by Jill Shalvis
It couldn’t be that easy. Could it? “Look, I’ve been wrong, a lot, so I want to be clear. We’re talking about…sex.”
“Well, it is a documented stress reliever.”
There, he thought. There was the light coming into her gaze, the one he’d missed. “My very favorite stress reliever,” he said. “And as a bonus, it scratches all itches, solves the universe’s problems, and—”
And Nick walked right into the cabin as if he owned it. He headed past Cam and Katie and straight for the refrigerator, helping himself to a beer.
“Nick?” Cam gestured with his chin toward Katie. “A little busy here.”
“No problem, I can wait.” He plopped down on the couch, sprawled his legs out, head back, eyes closed. “Take your time.”
Cam opened his mouth to say “Get the hell out,” but then he caught a good look at Nick’s face and the utter misery on it. Hell. He turned to Katie, who shook her head worriedly. With a squeeze of his hand, she let herself out.
Double hell.
Oblivious, Nick took a pull on his beer. “She’s fucking with my head.”
“Annie?”
“The UPS guy asked her out and I think she’s going to go. She’s waiting for me to sign the damn papers.”
Cam sighed and went for his own beer, but Nick had taken the last one. Perfect.
“You Wilders are crazy. All of you.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Cam sat on the coffee table facing Nick and nudged his knee with his own. “Look, you have two choices here, just two, and you know what they are.”
Nick set the beer down and nodded. “Actually, there’s only one. One choice.” He stood up and headed for the door.
“So that’s it?” Cam asked Nick’s back. “You chase the girl out of here and don’t even stay?”
Nick opened the front door. “You have two choices, Cam, and you know what they are.”
Yeah, hell if he wasn’t right. Cam followed Nick out, then turned in the opposite direction, heading in the falling darkness to Katie’s cabin. He knocked on her door and then stood there waiting, his blood pounding, his body on high alert.
“Who’s there?”
“The scratcher of your itch,” he said.
She opened the door a crack and stuck her nose out. “Was that supposed to be romantic?”
“Okay, how about this. I came bearing all the answers to the universe’s problems.”
She lifted a shoulder, distinctly unimpressed.
Huh. This wasn’t going quite as planned. He decided to try her favorite thing—words. “Okay, here’s the thing. I’ve never been much of a romantic. Honestly, I’ve never had to be.”
“Because women always throw themselves at you.”
Well, yeah. In the past, that was definitely true, not that he was stupid enough to say so. “Does it count that there’s no one, no one I’d rather be with right now?”
She opened the door a few more inches, standing there all whiskey-eyed, her lips shiny with lip gloss that smelled like…watermelon.
He loved watermelon.
“Right now,” she repeated. “As in you might change your mind a minute from now? To what did you call it? Scratch the itch?”
Okay, he was beginning to sense an attitude. “I’m sorry. I’m…really sorry. But it’s been a helluva long day, and I’m dead-ass tired, and to be completely honest, I’m out of practice at seduction. You are sweet and beautiful, and you have a way of being positive no matter what the hell is going on. It’s sexy as hell, you’re sexy as hell, and I just want to be with you.”
“Well, there you go,” she murmured. “The magic password.” And she opened the door all the way.
He smiled in relief. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Look, I know I’m leaving, and this is just fun, but I didn’t want to be like all the other women who’ve been in your life. In and out. Gone and forgotten.”
“You aren’t. You won’t be.”
She stepped aside for him to come in. She wore jeans and a long black sweater, with bunny slippers. Her hair was loose and shiny. Everything about her stirred him up, but he had to ask, “You like that I’m out of practice at seduction?”
“Uh-huh.” She stepped close, smelling like heaven. “Our first time, on the rocks, it wasn’t practiced or old hat. It was real. And so was afterward, when you came to my cabin when you thought you’d get me out of your system.”
He let out a long, shaky breath when she pressed up against him. “Apparently it didn’t take.”
“Which is unusual for you,” she said.
“Yeah.” When she locked her arms around his neck, he ran his hands down her back and did his best to inhale her in, deep inside, where she always, always made him feel good.
“I told myself whatever happened here with you, I just wanted it to be real.” She looked at him, really looked at him, the way only she seemed to do, and he knew she saw things that he couldn’t hold back, things he didn’t show to anyone else. “And it was,” she whispered. “Real.”
