Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella
Page 23
He didn’t answer, merely stared at her. Just when she started to feel that she’d made a terrible mistake, he walked to a side table next to the sofa and turned on another lamp. “Sure. But I want to be able to see.”
She didn’t know if he meant he needed the light to illuminate the laces, like task lighting, or if he wanted it to see her.
He stood by the lamp for what seemed a maddeningly long interval. Just when she was about to tell him to get a move on, he strolled over. She was going to need to turn around for him to unlace her, but they were back to having one of their staring contests. She was glad he’d turned on the light, because now she could see that while he was staring at her like he always did, he was also biting down on his lower lip. She did the same, almost against her will. And on they stared.
Until she realized she’d been holding her breath. When she let it out, she almost felt dizzy. She was going to have to lose the contest. So she shot him a little eye roll that seemed to amuse him, and turned around. Finally, finally, she felt the pressure of his fingers. But not the heat of them, separated as they were from her by a layer of linen and a layer of leather. It felt like a lost opportunity. She wanted his skin on her skin. “Hurry,” she panted, but it was no use. He was going to do things in his own time.
Which meant slowly, apparently, agonizingly slowly. The apartment was so silent that the sound of the laces dragging against each other as he undid the bow hissed through the air between them. The feeling of being almost but not quite free was excruciating, suddenly. Of having his hands on her but not on her.
She still couldn’t get a full breath in. “Hurry, hurry,” she said again, more urgently. “I can’t breathe.”
He went into overdrive, loosening the bottom laces with lightning speed. When he got her fully unlaced, he pulled off the corset and flung it aside, turning her around as he did so. His hands came to rest lightly on the sides of her lower ribs, as if to soothe. “Better?”
She nodded. Better, yes, but she still didn’t have his hands on her skin. They were resting on the blouse that had been under the corset. So she grabbed a handful of fabric on each side. He began to let go of her, but she said, “Don’t move.”
He raised his eyebrows and shot her one of his stupid smirks. “And here I thought that was a help-me-so-I-don’t-suffocate corset removal.”
“It was, but…” She pulled her blouse partway up, past his hands, which were as warm as she’d imagined. He was still looking at her with amusement. “I am good at multitasking.”
The stupid thing about her costume was that she had to wear a bra under it. The corset stopped under her boobs, and the white linen blouse was too sheer for her to go braless under it, especially under the stage lights.
So while this would have been an excellent opportunity for her to peel off her shirt and flash him in all her topless glory, what was actually going to happen was she was going to peel off her shirt and flash him a giant, unsexy, padded “nude” bra. And it was white-lady nude, so she couldn’t even go for a monochromatic version of the giant, unsexy padded bra look.
But the show must go on.
So she finished taking off the blouse and, as quickly as she could, undid the bra.
There, that had wiped the smirk off his face. He was a little slack-jawed, even. “Are you—”
“Remember how we weren’t going to talk? Let’s go back to that.” Because they were certainly capable of talking themselves out of this. They probably should talk themselves out of this.
“Okay,” he said, “but—”
“Shh.” She put her hands on his and guided them up so he was cupping her breasts.
“Oh shit,” he said.
“Will you shut up?” She let go of his hands, wrapped her arms around his neck, and tugged his head down and kissed him. That should do it.
It did. He kissed her back, right away, no hesitation. She sighed into his mouth. This was starting to feel normal. Like it was a thing they did. Not boring-normal, though, as evidenced by the heat that gathered inside her when his hands, which had been resting lightly on her breasts, started to really get in on the action. He slid them back and forth, his palms rough against her sensitive flesh. As much as she’d been having trouble getting in a full breath before, now she was all sighs, sighs shading into moans. His mouth came back to hers, swallowing one of those moans, and his hands kept going, kneading and then grazing her nipples, and it was almost too much.
His tongue, his hands, him. Too much and not enough at the same time, and didn’t that sum up just about everything to do with Ben Lawson?
She twisted, trying to rub herself against him, but his arms were in the way as he continued to work her breasts. She hummed her frustration into his mouth and pulled on his neck to lever herself to the side. There. There was his erection against her hip. Another pull on his neck and she launched herself off the ground. One of his hands came around to grab her butt, instinctively, it felt like, like at the dunk tank. She squirmed in his hold until his hardness was lined up with her center and ground herself shamelessly on him, her thin skirt letting her really feel the bulge beneath his jeans.
“Oh shit,” he said again, and she laughed against his mouth. She had reduced him to one short phrase.
Which was good, but not ideal. “Shh.” She kissed him again.
It didn’t work this time. He groaned and pulled his head away. He kept holding her up with his body, taking a step so she was backed against the window, which created more friction where their bodies were joined. It was glorious.
“Sorry,” he rasped, “but we have to talk. A little bit.”
“Why?” She tried to lick his neck.
He took evasive maneuvers. “There has to be a logistical discussion at the very least.”
