Because You Love Me ; Journey to My Heart

by Terra Little

  “It’s Friday night, Miss Carrington,” Cooper drawled into the phone. “I thought all of the popular girls had hot dates on Friday nights, so why are you home and, from the sound of things, in bed alone?” He sucked in a sharp breath and then chuckled darkly. “Wait, you are alone, aren’t you?”

  “If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have answered the phone.” She squeezed her thighs together and smiled in the darkness. “Or maybe I would have, and you could’ve taken a break from your stamp collecting to listen in.” He chuckled but said nothing. “Do I even need to ask why you don’t have a date tonight?”

  “You can ask but I’m not promising an answer. What do you know about breasts?”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”

  “Chicken breasts, Miss Carrington. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “You called me at one o’clock in the morning to ask me about chicken breasts?”

  “As ridiculous as it sounds, yes, I did. I found a recipe online that I decided to try whipping up tonight and...” The sigh that floated through the phone sounded so dejected that Olivia melted a little. “Well... I’m calling you for help, aren’t I? Do you really want me to go into detail about the tragedy that’s taken place here over the last four hours? Because it isn’t pretty.”

  “Since you put it that way, I guess not. What’s the name of the recipe?”

  “I’m trying to make golden chicken with cilantro-cashew pesto and coconut rice on the side. Sounds simple enough, right?”

  “Uh...right. So what’s the problem?”

  She listened to his tale of culinary chaos and mayhem with baited breath, giggling when he admitted that he was currently on his third tray of chicken, having burned the first two beyond recognition, and then apologizing profusely for bursting out laughing when he revealed that he had mistaken sugar for salt once and pickle relish for pesto base twice.

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Cooper snarled when she couldn’t stop laughing. “Could you have done any better?”

  “Yes,” Olivia panted between guffaws. “Yes, I could have. Tell you what, Coop,” she said, sitting up and scooting to the edge of the mattress. She tucked the phone between her head and shoulder and grabbed her MacBook from the nightstand. “Stop what you’re doing and give me the website’s URL, so I can pull up the recipe that you’re using. We’ll take it step by step.”

  “Okay, but does it matter that I’ve already seasoned the chicken with salt and pepper?”

  “Probably not, but don’t touch anything else until I tell you to.”

  “Agreed,” he said, rattling off the URL in the next breath. “You know what I just realized, though? I didn’t think to ask before, but can you even cook?”

  “Oh, Coop...honey, you have no idea. Now, pay attention,” she instructed as she began walking him through the recipe, one step at a time.

  Two hours later she hung up with a smile on her face and waited for Cooper to follow her parting instruction—to send her a picture of his breasts. It landed in her inbox a few seconds after she’d hung up, along with a text.

  Now you. Send me a picture of your breasts.

  In your dreams, she texted back.

  Several minutes passed before his rebuttal came.

  Well, at least allow me to thank you properly for your help. Will I see you next week? If so, dinner? I promise I won’t make it.

  Shannon was scheduled to fly to Knoxville on Tuesday to meet with the prosecuting attorney there. Until that very second, Olivia had managed to avoid thinking about the possibility of accompanying her, but now that Cooper had brought it up again, it was suddenly the proverbial elephant in the room. There was really no reason for her to go—none at all. But...

  Still undecided, she eventually texted back.

  But was she really? Maybe Shannon really did need her to tag along for moral support, in which case she sort of had to go, didn’t she? And if she just happened to run into Cooper Talbot while she was there, well, that couldn’t be helped, could it?

  Admit it, Olivia. You want to see the man again.

  All right, fine. Okay. She did want to see him again. But that was all and, really, what was the worst that could happen?

  She texted Cooper a short time later.

  I’ll come. But I have no intention of showing you my breasts.

  His reply was an innocent-looking smiley-face emoticon, but the sizzle of anticipation that zinged through her in response was anything but.

