by Jaci Burton
The thought brought her down quickly, quicker than she wanted. She was shaken. Shaking, still catching her breath. As he’d pulled her up, it had yanked her ear phones free, so now the music was her own rasping breaths, the birds, the rush of water, the wind. The drumming of his heart, his own ragged sounds.
“Little idiot,” he murmured, his jaw along her temple. She heard a faint Midwest trace under the blatant edge of desire. “You could have passed out.”
“Well, who knew you’d be good at this?”
She said it without thinking and cursed herself. Guys got off on that kind of flattery, took it as invitation for more. She didn’t want to stroke his ego, not when he’d ripped her open like that. Forced her to loosen her self-imposed restraints and turn control over to him.
Wrapping his hand in her hair, he canted her head back. Before she could think of something more quelling to say, he shocked her again by slamming his mouth down on hers, taking it over, and everything attached to it. Drinking deep, he made it everything a kiss should be. Fire, mind-altering, wet, demanding, scraping things raw that would scream in the open elements when he took his mouth away, so that she’d beg for it to return.
Raising his head when she was nowhere near sated, he held his grip so she couldn’t try to follow his mouth. “I was just getting started, sweetheart.”
Since he was still giving her that penetrating look, it suggested he was used to assessing things closely, determining what made them tick. But he disrupted her anxiety over that when he released her hair to run his hand beneath it, caress her nape in a way that said every time he touched her there, he’d remember what had shattered her. “Now, let me give you a real climax.” As his gaze heated, she began to moisten again, anticipating. “If you thought what I did before was good, there’ve been too many losers in your life who didn’t appreciate how they could make you sing.”
A backhanded compliment for sure, she told herself, trying to keep the sensual intent of the words from muddling her mind more than he already had. Implying she was sexually deprived if she let something like a couple minutes of lip play get her off. Bastard.
“What’s your name?”
She shook her head and he tipped up her chin, a trace of impatience in his eyes. “I want to know.”
“A name comes with expectations.”
“Identity,” he agreed. “Repeat dates.”
She couldn’t afford a man like this in her life, for certain. He’d almost made her smile. “I’m taken.”
He blinked once. “No, you’re not.”
Someone more inexperienced would have retorted, “How do you know?” But when words were used as weapons, she could hold the upper hand. She merely met him eye to eye and stayed silent, trying not to think about the fact she was wearing only soaked panties and a way-too-loose corset. While he was wearing a pair of shorts that should be illegal.
“If you were taken,” he said, a sexy, rough edge to his voice, his hand tightening on her sensitive neck, “I’d see him, smell him. There’d be a hint of his aftershave on your breasts, where he started the day by suckling your nipples, or razor burn where his jaw scraped your tender flesh. Your lips would be swollen from his kisses.” When she tried to turn her head, he dragged his jaw along the side of her neck, then placed his mouth there, spoke against her tingling skin. “Or I’d have smelled him on your cunt. Because if he doesn’t mark you as his every morning before you walk out the door, he’s insane.”
Hadn’t she compared this man’s initial approach to that of an animal? After a statement like that, he was pure animal for sure, stating possession in terms understood by beasts of the forest. As well as alpha males with a primal code like this, an undercurrent that she knew women sensed but most could never truly understand. Even as they were hopelessly drawn to it.
Still, women had their own code to survive such a devastating assault. Drawing her head back, she managed a cool smile reflected by no other part of her quivering body, but it was a starting point. “I said I’m taken. I didn’t mean by a man. I’m taken by the demands of my life, and you’re not part of it. Nor am I inviting you. Only into this moment.”
“So that’s what this is about.” He dipped his finger into the crevice between her breasts, tugged at the corset.
“What?”
“You wear it beneath your clothes. It’s not fashion. Control is very important to you.”
“It’s important to everyone.”
