, was the closest he’d come to touching it since he’d met her.
He set a rhythm, one that had her clawing and scraping at his back as she arched into him. But he couldn’t outride this feeling, that every stroke was binding them, building something between them, like a hammer building a house. He was reaching, reaching for that part of himself he’d given her. That lived inside her.
And at the same time there was nothing but her in his entire life. It was almost as if he’d ceased to exist. There was only Tia. Her scent, her flavor, the slick of her heated skin against his.
Eli rolled them, and then again. And Tia was lost in the dizziness of it. The proximity to that much raw power. She wasn’t sure where her body began and ended. She felt herself mix with him, with the air around them. Every line she’d lived her life with was blurring with each stroke he took.
They rolled and clutched and there wasn’t enough bed for all the ways they wanted to climb one another now. So it was natural for both of them when Eli lowered them to the ground next to the bed. Where they continued to roll and roll over one another. His feet slipped for purchase against the hardwood floor and he kept flipping them so that her sweet body wouldn’t be pounded into the hardwood. But she kept rolling them too, her mouth at his neck, his ear, her hands tangled roughly in his hair.
And then it was too much for him. Every sensation. And he rose with her in his arms, still connected. Eli propped her against the bedroom wall and loved her standing up. His hands firm and strong on her backside and his eyes burning into hers.
Tia lost herself again, spun out into another dimension as she exploded around him. Her body tightening and clamping down and nothing but this high speed spiral of pleasure. She clung forward onto him, her mouth opening and clasping onto his shoulder. Her teeth biting into him, desperate for any way to hang on to this man.
And finally, Eli took his own pleasure as he squeezed her to him as tightly as humanly possible. He surged into her as he pressed her down. She was everywhere, everything, she was the human embodiment of the slow motion firework that bulleted out of him, destroying the man that he had been.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eli stumbled toward the bed and collapsed onto his back, taking her down on top of him. They panted and tried to regain their sanity.
Tia was stunned. Her body and brain buzzing with what just happened. God. He was a sex mastermind. She hadn’t even known that sex could even be like that. That wasn’t even in the same category as anything she’d ever done. Part of her wanted to say that it was all him. That he had transformed her from a frog into a princess with the power of his passion. But she pushed those thoughts down. Because she’d been there too, damn it! She’d been just as passionate and loose as he’d been. It wasn’t simply that Eli was amazing at sex, which he was, it was that they’d made something together. Something real and overwhelming and so, so hot.
Eli traced his hands up and down her back and even as exhausted as he was, he couldn’t control the gruff laughter that bubbled up out of him.
Tia lifted her head. “What’s so funny?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m happy. That was... that was…”
If he’d looked up, he would have seen the insecurity race over her face. He would have seen her confidence fight with it and win. She screwed up her courage to tell the truth. “I’ve never felt anything like that.”
“Yeah,” he murmured as his smile fell away. He pressed the back of his hand to his eyes for a second. “Neither have I.”
She sat up on his chest, looked back, and quickly dealt with the condom, tossing it into the trash. When she looked forward again, he was watching her through the branches of his fingers.
She cocked her head to one side. “You haven’t? But you’ve had so much sex.”
He smiled, but it came out as more of a grimace. “Not as much as you probably think I have. Gossip sites and tabloids exaggerate to make a better story.”
“Oh.” Even though she’d been the one to bring it up, Tia found herself wanting to talk about anything but his sexual past right now, while she was sti
ll naked and straddling him.
“But to answer your question,” he said, stroking and petting his hands over her like he couldn’t help himself. “No, I really haven’t felt anything like that before. That was…”
And still, he couldn’t find a word for what he was trying to say. Tia desperately wished that he could.
He tugged her down next to him and stroked a hand through her hair. “I can’t believe I’m here,” he whispered against her lips.
“What do you mean?”
“I kept telling myself that it was never going to happen. I wanted it to. But you’d told me it wasn’t. So I didn’t want to hope. But I wanted you so badly. I imagined myself like this, with you, at night. Even while I knew I would never see you this way. Tangled and flushed and bright from me touching you.”
