Kelly was rubbing his neck again, her fingers strong and cool against the heat of his skin. It was definitely time to leave before his eyes started rolling back in his head, before he came to the conclusion that talking was way overrated, that what he really wanted was a whole lot of nonverbal communication, and who really gave a damn about trust anyway?
It took a great deal of effort, but Tom cleared the screen, signed off the computer, and slipped out of both her hands and the chair. “I’m going to go take a shower.” His voice sounded as ragged as if he’d just run ten miles, fast.
Her robe met in the front in a V that was growing deeper every moment. He caught a flash of dark purple against the soft, pale swell of her breasts, and as he looked up into her eyes, he knew the battle was lost.
She knew it, too.
He lunged for her as she reached for him, and then, God, she was in his arms and he was kissing her.
And she was kissing him back just as hungrily, her soft body tight against his.
Tom caught himself before he peeled her robe from her shoulders, forcing himself to slow down, to kiss her more tenderly and less ferociously, to stay in control, to keep from devouring her whole.
She was everything he wanted, everything he’d always stayed far, far away from.
Dinner first.
Talking first.
She trusted him.
Breathing hard, he pulled back. He could see the promise of paradise in her eyes. But the woman trusted him, dammit. “I’ll meet you on the deck for dinner in about an hour, okay?”
She smiled at him. “If that’s what you want.”
Tom headed for the door, then took two steps back toward Kelly. “You know damn well what I want. I’m trying to be good here. I’m trying to do this right.”
She didn’t say a word, didn’t argue, didn’t do a damn thing but just stand there in her barely-there robe, looking at him. Wanting him, too, and letting him see it in her eyes.
“See, there’s no way this could work,” he told her. “I’m going to be here for only a few weeks. And even if we could keep it going long-distance—and I’ve got to be honest here, Kelly, I’ve never been able to keep any relationship going for more than a few months—you deserve better than that.”
She took a step toward him.
“My future’s . . . a little shaky right now,” he told her, “but I can tell you that I intend to do everything in my control to hang on to my career with the SEAL teams. I can also tell you that a romantic relationship with a SEAL is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. These next few weeks I’m here in Baldwin’s Bridge—this is probably going to be the longest time I spend in any one place in the U.S. this year. I’m always moving, Kel, always heading out someplace new, usually overseas. Deployment’s usually without warning, so I don’t even get a chance to phone home to say good-bye. I’m just gone. And when I come back, I can’t talk about where I’ve been or what I’ve done. And there’s always a chance I might not come back at all.”
She took another step toward him and another and she was close enough now to touch.
Tom couldn’t stop himself. He touched her. Her hair, her cheek, the warmth of her neck. She closed her eyes, pressing her cheek into his hand, her lips slightly parted. Her skin was smooth and so soft.
“A woman’s got to be pretty tough,” he whispered, “to put up with that.”
She was touching him now, too, her hands skimming his forearms. And when she opened her eyes, they were filled with both heat and need. “I’m tougher than you think.”
Tom didn’t laugh—at least not aloud. He didn’t even let his lips twitch. But somehow she knew he didn’t believe her.
“I am.” She ran her hands up to his shoulders, down the front of his uniform shirt.
He kissed her. He couldn’t help himself, not when she was gazing at him so fiercely and touching him like that. He kissed her as slowly and as sweetly as he could, careful to keep his own explosive desire on the shortest possible leash. He felt her melt against him, heard her sigh as he pushed her robe off one perfect shoulder.
Jesus, somebody stop him.
He pulled her robe back.
“Maybe we should take this a little more slowly.” He couldn’t believe the words that had just come out of his mouth. But then again, he couldn’t believe he was standing here in Kelly Ashton’s bedroom, with Kelly Ashton in his arms, nearly naked beneath her thin cotton robe. God help him, the way she was pressed against him, she couldn’t miss feeling his arousal.
He knew he should step back, put some space between them, but he was only human, dammit, and he kissed her again. He could feel his control slipping and he worked harder to make his kisses gentle. Respectful. Reverent.
The kind of kisses Kelly Ashton would want.
“Ah, baby, I don’t want to hurt you,” he told her hoarsely. “And I’m so afraid I will. Even under the best of circumstances, I don’t have much to offer a woman like you. And right now . . .”
Kelly pulled his head down and kissed him.
Again, she felt him retreat. Oh, his lips were against hers, and his tongue was in her mouth, but she could practically taste the tightness of his self-control. He was being careful with her, as if she were fragile. As if she might break.
She remembered that ride she took on the back of his Harley all those years ago. She’d asked him to go fast, as fast as he would dare to go along the beach road. She’d wanted to feel the wind in her face and the dizzying thrill of the pavement rushing beneath them.
But he didn’t do it. He’d been careful with her then, too.
Too careful.
That same night in Joe’s car, she’d wanted him to take her to the beach, to take her places she’d never been before.
Instead, he’d taken her home.
Just now, he’d said he didn’t have much to offer a woman like her. Implication: a nice woman like her. All her life, people looked at her and couldn’t see past the goody-two-shoes image that had followed her around since she was old enough to walk. Even in college when she’d gone through her Madonna phase—perpetual lacy black with bra straps showing—no one had taken her seriously. Her cheerleader-cute looks were mostly to blame.
