by Susan Sey
She wound her fists into the crisp cotton of his shirt, inhaled the scent of hot man at his collar while his tongue did something knee-weakening and wicked to her ear. He nudged her knees apart and put himself there. He pressed against her, pulsed hard and demanding against the epicenter of her want. She sucked in a breath as he added these sharp notes of frantic need to the languid symphony of desire he was writing on her body.
His hands moved down her arms to encircle her wrists, to slide them slowly above her head. He pinned them there against the wall in one large hand and a draft of cool air shivered across her belly. She arched, and her t-shirt drifted away like magic. She yanked at his shirt until the tails came loose from his khakis, allowing her hands free access to the smooth muscled planes of his back.
His skin was warm and just slightly rough under her palms. He felt like a man, she realized. Not Hollywood’s shaved, waxed and professionally sculpted version, but a real, live man. The kind with muscles and hair and unapologetic appetites. A fierce and answering hunger rose up in her and she tugged at his shirt until he stopped kissing her long enough to tear it off. She smiled at him, at them both, the way they were pulling and panting and snatching.
“You feel like a man,” she told him.
“Yeah?” He gave her that lightning strike smile of his and she felt it all the way to the bottom of her belly. “You were expecting something else?”
“I’ve lived in a strange world.”
“I’ll bet.” He reached for her, one hand warm on the curve of her waist, the other sliding up her ribs to cup her breast. He dipped a finger under the lacy edge of her bra and skimmed her nipple. She arched into his touch on a gasp.
“I like this,” he said, rubbing the silky fabric between his fingers, while his knuckle brushed her aching nipple.
“Me, too,” she managed, while hot showers of sparks danced down her entire body.
His chuckle was low and wicked. “I meant the bra. I never pictured you as the lace and silk type.”
She opened her eyes and found him leaning into her, his mouth a whisper from her own. She let her lips curve into a knowing smile. “It’s a special occasion. I usually don’t bother.”
“With silk?”
“At all.”
He groaned and dropped his forehead to the wall beside her ear. “I didn’t need to know that. How am I supposed to look you in the eye at the clinic now?”
She laughed and hooked a finger into his belt. “The same way you did before.”
He pushed himself into her hand and she nearly purred at the surge of heat and wonder. He was gloriously hard, and large enough to give her a frisson of purely female anticipation. “Like I was two seconds from snatching you up and doing you on whatever flat surface was handy?”
She laughed, absurdly flattered. “Wow. I really have been dating the wrong guys.”
He went still, and she looked up to find his eyes gone serious. “I’m not the right guy, Nixie. I thought you understood that.”
She flipped open his belt and said, “I disagree.” She dealt with the button fly with one smooth yank, and in seconds had him gloriously nude. She cupped him in both hands, and he sucked in a ragged breath. “Plus, I don’t think you’re entirely convinced yourself.”
He strained against her hands, but his fists stayed rigid by his sides. “I’m convinced,” he said. “I’m going to marry Mary Jane.”
Nixie stopped and looked at him. His jaw was clenched, a muscle jumping in his cheek. Every line of his body was taut, whip-tight and quivering for release. His eyes were the molten blue of fire, and she smiled. He wasn’t going to marry anybody but her.
“Do you really think that’s going to keep you safe?” she whispered, pressing a chain of tiny kisses along his cheek. “Do you really think giving another woman your ring is going to stop you from wanting me? From wanting this?”
She slipped out of her jeans, left the rest of her clothes in a tangle on the floor and pressed herself against him.
Home. The word passed through her mind, dissolved and ran through her veins like a life force. Home. She shuddered and Erik’s arms came around her, fierce and strong.
“Jesus, Nixie,” he said, his voice like a cat’s tongue--rough and somehow comforting. “You’re killing me.” He ran his hands up and down her goose-pimpled back, a curiously tender gesture.
She laughed, a sudden overflowing of joy. “You sure talk a lot for a guy with a naked woman in his arms.”
He rolled his hips into hers and zingy little shock waves ran straight to her lower belly. “You want me to stop?”
“If I do, I’m sure I can render you speechless.”
“Really?” He tugged her to the carpet and laid her there like a feast. “Me first.” He eyed her head to toe, and her nipples tightened in anticipation. “Yeah, good thinking,” he said. “I’ll start there.”
Nixie’s entire body flashed hot as he closed his lips over her nipple, plucked lightly with his teeth and then soothed with his warm tongue. When she could breathe again, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and said, “Do that again.”
“At your service, princess.” He rolled her damp nipple between his fingers, and turned his attention to her other breast. The exquisite tug of his mouth had her arching up off the carpet and sliding a knee around his thigh in silent demand. He chuckled, though it sounded a little ragged to her.
“So impatient,” he said, but his hands weren’t precisely steady as they dealt with the condom he pulled from the tangle of clothes on the floor. He settled into her like she’d been custom designed to cradle his weight and a feline hiss of pleasure escaped her. She rocked under him, her hands greedy and urgent on his back, on his behind, pressing him forward.