His words, though not the ones she’d thought she wanted to hear, were soothing her, delighting her, reassuring her.
“But now, here I am. In your room.” He looked around, his eyes long since adjusted to the dim light, and took in her room. The dark gray walls and the colorful paintings here and there. She had a good sturdy dresser with jewelry and lipstick scattered across the top. And of course, a huge bookshelf on one side. Just like every room that was hers. Her bed, though fully destroyed beneath them, had a colorful quilt over top and a ridiculous number of mismatched pillows at the head. “Nice room, by the way.”
“Thanks.” She bit her lip for a second. “I kind of can’t believe that you’re here either.”
He turned back to her. “What changed your mind? About sleeping with me?”
She wanted to lie. To say that there had been a logical, calculated reason. One that she could justify in grounded thinking. But she looked into those tawny eyes and remembered what they’d just done together. The raw, seeking, searching honesty of it. To lie now would be to disrespect what they’d just done. And she found that she couldn’t do it.
“My feelings for you changed,” she admitted. His eyes softened and opened to her, letting her in as his smile grew. His friendly, creased smile. “I started with just a crush. Well, actually, it was more of a memory of a former crush. One I used to have on you. And I knew that all I had to do to express it was kiss you.” She absently traced her fingers over his lips. Those perfect lips. “But then things changed. You were so sweet. So funny. So… you. And it was more than a teenager’s crush. It was a grown person’s feelings. And those can’t be expressed in just a kiss.”
“No, they can’t,” he agreed, pressing a kiss into her palm. He was delighted, thrilled, and terrified by her honesty. Because it was exactly how he felt too.
“Oh,” Tia let out a small sound of dismay as her eyes fell upon his shoulder. The bright red and purple mark that perfectly matched her teeth. “Oh my god, Eli.”
“What?” His hands followed hers to his shoulder. A grin immediately creased his face. “Ah. You marked me up a little, huh?”
“I’m so sorry.” She looked at him with absolute horror on her face. As a surgeon who’d taken the Hippocratic Oath, biting someone into a bruise was utterly horrifying to her.
“Don’t be,” he insisted. “It felt good while you were doing it. Tight. Like you couldn’t get me close enough. And I like having a mark from you. It’ll give me something to smile about every time I look in the mirror.”
“Are you sure? It’s just so,” she brushed her fingers over the bruise and blushed peach, “intense.”
“Yeah, well, we got pretty intense there.”
She nodded. They sure had. I want to get so lost in you I can never get out. The words he’d said to her right before they made love echoed in Tia’s head. No one had ever said anything remotely like that before to her. In the heat of passion or not. She wondered absently if he’d really meant it.
Eli propped himself up on one elbow. “Are you on call tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “Day off.”
“Good.” He rolled over her, his mouth sinking to her neck. “Because I want to keep you up late.”
***
Tia stared, disoriented and strangely off kilter, at the man who slept, sprawled across her bed. He’d held her the entire night through, and honestly, his large body had been like a pile of cinderblocks she’d had to crawl out from under to go to the bathroom a few minutes ago.
She’d fed Ham and let him out back. And now she stood in the doorway of her bedroom, staring at a buck naked Elijah Bird.
Well, the good stuff was covered up with her quilt, but she knew for a fact that he was naked under there. He lay on his stomach, most of his head buried under a pillow at the head of the bed. He was so big that his feet hung off the bottom of the bed by a good foot. The sight made her smile just a little bit. Softened her toward this huge foreign object in her room.
Over the last year, since she’d broken things off with Owen, Tia had gotten used to being alone most of the time. She’d certainly gotten used to being alone in her home. And whenever Owen had slept over, he hadn’t demanded quite so much…air.
It wasn’t just Eli’s sheer size. There was something about his presence that just made her aware of him. Aware in every single way. She’d slept hard after they’d finally fallen into exhaustion. But even in her dreams, she’d felt his heartbeat against her, his breaths clouding over her.