When most people looked, they didn’t look closely, and all they saw were rosy cheeks, freckles, and big blue eyes. They only saw nice.
So, okay, maybe she was a little bit nice. But so what? Weren’t nice women allowed to want heart-stoppingly passionate sex? Wasn’t she allowed to long for the exhilarating sensation of Tom’s incredible body out of control inside of her? As if nice women would only want polite, careful sex . . .
As if nice women didn’t sometimes have healthy, short-term, no-strings relationships simply for the sake of fulfilling a lifelong fantasy, for the sake of feeling that powerful carnival ride, stomach dropping, I’ve-got-a-crush-on-you attraction, for the simple sake of having someone to hold on to when the night got particularly dark and lonely.
Lately her nights were very dark and lonely.
Kelly knew Tom wanted her. There was no disputing that. She could feel him, completely aroused, against her. She wanted to reach for him, to unfasten the buckle of his belt. She wanted . . .
There was nothing careful or controlled about what she wanted. What she wanted would probably give him a heart attack, particularly if he was expecting nice.
God, the last thing she wanted was another careful lover.
She wanted someone who would treat her as an equal, someone who would let her be on top, let her set the boundaries—of which there would be practically none. She wanted someone who wasn’t afraid of her, someone wild, someone a little selfish, someone who lived for the moment.
That was how she’d always imagined Tom Paoletti to be.
She tested him, kissing him again, harder this time, sucking his tongue into her mouth as she swayed against him, brushing her stomach enticingly against the heaviness of his erection.
She heard him groan—that was g
ood. She felt his hands slide down her back as if he were going to cup her rear end and press her more tightly against him, but he stopped politely, halfway there. And again, she could almost taste his control. That wasn’t so good.
She knew he had to work hard to be careful. It wasn’t natural for him. It was something special he was doing—because he was with her.
Miss Nice.
Kelly kissed him again and again, long, deep, languorous kisses that practically begged him to throw her back onto her bed. She pulled out his shirt and skimmed her hands beneath it, against the heat of his skin. She slid one hand between them, her knuckles against the taut muscles of his stomach as she dipped her fingers beneath the waistband of his pants. Just a little, not a lot. Just enough to make him wonder if she was going to reach down his pants.
How about that for nice?
He was working even harder now, that was for sure, but he was still in careful control.
Oh, no way was she going to make careful, polite love with Tom Paoletti. No, she wanted dangerous. She wanted tempestuous. She wanted the man with the reputation for being a little rough, a little crazy, a little wild.
“Kiss me, dammit,” she said to him. “I’m not fifteen anymore. You’re allowed to kiss me like you mean it!”
He used the opportunity to try to step back, to carefully move her hand from the edge of his pants. “Kelly, I think we might want to—”
She used a single, crudely honest word that managed, quite nicely, to define exactly what she wanted. “That’s what I want to do, Tommy, but every time I kiss you, it feels like you’re a little too worried about hurting me. Believe me, what I want is not going to hurt.”
He laughed at that, but she could see surprise in his eyes. He’d never, not in a million years, expected her to be so blunt in either her words or her meaning.
It was exasperating.
“I’m not a virgin anymore, you know,” she told him. “I was married for years, for God’s sake. And brace yourself, but Gary wasn’t the first. Believe it or not, I like sex that’s a little risky, a little rough. I like it loud, too, Tom, and frankly, I’m looking forward to making a lot of noise with you.”
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. Kelly could relate—she was shocking herself, too. But it was all true. She’d just never dared to say it aloud before, and now that she’d started, it was exhilarating. And she wasn’t done.
“I know you still think of me as the little girl next door, but I’m a grown woman,” she continued. “I have about a million bad habits and just as many dark, awful thoughts. I’ve seen a lot of shitty things, Tom—death and godawful suffering and pain. I need you to see me for who I am—let me climb down from this pedestal of niceness you’ve stuck me on top of, because up here I can’t live my life the way I want to live it. I can’t reach you from here. I can’t wrap my legs around you the way I’m dying to do.”
The look on his face would’ve been funny if it weren’t contradicted by the heat growing in his eyes. He was paying attention, and when she was done, she knew he was going to give her exactly what she wanted.
No more careful. No more control.
“I’m not perfect.” Her heart was pounding, but she needed to make sure he really understood. “I cry when I’m unhappy, I have temper tantrums when I’m angry, and I really wallow in it when I’m down. I say bad words. All the time. All the time. I have a tattoo.” She nodded at his expression of disbelief. “Yes, I do. It’s only a little one, but it counts. I’m too chicken to get my belly button pierced, but I really want to, so maybe I will. There are a lot of things I want, you know. I want to be able to really talk to my father. I want to go to bed at night knowing I lived my life to the fullest, instead of feeling as if I’ve chickened out again. I want to stop playing it safe! I want to do all the things I’ve always dreamed about but never dared to do—to get a really funky haircut and wear clothes that show off my body. I want to skydive and windsurf. I . . . I want to, I don’t know, swim with the dolphins, bike across Europe. I want to go down on you at the movie theater.”