“A logistical discussion? Wow, you really have some moves.” She tried another approach, reaching for the hem of his T-shirt. She couldn’t get it very far up, given the way he was bracing her against the window with his body, but she got her hands on his skin at least. Her fingers traced taut stomach muscles.
He hissed like she was hurting him but followed it with more talk. “Yeah. Birth control? STIs?”
“Here’s your discussion: Do you have condoms in this apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, end of discussion.”
He rolled his eyes, but he was grinning. She tried again with the shirt, and this time he helped her, lifting one arm at a time while using the other to keep holding her up.
His shirt dispensed with, he stepped away enough to slide her back to her feet, but then he was back, smiling against her mouth as they kissed. He started walking backward, pulling her with him, their arms around each other like they were slow dancing. They were clumsy, trying to walk as a unit but not stop kissing, which led them to step on each other’s toes and trip over their own feet.
His smile was contagious. She was super turned on as her breasts slid against his chest, but some of the urgency had bled out of their encounter, making way for levity. They laughingly stumbled their way into the bathroom, where he yanked open the medicine cabinet and found a box of condoms. He grabbed her hand, giving up on the lip-locked stumble-walking, and led her into his bedroom, the mystery room she’d wondered about for so long.
She didn’t have time to really take it in, because he sat on the bed and pulled her onto his lap. Once she was there, he flopped onto his back, taking her with him. She squealed—which, let the record show, was not the same as talking—as she landed on his chest. He went right for her lips, palming her cheeks to angle her face so he could invade her mouth. They kissed and kissed.
She loved kissing him. She could do it forever, letting their tongues tangle lazily and then more urgently as heat bloomed between her legs.
Eventually one hand floated off her cheek. He growled into her mouth as his hand slid over the curve of her butt.
Okay, maybe she couldn’t kiss him forever. The heavy hand on her backside was a tease. It hint
ed at the potential for so much more pleasure. She thought of his hands in the bar, filling pints, polishing glasses. And now those hands were on her. Remarkable.
But they weren’t really on her. They were on her clothing, and again, she didn’t want that. She wanted skin.
He must have felt the same, because he grabbed a handful of skirt and pulled. She helped him, working the fabric up so her legs were exposed. She squirmed, bending one knee so she could grind herself against him, but she was only wearing thin cotton underwear and his jeans were stiff against her sensitive flesh. She knew how to fix that. She sat up, undid his jeans, and rolled over so she was on her back. He got the message, standing up and shucking his jeans. He paused, standing there in a pair of gray boxer briefs, his eyebrows raised. He was asking if he should take them off, too. Since he’d finally gotten the hang of the no-talking thing, she answered by getting her skirt all the way off and shimmying out of her underwear. She boosted herself up on her elbows so she could see him better. Your move.
He peeled his underwear off, too, and hello.
It had been a long time since she’d seen a penis in the flesh. Just seeing it jutting out, as if it were straining toward her, made her feel a little weak, like she was a lady in a gothic novel, but also, paradoxically, powerful, like she was a siren who could make men do her bidding.
A mermaid queen, maybe?
She tested her powers by crooking a finger at him.
He stalked toward her and climbed onto the bed, laying himself over her but using his arms to hold his weight off her. “You gotta take the lead here.”
“Shh!” She pinched her fingers and thumb closed over his lips.
He batted her hand away. “I’m serious. You drive this.”
Ugh. She sighed. “How do I know what you want to do?”
“I want to do what you want to do,” he said quickly.
“What if I want to do something creepy? What if I have a weird fetish that I’m about to whip out? Oh, what if it’s actually whips? What if—”
“Okay, you were right. Hush.” He stopped her mouth with his.
“Oh!” She turned her head to evade his kisses. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
His mouth chased hers. “Not talking is better.”
“No, what did you actually say? What words did you use?”
He snorted even as he kept trying to kiss her. “I said you were right. Once. Don’t let it go to your head.”
She secretly loved it when he parroted her own lines back to her. It meant he’d been listening to her all along.
She let herself get lost in his kisses again, but this time there was nothing between them, and it felt so good.
But soon, too soon, he was gone. On the move. She made a noise of dismay that totally didn’t count as talking and tried to grab him, but he was too fast. He wrapped his hands around her ankles, and before she could process what was happening, dragged her so her butt was right on the edge of the bed and her legs were hanging over.
Then he knelt on the floor between them.
And wow. Was he really going to go there, just like that?
Yes, yes he was. He pressed his lips to the crease where thigh met torso. As he lavished attention on the damp skin there with his mouth, he stroked her folds with one hand.
She swallowed a gasp. Part of her was irritated that he found her already slick with wetness. She didn’t like him knowing he had that much power over her. But when he lowered his mouth and licked her seam, she told that part of her to shut up.
