by Selena Scott
“I don’t sleep with every man I’m attracted to, John.”
She expected him to correct her on the name but he didn’t. Instead his eyes warmed as they traveled across her face, lingering on her lips.
“Alright.” He leaned in closer. “But are you going to sleep with me?”
Milla had no idea what to say. She hadn’t decided yet. So she just went with that. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Alec bobbed his head. “Well, think about this, then. When we get back, I’d bet a week’s worth of food that Ruby will be calm and relaxed.” He waved his hands in the air in a magical way. “Ansel will be loose and in a good mood. The two of them will sit close and worry much less about what lies in wait in the future. They’ll be determined to feel good about the day. About today. And you know why?”
Milla rolled her eyes. “Because they boned?”
“Boned?” He cocked his head to one side, considering her word choice. “That’s a very strange way of putting it. Bones are the last thing I think about in a woman’s body when I… Ah, I get it. Because a good cock becomes like a bone.”
Milla burst out laughing, sure there was even more color in her cheeks now and it amazed her. She was not a blusher by nature. “Sure.”
“Anyways,” he took her by the shoulders again. “You understand my point? Fucking feels good. It releases your fears. It relaxes the people involved.”
“Good fucking does that.” She raised that eyebrow again and he had the impulse to take his finger and draw that brow right back down into place.
Slowly, very slowly, he slid his hands down from her shoulders. One went down to her lower back, to the highest curve of that juicy ass of hers. The other slid to the nape of her neck. He kept the remaining inches between them but he couldn’t resist tilting her head back, as if for a kiss. Lowering his mouth, he bypassed her lips and went straight for her neck, but he didn’t touch. He let his breath tickle her as he spoke and was very pleased to see her skin tighten against him. “You doubt my skill? What we could make together?”
Milla straightened and took a firm step back from him. She’d enjoyed that. She’d really, really enjoyed that. She took another step back up the mountain so that now they were eye level with one another. She let her eyes heat and skate lazily over the man in front of her. Plain, but yeah. There was really something about John Alec the Warrior that had her lady parts waking up, tingling, heating.
She reached out with the back of her hand and traced her soft skin over his short beard. She was very, very vindicated when his eyes went hazy with desire for her. When his eyes seemed to have gotten stuck on her lips.
“I’ll think about it,” she said. Then turned and hiked her way back to camp. Neither of them spoke again. Neither had to.
CHAPTER FOUR
Of course, Alec had been right. Ansel and Ruby had been relaxed and loving, her lounging across his lap in a patch of sunlight when they’d returned. The sun was already most of the way across the sky and they chose not to move camp that night.
Ansel had tracked down quail eggs and along with their berries and a Clif bar each, the group was very well fed. The panicky tension that had seemed to only build and build over the last few days was momentarily suspended and Milla found herself reclining against her pack, listening to the dull hum of Ansel and Ruby talking to one another. She was actually enjoying herself.
She had to be honest, there was a good chance she was enjoying herself because of the hunk of flexing, stretching, knife sharpening, pure masculinity that sat across the clearing from her. Milla could feel his gaze on her body like a touch. The man was not subtle and she liked it that way.
She also had to be honest that she’d already decided what she was going to do. It had taken coming back to camp and feeling the blissed out vibe between Ansel and Ruby for her to fully realize just how right Alec had been. There was no reason to feel tense and on edge when she had a perfectly good energy release mending arrows ten feet away. She also couldn’t lie that she knew what her answer was. And she liked that he didn’t know it yet. She liked the heated way he watched her. As if he wanted her so badly, and wasn’t sure he could have her yet.
So maybe she did like playing the game just a little bit.
When night fell, bit by bit, Ansel and Ruby zipped themselves into the tent. It was Milla’s night to keep first watch and Alec had agreed to take second. Even though he insisted that watch was unnecessary this far out in the mountains.
Milla waited until she heard her brother’s breath and heartbeat fall into the gentle, regular rhythm of deep sleep. Alec’s breaths were regular and even as well, but she was almost positive that he wasn’t sleeping.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she rose, silently, and felt his eyes on her immediately. She picked her way down the path they’d gone toward the river. She couldn’t hear or scent him behind her. But she could feel him. The heat of him, the weight of his eyes.
They walked the entire way to the river in silence, him just a few steps behind her. They came to the place where he’d hauled her onto his lap, soft with moss and dappled in moonlight. Then he came even with her. She saw then that he had a thin blanket thrown over his shoulder. He must have been keeping it in the bottom of his bag.
It touched her. He wanted something between their bodies and the ground.
Alec stood there, looking down at this woman in the moonlight. He’d found that in other similar moments in his life, the women he was about to touch had looked infinitely more fragile than they had in other moments. He’d always thought that it was a trick of moonlight on a woman’s skin. Or perhaps it was the way a woman’s expressions looked when she was about to be taken by a man.
But he saw none of that in the woman who stood before him now. Milla looked stronger in the moonlight. As if she were made out of some untouchable ethereal metal. He almost expected her to be cool to the touch. And her lust for him, written in that plush, slack mouth, in the hooded lids over those sly, green eyes. That lust wasn’t submissive or fearful. There was a demand in that lust. A fire. He knew, even before he touched her, that he’d met a physical equal. She would not cower in the face of his desire. She would stoke it, and challenge him, and rage against his demands for her.
