by Amber Bardan
The pressure exploded into more—bone-deep satiety coexisting with hunger. I eased myself all the way down his cock. He let me have that moment of control, of adjustment, as my flesh strained to accept him.
My fingers tightened on his shoulder. Need plowed through me. I panted. He overwhelmed me. My thighs quivered, knees forced wide to clear the breadth of his hips.
He took up all my space. In my cunt. In my head. In my heart. I shifted. His cock pressed high in my vagina, hitting a sensitive, wonderful place.
His chin rose, his head falling against the headrest. His Adam’s apple jutted. It was work to take him. The struggle for leverage made me awkward in a way I’d never been.
His grip on my ass halted movement.
“You’re hot.” He growled. “Your pussy is so hot.”
He held me right there, his cock buried all the way.
Heat smothered me, as though at his command. I could combust. I grabbed his wrists, resisting his hold, pushing for friction. Sensations intensified, winding through me in heart-stopping waves.
He grabbed a fistful of my hair and seized me against his chest, thrusting deep. “You’re so hot and wet.”
I wrapped my arms around him, and held on.
He squeezed my hair. My face pressed to his neck. Air filled my lungs—ready for screaming. His scent flooded my senses.
His sweat seasoned my lips.
“You’ve soaked my balls.”
He shoved deeper, his cool balls grinding against me. Slippery. Soaked from my arousal. My muscles seized. Bliss slammed into me. I shouted into his neck. He crushed me, thrusting and fucking into my orgasm.
The walls of my vagina shook around his thickness. My knees slipped against the leather. He clutched my hip, pulled my hair and bucked. I came harder. He stiffened inside me, closely, intimately, like nothing I’d ever felt. A cry ripped from my chest. He came in me. His cock pushed hard. My pussy clamped down on him. His heat spurted into me.
Pleasure stole my bones.
I collapsed into him. His touched gentled. Our breaths turned soft. He shifted. Our combined lovemaking trickled toward my thigh.
I pressed my face deeper to his neck and closed my eyes.
“Emma?” he whispered at my temple.
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
My lungs ached but I still breathed. I opened my eyes, and glanced at my fingers resting above his heart. “I’ve never done that before.”
He didn’t ask what—the “what” must be trickling onto him too. Don’t know why I had to say it. Don’t know why admitting it made my lips shake.
He tilted my chin up, then I realized the truth.
“I know,” he said.
Avner knew. He knew me. When everyone else questioned my choices, he was who understood that I was the most cautious of all my friends.
There was nothing reckless about anything I’d ever done or how I’d dated. It was all so very cautious. Wary. Guarded.
“Me either.”
I straightened. “Really?”
“Really,” he said, his voice so deep, his sincerity so plain, that I knew him too then. Because he was thirty-three. Rich enough to have his partners tested for his convenience, and he’d never once been reckless either.
He was unguarded with me.
I pressed my mouth gently to his, grateful to share a first with him, even though the truth was with Avner everything was new.
Chapter Nineteen
Emma
We drove through the gates of a high-walled resort, toward a gleaming building with sweeping arches and delicate lacy detail. “Wow, the hotel is stunning.”
“It’s not a hotel.”
“Resort?” I stared outside. A resort with top-notch security, apparently. I’d seen the cameras on the way in. Now that we were inside, it was impossible not to notice the guards patrolling the parameters.
“No, it’s my house.”
I laughed. “It’s not.”
“It is.”
I looked at Avner seated beside me, and blinked. “Your house is in Melbourne.”
“My other house.” He gazed out his window. He’d grown quieter the closer we came to here. I followed his gaze and took the place in again. On second look it wasn’t as huge as it was grand. I’m not sure why this house shocked me so much. This was exactly the kind of place he should live in. This is what I’d expected to see when he’d first taken me home with him. Who, if not someone like Avner, could live in a virtual palace? He possessed more wealth than countries did.
Yet, here was a man who’d built himself a modern family house on the outskirts of my hometown. Who had one car in his garage, and no household staff I knew of.
“This was your place when you lived here?” My stomach dipped.
He’d become so normal to me, I’d forgotten there was almost nothing normal about Avner.
He didn’t answer.
I glanced at him. His body lined with tension. The car stopped outside the front doors.
Holy shit. It occurred to me. “Does your family live here?”
Had he taken me home home?
“No.”
“Did they? Is this your family house?”
“No.” His answers may have been getting shorter, but that didn’t inspire me to be less curious. Now that I’d pictured his family, I needed to know more.
“You mentioned your dad—” Actually Angelina had, but whatever. “What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“Is she living?”
“She is.”
“Does she live in India?” Is that why we were really here? Holy crap, was I about to meet her, after all?
He undid his seatbelt, still not returning my gaze. “No.”
“Where does she live?”
“Not here.”
“When did you last speak?”
