“Oh, I do.” With his eyes on hers, he lifted her hand and brushed a kiss across her knuckles, one that sent hot shivers up her arm and to the furthermost reaches of her body. “I most certainly do.”
CADE REFUSED TO TELL HER where they would begin. And since the plan of therapy had been his, Brynn allowed him to decide where and how to administer “treatment.” There were quite a few sites he could choose from—places where they had come close to making love.
“Just a hint,” she insisted as she slid into the seat next to a window on a bus headed downtown. Unlike their first ride today, the bus wasn’t crowded. The football game had begun some time ago; the fans were occupied at whatever site they’d chosen to watch the game, be it the stadium, a bar or a tailgating party. Only a few people rode the bus now, all seated near the doors for easy exit.
“You’ll see where we’re headed soon enough,” Cade said as he settled in beside her, his large, manly form and long legs taking up more than his share of the seat.
Brynn knew he was enjoying the suspense he was generating. With the stadium throw she now held in her lap—a blanket he’d bought from a vendor—they could be headed to any of their old make-out sites. “The pasture of the vet school,” she guessed, “where we put on a show for those voyeuristic cows.”
“Nope.”
“Our secret place near the hill behind the stadium.”
“Uh-uh.”
“The balcony overlooking the quadrangle.”
“Don’t waste your time guessing. As your therapist, I advise you to keep your mind on more important things.”
“Such as…?”
“Visualizing the steps we’ll take to reach our goal.”
She had no problem picturing what those steps might be. A tingle of excitement raced up her spine. “Ah. The visualization technique. Brilliant of you, Doc.”
A smile deepened the crescents bracketing his mouth, and his voice lowered to a husky pitch. “I believe that half the battle is won in the…preparation.”
And he laid his hand on her knee. A tendril of heat unfurled between her thighs.
“Yes, preparation is…good.”
The bus turned a corner, and as he swayed closer to her, his large, pleasantly callused hand slid from her knee upward, tunneling beneath the blanket on her lap…and also beneath her skirt. “In order to cure you of your sleep disorder, we’ll have to explore beneath the surface of your…consciousness.” His fingertips reached the very top of her thigh. The inside of her thigh.
Her breath stalled, and she couldn’t help casting a startled, furtive glance at the other passengers on the bus. Though most of the riders were seated with their backs to them, a portly older woman on the sideways seat behind the driver was peering in their general direction.
“I…I’m not sure this, um, preparation shouldn’t wait.”
“Visualize.” Cade’s voice was a velvet caress. “See in your mind how we’ll start out just skimming the surface.” Bending his head to hers, he slid the tip of his tongue across her lips. And his fingertips brushed along the sensitive valley between her legs. The sensation jolted her.
“We’ll delve deeper,” he whispered against her mouth, then engaged her in a longer, more voluptuous kiss. And his fingers slipped beneath the satin of her panties, dipping into intimate folds.
Serious heat coursed from the point of contact, and she gripped the blanket in her lap, sliding lower into the seat and tilting her hips. She wanted him in. A shocking thing to want, here and now….
He slanted his mouth on hers and his tongue went deep. As did his fingers, radiating a startling pleasure.
He broke off the kiss and, breathing hard, met her gaze. “Preparation,” he whispered, “is the key.” And his fingers moved again, inciting liquid heat.
Her throat muscles worked to hold back a groan. The woman at the front of the bus was covertly watching now, or so Brynn believed with what little part of her brain was still functioning.
The bus slowed and whined, approaching a stop.
Cade slowly withdrew his fingers, causing a quivering reaction and leaving a needy throb in its wake. “Our stop.” He pulled her skirt into place.
Then he rose from the seat, took the blanket from her and helped her to stand. With her knees wobbly and her blood rushing, she allowed Cade’s strong arms to steady her.