She held his eyes as she gripped the bottom of her T-shirt, whipping it off and over her head. She wore the same stretchy undergarment she’d put on at the river. John Alec couldn’t wait to yank it off her.
He strode toward her hands and stilled them as she tried to undo her pants. She was rushing this. She’d be completely silver in the moonlight in no time and then this was all going to move a bit faster than he wanted. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he lived a lonely life. Not celibate by any means. But the thought of getting to spend some time with a warm woman was too much to pass up. He tugged her hands into his and then stood away from her again. Just taking her in.
She cocked her head to one side, wondering why he was being so suddenly reverent. “You’ve already seen me naked.”
“Yes,” he replied easily and then skimmed the back of his knuckles across the golden expanse of her soft stomach. “But I have not made you naked yet.”
With that he flicked open the button of her pants, yanking them down an inch and seeing just the edge of those tiny undergarments she wore. He fell to his knees in front of her and slid her pants down the rest of the way. He smiled, quick and true, when her hand came down on his shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of them. She had a surety in her touch that he responded to. There was nothing tentative about this woman.
And then he was there, on his knees, eye level with the tiny black garment she wore. He could smell the scent of her heat and it tightened his muscles, had his mouth opening without his permission. It set something loose. He took her by the hips and quickly turned her around so that it was that perfect, lush, round behind in his face instead. The garment cut across the globes of her ass and he chuckled.
Milla looked over her
shoulder, raising an eyebrow at him. “What’s so funny?”
“This garment.” He traced the edge of it across her lower back, his finger curling around her front and dipping under the hem at her hipbone. “What’s the point of it? It covers nothing.”
Milla’s eyebrow raised even further and if he’d been standing he would have slid that brow back into place with the tip of his finger. “If you can’t tell the point of these panties then I must not be wearing them right.”
“Oh,” he murmured, more to her ass than to anything else. “You’re wearing them just fine.”
Milla gasped and laughed as his teeth came down over the part of her curvy ass that was completely exposed under the line of her underwear. She should have known he wouldn’t have a gentle touch. His teeth nipped their way down to the crease where her thigh began and Milla’s smile fell right away when she felt his tongue take over.
She swayed and found both of his hands at her hips, steadying her. His mouth worked down her leg and she couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped when his tongue found the back of her knee and swirled with a firm pressure.
He growled against her skin as he rose up just a touch. Milla expected him to start that same exquisite torture on her other leg, but he didn’t. He bit her, hard, on the back of her opposite hip. His mouth traced a warm, firm path up the curve of her waist until he got to the line of her sports bra.
In Manhattan, with a lover, Milla could often be found in lace or silk, something barely there. And she enjoyed that. Dressing for a lover. The flare of appreciation that never failed to be there in a man’s eyes. But there was something about her simple attire that suited this moment with John Alec the Warrior. If her bikini-cut Under Armour panties had seemed pointless to him, she could only imagine what he’d think of the La Perla she kept back home.
But she stopped analyzing the second his warm, rough fingers slid under the bottom of her sports bra. He slipped it up, almost roughly, and tore it over her head. She felt her breasts bounce free for less than a second before his hands were there, cupping her from behind, his thumbs already strumming across both of her sensitive nipples. She stiffened under the intensity of his fingers and he let up the pressure, chuckling in her ear as he stood behind her.
“Sensitive,” he murmured, as he trailed his nose up the back of her ear, into her hair.
“Only in certain ways,” she murmured back, tilting her head to give him better access.
She’d been teasing him, but he froze. Stepped back from her.
A noise flew out of her, protesting the lack of his heat, but when she turned, it was to see him tugging his jacket off and tossing it aside. Next came that holed T-shirt of his, one boot and then the next.
His eyes were pinned on her breasts. The man looked beside himself with lust for her, it was in every line of his face, every terse movement. He stood there in just his pants.
“I don’t get to undress you?” she asked dryly.
Alec said nothing. He merely reached down to the waistband of his pants and unsheathed a glintingly sharp knife. Milla’s breath caught as the blade winked in the moonlight. But she didn’t have even a moment to fear him before he was loping toward the river and crouching at the edge.
He splashed water on his face and then she heard a familiar scritch scritch scritch of a blade being dragged over stubble.
He was shaving his face for her? Because she’d admitted to being sensitive in certain ways?
Milla strode across the clearing and laid a hand on his glorious, scarred back. The man was so far from perfect. Parts of him looked as if they hadn’t healed right, as if he’d been stitched together in the most rudimentary of ways. And underneath that scarred and lined skin was a rippling strength. Long muscles that played against one another, roping across him. She got the crazy feeling that his body was almost straining to contain the man within. As if his muscles were holding back some spirit that was fighting to get free.
He froze when her hand came to his back. She guided him down so that he was sitting on the river bank and she was sitting behind him. She spread her legs at his back and pressed her breasts into him, hugging him from behind. When she purposely pressed her pussy against him, even through her underwear, air hissed through his teeth.
