Without looking away from him, Larissa lifted her arms over her head, let her lips crook slightly, imperiously, and waited. Jack’s mouth pulled into something too edgy to be a smile. His dark eyes caught fire. An echoing shiver raced down Larissa’s back, then became a low and insistent pulse between her legs.
He took the bottom of her sweater in his big hands and began to pull it up, inch by agonizing inch. Slowly, carefully, bit by bit, he bared her skin to the cooler air of the kitchen. Punishing her, she was suddenly convinced, for her little half-naked show earlier. With a gentleness that belied the stark hunger stamped across his face, he tugged it over her head and then discarded it, his attention immediately drawn to the breasts he’d finally revealed. He let out a breath, low and jagged, that danced over her skin and made her nipples draw tight. Slowly, as if in some kind of awe, he cupped a breast in each hard palm, testing them against his heat, his strength. His thumbs dragged over each peak, and she arched helplessly against him, pressing her breasts more fully into his hands as the exquisite pleasure threatened to spiral out of control.
Then he bent down and sucked one tight, hard nipple into his mouth, and Larissa lost herself completely. Her head fell back and she could only moan out her pleasure.
She clung to him as the world spun around, as she spun around—and she was only vaguely conscious of the fact he was actually lifting her. She could only concentrate on the wicked perfection of his mouth on her breast, and the wild, consuming heat that pulled tighter and tighter in her core.
“Hold on,” he muttered urgently, pulling his mouth away and lifting her higher against him. Larissa wound her arms around his neck and her legs tight around his waist and gloried in the slide of her skin against his, his heat against hers, and the way each step he took rocked him harder and tighter against her very center.
She was flat on her back before she realized what he was doing, and it took her longer than it should have to realize he’d simply laid her down on the table, spread out before him like his own, personal feast.
He loomed over her, beautiful and dark, propping himself up on his hands as he let his gaze travel down the length of her torso. He straightened, letting his hands move to her legs, then carefully smoothed them down one of her gleaming black boots before he gently tugged it off. Larissa registered the thunk of it against the kitchen floor, but he was already on to the other one, the slightest frown between his brows, as if undressing her was a task that required his fiercest concentration.
So she could do nothing when his hands moved to the button of her jeans but lift her hips and let him peel them down her legs, baring her entirely to his gaze, save the tiny scrap of scarlet that covered her sex.
For a moment, he only looked at her, his dark eyes burning that deep, passionate black, that same rough hunger that beat in her making his face seem nearly grim. She felt weak, wild. Deliciously wet. She felt that current running through her again, electric and demanding, making her feel as if her body was not her own. That she had not lived in five long years, not since he’d last had his hands, his mouth, on her. That there was only this. That there could never be, had never been, anything but Jack.
It was too much to bear, too much to survive intact. She was shaken by the depth of her own longing, her own desperation. All these feelings. It was like a tidal wave—sensation after sensation crashing over her, threatening to drown her. She could hardly take it all in. She felt a restlessness wind through her—a kind of sensual panic, and knew she had to move, or it might well burn her alive. She sat up, pulling him closer to her by the waistband of his jeans, trembling slightly at the feel of his hair-roughened skin against the back of her fingers, and the intense heat of his body.
This was too much. He was too much.
But she couldn’t seem to stop. She didn’t want to stop. Something she would no doubt castigate herself for … but later. Later.
He looked down at her, and the frank hunger and sensual heat in his dark gaze made her ache. She kept her eyes on his as she undid the button of his jeans, and then slowly pulled the zipper down, moving carefully over his impressive hardness. She could hear the storm against the windows and the wind howl around the sides of the house as if it came from far away. But here, now, there was only the sound of his breath, and her own, and then the smooth, hard length of him in her hands. Only him. Only Jack.
Too much. Never enough.
“Not now,” he said, as if the words hurt him. She could hardly understand what he was saying, so intent was she on relearning the shape of him. She swayed closer, as if to pull him into her mouth, to truly taste him, and she heard his slight groan as he stopped her.
He pulled her hands away from him, and leaned down to catch her mouth with his, his kiss scalding hot, demanding.
Larissa fell back and he followed, pulling her hips toward him down the length of the table. Propping himself up on one arm, he continued to kiss her, deeper and with more raw command, as his other hand traced the shallow indentation of her belly button, then moved farther south. He pulled the scrap of scarlet to the side, and then slipped his long fingers into the wet heat beneath.
Finally. Fire. Larissa arched against his hand, her mind spinning out, dizzy and desperate.
“Jack …” she managed to say, and it was like throwing kerosene on an already out-of-control blaze. She felt his focus sharpen, as his hands traced her secret curves, then a long finger tested her entrance. Then two. She shuddered in anticipation, in joy, in the helpless wonder, the enormity, of what he made her feel.
He moved closer, the blunt head of him pressed up against her, so very close, and then—impossibly—he stopped. He looked at her.
Just looked at her. As if he was trying to see … everything.