They exited the bus on Broad Street, the main thoroughfare between the campus and historic downtown Athens. With a hungry glance at her—one that caused a surge of heat from deep inside—he hurried her along. She no longer cared where they were headed, only that they’d get there soon. He’d stirred up an awesome need in her, the kind she’d almost forgotten about over the past nine years.
He guided her not toward the downtown area, but up the concrete steps to the legendary University of Georgia arch. He swept her at a brisk pace through the wrought-iron gateway and down a tree-canopied walk onto North Campus.
Although most of the football fans were now corralled in Sanford Stadium, some clustered around tents where radios and televisions broadcast the game. Cade steered her away from the biggest, most active gatherings. Clearly he didn’t want to be waylaid.
He barely spared a glance for the architecturally stunning historic buildings they passed or the majestic oaks and poplars shading the walkways of the grassy quadrangle. He didn’t even pause to listen to broadcasts of plays being made in the stadium “between the hedges,” as it was called.
His single-mindedness aroused Brynn, kept her inner heat on a low simmer.
On some rational level, she knew she should be balking at having sex somewhere here. Too many people were milling about. But caught up in a Cade-induced spell, she ignored her customary caution. She wanted adventure. She wanted him.
When they reached the end of the quadrangle, Cade led her down a maze of walkways bordered by exotic trees and fragrant hedges. Twilight had descended around them, and tiny white track lights flicked on to illuminate the walkways.
Deep within the heart of the mazelike garden, a familiar sight met her eyes: a gargantuan magnolia tree with broad leaves glimmering in a solid mass from the ground to its towering top.
“Our tree!” she exclaimed with hushed reverence. This sweet-smelling evergreen had been the site of their very first make-out session, when the compulsion to kiss and feel and taste had overcome them. “How did you remember where to find it?”
“You’d be surprised what I remember.” Hoarseness roughened his voice, and her pulse quickened in reaction. Catching her hand in his, he led her around to the back of the magnolia and pushed aside a heavy branch.
She ducked and entered. Once inside, she was able to stand erect within the roomy space beneath a leafy, umbrellalike canopy. The dark green outer wall had grown thicker and more concealing over the years. The branches were sturdier now, the interior more spacious. From outside, the glow of the white bulbs bordering the walkway provided just enough illumination to see by, like moonlight.
Cade allowed the limb he’d been holding to spring back into place, enclosing them in a cozy space fragrant with magnolia and peat. “Be quiet now,” he whispered as he came up behind her, infusing her with a hot, prickly awareness of him. “You never know when someone will walk by.”
He then ran his hands beneath her skirt, caught the sides of her panties and tugged until they whispered down her legs and pooled around her spiky black high heels.
Her adrenaline surged, and she stepped free of the black lace. The risk of what they were doing heightened all her senses, making her vibrantly aware of her intimate scent mingling with the redolence of the woods, the lingering taste of beer and this morning’s luscious kisses, the stirring of the evening breeze like phantom fingers beneath her skirt. Feeling drugged with sensuality, she lowered herself onto a smooth, broad limb and leaned against the massive trunk. Her breasts ached for his touch, and the wet heat he’d aroused between her legs pulsed to a greater intensity.
Cade tossed the blank
et onto the ground and dropped to his knees. “This time, we’re going all the way, Brynn,” he stated. “All the way.” As if to assert the fact, he unzipped his jeans, freed his erection and sheathed it with a condom.
Dizzy with desire, Brynn unbuttoned her blouse, untied its sash and unhooked her bra. And then he was there, taking her breasts in his hands, in his mouth, drawing her into a wet, hot heaven. Awash in sensation, she dug her fingers into his brawny shoulders and leaned her head against the tree.
But after he’d suckled her nipples into hard, sensitized points—a brusque, purposeful undertaking—he broke free, his gaze golden fire, his face intense. Leaving her nipples glistening and tingling in the open air, he pushed her skirt to the tops of her legs, wrapped a hand around each naked thigh and parted them.
With a breathy cry, she gripped the branches above her head to brace herself as he kissed, licked and nipped along her inner thighs, his silky hair brushing against her, his beard-shadowed face rasping here and there. She struggled to hold back a moan. Be quiet now.
