by Amy Andrews
‘I’ve seen comet trails,’ she panted as he pulled his fingers out and pushed them in again. ‘And exploding stars.’ More pushing and pulling and panting. ‘The birth of universes. Nothing can beat that.’
Tuck looked up from her belly, where he was doodling wet circles with his tongue, withdrawing his fingers. ‘Oh, honey, just you lie back,’ he murmured. ‘Let me teach you some things they don’t rate at Mensa.’
And he settled between her legs, pushing them wide with his shoulders, feasting his eyes on the end game. Her arousal wafted towards him and he salivated at the thought of tasting her. A surge of red-hot lust enveloped him at seeing the thatch of dark hair reminding him she was all woman.
Cassie’s eyes widened as Tuck lowered his head and his intent became clear. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, placing her hand over herself, barring his way. ‘No, no, no. You definitely don’t have to do that.’
Tuck looked up. From this vantage point he could see her still erect nipples, standing proud and puckered, and smell her musky scent. He flared his nostrils. It filled his head and it took all his willpower not to bury his face in her. ‘I know. But I want to.’
Cassie shook her head. ‘Nothing works,’ she reiterated. Why wasn’t he listening to her?
Tuck’s hands slid up her body to stroke her breasts, his fingers smoothing over the taut peaks of her nipples. ‘Trust me,’ he murmured.
Cassie gasped as his touch bloomed and tingled at the juncture of her thighs, just below where his face hovered. It burned and ached. ‘I’ve never…’
‘It’s okay.’ He grinned. ‘I’m an expert.’
And then he lowered his head, nudging her hand aside, just nuzzling her at first, brushing his closed mouth along her sex, familiarising himself with the contours, filling his senses up with her.
Then he let his tongue do some exploring. He swiped it against the centre of her and grunted in satisfaction when she gasped and bucked against him. He inhaled then, deep and long, and his head roared with a surge of lust and male possession and he opened his mouth over her, needing more, wanting all of her.
Cassie felt a jolt of something hot and hard slam into her belly and she shut her eyes against the urgency of it. Tuck’s tongue licked and probed and sucked as his fingers spread their own joy, stroking and teasing and rubbing her nipples to a state of almost painful arousal, and she gasped and squirmed beneath the relentless attack.
She lifted her head to look at him, and the sight of his blond head between her legs flushed like a drug through her system. When his tongue found the hard nub that she’d never really bothered to explore for herself and flicked it she just about lifted off the bed.
‘Tuck!’ she cried out as sensations she’d never experienced before catapulted her into a whole new realm.
Tuck’s hand moved down from her breast to splay low and wide on her belly, clamping her to the mattress, holding her earthbound as she bucked and writhed beneath the onslaught of his tongue. He was holding her right where she was, taunting her with all he had, tasting her, determined to make her so rattled she wouldn’t know which solar system she was in.
And all the time a primal beat thrummed through his head and streaked hot urgency through the muscles of his belly and buttocks. He was torn between the overriding urge to drive into her, to plunge himself into all that tight heat and feel her around him again, and the need to suck up every last morsel of her, to feast on her, to propel her to a place she’d never been.
A place more cosmic than she’d ever seen.
Cassie didn’t know what was happening to her as heat and pressure built everywhere, but she was suddenly terrified. She hadn’t felt anything like this before but she knew with a disturbing clarity that she wanted it—bad.
And that was the most frightening thing of all.
The only thing she’d ever wanted this badly was to go to Antarctica on a research mission, and now even that seemed to pale in comparison to the tidal force of lust and seething need consuming her body.
Her life dealt in certainties. Fact and logic and common sense were her true north. She depended on them. She needed them. And this…whatever it was…was making a mockery of them.
If this was the power of an orgasm she could do without.
‘No,’ she muttered, her head tossing from side to side, her eyes shut fast. She didn’t want this. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Tuck said, sensing that most of the battle was inside Cassie’s head. He held her fast and sucked down hard on her clitoris. ‘Stop fighting it, Cassie,’ he said when he finally lifted his head.
Cassie shook her head. ‘No,’ she muttered as sensations rose and she pushed them back.
Tuck grimaced. He knew she was there, that she was on the edge, so close. Goddamn it, he’d never met a woman so averse to a good time in his life.
‘Yes,’ he said, shifting his hand off her belly and using it in tandem with his tongue, stroking his index finger up and down her centre as his other hand ministered to the tight pucker of her nipples.
She didn’t need to have this in her life—to change everything she’d thought she knew. She knew what she wanted. And it wasn’t the total consuming vortex of sex.
Tuck urged her on, pushing a finger inside all her tight, slick heat. And then another.
Cassie gaped at the invasion. Something started to pool and ripple, down low and deep, and hot urgent fingers dug into her buttocks and thighs. But she clamped down hard against it, pushing it back. Her heels drummed against the mattress. Her head rocked from side to side.
Tuck looked up at her. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open, gasping with every thrust of his fingers. ‘I can show you some stars, darlin’, like you’ve never seen before,’ he murmured. ‘You just gotta let go.’
