A Whisper Of Wanting

by Jamie Sobrato

  As if they were one body split in two, desperate to rejoin, he pulled her to a standing position, then lifted her against the wall and plunged into her without a moment of hesitation. Her flesh enveloping him eased the aching so thoroughly that he nearly cried out in relief, and he could only rest still there for a while, savoring it.

  Ethan held her hips, with her legs clasped around his waist, and he began pumping into her, using the wall to brace them. Slowly at first to find their rhythm and balance, and faster the surer he became. She devoured him with hungry kisses and greedy hands. There was no stopping, no thinking, only feeling and wanting and needing.

  Only this, only them, only right now.

  He felt a fast orgasm coming on, and he both wanted to stop and wanted to sink into it. Stop it, his conscious self commanded, while his primitive self was not listening to reason.

  Somehow they ended up on the floor, and Ethan was sprawled out on the beige shag carpeting. The unstoppable orgasm, miraculously halted in its tracks by their tumble to the floor, lurked near the edge of his desire, and Nicole hovered over him, straddling his hips as she kissed his neck and chest.

  His cock lingered near the nexus of her thighs, but was painfully not there. So close, but not. Any other time, he would have relaxed and enjoyed her teasing, but now he had the single-mindedness of a man dying of hunger. He grasped her hips and guided her where she needed to be, thrust into her again, and held her there for the ride.

  The floor was his leverage now as he pumped faster and faster, delirious with the hot wet sensation of her, intoxicated by her scent and her beauty. Her face over his, pleasure softening it, was captivating. He could not look away. And he could see her climax building there. In the tension of her brow, the clouding of her eyes, and that sight pushed him closer and closer to his own orgasm.

  But he wanted to delay the inevitable a while longer, so he wrapped his arms around her and rolled her until he was on top, and she was resting on the ground beneath him, her legs hugging his hips. Now he could take his time and savor the pleasure.

  Or so he’d thought. No sooner was he thrusting into her again than he felt the delicious way her body enveloped him in this position, and he couldn’t help thrusting faster and faster, like a well-oiled machine performing the one task it knew how to do. He gazed into her eyes again, locked here, unable to look away.

  He felt an enormous rush of pleasure rising up from his groin, enveloping him, gripping him in its hold, wracking his body. And then he became aware that she was coming too. Her cries of pleasure, her intensely wet pussy swelling around his cock, her eyes closed for the rush.

  And it seemed to go on forever, for both of them. By the time he felt his body calm, he was drenched in sweat and breathless, with Nicole collapsed like a rag doll beneath him, just as sweaty and overwhelmed as he.

  This wasn’t normal sex. It was supernatural sex. Superhuman sex. Sex of epic proportions.

  NICOLE WOKE UP feeling as if someone had beaten her. There were aches in her shoulders, her arms, her back, her legs… She stretched beneath the covers, testing each body part to see just how stiff and sore it was before moving on to the next.

  And in flashes, the memories came back to her. The nightclub, the car, the police officer, the foyer, the rest of her apartment. They’d had so much sex last night, she’d gotten a killer workout. Her foot bumped against something warm—him.

  Ethan.

  Still in her bed. Dear God.

  And more memories came to her. The fuzzy-headedness, the uncontrollable desire, the absolute certainty that she would die if she wasn’t satisfied immediately. She lay staring at Ethan’s bare shoulder, the curves and angles of his back, and she tried to remember more.

  It all felt like an extremely lucid dream. So strange, so unlike her real self…

  The lust potion—could it have been real?

  She laughed to herself, silently, then wriggled deeper beneath her down comforter, waiting for her body to wake up. She had not anticipated waking up next to Ethan, a man she probably had nothing in common with outside of certain uncontrollable urges.

  And what could they possibly say about last night?

  Words fell short. And words confused the truth, which was…what?

  Nicole thought of the tiny vial of potion, the claims that it was an aphrodisiac. It seemed impossible that the mere scent of some mystery liquid could induce such a wild reaction in the two of them. Impossible, but…

  No, this had to be stress. Ethan had been sniffing around her for as long as she’d known him, and after their first sad little incident in bed, he’d been dying for another chance to prove himself the virile male. So that explained his side of it. As for herself, she’d been having one of the most unpleasant days of her career. She had to forgive herself if the unwinding from it got a little out of hand.

  Okay, a lot out of hand.

  She was wide awake now, so she eased out of bed and tiptoed across the room. Why couldn’t her first and only one-night stand have been with a guy who had the grace to slip out of her apartment in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again?

  She didn’t need any pretense, no phone calls afterward, nothing. Not for this kind of one-faceted relationship.

  Nicole simply didn’t do one-night stands. And she had no idea how to handle it now that she had. She wanted to run away from her indiscretion, or have it run away from her.

  She entered the bathroom and closed the door silently, flipped on the light and did her business, grabbed a robe, put it on. Maybe she should be the one to slip out of the apartment unnoticed. She could leave the obligatory thanks-for-the-good-time-and-help-yourself-out-the-door note, then stay gone until he left.

  Okay, that worked. She could do that. She brushed her teeth as quietly as she could, pulled her hair back in a ponytail and went out into the bedroom to find some clothes. Instead, she found Ethan sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

  Crap.

