Will’s eyes are still focused on my legs, my thighs, the V of my French cut briefs where the blood orange silk and lace cover my core. His eyes are narrowed, his jaw grinding. Fists clenching and releasing. Shoulders back, spine stiff. Zipper? Bulging.
I snap my fingers in front of his face, capturing his attention. “Nothing to see?”
I peel the blouse up—with difficulty—and not with as sexy and sultry a movement as I’d planned, but tight wet synthetic blouses are impossible to get off. The shirt halts, tugs my breasts up and flattens them against my chest, and then I rip the garment off with one last yank, and my breasts flounce free then bounce back down heavily. Will’s eyes follow the natural jiggle of physics taking over, and his breath leaves him in a harsh, ragged groan.
“Enough.” A single word, growled at a nearly inaudibly low octave, the snarl of a wolf from deep within a cave.
“Oh, it’s enough, is it?” I throw the wet shirt at him, and it hits his face with a slap, tangling around him; he tears it away and he hurls it angrily at the floor.
I wait a beat, let the surly, tense, sexually primed silence breathe and expand and writhe like billowing flames between us. He can’t help his gaze from roaming. I’m in nothing but my bra and underwear now, a flattering but modest matching set—expensive, custom made and hand-tailored to my precise measurements. I pride myself on being able to buy haute couture off the rack, but just about everything I own is bespoke, handmade specifically for me by the designers themselves and their personal assistants.
Will is swallowing hard, Adam’s apple rising and falling rapidly. His big hard chest expands raggedly, his hands curling into fists and opening in time with his breathing and his rapid heartbeat. His eyes rake over me, taking in my figure, the curve of my thighs, the V of my sex—and, probably, seeing the damp spot on my underwear that is the telltale sign of my own blazing arousal—the bell-curve swell of my hips, and the heavy bulge of my breasts against the restraint of the bra.
I take another step closer to him, until you couldn’t fit a palm’s width between my chest and his. I stare up at him, watching the wild storm in his fierce blue eyes. The fury still has me, the manic need, the raging arousal, the crashing pump of post-adrenaline hormones. I can’t stop myself. I know I’ll hate myself for this later, but my temper is my greatest weakness and this big, hard, tough, rugged, Old West archetype of a man has pressed every single button I have, and now that temper has snapped, and he’s getting the full force of it, both barrels.
I lift my chin, stubborn and arrogant. “It’s enough?” I let a vicious grin curl over my lips. “I thought there wasn’t anything to see, Will?”
I reach up behind my back and unhook the bra.
“Stop,” he snarls, the command a broken, ragged snarl.
“I don’t follow orders, Will,” I murmur. “I give them.”
His hand flashes out and snags one of my wrists, an attempt to stop me from removing my bra completely. A last-ditch attempt to prevent what is now inevitable. “Same,” he growls.
“Well, I’d say that leaves us at an impasse. Two alpha types used to giving orders.” I grin up at him, and it’s not a kind smile, not a warm, welcoming, affectionate grin.
He has one wrist, but all I need is one hand free. Before he can stop me, I shrug my shoulders forward so the straps sag off, reach up with my free hand and tug the bra down my arms—I slide it off my arms, over his hand latched around my wrist, and up his arm so the lacy, bright orange-red garment hangs from one of his shoulders. I keep my eyes on his, but he cannot do the same. He’s all male, red-blooded and at the mercy of his libido.
God help him, he can’t resist the siren song of my bared breasts. They hang heavy, tear-drop shaped, tanned from laying out on my rooftop deck. My areolae are wide and dark, framing thick pink nipples that stand out hard with arousal and chill. I yank my wrist free, and my breasts jiggle. Will’s breathing stops at the gelatinous ripple of generous flesh, and his jaw grinds audibly.
I do nothing by half measures.
Keeping my gaze firmly on his, I snake my fingers into the waistband of my underwear. I bend at the waist—and my breasts dangle and sway, momentarily drawing his gaze. I pause, grinning wolfishly at Will, and then shove my underwear off. I step out of them, lift them into the air with one foot and snag them with my hand…one last rash impulse has me shoving them into his splayed open hand.
