Warm wet heat closed over his cock, stalling his thoughts and hand movements. He looked down to find Blue, her mouth wrapped around his cock, sucking at the tip, licking at the vein below, drawing more of him in until his hand dropped to the top of her head. He sank his fingers into her curls and bent his knees just slightly.
“Hands behind your back.” He grunted the words much like a caveman might have or at least someone beyond coherent thought beyond grunting and crude language, orders uttered. He didn’t care about finesse or sweetness. He didn’t care about comfort or pleasure, at least not hers, not in that moment. He just wanted to come.
Whatever it was about her and sex that drove him to that edge of insanity, that pulled him to that dark place of rude and hurt and anger… He hated it but couldn’t stop it. Not yet.
Using her hair as the lever, Cort drew her forward and fucked her mouth. He surged between her teeth, over her tongue, straight to the back of her throat. He tugged her off, let her gasp for breath, then pulled her forward over his dick again, repeating the pattern until she got the hang of what he wanted.
At any given moment, she could have shoved away from him; his hold in her hair wasn’t so tight that she couldn’t have gotten away if she’d tried. He wasn’t going to force something she didn’t want. He didn’t own her, but dear God, he wanted to. He wanted to tie her to the bed so she could never think of leaving him in the middle of the night again. He wanted to tie her to the bed so he could touch her, lick her, fuck her any time he wanted.
He couldn’t do that, not against her will, but sometimes, over the years, he’d dreamed about it, dreamed about being with her again, about having her like this, naked and on her knees, at his mercy.
And all the while his head was spinning with things he wanted to do to her, he kept steadily fucking between her lips, glancing the head of his cock against the back of her throat, retreating, then filling her again. It was when he looked down, looked away from the images on the wall that had spurred him on to this bout of frustrated and angered arousal that he found her eyes focused up at him.
Glassy, beautiful, dark rum-colored eyes full of unshed tears and hunger so keen he might have lost his balance had he not had hold of her hair. Her arms were still behind her back, and she was there, with him, letting him use her for his own lust, his own purpose, his own need.
Goddamn, he was fucked.
He pressed her face to his body, felt his cock begin the slide into her throat. She gagged, and he let up a little but only just. When he pressed her face close again, her throat accepted, and she swallowed against the head.
Shit. “Again.”
She swallowed. She breathed out her nose, and he felt it tickle the dark curls of his groin. Behind her back he could see her hands wrapped around each of her wrists, and the nails digging into her skin. She was taking this from him, for him.
And he lost it.
Cum traveled up his cock and slid down her throat where she worked it as though she were drinking from a straw. The shaft jerked with each spurt from his balls, and each time she tightened her lips to hold him. He was left drained and tired and far from sated.
When he loosened his grip on her hair, Blue extracted him from her throat and proceeded to lick him clean of the remnants of his orgasm. She blinked up at him as she sat back on her haunches. Expectation stared at him, and that hunger from before was still front and center in her gaze. Her arms still behind her back, her tongue snaked out to lick at her lips, her nipples pointed straight at him.
What in the hell was he doing? What in the hell was he going to do?
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to bend her backward and nuzzle at her breasts. He wanted to lay her down and bury his face between her legs and give her the same pleasure she’d just given him. He wanted to be as selfless as she’d been just now.
Instead, he simply regarded her for a long drawn out moment before taking one, two, three steps back. “My coffee is getting cold,” he muttered. He spun away from her and walked back to the kitchen as calmly as he could. He wanted to stomp. He wanted to run. He wanted to get far away from her, but that wasn’t happening. Hoping she would stay where she was or retreat back to the bedroom wasn’t going to happen either. He heard her feet behind him in what sounded very close to a female stomp.
He’d grin at the thought of how much trouble he was in with her, but he knew better. He might be a callous asshole at the present, but deep down, he wasn’t one. He knew it without having to turn around and see her face she was likely to be pissed. She had every right to be, and she had every right to rip him a new one.
They stood in the kitchen, him facing the counter. Just from the currents between them, she was standing behind him, facing his back. He forced himself not to straighten up, not to flex his shoulders. When she didn’t lay into him as he was expecting, he chanced a look at her.
Naked, her hands on her hips, her right foot tapping, an unreadable message in her pretty eyes, Cort wondered what was going on. She sighed.
“Did you make enough for me too?”
Okay, well he wasn’t expecting that. “I…” He glanced at the French press on the counter, then back at her. “Yeah. There’s enough.”
“Good.”
She did a good imitation of him as she spun on her heel and walked away, calm on the outside save for the anger radiating off her. He should be trying to explain about the living room episode. He should be trying to explain everything, but damn if he could form the words that needed to be said. The corset tattoo moved with her body, and he was caught, almost dropped to his knees. The detail was so realistic that the ribbon ties looked as though they swayed as real ties would on a real corset.
He’d never seen anything like it. Shit. He’d never seen anything or anyone like her. It was the whole reason everything was so fucked up. “Blue, we need to talk.” The words escaped his mouth before he even realized they were there on his tongue.
