by Alison Kent
She wiggled.
He hissed.
And then he started to move, slowly at first, soaking in her cream and the friction between them. But the temperature grew too hot too fast.
He ground his jaw and picked up the pace, slamming into her like he would take her apart. She moaned, asked for more, begged and pleaded with her mouth as well as with her cunt that gripped his cock so tightly he thought he would die.
It was over before it started. He came in a furious rush of come, unloading into her body until he was spent, drained, and on the edge of falling in love.
“Whew. I’m glad we got that out of the way.”
Glory glared at the man sitting across from her in the huge tub and pelted him with her sponge. “Watch the complaints there, Shaughnessey. Or that’ll be all you get out of me.”
“Say it isn’t so,” Tripp teased, his expression that of a boy fearing he might never have a chance to snoop around the cookie jar again.
“You play nice, and we’ll see how it goes.” She leaned into the curve of the tub, drew her heels to her hips and stared at Tripp over the sudsy mountain of her knees. “I can’t believe this day. I mean, now it’s almost like it was a bad dream, but you’re here, so I know it happened.”
He arched a surfer-blond brow. “You think I wouldn’t be here if not for what happened?”
She looked at her knees instead of at him and gave a weak shrug. He tossed the sponge; it hit her square in the chest and she glared. “What was that for?”
“Because you’re acting like a woman.”
“I am a woman.”
“I know that.”
Men. Argh! “Then what are you complaining about?”
“A man can only eat so many sprouts in a week, sweetheart. I figured you might realize I was in the shop to see you.”
The butterflies were back with a vengeance, and this time she had the advantage of knowing how well he knew how to take care of the tickle. “I just thought you had a thing for turkey and avocado.”
He held up a finger. “Don’t forget the Dijon.”
“And the whole wheat.”
“See? You know me as well as I know myself.”
“I know what you like to eat.” His ego needed no further encouragement, so she twisted her mouth a bit before admitting, “And how well you eat.”
He waggled both brows. “Eating is only one of my many talents.”
“What are your others?”
He studied her for several long seconds. Apparently she was more transparent than she knew, because he had no trouble seeing her probing intent.
And he wasn’t too happy about it. “You’re not talking about my sexual prowess, are you?”
“You have prowess?” she teased.
“I have a lot of things that might surprise you.”
“I only want to know about one.”
“I am a renaissance man. I do not exist in a single dimension.”
“Do you carry a gun?”
That seemed to knock him back a bit. He leaned into the curve of the tub as she had, stretched out his legs until his feet straddled her hips. His knees still broke the water’s surface. It was a big tub, but he was a tall man.
“I do, yes. Most of the time.”
“Do you have one with you now?”
He shook his head, his mouth in a tight line as if holding in more that he wanted to say.
“What’s it like? To use it?”
“I try not to.”
“But you have.”
He nodded again.
“Well?” She prodded with her toes beneath his thigh as well as with her words.
“It depends on the situation and the outcome, but it’s never nice. I mean, I don’t go out hoping I’m going to get to use it.”
She remembered then that he’d been a sniper. She started to ask, held back, thinking it best to wait before dredging up his past. “Well, I never did think you were an engineer.”
“Did I admit that I wasn’t?”
She nodded, because what he had said was enough to convince her. “You said you spun webs and leaped tall buildings.”
“Have you ever seen a blueprint? If that’s not a web...”
“An engineer wouldn’t think so.”
“Hmm. Busted.”
“Exactly.” She waited, one second, two seconds, hoping he’d say more. When he didn’t, she came right out and asked, “What do you do that requires you carry a gun? Are you FBI? CIA? DEA? Some Secret Squirrel government agent?”
“I’m pretty squirrelly, yeah.”
Evasive, but cute. “You can’t tell me, can you?”
“It wouldn’t be a good thing for you to have to admit to your mother.”
“My mother?”
“Sure.” He scooted forward in the tub, grabbed her by the knees and tugged her between his spread legs. “When you take me home to meet the folks.”
“And when am I going to be doing that?” she asked, so close she could see every fleck of color in his eyes.
“I’d say as soon as they start asking questions about the smile on your face.”
“My smile?” God, she felt like a mynah bird.
“Yeah. The one your new boyfriend puts there.”
She couldn’t breathe, her heart was pounding so hard. “I have a new boyfriend?”
“You do now,” he said, and covered her mouth with his.
The kiss was long and soft and sweet. He pulled her into the cradle of his body and wrapped her up in his legs. She closed hers behind his hips, felt his penis stir to life against the lips of her sex.
His hands roamed her back with the same testing pressure with which his tongue roamed her mouth. Nothing existed but the here and now for either of them. Nothing but the summer-sweet scent of the room, the warm water lapping like another tongue, the sounds of labored breathing as arousal crept in to blossom and grow.
He was hard between her legs, and she felt herself open with wanting to take him inside. He was in no hurry, however, seeming content to do no more than kiss her, make love to her with his teeth and his tongue, soft thrusts, then bolder, until he released her mouth and went to work along the line of her jaw, her neck, the curve of her ear.