“A woman in a corset has to be constantly aware of the state of her body,” he observed. “Never getting too flustered, stressed. It’s an armor of sorts, but a paradoxical one. Because while the parts so tightly laced inside it lose some sensitivity to a man’s touch, the parts above and below become far more sensitive because of the constriction. The trail of a finger along the buttock, just below the corset hem. Or the lightest kiss on the pillow of a breast. Or even the nape . . .” His hand passed there again. When he put his lips back on her shoulder, she had to ball her hands into fists to keep from sliding her hands down the curve of his bare back, feeling the ridges of spine, how low those shorts came on his hips. Whether she could slip her hands beneath the band to explore the design of his lower back, the rise of his tight ass.
“Let me go down on you again, sweetheart. Let go of your precious control. Give me the bliss of eating your sweet pussy and hearing you scream for me.”
She closed her eyes. I really, really want to, which is why I can’t. “I need some water first. Do you have any?”
A pause. Raising his head, he studied her. “I do. I left my bike just over there. But playing the coward doesn’t seem to be your style. If you’re going to leave, you’re the type who’d just knock a man flat on his ass and walk right over him, not look for a running head start.”
“And you’re the type who wouldn’t get out of the way.”
“Not if the fight is worth winning.”
I can’t say no to you. She’d had her twenty minutes, and that was all she could afford. “I’m out of time. I’ve got to go.” Moving away from his intoxicating proximity, she grabbed up her jeans, pulled them on while he leaned on her bike seat, watched her silently. She tied on the chaps, fingers trying not to fumble beneath his gaze as she performed the intimate task. When she found her T-shirt, she looked down, realizing she needed to tighten the corset laces. Her breasts were in danger of coming out entirely. It was possible she’d even given him a glimpse of her nipples once or twice in her haste. Well, she’d call it just compensation for taking off on him.
“Allow me.” He’d shifted when she’d been pointedly ignoring him, hoping he’d just vanish, and so now he was right behind her. “Stand still.”
As she stiffened, uncertain whether to move away or not, his hand snaked around her waist and up, lifting the corset so the underwire was more fitted beneath her breasts. While he almost impersonally ran his hand over the cups, her nipples hardened from the passing heat of his touch. The liquid pooling between her thighs increased. He adjusted the laces, tightening, tightening again, until a breath escaped from her, a hint of a moan to it.
“You like that, don’t you? You like it when a man binds you.” His voice had lowered, animal urgency to it, his hands starting to slide downward, taking her resolve there as well.
She jerked away, knowing if he pulled her back so she could feel the hard line of his cock, she’d be lost. She’d let him plow her like a field. Yanking on the T-shirt, she turned, found her boots, and yanked them on as well. A quick grab at the handlebars and she had the twist for her hair she’d left there, whipping it up into a tight bun on her neck.
“Transformation. All armor in place now.”
She ignored him, pleased when she managed a flippant tone. “The room’s yours. If you want to continue.” Though she really didn’t want the provocative image of him stripping off his shorts to lie naked in the grass as God made him, his hand pumping what appeared to be an impressively proportioned cock. All muscles straining as he thought
of her, as come spewed from him, wetting his thighs, his smooth ball sac, that hard belly where she could lick it off . . . Sweet Mother Mary.
“Don’t cheapen it.” He stepped forward, but surprised her when he didn’t reach out to touch her. Even so, she felt the need to pick up the helmet, hold it as a casual barrier between them, trying to give him a diffident look.
Finally, when she thought she couldn’t stand his silent scrutiny another moment, he leaned in. His body pushed against the helmet, brought the pressure of it against the churning in her belly. Despite herself, her lips parted, her eyes seeking his. “My mistake was in giving you a choice,” he said. “Next time I get you alone, I won’t do that. I’ll restrain you the way you wanted to be, and then I’ll make you come so hard you’ll think you’ve died. You won’t run away from me again. And I’ll have the truth about why you feel you need to run now.”
Unclogging vocal cords glued together by aching lust was not easy, but she managed it. “To the next time then,” she said. A taunt, because of course they’d never see one another again. Moving around him, she strode to the bike.
