Who are you and what have you done with the real Tori Bay?
She didn’t have an answer for that. Worse, she wasn’t sure she cared just then, wrapped in Jack’s arms with her lips moist from his kisses and her ears ringing with the rasping request that suddenly seemed like the sexiest, most romantic thing a man had ever said to her.
He was meeting her on her terms, wanting to be with her tonight, in the indefinite “now” that had them here together, and safe, thanks to him.
He might not want her gratitude, but he had it. Without him, she wouldn’t have been able to stay on the case, wouldn’t have seen the glory of Bear Claw Canyon at sunrise, wouldn’t have put all the pieces of the investigation together into the workable, if terrifying, hypothesis that they needed to bring back down to the city. And she most certainly wouldn’t have lived long enough for the hypothesis to matter.
The heat pumping in her veins now didn’t come from gratitude, though, or from her bone-deep relief at being alive. Both of those things were inside her, of course…but the flames of desire were so much stronger, overriding even the part of her that wanted to recall that they’d had good reasons for sleeping in separate beds last night.
She wanted what he was offering: her. Him. The two of them together in the small, safe place he had made for them.
“Yes.” The word was a breath, a shape of lips that barely grazed each other.
His eyes fired and his fingers tightened where they were splayed at her hip and shoulder, but he held back. She could feel the effort it cost him in the rigid tension of his arms and neck, hear it in the rasp of his voice as he said, “Tell me.”
Her stomach coiled on a surge of desire that left her wet and aching. She took a breath that did nothing to settle the inner churn, and said, “I want this, Jack. I want to make love with you.”
Triumph and fierce, flattering joy lashed across his features, and then his lips came down on hers in a kiss that was equally ferocious and joyful, and made her heart sing. Her pulse stuttered as their tongues touched and slid, and his hands found their way to her waistband and then beneath her shirt. His fingertips were hot on her skin, and the faint rasp of masculine calluses sent new heat flaring from the points of contact and outward, curling to her breasts and bringing a blush of moisture to her cleft with a poignant intensity that had her sagging against him with a soft moan.
He growled a low curse, earthy and reverent, and caught her up against his chest, gathering her close and lifting her easily as he rose to his feet. Under any other circumstance, with any other man, she would have raised hue and cry at the idea of being carried anywhere. Now, though, his powerful move reminded her of the way he’d swaggered across the encampment, walking among their enemies without flinching. The memory—and the echo of fear it brought—had her tightening her arms around his neck and pressing her cheek to his.
He lowered her gently to the air mattress she had already inflated and padded further with one of the two sleeping bags that had been among the supplies they’d been carrying around in the SUV. More than once, she had inwardly rolled her eyes at the mountain of gear that Jack and his ranger friend had deemed necessary for their daily trips into the Forgotten.
Now, though, she was grateful for the forethought…and the softness at her back as he followed her down and eased alongside her, so they were facing each other, bodies aligned.
Last night he had wanted to dissect things, as if trying to talk himself into—or out of—a decision. Now, though, with the decision made, he said nothing as he cupped her cheek, leaned in and took her mouth with a kiss that was somehow sweet, gentle and possessive all at the same time.
If their prior kisses had been storms—all thunder and passion—this one was a love song that made her want to believe in forever, at least for a little while. She shuddered and clutched at him even as she did her best to return the seduction and give as good as she was getting. Which was very good indeed.
Maybe a small but persistent alarm was going off inside her, warning that she was in too deep, that she needed to pull back and regain her normal perspective. If so, she ignored it because she trusted Jack and he knew the score. They would be fine.
“So sweet,” he murmured, then kissed her lips, her cheeks, then blazed a path down her throat to the hollow of her neck to nuzzle there, planting soft, insistent kisses that tightened her skin and set off starbursts behind her closed eyelids.
She tipped her head back, exposing herself to his lips, and luxuriated in the sensations as his hands skimmed up beneath her shirt and found her breasts and the hard points of her nipples, which he worked in rhythm with his kisses and the gentle roll of his body against hers. Her shirt came off and then his, and they were belly to belly, skin to skin, and although she was caressing him, kissing him, learning his body and the places where her touch could make him shiver and groan, he was utterly in charge, dominating her, not with his superior size or strength, but with the things he was making her feel.
Warning. Dangerous.
This time she heard the alarm, heeded it, knowing that she didn’t dare give any man power over her, even one she trusted as much as she trusted this one. And this wasn’t the hot and heavy lovemaking she had expected based on the explosive kisses they had shared leading up to this point. He was worshipping her, imprinting himself on her. She felt entirely feminine, entirely wanted. But she also felt naked and needy, and knew that if he got up and walked away at that moment, she would have watched him leave. Worse, she might even have asked him to stay.
The realization put her off-kilter. Or maybe she’d been that way since the night before, unable to regain her balance when things hadn’t gone the way she had hoped they would.
They were going that way now, though. Which meant it was time to put the two of them back on more even footing.
“Hey,” she said, bringing his eyes up from the V of her breasts, “my turn.”
Before he could anticipate the move, she shifted up and over him, bearing him back beneath her. He had proven aptly before that he could handle her weight, but he let her have the leverage, lying back and looking up at her with a heated expression that she interpreted as Bring it on.