  Chapter 9

  A lamp crashed to the floor with a loud thud. “Shit!” Cooper growled as the sound of shattering glass filled the room. “Be careful,” he murmured just before he caught a corner of the couch with his knee and cursed like a sailor.

  Undeterred by the minor casualties, he moaned with approval when Olivia promptly plopped down on a corner of the end table that he had just accidentally cleared, leaned back and parted her thighs for him. Unwilling to release his hold on her, his legs buckled beneath him and he went with her, his hands riding the slope of her thighs like a blind man’s.

  As if she were reading his mind, she hiked up the hem of her denim sundress and tilted her smooth, bare sex up to him in invitation. He had bared it himself just a few minutes ago, backing her into a corner of the elevator downstairs as soon as the doors had closed them inside and it had lifted off from the hotel lobby, and reaching underneath her dress to drag her lacy snow-white thong down the length of her stunning legs. Just before the doors opened again, he had pressed his wispy prize to his nose and inhaled the vanilla-laced aroma of her sex, and then tucked it in his pocket to keep as a souvenir.

  At the door to her suite, he had reached around her from behind and slipped his fingers into her slick folds as discreetly as possible, pressed his stiff cock into her butt cheeks by degrees and whispered into her ear all the nasty things that he planned to do to her. Starting with this, he thought as he gripped her thighs, pinned them back further still and slowly parted the thick, slippery lips between them with the very tip of his tongue.

  She cried out when his tongue glided over her engorged clitoris and swam down into the pool at the entrance to her pulsing walls. Reached down to cup the back of his head and hold him in place when he slid one long finger inside of her and stroked her with it, while he tongued her clitoris like a starving man. He heard himself moaning ecstatically, almost gleefully, as he devoured her and was helpless to curb his enthusiasm. She tasted even sweeter than he’d imagined she would, and her lack of inhibition was the ultimate turn on. He loved a woman who could set aside the structured mechanics of sex and simply enjoy a good fuck.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she chanted like a prayer as he sucked and licked at her dewy lips one at a time and then opened his mouth over her entire sex like a suction cup. “Aaahhh... I’m coming!”

  And she did, noisily and trembling violently, in the perfect position for him to mount her and drive his cock into her over and over again, hard and fast. Resisting the temptation of quick release, he rolled to his feet and licked his drenched lips as he stepped out of his shoes and reached for his belt. The sound of his zipper lowering in the darkness punctuated the chorus of their heavy breathing. He understood that she was on her knees before him when he felt her hands pushing his aside and reaching down into his boxers to free his anxious cock with a grip that sent his eyes to the back of his head. Pumping him softly, she dragged his pants and underwear down to his ankles so that he could step out of them.

  “Damn, Coop,” she murmured up at him, her lips riding his length as she spoke. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” His long cock spasmed in her hand and a bead of pre-cum bloomed on the very tip. Cooing with pleasure, she found it and smeared it into the skin there with the pad of her thumb.

  “Mmm, and just think, in a few minutes you can have as much of it as you want.” Following the cut of her sundress wi
th his fingertips, he found the zipper in the back and lowered it. She shrugged out of it and let it fall to her lap, exposing her fluffy breasts to his greedy hands. He fingered her jutting nipples gently. “I can’t wait to give it to you.” She could barely wrap her fingers around him and even then, they didn’t meet. The anticipation of slowly sliding his erection inside of her and watching the play of emotions on her face as he stretched her wide and drove deep was starting to mess with his head. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d been so aroused. “Suck it,” he murmured quietly and pushed his fingers into the curly hair at the back of her head and brought her mouth closer to his shaft.

  Seconds later her head was bobbing back and forth, meeting the rhythmic stroke of his hips. Her hot, wet mouth was wrapped around his straining flesh and, inside of it, her tongue was busy dancing up, down and around and around his length. “Awww, Liv, that feels so good.” He loved oral sex, both giving and receiving it, and the discovery that she obviously enjoyed it as well was damn near hypnotizing. The sounds she made as she pleasured him pushed him closer and closer to the brink of exploding in her lovely mouth, ultimately forcing him to withdraw from her greedy suction and take an unsteady step back. Reaching down, he hauled her up against him, chest to chest, and rooted around for her mouth with his own until he found it.

