by Chant, Zoe
And then it just happened—his tiger roared inside him and his brain froze as he grabbed hold of her face and laid one on her.
Then she kissed him back. Not a granny peck or a good-bye-and-good-luck smack, but head-tilting, tongue searching, scorching hot mouth-to-mouth that obliterated his brain altogether.
He had no idea how long that went on. It could have been the hottest minute in history—or it could have been half an hour, but it would never be enough—they fell apart, clothing awry, breathing shaky. He had a four-hundred horsepower boner, and she looked at him with those eyes of hers, framed by wild curls, her lips soft and parted, her nipples straining against that halter top.
“Five miles,” he managed. “My friend loaned me his house. It’s empty. Five miles away, on the other side of the hills.” He looked at her, his entire body frozen in inarticulate question.
“Yes,” she breathed.
Afterward he never remembered how he managed to get to JP’s house. All he knew was they made it to the guest room after stopping to kiss in the garage, the laundry room off the garage, the kitchen, the hallway, and then they reached the guest room, after leaving a trail of shoes, socks, his jacket, her purse and sandals, his shirt, and there they were, standing before the bed he’d made Marine-style before leaving that morning.
Her mouth, sweet and soft as peaches and cream, shook as he plundered it, then she came back at him biting, nipping, licking. He was hazily aware of his hands drifting down the silk of her dress to cup her wonderful ass, and oh, then he slid his palms under the hem, to find her totally naked.
His brain exploded. “You are so damn hot,” he muttered into her lips. He picked her up and threw her on the bed. “For three days I’ve wanted . . .”
“What?” she asked, smiling as she rolled to her knees, then did that marvelous thing as she shrugged out of her dress and flung it.
“This.” He eased her back on the bed and knelt between her knees, which she obligingly widened, her eyes glittering with heat.
He started on the inside of one knee, kissing softly, slowly, deliberately. Her skin was silkier than silk, warm and there was no fucking way she wasn’t wearing some billion dollar scent from Paris, because she smelled so damn good he found himself moving faster as he traced up her thigh to the sweet hollow there.
She made a little noise that zinged straight to his cock, which was already rock hard. But that could damn well wait. Because he was not going to miss a second here—and with lips, teeth, and tongue, set about driving her wild, until those little noises reached higher and higher with each breath she took.
And when her body trembled, her back arched, he licked slowly around her clit as he slid two fingers inside her warm, wet folds. He sensed her shuddering on the knife edge, and sucked her over the brink. She clenched hard on the bedclothes, and he caressed her as she came down, then moved up to lie next to her, his fingers tracing over her trembling belly and up to caress her breasts.
“M-m-m-m, good as that feels,” she murmured, “I think it’s my turn.”
She pounced upright in one of those sudden, sprightly moves of hers and pushed him flat. Then she knelt between his legs and leaned over to slowly pull the zipper down.
His cock was so hard it was nearly painful as it strained against the confining fabric. It sprang free, the air making him jump.
She flashed him a triumphant grin, then rolled off the bed entirely, putting her hands to the hem of his pants.
He lifted his hips and she yanked his trousers off, and then slowly slid his boxers down before climbing to sit astride his legs. She ooohed down at his cock as though she’d just discovered a candy cane, and stroked him with her fingernails before lowering her mouth over the tip. As her tongue swirled around the head and poked teasingly at the tip, he bucked, and he knew he was going to lose it soon.
What’s more, though never in his life would he have turned down some head, the need to be inside her was so overwhelming he sat up. “Mindy . . .” he breathed.
“Let me,” she said, and when he pulled the condom from the nightstand, she did that thing with her teeth again, and slowly, teasingly unrolled it—
“Oh God,” he gritted, his teeth clamped shut as he held himself simmering at the edge.
Still with that mischievous, triumphant grin she rose up on her knees, rolled her hips in one of those smoking hot undulations, and lowered herself onto him.
Two inches in and he began to buck.
Mate, the tiger stirred.
