“And what happens if your inner caveman doesn’t get his way?” she asked.
“If not getting his way means you keep doing what you were just doing, then I think I can reconcile him to it,” Lucas said. “He’ll lie back and take it. But he’d prefer if you let him do his thing for a while.” He lifted himself up and shifted them effortlessly so he was sitting up while she was still sitting across his lap. And then he kissed her.
Fiercely enough to make her forget what she was doing at all.
“If it helps,” he said, pulling his head back. “Just remember that my inner caveman comes attached to an outer doctor.” He grinned at her, the expression a flash of white teeth and a just visible rapid change of the planes of his face. “An outer doctor who has spent a lot of time studying anatomy.”
He slipped a hand between them and flicked open the button of her waistband—damn it, why was she still wearing her trousers—then slid his fingers between the fabric and her skin, and down between her legs. He found her clit with no trouble at all. Heat spiked through her.
“So I see,” she managed.
Another stroke. “Is that a yes?” His lips pressed against the curve where her neck joined her shoulder, and she shuddered.
“Hell, yes.”
“I like your enthusiasm,” he said.
“I like your hands,” she gasped as he pressed again.
“This will be easier if we’re both naked,” he said and suddenly she found herself lying on her back with him above her. Her trousers and underwear vanished like magic.
“Do they teach you that in med school as well?” she asked. “Or are you just naturally talented?”
He laughed but then bent and pressed his lips to her torso, where the arches of her rib cage met. His tongue flicked against her skin and she shivered as a nerve she didn’t know she had went live with a force she felt deep in her stomach.
“I’m going with naturally talented.”
He lifted his head. “I also take direction well.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
He pressed another kiss, this one a little lower, then stopped again. “Feel free to try it out.” He slipped a hand under her thigh, coaxed her to drape a leg across his back as his mouth moved a few inches lower.
Good Lord, the man was trying to kill her. “Right now, you’re doing okay.”
“Really? No—” Kiss. Lick. “—needs you want to—” Kiss. Lick. Nibble.
Oh Lord. Who knew that teeth pressing oh so carefully into her hip bone could feel so good?
“—tell me about?” he continued. He wriggled a little lower and pressed a kiss to her thigh. Her stomach clenched as her body throbbed. She wanted to feel his mouth right where it was hottest. And apparently all she had to do was ask.
Her head fell back as her face heated. Thank God for darkness. In the darkness, maybe she could be the sort of woman that asked a man to go down on her. After all, her body had thrown her brain under a bus way back when she’d first touched him. So maybe she just had to let it take over completely.
She licked her lips, felt his lips drag across her inner thigh again. Swallowed hard. “I want your mouth on me,” she said. It was half a whisper, which thankfully sounded much more man-eating sexy than she was.
“Hell, yes,” he whispered back, and then his head moved and his hands coaxed her legs wider and then his tongue slipped across her clit. And set to work.
God.
She really was going to catch on fire.
He hadn’t been boasting, and he knew what the hell he was doing. Each stroke drove her deeper into the swirl of heat and sensation and oh-so-damn-good-she-couldn’t-think. She might have moaned. Someone moaned, anyway.
She couldn’t keep track of who. Couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but lie there and let him set every last inch of her on fire with his clever tongue and talented fingers. Until she had her fingers buried in his dark hair and was calling out his name as she came.
Lucas stayed where he was a moment or two then pressed a final kiss and rolled away. She heard a crinkle of foil but was still too floaty and buzzed to think much more than Oh good, condom.
When she finally managed to catch her breath and a thread of sanity, he was poised above her, his cock pressed hard against her, sending off a second mini shock wave.
The fuzziness receded as hunger for him took over. “Star pupil,” she said, twining her arms around his neck. “What’s your next trick?”
“This,” he said and buried himself inside her with one long slow thrust.
Lucas Angelo is inside me, she thought for one wild minute, and then he bent to kiss her and started to move and once again all rational thought fled. Her legs wrapped around him, hooking above those slow driving hips, pulling him closer. Closer still.
She wanted to crawl inside him. Or have him crawl deeper still inside her, she wasn’t sure which.
Just knew that she wanted to stay here a very long time, riding the dark with Lucas and maybe never, ever leaving this bed again.
“Lucas,” she said and he kissed her again. Deep sure kisses that matched the rhythm they’d settled on. Kisses that felt both new and familiar, like she’d spent a long time kissing him in her dreams, or a prior life, or something that meant that she knew the taste and feel of him and felt like he knew her, too.
Each thrust stole her breath and each kiss gave it back to her. And the pressure started to build again and she started to move more fiercely beneath him, arching and retreating, closer and … “More,” she whispered. “More…”
It grew faster then. And deeper. Wilder. She wanted to tell him something but try as she might she couldn’t gather her thoughts to figure out exactly what. “More,” she managed again until more was suddenly too much and she dissolved again and spiraled away into pleasure.