The first hot glide of his tongue across the intimate center of her nearly brought her off the limb. He tightened his grip on her, though, and continued the sensual assault, every lick, swirl and probe increasing the pleasure, escalating her tension.
She couldn’t hold back the groans and cries any longer. Couldn’t resist the overpowering tide. Like a woman possessed, she writhed, moaned and rocked her pelvis while he continued his ministrations, her hands locking fiercely around the tree limbs as if to keep her earthbound.
His tongue went deep, forcing her body to arch. Sensation speared her, spiked her into a long, hard, shuddering climax. The tree itself seemed to convulse around her, the leafy limbs jerking and quivering until she managed to release her grip and reach for Cade.
He rose from his knees to catch her, and stifled her cries with a kiss. As she answered every thrust and parry of his tongue, she ran her hands down his body—one beneath the open waistband of his jeans to the taut muscles of his buttocks, the other to the thinly sheathed erection that pulsed with awesome heat and hardness.
She longed to feel it pulse within her. But she also longed to push Cade beyond all control, into the sweet madness that now possessed her.
Breaking their kiss, she slid from the tree limb to her knees and swept her fingers down his backside within the most sensitive of valleys. She wrapped her other hand around the base of his erection and took the plum-shaped tip into her mouth. He jerked and tensed and hissed in a breath. And as she licked and laved in ever-deepening revolutions, he groaned, undulated and tangled his fingers in her hair.
But when she tightened her lips around him and pulled with a steady suction, a hoarse cry broke from his throat and he caught her face in his hands. “Brynn. Brynn!”
Urgently he gripped her shoulders and pulled her up, until his gaze burned into hers. They surged together then in a voracious kiss. And in one fluid motion, he hefted her off the ground, wrapped her legs around his hips and pushed into her.
The penetration jolted her, stunned her. And as she hovered on the upswing of the most incredible thrill, he said in a gruff whisper, “This is where I want to be, Brynn. This is where I’ve always wanted to be. Right here, inside you.”
She flexed her inner muscles to embrace him there.
And Cade lunged with deep, possessive thrusts. Ablaze with need, he was ruled by compulsion: to fill her, body and soul. To brand her from the inside out. To make this moment go on and on. He’d wanted her for so damn long, needed her so damn badly.
But too soon, the fiercest, keenest pleasure gripped him, blinded him, and he couldn’t hold out. Neither, it seemed, could she. Her orgasmic contractions milked him relentlessly as he bucked in the throes of a soul-shaking climax.
He kept her locked against him as they panted, gasped and trembled, her legs around his hips, his shoulder wedged against the tree, until the aftershocks mellowed to a point that he could think and see and possibly even move. Slowly, then, he slid down the tree trunk onto the blanket, where he held her tightly on his lap.
For a long moment, neither of them attempted to speak.
“Brynn,” he finally said, mystified more than ever by something she’d said the first time she’d spoken in her sleep to him. “How could you ever have thought you were frigid?”
She didn’t answer at first, just hugged him harder and pressed her face against his chest. “No one else does this to me,” she finally whispered. Drawing back to look at him in tender awe, she repeated, “No one else.”
Emotion reared like a wild stallion in his chest, and he took her mouth in another kiss, this one charged with a passion that bordered on devout. It seemed impossible that he could want her again so soon, but he did. God, he did. And she returned the kiss as if she felt the same.
In a distant corner of his brain, he noted the ringing of a bell. The victory bell. For a moment, he connected it with his own personal victory. The most exhilarating victory of his life.
But Brynn ended their kiss. “Cade. The bell. The bell! It means—”
“Victory.”
“—the game is over.”
“Over? No.” Their game was far from over. It was just beginning.
“The stadium is letting out. The crowd’s coming our way.”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than footsteps and voices sounded nearby. A few yards away, at the most.