I stand utterly nude in front of him. Bare and arrogant, pulse secretly hammering crazily, knees shaking, a chill still gripping me even as nerves and fury leave the false illusion of heat.
“Still think there’s nothing to see, Will?” I whisper.
I run my palms up my flat toned abdomen and cup my breasts, lifting them, framing them for him, and then dropping them. His nostrils flare, and his jaw clenches, teeth grinding so hard I’m worried he’s going to crack a tooth.
“Goddammit, woman,” he snarls, sotto voce. “What game are you playing at, Brooklyn?”
I turn away, run my hands down my waist and over my hips, glancing at him over my shoulder as I highlight with both hands the taut, high, round firm curve of my ass. “You make me angry,” I admit, truth tumbling from fury-loosened lips. “And I do foolish things when I’m pissed off.”
“You’re playing chicken with a wolf,” he says, his gaze snapping with his own boiling anger, as well as no small amount of pure high-octane sexual fire. “And you’re going to lose.”
I lift my chin, gaze daring. “Don’t be so sure who the loser will be, Will. I chew up men like you for breakfast, and spit them back out by lunch.”
Lies. Dirty, bald-faced lies. I’ve never met a man like him. Never. But I’m caught up in the web of my own foolish fury, and cannot now disentangle myself. My worst mistakes have all been made in the heat of my lost temper, and if the primal, dominant masculinity in his eyes and the set of his huge shoulders and the clenching power in his hard hands is any indication, this is going to be my worst mistake ever.
He reaches out, his work-roughened hand scraping over my hip, preparing to draw me up against him.
Instead of allowing it, I turn away and step into the shower.
Will watches as I drench myself under the steaming water—he watches the way the hot, stinging rivulets sluice over my naked breasts and over my belly and between my thighs, over my sex. I rinse my hair, scrub my chilled body with the scorching hot water, soaking up the heat until my skin stings.
And Will’s gaze follows it all, every movement, unabashed and rife with desire.
My anger is fading, but need is taking its place. Hormone-fueled desperation, a need to be seen and appreciated and touched and desired and needed and taken—it’s been weeks, if not months since my last lover. I tend to go long periods of time between sexual liaisons, too busy with work to bother, until my high-rev libido is so pent up I have no choice but to find a willing partner to expend it on—always someone easily discarded, a pretty male with a big penis and few words preferably, used for a night and sent away with a signed NDA and a happy grin.
Will fits the bill—he’s big, he’s beautiful, and if the bulge at his zipper is any indication, he’s packing something substantial in there—the mammoth size of his hands is a testament as well. But there’s something more to him that tells me he won’t be as easily discarded as my usual prey. If anything, I may well end up being the prey in this situation, but I’m too far gone to care, at this point.
My nipples stay peaked, hard and thick and prominent, aching. My sex pulses with heat and tension. My belly flutters.
I close my eyes to block out Will, soaking up the delicious heat of the water on my flesh. I remember seeing a bar of soap on a built-in shelf near the knobs, and I reach out, find it, lather it in my hands and rub it over my body. This is not meant to be sexual or sensual, but I’m so aroused I know it comes across that way. My hands move on their own, rubbing the lathered-up soap bar over my flesh in a slow, sensuous slide. Over my shoulders, down my arm. Acr
oss my belly. Up to my breasts, over the mounded flesh, tugging past the peaked nipples. Down, down over my stomach again and over my thighs. Over the sensitive, tender flesh of my sex, barely stifling a moan at the accidental scrape of my palm over the most hypersensitive part of my arousal.
He hears it. I know he does.
I turn away, rub the soap down my hips and over the backs of my thighs, up my bare, wet bottom.
I hear his wordless snarl, and I turn around and open my eyes just in time to see him ripping off his T-shirt.
He moves with the slow predatory prowl of an aroused male with a primed female in his sights.