“Do we? I thought we just needed to fuck, to have angry sex. Or is that just what you need to do? Have angry sex with me until you…I don’t know until what. I’m so confused. One minute you act like you want me, the next minute you act like you want anything but me.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“You know? Well good for you because I don’t seem to. Explain it to me, Cort. Explain to me what you know.” She sat down heavily in a chair at the kitchen table, comfortable in her nakedness.
He debated suggesting clothes for the both of them, but if she was good with their mutual nudity, then so was he. He pulled a couple of cups from the cabinet, grabbed the press, and took both to the table before taking the cream from the fridge and picking up the sugar bowl, all the while very aware of her eyes following him around. He set them on the table as well, pulled a chair from under the table, and moved it in front of her, remembering at the last second they needed spoons to stir with. He got those and sat down.
It was his turn to sigh. He never, ever thought to have this conversation with her or anyone, but Blue deserved the truth, deserved to know that she wasn’t the reason, only the excuse. If he wanted any kind of relationship with her, he had to do what he had never done. Open up.
God, he felt sick. He busied his hands with pushing the plunger down on the coffee press and pouring equal amounts into cups. He took a deep breath and let the words pour out, not quite as smooth as the coffee had.
“Her name was Alicia. We met our junior year in college when I was playing baseball. Her boyfriend at the time was one of my teammates. She and I spent a few months trying to ignore each other because we both felt something, but eventually she broke up with him. He didn’t care and didn’t hold a grudge. She and I were inseparable from that moment on, and after graduation, we moved in together.”
“Were you in love with her?”
Blue never took her eyes off him, and he fought the urge to shift against the wood seat of the chair. Neither had touched the coffee since he’d poured it. Her intensity made him uncom
fortable, but he’d get through this. It was time. “Yes, I was in love with her.”
“Was she in love with you?”
He’d known the question was coming, but hearing it and actually having to form the answer made the knots in his stomach twist tighter. She’d asked it softly, almost hesitantly, and it was the first time he’d realized she was as vulnerable during this conversation as he was. She had feelings for him the same as he had for her and listening to the tale about the woman that first broke his heart had to be as hard to hear as it was for him to tell.
The memory of the moment Alicia told him she didn’t want to marry him, the feel of his world finally crashing down around him after he’d seen the cracks in the walls for so long still had the power to make his chest constrict. “No. She was in lust with me. She loved me but not the way I loved her. I wanted to get married, her family wanted us to get married, all our friends thought we would get married. In the end, though, we didn’t. We didn’t want the same things out of life.”
“You wanted the white picket fence, and she wanted what?”
“Money. Her career. Hot Sex. A roommate. A friend. Anything but the white picket fence.”
“You didn’t figure that out in college?”
Cort shook his head and finally reached for his coffee, needing to do something with his hands. “Things changed after she was offered a very coveted associate position at a big law firm down in Denver. We each went our own ways about two years after school, but we’d been over long before we actually split up. She moved away from Idaho when I brought up marriage again. I went about the wrong way. Told her I’d go with her if she’d marry me. She walked out the door without a word, and I haven’t seen her since.”
“And that put you off women?”
He laughed without humor or lightness. “No, I love women.”
“Okay.” She smiled and reached for her cup, a spoon, and the sugar cubes. “She put you off trying to find the kind of woman you wanted?”She lifted the cup and took a sip, spitting it back in almost immediately. “What in the hell did you do to the coffee?”
There was humor in his laugh this time. He took a sip of his own coffee and fought not to spit it across the room. God, it was awful. “No idea.”
“Tastes like mud.”
She made a face and stuck her tongue out as though it could rid itself of the taste. He understood completely. He took their cups and dumped them in the sink at the same time she got up and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge. She popped the top on both and set one down for him on the table and took a long swig of her own.
He was grateful and tipped his bottle toward her before taking a long pull. He sat in the chair again.
“So? Gonna answer my question? She put you off trying to find Suzie Homemaker?”
He flinched. She faced him with that pointed stare again, and he put off the answer some more with another swallow of beer. He really didn’t like the name brand domestic ones. They were almost as bad as that pot of coffee. The small microbrewery ones, though, he enjoyed trying those out. “Something like that, I guess.”
“Something like that you guess?”
She sounded as though she didn’t believe him anymore than he believed him. “I don’t know, Blue. I just know that after she left, I lost the desire to settle down. She was supposed to be the one, and it blew up in my face.”
“You believe there’s just one someone meant for everyone?”
“I don’t know that either.” Two more swallows and he’d have to get another beer in order to finish this. He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension building in his muscles. He hated heart to heart conversations. He didn’t do shit like this. Not anymore at least. Not since Alicia. He didn’t pour out his heart, and it was grating on him.
“And what about me?”
His eyes flew to her face. “You?”
“Yes. She made you give up on finding love again. What did I do?”
“You left.”
“Yes, we’ve established that. What did it make you want to do?”
“Do you want the truth?”
“Yes.”
