He skimmed his knuckle up her arm, took it over the point of her shoulder. “You’re not cold,” he observed. Winding his fingers tightly beneath the slight spaghetti strap of her blouse, he savored the feel of the sliding silk. “I’ve touched you. You’ve never been cold to me.” He twisted the strap. It snapped.
“What scares you?” she returned. She was trembling. And yet she was back to speaking to him in that Zen hummingbird voice that soothed him to no end. He’d missed the lure of her voice.
“Using you,” he said, giving her the same answer he had weeks before. He pressed an open kiss to the shoulder he’d bared. Then he turned his mouth into her throat.
“Gavin?”
“Hmm?”
She sighed. “Use me.”
Shit. His arousal took a jump. With a grunt, he picked her up again. The silk had to compete with the satin of her skin against his chest. It all went in tandem with the leather. The triad of texture was erotic as hell.
He found the bed and dipped a knee into it, taking her down to sheets that were already rumpled and…
Silk. Dear God. The material would make him lose his mind before daylight. The simple thought of taking her wrapped up in silk sheets made him moan. He sat up. Reading him in darkness, she handed him the packet she’d stolen from his billfold. He made quick work of the clasp of her pants and peeled them off, one leg at a time. He pushed the waistband of his jeans farther down and carefully fed the rubber around his girth. Then he grabbed her by the calves and dragged her closer, kicking off his jeans as he came down on his hands. He teased her mouth with a kiss before working his way down. The lone strap holding the blouse gave a satisfying snap when he balled the material near the neckline and gave a hearty pull. She helped him work it over her hips, down to her toes.
He turned his knee out against hers, opening her up. He couldn’t see. But he could touch. He could taste. He’d take advantage of that. But first—
His weight settled over hers, torsos aligning. Grabbing her hands in his, he tugged them straight to either side. He fit his hips against hers. Her pelvis jumped. A hot gasp lifted. “Warm,” she panted, dipping her head back into the covers. Her hips rose against his in a circling wave. “You’re so warm.”
“I’m burned up, baby.” He brushed his lips across hers. He brought her knees up and arched, lifting his head when he felt her bloom and dampen. He turned his palms into hers, twining finger by finger.
She dug her heels into the mattress and hiked her hips until the head of his arousal met the juncture between her thighs. Then she dug her ankles into the base of his spine, inviting him in one glorious inch. “Warm me up, too,” she ordered. “I want to be warm like you.”
His restraint snapped like the strap of her blouse. Any thought of finesse climbed into the back seat and he found himself buried, his face burrowed in the sheet near her head.
She quaked from head to toe. Her legs didn’t leave him, but the fine bones of her hands trembled under his. “Ah,” she said as he remained deep inside her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Mavis. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said, pressing her cheek to his. She swallowed. “No.”
“I’ve hurt you.”
She shook her head. “No. Just…ahhh.” Her lips grazed his cheek. Still, she trembled.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, stiff and still.
“I think…” She sighed. “I think you should kiss me.”
Instantly, he fit his mouth to hers. He treated her, kissing the way she always seemed to want. Curling his palms beneath hers, he kissed her slow. He kissed her deep. He kissed her as if they had the rest of their lives for kissing.
The tension in her muscles melted until her fingers laced with his and her legs loosened so her feet could venture down his calves. They flattened, caressing. She kneaded her center against his in circles, rivulets of friction. He caught on to them, drawing shapes from the center of his hips. Releasing her hands, he cupped the back of her head, spreading his fingers wide in her hair, guiding it back to the bed. He kept kissing, not giving up the link she needed as the circles grew wider and faster.
Her toes pressed against the tops of his, like boots in stirrups. It was her hands now that dug into the small of his back, mashing his pelvis into hers. He felt her nails. He felt her grow harried and piqued.
“What do you need?” he breathed. “What do you need from me?”
“Harder,” she said.
His curse was reverent. He pressed down into the bed. She lifted. He thrusted.
“Oh,” she said on a rush.
He dropped his chin to his chest. “I can’t… I’m not gentle.”
“Stop it.” She brought her hips up again to meet his and kept circling. “Stop whatever makes you think this isn’t right. That you’re too big, too rough. Stop whatever’s telling you you’re wrong for me. You’re worthy. This is good. So good. Gavin, if you stop, one of us is going to scream, and I’m afraid it might be me.”
“I can’t stop.”
“Good.” She tipped her chin up as he went from circling to rocking.
Light flickered against the windows. Heat lightning at a fair distance. For a second, he saw her, the parts of her visible to him. Her fists were wrapped up in sheets. The smile on her face and the high-stepping friction at the point where they joined…it was enough. Mavis disappeared again into the cloak of night and he closed his eyes to keep her painted against his eyelids.
She was right. It felt good. Like coming back to life. He rocked faster.
She began to make noise, little mewls.
Hold it together, he thought as the skin around the waistline of his back drew in tight and his nervous system went up in flames. Hold it together.
She cried out, once. Her head slammed back into the sheets. She cried out again, her feet lifting her lower half against the brunt of his charge. Gavin groaned in appreciation as the climax ripped through her. With an animal sound, he lowered his head and kept charging.
