Hannah And The Hellion (Silhouette Treasury 90s)

by Christine Flynn

  Defiance was her defense. But it taunted Damon like the proverbial red flag being waved in front of a bull.

  He stepped closer, his anger coiling around her as he came slowly forward, knotting her stomach, testing her courage. He didn’t stop until his body blocked sight of the fire, the room, everything but the breadth of his chest and the storm clouds darkening his eyes.

  “I don’t use excuses,” he informed her, his voice rumbling like distant thunder over her nerves. “I don’t need them. I’ve honestly tried to do what was best for both of us by staying on the fringes of your life. And you think it’s because I don’t want you?”

  Any incredulity in his expression was masked in the fierceness of his carved features. His glance darted over her face, touching her hair, the part of her mouth when she drew in an uncertain breath. “I want you so badly I ache, Hannah.” His arm swept behind him, his eyes glittering hard on hers. “I lay in that room night after night imagining how it would feel to have you under me. I imagine how your hair would look spread out on my pillow, how you would taste and move and feel. It takes every ounce of willpower I have to keep my hands off you. Don’t you realize that?”

  Like a starving man faced with a banquet he couldn’t consume, he forced his glance from her mouth and turned his back on what he’d told himself he couldn’t have.

  Hannah’s heart pounded as she focused on his rigid back. His heated admissions robbed the strength from her voice. “Did it ever occur to you that I’d rather you use your willpower for your temper?”

  “I don’t have a temper.”

  “It certainly sounds like you do.”

  He wheeled around, expecting recrimination, finding instead a reflection of his own desires.

  Need hit him like a fist.

  “There’s a difference between irritation and frustration, Hannah.”

  She swallowed, her chin coming up, her defenses shot. “Then, show me the frustration.”

  The inequities he’d been dealing with for hours already had him feeling as if he wanted to explode. Now the naked challenge in her eyes taunted his restraint. If she wanted to know what he was dealing with, he’d be more than happy to show her.

  He took a step closer, crowding her, and pushed his hand into the hair at her nape. The circle of gathered fabric holding back her hair hit the carpet about the time he molded his hands to her skull and lowered his head.

  “You want to know how frustration feels?” he taunted.

  His mouth came down hard on hers, his hands pulling her head back, tilting it at an angle. His tongue swept her lips, making them part before she could let him in on her own. He wanted her open to him, as vulnerable to his invasion as he was to her smile, the sound of her voice, her scent. If she wanted to understand what he felt, then she needed to know how it felt to have control wrested away and constantly teetering on its edge, to be burning up on the inside and having no way of slaking the heat. Even now, especially now, the desire clawing in him was a physical thing. Demanding. Taunting. Threatening.

  He dragged her forward, wanting her body vulnerable to him, too, but her raincoat was in the way. Shoving his hand between the open sides of the slick fabric, he swallowed her faint moan when he deliberately dragged his palm up and over the roundness of her breasts.

  His heart was hammering when he finally pushed her coat over her slender shoulders and let it fall in a heap at her feet. She was trembling like a leaf in a stiff breeze, her fingers coiled around his neck as if she would fall without his support. He wanted her mindless, limp with need. He wasn’t sure what was pushing him. He just knew it was no longer anger. That had died the instant he felt her mouth soften beneath his.

  He knew, too, that he was beyond proving a point. With Hannah’s soft hands working under his shirt, her mouth seeking him as hungrily as he sought her, he simply couldn’t remember why he should care.

  He wanted her.

  The knowledge flowed through Hannah like the headiest wine. She yearned for this man who tried to do what was right; this scarred, angry man who felt compelled to hide how truly decent he was. He made her feel things she’d never known existed, and now, she feared, she couldn’t live without. She’d never known, never believed, she could experience such reckless need. That she could crave a man with such desperation. But, then, she’d never been desired the way Damon desired her. No man had ever told her he’d imagined her in his bed. No man had ever touched her with such possession.