She was nearly mindless. Nearly. She felt that dark, nearly black gaze from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. Inside and out. It was as if he was already deep within her, had already claimed her. Changed her. And she knew, in the way she always had, that there was nothing about this man that could ever be taken lightly. That he demanded too much, and would take too much, and there was no way around that simple, salient truth.
But the other truth was that her desire for him was like a poison in her blood, turning her inside out, alive and sharp and now. She hooked her legs around his hips, swiveled hers, and pulled him into her.
Too much. Never, ever enough.
He slid all the way home, hard and sure, and she burst into a shower of light all around him.
He waited until she opened her eyes again, those sea-green depths shot through with gold, dazed as she slowly focused on him, and then, only then, he began to move.
She was even more perfect than he’d remembered, than he’d dreamed all these years. Her soft curves, her lithe body, her dangerously addictive mouth. The small sounds she began to make in the back of her throat as he set a slow, steady pace. The scent of vanilla hung in the air between them, tempting him, teasing him, making him move faster, deeper.
He built her up again, using his hands and his tongue and his mouth. He played with her, with that masterpiece of a body that he’d never expected he’d touch again, laid out before him, his to command. Her hips rose to meet his, her nails dug into his back, and she clung to him, urging him on.
He wanted her too badly. He wanted all of her. He reached between them, unerringly finding the very center of her pleasure, and stroked her, even as he kept up his demanding pace. He felt her tense again, her muscles clenching his, her mouth against his skin.
And then, finally, she screamed out his name and he followed her, tumbling over the edge into oblivion.
When he could breathe again, he pulled back from her so he could study that beautiful face of hers. Trying, once again and with as little hope of success, to figure out what went on behind those perfect bones, that flawless skin. She lay sprawled across the kitchen table like some kind of banquet, her skin flushed a light shade of rose, her arms stretched above her head in total abandon
.
God, she was beautiful. The most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
It made him harden again. It made him want her as if he hadn’t just had her. It made him want things he’d told himself were part and parcel of that darkness five years ago, things he’d told himself had never been real.
But she was real, and she was here. And for this moment, at least, she was his.
He told himself that kick he felt in his chest was anticipation for the night ahead, nothing more.
Jack stepped back and refastened the jeans he’d never managed to fully remove, then adjusted the scrap of scarlet between her legs, putting it back into place. Larissa stirred slightly, though her eyes stayed closed. She looked … soft. Almost vulnerable. He felt something move through him, and told himself he had no idea what it was. None at all.
He didn’t question his actions then, he just swept her up and into his arms. He was halfway up the stairs before her eyes opened, fixing on him in that solemn, disarming way of hers.
“Don’t argue,” he told her gruffly, feeling something too close to emotional, something much too raw. Explosive. Did he expect her to argue with him? Did he want her to argue? Did he fear it? “You’re staying.”
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and her green eyes looked guarded, suddenly, but she didn’t say a word.
He carried her into the sprawling suite at the top of the stairs, his favorite in the house. It took over the front of the second story and looked out over the vastness of the sea from three side-by-side bay windows that stood at proud attention on the outside wall. Inside, he moved to the big, wrought-iron four-poster bed that sat in the center of the room, piled high with snowy white linens, and deposited her in the middle of it.
Because she was Larissa Whitney, she showed no evidence of any second thoughts or regrets, or even any acknowledgment that it was far chillier upstairs than it had been in the kitchen. Instead, she closed her eyes again and stretched out like a cat, her lithe body so smooth, so endlessly fascinating, spread out on the soft, old quilt.
Mine, he thought. It rang in him like the low toll of the island’s old church bells, deep and true, but he didn’t let himself worry about what that might mean. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think it through. He moved to sit next to her, opening a drawer in the chest that stood next to the bed, the repository of some thirty summers, including the long-ago summers when he’d put on plays to amuse his mother. Larissa was warm next to him, vanilla and musk, and he could not bring himself to regret what he was about to do. Or even question it. He pulled out the pair of heavy steel handcuffs he’d once used as part of a costume, clicked one circle tight around her wrist, and attached the other to the scrolled-iron headboard.
Her eyes opened slowly. Perhaps too slowly, too deliberately. She blinked, though she showed no particular sign of alarm, and then she tested the handcuff against the iron scrollwork, pulling on it slightly before letting her arm rest back against the pillows.
“Kinky,” she said mildly. Her gaze moved to his, clear and faintly amused. “And me without my safe word.”
“I don’t want you to get any ideas,” Jack said, his voice rough in the stillness of the room.
“Says the man who just cuffed me to his four-poster bed.” Her voice was dry.
“About leaving without telling me.” His gaze drilled into hers. “Like the last time.”
Her expression didn’t change, but he felt the air around them shimmer slightly with the tension that never quite disappeared. She moved her arm, letting the steel clank against iron. Her chin lifted.
“Some men might simply have asked,” she said quietly.
“I’m not ‘some men,’” he said in the same tone. He moved to sprawl next to her, tracing a line down between those pert breasts with his index finger, pleased to feel that telltale shiver move through her. “And you are certainly not ‘some women,’ Larissa.”