The man who’d collected us from the airplane and driven us here, Rohan, opened my door. I didn’t exit.
“A long time ago.”
I undid my seatbelt. So he doesn’t speak to his mother... “Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?” Finally, he looked at me—fixed his full brooding attention on me.
“I didn’t say anything.”
He reclined in his seat, now apparently not as eager to get out as a moment ago. “You didn’t, but you have something to say?”
“Nope.”
“I think perhaps you do.”
“Oh sure, now you can string a sentence.” I shuffled toward the door.
He took my hand, stopping me. “What was hmm?”
I’d struck a nerve. Presumed something about him and he knew it.
“It’s nothing, just something my mother once told me.”
One of the few pieces of advice she ever had the chance to pass on.
He leaned in. “What did your mother tell you?”
I sighed. Nothing he’d enjoy hearing repeated. “It’s not important.”
He stared. His jaw set. Dammit. He was going to be impossible until I told him.
“Fine.” He asked for it. I’d let him have it. “Mum said everything I need to know about a man can be judged by how he treats his mother.”
His face clouded. First with fury, then with pain that tore his lips back from his teeth. He hissed.
Shit.
Why’d I let him goad me into saying that?
“So tell me, Emma, how do you judge me?”
My breath hitched. This man with his sharp jaw and strong bones, with his immenseness and his dangerous eyes, with his low commanding voice and his control—my assessment hurt him.
No, my judgment.
“I don’t judge you
.”
“You did. You did with hmm.” He released my hand. “So at least give me the courtesy of telling me what you think you’ve learned about me?”
I never should have said anything. Even if it were true. Dad had been a whining prick to his mother. He’d been a meaner whining prick to mine.
I touched his arm. “Only that you don’t talk to your mother.”
“Wrong.” He leaned in all the way. “My mother doesn’t talk to me.”
My lips parted and air rushed out.
His expression blazed. “I wish every day that she would. I wish every minute that I could take back the reasons why she doesn’t. I long every second to have been a better man when she was watching.”
His words reverberated between us, then settled like a glove around my heart.
I moved my touch to his face. “I’m sorry, Avner.”
“You shouldn’t be, I deserve it.” His cheek jutted against my palm but he didn’t pull away. “What does that say about me?”
He watched me with bright and open eyes, filled with the pain of a past perhaps as lonely and bitter as mine.
“That you’re a real person.”
I’m not sure I knew it until then—not really. That he had a life beyond enigma. Beyond the intimacy and real raw moments we had together. Underneath the secrets there was a person who was someone’s son. A man who’d had complicated relationships with other people.
“I’m sorry I made unfair assumptions. I’m sorry you haven’t been able to work things out with your mum.” I gripped his face. “And I understand that some things can’t be worked out, even if that doesn’t make it easier to bear.”
He wrapped his fingers around my wrist, yet he didn’t press me deeper to him, or push me away. He just held on like that, braced, as though my fingertips might pierce him.
I don’t know why he was compelled to drag me to India. I hadn’t wanted to come. Yet, here, for the first time, his past gained colors.
They might not all be pretty, but neither were mine.
* * *
He glided through the water, arms windmilling in long, even synchronicity. Never skipping a beat. I rolled to my side on the sun lounge. He reached the edge, then dipped under the water in a flip and propelled off the wall. I dragged myself up on sun-drunk limbs.
The wet lap, lap, lap of water beckoned. I strode to the edge, stopping where the teal tile border touched my bare toes. The chlorine hit my lungs first, my stomach second. A familiar churning rose, twisting through my middle.
“Have you decided to join me?”
My gaze flicked to Avner, gliding closer with only his face out of the water like a shark fin.
“I don’t care for pools.” My pulse kicked up as he reached the edge.
My toes curled, growing roots on the ground.
He paused there but didn’t rise further out of the water. “Yet, you looked tempted.”
Had I?
Maybe for an instant I had been. Maybe I’d wanted to slink through the water the way he had. Maybe I wanted to glide blissfully like that.
Maybe I’d wanted to be free.
He grabbed the edge, drawing himself close enough that he could grab my ankle if he wanted to. I rocked back, resisting the compulsion to leap out of reach.
My chest thumped.
Sometimes people think it’s funny to do things like throw girls in pools.
But he didn’t reach out, he released the edge and drifted back a few feet. “The water is cool.”
My skin prickled, the sweat stuck to me chilling at the suggestion in his voice. He watched me intently, gaze narrowed and focused, as though he knew things he couldn’t possibly know.
Like why I’m not so much into water.
I cleared my throat. “Did you swim in school?”
“I was on the college swim team.” He stayed there straddling the water, watching me.
“I bet you were.” I smiled, picturing him as a broad-shouldered twenty-year-old. My chest unclenched. “I bet you had a swimming scholarship.”
He squinted. It could’ve been the sun, or it could be that we were slinking closer to the topic of his unmentionable past. “I did.”