  His big hands molded her, shaped her hips, drawing her intimately against him. It wasn’t enough.

  “I want you,” he murmured, sliding his hand under her sweater. He rubbed the silky fabric of her camisole over her ribs, her breasts. “You want me to stop, say so now. I can fight myself. I can fight you. But I can’t fight both of us.” The satiny fabric slipped up, exposing her skin to the tantalizing roughness of his callused palm. “Another minute, and I’m not going to try.”

  The thought of him stopping nearly undid her. “Then, don’t. Where’s your room?”

  His eyes glittered like polished pewter in the moments before he bent to catch the back of her legs. He didn’t answer. He just lifted her in his arms as if she weighed nothing at all, and swung her through the doorway behind him.

  He didn’t bother with the lamp by the bed. The golden light spilling in from the living room made it easy enough to see when he lowered her to the rumpled sheets, then reared back to unbuckle his belt.

  Over the erratic pounding of her heart in her ears, Hannah heard the harsh rasp of his zipper and the impatient rustle of fabric as he shed his denim shirt. Gathering his T-shirt in a wad between his shoulder blades, he dragged it over his head, revealing the corrugated muscles of his stomach and chest, the dark thatch of hair under his powerful arms. His wide shoulders glowed like hammered bronze, the narrow, dark tattoo circling his left bicep making him look like a primitive warrior about to stake his claim as he came forward on his knee.

  The mattress sagged with his weight when he reached for the hem of her sweater.

  Damon’s impatience aroused Hannah as much as the possessiveness in his eyes when he skimmed sweater and camisole away in one tangle. His mouth came down on hers the instant the fabric hit the floor, pushing her head into his pillow while he pulled her under him. She felt his hand slide under her back and the flick of his fingers when the clasp of her bra gave. An instant later, she felt the brush of cool air on her breasts, and the moist heat of his mouth when he trailed his debilitating kiss from her lips to the pebbled hardness of her nipple.

  She didn’t know if the moan she heard was his or her own. Tangling her fingers in his amazingly soft hair, pressing him to her, she knew only that she had been missing him for her entire life. She had fallen in love with him. Hopelessly. She didn’t know when it had happened. But she could no more deny that simple fact than she could deny the fire he ignited deep inside her. Everywhere he touched, she burned. And he was touching her everywhere.

  His mouth was still on her when he peeled away her slacks and underwear. On her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. She could feel him trying to slow down, to curb the impatience and heat that drove him. But she gloried in the knowledge that it was she who had put the stark need in his beautifully tortured features; that it was his want of her that coiled the raw tension through his magnificent body. Slowing down was the last thing in this lifetime that she wanted.

  She reached for the loosened waist of his denims. He caught her wrist, stretching out over her, nuzzling her neck. “You take them off and I’ll be inside you.”

  “I know.”

  He lifted himself on his elbows. His expression feral, he smoothed the dark silk of her hair from her face, fanning it on his pillow.

  “The way I feel right now, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it easy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Every nerve in her body was vibrating when she moved her hand shamelessly beneath his briefs. “I want you the way you feel right now.” She wanted him exa
ctly as he was. The rough edges. The unbridled passion. He held too much of himself back from her in too many other ways. Here, now, she could refuse his restraints.

  Her eyes steady on his, she pushed at the fabric. His jaw locked, but he lifted his hips, letting her shove jeans and briefs as far as she could before he pulled back himself and kicked them away. In an instant of sanity, he fumbled open the drawer of the nightstand and ripped open a small foil packet with his teeth. She barely had time to feel grateful that at least one of them had been thinking before his hands were in her hair, his mouth crushed hers and he’d covered her slender curves with his hard, hot body.