She wished she could let him know how much she wanted to stay. She was sorry that she’d turned it into this. But he’d managed to kick in the door to her darkest needs in less than twenty minutes, and she couldn’t afford to get lost there. It was for the best.
No, the best thing was to let him sate them both, spend another volatile hour together, and then go their separate ways as two strangers who’d enjoyed the novelty of an unexpected sexual encounter. Leaving a challenge in the air like this wasn’t good. But he was right. She was being a coward, because if she stayed, she might just want to take him home. And she wouldn’t embarrass herself, wouldn’t reveal she was so desperate for this type of intimacy she would cling to a stranger. That was almost as pathetic as losing her perspective, making this about more than sex, and ruining it for both of them.
Because she wanted to apologize to him for that, she thought instead about clipping him, enough to make him stumble backward. She didn’t, but he did something worse to her. As she passed him at a slow idle, her booted feet balancing her, his hand closed on her arm, so she released the handlebar. He didn’t do anything to bring her to a halt, just followed the line of her arm down to her elbow, the tender skin of her forearm, and closed briefly on her fingertips before he let her hand pull free.
She could escape him, but not the irony of it. In his grasp, under the tantalizing hint of his control, she’d felt freer than she had in a very long time.
No, she definitely couldn’t afford a man like him in her life.
Two
“Turns out they’re sending over someone else to help us work out the final contract points this morning,” Jon commented, setting his organizer on the conference room table. “Allan contracted the flu. Johnson called over to Pickard Consulting to send one of their people instead.”
Lucas swore, slapping his legal pad down. “This is the type of pissing contest Johnson’s been doing throughout this whole thing. I’ll bet he talked to Pickard a week ago.”
“They’re sending Cassandra Moira,” Jon added.
Ben whistled. “Big guns, that one.”
When Peter lifted a brow, he chuckled. “And those aren’t bad either, you complete tit addict.”
Peter shot him a grin as Ben continued for Lucas’s benefit. “She’s one of Pickard’s best, groomed right out of school. She’s known for getting the job done and walking away from the table with more than you wanted to give away, but making you feel damn good about it. Be particularly careful about her, Lucas. She’s hell on wheels on details. I think Pickard had her brain replaced with a CPU.”
“We should cancel. We don’t have to take this shit. Hell, let’s make him think we’re pulling out. Maybe he’ll have a fatal heart attack and we won’t have to deal with this crap anymore.”
Jon lifted his brows, exchanged a look with Peter, but it was Ben who stated the obvious. “Are you getting laid enough? You’ve had that stick up your ass since you got back from the Berkshires last month, right before the Mancuso thing.”
“Some of us don’t need sex every night of the week,” Lucas retorted, but he waved a dismissive hand and turned toward the window, cutting off further comments.
Yeah, he knew he was out of sorts. And he was sick of being out of sorts, and not knowing what to do about it.
He’d thought about lying down in the grass where her clothes had lain, where the crushed grass suggested she might have lain, and jacking off to relieve the seething frustration in his balls. Instead, he’d pedaled another thirty miles at a cardiac arrest RPM and cursed himself for not memorizing her plate. But it was just fun and games, right? He’d played sex games enough to know the edge during was as serious and purposeful as it should be, to give the fantasy a sense of reality. But afterward, it was supposed to become a fond memory. Not a damn possession of his mind.
He could have called ten different women when he got back, but he hadn’t. He was still thinking about her, the honeysuckle scent of her hair and skin, the enormous blue eyes that had shifted away from desire at the end, when he’d put his foot in his mouth, intruding on their fantasy with a too-close-to-home observation about her reality.
Damn it all, he had more finesse than that. If it was fun and games, you didn’t poke at the underlayer. But she’d been so armored, not only in the corset but everything he sensed it represented to her. He believed in pushing a woman far beyond what she believed her capacity for pleasure was, because that was what brought them both the most pleasure. To do that for his blue-eyed mystery, he’d known he needed to strip those layers away. Maybe that was what was bugging him. He didn’t like leaving a woman unsatisfied, even if the retreat had been her choice.
