by Amy Andrews
Even now, at nine o’clock at night, sitting at her desk, she looked down at the paper she was reading to find she’d been doodling a certain name in the margins. Like a teenager! Not that she’d ever been that kind of a teenager.
Cassie squirmed in her chair in disgust, throwing her pen down. But that didn’t help as her body was hell-bent on betraying her too. The movement stirred internal muscles that were still hypersensitive and sensation rolled through the pit of her belly. The brush of her arms against her nipples had them hard and aching. The same type of ache that had taken up semi-permanent residence between her legs and woke her in the middle of the night.
Cassie reached for the phone to dial Gina. She’d know what to say, what to do. But she withdrew her hand at the last moment, not sure she really wanted to hear her friend’s recommendations or—worse—advice about needing to collect more data from Tuck for her libido experiment.
She was a freaking genius, for crying out loud! Her head would rule her body.
She threw the paper down and opened her laptop, looking at the latest images they’d received today. Jupiter’s auroras were particularly vibrant, and usually just the sheer enormity and random beauty of the solar system was enough to lift her beyond any of the mundane issues of earth. But it wasn’t tonight.
Half an hour later she closed the laptop lid, knowing there was really only one solution to her problem. She could feel herself sliding towards an abyss she was all too familiar with and, whether she liked it or not, the jock seemed to be her way out.
Okay, she’d told him her brain was back. And it was. She’d told him her libido wouldn’t be out of control again. And it wasn’t. It just needed one more night.
Maybe he’d be open to one more night?
Mind made up, she scrambled frantically through her wastebasket, her fingers snatching at the card sitting at the very bottom, automatically bringing it to her nose for a long, deep sniff. His lingering pheromones catapulted through her system like a shooting star and any arguments her brain might have made got lost in a sea of stupid.
Her fingers trembled as she rang the number. Her heart thundered as it rang once, twice, three times. Her breath caught in her throat when he picked up and said, ‘This is Tuck.’
His voice sounded deep and sexy and deliciously Texan and her brain powered down. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but nothing came out.
‘Hello?’
Cassie tried again and failed. For crying out loud, she could recite the Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence and every single one of Winston Churchill’s war speeches word for word and she couldn’t say a simple hello?
‘Cassiopeia…is that you?’
Still she couldn’t get the words to come.
‘Cassie!’
His sharp enquiry snapped her out of her daze.
‘T…Tuck…I…’
‘Cassie? Are you okay?’
There was concern in his voice and she hastened to assure him she was fine. ‘Yes, I’m good…fine… I just… I…’
Now she was talking to him she didn’t know how to say it. She’d already asked him for sex once—it should be easy. But it wasn’t. There was a silence at his end now too, that seemed to stretch interminably.
‘Don’t move,’ he said in her ear. ‘I’m coming.’ And the receiver clicked.
Cassie was lying awake when the soft knock sounded on her door at exactly one-thirty. She’d spent the last four hours convincing herself he didn’t really mean he was coming for her straight away—tonight. And how could he possibly get inside the locked dorm? But she didn’t know anyone else who would be knocking on her door in the middle of the night.
She padded across the floor, her pulse thrumming so loudly in her head she was afraid she was going to wake the whole dorm. She took a steadying breath as she flipped the lock and turned the knob—to reveal one ex-quarterback standing on her doorstep, oozing pheromones in loose running pants and a T-shirt with some sports logo that stretched nicely over every muscle in his chest.
‘Tuck,’ she murmured. ‘How’d you get in?’
‘The RA at the front desk is a Texan,’ he muttered, his gaze zeroing in on her mouth. He’d been daydreaming about kissing her like some lovelorn Romeo for the last three days and talk just wasn’t on his agenda.
He reached for her, yanking her into his arms, his lips swooping to claim hers as he kicked the door shut behind him. Her mouth opened on a frantic little whimper and she tasted like toothpaste and desperation. He sucked it all in, hauling her up his body, gratified to feel the press of her breasts and the wrap of her legs tight around his waist as he ploughed a path straight to her bed.
And then they were falling back on to it and they were stripping away each other’s clothes. Her shirt hit the floor and his followed. Her underwear joined the pile. His running pants and cotton briefs seemed to melt away, and then they were skin on skin, licking and sucking and sniffing and kissing and stroking and stoking until they’d built to a fever-pitch where only the strong, thick thrust of him pounding inside her was enough to satisfy the primal roar in their heads and the even more primal demands of their bodies.
Tuck collapsed on top of her as they both lay spent in the aftermath. For a moment he couldn’t even move. It had been that intense. Then he rolled off her, groaning his bone-deep satisfaction. He hit his head against the wall and then banged his perpetually sore knee as he tried to adjust his too-big frame. He cursed as it twinged painfully.
‘You really need a bigger bed,’ he panted as he shifted to dispose of the condom, then scooped her up and pulled her half on top of him to accommodate both of them within the narrow confines of the mattress.