Her arms locked around his middle, not giving up the link. She raised her torso to his so the slide would be complete, toes to chest. She kissed him. Then she kissed the wolf on his chest.
He couldn’t stop, he realized again. He ground to a halt as the dark room reeled and the badass sensations he’d felt up to this point tore off their wee lamb skins and went on a Hulk-sized blitz. They blitzed until he was nothing but a shaking, heaving beast. Then he dissolved over her, rubber all over.
She clasped him around the shoulders when he began to shift his weight off of her. “Don’t,” she said. He could hear the hum of satisfaction in her throat. “Don’t you dare, Gavin Savitt.”
“Taking you with me,” he whispered raggedly. He shook his head to clear it. “Taking you with me this time, Frexy.” Then he flopped the both of them back to the bed, her on top where she could nestle.
* * *
MAVIS FELT GAVIN wake three times in the night. Once to entangle himself with her further. The next to turn away. She curled against his back, caressing until she felt him subside. Nightmares jolted him even as sleep held him in repose—repose that was not repose. He kicked her only once, lightly on the shin before muttering a sleep-rasped, “Frex?”
“Still here.” She kissed the center of his spine as proof.
He tugged her hand from his waist. He pressed it against the wall of his chest, covering it with his. She counted the beats beneath her hand until they dwindled back into an easy cadence.
I’m not going anywhere. The certainty had been there throughout the experience. She’d ride out his storms until he no longer doubted that she could handle them. Then she’d ride out some more, however many he had to endure. Touching her cheek against the warm press of his back, she gathered his heat. She let it cover her like a blanket and drifted back to sleep, satisfied he had done the same.
When next she woke, it was near dawn. The room was dark, yet the night had lost its inkiness.
Gavin was gone.
She padded downstairs, wrapping the loose sheet around her. Halfway down, she heard the shower running. At the bottom, she found the door near the landing closed, the light a golden stripe underneath.
She entered. The shower door was pulled to. She saw his outline through the glass.
Mavis shed the sheet. She made sure to make noise so that when she opened the shower it wouldn’t trigger reflexes she knew he wanted buried.
His head was under the spray when she stepped in. He peered back over his shoulder and the arm he had posted high against the wall. The one good eye did a steep dive over her naked torso. “Beautiful,” he greeted.
Nobody had ever called her beautiful. Not since she was a girl and her parents didn’t know any better. She moved to him, admiring his lines. The perfect shape of his behind. He had a birthmark on his right cheek. It was shaped like an apple. A smile snuggled into the lower half of her face, right at home. “You’re still here.”
“Still here,” he echoed.
She touched him. He smelled like the soap her mother made from scratch and sold at Flora. “Thank you.”
His feet circled until she was looking at more than his lines. More muscle. More flesh. Ink and sex.
Then he kissed her again and the ache she’d thought he’d treated swallowed her up. Smoothing her palms up his chest to the column of his neck, she linked them over his nape. His hands planed over her, around and back to rest low on her hips. They melded together as one.
She broke away. “Did you happen to grab the last—”
“Condom? No.”
She cursed.
He chuckled.
“What?”
“I’ve never heard you cuss that badly before.” His head angled down to hers again before his gaze seized on her collarbone. He stopped, eyes narrowing as he tried to make out the shapes that ranged from one side to the other. His fingers came up to trace, barely there. “Ah. This is what got you in trouble.”
“Moon cycles,” she explained. Helping him, she moved from the first shape to the last, left to right. “Waning…to waxing. But this isn’t the tattoo that got me into trouble.”
His stare fused to hers. “There’s another?”
Guiding his hand around, she planted it against the back of her ribs on the left. “This one got me grounded for an entire season.”
“What is it?” he asked, grazing the skin. “Butterfly?” He grinned. “Dream catcher?”
Mavis turned her eyes to the feral thing on his chest. “Did you know that ancient Romans claimed they were descended from wolves?” she asked, quietly. When surprise dawned and his gaze swept back to hers, her nerves flared. “And in Scotland…there was supposedly this goddess named the Cailleach. She ruled the dark half of the year and was often depicted riding a wolf.”
Gavin had stilled.
“They called her the ‘protector of wild things.’” When he said nothing at all, Mavis shifted her feet. Water driblets had glossed the side of her face. She swiped them off. “I always wondered…what riding a wolf would be like.”
Slowly, he brushed shower mist over the surface of her hair. He brushed her cheek, tipping her face to the light. His thumbs rubbed the space beneath her eyes. Makeup, she realized. The water, heat and sleep had no doubt spilled her eye makeup down her cheeks. He rubbed gently, methodically until it was gone. Then he scanned her, seeing beyond the shadows. “I like lookin’ at you in the light.”
She dragged teeth over her lower lip. “I like when you open your mouth.”
“Thirty-seven,” he pronounced. “You have thirty-seven freckles. Just on your face.”
She didn’t have an answer. Not yet. He was looking at her. Nothing between them. No pretenses. No expiration date.
Nakedness came in so many forms.
