by Amy Andrews
“No. Just checking in.”
Ivy took a moment to check him out. His broad pecs, his big shoulders, and beautiful biceps made her dizzy. Or maybe it was the lingering smell of cardamom.
She was hyperaware of the unfinished business between them. Even more aware that they were completely alone—no cops in the carpark, no busy road or the bustle of hotel life outside their door.
The urge to touch him was almost overwhelming. She wanted to run her hands over him so freaking bad.
Awesome.
One orgasm and she was turning into some kind of sex freak.
How was it possible to want to scratch his eyes out as much as she wanted to scratch that perfect back up while he pounded her into his mattress?
“Can I…help you with something?”
Ivy stepped into his room, her heart skipping madly in her chest. “I came to borrow some underwear.”
“Oh.” His startled gaze flew to the jersey, zeroing in on her crotch area with X-ray-like intensity.
Ivy felt that stare right at the point of contact as a wild flutter kicked to life deep and low. It was a revelation to realize he still wanted her, too. She could see it in the smolder of his eyes. In the bob of his throat. In the tension of his neck muscles.
“Sure,” he said, moving awkwardly to a tall chest of dark wooden drawers, opening the top one and pulling out a black pair with a broad green waistband. He walked them over to her, stopping before he got too near and passed them over. “They’ll probably be a little baggy.”
Ivy took them. She couldn’t give a rat’s ass how baggy they were because, suddenly, she did not want to put them on. She dropped them on the ground and took a step closer to him.
“Ivy?” he said, looking down at the underwear. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t know what she was doing. She just needed to be closer. To run her hands through his damp hair and over his shoulders and his back. To absorb the heat coming off him and bury her nose in his neck and inhale all his spicy, male goodness. To lick his tattoo and tear his towel away.
She took another step and leaned in, close enough to kiss him if she wanted. And she wanted. She didn’t care how pissed she was at him. Right now she needed to finish what they’d started the other night.
She might as well get something out of this whole debacle. And she’d deal with how fucked up that was later.
She laid her hand over one broad, warm pectoral. He flinched slightly, but Ivy could feel the hard thump of his heart beneath her palm.
She loved the way their skin looked together. Golden bronze and milky white.
“Ivy…”
The strain in his voice roughened up the silk of his accent and brushed like sandpaper against her skin. He circled his fingers around her wrist and tried to dislodge her. Ivy resisted and he dropped his hand, but they both knew a man who could kick down a door could easily pry her off if he really wanted to.
“I thought you didn’t like me.”
Ivy dragged her gaze from his chest to his face. “I don’t. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Like this. With no clothes on. Have you thought about me like this? Naked?”
“Ivy.” The strain in his voice was replaced with a very British sounding warning.
“Have you?”
He swallowed. “Yes.”
Ivy leaned forward and nuzzled his chest, dead center. She was pushing her luck but she sensed he was open to pushing. If he’d really wanted her to keep away he could have easily picked her up and deposited her outside.
But he hadn’t.
Her senses filled with soap and cardamom. “Mmm,” she said with a half moan as she inhaled deeply. “You smell good.”
He didn’t say anything, but he made no move to reject her either. She brushed her nose farther to the left, stroking it against the side of his nipple. It constricted a little and Ivy couldn’t help herself, she opened her mouth over the top, moaning fully this time as she sucked on it, giving her tongue free reign over its flatness.
Vaguely she heard him swear and his hand clamped on to her hip, but he didn’t push her away.
She released his nipple but continued her line of nuzzling around the meaty fullness of his bicep from front to back, right around to his shoulder blade. Her fingers trailed along just ahead of her mouth, brushing against the smooth skin as if he were embossed in braille and she was trying to read him.
She was conscious of the bed nearby as she buzzed her lips all the way across to his right shoulder blade and his tattoo. She traced her fingers around the pattern of stars, the muscles sloping from his neck to shoulders tensing at the caress.
She counted each one. Eighteen.
“What does it mean?’
“It’s Scorpio,” came the gravelly reply. “The constellation.”
Ivy traced her index finger around and around it. “You’re a Scorpio?”
He shook his head and she was distracted by the brush of his hair at his nape. “I was part of Scorpio team.”
Ah. “Where’d you get it done?”
“Some gypsy woman did all of us when we were on leave in Germany one time.”
Ivy leaned forward and pressed her nose to it as she thought about that group tattoo session. If the rest of the guys in Seth’s unit were half as good looking as him the woman must have thought all her Christmases had come at once!
She dropped a string of kisses along it before continuing on, nuzzling his other bicep all the way around to his front again, to his other nipple, giving it the same treatment as the first.
His hand slid back onto her hip and it was him that moaned this time. The sound went straight to her belly, pulling taut, the muscles undulating. She slipped her hand down his chest to the knot of fabric where the towel was fastened.
His hand clamped around her wrist, hard. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She looked up into his face. “Because you’re hard?”
His jaw clenched. “Yes.”
“Do you think I’m going to swoon like some Victorian virgin?”
“I think you’re playing with fire.”
Ivy’s heart tripped. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? What I want?”
