Sex & Sensibility

by Shannon Hollis

  Griffin’s mouth and hands and that hot light in his eyes as he watched her undress—those were the reasons.

  He touched her the way some women touched priceless velvet—as though it were a sensuous experience just by itself. His tongue laved the sensitive places under her ear, at her throat, and in the valley between her breasts, returning again and again to trace the shape of her. It was as if he was trying to memorize her for a day when she wouldn’t be there.

  Goose bumps tiptoed over her arms.

  “Are you cold?” he whispered.

  “Not a chance.” Not with this fever of desire in her blood, this hunger deep inside that was only stoked every time he tasted her skin and left a trail of pleasure. She let it erase the brief thought from her mind. “But just to make sure, let’s trade.”

  He smiled against her skin. “What, me on that table? I’d break it for sure.”

  She slid off the table and gave him a full-body kiss that must have made his knees go weak, because when it ended, he was half-leaning, half-sitting on the edge of it.

  “Go on. All the way up on it,” she commanded. With one hand, she reached for the pale pine office chair at one end, and seated herself in front of him, between his legs, as if she were going to—

  “What am I, lunch?” His voice sounded husky with anticipation, and she grinned up at him.

  “Absolutely.”

  The skin on the inner side of his thigh felt soft under her cheek, and the muscles quivered under her tongue. She tasted her way up his right thigh and turned left when she got to the top.

  “I can’t hold out much longer, sweetheart,” he said gruffly. “I’m set to explode.” His fingers were splayed on the tabletop as though he was trying to hold on to it and not slide off. His cock was rigid, standing straight out from his body, and when she took him in her mouth at last, he dragged air into his lungs in a gasp.

  His flesh filled her mouth, and she circled the rim with her tongue, seeking the sensitive nerve endings that would bring him the most pleasure. Her busy tongue laved him the way he had pleasured her areolas, faster and faster.

  When she felt his hand convulse in her hair, she slowed and made a questioning sound.

  “Tess—now—”

  He scooted back on the table, forgetting all about whether it would hold their weight or not, and when she scrambled up beside him he took her in his arms and rolled her on top of him. With infinite slowness, his solid heat entered her, smooth as satin, because she was already soaked with desire and the pleasure she took in tasting him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he grated. He drove his hips forward, clasping his hands around her waist and pulling her to him more tightly. She wrapped her legs around him and he made a sound of satisfaction. “That’s it, Tess,” he encouraged her. “Let me have all of you.”

  I wish that was what you wanted.

  What?

  She was so surprised by the sudden thought that her legs relaxed and she nearly lost her grip on his body.

  His big hands gripped her hips and he groaned. “You are so tight. So slick. I love how you feel, inside and out.” He thrust into her again and she abandoned thought, letting his body take her to that place where thought didn’t exist, only sensation. His strokes filled her completely, excited her past bearing. And he was a man who could multitask. She arched toward him and he suckled one breast, adding a river of pleasure flowing between his mouth and her clitoris. Then he slipped one finger between the lips of her vulva and stroked her clit, and with that stroke she lost her mind—and her control.

  She cried out as her orgasm blossomed like a hot, red flower deep inside her, tingling through every nerve, all the way out to her fingertips. She couldn’t bear this much pleasure. She was going to pass out any second…

  With a final thrust, Griffin gasped, grabbed her so they both could keep their balance, and spent himself inside her, his body pulsing with helpless pleasure. Trembling, she fell forward against him and he wrapped his arms around her, murmuring sounds that she couldn’t quite hear but whose meaning was perfectly clear.

  Still intimately joined, she rested against his chest, gasping a little as her breathing came back to normal. His heart pounded against hers and they stayed that way, in the peaceful aftermath of lovemaking, until their bodies quieted.

  The cards had told her to wait, Tessa thought, her mind still flying halfway between the sky and the earthy reality of the tangle they made of legs and arms. What would they have to say now?

  WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE to have a woman like this around every single day?

  Griffin pulled Tessa with him down to the carpet. Warm and pliant and exhausted, she lay curled next to him as though they had been together for years and always fit together like this after sex. Griffin closed his eyes and just enjoyed the hell out of the moment, before it disappeared.

  Because the happy moments always did. No matter how hard he worked to keep them, they slipped through his fingers and dissolved like sugar in warm water, never to be seen again.

  Sheryl had taught him many things, some of them good even, but her most enduring lesson had been learning not to trust what made you happy. And she’d never said a word on the subject. She’d been the kind to lead by example.

  Was he going to let those lessons rule the rest of his life? Not allow himself to be happy? Of course not.

  Then why was he punishing himself? Did he think that if he suffered enough, she’d come back to him? But he didn’t want her back. Caleb was welcome to her—if he could hang on to her.

  Then why not give Tessa a chance?

  He opened his eyes and looked at the woman whose blond hair tumbled over his shoulder to silence the voice of his conscience.

  “Hey,” he said softly, “are you asleep?”

  “No, I’m just lying here being happy,” she murmured into his chest.

  “Think we should move? Jay will be waiting to hear something.”

  “He can wait five minutes.”

  Griffin chuckled, and the shaking of his chest made her lift her head and smile in return. His body stirred again at the sight, a thing he would never have believed possible after what they’d just done on Mandy’s worktable. But they couldn’t afford the time for seconds. Not yet, at least.

  To get his body and his brain back in working mode, he kept talking. “I thought you learned on your first day that that wasn’t true.”

  “I also learned that you have to stake your territory right away with that man, or you’ll never get it back.” She looked over her shoulder, obviously a woman who could take a subtle hint. “Where did I put my clothes?” She rose to her knees, and he let her go with regret. While she hunted up her scattered garments, he straightened the books that had shifted on the worktable.

  “I guess we’d better be at least as tidy as Christina and Trey.”

  “If they were even here,” he said as he dressed swiftly.

  “They were here.” She tied the last of the bows on the front of her blouse and tightened it with a tug. “What I saw was in color and really vivid, like the first one I had of her. That means it was happening in real time. And it was happening here, contrary to the evidence. Or lack thereof.”

  Griffin wasn’t about to argue with her and spoil the mood. He couldn’t, anyway. What did he know about the way a sensitive saw things? All he knew on the subject was distilled from ancient episodes of The X-Files and from spending the last several days with her.

  One thing for sure—it would take a lot of faith and flexibility to live with a woman like Tessa. Qualities he was a little short on these days.

  With a final look around to make sure they had disturbed nothing else, he led the way out of the house and reset the alarm.

  By the time they were back in the beat-up familiarity of his truck and rolling down the highway at a comfortable eighty miles an hour, he had begun to feel as if the whole morning had taken place in a dream. A house he hardly knew, pleasure he’d never known, a woman he couldn’t imagine knowing…d
riving back to Jay’s was like coming back to the real world.

  And the real world, for all its faults and risks and dangers, was the only one in which he was comfortable. He knew nothing of Tessa’s, with its visions and bright colors and cheery optimism. It was foreign, as different as Kansas was from Oz.

  And there was nothing wrong with Kansas, thank you very much.

  HE WAS DOING IT AGAIN. Tessa felt Griffin’s emotional withdrawal like the slow leaching of light out of the day at twilight. She was a morning person herself. She loved light and possibility and the scent of hot coffee. Twilight, with the slow triumph of night, was the time of day she liked the least. Not even the sight of Venus glowing on the horizon could redeem the encroachment of night.

  And now Griffin was going gently into his emotional good night, as Natalie had told her he did, just when she was really getting to like him in the brightness of day. There had to be something she could do to break this pattern. Sex helped, but its effects didn’t seem to be permanent. How was she going to create a change? Was it even possible?