His chest is magnificent, flat and hard with thick slabs of muscle defined and built through hard work rather than time in the gym. His abs are ripped to rippling shreds, leading to a hard V—no underwear beneath those dirty, faded jeans. I can see the sideways-angled ridge of his arousal framed in a fold of dark denim, and the size of what I see has my throat closing in anticipatory nerves. He prowls toward the shower, eyes wild and hungry, fingers plucking at the button of his jeans, toeing off his huge muddy boots, pausing to rip off wet socks, and then his jeans are open in a sagging V and I get a tantalizing glimpse of what’s behind the zipper.
Ohhh crap.
What have I done?
I’ve unleashed a wild animal, an untamable stallion, the most primal alpha male I’ve ever encountered. There’s no backing down now.
This is happening, consequences be damned.
9
He shoves the jeans off, but they’re wet and cling to his thighs and calves, and he stumbles as he struggles to rip them off. Finally the leg holes come free of his feet, and he throws them aside, and any lingering awkwardness on his part is gone.
I’m frozen in place.
There are no words for the glory that is a nude Will Auden. He’s all heavy muscle and long lean limbs, all chiseled angles and hard-hewn planes. There’s nothing soft about this man, not an ounce of fat, nothing extra anywhere. I swallow hard, thinking for the first time in my life that just maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew in tangling with this one.
He jerks open the shower door and steps in—there would barely be room for him alone, and now there are two of us. Skin slides against skin, and he’s in my space, pressed up against me, filling my world with billowing body heat and hard muscles and masculine scent. His eyes blaze, snapping with raging arousal and unrelenting fury. He resents me, I think, for crashing past whatever barriers he had against me, or thought he had—for forcing my way into his world and shaking it up.
Sorry, pal, but that’s what I do.
I shrink against the farthest wall of the shower, not to get away from him, but to make room for him. He towers over me, his anvil-hard chest rough against mine, scratchy with a dusting of fine hairs. His manhood is…enormous. Considering his profession and the size of the thing standing rigid and straining between us, it would be rather apropos to say he’s hung like a horse. I can’t take my eyes off it—no more than he can take his eyes off my breasts and the apex of my sex, and the rivers of water coursing over my flesh. Neither of us seem eager to make the first move, although we both know precisely what’s catalyzing between us in this tiny shower stall. His chest heaves, his eyes narrow, and that cliff-craggy jawline of his grinds audibly.
“You’re going to crack a tooth, grinding your teeth like that,” I mutter.
“If you’re planning on quitting this game before I take what I want from you, best do it now, girl.” He stares at me hard, his gaze unforgiving, blue eyes exploding with fiery need. “Last chance.”
I just stare back, and our personalities are a rock meeting a hard place—a projectile traveling at high speed meeting an unmovable object.
I’m trembling again, this time with need. It’s been months since I’ve felt the touch of a man, and weeks since I’ve even taken the time to relieve sexual tension on my own, which only goes so far in the first place, and now I’m naked in a shower with a prime specimen of virility and masculine sexuality.
But I’ll be damned if I’ll move first.
He wants a piece of this, he’ll have to take it; I give nothing away for free, not to anyone.
Well…I did strip for him, but that wasn’t for him, that was for myself, proving a point. What point that is, I haven’t quite figured yet, but I’ll work out the particular mental gymnastics of justification later.
“God damn it,” he snarls. “I knew you were trouble from the moment I saw you.”
“Blame your sister. She’s the one who put me on that horse.”
“You should’ve just taken the hint when I told her to tell you I’m not interested.”
“I don’t take hints, and I don’t take no for an answer.” I smirk up at him, with a pointed glance at his straining manhood. “And it seems to me you are interested.”
“Not what I meant and you know it.”
He tilts his head back to douse his hair under the stream of hot water, rolls his shoulders forward to bathe them in the spray, and then reaches behind his back, twists off the water, and steps out of the stall backward. His hand latches onto mine, hauling me after him, and I tumble at the unexpected action. Tripping out of the stall, my wet feet slip on the wood, and I topple forward. My face lands against his chest, and I’m sprawled in his arms, off-balance and at his mercy yet again. His hands wrap around my waist, haul me upright. Even though I’ve regained my balance, now, he doesn’t remove his hands.
And so it begins.
His touch is fire. A match licking against the wick of a stick of dynamite.
A whole room full of dynamite.