Cassie gurgled something unintelligible in response as her body seemed to levitate in the afterglow. When she could string enough words together to make a sentence she raised her head and looked down at him through half-lowered lids. ‘You came,’ she murmured as a strange sort of peace suffused her.
Tuck grinned. ‘So did you.’
She rolled her sleepy eyes at him, then snuggled her cheek against his nearest pec as if he were her own personal pillow.
He smiled and stroked her hair, his own eyes shutting as long sleepless nights combined with a potent sexual malaise drifted them both into a deep slumber.
SEVEN
Everything ached when Tuck woke at six the next morning. His back was stiff from the wafer-thin mattress, his knee throbbed, his neck was at an awkward angle and his ankles were sore from his feet hanging over the end of the bed.
But Cassie was warm and pliant, snuggled along the length of him, her hair streaming over his chest, her leg bent at the knee, trapping his thigh, her hand splayed on his abdomen, dangerously close to a part of his anatomy that had been up for a while.
Tuck smiled. Atta-boy.
Unfortunately he didn’t have time this morning to do it justice. He had to get up, get going. He had a meeting with some execs in New York at eleven about the app. But, despite the aches and pains from a night in a bed made for an Oompa-loompa aggravating his injuries from a decade of being regularly slammed for sport, he was reluctant to move.
Soon. He’d go soon.
His gaze drifted around a room quite unlike any other female dorm room he’d ever been in—his jock status had pretty much seen to it that he could judge from personal experience. Hell, it was unlike any female bedroom he’d ever been in. No personalised curtains. No pretty rugs. No flowers or mu
ltiple soft stuffed toys or brightly
coloured cushions or throws littering surfaces. No pinks, no purples, no pastels. No ornaments, no lava lamps, no photographs of friends or lovers.
It was about as girly as a jail cell.
Still, there were some touches to break up the starkness of the room. A couple of star charts were posted above the desk. Some blown-up photographs of who knew what were stuck to the walls. Stars? Black holes? Galaxies far, far away? Whatever they were, they were captivatingly beautiful in their majesty, and Tuck couldn’t think of anything more awesome than having the solar system as your office.
A poster of an eerie green glow being cast over a landscape of white was stuck to one wardrobe door, and on the other what appeared to be a planet with a wispy ring of electric blue light at its pole. Auroras, perhaps?
But it was the large poster taking up the entire back of her door that drew his attention. It was of Barringer Crater in Arizona. He knew that because he’d been obsessed by the fifty-thousand-year-old hole in the ground since he’d been a kid and had been there several times. It was a big brown pockmark in the middle of nowhere, and it seemed an odd, even ugly earthbound addition compared to the beauty of the other celestial decorations.
She stirred and Tuck looked down at her. Her hand on his stomach curled into a light fist, dragging its fingernails deliciously against his skin, and he shut his eyes for a moment enjoying the sensation. As did his erection.
‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ he said, opening his eyes and dropping a kiss on her hair. He really, really had to get going.
Cassie woke to solid warmth and her nostrils full of Tuck. No thoughts of anything but Tuck in her head. ‘Hmmm,’ she murmured, stretching against him, her eyes slowly drifting open. She smiled as her bird’s-eye view down the flat of his stomach ended in the delicious outline of his erection.
‘Hmmm,’ she said again as her hand slid down his belly and reached for it.
Tuck shut his eyes as her hand closed around him and talons of need clawed deep into his buttocks. He reached down and placed a stilling hand on hers. ‘I can’t stay. I have a meeting at eleven that I can’t get out of.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Cassie said as she gave his girth a squeeze, her thumb running over its firm head.
Tuck dragged her hand away—that was not helping. ‘Why,’ he asked in an effort to distract her, him and his erection, ‘do you have a poster of Barringer Crater on your door?’
Cassie dragged her gaze from his fascinating anatomy and glanced up at him, resting her chin on his pec for a moment. He didn’t look as if he was going to be easily dissuaded, and the fact that he knew its actual name rather than calling it Meteor Crater, as it was popularly known, piqued her interest. She sighed, then turned her head towards the door, resting her other cheek on his chest.
‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ she said, eyeing the poster. ‘There’s one like it in Australia, called Wolfe Creek. My mother took me when I was little so it’s a bit of a fascination of mine. The girls and I were going to stop in and visit it on our road trip a decade ago, but then…then there was “the great falling out” and it never happened.’
She turned her head back, resting her chin on his chest again, looking straight into his starburst eyes. Tuck’s hand absently stroked the small of her back. There wasn’t a lot of room in her single bed and he seemed to take it all up. Her position close to the edge was precarious and his hand at the base of her spine was the only thing anchoring her.
‘So I promised myself this time around I’d go and see it. It’s my reward for when I complete my three months at Cornell.’
Tuck chuckled. ‘Sounds much more sensible than getting wasted at Daytona Beach.’