  From beyond the window by the bed came the patter of rain on the sill. The gentle sound was muffled by their ragged breathing, the soft rustle of skin brushing skin and the heated honey of Damon’s dark voice. He murmured to her, inflaming her with a graphic description of what he wanted to do to her as his big hand slid under her hips, his legs wedging hers apart. He told her exactly what she did to him, too. A tiny moan escaped her lips at the knowledge, then she gasped at the feel of his fingers seeking her dampness before he proved that she made him every bit as hard as he claimed and he began sinking into her.

  Damon’s hand fisted at the side of her head. He was hanging on to his control by a hair, and the sensations surrounding him as he entered her were almost more than he could bear. He knew she didn’t want him to hold back. She gave as well as she got from him even now. But she wasn’t a big woman, and he was a big man. So he inched forward, dying a little death each time she lifted her hips higher, taking him deeper, until he was aware of little beyond his need and her heat.

  She rose to him like a siren coming out of the sea, melding her body to his, matching his rhythm. He had never wanted a woman the way he wanted this one. She was like a fever in his blood, a delirium that could well drive him mad. Part of him wanted to purge himself of her, to drive her out of his system with each thrust she so willingly met. Another part drove him to make her part of him, to brand her as his. Torn by the storm raging in his body, he ignored the one raging in his mind and let himself be swept away by the feel of her in his arms.

  “That’s it,” he whispered, coaxing her higher. His hot breath feathered against her skin as he traced the delicate shell of her ear. Her skin felt like satin. She tasted like sweet wine. “Let go, honey. Do it. Let go.”

  His name was a ragged plea on her lips when he felt her convulse around him. Burying his face against the side of her neck, he lifted her with one last, powerful stroke, and emptied himself into her body.

  The fire in the other room had burned to embers, its flickering glow long gone. In his spartan bedroom, with its dresser, nightstand and queen-size bed that lacked both headboard and bedspread, the air was considerably cooler than it had been hours ago.

  Damon lay in the semidarkness, listening to the constant drumming of rain on the roof. The television was still on and he should turn off the lights, but the thought of disturbing the woman tucked spoon-fashion against him made him stay right where he was.

  Even if Hannah hadn’t been curled so trustingly in his arms, he wouldn’t have wanted to move. Always before when he’d wakened with a woman, an odd, gnawing emptiness would be in his gut. The feeling would drive him from the bed and, ultimately, out into the night. The fact that he was in his own house gave him nowhere else to go. But leaving was the last thing on his mind. The emptiness wasn’t there. He’d been waiting for it, expecting it. Yet, as he lay holding her, it simply hadn’t come.

  He held her left hand in his. Slipping his fingers from hers, he pulled the blankets and sheet down far enough to expose the smooth curve of her shoulder. Easing forward, he kissed her nape, the warm curve of her neck. He’d taken her twice, the second time with the patience he’d lacked the first. But he wanted her again. And again.

  But there were a lot of things he’d learned to live without.

  With a soft sigh, she shifted against him, then turned in his arms.

  “Hi,” she murmured.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly five.” He drew his finger along the delicate line of her collarbone, his shadowed features revealing nothing. “What time do you have to be at the café?”

  The sweet lethargy filling Hannah began to fade with the rude tug of reality. With the memories of the night flooding back and Damon’s hand skimming possessively down her body, the café was the last thing she wanted to think about.

  “It’s still closed on Sundays.”

  His response was to let his hand roam over her bare stomach.

  Encouraged by his touch, she reached for him, too, skimming her hand over the hard muscles of his shoulder. She could scarcely believe she was finally free to touch him.

  Her fingers trailed to the tattoo circling his bicep. She remembered it being a deep indigo blue. But the intricate patterns in the inch-wide band looked black in the light filtering through the bedroom door.

  Realizing what had her attention, the strong line of his jaw hardened.

  “Does that bother you?”

  His question held a note of defense. Hannah had a pretty good idea why it was there. In a place like Pine Point, a tattoo was considered a sign of rebellion, an in-your-face way of defying convention. In the city, people often regarded them as decoration, or art—or the signs of a gang or cult. Damon wasn’t the art type. As much of a loner as he was, she couldn’t imagine him belonging to a gang, either.