“So you swam competitively?” I moved a little to the edge, then lowered myself inch by inch to the ground and sat. “Did you often win?”
His rich chuckle rolled across the water. “I always won.”
A laugh rippled through me too. I should’ve known. Yet, even so, the image had me thinking of who he’d been then. “Why did you go to college in the States?”
He’d called Australia home, he’d had family in Italy, lived in India, but where was Avner from?
“That’s where the best college offered the best scholarship.”
I peered at him. “Where would you have studied otherwise?”
His dad was an aid worker. Could his family have afforded to send him without a scholarship?
He glided closer again. “I’d have taken the next best offer.” His voice dipped deeper, the telltale sign this conversation was about to shut down.
I twisted toward him, glancing over the edge into water I knew was shallow enough to stand in. Not that I’d be going in, but it eased the rush of adrenaline that hit as I lowered my feet, dipped my toes and faced him. “Did your parents travel to America with you?”
“They did not.” His words were clipped, and he swam closer, then rose up out of water that proved only to be chest deep.
Beads of liquid cascaded over his chest. The deep olive of his skin took on a shimmer. My tongue darted between my lips.
His pecs bumped my knees.
My gaze slammed into his. I hadn’t realized he’d gotten so close. He grabbed my thighs. I gripped the ledge.
“You’re breathing fast.” The sun hit his face, turning his shrewd eyes deep amber and gold. “What are you afraid of?”
My nails scraped the underside of the ledge.
I didn’t glance at the water, the greater of the two things that right then truly scared me. “You’re all wet.” I raised a hand I wished were steady and set it on his broad shoulder.
“You’re very—” my touch smoothed over his slippery skin “—very sexy, all wet, Avner. That’s why I’m breathing fast.”
His nostrils flared a fraction. “That’s a reason.” His grip tightened on my thighs. He pulled me closer, and claimed the space between my knees for his own. “But we both know that it’s not the only one.”
My breath caught. I grabbed both his shoulders.
“Do you always flirt with fear, or only with me?” He dragged my hips. My ass scraped on tiles through my bikini briefs, and my heart knocked against my ribs.
“What are you talking about?”
He slid me a little more. One more inch and I could slip right into the pool. But his arms came around me, and he lifted me against him. My chest slid over his. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and clung. Water lapped around my calves—my knees.
His mouth pressed into my hair as though he were telling a secret. “Does it turn you on to be a little bit afraid?”
Adrenaline plowed through me, lifting my stomach like a theme-park ride, making my lips tingle, and fingers shake.
“I’ve asked myself why.” He grabbed my ass and stepped back from the edge. I held on, my entire body pulsing with electric buzz. “Why does this woman who resists me, also lure me?” His words pierced through the howl of blood in my ears. “Why does she look at me like she’s in the middle of the dream, when she also trembles against me?”
Water climbed around us, moving toward my waist. I clutched him with the full force of my muscles. My head spun. I breathed into the feeling of something between panic and delirium.
His breath poured in a hot, hoarse whisper
. “Why does she struggle, when she’s wettest when I hold her down?”
I twitched. My back met a solid force. The other side of the pool. I reached behind me with one arm for the ledge, but hung on to Avner with my other.
With that space between us, I saw his face, impassioned so fiercely he could’ve been angry—chin low, gaze hooked on me.
He wasn’t done with whatever he was doing. “You came to the edge, and I saw right here—” he released one hand from my waist and touched the base of my neck “—your heart pounding like it were about to break through skin.”
My pulse leaped against his touch, leaving no doubt he’d detect every little variation in the beat.
“The same way it did in Italy when you’d step out onto a balcony. Yet, you lean over railings and dip your toes anyway.” He moved, his touch circling my throat, baring me back against the edge. “Just like you come after me.”
My head swirled, woozily and not so different to when I’d been drugged. His voice moved through me, through my memory, tempting out flashes of things—like the first time I’d turned up to a fight. Took a punch. A real punch designed to knock me down. The first punch that hadn’t been from my father. How my blood trembled, scared yes, but alight with exhilaration. Because I chose it and owned it.
He drove his big hard body against mine. “You’re afraid because I’m stronger than you and that turns you on.” He squeezed—just enough for the pressure to flare without choking. “You’re scared right now, that I could drop you...”
My eyes flared, heart stopped, breath vanished.
“But you know I’ve got you.” He released my throat.
I didn’t fall. Not with his body holding me up. I’d never fall with Avner. That’s why he was the first time I’d taken a risk on a man.
My chest constricted—hard.
“And now we both know why you’re here.” He tugged at my hair, jerking my head back, but I could hardly see him through the building sheen. “I’m your darkest desire.”
I shuddered, shivered, shook, but couldn’t deny it.
He was the fantasy I never let myself have—dangerous and safe.
Attentive and possessive.
Frightening and irresistible.