Cassie nodded, not remotely concerned about being thought of as sensible. She was sensible. She never did anything rash or ill-considered.
Except this.
Tuck was the very definition of rash and ill-considered. But surely one blip in almost thirty years was allowable? ‘I take it you’ve been?’ she said. ‘To Barringer?’
Tuck nodded. ‘A few times, actually. The stars out there are amazing.’
‘Well, they would be,’ Cassie said. ‘It’s the middle of the dessert. No ambient light. No pollution.’
‘Yeah.’ Tuck smiled as she got all scientific on him. He picked up a lock of her hair and let it sift through his fingers. ‘So…about last night…’
Cassie dropped her forehead to his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice muffled against his pec. She looked up. ‘I think my libido went into some kind of…withdrawal situation. I just needed…it just needed another night.’
Tuck grinned. ‘Another hit, huh?’
Cassie didn’t like the idea that she might be addicted to Tuck. She was far too highly evolved for that—even if evidence to the contrary had not been forthcoming of late.
She had to stay in charge of this thing.
‘Libido is influenced by a variety of factors often not under conscious control,’ she said, trying to give herself an out for her inexplicable behaviour.
‘So you may require my services again?’ Tuck tried to decide whether he cared about being used by a horny PhD student who cared even less about his celebrity status than she did about football. He didn’t.
Cassie’s nipples beaded against his chest at the suggestion, as if it was made from a block of ice instead of hot, pliant muscle. She looked down at his still present erection. Her nostrils flared. Lust surged through her belly.
‘Possibly,’ she murmured, entranced by the pure masculinity of it, her synapses shorting out as her hand slid down.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ Tuck said, grabbing her fingers before they could wreak havoc at their destination. ‘I really have to go.’
Cassie glanced at him. ‘I’ll be quick,’ she said, and shimmied down his body, kissing his ribs, his belly button, his hip on her way down.
Tuck shut his eyes as the heat of her mouth closed over him. ‘Oh, God, I’ve created a monster,’ he groaned, his eyes shutting as his resistance ebbed beneath her onslaught. He threaded his hands through her hair and surrendered to the pleasure, his appointment forgotten.
When she called him two nights later, asking for just one more night, Tuck hired a helicopter, grateful that his money and celebrity meant he didn’t have to endure another eight-hour round trip in his car.
Two nights later he did the same thing. But she hadn’t instigated the trip this time, so he was a little nervous when he knocked on her door at ten o’clock.
‘One more?’ he asked when she opened it.
Her shirt said ‘Never drink and derive’, and she looked all smart and serious and cute and nerdy, with a pencil tucked behind her ear, and he wanted her so damn bad he didn’t even wait for an answer before yanking her into his arms, swivelling her around and using their combined body weight to shut the door, pressing her hard against it as he plundered every millimetre of her mouth.
Hell, they didn’t even make it to the bed.
He sure as hell had no idea what delightful underwear logo awaited him, because he just tore it right off in his haste to be inside her. And nothing mattered after that except the crazy, blind, driving need that seemed to grow more desperate every day.
Tuck woke the next morning, every bone, muscle and joint protesting, knowing he would never survive another night on Cassie’s mattress.
He was just too old and injured for dorm beds.
Cas
sie wasn’t with him and he raised his head, expecting to see her sitting at her desk or standing by her wardrobe getting dressed. But the room was empty. He looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. Given how late it had been when they’d eventually gone to sleep, he wasn’t surprised he’d slept in.
But when had she left?
Tuck unfolded himself from the bed, his body aching as he stood slowly and headed to the pile of clothes by the door that he didn’t even remember losing last night. He bent over and both knees twinged. He climbed into his shorts and pulled his T-shirt over his head. A scrap of fabric remained on the floor and he picked it up, grinning at what was left of Cassie’s underwear and its amusing logo: Vacancy: Rocket Scientists need only apply.
He walked to her desk and tossed them in the bin. And that was when he saw the note propped up by a couple of textbooks. He opened it, and the first line jumped out at him.
We can’t keep doing this, Tuck.
Well, she was damn right about that. Her bed just wasn’t made for two.
I’m getting nothing done. I can’t concentrate. And all I do is think about you. I think it’s best if I go cold turkey. I know that with hard work, focus and medication my libido will have to eventually submit to the dictates of a higher power. It has been my dream to come to Cornell, a much desired step in a grander plan, and I ask that you not derail that. Or, given that you are so much more practised at this than I, let me derail it either. If I call, please ignore me. No one’s ever died from sexual deprivation and I don’t expect I’ll be the first. It has, as you say, been fun, but it’s over.
Tuck read the note several times. Even the way she wrote, so precise and matter-of-fact, cracked him up, and he found his grin getting broader with each read-through.
She was right, of course. What they were doing was utterly distracting and not very productive. He had some work backed up on the app that he’d been neglecting. So ending it—whatever the hell it was—would be one solution. But suddenly he had a much better one. He scrunched up the note and threw it in the bin.