  She tasted like brown sugar and barbecue sauce, like mustard potato salad, baked beans and the Irish ale that they’d both drunk with dinner. Like the candied yams and homemade macaroni and cheese that they had gorged themselves on. Her hair smelled like smoke, because he had taken her to a ramshackle little juke joint that was set back too deeply in the woods to be on any map, where the men grew their beards long and scraggly and chain-smoked, and the women wore tight dresses and too much lipstick and filled the place with the sound of belly laughs. He had promised her the best barbecue that she’d ever tasted, and by the time they had finally pushed back from their table near the makeshift stage, she was in agreement that he had fulfilled it.

  And he’d been on his best behavior the entire time.

  He wasn’t much of a dancer, but the house band’s slow mix of country and jazz gave him the perfect excuse to touch her, and for a few short songs, he had taken it. Later, when she had looped her arm through his and leaned against him during their after-dinner stroll around the lake out behind the juke joint, he had dutifully kept his thoughts from straying into the gutter then, too. But the moment that he pulled into the hotel parking lot and she leaned across the armrest and offered him her tongue for a good-night kiss, he had bid a fond farewell to what little self-control he still possessed and snatched Olivia up the way an addict snatched up his next hit.

  Just once, he’d promised himself, mentally licking his chops. If she was playing games with him, pretending to be something that she wasn’t, then just this once he’d given himself permission to be the sucker that she believed him to be. I’ll make her come just once—okay, maybe twice, he qualified as one of her pampered-looking hands had crossed the divide, found the tent that his cock was making inside of his trousers and closed around his thumping flesh as if to soothe it. Then it’s back to business as usual. If it turned out that she and Bridgeway were working together, then he was completely prepared to arrest her, even if it meant taking a little heat himself for temporarily thinking with the wrong head.

  But that hadn’t been established yet, and technically he was working off the clock anyway, so as far as he was concerned, in the here and now, she was fair game.

  At least, that was the justification that he was prepared to give, if one should ever become necessary.

  Too far gone now to check himself, Cooper picked up his pants from the floor and brought them along with him as he walked her backward through her suite toward the bedroom, with his tongue busy in her mouth. There, she toppled over onto the king-size mattress on her back and scooted across its width until she was in the center of it. Somewhere in the room, a nightlight cast a soft, rosy glow and, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the sudden light, the picture she made came into focus. He watched her stare at his stiff cock while he found his wallet and removed a condom from it. Braced on her elbows, with her legs spread wide for his viewing pleasure and her dark, bulbous nipples pointing up at the ceiling, she tracked his progress as he slowly walked across the mattress on his knees toward her, sheathing himself as he came.

  “Ahhh...such pretty tits,” he murmured just before he braced himself above her, opened his mouth over one swollen, elongated tip and proceeded to inhale the delicate morsel. At the same time, he relaxed his knees on the mattress, allowing them to slowly slide from beneath him while his cock sank into her tight velvet tunnel, inch by excruciatingly tight inch, until he was planted to his balls.

  As soon as Cooper’s hips began dancing against hers, she stiffened and cried out, instantly coming around him like a contracting velvet fist. He threw his head back and growled at the ceiling, picking up the pace of his strokes until the mattress shook underneath them and Olivia’s breasts were bouncing around on her chest. Aware of the almost painful thumping at the base of his spine, he shifted and sucked her other nipple deep inside of his mouth, feasting on it as he tilted his pelvis and deepened his hard, fast strokes.

  The last thing he remembered seeing before his vision went blurry and his mouth went slack was the sight of Olivia, stroked into orgasmic silence and gazing up at him through sightless eyes as she bucked beneath him like a fish out of water. Unable to deny himself any longer, he turned his lips and tongue loose on the column of her neck and gave in to a toe-curling climax that stole his breath.