Her fingers fumbled with the towel and his fingers tightened around her wrist. “Ivy.”
“I want to look at you,” she murmured. “I want a chance to touch and explore like you had the other night.”
He dragged in a breath. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“That’s right,” she muttered, her hand still clamped around the knot of his towel. “It was a mistake.”
His blue eyes clouded. “Ivy…you know I—”
She cut him off with the shake of her head. “That was then. This is now. You’re Seth and I’m Ivy. There are no false identities. No secrets. No reasons not to.”
He stared at her for long moments, his gaze turbulent, then something changed and his hold on her wrist eased and fell away. Ivy’s pulse fluttered madly as she pulled the towel fastening undone and the fabric fell to the ground.
She was conscious of the heavy weight of his erection pressing upward between their bodies and deliberately stepped back. She wanted to feast her eyes on his cock.
She wasn’t disappointed.
It sat out long and thick, proudly standing to attention, a fascinating vein bulging along most of its length. He looked like a Greek statue, a study in pure masculine beauty, a god.
Ivy dragged her gaze up from his hard-on to the flatness of his belly and higher again to the width of his chest, the smoothness of his neck and the brooding blue of his eyes.
“Damn,” she whispered. He was all muscles and planes, dips and hollows, his erection jutting proudly out.
A fully aroused man in his sexual prime.
He didn’t say anything, just stood there, watching her as the blood surged through Ivy’s veins thick as molasses. She wanted to touch him, to step in, take his cock in her hand, lift on her tippy toes and kis
s him, but she needed the full effect first.
“Turn around.”
Ivy wasn’t sure if she was asking him or telling him, but either way her husky voice made it sound more than a little dirty. And it was a turn-on to be the one giving the orders.
An even bigger turn-on when he complied.
His back was as perfect as the front. From the scalloped hardness of his bronzed shoulder blades to his tat all the way down the furrow of his spine to a truly awesome ass. Seth Rodrigo did not disappoint.
Ivy’s gaze crept lower, brushing down the backs of his legs. A messy knot of scar tissue halted it midway down his thigh. She frowned, advancing closer, sinking to her knees before she’d even realized what she’d done. One hand slid around the front of his thigh as she stroked the uneven tissue. He sucked in a breath but didn’t move away.
She didn’t remember seeing this the morning the police had almost busted them together in bed. But he had gotten into his Levi’s pretty damn fast.
“What happened here?”
“Bullet wound. Afghanistan.”
Ivy shut her eyes. With her hands on him like this he felt so strong, so alive, so real. It was easy to forget that Seth had faced death many times. That this wound could have killed him. That he no doubt had other wounds. Ones she couldn’t see. She pressed a kiss to it.
“Was this the one you told me about? Where my father saved your life?”
“Yes.”
Ivy made a note to thank the Colonel for that. If she ever spoke to him again.
Slowly, Ivy stood, sliding both hands up the side of his legs as her front came into contact with his back. Her hands continued up, gliding from his hips onto his belly, then up to his chest before entwining him in an embrace.
His hand came up to cover hers and for a moment she thought he might try to pry her off him but he made no move to do so. She pressed a line of kisses between his shoulder blades, her nostrils flaring at his fresh, clean smell.
She dropped her arms and stepped away. Every muscle in his back—from his butt to his neck—tensed. His hands clenched and unclenched by his sides.
He was waiting for her next move.
And she was done waiting.
Ivy whipped his jersey over her head. Air currents cooled her heated flesh, but did nothing for her molten hot core.
“Turn around,” she ordered again, her voice a husky whisper now as she contemplated his reaction to her nudity.
He turned slowly, his erection leading the way, his eyes widening as he took all of her in. “Fuck…Ivy.”
Her nipples ruched as his gaze licked over them like the hot swipe of his tongue. “Yes, please.”
His jaw clenched. “Is this what you really want to do? Lose your virginity to some guy who lied to you? Who you don’t even like?”
Ivy nodded. She’d never wanted anything more. “Yes.”
He didn’t do anything for long moments, then he reached for her hip and hauled her to him. Their bodies collided as he swept her up, his mouth swooping down on hers, bending her back with the ferocity of his kiss and the desperation of his groan, taking over, taking control.
And she handed it to him. Whatever control she’d had to this point she ceded without argument. She just wanted to keep on kissing him, feeling her breasts and the hot, hard length of him squashed between them.
“God…” he groaned, his mouth pulling away from hers as he grabbed her butt cheeks, urging her legs apart as he hauled her up his body, her ankles locking around his waist. “I want to be inside you.”
It was exactly where she wanted him, too.
Ivy moaned as he claimed her mouth again and turned them around. She clung on tight to his shoulders as he tipped her backward and followed her down, her back landing on soft mattress, her front colliding with hard chest, her legs splayed wide, him on his knees on the floor wedged between them.
She cried out in protest as his mouth left hers, lifting her head to chase his, but he was licking down her neck, then kissing down her chest, then sucking on her nipples. Her eyes fluttered closed as she lost all sense of time and place on a surge of lust that turned all her bones to jelly and liquefied her few functioning brain cells.
