by Selena Scott
“Right.” His brow was pulled straight down to the bridge of his nose. “Nothing could get through it. It was impenetrable.”
Well, it was impenetrable to him. The weight of everything her family had discovered over the last two years hovered over Inka, but she deftly sidestepped it. She was too buoyant to get weighed down now. She knew that she and Matt had a lot of things to talk about. And she knew that she owed him some explanations. But the story he’d told her was his and his alone. If Inka were to tell her story tonight, she’d be telling Ansel’s story and Ruby’s and Griff’s and Milla’s and Alec’s and Kain’s. She’d be telling so much more than she had a right to tell.
She stood up, off his lap and paced toward his blueprint wall. She studied the hand-drawn ones and realized, with a galloping in her chest, that he hadn’t gotten any better at drawing over the years. She turned back to him and almost let out a sound of dismay at the pained expression on his face. Immediately she strode back and threw her legs over his lap again. He widened his knees and Inka realized that she was straddling him. She’d meant the gesture to be supportive and sweet, and it was, but it was also something else altogether.
She struggled to keep her head on straight as Matt anchored his hands on her upper thighs. His hands were strong and confident, as if they had a mind of their own, but his eyes were cautious still as he waited for her to speak.
“This is super cool, Matt.” She cocked her head to one side and swung her suspended feet in a few quick circles. “I’m really excited for you that you’re so close to a breakthrough. And I can’t wait to see what happens.”
“That’s it?”
“What’s it?”
“You don’t think I’m insane?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Not in the least.”
“And even though I just basically revealed that you’re living in a world that has windows to another dimension, you’re just… fine.”
She couldn’t lie to him. “Well, you didn’t exactly reveal it to me.”
He went completely still under her. He was like a Matt Woods statue. “Do you mean to imply that you already knew about this phenomenon?”
She seemed, again, to be staring at nothing and she was quiet for so long that Matt thought he might scream. “Inka…”
She jumped, like she’d forgotten he was even there. “I’m trying to think of a way of explaining this. Okay. How about this: I have a lab, too.”
“Sorry?”
“Metaphorically speaking.”
“Inka, I’m not following.”
She sighed and leaned her forehead against his. “Okay. You wanted to stop kissing and show me your lab because it was something you hadn’t told me that you thought might drive me away. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I have something I haven’t told you that I think might drive you away.”
Impossible. That was the only word that came to mind. He couldn’t think of a damn thing she could tell him that would make him want to be away from her. He tightened his hold against her thighs. “So tell me. I promise to be open-minded. I mean, after the way you just absorbed my bomb drop, I owe it to you.”
“I can’t tell you.” She shook her head, those wide green eyes planted on his. “Because I’m not the only one involved. I have to ask the others if I’m allowed to tell you.”
“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Disappointed. But also proud of her. She had principles. It was one of the many things that he liked about her. “Well. Alright.”
“Are you okay with waiting?”
“Waiting in what way?” Please don’t let her say she wants to wait to kiss again.
“Waiting for me to tell you.”
A warmth spread through his chest. “Can we keep kissing while we’re waiting?”
She smiled, all white teeth and pink lips and, he swore, pure sunshine. “Yes. Definitely yes.”
And then he was just really, really over being in his lab. He rose, with her in his arms and her legs wrapped easily around his waist.
“I’m too big to get carried!” she insisted, looking dubiously at the ground.
He scoffed. “What are you, 5’9”?”
She nodded.
“You’re a peanut.”
He moved through the lab, knocked something over, and couldn’t be happier to leave it. He kicked the door closed behind them and moved, fast, toward his couch.
“But I’m not, you know, super skinny.”
“I noticed.” He grinned into her neck where he was currently nuzzling as he sat the two of them down on the couch.
“Oh!” She pushed her hips a little tighter against him and encountered some very titillating evidence. “And you like it?”
“Yes,” he brought his lips to hers and kissed her once on the mouth before burying his face in her neck again. “Anyone with a pulse and a predilection for the female form would like this, Inka.” He dragged his palm over her ass. “Especially when you’re wearing these fucking yoga pants.”
“I’m really good at yoga,” Inka assured him with those wide eyes and her hair pulling out of her bun.
Matt groaned and adjusted his grip. His fingers played with the hem of her shirt. “I’d like to see that sometime.”
Her hand fisted in his shirt when he nipped his way to her ear, his thumb drawing circles on her lower back.
“Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you smell like fresh paper and copper pennies?”
He laughed, despite himself, and took her mouth in a kiss because he simply had to. “No. I can’t say they have.”
“Well, you do.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Definitely.” Her breath hitched when he slid his hand up under her shirt and flirted with the clasp of her bra.
“Well you smell like…” He buried his nose in her hair, then under her chin, and then into the crook of her elbow. “I can’t even explain it. It’s just ‘new’. That’s what you smell like. You smell new.”
“Matt?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re tossing my marbles again.”