If Maya refused to talk—who would have ever thought he’d live to see the day when he was trying to get Maya to talk to him and she wouldn’t?—Law was going to have to make sure they did something she enjoyed. Go slowly and watch her closely—he was good at watching her closely.
Not that it was going to be any hardship. Well, the slowly part might be a little torturous, but it was a good kind of torturous.
She felt so good, so soft and slippery and ready.
She tasted good, too, the tangy sweetness of her most sensitive, vulnerable flesh under his mouth. The intimacy of doing this with her, the woman who lived to antagonize him. It almost made him dizzy.
He explored gently, lightly, with his tongue, so she could adjust to what was happening. When she inhaled sharply and held her breath, he tried to angle his head so he could see her, but she was flat on her back looking up at the ceiling. He couldn’t see her face.
He stopped, pulled away a bit, intending to slide up enough to check on her. But he didn’t have to, because as soon as he broke contact with her, she moaned—it wasn’t a happy moan—and bucked her hips, chasing his retreating mouth.
Okay, then. He chuckled and settled back between her legs, smiling against her. Damn, he kept doing that, touching her body with his lips and smiling at the same time. It made him feel like a fool, all this smiling at moments that should be serious and focused, but he couldn’t make himself stop. It wasn’t long before she was moaning again, and these were definitely good moans.
He had to force himself not to take his dick in hand. Listening to her was killing him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she wasn’t holding back, that she wasn’t a quiet lover. She sighed and moaned and writhed as he kept up the measured assault. He might have wondered, given that she was such a good actress, if it was all real. But that was the convenient part about having sex with someone who disliked you. She wasn’t going to do you any favors by faking it.
And as if to hammer home the point, she let loose a moan that sounded like it was shading into a sob, and her flesh started pulsing against his lips. He stayed with her. A sense of…something washed over him as she rode out the waves of her release. It was a triumphant feeling, like when he bested her in an argument. Except they weren’t arguing.
It was also a little like the feeling he got during a truce, when they stopped arguing and coexisted in the same space for a while. Except right now they were doing a hell of a lot more than coexisting.
It was a feeling of…rightness. A feeling he didn’t have a word for.
She interrupted his mental vocabulary session by throwing the box of condoms at his head. A corner clipped his temple. “Ow!”
“Shh!” she scolded.
While he retrieved the box, she scooted back up on the bed and reclined against his pillows looking like a self-satisfied queen. He thought suddenly of when she’d played Cleopatra in one of her plays. She definitely looked like a woman with an empire under her command. Which he supposed made him the empire. He was surprisingly okay with that.
He made quick work of the condom wrapper, sheathed himself, and crawled up to join her. She didn’t waste any time—she reached for him and wrapped her legs around his waist. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, and oh, the feeling of being surrounded by her, her soft, warm skin everywhere, her ankles hooked at his lower back. He needed a minute to get himself together or he was going to blow right here, before he even got to be inside her.
It didn’t help matters that she only let him be for a moment before she squirmed around so his face in the crook of her neck became his face in her breasts. He groaned, took one in hand, and flicked his tongue over the small brown peak of the other. And groaned again when a hand snaked around his dick.
She guided him to her entrance, and he didn’t need any more encouragement. He pulled away from her breasts and studied her face as he slid in. She stared at him, her pupils still blown despite the fact that he’d turned on the bedside lamp—he’d been turning on lamps since they arrived, because damn, for all he knew this was going to be his one and only chance with her, and he wanted to be able to see.
He stared at her.
A smile bloomed, lighting up her face. It made his breath catch.
Eventually she moved, rolled her hips a little. It woke him up, and he moved with her, letting his own hips move forward and back, but slowly, as seemed to be in keeping with the rhythm of everything between them this evening.
Her breathing shortened, and she adjusted her hips, relocking her ankles at his lower back. The change in angle let him slide in a little deeper and, oh shit, he couldn’t hold back anymore. He’d meant to keep up the pressure on her clit, but he faltered as his orgasm barreled down on him. She slid her own hand down and picked up where he’d left off as she continued to roll her hips and stare at him. The smile was gone, replaced by a slight furrowing of her brow. She was concentrating—on this, on them, on her own pleasure. Had he ever seen anything so hot?
With a groan, he ground into her one last time and emptied himself into the condom. She kept going, her breathing growing shuddery. He teased one of her nipples. It seemed to be the nudge she needed. She cried out and her eyes slipped closed—she lost the staring contest—as she surrendered.
And there was that feeling again, that vague sense of rightness he couldn’t quite name.
He rolled off her, grabbed a tissue from the nightstand to deal with the condom, and rolled back. She hadn’t moved, just remained splayed on her back, half propped up on his pillows. He copied her posture, stretching out next to her and staring at the ceiling as his breath returned to normal. He wondered when the no-talking rule would be lifted. Wondered what to say when it was. Thanks? Can we do that again soon? You are the sexiest person I’ve ever seen?