Mindy laughed low in her throat and began to ride him, each stroke taking him deeper, those amazing muscles of hers clenching and releasing, which shot him to a higher brink than he’d ever been in his life.
Mate! The tiger roared deep in his core.
The entire bed was shaking as they worked together in a primal rhythm. She tightened, tightened, he reached down to grip her hips, and she threw her head back as he expelled his breath with the force of his orgasm, and wave after wave took them both down into boneless, mindless bliss.
* * *
For one sweet minute Mindy reveled in the afterglow, aware of Dennis’s arm curled around her, his fingers slowly and gently caressing her ribs.
Then came the what have you done, you idiot? mental yelling. She’d had sex twice with a guy she didn’t even know. Well, yes, she did know some things.
His name was Dennis O’Keefe. She’d never thought the name Dennis sexy before, but just thinking it gave her echo-pulses in deep places.
She knew he came from a small town.
She knew his dad was a Marine.
She knew he loved travel, and had made a lot of trips, and when he didn’t, he’d had a couple of friends with whom he’d watched Mork and Mindy.
She knew he was still friends with at least one of them, because they were in this guy’s house now. So the guy had to be pretty successful because she could turn her head toward the huge windows, and see glimpses of L.A. below, half-obscured by California black oak. She was in the Hollywood Hills, not all that far from her own apartment just off Wilshire.
She treasured up each of these nuggets until the horrible thought occurred: at some point he was going to want to know stuff about her.
His fingers had stopped. She hoped he was asleep, and carefully wriggled free. She rolled off the bed, and was halfway to the bathroom when his low, rough voice stopped her. “You’re not going to vanish, are you?”
She turned. He lay naked on the bed, his gorgeous body warmed by the golden shafts of late afternoon sunlight slanting in between gently moving leaves. Her heart squeezed and she resisted the impulse to dive right back into that wildly rumpled bed.
“I don’t even know where I am. Except somewhere in the Hills.” She couldn’t help a smile. He was just so luscious, with his thick, tawny hair hanging tousled on his forehead and spilled against the pillow, the light catching gold glints in his chest hair. The long play of muscles down his body. “I just want to . . .” And she jerked her thumb at the bathroom door.
For answer, he grinned back, reached down to the side of the bed, and picked up her sandals. “I’m holding these hostage. Just in case.”
His grin was so bad-boy she laughed as she walked into the bathroom. Then stopped in total dismay when she saw herself in the mirror.
Hell’s bells, her hair had totally poodled.
She clawed at it, trying to flatten it down, but it sprang up wilder than ever. How could he look at her and not immediately suspect she was secretly a poodle? She yanked the spigots in the shower, and as soon as it was warm enough she stepped into the spray. Then she looked around, feeling a sneakily secret delight in using his soap and shampoo.
A sudden, nearly overwhelming urge to shift so she could sniff him all over and imprint all his wonderful scents made her clutch at the shower wall. Wow. What was that? She’d never felt that before.
Terror at being discovered effectively doused the sleepy, sexy feelings, and she feverishly poured shampoo on her head a
nd scrubbed until her hair lay in wet worms on her face.
A light knock at the bathroom door, and Dennis’s muffled voice came through. “Room for two in there?”
Mindy ran her fingers through her soggy hair as her entire body flashed and tingled. She could let herself have a little more fun—it wasn’t like he’d interrogate her in the shower! “Come on in! The water’s fine.”
She’d never shared a shower with a guy before. Heck, she’d never made love during the day before. It had always been decorously in the dark, her body hidden by bedcovers, after which she whisked herself into her shrouding bathrobe. She shivered with daring, then winced.
Stupid! The reality was sure to be elbows bumping and water hogging and maybe he’d think her too large for the space, or look critically at her creases and folds, but when he stepped in and smiled down at her at that way she couldn’t define, little aftershocks of pleasure throbbed through her, making her breathless with anticipation.
He said, “You’re the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. May I soap you down?”
“Okay?” she said, totally not expecting that.