Could he give her the truth? He scooted his chair closer to her, invading her space. She watched but she didn’t move to get away. “I wanted to find you. I spent all day after I woke up looking for you. I scoured Savannah from one end of town to the other looking for you. I sat in that goddamn bar all night hoping you would walk in. I stayed one more night hoping you’d come back to the room.”
She looked surprised, and for the first time in five years, something cracked in his chest.
“You did? You did all that for me?”
“I wanted you. I wanted you in my bed again. I wanted your smile as you straddled me. I wanted your laugh when I tickled you unexpectedly. I wanted to hold you against me and listen to you whisper your dreams to me. I wanted to hold you while you slept. I wanted everything, Blue, but you never came back, and each hour that passed, each minute that ticked by, I became more and more angry at you, at her.”
“At least I’m not the only one.”
“You didn’t have to leave.”
She looked down, smiled with a lift of one corner of her mouth, then raised her eyes back to his. His cock twitched. He’d known he was getting hard again. The anger was fueling his lust, and he was doing the best he could to ignore it. Now that she’d drawn conscious attention to it, he couldn’t any longer.
His cock filled almost immediately and stood proud, slightly to the left. His gaze dropped to her nipples, and the longer he stared at them, the harder they became. Two could play that game. If he looked lower, though, between her legs where he wanted to bury himself, he’d be a lost man.
He dragged his focus back to her face. No, they had to get through this once and for all. They needed to move on or move away. He couldn’t work on her house and be near her without wanting her. He couldn’t stay in the area and work with his friends without wanting her. Whatever the hell hold she had on him, it was there to stay. Five years hadn’t done anything but make the ache worse, and seeing her now, again, more beautiful than before…
“Cort?”
There was softness, a little pleading, a question. He had to ignore that too. Dammit, she wasn’t making this easy. “Why did you leave, Blue? Tell me why you left me.”
She moved quickly, so quick he didn’t have a chance to react other than to reach out and hold on to her as she straddled his thighs. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself, her clit, her lower belly against his cock. His fingers flexed on her waist, and he tried to push her back, push her to where he could see her face, see her eyes. Him, who was trying to avoid that directness earlier, wanted it now.
She buried her head in his neck and shook her head. She rubbed her body on his, slow undulations of her hips. It was one of the most erotic sensations he’d ever experienced. His arms slipped around her back and he just gave in, let her tease and torment them both. His anger was gone, at least for the moment, and he reveled in the feel of her, free of that pain in his gut.
“I think I fell in love with you that night,” she whispered.
Cort’s breath all but stopped in his chest, but he forced himself not to change a single thing going on between them.
“I didn’t believe in love at first sight. I wasn’t even sure I believed in romantic love at all. I only believed that love brought pain, and I didn’t want that in my life.” She shifted closer. “I wanted to be the free spirit my aunt was. She never let anyone get close, not after her husband died. She’d loved him so much and hurt so bad when he was gone. I remembered that feeling after my parents died. It was a different kind of love, but love just the same, and it hurt. I hurt. I didn’t want to feel that way again. I—”
“Blue, I—”
She shook her head again. “Please, Cort. You wanted to know. Please just let me talk.” She licked his neck and kissed him softly until he nodded his acquiescence.
Cort tightened his hold on her, and the wetness left a streak of juice on his cock that slid in drops down his balls. He wanted to grip her ass and impale her to the hilt, rock her on his lap until they both came. Instead, he gently rubbed her back, kneading the muscles along her spine. She relaxed against him, and her pussy lips opened farther to wrap around his hardness, coating him in liquid heat.
Death. Of. Him. That’s exactly what she was going to be if he didn’t get inside her soon. They could have this conversation that way, right? With him buried deep in her cunt? He felt sure they could, felt rather certain of it, in fact, but then she lifted her head and looked at him with tears glistening on her lashes.
Okay, so maybe not.
He raised his hands to her head, holding her face in his palms. His heart ached for her, for the woman who wasn’t even sure love existed. How could such a beautiful spirit, such an open human being, be so scared of love? She, of all people, should embrace love, should be sensitive to it, move toward it, not run away from it.
He leaned forward and smiled as her eyes grew wider the closer his face got to hers. Her lashes fluttered closed, and he figured she was thinking he was going to kiss her. He would, but first… With the tip of his tongue, he licked the tear that fell from the corner of her eye. Just a light touch, but one that had her catching her breath. That was when he kissed her.
He pressed his lips to hers and kissed her the way he’d witnessed his father kiss his mother a thousand times over the years. It was with love, with reverence, with tender concern. It wasn’t a sexual kiss. It wasn’t meant to entice or arouse, but when he pulled back, her hunger was staring back at him.
“Blue?”
“Do you want to love me?”
Cort was momentarily speechless, and when he tried to speak, he sputtered and couldn’t utter a single solid word. “Uh…”
“I thought I didn’t want to love you. All these years have gone by, and I didn’t think I could possibly still feel the same way as I did the night I met you. You’re here though, and I do. I still feel that way, I still love you.”
Forever in Blue Jeans Page 11