My mistake was giving you a choice . . .
She was protective of something in her life, something that couldn’t afford romantic entanglements. “I’m taken.” That meant kids, though he’d seen no evidence of it on her body. Even on a fit woman, signs of childbearing lingered. Still, he was sure that was it. She was also doing it alone. A woman who would take a Harley deep into the Berkshires, who could assess him and let herself go just that small amount, was a hell of a confident woman. On the other hand, that quick, guilty climax had nearly been strangled out of existence by her own will.
Kick-ass confident, but way too tightly laced. Literally.
All five of the K&A management team grouped in this room knew how to read people, but the other four acknowledged he was the best at it. His assessment, based on their short interlude, was that she was tough, determined, and wary of any perception of vulnerability, but she didn’t have the weakness in her that many damaged women did. She’d fought for respect in her world and won it, if he didn’t miss his mark. She wasn’t going to allow anything to derail the forward motion of that train.
“She might just be your soul mate,” Peter observed.
Lucas struggled out of his thoughts. “What?”
“Cassandra Moira,” Jon supplied helpfully, studying Lucas with midnight blue eyes that saw too much. Kensington’s Archangel was what they called Jon. He had a side passion of studying ancient religious and philosophical texts, and a pacific personality that could calm any temper. His emotional radar was as finely tuned as a Star Trek empath’s. He also held a dual finance and engineering degree that was merely a footnote to his genius-level mechanical skills. “Lady has a reputation a lot like yours. She could play championship poker. You’d have crossed her path by now if Matt hadn’t had you scrambling all over the Central American start-ups these past couple years. When I met her at Pickard’s last year, she reminded me of that Ginger Rogers’ quote, modified. She goes balls to the wall with any of the guys, but she does it in a corset.”
Lucas’s head snapped around so hard he winced at the crack in his neck. “What?”
“Geez, man, don’t give yourself whiplash. You are hurting, if the mention of Victorian underwear will ge
t you worked up. I know a girl . . .”
“Shut up, Ben. What do you mean, Jon?”
Ben O’Callahan, the green-eyed, dark-haired legal advisor for K&A who had a passion for fast, expensive cars and extreme bed-sport, grinned, but closed his mouth.
Jon moved one hand in a thoughtful stroke along the satin surface of the table, as if recalling something entirely different and far more sensual. “I put a hand on the small of her back when I opened the door for her. She’s tall, but somehow delicate, too. I did it on instinct. Expected her to take a bite out of me, but she just thanked me. You know we notice women. The details. She was wearing a corset beneath her clothing.”
“Devil is in the details.” Ben flashed a look across the table that matched the comment.
“What does she look like?” Lucas asked in what he hoped was a casual voice, even as he battled back a baffled desire to take Jon’s hand off for thinking it was okay to touch her.
“You’re about to find out.” Matthew Lord Kensington, K&A’s CEO, entered the conference room. The expression on his aristocratic yet rugged features—the combination of an Italian mother of noble lineage and oil-rich Texan father—was that of an alpha wolf initiating a hunting party. “Alice said she just arrived in the lobby.”
“Warning, guys,” Jon said. “Now that I’ve got you all worked up thinking about her underwear, it’s only fair to tell you she’s all business. Don’t mix it up with her. She’s extremely good at this, and could pull the rug right from beneath us.”
Matt slanted a calculated glance at Lucas. “Sounds like we need your A-game.”
Great. Fucking great. He saw the concern in Matt’s eyes that matched Jon’s. Matt was his best friend as well as his boss. No one had pressed Lucas about his attitude, but they’d all noticed. It was time to shrug it off. Worry it like a terrier on his own time. Because there was no way it was the same girl. He wasn’t entirely skeptical of kismet, but the idea of a stranger he’d met entirely by chance, halfway across the country—in the middle of a fucking forest, for Chrissakes—waltzing into this business meeting, was more than fate. It smacked of burning-bush, freaking miracles.