  When they got back to the Singleton estate, it was to find both Jay and Mandy gone. “El Jefe says for you to call him the minute you get back,” Ramon’s voice reported at the gate. “He’s in some big shot meeting, so he says to text message him Yes if you found her and No if you didn’t.”

  “Will do.” Griffin leaned out the driver’s window. “What about Mandy? I can give her the status, at least.”

  “She wanted to help with the detecting,” Ramon told them. “She went to get a facial at someplace with a strange name.”

  Tessa leaned over, placing a hand on Griffin’s thigh for balance. It did not help that the muscles in his leg jerked as if he’d been ambushed. Sigh.

  “You mean Oraia?” she asked Ramon—er, the speaker box standing in for Ramon.

  “Yeah, that was it. I feel sorry for the stylist who gets her. She used to be a lawyer, you know. Really good at the old cross-examination.”

  “Thanks, Ramon.” The gate opened and Griffin drove through. “It’s not likely she’ll get much more out of Michelle than you did,” he said to Tessa as he pulled the truck around to the back of the garage. “Plus she’s the stepmother. If Michelle is on Christina’s side she’ll be more likely to put up a smoke screen and tell her they went to Vegas or something.”

  “We know they’re not in Vegas.” She climbed out of the truck and he joined her on the path.

  “We know they weren’t last night, if your vision was accurate. For all we know, they could be by now.” He tapped his watch, as if to prove the point.

  “It was accurate,” she said stubbornly.

  “So you said.” His tone was mild but behind the words she heard no proof as clearly as if he’d said them.

  A cloud passed over the late-afternoon sun. The last of her happy mood evaporated and suddenly she felt cross and frustrated. After all she’d done to prove herself to him, proving she wasn’t a fraud and she had real help to offer—not to mention blowing his mind making love not thirty minutes ago—they were back at square one.

  “I said it because it’s true. Look, Griffin, are we going to go around and around about how accurate I am, or are you ever going to just trust me?”

  “I do trust you.”

  She stopped on the warm salmon-colored flagstones of the patio between the house and the cottage. “You say that, but behind it your brain is asking for proof, demanding evidence that I don’t have. Do you have any idea how difficult you’re making this for me?”

  “It’s a difficult case.”

  Ooh, she just wanted to shake that calmness out of him. She wanted the hot, passionate man who’d taken her on a table.

  “You’re making it more difficult every time you say something that makes me doubt myself. I know what I see is true, but every time you second-guess me or go off to find something to back up what I say, it just makes it harder for me to trust myself. It’s a circle, Griffin. Between you and me.”

  “There’s nothing between you and me,” he said a little too quickly.

  “You don’t even believe that yourself. What happened at Mandy’s house wasn’t nothing. You just won’t let yourself believe it’s something.”

  He stepped back, almost involuntarily, and in the air between them Tessa could swear she saw the flash of a sword. Or maybe it was just the sun, glinting off the windows. The King of Swords was doing his level best to fend her off, but she was too keyed up to let him get away with it.

  “How do you know what I believe?” he asked, his tone rough with control.

  “I read your mind,” she snapped.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Of course it’s bullshit. Everything I say is bullshit until you do your little investigation and fact-check and come up with something to back me up. Except when it comes to emotions, Griffin. You’ve got no fingerprint kit there, have you? You’ve got nothing but instinct and your gut, and those failed you before, didn’t they?”

  “You don’t know anything about me.” His eyes narrowed.

  “You’d be surprised what I know. About Sheryl. And Caleb. And what they did. But that was then, Griffin. This is now, six years later. This is you and me. And if there’s—”

  But she got no further. Whatever tenuous hold he had on his self-control snapped. “Don’t you talk about her!” he roared. “My life is none of your goddamn nosy psychic business!”

  He turned and power-walked around the side of the garage. In a moment the truck fired up with a roar that echoed his own, the distress of a caged creature who has grown used to its cage and can’t tolerate the poking of the stick through the bars.