“God,” he said, as he slid into her, inch by glorious inch. “I swear, I’ll do this right next time. I’ll take my time. I’ll make it up to you. But right now--”
“Are you still talking?” she panted, squirming with the urgent need to move, to rock, to lift up and bring him home to her. “This is the part where you shut up and just do me, okay?”
“Right,” he said, and smiled down at her as he buried himself inside her. A dazzling fullness blurred the edges of her consciousness, mixed with an insatiable, driving hunger. “You can render me speechless next time.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, clenched her internal muscles and twisted under him. He hissed out a breath.
“Do...What...” He shook himself like a wet dog. “Do that again.”
“You stuttered.” She smiled at him. “Does that count as speechless, or should I do it again?”
He didn’t open his eyes. “Again.”
“Are you talking through your teeth?”
“Nixie.”
“Oh, fine.” She flexed again, pulling at him, urging him deeper. He was still moaning when she poked a finger into his ribs. “Listen, Erik, you weigh about five hundred pounds, okay? If you want me to drive, you’re going to have to roll over.”
His eyes opened a crack, something dominant and edgy gleaming in the blue depths as he smiled down at her. Her heart stuttered ahead on a jet of pure anticipation. “Who said anything about you driving?”
He surged forward, and she felt it all the way to the soles of her feet. He made love exactly the way she’d hoped he would, exactly the way she’d known he would. Hard-driving, straight-forward, goal-oriented. And God bless him, his goal appeared to be shattering her into a million shards of twinkling light.
She wrapped her legs around him and took him with her when she went.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I have to go,” Erik said.
“Hmmm?”
He lifted his face from the glorious tangle he and Nixie had made of her enormous four-poster bed. “I have to go.” He dropped his head back into the sheets and closed his eyes.
“Right.” Two warm fingers traced the indent of his spine to the crack of his ass. “Go ahead.”
“I’ll give you twenty minutes t
o cut that out,” he said, an impossible stirring of lust pinning him to the bed. “Then I’ll make you pay.”
She laughed, slapped him smartly on the butt. “I’d call you on that, but I think it might kill one or both of us.”
He caught himself smiling, and his heart flipped over and clenched with dread. He wasn’t supposed to be smiling and laughing with her. He wasn’t supposed to be seriously considering testing the limits of his endurance by taking her one last time. He was supposed to be walking away, physically satisfied, emotionally untouched, all lusty demons put to rest.
How had things gone so wrong?
He’d had his share of lost weekends, but he’d never experienced anything like what he’d just discovered with Nixie. She made love like nobody he knew, laughing, talking, teasing and playing the whole time, even during the parts he traditionally preferred not to chat through. But it was impossible to wall Nixie out of his heart. She was so ridiculously dear.
He needed space, he told himself firmly. A little distance to clear all the Nixie-dust out of his head so he could think straight. Surely this absurd feeling of connection, of contentment and bone-deep satisfaction was simply the by-product of too much sex, not enough sleep, and finally satisfying a month-long itch. Of course he was going to look at the woman responsible for easing it with some fondness. What guy wouldn’t?
He rolled his head to the side and opened one eye. She lay on her side next to him, her long, slim body bowed into an easy C, her hair a rosy tumble around that perfect face. Her mouth tipped into a do-me-baby smile, but her eyes were still and shining with a depth of love and passion that had his heart grinding helplessly, looking for the right gear.
“I really do have to go,” he said, sitting up abruptly.
She sat up as well, crossing her knees in front of her and resting her chin on them. “Why? What are you afraid will happen if you stay?”
He found his feet and stalked across her bedroom, following the trail of clothes toward the door. “I’m not afraid of anything, Nixie.” He kept his back to her as he pulled up his pants and jammed his sockless feet into his loafers.
“You shouldn’t be. I mean, come on. The dangerous stuff is already out of the way, right? The embarrassing declaration of unrequited love. The ill-advised leap into bed. There’s no use panicking now.”
“I’m not panicking.” Much. He glanced back, found her flushed and rumpled in the middle of that giant bed they’d used every inch of, a happily fallen angel. He looked away, but the image was already burned in his brain, on his heart.
“Then stay.” She leaned forward, her want tugging at him like a deadly and hypnotic undertow. “What harm could possibly come from hanging around and enjoying a little post-coital snack?”
He paused in the act of stuffing his arm into a wrinkled sleeve to stare at her. “Post-coital snack?”
She smiled. “I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
He checked in with his stomach. It was tight and hot with the desire to stay and the knowledge that he couldn’t. “No.”
“A little cold pizza isn’t going to voodoo you into loving me back, you know.”
He flinched. “Nixie, come on.”
“No, seriously. This needs to be said. We had sex, Erik. Really great, wall-banging, mattress-on-fire sex. Enhanced, for me at least, by the fact that I’m in love with you.”
He concentrated on buttoning his shirt, shaking off the silken strands she was spinning between them each time she said those words.
“But I understand that you don’t feel the same way. I understand that you have a lifetime of experience telling you not to take a chance on me.” She rose, pulling the sheet off the bed and twisting it around her like a toga. She scooped up one of his socks and handed it to him. “I get that. I respect that, okay? You don’t need to love me back for us to enjoy this...whatever it is. For however long it lasts.”
He stuffed the sock into his pocket and looked at her. “No.”
