by Amy Andrews
Steffy felt her cheeks heating and blamed a delayed reaction to the wine. “Yes.”
Bill nodded. “My turn to deal.”
Steffy handed over the cards warily. She’d expected him to push more and it made her suspicious that he hadn’t. He won the next hand.
“Did you enjoy it when I kissed you on the dance floor?”
Steffy glanced up at him. “Do you have a one-track mind?”
He shrugged. “I’m a man, aren’t I?”
“So you only think with what’s inside your jeans?”
“Do you always answer a question with a question?”
Steffy considered his question. She had enjoyed the kiss. But …
“Well?” he insisted. “Did you?”
His low voice undulated through her belly. “Yes. But it’s complicated.”
Bill grinned. “The best ones always are.” He handed her the cards. “Your deal.”
He won again. “Am I a good kisser?” he shot at her before she had a chance to steel herself.
Steffy rolled her eyes. “You do have a one-track mind.”
“Where did you feel it when I kissed you, Steffy? Here?” he asked, lifting his hand and tapping his fingers against her chest, over her heart. “Or here?” he said, trailing his fingers to her belly. “Or lower?” he murmured. “Same as me?”
Steffy swallowed at the intensity of his gaze and the heaviness in his voice, grateful his fingers hadn’t traveled lower even if they were burning a hole right through her skin. “That’s more than one question,” she said, her voice husky.
Bill withdrew his hand. “True.” He gathered the cards, dealt again and won again.
“You’ve been foxing me,” Steffy protested before he could get his question in. “You’re a card shark.”
Bill shrugged. “I play the tables in Vegas a little.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You’re thinking about kissing me right now, aren’t you?” Bill asked, ignoring her protest.
“I’m thinking about strangling you right now.”
“Yeah.” Bill smiled. “But before that.”
Steffy blushed under his unrelenting gaze. “What do you expect?” she said. “You’ve done nothing but talk about kissing for the last fifteen minutes. You got me tipsy and then you started talking dirty to me.”
Bill chuckled. “I was not talking dirty. You want dirty, I can do dirty.”
Steffy had no doubt at all. “You know what I mean.”
Bill knew exactly. He was one hundred percent turned on right now and it had everything to do with the kissing talk. “Well, what do you say?” he murmured. “We have lamplight and wine. There aren’t any flowers but we have time to kill …”
Steffy drew in a ragged breath. Bill was looking at her with heat and purpose in his eyes and she felt like she was melting from the inside out.
“Bill …” Her senses may have been scrambled with wine and fifteen minutes of verbal foreplay but Steffy still couldn’t bring herself to cause a rift between father and son. She was going to have to look Liam in the eye when she got out of here and she wanted to be able to hold her head high.
“This is wrong,” she said gently.
Bill gave a half laugh. “I admire your strength of character, Steffy, I really do but … wrong? Do you think any of those moral absolutes apply down here? Do you think what’s good and right and decent matters when we’re down here staring at our own mortality?”
“So you think what happens in the collapsed building stays in the collapsed building?” she asked.
“Sure—why not?”
“Because what you do when the chips are down always matters, Bill. Do you think my money, my position, my celebrity mean anything down here? You think any of that is going to help? All I have is my strength of character to get me through. That’s all we both have.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s not. We’ve got each other, Steffy, and for one reason or another, we’re in this together. Haven’t you wondered why? Why us? Maybe someone somewhere is trying to tell us something.”
“So we just forget all the reasons why this is a bad idea. Forget about how much we could hurt Liam. Forget about all our responsibilities in the real world?”
“The real world! This is the only world that matters at the moment.” He flung his arms out to indicate the piles of rubble hemming them in, trapping them in the middle of who knew what. “One major aftershock and the whole lot could come down on our heads.”
Steffy shook her head. “I refuse to think that we’re not going to get out of here, Bill,” she said, despite the insidious whisper chipping away at the back of her brain. “I need you to think positively too.”
“I am,” Bill said. “I am thinking positively. But as this thing drags on we also have to be realistic and I don’t know about you but I don’t want to die without ever having loved you, Steffy. Without having kissed you more, and held you more and made love to you.”
Steffy drew in a shaky breath at the unexpected revelation. Each word wrapped her in invisible threads, pulling her inexorably closer to him.
She shook her head, trying to resist. “Don’t say that,” she said.
Bill refused to be silenced. His feelings for her had been building over the last couple of months and he’d tried to deny them, pretend they were other lesser emotions—like respect and affection. But it took a dance with death to make him realize what was important.
He reached out and took her hand. “I’m falling in love with you, Steffy.”
She looked at their joined hands. She knew she had to get up. Had to walk away from him, because if she kept sitting, her hand in his, she was going to let his crazy words seduce her.
She pulled her hand away and climbed to her feet. “You don’t mean that,” she said walking toward the storeroom, trying to put some space between them.
Bill stood too. “Yes, I do.”
Steffy turned. “We can’t do this to Liam.”
“Liam is my son and I love him but he loves Hope,” Bill said. “And he’s a big boy. He just needs to get used to the idea of you being with someone else. He’ll come round.”