She leaned against the doorjamb as a sudden thought swamped her. He was consuming her. She was so much more into him than she’d ever planned to be. Even before the sex. But now, after what had happened last night, Tia found herself tumbling into a Grand Canyon-sized hole. She wondered what she was supposed to do next. Did she try to tumble with grace? Or did she flail for a handhold?
Either way, she knew landing was gonna hurt.
She shivered as she reflected on all the ways they’d torn into one another last night. She was strangely unhappy about it. She’d hated feeling like she wasn’t good at sex, but in a weird way, she’d also grown used to the idea. Sort of comfortable with it. She knew that she simply could just not have sex and then she wouldn’t have to think about. But Eli had made her stare it in the face. He’d proved her wrong over it too. Tia wondered now if she’d had the misfortune of having a string of subpar lovers. Or if she and Eli really had something between them that lit the bed on fire. If their chemistry trumped nerves and performance anxiety. All they had to do was both show up and surrender.
Tia felt so many things sliding around inside her. So many things she just knew to be true. They weren’t so true anymore. She was off kilter and slipping and all she could think to do was reach out for the steadiest thing she could name. Eli.
Eli stirred and Tia instinctively froze. And then she tried to stifle the laughter that threatened to bubble up out of her. Because instead of raising his head and opening his eyes to look for her, Eli merely sent out a searching hand. His palm fumbled across the bed, under the covers and then over. And then tried to navigate the sea of oddly shaped pillows that littered the bed.
After a few minutes of fruitless searching for her, Eli gave a disgruntled huff and finally raised his head up from under his pillow. His hair stuck up on one side of his head and was flat on the other. He blearily looked around the room until he spotted her in the doorway.
“Too many damn pillows,” he grumbled, flipping over on the bed and pulling his face into a frown.
She had no idea why him being such a grumpy morning person was so unbelievably charming to her. Maybe because he was so cheery and smiley at all other times. Seeing him like this, grumpy and sleepy, pushed Tia even further into the Grand Canyon. He was just so cute.
Eli opened one eye and glared at her. “You gonna get back in bed by yourself or do I have drag you in.”
Tia took a few steps toward the bed and then paused, considering. Getting dragged into bed did sound kind of good, actually. But she hesitated a moment too long, because Eli’s hand shot right out, looping around her waist and dragging her into bed just the way he’d proposed.
He lay on his
back and settled her over his hips, pushing her up into a sitting position so that he could look at her. “You put on a nightgown?”
“No,” she shook her head.
“Oh,” he realized. “You’re wearing my undershirt. Damn.” His voice went low and gruff. “You look good in my clothes.”
He didn’t give her the chance to say much else before he leaned up and took her mouth with his. His hands lit a path up from her hips to her breasts. This time he kept her on top as he moved his hips underneath her. He stoked a slow-building fire that rose and rose before breaking away from them like a runaway train.
She couldn’t do anything but let her head tip back and take everything he was giving her.
He couldn’t do anything but watch her, the thin column of her throat, the flush rising up her chest.
It thrilled him beyond belief to see her like this, undone and needing him.
He brought them both to where they needed to be and when it was over, she fell panting across his chest and his morning grumpiness had fallen away completely.
He smiled into her hair and brought her face up to his. “You’re better than a cup of coffee,” he murmured into her hair.
She couldn’t help but smile back. “I guess you really are recovered, huh? You’ve had quite the workout over the last ten hours.”
He brought his hands down and checked his ribs. “Still a little sore, but more than ready to get back into the swing of training. That’s for sure.”
“When will you start?”
“Well, since that requires getting out of this bed, never.”
***
They spent the day together. Simple as that. They’d had a late breakfast on Tia’s back porch and then taken Ham on a long meandering walk through her neighborhood. A few people had recognized Eli, given speculative glances at his fancy slacks and undershirt he wore in lieu of a change of clothes. She’d cooked dinner for them and he’d done the dishes. And then they’d sprawled over her couch. Pretending they were going to watch a movie but really just drowning in one another.
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