I lick my lips and suck in a breath at the sting of his hot rough hands on my skin, rest my palms on his chest, and then curl them into claws, raking them down his firm flesh and over the ridges of his abs. Lower, lower, and his belly sucks inward, in anticipation of my touch—which I withhold, my grazing palms missing his engorged sex and sliding across the bunched quads.
His snarl of frustration makes my skin break out in goose bumps, or maybe that’s the warm air of the fire from across the room mingling with the cooling water dripping down my skin and pooling on the floor at my feet.
“Fuck it,” he murmurs.
There’s no warning, no lean in, no telegraphing of his intentions—one moment he’s towering over me with his hands around my waist, just above my hips, and the next his palm is wrapped around the back of my neck and his other hand is clawed on my buttocks, and I’m bent backward into his arms, off-balance entirely and his lips crash against mine. Rough, forceful, masterful. Taking. Demanding. He slides his tongue against my teeth and inside my lips and slithers it against my tongue and his fingers tangle in my hair and scratch my scalp. He’s holding me upright with those hands, his fingers digging hard into the generous flesh of my ass, squishing the cheeks together under his grip. I gasp into his kiss, but he doesn’t relent, only sucks in my breath and gives me oxygen from his own lungs and kisses me harder, scouring my mouth with his lips and tongue until I’m utterly breathless.
This isn’t a kiss—it’s a ravaging.
Thoughts—all capacity for rational thought is blasted away by his assault, and when he finally releases me and stands me up on my feet, I stagger, dizzy and off-kilter and stunned.
“Warned you, girl,” he growls.
And then his hands latch onto my waist once more, but instead of merely gripping, he lifts me bodily off the floor and literally tosses me like a rag doll onto the bed. I land hard, but the mattress is thick and springy, and absorbs my impact with a creak. I barely have time to blink or breathe, and then Will is kneeling on the bed between my knees, bending over me. One hand reaches past me, under the bed, brings out a box of condoms. Ripping one off the string, he slides the box back underneath the bed.
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever had in this cabin,” he says, by way of explanation I neither asked for nor had even considered.
“Okay?”
H
e tears the condom open with his teeth, spits the wrapper aside and rolls the protection on in a smooth motion. Still kneeling above me, I think for a moment he’s going to just go for it without so much as a how-do-you-do of foreplay—not that I need it, I’m so wound up and turned on right now, but still.
I even open my mouth to say something about foreplay, but instead of driving into me as I expect, he dives down between my thighs. And even this, he doesn’t do as I expect—his tongue doesn’t drive against my sex, but instead, despite the forceful dominance with which he seems to do everything, his kiss to the tender flesh of my inner thigh is exquisitely gentle—eliciting a shocked gasp from me instead of whatever I was going to say. Kiss after kiss, all over my inner thighs and over the top of my sex, missing the sensitive center of it again and again, ratcheting my need higher and higher with each narrow miss. My fingers claw into his hair and my thighs fling apart—I lift my hips and tilt my sex to his mouth, demanding without words what I need from him.
“Quit fucking around, dammit,” I snap.
He laughs, then, a wry, amused, aroused rasp. “If you insist.”
His tongue lashes against my clitoris in a sudden and frenzied assault, and my resulting shriek is loud, unabashed, and breathless. I writhe against his mouth, and he moves his head side to side, up and down, tongue stiffening to circle me, and then softening to lap against the seam of my sex. One hand scrapes against my hipbone and soars over my stomach and drifts up to my breast, and for the first time, he cups one globe. I gasp at his touch, which is reverential and gentle, again unexpectedly gentle for all that he warned me. His tongue continues to drive me to spasmodic, back-arching screams, and his other hand splays under my buttocks, half supporting me and half caressing me.
His thumb brushes my erect nipple and his hand encircles my breast, and he kneads the flesh, massaging and exploring. Then he moves to the other breast, with the same awed reverence, and all the while his tongue and lips are mad against my sex, lashing my throbbing clitoris and lapping my dripping seam. I can’t even scream for the ache inside me, for the building, burgeoning explosion.
Cowboy in Colorado (Fifty States of Love) Page 13