Steffy opened her mouth to deny it again, to tell him no, but an aftershock jarred the floor beneath her—a big one. She flailed her arms as she stumbled, frightened by its intensity compared to the more gentle ones they’d been having.
Bill cursed under his breath, covering the few paces between them quickly, and dragged Steffy back to the doorway. He pulled her against him, tucking her head into his chest, feeling the frantic beat of her heart. A loud crack rent the air and he felt her burrow her head in further.
It was over in about twenty seconds but it still took a full minute for Steffy to surface from the protection of his chest.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his hands cradling her face.
Steffy nodded, but she was not okay—she was not in the ballpark of okay. “That was a big one,” she said quietly.
Bill nodded. He let her go to find the flashlight as the aftershock had knocked over the lanterns but Steffy clutched at his arm.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
Bill wrapped her up in his arms again. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m just going to crouch down and find the flashlight, okay?”
Steffy shut her eyes. No. The only place she felt okay was right here in his arms and she didn’t want him to let go. “Okay,” she said but her voice sounded small and uncertain even to her own ears.
Bill groped around for the flashlight at their feet, locating it fairly quickly, flicking it on, then standing again and pulling her against him. Silently, he shone the beam around the area. The pile of rubble where they’d raised the flag seemed okay and the piping was still anchored in place. But when he shone the light on the kitchen side, Steffy gasped.
A beam from the kitchen rubble pile had shifted and fallen sideways. It was large and clearly heavy, and it didn’t escape Steffy’s notice that it had come to rest in almost the exact spot she�
��d been standing when the aftershock hit.
“Oh God,” she said, a sudden wave of nausea roiling through her intestines as she turned her face into Bill’s chest.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, rubbing her back, flicking the flashlight off and plunging them into darkness.
“No, it’s not,” she said, raising her head. “I was … standing right there.” She’d be dead right now if he hadn’t snatched her away. He’d saved her life again.
“But you’re not now,” he soothed, his hand continuing its calm stroking.
Steffy looked into his earnest face. He was so heroic right now she could barely breathe for it—it was suffocating and oh so sexy. Everything about him was sexy. His impossibly square jaw, his neat beard, his strong chin. The way he oozed masculinity and confidence.
And his mouth. God but his mouth was sexy.
And he was right. They could die here. The building could collapse before they were rescued and they’d be gone. Wiped from the face of the earth.
And she’d never know what it was like to be loved by him.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Bill blinked at the unexpected request. “Steffy, are you sure—”
She didn’t give him a chance to finish, just raised herself up on her toes and kissed him instead.
His lips were resistant at first. She wasn’t sure if that was from shock or from some kind of belated morality, given how much she’d been banging on about it, but the second she whimpered her frustration against his mouth, he opened to her and she took what she wanted.
He let her take the lead, his lips slanting in the direction she wanted them to go, his tongue stroking against hers when she commanded it to do so. Her hands bunched in the fabric of his T-shirt, her hips aligned with his and when she felt the hard length of him at the juncture of her thighs she rubbed herself against him, desperate to get closer.
Bill, his breath ragged, pulled away. “Are you sure?” he asked again, knowing this was escalating, feeling his own control at snapping point.
Steffy blinked, her head swimming from the overdose of testosterone and the sheer weight of her need. “I’ve never been surer of anything,” she said, dragging his head back down.
Bill didn’t need any more convincing. And he didn’t do any more following either. He bumped her back against the door frame and flayed her with a kiss that left them both gasping.
“More?” he asked roughly.
“Oh God, yes!” Steffy begged.
“All the way?” he demanded against her mouth.
Steffy whimpered. “I’ll die if you don’t.”
Bill reclaimed her mouth, his hands gliding down her body, skimming her waist and her hips and sliding around to her butt and squeezing. She cried out and he jerked her hips hard against him, using the angle of their bodies to his advantage, grinding into her.
“You like that?” he muttered.
“Yes,” she panted. “More.”
“Hell yeah,” he groaned, tormenting them further as he rubbed against her. He wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. He was just getting started.
But he needed more than this. He needed to touch her all over, to see her. His hands found the hem of her T-shirt and he wrenched it up. Steffy helped him, lifting her arms, and when she was free he feasted his eyes on her, his chest heaving.
“Mmm,” he said, as his gaze roamed over the pink satin and black lace of her bra, the flatness of her stomach, the cute wink of her belly button.
He dropped his head and traced his tongue down the edge of a bra cup into the depths of her cleavage. Then he yanked the cup aside and claimed an erect nipple. Her harsh hiss and the arch of her back encouraged him further, and he reefed the other cup aside, his mouth again seeking the taut bud.
Steffy could barely think. Hell, she could barely breathe. All she could do was hold on and feel as fireworks exploded behind her eyes. Before she knew it, her bra was off and his hands were wandering south. Not gentle, not rough, just determined. Purposeful. Eager.
Resolute.
They brushed her belly, pulled at the stud of her jeans, pushed under the waistband at the back, beneath the fabric of her underwear until they were kneading her firm naked flesh, bringing her in close to him again. Steffy’s back arched again as his mouth teased her nipples and he rubbed himself maddeningly against her.