* * *
It took her a moment to figure out exactly where she was. And what had woken her. Then she heard it again. The buzzing. Her phone doing a little vibrating tango under her pillow.
She rolled over and realized she was naked. And that there was a naked man beside her. Lucas Angelo.
It all flooded back. All that sex. They hadn’t been able to stop touching each other. Which resulted in all that very good sex, which, as she remembered, made her body buzz as happily as her phone.
The phone.
Damn. Who was calling her at whatever ridiculous hour this was? Surely it was too early for Viv to be checking on her? She reached out and grabbed the phone off the bedside table and peered at the time. Five a.m.
Too early.
But Ellen—and it was apparently Ellen unless her caller ID was lying to her—wouldn’t be calling her if it wasn’t important.
She slipped out of bed, holding her breath, hoping that Lucas wouldn’t wake because really, how to deal with the very hot guy who’d given her several memorable orgasms during the night when they’d agreed this was just for one night was not something she was ready to figure out.
So she would deal with the more immediate problem and then come back to that one.
She reached the tiny bathroom with a few cautious, silent steps and, closing the door carefully behind her, tapped the screen to answer the call as she pulled one of the skimpy towels off the rail to wrap herself in.
“Ellen?” she asked quietly.
“Sara? Is that you? I can’t hear you very well.” Ellen’s voice sounded rough. Tired.
Worry gripped Sara’s stomach but she wasn’t going to shout and wake up Lucas. “The line is bad,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” Ellen said bluntly. “It’s not. Sweetie, you have to come back. The storm—well, your helo got damaged.”
“Damaged?” Sara’s voice rose. “What do you mean?”
“Just come back,” Ellen said. “Where are you anyway? Manhattan? That’s what your note said.”
“No, we didn’t make it all the way back. There was a tree down. Blocking the road. I’m in some motel about a
n hour away from you.”
“Then turn around and come back,” Ellen said. “You need to deal with this.” She hung up and Sara sat down on the cold tiled floor, legs suddenly weak with panic.
Her helo.
What had happened to it? She couldn’t run Charles Air without a helo. Her dad had put their other helicopter out of commission in his accident, and his medical bills were doing a good job of eating up the payout from the insurance company, so they hadn’t been able to replace his helo.
She’d told herself that she would get ahead of things by the time he was back in the air and they needed two helicopters again, but so far she was only going backward.
Shattered legs, it turned out, cost a lot of money to fix. Even more when you got infections in the pins and other complications. Her dad, apparently, didn’t believe in doing things the easy way. Even now, when he had been out of hospital for months, the physical therapy bills were killer. Especially when he seemed to have stopped making progress.
If the A-Star was out of action, too, they were toast. Because she doubted the insurance company would be keen to pay out again to them. The deductible alone would be massive. And the way their cash flow was currently dwindling, renting a replacement wasn’t going to be an option, either. She needed a healthy customer base to cover rent on a helo—assuming she could find somebody willing to rent her one—and her operating costs. Right now, the only way to describe her customer base was “in need of intensive care.” Possibly about to flatline.
And she had just slept with one of her few customers. She put her head down and pressed her hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t swear out loud.
Lucas.
Out there in the bed, sleeping the sleep of the well-satisfied male. Or of a doctor who’d learned to sleep hard when he got a chance. She’d learned that skill herself in the army.
Oh God. Lucas.
Lucas who had a car.
She stared down at the phone. Just after five. She couldn’t hear rain anymore—so she assumed the weather had settled down—but who knew if the road was clear?
So there was no guarantee that he would be able to make it back to Manhattan on the road. He must already be cutting it fine.
It was a rationalization and she knew it. It wasn’t even a very good rationalization. But she had to get back to Ellen and see what had happened to the A-Star. The sooner she could start the processes of getting whatever needed fixing fixed and lodging any insurance claim, the sooner she could get back in the air. And every minute counted because without it, Charles Air was going to be history.
Which might just kill her dad.
So that meant she needed the car. Lucas was rich. He would find another way back to the city. That’s what rich people did. Used their money to get what they wanted. She’d dealt with enough rich customers to know that.
She pushed to her feet, feeling sick to her stomach.
Damn it.
Last night, apart from the storm and the near death by tree, had been one of the best nights of her life and now she was going to ruin it.
They’d agreed it would be one night only and she had steeled herself to honor that even though the thought made her body protest loudly. Not to mention that she’d enjoyed Lucas himself. The funny playful guy he’d been in bed was very different from the serious doctor in the suits.
Which one was the real him?
It didn’t matter, she realized. She wasn’t likely to see either version of him ever again. Not after she did what she was about to do. Not unless he decided to have her arrested or something.
She crept back into the main room, tiptoed around picking up her clothes and donning them as fast and silently as she could. When Lucas turned over, muttering something under his breath, she nearly had a heart attack. But then he stilled again, his breathing slow and steady.
The whole room smelled like him, which made her feel even worse.