But he didn’t stop there. He went lower, his fingers claiming her nipples. And lower. And lower. Until suddenly his elbows were pushing her thighs wider and his tongue stroked right up her center.
Ivy’s back bowed and her eyes snapped open. She gasped out loud as his tongue zeroed in on the tight little nub with startling accuracy and flicked at it mercilessly while his fingers stroked her nipples.
She’d always wondered what it would feel like to have a man gorging on her so intimately, taking her to heaven with his mouth, why the act was spoken about with such hushed reverence by those in the know, and now she knew why.
It was so primal. Base.
Dirty.
So freaking hot.
And she was pretty sure she was never going to want it any other way, but somewhere in the blended mess of gray matter that was her brain she remembered that he was supposed to be inside her. And she wasn’t going to let him distract her this time.
Not even with some seriously, fucking good tongue action.
She looked down at him, almost side-tracked by how freaking hot he looked between her legs. “Dean,” she panted, sinking her hands into his hair and giving a pull before she changed her mind.
He lifted his head immediately and their gazes locked. “Seth,” he growled, his eyes blazing.
“Seth,” she repeated. “I want you in me, Seth.”
“Later,” he growled, going back for more.
Ivy pulled harder. “No.” He glanced up at her again. “Now, damn it.”
Their gazes locked. “Shuffle back.
Ivy shook her head. “Like this.”
His jaw clenched. “It’s going to be much more comfortable in the middle of the bed.”
Screw that. She didn’t want this to be some tender romance-novel deflowering. That was for lovers. For people who liked each other. This was sex. She wanted it. He could provide it. And she was ready.
She didn’t want it comfortable. This wasn’t a freaking fairy tale.
She wanted him to take all the anger and worry and frustrations of the last week and introduce her to what it felt like to be fucked.
“I don’t want to be comfortable. I don’t even like you, damn it. I want to be owned. I want to leave here knowing you held nothing back.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to hurt you, Ivy.”
Outrage bubbled in her chest. “You already have, Dean.”
For a moment, Ivy though his jaw was going to shatter into a thousand pieces it clamped so tight. It didn’t, but anger simmered in every movement as he leaned over, ripped open the bedside table drawer, and yanked out a condom.
Chapter Fifteen
Ivy’s pulse tripped as he stood towering over her, his hot gaze raking her body as he tore the foil packet with his teeth and rolled the condom on in one quick, aggressive action.
He looked pissed.
Good.
Now he knew how she felt.
He shoved a knee on the edge of the mattress beside her thigh and bracketed his bent elbows on either side of her head, holding his torso off hers as he aligned their hips. Ivy gasped at the prod of his cock amid all the slick heat between her legs.
“Are you sure you want it like this?” he demanded, his blue gaze boring into hers.
Ivy supposed it wasn’t the best position for him, either. It probably had a degree of difficulty that would make an elite athlete wince but she wanted this done. She had plenty of time to perfect it.
She locked her legs around his hips. “Just do it, damn it.”
He glared at her, sparks flaring in his eyes as he flexed his hips, lubricating himself with her wetness before notching his cock at her entrance. Slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, he increased the pressure through his hips, pushing his cock, bit by bit, inside her, st
retching, stretching, stretching.
Ivy panted, grabbing hold of his straining biceps as he kept pushing until he sat high and hard inside her. It hurt a little. Burned. But she was mesmerized by the smolder in his eyes, by the barely leashed restraint she could feel in the tremble of his arms.
He was as riled as she was, his brain barely keeping his body in check. He was a man on the edge. And she wanted whatever he had to give, however he had to give it.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
The burning had eased to a delicious fullness and she wanted more. “Yes, damn it,” she said. She was a virgin, not a freaking piece of blown glass.
“Fine,” he muttered, withdrawing quickly. The burning flared in a searing stab, and she cried out at the suddenness of it, her eyes shutting, her hand wrapping hard around his arm.
“Fuck. Ivy?”
Her eyes flashed open as the sensation quickly dissipated. “Don’t you stop now,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare stop.”
So he didn’t. But he did go gentler for those first couple of strokes before she tightened her ankles around his butt and demanded, “Harder,” her eyes flashing, her frown fierce. The stretch and burn had become a buzz and a tingle and she was impatient to find out how much better it could get.
Ivy reveled in the relentless motion of him as he reared over her, thrusting harder, holding himself up on his forearms, his pissed-off gaze skewering her to the mattress.
It was such a freaking turn-on.
She got off on him watching her as he went hard and deep, rocking her head back with each thrust. She couldn’t look away from him, couldn’t shut her eyes as he gave her everything she asked for with every damn stroke.
The first ripple hit deep and low and Ivy whimpered, her fingernails digging into his arms.
“Yes,” he groaned, doubling the pace, his shoulders trembling under the strain.
The ripples kept coming, undulating through her belly, gently at first, then building momentum. Prickles erupted at the base of her spine.
“Oh…” she moaned, unable to keep her eyes open any longer. “Oh, yes…Dean!”
“Seth goddamn it,” he swore, stabbing into her harder and higher than he’d been before.