“Good.”
***
Inka was an early riser. She always had been. No matter when she went to sleep, if the sun was up, so was she. In this case, at 6:00 in the morning, Inka was up before the sun.
And she was trying her hardest to be still. Because Matt was still asleep.
They were tangled together on his living room couch in various states of undress. He was still shirtless, with his sweatpants on. Her shirt had been flung somewhere during the course of their makeout. But all the essentials were covered up still. The blanket was pooled around their waists and Matt had her tucked into his side.
He looked so much bigger while he was sleeping, she realized, propping her chin on the heel of her hand. He was peaceful and relaxed and ginormous. She wondered if maybe he was taller than 6’5”. When he was awake, he moved so quickly, with so much clumsy energy, that he seemed almost puppyish. But here, with a foot and a half of leg hanging off the end of the couch and one arm tucked back under his head, he looked about twice as big. There was no movement to distill the size.
She was ready to get her day going, she only had a few hours before she had to be at work, but also wasn’t ready to get up. She was grateful for the moment to study him. She realized how little she’d really looked at him before yesterday. There was something about that blue slice of his eyes that kept her gaze from really landing on him. But right now, with those eyes closed, she could really look.
He was olive-skinned and much more muscular than she’d even realized. Muscles roped his chest and his arms and a V arrowed down into his sweatpants. She’d been surprised yesterday to see he had a hairy chest. She wasn’t sure, now, why it had been a surprise. He always had that dark dusting of stubble. She looked from his chest over to his armpit. Stared at the dark whorl of hair there, too. For some reason, it brought
a blush to her cheeks.
She liked that his body was so different from hers. That she actually felt little next to him. Her bare feet, under the blanket, only made it to the middle of his calf. She adjusted just the tiniest bit against him. He was just so warm and his hands were so big and she really wanted to press her nose against his crooked one.
“I can feel you looking at me,” he mumbled without opening his eyes.
She couldn’t help but giggle. “I can’t help it. You’re nice to look at.”
“Is that so?” He readjusted her, without opening his eyes still, so that she mostly laid over his chest. He stroked her hair back. “Just a little more sleep, Inks.”
She tried. She really did. But it wasn’t thirty seconds before her fingers were playing with a loose thread from the couch. And it wasn’t thirty seconds after that her head popped up. She laid her chin on her palm again and started looking around the room.
He chuckled and stretched, his eyes still closed. When his hands came back to her body, they immediately found her ass, nestled there. “I assume you’re in the market for some breakfast?”
“That sounds great!” She sat all the way up and her knees went to either side of his hips. His eyes popped open immediately at that.
He cleared his throat. And then cleared it again when the first time hadn’t done enough. Inka Keto half naked and straddling him first thing in the morning. Yeah. That was a hell of a way to wake up. “I, ah, I have stuff for eggs. And maybe for a pancake or two.”
“Yum.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Yum.”
His hand slipped to the nape of her neck and he guided her down, his mouth a warm clasp against hers. His lips were soft and loose, but his hands were not. He held her to him insistently. The hand on her ass pressed her down against him at the same moment his hips raised just a scant inch off the couch.
“Mmmm,” she moaned, long and soft and into his mouth.
He couldn’t get enough of her noises. He’d never encountered anything more sexy than that. He’d been thrilled the first time he heard them and they were gasoline on the fire right now.
So he did it again. He pressed her down and his own hips up. He could feel her heat all the way through their clothes and it drove him crazy. He wanted to burrow into her and just live forever.
Inka knew that she could press down with her own hips, that she could ride him. But there was something about his strong, humongous hand pushing her down that just felt so right. He was giving her a gift and all she had to do was receive it.
And so she did. He continued to guide her hips, with his hand on her ass. His fingers slipped under her yoga pants and tangled in the edge of her underwear. Their tongues slid across each other as he continued to clasp her around the neck with his free hand.
He was pinning her against him and making her take her pleasure. And Inka was in heaven. With every stroke, he guided her hips against him. She was warm and liquid and getting hotter and hotter every second. She dragged her needy little self against the steel rod in his sweatpants and she shivered.
He picked up the pace just a little bit, raising his hips a little further and making her swivel her hips as she rode him. Inka moaned again, gasping for breath and Matt tightened underneath her.
She tore her mouth from his and buried her forehead in his neck, unable to do anything but feel. His breath was jagged and hot in her ear as he guided her, pushed her, made her ride him.
She started stiffening, pleasure gathering between her legs. She felt herself throb and tighten and now she was gasping more than she was breathing.
“That’s right,” he breathed into her ear. “Just like that, mariposa—gah—Yeah. Just like that.”
His hand forced her hips down into a rhythm she would never have chased herself but it was doing something to her. Making her rise and tremble and just like that, she knew she was about to come harder than she ever had before.
Inka sprinted toward it. She wanted it. And she wanted Matt to give it to her. Her hand gripped the couch and his shirt. She tried to rear back, to sit up, but he held her against his chest.