  She shook her head, still tracing the patterns. She wasn’t put off by the markings at all. Not on him. “I was just wondering what it’s supposed to be.”

  It was his turn to hesitate.

  “They’re symbols,” he finally said, sounding as if he had considered some less revealing response. “From the Samoan tatau, except a true tatau covers a Samoan chief pretty much from the middle of his back and sides to his knees.”

  He’d learned of the elaborate body tattoo when he’d worked tankers in the Pacific, he told her. The whole thing was about religion, individual integrity and the honor of the Samoan people. As he spoke, she could hear respect in the low, smoky tones of his voice. She could hear caution, too, as if he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to admit that he cared about anything so redeeming or noble as honor.

  “These are just the symbols from it I thought I could use.”

  He’d accused her of living in denial. Perhaps, she thought, slipping her finger along the intriguing shapes, he’d recognized that because he did such a remarkable job of denying things, too.

  “What do they mean?”

  “The long spear around the top is for bravery in fishing deep waters.”

  She smiled at that, easily understanding why he’d chosen it. “And these?” she asked, moving the tip of her nail along the undulating line and what looked like the ribs of a feather beneath it.

  “That’s the centipede. It’s to remind a man that he won’t feel pain if he’s hurt.”

  She lifted her eyes to his as her hand slowly slid to his muscular forearm. She suspected she understood why he’d chosen that one, too. But she didn’t ask if it was only for physical hurts, or if it reminded him not to feel emotional pain, as well. He’d closed himself off in so many ways over the years. Just for now, she wanted to believe that whatever cracks she’d made in his wall wouldn’t be so easy for him to repair.

  Her voice was quiet, gentle, like the patter of the rain on the windowsill. “And here I thought tattoos were just something a sailor got after a few too many in an accommodating port.”

  He placed a kiss on the skittering pulse at her wrist, then flattened her hand beside her head when he rolled over her. “Shows how little you know, huh?”

  She smiled at that. He smiled back, looking just a little dangerous as his free hand skimmed her breast, her nipple instantly blooming against his palm. The way she responded to him drove him crazy. He’d told her so himself.

  Carrying that touch to her hip, he f
itted her to him as easily as if they’d been lovers forever, rather than only for a night.

  “How am I ever going to keep my hands off of you?” He growled the question against her ear, stealing her breath as he slipped inside her. “How can I work knowing you’re just a flight of stairs away? This isn’t going to be easy, baby.” He began to move, slowly, his voice growing husky. “Being together won’t be easy.”

  Damon knew he was right. But he also knew Hannah would choke before she’d admit it She refused to back down when she believed in something, but the thought that she believed in him destroyed any thought of pressing the point.

  They spent Sunday together secluded at his place, making love, walking in the rain. By tacit agreement, neither spoke of what had happened the day before, or of the town. He had learned to live on its fringes, and his world was a quiet one of deep woods and open waters. That was what he shared with her. Reluctantly at first. More easily when he realized she wasn’t put off by the meagerness of his existence. He wasn’t a sentimental man. He wasn’t even sure he knew what sentiment was. But he knew he’d never forget the way she looked smiling at him from the edge of the cliff overlooking the vast lake.

  The rain had stopped, and a shaft of sunlight backlit the hair the wind whipped around her head. She turned to watch him walk toward her, her smile soft, inviting.

  “I wish we never had to leave,” she said, fitting her back to him when he put his arms around her. “It feels so peaceful here.”

  He didn’t trust the way her quiet words pleased him. Nor did he trust the thoughts that came unbidden that evening when they prepared dinner in the kitchen he’d refloored but hadn’t yet painted, or when they later lay curled in front of the stone fireplace that had once been covered with years of soot. He was slowly cleaning up the place, making it livable, but he hadn’t really considered why he was doing it, other than it needed to be done.