She shuddered and pulled away. “You’re making me crazy here, Shaughnessey.”
“That’s the point, sweetheart.” He pulled back, looked into her eyes. “I want you on the verge of crawling out of your skin. And crawling into mine.”
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted you here like this?”
Tripp stared into Glory’s eyes, his throat having tightened at her softly spoken question.
They lay naked in her bed, facing each other, playing footsies while their knees touched, both resting up before they tackled cleaning the bathroom.
They’d left one hell of a wet mess on the floor.
“How long?” he finally asked, because it was a safe enough question without first admitting how long he’d wanted to be here.
“Since I’m being honest about my inner slut”—he tickled her low on her belly until she giggled—“I was mentally undressing you the first time you stood there ordering your sprouts.”
“Is that so?” This time he tickled her a bit lower, until he felt her moisture seep from between her folds onto the tips of his teasing fingers.
She quivered, nodded in answer to his question, her lower lip caught between her teeth as if she were holding back a whimper or moan she didn’t want him to hear.
“And here I thought all that intensity was about trying to get my order right.”
“It was. I wanted to make sure you came back.”
This time when he tested her wetness, he shifted his hips forward and guided the head of his cock down the seam of her pussy.
This time, he was the one who shuddered.
“Then you did your job well,” he said once he’d found his voice. “I couldn’t stay away.”
“Because of the sandwiches?”
“No, Glory. Because of you.”
“Why me?” she whispered as she wrapped exploring fingers around his shaft.
He throbbed into the vise of her hold. “Because you looked at me like you wanted me naked.”
“I did not,” she denied with a growl, sliding her hand the length of his cock and circling the flat of her palm over the capped head. “I purposefully looked at you like you weren’t worth the time of day.”
“And aren’t you glad I saw right through your ruse?”
“Ha. As if.”
“Well, I’m sure not a masochistic glutton for a woman’s punishment.”
She increased the pressure of her palm, circled the head of his cock repeatedly until he grabbed her by the waist and tumbled her on top of his body. She screeched but settled in and straddled him.
“Stop that,” he grumbled. “I’d like to spend some quality time here with you, and it’s not going to happen like that.”
He raised his knees, and she leaned back, bracing her weight against him, her hands on her thighs, his cock nestled into the soft hair and softer skin between her legs. “Are you going to sleep here tonight?”
It was a simple question. Her tremulous tone of voice and the look in her eyes complicated his answer. He knew what he wanted, but wasn’t as certain that she was ready for this to move forward as fast as it seemed to be doing.
Seemed to be, hell. As it had.
“Is that what you want?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Is there an echo in here?”
She growled again—he loved the way the sound vibrated all the way into his body—and she fell forward, catching herself with her hands planted above his shoulders. “Cruisin’ for a bruisin’ again, Shaughnessey? Because I am definitely in a position here to do some serious harm.”
It would take him less than ten seconds to reverse their arrangement, but he loved having her above him, her wild black curls a cloud around her face, her dark cherry nipples both inches from his face.
He moved his hands from beneath his head where he’d tucked his crossed arms, cupped and kneaded her tits until her eyes glazed over and his cock bobbed between their bodies.
“Oh, Tripp, you have no idea how good that feels.”
He knew exactly how good his end of the bargain felt. She was sweetly firm and her skin was softer than anything he’d ever rubbed up against. Then there was the tiny fact of how much she wanted him, the way her tongue slipped between her lips when he caught one nipple between two fingers and tugged.
“Yes. I want to spend the night. Whether or not I do is your call,” he said before lifting his head and sucking the berry-ripe knot into his mouth.
“Please stay,” she begged breathlessly. “In fact, if you never left it would be fine with me.”
With his gut clenched and the coals in his belly stirring to life, he swirled his tongue around her, drew her into his mouth, released her to move to the playground of her other breast, but took a second or two to say, “Never’s a pretty long time, sweetheart.”
When he bit lightly with the barest edge of his teeth and sucked, she cried out, her neck arching as she tossed back her head.
And then she whimpered, “I know. I’ve never known anyone like you. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. It’s taken way too long for you to get here, Tripp, but I don’t want you here if this is all you want from me.”
Love at first sight was nothing he’d put much stock in. Hell, he thought, burying his face between her breasts, he wasn’t sure love was anything he believed in.
What he did know and what was rapidly becoming apparent, was that he needed to be with this woman as long as she’d have him. And that what he was feeling had dived over the wall separating his comfort zone of lust and the enemy territory of involvement when she’d taken off her clothes in the bathroom.
He made his decision. He dropped his head back to the pillow, looked up into her eyes, and said, “I want to stay. I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me. And if all we do is cuddle up and sleep, that’s fine by me.”
She stared down at him, tears giving her eyes a misty sheen. The smile that lifted both corners of her mouth grabbed his heart and squeezed. “Are you just saying that to get me to put out?”