She only looked at him for a moment, that gaze of hers so serious, and still so sad, despite the glaze of passion that deepened whenever he moved his hand against her.
“What kind of woman am I?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a whisper, and he had the strangest sensation that despite the way she lounged there without an apparent care in the world, as if she routinely found herself almost entirely naked and restrained to various items of furniture, that question cost her. That the answer meant something to her.
He couldn’t let himself think about that, either.
He would marry the kind of woman his grandfather approved of, safe and dutiful and boring, who would not remind him of the sea. He would build a life with her, an adult life made of obligation and responsibility, and he would not feel like this again, this roller coaster of desire and a kind of fury, this pounding need to bury himself inside Larissa. He told himself that was what he wanted. What he desired above all else.
But right now, tonight, his duty seemed a far-off thing. There was only this woman stretched out in his bed, waiting for him, flushed and near enough to naked.
“At the moment,” he said quietly, intently, the words sounding like a promise he knew better than to make, and had no intention of keeping, “you are mine.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE RELEASED her from the handcuffs much later that long and breathtakingly intense night, but the hold he kept on her, Larissa thought many days later when she was still on the island and still deep under his spell—was proving much harder to break.
She had woken the following morning feeling bruised—and not physically, which she imagined might have been easier to deal with, all things considered. Physically, though, she’d felt wonderful. More than wonderful—she’d felt alive. Vibrant. As if she’d finally understood, after all this time, what her body had been made to do, though she’d tried not to think of it that way.
No, the bruises she’d sustained were of the emotional variety, and Larissa had wanted only to hurry back to her tiny room at the inn, bury herself in the deep and forgiving bath, and try her best not to poke at them. She’d eased herself out from under the delicious weight of Jack’s heavy arm, and had moved to the edge of the bed. She’d told herself that her trepidation was only because it was a cold morning, with the rain still beating down against the bay windows that allowed in only a thin, weak light to indicate the night had passed. It was chilly and wet, and she’d known she had to walk all the way to the kitchen to locate her clothes. That, surely, had been reason enough to want to stay in the bed.
But then his hand had snaked out and his arm had wrapped around her waist, capturing her that easily. Not that she’d put up much of a fight. Or any fight. She’d been too busy repressing the deep sigh of contentment that threatened to spill out, just because he’d been touching her again.
Her weakness, she’d told herself then, was truly astonishing. There was so much she’d needed to think about, to come to terms with. The night before had blazed inside her, neon and vivid, and she’d not been at all certain she was the same person she’d been the day before. She’d had no idea who she might have become.
But even so, all she’d wanted to do was lean into him, lose herself in him, as if none of that mattered when he was near.
There would be time for that later, she’d promised herself. When the storm passed, when the smoke from this particular fire cleared. When sanity reasserted itself. She’d deal with it later. She’d have to.
“Do I have to chain you to the bed again?” he’d asked, his voice thick with sleep and far too appealing, dancing down her spine like a touch, like his clever, demanding hands.
“Are you asking for permission this time?” She’d had to force her voice to sound light. He’d tugged on her, gently, until she’d had no choice but to fall back against him, and she’d sighed involuntarily when he’d tucked her back into the heat of his chest, his mouth moving along her neck to tease the tender skin below her ear.
She’d felt him all around h
er, holding her—his hard chest and his strong thighs behind her, and the evidence of his unquenchable desire stirring against her bottom. He should not have felt so good, she’d told herself with something too close to despair. The rough silk of his skin next to hers should not have made her quiver in delight. She should have been done with him after the night they’d shared. She should have thrown off his arm and walked away. For sheer self-preservation, if nothing else.
But instead Larissa had tilted back her head and met his lips, tasting him as if the desire that flared so easily, so wildly, between them was something other than destructive. As if it might sanctify her somehow, instead of ripping her apart.
“Stay,” he’d murmured against her mouth, then turned his attention back to her neck, his hand moving to cup her breast, sending arrows of sensation spiraling through her. “For breakfast.”
“I don’t eat breakfast,” she’d managed to reply, her voice breathy in the morning air as once again her body shook for him, melted against him, did exactly as he’d bade it.
He’d moved over her then, his beautiful face taut with sensual hunger, his eyes much too aware, then twisted his hips and slid deep into her in one smooth, devastating thrust.
She should not have loved that, gloried in it, but she did.
“We’ll have to come up with something else to do, then,” he’d said roughly against her neck, her mouth.
And then he’d started to move, and she’d stopped thinking for a long, long while.
He hadn’t proved any more interested in her leaving throughout the whole of that day and into the next. After an abbreviated walk in the woods a few days after that—an attempt at getting out of the house which had ended with Larissa gripping on to one of the ghostly white birch trees while Jack took her with knee-weakening finesse from behind, his mouth against the back of her neck while he braced himself with one arm on the same tree, whispering things she was afraid to listen to too closely—he’d packed her into his SUV. She had still been shaking from the aftereffects of the shattering climax he’d just given her, no matter how hard she’d tried to pretend she’d been unaffected.
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