She was sweet and hot, and more than a little crazy, and she completely slayed him. “I thought you wanted it to be great.”
“Oh, I think we’ve got that part covered as well.” Pressing her face to his throat, she breathed him in, too, as if she needed that as much as he did; then she sighed in pleasure. “Cam…” Her mouth was near his, her hands sliding beneath his shirt, her fingers—frozen solid, thank you very much—running over his flesh. “Maybe we should do what you came here for.”
Yeah, maybe they should. Bending his head, he rubbed his jaw to hers. Everything about her felt new for him. New and wild and just a little bit out of his control. Yet somehow she was also slow and steady, more than any presence in his life. Her hair was all around him like a soft, silky cloud, and he closed his eyes and just kept breathing her in like she was his lifeline. “I wanted you all damn day. For days. I wanted you all hot and sweaty and panting my name.”
“Tell me no one’s going to need you for the next few minutes,” she said breathlessly.
A few minutes. That’s the best she thought he had. He had to laugh; then he kissed her, filling himself up with the scent of her shampoo, her warm skin, loving having her soft curves pressed up against him. “This is going to take longer than a few minutes.”
Her glasses fogged, and he pulled them off, getting his mouth on hers again. She opened for him, but he didn’t deepen the kiss, not yet, because the high of the anticipation was flowing through him now, and for the first time in his life, he was enjoying it instead of trying to race it, because it all made some sort of crazy sense.
Being with her was making crazy sense.
He’d been so careful with himself, holding back, not giving anything of himself away. Building defenses one layer at a time.
But she’d stripped those layers away, one at a time, painstakingly, leaving him totally and completely bare.
And still he stood there, holding her. Wanting her. “I plan to take my time with you, Katie.”
Her breath shuddered out. “I don’t think—”
“Perfect, go with that,” he murmured against her mouth, picking her up.
“Your knee—”
“Is fine, now shh. No thinking. Nothing but this. Hope you’re not tired.”
Her breath caught. “It’s going to take that long?”
Not if she kept looking at him like that. So he leaned in, murmured “all night,” and then kissed her, waiting until her eyes fell closed before closing his.
Chapter 23
Katie’s heart executed a slow rollover in her chest as it exposed its underbelly.
All night…
All night worked for her. Yes, it did.
“Your room,” Cam murmured huskily in her ear, his arms tightening around her as he carried her across the cabin.
One of her bunny slippers fell off, but he just bent his head and kissed her, a deep, wild kiss, their tongues doing the same glide and dance that her body so desperatel
y wanted. He was a force, she thought dazedly, a force of destruction as it pertained to her heart, one of passion when it came to her soul, and unbearable pleasure for her physical being—
“Oh!” she gasped as she hit the mattress. Before she’d bounced once, Cam had followed her down, his big body sprawled over hers, eyes glittering as he held her tight. “Caught you,” he murmured.
Yeah, he had. She had the feeling he always would, no matter how far she fell.
He was pulling off her clothes, his clothes, and she joined the fray, helping him shove off his outer shell and T-shirt to latch her mouth to his chest. She ran her hands up his smooth, sleek back, touching the tattoo around his biceps, touching everything she could reach. “We made it to a bed,” she murmured. “Finally.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He spread hot kisses along her jaw. “Now let’s make it on the bed…”
With a laugh, she met his mouth with her own, straining to get the rest of his clothes off. She tugged at his pants and he met her halfway, surging up to unbutton them; then she was once again distracted by the sight of that rugged chest. His six-pack abs made her mouth water, but even more amazing was the way the muscles quivered when she ogled him. She realized she finally had the space and the time to explore, and her own body humming at the thought, she pushed him down to the bed.
“Katie—”
“Shh.” She touched her tongue to his hips, traced it over his belly.
“Katie.” His voice sounded a little strangled as she made her way lower. “Don’t—”
She wrapped her fingers around his impressive erection and licked him like a lollipop. “Don’t…?”
“I mean don’t—I don’t want this to be over before I get inside you.”
“We can always start again…” Another lick.
And another deep, rumbling groan from the man sprawled beneath her, breathing hard, a light sheen of sweat coming out on his chest as he slipped his fingers into her hair. “This was supposed to be about you—God—” he choked out when her tongue swirled over the top of him.
“We’ll get to me.” She kissed him again, then gently, slowly sucked him into her mouth.