“Hell, yeah,” he answered, his vision blurry, a bitch of a frog clogging his throat. “Was it that obvious?”
“It was.” She shifted her weight to one arm, slid her free hand down between their bodies, wrapped her tiny cool fingers around his fire-breathing cock. “Especially since you punctuated it with this.”
“Oh, well, never let it be said that I’m a master of understatement.” And if she didn’t let him go, let him breathe, she was going to witness the true power of his punctuation skills.
What she did, instead, was rise up onto her knees and position him exactly where he wanted to be before taking him inside and slowly sliding down into his lap.
He ground his jaw, his eyes rolling back in his head—though averting his gaze didn’t do much in the way of helping him find the control she’d crushed with her very light weight.
She leaned forward, placing both palms along his rib cage and massaging her way to his shoulders. The caress was firm, not the least bit hesitant, and would’ve brought him to his knees if he wasn’t already on his back, swaying off balance, on his way to a very big fall.
When she reversed the process, dragging her hands down his torso, her fingertips teasing his nipples as she made her way to his navel where she threaded her fingers into the hair beneath, he couldn’t help it. He surged upward, his hips leaving the mattress and taking her with him.
She fell forward, catching herself on his shoulders, one brow arched as she stared down into his eyes. “Punctuating again?”
“In bold and italics.”
She chuckled, shook back her hair, then leaned down to kiss him. The spoken conversation had come to an end. Now she was talking with her tongue, teasing it over his lips, dipping it into his mouth.
And she was talking with her hips, rotating and lifting and coming back down until he was a mess of groans and hisses and sounds that had no meaning at all.
He should have been spent by now with all they’d done already, but he felt like he was fifteen, not twice that age, what with the way his cock was throbbing, his balls drawn up into his body, the entire downstairs package ready to blow.
“Glory, sweetheart. It would be really cool here if you’d stop for a second, oh, God, damn, please stop.” He poured the words into her open mouth, feeling the heat of his own breath backwash over his face.
Glory stopped moving the part of her body giving him hell, but continued to kiss him, abandoning his lips to tickle his eyelids, eyebrows, his cheekbones, temples and ears, her hands kneading the balls of his shoulders all the while.
And he would’ve been okay. He would’ve calmed down and been perfectly fine. The kissing kept him mighty hard, kept him on edge without sending him over.
But as she sat there unmoving, he felt her juices begin to seep out from where their bodies joined and ease down the underside of his shaft.
And that was the end of that.
He hooked an elbow behind her neck, planted a palm in the small of her back, pulled and pressed her down while grinding their mouths and bodies together.
He pumped upward, the friction of sex against sex creating a heat that sent steam to the ceiling. He spread his raised knees, jerked his mouth from hers. She braced her forearms on his chest and curled her fingers into the muscles where his shoulders sloped down from his neck.
It was impossible not to look into her eyes. The room was dark, though she’d left a tiny lamp across the room on her desk burning; the lacy black shawl draped over the shade tossed shadowed shapes onto her skin.
But her eyes were bright with what he swore were tears burning with the same emotion making it impossible for him to speak. All he could do was move, driving, thrusting, pumping and pouring himself into her; sweat broke in the small of her back. H
e held her there even tighter, his hand slick with desire’s perspiration.
She clenched around him then, sucking in a sharp breath as her orgasm hit. He saw that she wasn’t ready, that she wanted desperately to wait, to hold on, to make what they were doing last forever.
But he was done. Her contractions were like a fist of fine fingers milking him for all he was worth. And so he gave it up, emptying himself inside her, spilling himself in ribbons of come until he had nothing left to give. Until he felt as if a blade had speared the base of his spine with a pain that was searingly sweet.
He held her tight while she came down, while she learned how to breathe evenly again. While she did her best to dry her tears on a pillowcase, her head turned so he couldn’t see.
He didn’t have to see. He felt the sobs she tried to suppress, but he didn’t say a word. He simply held her, stroked a soothing hand down her back and told her with meaningless noises and whispered nonsense how miserable his life had been without her. How he could lie here beneath her for centuries to come and be the happiest man in the world.
They both must have dozed, because he started awake when she disengaged their rather sticky bodies a long time later, rolling to his side and draping an arm over his chest.
“Tripp?”
“Glory?”
“Will you answer one question for me?”
“Anything.”
“Why do you do what you do?”
The easiest answer of all. “Because if I don’t do it, who will?”
Glory finally returned to Brighton’s on Monday morning. The police finished their investigation over the weekend and gave her clearance to open for business again. That very business was why she had shown up two hours earlier than she usually did.
She had no idea how much cleanup she’d have to do but knew it would take longer than did her usual morning prep. She was in such a good mood, however, she didn’t care how long it took or that she’d be handling most of the lunch rush—what there was of it—on her own.
Knowing it might take customers time to warm up to returning, she’d phoned Neal over the weekend and scheduled his next shift for tomorrow. The time alone didn’t faze her at all. In fact, she found herself humming silly love songs and thinking of the last four nights spent with Tripp.