  Time for Plan B. Well, except she didn’t have a Plan B.

  And that’s when she noticed that the crazy magnetism she’d felt last night was…perhaps…gone. It was like waking up after having a cold and realizing that the cold wasn’t there anymore.

  Sure, she could look at Ethan and see that he was an attractive guy. And she’d always felt a certain sort of…something…in his presence. But it was the same as she felt with any guy who was clearly such a reveler in his ability to charm women.

  “Hi,” he finally said, breaking the awkward silence that had filled the space between them.

  “You’re awake,” she said stupidly.

  “As are you.” He smiled that dazzling smile, which had a certain quality when softened by the fuzziness of morning.

  “I thought you’d be gone by now.”

  His left eyebrow quirked upward, but he said nothing.

  “I mean—” Nicole walked to the dresser and found some panties and a top. “I just figured we were both, you know, letting off steam. That’s all.”

  “To be frank, I didn’t really think about what we were doing last night. I felt like I was…possessed, you know?”

  She nodded. Did she ever know.

  “But,” he paused, looked down at himself, “wow, this morning I’m not feeling that crazy…you know.”

  “Yeah, me either. I guess we just needed to get it out of our systems, right?”

  “Maybe so.”

  Ethan leaned back against the headboard, settling in instead of moving toward the door as she wanted him to. Nicole bit her lip and took off the robe, put on the panties and stretchy tank top, pulled open a bottom drawer where she found a pair of black yoga capris and put those on, too. Dressed, she ignored Ethan and headed for the kitchen, where her coffeepot beckoned.

  She went through the motions of making coffee, and when she got it started and left the kitchen, she spotted her cell phone lying on the dining room table and marveled at the fact that it hadn’t rung. She usually couldn’t make it through an
entire Friday night uninterrupted, but her co-workers must have been tiptoeing around her, giving her a break knowing her state of mind.

  The coffee gurgled from the kitchen, and she picked up her mail from yesterday, flipped through it one more time. She could hear Ethan moving around in the bedroom now, or maybe the bathroom. Then the shower started, and she breathed a sigh of relief that at least while he was there, she didn’t have to talk to him.

  Bills, bills, junk mail and bills. She tossed the mail back on the table, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something red on the patio. She walked across the room, and slid open the vertical blinds. Then she saw that the red was the skirt on a doll, and out of nowhere her stomach recoiled at the sight.

  She opened the sliding door, and saw clearly that it was a voodoo doll like the cheesy little things they sold at the tourist shops. It wore a white top, across which were scrawled the words Die Bitch.

  Nicole’s breath whooshed out of her and she slammed the sliding door shut and locked it. She scanned the balcony to see if anything else looked out of place, but no, nothing. Then she peered out at the grounds she could see from her vantage point, and she saw no one, nothing amiss.

  “Damn it,” she muttered. Her heart was thudding violently in her chest now, and any sense of relaxation she might have gotten from last night had vanished in an instant.

  Was this a joke? No, definitely not. An accident, wrong balcony? Doubtful. A sign that Jonas Pulatski had already set his sights on her?

  That last thought left her cold, and it resonated with truth. She’d known it was possible he’d seek her out, but she’d never thought it would happen so fast.

  She went to the end table and picked up the phone, dialed her office. A few rings later, the department receptionist was on the line, and Nicole explained what had happened and asked for someone to come out and file a report right away.

  When she hung up the phone, her heart was still thudding wildly, too fast, and she had a weird fuzzy sensation in her head again. Ethan had turned off the shower, and she went back to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee, then one for him too. Her hands shook.

  “I realized belatedly I should have asked first before using your shower,” Ethan said from behind her, and she turned to find him standing in the kitchen doorway.

  She burst into tears, which was even more out of character for her than what she’d done last night.

  7

  ETHAN TOOK NICOLE into his arms and held her against his chest, baffled by her burst of tears but instinctively wanting to comfort her. Had the shower usage really been such a huge offense?

  Or was it something else? Was she suffering from huge regrets about last night?

  Her close proximity brought back a rush of desire so strong, his cock went instantly hard, and he had to shift his weight away from her down there just to avoid poking her at this inopportune time.

  He smoothed her hair and rubbed her back as he held her, and once she’d calmed a bit, he asked, “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

  She pushed away and took a deep breath, wiped the dampness from her eyes. Then she pointed at the balcony, and he walked over to it, his gut twisting at the thought that maybe he’d accidentally left some evidence that he’d been hiding there yesterday.

  Ethan reached the glass door and stared at the weird little voodoo doll, and a rush of guilt and recognition and confusion hit him in the chest.

  What the hell?

  It looked a lot like the voodoo doll Zoe had bought at the tourist shop yesterday. How had it gotten there? And why on God’s earth did it have to appear on the balcony right after he’d done his little pervert impression in that very spot?

  “What’s the matter?” Nicole asked. “You look like—”

  “Like I just saw a creepy little voodoo doll with a death threat scrawled across its chest in blood?” His faux light tone came out sounding as fake as it really was, and he forced out a laugh in a failed attempt to cover it up.