Excitement flared in her bloodstream and the warning smoothed to a cautionary note as she rose above him and kissed his jaw, his throat and then shifted lower, trailing her lips along the downward-pointing arrow of masculine hair on his leanly muscled chest and washboard abs.
He arched and groaned—a short, sharp noise that reverberated off their rocky surroundings—and his hands came up to cradle her head. His fingers sifted through her hair, flexing as her lips cruised along the verge of his waistband and she lightly scraped her fingernails down his thighs.
She might have intended to seduce him and equal the balance of pleasure between them, but as she trailed her hands back up, stroking the strong columns of muscle and absorbing his groan, she was thoroughly seduced herself.
Her blood burned as she palmed the long line of his erection, which strained tautly beneath his jeans and then, when she loosened them and tugged down his boxers, sprang free into her hands. Her breath trembled when she took in the long length of him, ruddy and engorged for her, with a thick, corded vein that throbbed in time with the fast, excited beat of his heart. And her inner muscles pulsed, yearned, when she encircled him with her hand, covering the wide, blunt tip of his hardness and then taking a long stroke downward, reveling in his harsh groan and the way he shifted restlessly against her, thoroughly at her mercy as she touched him, worked him, stroked him and brought him breathlessly to the edge, and wound up bringing herself there as well.
Passion flowed through her, tightening her core yet relaxing her mind, until she didn’t care that her head was spinning and she wasn’t entirely herself anymore. She only cared about the rushing heat inside her, the presage to an orgasm brought solely by his restless hands and the fierce joy of making him feel the same sort of heat that pounded inside her with an increasing tempo that
would soon demand release.
Then his hands shifted to her shoulders and he urged her back up his body. “Come here,” he murmured. “Let me.”
Before she could return through the sensuous haze to regain full control of herself, he was kissing her, caressing her, loosening his clothes and hers, and then tugging them free until they were both naked beneath the blanket, which let in wisps of the chilling mountain air as they moved, twining together while he caressed her exquisitely sensitive breasts and then down to her hips, her thighs and finally to the wet, wanting place between.
She arched against him and gasped into his mouth when his fingers found her, parted her moist folds, and slipped between, setting up a delicious friction that brought her trembling once more to the brink. Refusing to go there alone, she stroked his hard flesh. Her touch wrung a sharp hiss out of him, had him surging into her hand with a harsh whisper of, “Ah, Tori.”
Unaccountable pressure tightened around her heart, and her eyes misted at the sudden sure knowledge that he knew exactly who she was in that moment, that she wasn’t just a pleasurable interlude as she had been for too many of her prior lovers. Knowing, too, that it had been the same way for her too often before—nice guys, no harm, no foul, no investment—she pressed her cheek to his and whispered, “Jack.”
She would have said something more, would have told him how good he was making her feel or what she wanted to do to him next, but the words backed up in her throat, locked there by the intensity of his next kiss and the spiraling pleasure being aroused by his fingers. She bowed into his touch with a wordless cry as he quickened the rhythm of his touch and she did the same, until they were gasping and twining together, grinding toward the pinnacle.
He shifted over her, rose above her, and then, going a bit wild-eyed, looked around them. “Where’s the—”
“Here.” She popped the top off the first aid kit and offered the small box of condoms she’d noticed there earlier.
Grinning, he donned the protection with an aside of “Remind me to thank Blackthorn for the supplies.”
“I’ll thank him myself,” she retorted, not letting herself feel a pang that she would probably never meet the ranger in person. This wasn’t about what might or might not happen tomorrow, after all. It was about the two of them, here and now.
Finished with the necessary task, he lowered himself until his body just brushed hers with feather-light touches that teased and incited almost as much as the kisses he dusted onto her throat, her face and then finally her lips.
Not to be outdone—or have them put off balance once more—she curled her legs around his, and arched upward to slide herself along his length, finding him hard and ready, and the normally cool slickness of latex gone warm and taut against his body, fading to insignificance in the face of the pleasure that spiraled through her when he groaned into her mouth and surged against her in a primal, instinctive response to her caress.
She gasped at the flood of sensations, then moaned when he repeated the move, rolling his hips into hers so his hardness dragged back and forth across her cleft and the sensitive folds within.
“Oh!” She let her head fall back, let her body move with his, back and forth, back and forth, until the orgasm that had earlier flirted without delivering now came back to hover just out of reach, waiting for him to fill the aching hollow inside her.
As his next stroke began, she shifted her hips, angling so that he slid deeper and seated himself in the natural pocket formed by her body.
Groaning, he slowed his thrust and then stopped, so he was poised just at the outer ring of the achingly heated flesh that was so very moist and ready for him. And then, inch by smooth, fulfilling inch, he sheathed himself to the hilt. Then he paused there, pressed his temple to hers as their breathing heaved in synchrony and their bodies vibrated with the intimate joining.