Cassie whimpered. Let go? What did that mean? She didn’t know how to let go.
‘Relax, let it take you,’ Tuck soothed as she cried out in obvious conflict.
Cassie sobbed as the effort to push back the looming tide threatened to overwhelm her. Nothing was familiar. Nothing was the same. Everything was coming apart around her as a swirling, sucking sensation deep in her core obliterated all thought and consciousness and finally pulled her into its abyss.
Tuck felt her clamp tight around his fingers and knew she was finally there. He dropped his head and lashed his tongue back and forward over the nub that had grown impossibly hard. Her back arched off the bed and he squeezed her nipple between his fingers.
Cassie cried out as her mind left her body and flew. Tuck had promised her stars, and as deep, unremitting pleasure drenched her she floated through a cosmos of colours, with a kaleidoscope of shooting stars bursting around her like fireworks. She was actually amongst them—not just observing them from afar. Reaching out for them. Basking in their heat and absorbing their incandescence into her soul.
Tuck did not let up, feasting greedily until Cassie’s muscles stopped contracting around him and the cries and the wild bucking of her hips started to settle. He gently withdrew his fingers from her, propping his chin on her belly as he watched them die to a hush, waiting for the moment that she opened her eyes.
And he wasn’t disappointed. When she finally lay spent and still on the mattress, and her eyes eventually fluttered open, the blue-grey was practically slate with drunken satisfaction, her pupils big and black, her focus obviously not quite twenty-twenty as she blinked at him rapidly.
‘Tuck?’
Now he could pick her
out of a line-up.
Now she didn’t even look as if she could spell the word paper.
‘I… I…’
Tuck smiled at her utter bewilderment, but it grabbed a big handful of his gut and squeezed hard. He grinned, crawling up her body, dropping a kiss on her belly, and one between her breasts and the hollow at the base of her throat, before lashing her mouth with a deep, wet kiss, his erection surging as it pressed into her thigh.
‘Hold on, darlin’,’ he muttered against her mouth as he reached for a foil packet, ‘we’re not done yet.’
Cassie watched, still in a daze, as he tore at the packet with his teeth. There weren’t a lot of coherent thoughts in her head, but her stomach clenched at the sight of him, hard and ready, and once again her brain went on vacation as her body responded to the primal cue to mate.
And then he was over her, and in her, his mouth drugging her with kisses that took her back to that place amongst the stars, and his erection was stroking inside her, reviving tissues that were already in a dangerously excitable state. And she was flying again, but it was better this time because he was with her, and she held on to him tight as they astral-planed through the cosmos, revelling in the shake and the shudder of him, his guttural cries in her ear ratcheting the pleasure up, taking her higher and higher and higher.
Cassie didn’t know how long they were gone for. Or how long it took to come back down to earth. Time ceased to exist and the awareness of her surroundings crept back very slowly. The mattress beneath her. The weight of his body on hers. The sound of their breath as they lay together, gasping.
All these years and that was what she’d been missing out on?
At some stage Tuck rolled off her, getting up to dispose of the condom, then rejoined her, lying down next to her as she stared at the ceiling, contemplating the magic that had just happened.
When she finally got her breath back she said, ‘Please tell me you can do that again.’
Obviously her brain was still missing in action.
Tuck rolled his head to look at her and laughed. It looked as if one round of good sex had turned Little-Miss-Brainiac into Little-Miss-Nymphomaniac. ‘I may need a moment or two.’
Cassie was pretty sure she was going to need some recovery time too. She turned on her side, her gaze roving over his face. ‘Is it…is it always like that?’
Tuck nodded, but he knew that wasn’t true. What they’d just had wasn’t like anything else he’d ever experienced. Sex had always been good, but never like this. Not even with April, whom he’d thought he’d loved. Or tried to anyway.
The knowledge was unsettling.
He rolled his head back to stare at the ceiling again. ‘It is with me, darlin’,’ he said, keeping up his usual patter.
Cassie got goose bumps as the low, slow drawl of Tuck’s accent whispered across her skin and stroked those muscles inside her that didn’t seem to be able to get enough of him. Her gaze was drawn to the rise and fall of his chest and she actually reached out and trailed her fingers down it—something, prior to yesterday, she would have thought she’d need a frontal lobotomy to do.
Her cheek rested on his biceps and his scent tickled her senses again. She pressed her nose into the warm bulk and inhaled him deep inside her body. A blast of his natural essence invaded her cells again and stirred the embers of her orgasm.
Tuck smiled. ‘I could bottle some of those pheromones, if you like?’
Cassie dragged herself away. Why bottle it when it was right here? In the flesh? Gina was right. Maybe she needed a little time? Like a whole night?
She was leaving in the morning—hopefully with her brain returned—why deprive herself?
‘Direct from the source is always best,’ she said, trying to sound scientific and factual when she felt tongue-tied and unsure of herself.