  She frowned at him. “Yeah…” she said, sounding unconvinced. “I’m freaked out too. There’s an officer headed over now to take a report.”

  “Do you think it’s—”

  “Yes, definitely. But it’s odd. My neighbor claimed to have seen someone on my balcony yesterday—someone driving a car that fits your description.”

  “Wow, that’s more than odd. That’s downright freaky,” he choked out.

  Ethan paced across the room and back again, pausing at the balcony door. What could he do now? Admit the truth, that he’d been lurking around on her balcony yesterday, right before someone had just happened to leave the doll there? Could the angry neighbor have left the doll as some kind of warped retaliation?

  He imagined Nicole’s reaction to his story and decided that no, no way in hell could he admit the truth. He’d just have to take his chances.

  Nicole went into another room and came back with a camera and a plastic bag that turned out to contain an evidence kit. She put on gloves and went out onto the patio, then carefully knelt down next to the doll and took a few shots of it, before collecting it up in a bag.

  Ethan watched all this in a state of abject misery, not quite sure whether to bolt from the apartment completely, confess the truth, or stick around for the horror show to begin.

  But then his self-preservation instincts got out of the way so he could see the real problem at hand—that some sicko had put such a thing on Nicole’s patio in the first place. She was clearly a woman who knew how to take care of herself, but still, he couldn’t stand the thought that she was in danger, that someone out there truly wished her harm.

  “Do you have any neighbors who might have, you know, just done this as a dirty trick for some weird reason? A parking spot conflict or something?”

  She looked up at him. “Not that I can think of. I get along with all my neighbors. This is a pretty friendly building.”

  Ethan bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that at least one of her neighbors wielded a baseball bat with a little too much abandon for his taste.

  There was a knock at the door, and Nicole went to open it. The doorway was filled by a large officer in uniform, and he and Nicole talked for a short bit before he entered and went about the work of taking a report.

  Ethan went into the kitchen and helped himself to some coffee, growing more and more uncomfortable as the minutes ticked by, having to omit the little detail of lurking around on Nicole’s balcony. But then he thought again of the downstairs neighbor. She was totally going to squeal on him when questioned.

  And then what?

  Nicole would recognize his description and determine that he was the sick jerk responsible for the voodoo doll. Maybe they’d even trace it back to the tourist trap where Zoe had bought that doll, and then the whole thing would definitely point to him, and he’d go to prison for years and have forced unnatural relationships with that guy named Bubba.

  It was all too horrifying to contemplate.

  He had to tell them the truth. But no freaking way could he do it.

  He went back into the living room with his coffee, to find that the police officer was wrapping up his report and Nicole was promising to give him a call if she thought of anything else. So would he go talk to the neighbors right now?

  Ethan kept his mouth shut until after the officer had left, and then he cleared his throat.

  “I’ve, um, got a little confession to make,” he said.

  Nicole’s brow furrowed as she looked at him. “Okay, what is it?”

  “This is going to sound completely bizarre, and I didn’t have the balls to bring it up while the police officer was here, but the truth is, I was on your balcony for a short while yesterday.”

  Her eyes widened, and he wondered if she was going to slap him.

  “I swear I had nothing to do with that doll, and it wasn’t there when I was on the balcony. I promise you that.”

  She took a step back, and then another. Ethan glanced behi
nd her at the purse that lay on her dining room table. She probably kept a gun in it, and she was probably going to shoot him in the kneecaps for doing what he’d done, if he didn’t do a really fabulous job of explaining why the hell he’d done it.

  And why the bloody hell had he done it?

  “What were you doing on my balcony?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and took another backward step in the direction of the purse.

  Ethan felt a premature pain in his knees. “Do you remember how crazed we felt yesterday? Like we couldn’t get enough of each other?”

  Her eyes narrowed, but she nodded.

  “Well, I, um, got so possessed with that feeling, I thought I might go crazy if I let you out of my sight.”

  “And?”

  “I followed you home, thinking I wanted to talk to you about the tension between us, but somewhere along the way I just got so caught up in watching you, it was like I was possessed or something. I got so frustrated that I climbed onto your balcony and watched you through the window.”

  “You stupid mother—”

  “Just hear me all the way out, please,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was absolutely not thinking clearly. I really believe that lust potion affected my brain somehow. Maybe it really is a narcotic of some sort, like you said.”

  “Then why was I able to go my merry way home without feeling the need to stalk you?”

  One more step closer to the bag. She’d probably be aiming a gun at him any second now.

  “Maybe the stuff has a slightly different effect depending on the person.”

  “Or maybe I’m not a lunatic who lurks around on people’s balconies!” She reached for the phone on a nearby table, grabbed it, and started dialing. “I have to add this information to the police report, you know.”

  “Just please wait. Hear me out first, then decide what to do, okay?”

  She eyed him warily, hit the phone’s off button, and sighed. “You’ve got two minutes to convince me you’re not a lunatic. Then I’m calling.”

  “I really had no control over following you. In my head I knew it was crazy, but I couldn’t stop myself. Just like what happened between us last night. I know if you could have stopped yourself, you probably would have, right?”