He started at the top of her head. Not scrubbing as she’d been doing, but gently fingering through the short curls, then he stroked with his thumbs over her brow in widening circles. She shut her eyes and tipped her head back as he massaged slow circles in the hollow of her temples, and over her cheekbones. Her knees began to tremble, it felt so amazing.
His forefinger traced over her lips, and she couldn’t resist opening her mouth to suck his finger in. His response was a huff of laughter deep in his chest, then he gently removed his finger, set his hands to her shoulders, and turned her around.
A moment’s pause, some squishing sounds with the soap, and here came his hands again with palms full of suds as he spread his fingers over her shoulders, kneading and smoothing muscles she didn’t even know she had. Her knees trembled again—it felt insanely good.
Down he worked, and when he hit the folds in her skin he caressed them and kneaded them, following every curve with his fingers spread as if he couldn’t touch enough of her. Over her arms and down to her hands, his fingers lacing with hers, as he hummed deep in his chest, Hmmmmmmm. He was purring, like a big bear, no, more like some big mountain cat.
And the dog inside Mindy melted into a puddle of goo.
Then he turned her again, and those searching thumbs spread along her collarbones, making widening circles that left swathes of heat under her skin, and she could scarcely hold herself up as her nipples tightened, exquisitely sensitized under the hissing water.
He soaped her breasts, caressing each and then kissing and licking them with a kind of intense focus as if he had nothing else in the world he would rather be doing, and the humming note changing subtly, deepening, as fire kindled deep in her core. Then his hands smoothed over her belly, caressing her flesh with slow, tender strokes, and she swayed.
By the time he reached her hips, she was on fire, and when his fingers moved at last, at last to her inner folds, she whimpered, lifting one knee up so she could slide her inner thigh along his hip. His cock thumped insistently against her rib, and she grabbed it with both hands, moving down the shaft to his balls.
And she began to knead, and stroke, and then playfully pinch.
The purring hum hitched, deepening to a rough, low growl.
The fire in her had reached scorching heat. She gasped, “In me.”
“I’ll get a condom,” he gasped.
For the first time ever, she didn’t care. “On the pill.”
He reached, slid his hands around her butt, and lifted her up. She closed her legs around his waist and lowered herself inch by inch onto his rock-hard cock, gyrating her hips with deliberate slowness, loving the way he slid into her, skin against his velvety skin, as though he had been made just for her.
They began to rock with frenzied rhythm as the water poured all around them. This time he came first, and the shudder of his orgasm deep in her sent her crashing over the edge to fall, and fall, and fall, as he held her tight.
Chapter Seven
Mindy decided that this unknown JP was the perfect host.
There were two luxurious bathrobes in the linen closet along with lots of fluffy towels that matched the blue of the bathroom.
Mindy sat swathed in a man-sized robe at the table with a mug of coffee in her hands as Dennis, his bathrobe hanging open, stood before a spice cabinet loaded with jars and boxes, his hands on his hips. “JP’s fiancée is supposed to be a terrific cook, but I haven’t got a clue.” He turned Mindy’s way, affording a delightful view of his body from collarbones down.
She smiled, thinking she could never get enough of looking at him. “I’m a rotten cook,” she admitted. “All I can make is coffee and toast.”
“How about we stop for dinner before I take you back to your car,” he asked lightly, and she sensed question underneath the question.
“Great idea,” she said, squashing down the poodle inside who was jumping about, barking, Stay! Stay! Stay! Yeah, and see what happens if he finds out about you, she scolded the poodle, who curled up into a little ball and vanished.
Dennis poured coffee for himself and sat across from her. “So, do you always go commando?”
“Not always.” She smiled, wanting to recapture the good mood while it lasted. While he lasted. “Sometimes I wear a thong.”
His mug clattered on the table. “Okay, we’re talking about something else, or we’ll end up right back in that bedroom. If we make it that far.”