Tuck grinned as he looked down at her. ‘Don’t you have a paper to get back to?’
Cassie nodded. She did. She really did. But she was pretty sure even simple words were beyond her at the moment, let alone complex analysis of weather patterns on Jupiter. Not to mention the fact that for the first time in her life she actually didn’t care about the complex weather systems of Jupiter.
‘I’m not sure I’ll understand it. I think I just lost a hundred IQ points.’
Tuck chuckled. ‘Welcome to being average. I hope you enjoy your stay.’
If this was how average people passed their time Cassie was beginning to think that being a genius was the dumbest thing anyone could be.
‘I’m leaving for Cornell in the morning,’ she said. She had no idea where it had come from, but there was obviously still one functioning brain cell somewhere that seemed to remember what had been the most important thing in her life until half an hour ago.
Tuck rolled up in one swift movement, settling himself into the cradle of her hips. ‘So tonight we’ll just play dumb. How’s it been so far?’
Cassie blinked. ‘Very…educational.’
‘Oh, so you approve of my copulation techniques?’ he teased. ‘Your libido has been adequately serviced?’
Cassie might have been clueless about a lot of things but, having read a lot of textbooks and seen a lot of nature shows, even she was aware that what they’d just shared was nothing to do with the slaking of a biological imperative.
‘Well, I have minimal comparative data, and no blind studies to—’
Tuck’s mouth cut her off and she lost her mind for a while as his scent filled her up with heady need. When he pulled back they were both a little out of breath.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I’ll try harder. They don’t call me Mr-Satisfaction-Guaranteed for nothing. Libido servicing is right up my alley. Are you hungry?’
‘It’s almost midnight,’ she murmured. Cassie never ate after seven o’clock. It wasn’t good for the digestion.
Tuck shrugged. ‘So?’
Cassie blinked as a huge belly rumble echoed in the space between them and she realised she was starving. She’d become a truly primitive woman—utterly biological. ‘I could go for some toast.’
Tuck smiled as he dropped a hard kiss on her mouth and reached over and snatched up the phone. ‘Trust me—you’ll like what I can do with strawberries and cream much better.’
Cassie woke wrapped spoon-like in Tuck’s arms at eight the next morning. It was the second morning in a row she’d woken late. The second morning in a row she’d woken thinking about him. The second morning in a row she’d woken with Jupiter as far from her brain as the actual planet itself.
And the first morning ever she’d woken with a man rubbing all his rampant male hardness against her. Tuck’s hand was at her breast, and his essence filled her waking senses with sex and surrender, giving her brain no chance to switch on.
Tuck sensed the moment she came awake and his hand tightened around the swell of her breast, his fingers rolling over her nipple. When she moaned and arched her back he dragged her closer, kissing her neck.
‘When do you have to leave?’ he muttered in her ear.
Leave? Cassie thought hard through the fog of pheromones and the heavy scent of sex clouding her senses. ‘Whenever I can get a train,’ she said.
Tuck licked a path from her ear to the slope where her shoulder met her throat as his hand slipped between her legs. ‘When do you need to be at Cornell?’
Cassie shut her eyes as his fingers stroked against her centre. ‘
Day…after…tomorrow…’ she murmured, easing her legs apart to give him better access.
‘So you could stay another night?’ he said, his finger sinking into the slick heat of her. ‘Just to make sure your libido is well and truly serviced. I’d hate for that to get in the way of your very important studies.’
Cassie thought he made a very good point—just as he found the spot that was screaming for his touch. She gasped. ‘Yes. That would be awful. I need to focus at Cornell.’ She needed her libido back in its box. ‘I could do one more night.’
Tuck was too far gone to acknowledge his triumph. All he could feel was the wet heat of her as he slid his erection up and down the length of her slick entrance—close, so close.
‘Do you have any condoms in your room?’ he asked.
Cassie squirmed against him, tilting her pelvis, desperately needing him inside her, not taunting her from the outside. ‘Why would I have condoms?’
Tuck groaned, trying to wrestle back control. ‘We’re out.’ And a place as posh as the Bellington wasn’t likely to have a condom vending machine. ‘Somebody was insatiable last night.’
Cassie blushed. She’d lost count of the number of orgasms she’d had. They’d all just blurred together into one long brain-incapacitating event.
Tuck pulled away from her with difficulty. Even knowing he couldn’t get any woman pregnant, he’d always been a stickler for safe sex. He reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll ring the concierge.’
Cassie dragged in gulps of air, trying to clear the sexual fog, but as per usual all she did was drag in more of him and her belly tightened. She rolled onto her back, her head turning towards him. ‘The concierge will get you condoms?’
‘The concierge will get a star quarterback whatever the hell he likes.’
‘Even an ex?’ she asked, trying to imagine a famous astronomer—real stars, in her opinion—getting the same treatment.
Tuck flinched slightly at the ex. For well over a decade he’d defined himself by the magic he’d made on the field. It still cut deep that it had all been snatched away. But he pushed it aside. ‘Yup.’