She shuddered at the delicious invasion, mouth opening in a round, soundless O of delight as his entry set off bursts of color behind her closed eyelids, detonations of heat and pleasure within her. Then, moving a little beneath him, she curled her feet around behind his calves and used the leverage to press up against him and take him just that little bit deeper, until he was hitting her sweet spots inside and out, intensifying sensations that were already almost unbearably intense.
A moan slipped from her lips and he caught it with his mouth as he shifted to kiss her wetly, deeply, one kiss leading to another and another, taking her deeper and deeper still as he withdrew and then came back into her on a powerful surge that hit those same spots. She arched and gasped in surprise as he did it again, proving that the move had been no accident.
Always before, she’d had to find that doubled pleasure herself, by making sure that she had the depth and angle right while her partner thrust as suited him. Jack, though, had not only taken the hint, he was running with it, expanding on it, experimenting with slightly different angles and depths, and gauging her responses.
His athlete’s body surged against hers, sure and strong. She moaned at the building sensations and her hands splayed open on his back as pleasure robbed her of the ability to do much more than hold on and counterpoint his thrusts with an instinctive rhythm of her own that made him growl her name low at the back of his throat.
They rocked together, and the heat built within her. They kissed, and needs coiled tighter and tighter still. When he rasped her name and pressed his forehead to hers, she felt powerful, and when his thrust worked that secret inner spot that drove her wild, she could moan and cling, because she felt safe with him.
Passion swept over her like a spring storm at high altitude, powerful and lovely, leaving her breathless with the climb. She dug her fingers into the strong columns of muscle on either side of his spine, helpless to do anything other than ride the surging ascent as she rocketed up, up, up…and then hung poised.
In that moment, she was wholly aware of her own body and his, and the way they fit together. Then the quiet shattered into a tingling chorus of pleasure that contracted inward around his hard, driving flesh as he rasped her name once more, and then exploded outward, toppling her from the high altitude she had attained and plunging her into the vibrating waves of a huge orgasm.
The starbursts of color behind her eyelids went to red and then blurred to gray as every fiber of her being concentrated itself at the point of their joining. Her inner muscles closed around him, worked him, milked him, and she whispered, “Oh, Jack.”
He stiffened and bucked against her, once, twice and a third time, and then he let out an inarticulate noise and sank into her, against her, grinding with delicious thrusts as he came, shuddering and groaning her name. His pleasure prolonged hers, sending the delicious tension spiraling through her once more. She wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her face into the side of his neck and reveled in the sensations as her orgasm faded to aftershocks, and then to a deep, drugging, warm afterglow of satisfaction.
They lay like that, wrapped together and breathing in synchrony, for a long time. Long enough that their bodies cooled and she started to notice the chill mountain air.
She must have shivered, or else she and Jack were on the same wavelength, because he lifted off her, shifted them so they were on their sides facing each other, dealt with the condom and then brought up the blanket and tucked them in together with a gentle thoroughness that made her heart give a little thudda-thudda.
It was tempting to burrow into him, close her eyes and doze. She didn’t want to analyze a sexual encounter that had catapulted right into her top-five list—she wasn’t willing to really think any further than that—but it was inevitable, wasn’t it? So as her brain started to come back online, bringing with it new nerves and a sense that what they had just done together might not have been her best move ever, she stirred against him, starting to rouse.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Not yet.”
Her eyes flew open. “What?”
“Don’t think about it. Just let it be for ton
ight. Okay?”
Body easing of a tension she hadn’t even consciously recognized until that moment, she smiled softly. “I thought that was my line.”
“Maybe I’ve learned a couple of things in the past few days.” He kissed the corners of her mouth, expression serious but not dire, and more relaxed than she’d seen him before. She was struck anew by the mountain-lake-blue of his gorgeous eyes, and remembered noticing them that first time in the airport and thinking he was way out of her usual league.
Apparently, she’d been promoted, at least temporarily. And thank God for that.
“Okay.” She blew out a breath, letting go of more of the unacknowledged tension. “Yeah. Okay.” Then, flushing a little at the loss of her usual postcoital no-harm-no-foul cool, she said, “That was pretty special.”
“That’s because you’re pretty special.”
She wasn’t sure which was worse, the fact that he said it with a bit too much feeling, stirring low-grade nerves in her belly…or the fact that hearing it made her want to cuddle into him and bask in the shared warmth of their bodies, the shared afterglow of their lovemaking. Which wasn’t her usual style, not by a long shot.
It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule that she didn’t spend the night with her lovers, or vice versa, but it was a rare event. Here, though, although she could blame it on the cave and the danger, the reality was that she would have wanted to stay regardless. Which was usually her cue to leave.
“You’re doing it again.”
She snapped her gaze back to his. “Doing what?”
“Thinking. I’ve got a better idea for what we can do instead.”
Arching an eyebrow, even though it didn’t take a rocket scientist—or a plant doctor—to guess what he had in mind, she said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you whisper it in my ear?”
She was aiming for playful, but that got derailed when he leaned in, cupped one of her breasts in his wide, warm palm and told her, in explicit detail, exactly what he wanted to do. As he spoke, her breath came short, her nipples peaked and she shuddered with a new wash of longing made even more intense than before because she knew now what it felt like to be with him.
Bear Claw Bodyguard Page 13