Kelly couldn’t believe she’d said that. He couldn’t either. But she was on a roll now. “I want to make love to you on my father’s boat, out in the harbor! I want you to take me to bed tonight and not let me out until noon tomorrow—no, noon the day after that! I want the kind of passion that you read about in books—sex on the kitchen table, on the stairs up to the bedroom, in the bathroom of the train into the city. I want to do it everywhere—in the closet of the guest room at a party, you know, where people come in and out, to throw their coats on the bed? I want you to sneak into my bedroom window at night to wake me up and make love to me, even though we just made love two hours earlier. God, I want to feel you inside me—”
Tom kissed her.
He couldn’t take another second of her voice, her words, winding around him, making him completely crazy. She wanted to . . . At the movies . . .
Screw dinner. Screw talking.
He wasn’t even remotely hungry, and they’d said just about everything they’d needed to. He’d told her he was afraid of hurting her, and she’d informed him that she wanted him, in all sorts of various creative places and ways.
They were both on the same page.
He picked her up, wrapping her legs around him as she’d so vividly described, molding her soft warmth against him, filling his hands with the smoothness of her derriere. He could feel her working the buttons of his shirt as he carried her to her bed.
She’d been right about him.
He’d been guilty of doing the one thing he’d hated most when it was done to him. He hadn’t looked beyond neat labels and obvious appearances to the real person below. He’d always had a crush on the idea of sweet Kelly Ashton—but the real woman in his arms took his breath away.
The real woman was more than sweet. She was spicy, she was funny, she was brazenly honest, she was even a little rude. And she was far hotter than any woman he’d ever known, ever met, ever dreamed of.
She had his shirt undone in record time and the sensation of her hands and mouth against his chest made him laugh out loud.
Her dress was on her bed, and he grabbed it with one hand and tossed it over the back of the computer chair. He shook his shirt free from his arms as she did the same with her robe.
Lord have mercy.
The woman was beautiful. Tom had a deep appreciation for nearly all half-naked women, but Kelly was amazing. Her breasts were voluptuously full, her stomach and thighs smooth and soft, and he realized in that instant that she was his idea of perfection. Every woman he’d ever been with in his life had paled in comparison—even the leggy, hard-bodied supermodel wannabe he’d dated a few years back. He’d thought there was something wrong with him because she just didn’t do it for him.
Now he knew why.
He used to watch Kelly swim in her father’s pool. He’d seen her in her bathing suit many times. But he’d only dreamed of her in her underwear. Until now.
This was so amazing. He kissed her, touched her, ran his hands across the impossible softness of her skin.
She was touching him the same way, as if she couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t believe this was happening.
He sank down with her onto her bed, and she was still on top of him. He kissed her throat, her shoulders, the tops of her breasts.
She took off her bra, and he wanted to weep or sing or shout. Or laugh. He laughed as he buried his face in her, touching and kissing and tasting as much of her as he could, all at once.
She was laughing, too, as she pulled back to reach for the buckle of his belt.
She couldn’t get it undone, so she covered him with her hand, touching him through his pants, and it hit him. He was really here. In Kelly’s room. Making love with her. Finally finishing what they’d started all those years ago in the front seat of Joe’s station wagon.
Did she know how long he’d wanted her?
He gently pushed her off h
im, rolling from the bed to kick off his shoes and quickly shuck his pants from his legs. She knelt then, watching him, her eyes hot, her full breasts tightly peaked with desire, like some kind of wild dream come true.
He’d wanted her forever.
“Oh, my,” she murmured as he pulled down his boxers. When he glanced at her, she smiled and widened her eyes.
Tom had to laugh. He knew damn well that he was just a man, but her obvious admiration for his body—and the fact that she had no problem showing it—was a total turn-on.
He slid back into her arms, entangling his legs with hers, kissing her deeply. The sensation of her breasts against his chest was incredible. And when she reached between them to touch him, to encircle him with the sweet coolness of her fingers . . .
“Kelly.” It was more a gasp than a word.
She laughed, pushing him onto his back as she kissed his mouth, his neck, his chest. She was heading south, her hair tickling sensually as it moved across his sensitized skin. He pushed himself up onto his elbows just as . . .
God! Oh, God! He realized as he struggled to breathe that he’d actually cried out.
It wasn’t so much the sensation of her soft mouth on him that made him shout. But rather it was the sight of her, with those blue eyes and that angelic face, smiling up at him as she . . .
Dear, dear God.
And they weren’t even at the movie theater.
What she was doing to him felt so good, too good. But this wasn’t the way he wanted their first time together to be. He wanted to be able to make her cry out, too.
He reached for her, hauling her up and practically throwing her onto her back. She pulled him with her, kissing his mouth as hungrily as she’d kissed him before.
She was still wearing those purple thong panties, and he reached beneath them, touching her, and she shifted her hips, opening her legs to him as she moaned.
Loudly.
Tom loved it. She was ready for him, soft and wet and smooth and perfect and not at all shy about letting him know it.
The Unsung Hero Page 27