She frowned. “No what?”
“No I’m not going to take advantage of how you feel about me to bang you into next week whenever the spirit moves me, all right? You love me. I don’t love you back. That means the two consenting adults rule doesn’t apply. Anything I take from you is stolen, and I don’t want that.”
The laughing invitation went out of her eyes. “I see.”
Erik hated himself. Whoever said the truth would set you free was a lying bastard. The truth was carving Nixie up like a Christmas ham, and it wasn’t doing him any favors either. But what was the alternative? Handing over his heart on a silver platter so she could carve that up instead?
“For Christ’s sake, don’t look like that!” he said. “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. But I spent my whole life watching what happens when two people who aren’t equally in love try to make it work. My dad spent twenty five years loving my mom first, best, and always. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t waiting around for her to return the favor. Waiting for her to come home, to be a wife, a mother. To realize her family was worth at least as much as that vast, faceless constituency of hers. But she served at the pleasure of the people, and as it turned out, the people were damn possessive.” He gave her a very steady look. “Sound familiar?”
Her eyes skated away. “Erik, please--”
“I was a sophomore in college when my dad had a massive heart attack. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I came home for the holiday and found him on the kitchen floor, two days dead.”
Her face froze, her mouth gathered into a pink bud of sympathy. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly.
“I was, too. Still am. A man that good should never have died alone.” Erik lifted his shoulders, the memory a burden he’d never learned to carry comfortably. “He loved my mother exactly the way he promised: better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health. She’s the one who broke her word.”
“I’m not your mother. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“No. I’d do it to you.”
“What?”
He stuffed his shirt tails into his pants and walked back to her. God, he was making a hash of this. But she had to understand. She had to get it, once and for all, that he wasn’t going to love her back. It was just too damn dangerous.
He took her hands in his and forced himself to look down into the bewildered hurt swimming under the bravado in her eyes.
“Nixie, I don’t doubt your...feelings for me. And I’m humbled. I don’t deserve that kind of gift.”
“Why not?” She gazed up at him and he could see where his whiskers had marked the delicate skin of her throat. A thrill of possession shot through him, primitive and hot and unwelcome. He clamped down on the unruly tangle of emotions and forced himself to move forward.
To finish it.
“Because while I don’t doubt you love me, I don’t love you back. And I’m never going to.”
She jerked back as if slapped, and Erik missed her hands like he’d miss his own.
“But I do like you, Nixie. Genuinely. And that’s why I refuse to do to you what my mother did to my father, to me. I refuse to string you along with well-timed scraps of affection, just enough to keep you paralyzed with the false hope that one of these days I’m going to come to my senses and give you something I’m just not capable of. It would be criminally selfish, and while I’m a lot of things I’m not proud of, I’m not cruel.”
She eased away from him, pain and wonder in her eyes. “You could have fooled me.”
“Nixie, please. I know what it feels like to be where you are. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
She gave a bitter, incredulous laugh. “Bullshit. You’re scared. But it’s easier to be Mr. Nobility and reject me than to look inside your heart and figure out what you’re so damn afraid of.”
She turned to grab at her robe with shaking hands. She stuffed herself into it and when she spun back to him, he braced himself for the blast of rage and betrayal he knew he deserved. But her face was cool, co
mposed.
Erik took it like a punch to the gut. He’d been prepared for her anger, her hurt. Anything but this perfectly polite absence he’d demanded. It was as if she’d imagined wonderful things behind the closed door of his head but when she’d finally pried it open had found it barren and empty. Everything about her, from the resigned set of that mischievous mouth to the sudden distance in those verdant eyes, spoke not of love betrayed but of love disappointed.
“I can’t give you what you need,” he said, and the words sounded pathetic even to himself.
“Of course you can. You choose not to.”
He spread his hands. “I choose not to, then.”
She sucked in a sharp breath, and something stirred in those unreadable eyes, something hot and hurt and furious. “You’re a coward,” she said, her words cracking through the confused brew of emotions hanging in the air between them. “You don’t deserve me.”
“No. I don’t.”
She strode to the bedroom door, pulled it open and turned on him with utter composure. “I want you to leave.”
He nodded, misery clutching at his throat. God damn, why did doing the right thing always have to kick the shit out of him? The scent of lemons, sweet and hot, reached out to him as he passed her, and he stopped. He opened his mouth but whatever he’d planned to say evaporated in the face of her icy, magnificent disdain.
It was too late, he realized. Too late to save himself. Because maybe he could resist the laughing, smart-mouthed woman who charmed every human being she’d ever met. The lonely seeker who thought she could build a home out of volunteer work and disgusting eggplant-based casseroles. The broken woman-child who desperately wanted a family she could count on with him as the cornerstone.
But throw in this woman with the endlessly generous heart he’d just shattered, holding herself together with nothing but blazing courage and haughty determination? She destroyed him, and forced him to admit the truth, if only to himself.
Somehow, without his permission or even his consciousness, he’d fallen madly in love with Nixie Leighton-Brace. And not just with the famous face, the million dollar smile and the infectious easy charm, either. No, he’d gone and fallen in love with the whole complicated package.