He jerked, his hips arching up to meet her. His fingers were still tangled in her hair, the tendons in his neck stretched taut, his expression such sheer, hot pleasure that she felt herself go damp just watching him react to her. And then suddenly she was flipped to her back, held there by over six feet of long, lean muscle.
Skin-to-skin, her bare breasts were mashed up to his chest as one of his powerful thighs slid between hers, pressing the heated core of her, ripping a needy little sigh from her. “So damned soft…” Holding her wrists in his hands, he shifted lower, then lower still, his shoulders urging her legs open. He kissed an inner thigh, then the other.
Then in between.
While she lost her mind, he ran his tongue over her, finding what he sought with feather-light strokes, then a little harder, until she twisted against him, her fingers caught in his, as she arched up into his mouth. “Cam—”
“You taste as good as you feel,” he murmured against her. At the next unerring stroke of his tongue, she cried out and her toes curled. At the next stroke, she bucked, but he had her, held her through it as she exploded in a kaleidoscope of sensations. When she opened her eyes, he was kissing her thigh, moving his way up to her belly, a breast…He lifted his head, and then his hand, which had a condom dangling from his fingers, which had her heart taking off again. Together, they struggled to get it on, a process that left him damp and trembling, and her ready to jump him.
When he sank into her with one thrust, she cried out in pleasure, and then again when he cupped the back of her thigh and tugged, opening her up to him even further.
“God, you feel good.” His voice was a thick whisper against her ear. “So goddamn good.”
She thought he felt pretty damn good, too, but she didn’t have the words, not then, and certainly not when he began to move within her. In and out, again, and then again, the fire licking down her body, settling between her legs. “Cam…” Love me.
Lifting his head, he stared into her eyes, his own open to her, open in a way he didn’t usually allow, showing her all he felt.
Helpless against the pull of that, her throat tightened as she strained against him so that they were plastered together, hot, damp skin to hot, damp skin.
She could feel how big he was, how wet she was, and he pushed even deeper within her. “Cam,” she whispered again.
He made a sound, a low, raw, rough sound, and slid a hand between their bodies, gently stroking her where he’d just had his tongue.
When she came again, it was with his body so deeply embedded in hers she didn’t know where she ended and he began, and it didn’t matter. He kissed her through it, his tongue gliding against hers as her body contracted around his, as with one last hard thrust, he followed her over, her name tumbling from his lips.
Cam woke up the next morning wrapped up in a warm, naked woman. Now that’s what he’d been talking about. The first time hadn’t taken, but this time…. This time he’d beable to breathe again. He’d be able to go about his day without feeling as if he had a fist around his heart, tightening, squeezing.
Choking him.
And maybe now he’d be able to think about something other than Katie twenty-four/seven. Yeah, he probably wouldn’t even think about last night, how hot it’d been, she’d been, or the sound of her panting out his name, how she gripped him tight when he’d nudged her over the edge…how sexy she’d sounded in the throes.
No, he probably wouldn’t think about that much at all…
He let out a breath, extremely aware of the fact that his body was already there, thinking, hoping, yearning.
Damn.
Maybe one more time…
She opened her eyes and smiled softly, and he rolled her beneath him. Yeah, one more time should do the trick, really nail it home. “God, you feel good.”
“You make me feel good.” She cupped his face, her entire heart in her voice, and when he met her gaze, he was slammed by the look in hers.
Soft.
Dreamy.
Emotional. Oh, Christ, she was looking so damn emotional over him.
“What is it?” she murmured.
It was almost incomprehensible, but his brothers, the knuckle-heads, had been right.
This wasn’t lust.
Not even close.
No, it was something much, much deeper. Horrifyingly deep. Confused, he rolled away from her and slid out of the bed.
“Cam?”
“Yeah, would you look at the time?”
“It’s only seven. I didn’t look at the schedule. You have a trip?”
“I…” He couldn’t remember. He just needed to think this thing through. God, he needed to think, which he’d proved over and over again that he couldn’t manage in her presence.
Out. Get the hell out. He wasn’t proud of it, but that’s all that he could think.
Get out.
He whipped around, looking for his clothes, having never felt more naked in his entire life. He found his snow pants and yanked them on.
No shirt.
No shoes.
He’d probably have hypothermia before he got to his own cabin,