“You spook me.”
She rubbed the back of his shoulders when the whisper caught. “You spook me, too,” she said back. Her heart walloped her breastbone because it almost sounded like they were saying something else.
Like I love you.
“You know me,” he acknowledged.
She nodded. “I know you.”
He went back to exploring the moon cycles. “I was rough.”
“The best things are,” she told him. “But that doesn’t change how lovely…emboldening—how great they can be in the end. My body’s singing, Gavin.”
“I haven’t always been nice. I pushed in the beginning. Pushed you.”
“You didn’t push me away,” she pointed out.
“I wasn’t strong enough,” he admitted. “I don’t think I need just anybody. I needed you then. I need you now.”
It felt good to hear. “I’ve pushed you, too,” she acknowledged. “I pushed you when some might say it was unwise to.”
“Yeah. ’Cuz here there be monsters.”
She smiled at his pronounced drawl. “I’m glad you’re here, pushing me.”
He looked at her in the stark way that made her forget he was legally blind. “Keep pushing me,” he told her. A rakish smile took over. Mavis saw the old Gavin, and her pulse was slipping and grabbing all over the place again. “Good things happen when you push.”
“I will,” she vowed.
Carefully, he turned her to face the opposite direction. She let him guide her around. His hands swept, roving, over her torso. She felt him at her back, his heat. His sex. “No protection. Remember?”
He nibbled a concise path along her jaw, grasping her breast in a hold firm enough to bring her to attention. “Admit it that I hurt you.”
Mavis moved, unable to help herself, when his fingers veered toward the apex of her thighs. As they rubbed her folds together in a light pinch, she felt friction. She felt an instant of recharge. “I’m okay, Gavin.”
“Okay isn’t acceptable,” he said at her ear. “Okay’s basic.” He rocked her from side to side simply, soothingly. A contrast against his rough-textured fingertips. “You should have something else. Something nonbasic.”
“Sounds excellent.” She rocketed onto her toes, stretching her back along his front as he flicked her chief erogenous zone with his thumb, then delved inside her.
“Hurt?” he asked.
She shook her head. She latched on, roping one arm up around his neck. She swayed into the lance arcing against her back.
He panted against her shoulder. He kissed it. “Thirty-one. You have thirty-one freckles on this shoulder.” He kept kissing, connecting the dots.
“If you don’t stop counting—” she rocked on her toes again as he plucked her like a well-strung harp “—you’ll never be done.”
“You think so good, Frexy.” He took her mouth when she offered it. “Come.”
She nodded quickly because it was coming. Her back arched as the wave curled.
“That’s it,” he said as she rode it out. He groaned as the orgasm gripped her. “That’s it, Mavis.”
It released, tossing her messily to shore. Her knees buckled. His arms banded against her middle, keeping her upright.
“I aim to do that again,” he whispered against the cup of her ear.
Mavis caught her breath and turned around. “That sounds good. Really good. But before you do that…” She planted her hands against his chest, backing him up until he was flush with the shower wall. She eyed him up and down, homing in on the areas that needed work. “Let me reciprocate.”
* * *
“THIS ISN’T WHAT I had in mind,” he noted.
“You got yours in the shower,” Mavis reminded him. “Think of this as a bonus round. Inhale, roll the shoulders forward, releasing the neck as you tuck your chin into your chest. Round your spine.”
Gavin pushed the
breath out, following Mavis in what she called “cat-cows.” The view wasn’t bad. He sneaked a glance at the mat to his right. Dawn was just creeping through the windows, fresh new-day dew clinging to the screens. She’d opened a few panes so that the sounds of the river, the birds, could accompany the flow of respirations. She wore yoga pants and a sports bra.
As he toweled off after the deep-tissue massage she’d offered in the shower, she’d come at him with a pair of rolled-up mats and his discarded Fruit of the Loom briefs. “Put these on,” she’d said, “and meet me downstairs.”
By the time he joined her in her living room, she’d pushed the couches back to the walls to make space for the mats. They’d started cross-legged on the floor, breathing. He hadn’t thought much of the exercise. What good was he at relaxing?
Watching her, though, in her element, was a trip.
“If your knees hurt,” she murmured, “you can fold a blanket under them.”
“Knees are fine,” he answered.
“Good. Exhale, come back up. Broaden those shoulders. Press the hips back. Arch the spine, looking up… And exhaling, round forward and down…”
Here’s what that Zen voice had been made for, he thought. It helped, as much as the stretch.
“If you draw your belly button in toward your spine, you can bring it deeper.” When he couldn’t stifle a groan, she added, “It’s almost like massaging the abdomen.” With a glance at him, she instructed, “Don’t force your chin in. Just release the neck. Nice, gentle stretch.”
He was neither nice nor gentle, but he did as he was told. The hell if it didn’t feel good.
“Cat-cowing is great first thing in the morning,” she said. “It creates room in the back and torso. It strengthens the abdomen, opens the chest. It eases the mind and is great for stress. It’s really just an awesome way to wake up, warming up the body.”
Harlequin Superromance May 2018 Box Set Page 23