  Several minutes later Cooper finally mustered up enough energy to roll off Olivia. Flopping back against the mattress beside her like a lead weight, he dragged a hand across his damp face and stared up at the ceiling. It was a toss-up as to which of them was panting harder.

  “That was good,” he eventually managed to get out.

  “Yes, it was,” Olivia agreed. “But you know this can never happen again, right?”

  “Absolutely not. This was totally a one-time thing. We agreed.”

  “Totally.”

  He scratched a spot low on his abdomen and stretched. “Right.”

  “Should we pull the covers back and get in?”

  “Totally,” he said, yawning.

  * * *

  Getting out of bed and hitting the ground running the next morning was easier said than done for Olivia. She’d only been asleep for a precious few hours when the 7:30 a.m. wake-up call that she had requested at check-in yesterday rang her bedside phone and startled her out of the deepest sleep that she’d had in months. Expecting to find Cooper still lying next to her, she rolled over and reached out for him. Coming up empty, she threw the covers back and cracked one eye open to look around the room. She might’ve missed the note that he’d scrawled on a sheet of hotel stationery and left lying on the pillow next to her if she hadn’t rolled over and landed on it with her face.

  You were sleeping so soundly, didn’t want to wake you. Later.

  Coop

  Later.

  In the light of day, Olivia was dreading later. The memory of precisely what they’d done and exactly how many times they’d done it singed her skin with embarrassment. The realization that she’d been way off base about Cooper’s sexual prowess had hit her like a punch to the gut sometime during the wild night that they had just shared, sometime between a third orgasm that had left her legs trembling for several minutes afterward and a fourth one, later still, that had reduced her to little more than a drooling puddle of quivering matter. She was confident that she had given just as much as she’d taken from the exchange, but still. The man’s stroke game was seriously on point.

  She pushed her hair back from her face and stared up at the ceiling as if it could provide her with the answer to the question swirling around in her head. What have I done? A vivid image of something
very specific that she’d done flashed across her mind and she groaned. You know what you did.

  A pitiful-sounding sob tumbled out of Olivia’s mouth as she pushed herself up on all fours and, after three tries, mustered up the energy to crawl out of bed and make her way to the adjoining bathroom, against the advice of her screaming thigh muscles. Conscious of the time, she brushed her teeth and showered quickly, padding back out into the bedroom several minutes later, feeling a little less comatose, but still nowhere near bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  Praying that the morning passed quickly, she dressed in an off-white linen pantsuit and scraped her hair up into a bun at the crown of her head. After dusting her face with a light layer of translucent powder, she finished her makeup with mascara and a sheer pink lip gloss that coordinated perfectly with both the rose-colored silk shell that she wore underneath her blazer and the multicolored scarf accentuating her bun. She found her shoes and stepped into them quickly, and then checked her cell for missed calls. Shannon’s meeting was scheduled for ten thirty, which was a little over an hour and a half from now. Plenty of time for them to find the nearest Starbucks and then get to the downtown Knoxville law-enforcement complex in time to meet Sabine Barnes before the meeting was scheduled to begin.

  Speaking of Shannon, she thought as she glanced at her watch and went in search of the color-block Kate Spade tote bag that held all of her business-on-the-go essentials. She had purposely reserved a suite on the opposite side of the hotel from Shannon’s room and sneaked out with Cooper only after she was positive that Shannon was asleep for the night. But now, with it getting closer and closer to showtime, the distance concerned her, mainly because of the dramatic anxiety attacks that Shannon was prone to but also because she was starting to feel guilty about sneaking out to begin with. Olivia tried to picture Shannon having an anxiety attack while she was surrounded by FBI agents, and she couldn’t see it ending well, no matter how she spun the story in her head. Any way you looked at it, she came out looking like a selfish, absentee friend who had used the trip to Tennessee as an excuse to hook up with a man and engage in a reckless one-night stand.