  The truck accelerated up the driveway, and a cloud of exhaust drifted gently over the hedge between the patio and the drive. He didn’t even slow down at the gate.

  Smart Ramon. Evidently he had left it standing wide open.

  Stupid Tessa. Why couldn’t she learn to pick her moments better and keep her mouth shut? No wonder all her relationship prospects got frightened away.

  Tessa pushed open the front door of the cottage and went in. The windows had been thrown open and the purple T-shirt she’d tossed on the bed had been hung up in the closet. There were new towels in the bathroom.

  She dropped her purse on the computer table, slumped on the window seat and gazed absently at the view. Even though she was convinced she was right, she had hurt him with the mention of Sheryl. If he wouldn’t let her make it up to him, it might take him a while to bandage his wounds and put his armor on again. It hadn’t been fair to toss his ex-wife’s name at him as if she’d read his mind when actually she’d done some fact-checking of her own. That was the next thing to a lie, and if he’d given her the chance, she would have admitted it. But they had both lost their tempers and now things were going to be awkward.

  No, that was a lie, too. It was more than awkward.

  She had hurt him and because of that, she hurt. And why did she hurt? Because she cared about his feelings.

  Come on, it’s more than that. The truth is, you care about him. Griffin Knox, the guy who makes you smile and want to wear see-through clothes. The guy who takes better care of his truck than he does of himself.

  The guy who probably won’t let you within touching distance ever again.

  20

  WITH A SIGH, Tessa got her cell phone from her purse and came back to the window seat. She keyed in the first number on autodial, and when she got voice mail at Linn’s office, dialed the second one.

  Her sister answered on the second ring. “Oh, hey, Tessa.”

  “What are you doing home?”

  “I pulled night shift this week. I have to go in about an hour.”

  “Kellan, too?”

  “Nah. He’s a corporal now. He gets dibs on days. But we manage to meet for supper. Except for tonight. We have to go pick a tux for him. But I bet you didn’t call to talk about my shift or tuxes.”

  “No.” The word was a disconsolate plea for help. />
  “Uh-oh. That sound means one of two things—either you got evicted or it’s man trouble.”

  “The second.”

  “That’s a relief. It’s easier to find a man than it is to find a decent rent-controlled apartment. So, who is it? Surely you can’t have met someone at Jay Singleton’s holy of holies. Unless maybe you’ve got a thing for the chauffeur.”

  “He’s, like, nineteen, so no. It’s Griffin.”

  Silence breathed down the line. “Griffin.”

  “Yeah, you know. Fort Knox.”

  “You’re having man trouble with Griffin Knox? Is that even possible?” Linn sounded a little winded.

  “At the moment, nothing is possible with him. We had fabulous sex this afternoon on the table in Mandy Singleton’s beach house and the next thing you know, he’s shouting at me and roaring out of here in his truck.”

  “Sex. On a table. With Griffin Knox, who arrested you,” Linn repeated, as if to make sure she’d heard correctly and they were talking about the same person.

  “Yes. But Natalie Wong was right. He’s not emotionally available. We enjoyed the heck out of each other and practically as soon as it was over, he was backing away, then walking away, then driving away at a high rate of speed.” She sighed. “I just don’t know what to do, Linn.”

  “My God. Tessa, have you fallen in love with that guy?”

  Deep inside, Tessa felt a deep knell of confirmation, as if something she’d always needed to know had finally been answered.

  This was it. This was why the cards had said to wait.

  “I…I hope not,” she said at last.

  “I hope not, too. He’s a one-way ticket to a broken heart, which has to be a line from a country western song somewhere.”

  “I don’t listen to country western.”

  “Well, listen to your big sister, then. There can’t be two people on the planet more different than you and Griffin. You were thrown together for a job, you had a little fun, now he’s decided he can’t handle it and it’s over.” Linn’s voice softened. “Don’t throw your heart away on him, honey. Natalie is right. She called and told me you were doing background on him, by the way, and I wondered what was up.”