Heat flared and something tugged deep down and suddenly Steffy couldn’t take it anymore. Was he just going to torture her, standing here forever with all his clothes on?
She needed him naked.
She needed him on top of her.
She needed him inside her.
Steffy pulled at his shirt, tugging it over his head and when finally his magnificent chest was revealed, she pushed against it, pushing him to the other side of the doorway.
“Steffy?”
“Shh,” she said, thankful for her large pupils dilated with desire. Thankful they improved her night vision so that she could see every amazing inch of Bill’s chest. “Wow,” she said, running her fingers over his meaty pecs, fluttering them over his nipples, trailing her hand down the row of pillowed muscles bisecting his abdomen, watching them contract in her wake.
She hooked her finger under the stud that kept his jeans together and looked up to find him watching her with hooded eyes, waiting to see if she’d pop it and it was such a turn on she raised herself up on her toes to kiss him again. He kissed her back, deep and hard, and she whimpered because she wanted to stay right there but she needed to kiss his chest more.
So she dragged herself away and put her tongue to a nipple. His low expletive, his sucked in breath and the light bump as his head hit the door frame empowered her and she traced her tongue everywhere, trekking down to where her hand had gone, right down to the button sitting low on his hips. Then she tugged at it with her fingers and it popped. She straightened, her hips aligning with his, her finger at the top of the zipper, and waited for Bill to open his eyes and look at her.
His eyes fluttered open and Steffy slowly, very slowly, pulled the zipper down. Tooth by tooth it unfastened, scraping against the hard bulge as it went and Steffy smiled as Bill’s breath grew more ragged and his nostrils flared.
When it reached the bottom, Bill placed his hand over hers. “Okay, whoa,” he panted, his voice thick as syrup. “I think we need to get horizontal.”
Chapter Ten
Steffy couldn’t have agreed more and in the next few seconds she was on her back on the ground, Bill’s big, hard body beside her, all hot muscle and leashed desire, one heavy thigh trapping both of hers.
Bill looked down into her face. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
Steffy’s heart swelled at the reverence in his voice, at how right this felt. She traced the outline of his jaw with her fingertip. “So are you,” she whispered back.
And then he was kissing her again, with absolutely no reverence. He unleashed the hunger she’d felt trembling through his biceps and flayed her with heat and lust and need, drenching her with his desire, branding her with passion she’d never known existed, until all she could do was hold on and submit to the maelstrom.
With his mouth reducing her to a mindless mess, his hands were able to roam freely and he took ruthless advantage. They traveled everywhere: her breasts, her nipples, her stomach, her hips, the zipper of her jeans—and then inside her jeans.
She gasped when his long fingers slid into her slick heat, breaking off the hot, hard kiss, her fingernails digging into the broad sweep of muscle covering his shoulder.
“Take your jeans off,” he murmured in her ear as he sucked on her earlobe.
With his help, Steffy wriggled out of them and then she was totally naked and completely at his mercy as he ducked his head to kiss her again. But her senses were back and she wanted him just as naked.
“Oh, no, no, no,” she whispered against his mouth, turning her head so his lips slid to her jaw as her fingers reached for the fly of his jeans. “Your turn.”
Bill felt a jolt to his groin as her fingers brushed against his hardness and then stroked him through the fabric of his underwear. He shut his eyes, his forehead falling to the curve of her shoulder.
“I need to touch you,” she panted into his ear and he could hear her frustration as two layers of fabric and his position hampered her access.
Bill rolled onto his back and pushed his jeans and underwear down, kicking them off before rolling over again and slamming his mouth down onto hers. When her hand slid onto him his lips broke away with a guttural groan, his forehead pressed against hers. And when she palmed the length of him and squeezed, his ragged gasping sounded like a hurricane in the silence.
“Steffy,” he muttered.
“Now,” she said, stroking the side of his face with her other hand. “Now.”
Bill didn’t need to be told again. He kissed her hard as he moved over, plundering the softness of her mouth as he settled himself between her thighs, reveling in her response. She wrapped her legs around his waist, bringing all her slick heat into contact with his straining hardness and he poised himself there, levering himself up on his elbows.
He broke off the kiss, placing his forehead back on hers, struggling to contain his breath. He wanted to watch her face as they became one. He wanted her to know that this wasn’t some quick, dirty, end-of-life, going-out-with-a-bang, any-port-in-a-storm thing. He wanted her to look in his eyes and know it was the real thing.
“Ready?” he asked, his breathing ragged, his voice unsteady as he denied himself the overriding urge to thrust inside her in one quick, hard stroke.
Steffy looked into Bill’s eyes. She was. But it was also the first time she’d made love since losing the baby and she knew that meant something. Frankly, it scared the hell out of her.
“I haven’t done this,” she said, her whisper amplified in the minuscule distance between their mouths, “since the miscarriage …”
Bill felt everything inside him go still at her startling revelation. Then he silently cursed himself for his insensitivity. Granted, it wasn’t one of the things he was known for, but he could have thought about the situation a little deeper before coming over all caveman, all the-end-is-nigh, on Steffy.