She laughed as if he was joking, though part of her wanted just that. This guy was dangerous, what he could do to her with one hot look and that wicked smile. It was definitely time to get some distance. She already knew that the inevitable crash was going to hurt so much worse than any of the casual breakups of her life so far.
“Those pictures I took,” she said. “Is that going to wrap the case up?”
Until that moment, she hadn’t recognized the expression in his eyes as tenderness until it vanished. His expression smoothed into a considering gaze that shifted somewhere beyond her left shoulder. He grunted. “I suspect it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we should take a look at them. Sloane’s waiting for our report as it is.”
They padded back to the bedroom, where she dumped the photos from her camera into his laptop, a high end model that apparently traveled with him around the world. He really did live out of a go-bag, she thought, looking at the duffel resting neatly on a handsome carved trunk against the opposite wall.
Then they sat together in a wicker love seat on the terrace outside the guest room, the laptop on a tiny table at their knees as he flicked through the photos. Some were harder to read than others as she hadn’t always got the perfect angle, or her finger moved minutely on the camera button while pressing.
“I did a crappy job,” she sighed after three blurry pictures in a row.
“Are you kidding? You were right in the line of fire, and had to move fast. You did damn good. Don’t sweat the smudgy ones. The techies can blow these up and do a lot of other computer magic. This is amazing, Mork.”
There it was again, that little flame inside her when he said ‘Mork.’ It was the way his voice caressed the word. She could feel a smile in his tone, though he wasn’t smiling as he bent intently over the laptop.
“I have to say, though I’m no expert, these contracts look legit,” he commented. “One point two mil for a screenplay that sounds like something me and my buddies wrote when we were in high school? Damn!”
“About that,” Mindy said, and repeated her conversation with Emma Gordon, ending with, “Aren’t internships usually unpaid? And even if they are paid, for one point two million, surely she would already have an agent and be in the Writers’ Guild, wouldn’t she? Whether or not she’d signed a non-disclosure agreement. She sounded confused, or maybe it was only me.”
“That makes two of us,” he said.
“One thing I do kn
ow,” she stated. “And this isn’t just Haskell, though I notice he does it in exactly the same tone, with exactly the same creepy smile, which is to say ‘Trust me,’ right before he utters a big fat lie. They all do it! The word ‘trust’ has almost lost all meaning, like the word ‘value’ hammered at you day and night from commercials trying to sell you something you don’t want and don’t need. It’s got so that anyone who says ‘trust me’ is a red alert.”
He gave her a rueful smile. “I hope I haven’t said that to you.”
“Of course you haven’t,” she retorted.
“And I won’t.” He held up his right hand. “Trust me!”
She dug her elbow in his side, knowing she was doing it as an excuse to press up against him.
Dennis gave that lovely rumbling purr of a chuckle deep in his gorgeous chest, then said, “But this much I am sure of, you’re right about something shady in that screenwriter’s story. I’ve listened to Mick enough for my bullshit detector to be at Defcon Three. Tell you what. Let’s shoot this stuff over to Sloane, go get some dinner, and I’ll drop you off at your car. We’ll let the experts hash this stuff out.”
She agreed, and grabbed up her clothes to change in the bathroom. There was obviously at least one other bathroom in the place, because when she came out, dressed again, there he was in jeans and a loose shirt over a tight black tee that hugged his chest and abs. God, he was handsome, she thought, staring up at him.
He smiled lazily down as he asked, “What kind of food do you like?”
“Anything,” she said as he led the way out to the garage where the Lexus waited.
“Well, that narrows it down to all of L.A.,” he retorted with good cheer as he held open her door for her. “Let’s try this. Do you like live music? Middle Eastern?”
Mindy waited until he got in the driver’s seat, then said, “I love folk music, ethnic music, really, everything but rock that feels packaged. And live is my preference—I usually don’t tell people this, because I know it sounds snobby, and of course I’ll listen to anything if someone recommends it. But that summer in Hawai’i, I first got addicted to traditional Hawai’ian music when I heard it played live. Then someone introduced me to Polynesian music, then Malaysian, and well, you get the idea.”