“You distract me, my queen.” His voice was a low growl.
“If something as simple as this can distract you, then you must not be very competent at this task.” She smiled against the skin at the back of his neck and inhaled the scent of the forest coming from his skin. Milla let her lush lips drag across the edge of one of his shoulder blades, her tongue coming out to lick against the smooth, raised pattern of a scar.
Alec grunted in response, but the challenge had been thrown down and a second later he brought the blade to his skin again. Milla’s hands traveled over his chest and muscular stomach as he carefully, if not hurriedly, shaved away the rest of his stubble.
Alec laid one firm hand over her hands to still them as he lifted his chin and brought the knife to his Adam’s apple. “Don’t make me slit my own throat, woman.”
Milla held perfectly still against him, their heat mixing where they touched. She was lost in the scent of this man. The feel of him. So she wasn’t prepared when he splashed water on his face and tossed the knife aside, the tip into the moss a few feet away. He whirled, his hands automatically gripping her ass, and crawled her backwards. She lay halfway up the riverbank, a blanket of moss at her back and a ceiling of stars overhead. The wind whispered and the river rushed behind them.
But the man? The man was not gentle. Had she thought him to be restrained at one point? That was completely gone now. One second he was on all fours over her and the next second his hand was behind her neck, lifting so her head tipped back on its axis, her mouth falling open.
His other hand he twisted in the underwear that lay across her hip, pulling them tight across her pussy and tangling his hot fingers in the fabric.
When he fell on her mouth, it was no getting-to-know-you sort of kiss. This wasn’t a first kiss. This was a kiss between two people who’d been fucking one another silly for years. Yet, it was their first kiss and Milla couldn’t learn him fast enough. The impatient tug of his teeth on her lower lip when she wasn’t opening far enough for his liking. The unforgiving swipe of his tongue against hers. This kiss wasn’t a challenge per se, but it certainly set the tone. The man was devouring her, eating her alive. His skin was smooth where it slid across hers, but that was the only soft thing about him.
She met his questing tongue with hers and gave as good as she got. She sensed her opportunity and swept her tongue into his mouth, tasting his dark and secret places. Alec groaned into her mouth and Milla felt a zipping thrill of success. Her legs were pinned between his and when she tried to snake one out and around his hip, he continued to lever his weight across her, pinning her down.
For all the intensity of the kiss, he wasn’t escalating. He was holding there, drowning them both in a kiss that wasn’t burning out.
When stars twirled in her vision and Milla realized she’d lost track of time, she tore her mouth from his and tossed her head to one side. Cool evening air stung her abraded lips, sipped itself into her starved lungs.
“John,” she whispered and felt a jolt of energy from him as his body went tight. She tried to turn her head back for more of his mouth but with one stern finger, he kept her chin turned to the side. He dropped his mouth to her neck and started to systematically destroy her. This was no stylized, practiced moment of seduction. He wasn’t checking a box in order to get her wetter faster. No. The man was genuinely, deeply enjoying himself.
Alec cursed the sun he knew would be rising in a few hours. He cursed his own body for needing things like food and rest. Because if not for those things, he could have spent the next week at her neck. The line of her jaw, the perfect, racing pulse under her soft skin. He’d never smelled anything better in his life than Milla Keto. There was no way to describe it than to say that
she smelled exactly like herself. A woman. With no middle man. Nothing to muddle her scent. It was just good, sexy body. And he was lost in her.
It wasn’t until she began to wiggle against him, her hands tight at his back, that Alec realized he might not be seeing the forest for all the trees. He had an entire woman to feast on here, and he was losing himself in the curve of her neck. He rose up from her, barely letting himself glimpse her golden, curvy body lest he lose track again.
Milla watched in singular, panting attention as he ripped off his pants and the undergarment underneath.
“Yes.” It was the only word she could think to say as his blunt, straining cock bobbed free. Every muscle in Milla’s body clenched tight at the sight of it. There was something brutal about his cock, wide and throbbing and almost angry as it lunged out toward her. “Yes,” she said again. “Yes to that.”
He looked down at his own cock and then at her in vague amusement, but he was not to be deterred. “Need to touch you everywhere.”
He knelt and tore her underwear off her legs, tossing them to the side. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting next. But it wasn’t this.
He rolled on top of her, his cheek to hers, her breasts smashed against his chest, their legs tangled. His cock was hot and huge against her soft belly as his arms banded around her back and one hand reached up to grip at her hair.
She was tempted to throw her legs around his waist, out of habit, but she paused and was so glad she did. It was glorious to have this length of muscular man pressed against her, against every inch of her. He growled, low and deep in her ear, and rolled to one side, keeping her pressed against him. He moved her up and down an inch, rubbing her smooth skin against his body like a balm. His chest hair, the hair on his legs and arms, it chafed at her in the most delicious way.
“So many cold nights, Milla,” he growled and rolled them again so that she was on top. He rubbed her against him again. “You have no idea how you feel, woman. Like, God, like paradise. The best thing I’ve ever felt.”