Well, she could do one thing to make it right. Her checkbook was in her flight bag. So she carefully wrote out a refund for his charter—though the thought of what that would do to their already shaky bank balance made her cringe—and the amount she guessed he’d paid for the car rental.
And, because it seemed like the honorable thing to do, even when she was abandoning him like this, she wrote, “I’m sorry. I had to go,” on a page from her notebook and left that and the check weighted down by the heavy watch on his bedside table.
She stared down at him, sleeping there, the lines of his face—as much as she could see in the darkened room—still one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.
Life really was a bitch.
Couldn’t even let her have this one thing without turning it into a disaster, too.
But that was the reality, and she was good at dealing with reality.
So she shoved away the guilt and regret, scooped the car keys up from beside his watch, and let herself out of the room.
Chapter Five
Ellen met Sara at the door to the terminal. She looked pale and wet and exhausted, her hair scraped back in a rough bun and her mascara smudged.
“Sara, honey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Sara braced herself. All through the ninety-minute drive—she’d had to take a couple of detours around downed trees and power poles to get back—she’d been holding out hope that it wasn’t going to be too bad. That whatever had happened to the A-Star could be fixed. A few days’ downtime and she’d be back in the air. No problem.
But looking at Ellen’s face, she wasn’t so sure. “Show me.”
She followed Ellen through the terminal and out to the airfield. The wind cut through her jacket like it wasn’t there but wasn’t howling as badly as it had last night. The ground squelched under her feet, muddy and slippery, rain still falling steadily. She concentrated on staying on her feet until they reached the place where her helo should have been, sitting patiently and waiting for her, the bright blue-and-silver paintwork shining. She’d tied it down properly. It should have been fine.
But it wasn’t.
Instead, it was on its side. She could see from here that at least one rotor blade had snapped off. About ten feet past it, a small plane was flipped on its back, looking far more mangled than the helo, but still. She looked back at the rotor and had to swallow hard as her throat went hot and tight.
No helo. She had no helo.
No helo. No work. No work. No money. “Oh God.”
“Sara—” Ellen put her hand on her arm.
“What happened?”
“Near as we can tell, it was the wind. The Piper came untied and flipped and got blown into the helo. That wind was nearly hurricane-force last night.”
Sara stared at the A-Star, blinking back the sting in her eyes as the rain hit her face. Did her insurance even cover freak wind gusts … what did they call them, acts of God? That was it. Though what she thought about whatever deity had decided to mess with her was firmly unprintable.
As to whether she was covered … she had no idea. Hopefully whoever owned the Piper was.
Regardless of insurance, she did know she was looking at a helicopter that was kind of screwed.
Much like she was.
* * *
I’m sorry. I had to go.
Lucas stared down at the note, still not believing what he was reading though he’d read it at least ten times now. The handwriting was neat and perfectly legible. It was just that it made no goddamned sense.
She’d left. And, he’d deduced from the lack of car keys on his bedside table, she’d taken the car.
When he’d first noticed the lack of keys, he’d stomped over to the window and confirmed it by flicking the blinds up. The Mercedes was gone. And so was Sara Charles.
She of the innocent face and the seaside eyes and the mouth that had made him think he’d gone to heaven. She’d spent the night with him—hell, that was too tame a term for what they’d done, because sex with Sara had been very good and very hot and damn he was gett
ing hard just thinking about it.
Which meant his cock was stupid. Because the woman who had done all those things with him—kissed him, whispered sweet nothings, laughed and teased and let him inside her—had run off with his car and left him stranded.
Fuck.
She had refunded his money but that was hardly the point. She’d run away and left.
I’m sorry. I had to go was not a suitable good-bye. And it was an even worse explanation.
He had no idea why she might have left. Last night had been good. More than good. They’d both enjoyed it. So why would she just get up and leave? Had she gotten embarrassed about the one-night thing? Decided the walk—or drive—of shame back to Manhattan was going to be too awkward or something?
Double fuck.
He allowed himself a small moment of regret and then locked it down and focused on the bit where he was, quite rightly, pissed off about the whole situation.
First things first. It was past six and he needed to get back to the city. So he would shower, get dressed, and then go see if the powers of cash or unlimited credit could find someone in this motel willing to either give him a ride or let him hire a damned car.
* * *
He was doing it again. Lucas stared down at his fingers. Which held a slightly ragged piece of folded notepaper.
The note Sara had left him two weeks ago.
The one that he’d shoved roughly into his wallet when he’d left the motel and had meant to throw out. Only he hadn’t.
And, every now and then, he kept finding it in his fingers. Fingers that remembered the feel of Sara Charles’s skin precisely.
He was famous for his hands—surgeons had to have good hands—but right now that seemed like a curse, not a blessing.
He didn’t want to remember the exact texture of her skin or the taste of her mouth or the sound of her voice laughing with delight in the darkness.
The woman had snuck out and left him abandoned in the wake of a near hurricane.
Angel in Armani Page 5