“Just like that,” he whispered one more time in her ear and Inka detonated. She was a trembling, gasping, slice of electricity in his arms. He felt that same prickling zing that he’d felt the first time he’d ever touched her, but it was full body. He could have sworn she was scalding him.
When she finally fell lax, it was only then he realized how tight she’d been. Because suddenly his arms were filled with liquid woman. He’d never felt anything softer in his entire life than Inka post-orgasm.
“Hmm.” He hummed it into her hair and couldn’t stop the breathless grin that spread over his face.
She pulled her head up with what looked like great effort on her part. When she dropped her head for a kiss it was lazy and dozy and like swimming through honey.
He pushed up so that he sat up and she sat with him. Her head plopped to his shoulder in a move so trusting and sweet it cranked something in his chest.
“If you wanna run and get ready for work, I’ll get started on breakfast.”
She pulled her head back and searched his face with her green, greens. “But…” She looked down at his pants. His cock was straining to get to her, thick and long along one of his legs. “Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
He swallowed down the groan. “I’d love to, mariposa. But you need breakfast before work. I don’t think we have time.”
She frowned at the clock on his wall. “But that’s so unfair! You made me feel so… so…”
“Please finish that sentence.”
“You made me feel like a million bucks,” she decided and had him grinning. “And like I wanna have sex with you forever.”
The second part had the smile falling from his lips. “Yeah,” he said gruffly. “Yeah, me too.” He cleared his throat. “But if there’s one thing I know about you, Inka Mariposa Keto, is that you need three square meals a day.”
“At least,” she nodded.
“At least,” he agreed. “So you go get ready and I’ll make breakfast and maybe after work we can pick up where we left off.”
She mimed opening a book with her hands and then placing something in between the pages. “We’ll bookmark it.”
He lifted her gently up, a huge smile on his face, and rooted around until he found that T-shirt of hers. “Come back in half an hour or so?”
“Definitely,” she sunshined at him.
“Inka?” he called when she got to the door.
“Yeah?”
“Do you always have to wear those plain clothes when you’re at work?”
She nodded. “It’s the dress code there.”
He frowned. “It just doesn’t look like you at all. I like your casual clothes better.”
“Me too. But even though the work clothes aren’t really my style, you should see what I wear under the work clothes. Those are definitely my style.”
She bounced out the door and Matt promptly ran full on into a kitchen stool as her words hit him one by one.
CHAPTER FIVE
Matt wasn’t sure if it was the natural course of things, or because he had about 7 billion gigawatts of sexual energy thrumming through his veins, or if it was because he had an evening with Inka to look forward to, but it was his most productive day of work to date.
It was a quarter to six when Matt held up the blueprints for his new design for the frequency tool. It was still in very rough stages, but he had higher hopes for it than he had for any other version he’d created thus far. He’d been building the tool so that it was wielded like a hammer, to very little success. This morning he’d had the idea, out of nowhere, to see if it could possibly be built to look much more like a flute. If, perhaps, the noise required didn’t have to come from reverberations, but could come from a solid, sustained note.
He glanced at the clock again and saw that it was already 6:15. He both loved and hated that his scientist brain could dra
g him so far into his own mind that he lost track of time. He loved it because it helped him get work done. But he hated it because now he was in danger of not being ready for Inka.
He closed up shop and bolted himself through a shower. Tonight he put on his nicest pair of dark jeans and a dark green button-up. He wanted to look nice for her. They hadn’t called it a date when they’d arranged to have dinner together again. But, to him, it was kind of a date, and he wanted to treat her nice.
“Hi!” she called as he heard her come in through his front door. He liked very much that they’d both seemed to agree that his place was headquarters for them now. Her sister’s place had been fine when it was just flirting. But freaking should definitely be done in his house.
It was with that smile on his lips that he walked out of his bedroom.
Her eyes widened as she strode right up to him. He’d wondered if there would be a shyness when they saw one another again. If it would be hard at all to reenter that cozy, sexy space they’d created last night.
But there was no hesitation or shyness on Inka’s face. There was only happiness. She went up on her toes and her hands immediately twined around his neck. “You got a haircut! And,” her eyes searched his face, “you shaved. And you look so fancy.”
Matt fought the heat that was threatening to climb up out of his collar. “Ah. I wanted to look nicer for you. Yesterday I was a little scrubby.”
“You were cute,” she corrected. “But you look handsome now.” She leaned up and smoothed her cheek over his. “But I miss the beard.”
“He’ll be back in the morning. Trust me.”
“Do you ever shave your chest?” Inka asked, cocking her head to one side.
Matt’s stomach dropped. “Ah. No. Are you… asking me to?”
She threw her head back and laughed. “No! I like your hairy chest! A lot. I was just curious. And we were already talking about shaving.” She pulled his head down to kiss him but paused right before they made contact. “Would you really have shaved your chest if I asked?”