“I know what I heard, Walt,” a woman said in a hushed, frightened tone. “It sounded like groaning, or growling. Didn’t you see the tree shaking?”
Brynn’s eyes grew round with horror.
“It was probably just the wind, Louise.”
“It was not. And don’t go any closer to that tree! There’s a big wild animal in it. Maybe a bear.”
“A bear? There ain’t any bears on campus.”
Footsteps plodded closer, and Brynn jolted into action. Pulling back from Cade’s embrace, she jerked her blouse together and tugged at her skirt, which was bunched up around her waist.
“There! Did you see something move in the tree?” Louise cried, while Walt cursed in amazed fascination.
With a soft curse of his own, Cade spoke up. “The only animals in this tree,” he said, tugging Brynn’s skirt into place, “are a couple of Georgia dawgs.”
Stunned silence greeted that announcement. Then a burst of masculine laughter.
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” Louise muttered.
“Go, dawgs!” Walt said.
“I told you something was shaking that tree.”
And as they walked away, Cade heard Walt say, “Gives new meaning to the term ‘between the hedges,’ don’t it?”
9
THE THERAPY HE’D prescribed for Brynn’s sleepwalking had been too effective, Cade decided later that night as he lay in bed alone, watching the digital clock turn to 1:00 a.m.
She should be with him now. She should be lying in his arms, sweaty and exhausted from wild, mind-altering sex. He’d been ready for another go shortly after they’d left that magnolia tree.
But he’d known as they’d strolled across campus toward the inn that something was going wrong. He had no idea what or why, but a chasm had opened between them as surely as if she’d pushed him away. It happened when he whispered into her ear, “I want you in a bed now. Naked. Both of us.”
Her face flushed with arousal, but she’d said, “I can’t sleep with you at the inn, Cade. It would get awkward if Trish realized we were together.”
“Why?”
“Antoine is her cousin. I’ve been dating him. I need to break things off with him, and let Trish know, before I’d feel right about sleeping with another man at our inn.”
Not a very good reason, in his estimation. She was making excuses not to sleep with him. Why?
“Call Antoine.” He handed her his cell phone. He wanted the guy out of her life as soon as possible. And if he was the abductor, he’d come running back to reestablish his connection wi
th her, and Cade would be waiting for him. “Break it off with him.”
“I tried to do that earlier, but our cell phones weren’t connecting very well. And he hasn’t called me back yet.”
Cade suspected he was busy courting another victim. Wanting to learn more about his main suspect—and the man who had too intimate a relationship with Brynn—Cade asked in a casual tone, “What does he do for a living?”
“Sells art supplies wholesale.” No surprise there. Trish had told him that much. “But his real passion is art. He paints. Oils, mostly. Some watercolor.”
“Have you seen his work?”
“No. He hasn’t had it shipped over from France yet. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, you know.”
“I have a friend in the art supply business. Wonder if he knows Antoine. What’s his company called?”
She told him, and Cade added that information along with the rest to his mental file. Even if Antoine wasn’t the abductor, Cade didn’t trust him. Of course, that might be because he was a personal rival. The very idea that he had a rival in regards to Brynn stuck in Cade’s craw.
“Are you going to break up with him?” he asked her.
“Of course.”
“Why?” He found himself holding his breath as he waited for her answer.
“After what I just did with you, do you really have to ask?”
“Yes.” He really, really did.
“Because I feel I’m wasting my time with him.”
That was good. But not quite good enough. “Wasting your time…sexwise, you mean?”
She’d then given him an enigmatic look and replied in a gentle yet firm tone, “That’s none of your business, Cade.”
Just remembering the conversation shook him up again. And now he lay in bed alone, tensing at every creak and footfall, hoping the alarm on his watch would beep, indicating she was coming to him. Whether she was sleepwalking or not. He didn’t have to make love to her again tonight, he supposed, but he did have to hold her. With a frustrated sigh, he shut his eyes.
Sex and the Sleepwalker Page 11
