by Lisa Cach
She felt something warm and smooth against her butt, and as Declan took his arm from around her and lowered her onto her back, she realized he’d propped her on the sloping boat tail of the Auburn. He disengaged her legs from his hips and reached up her thigh, under her skirt, and roughly tugged down her panties, then drew them off her and flung them aside.
A flush of alarm went through her—he was going so fast. Her feet scrambled for purchase, and found it on the chrome bumpers on either side of the boat tail, leaving her thighs parted over the tail end of the car with Declan in the open space. She pushed up with her hands on the sloping metal, trying to sit up. “Declan, what are you—”
His mouth came back down on hers, silencing her. He untied her halter and let the fabric fall, and she felt his hand on her breast, teasing and arousing, as the force of his kiss lowered her back against the car. His mouth left hers and gently bit a trail down her neck to her breasts. She flung one arm over her head and gripped the back of the seat to keep from sliding downward, and with the other dug her fingers into Declan’s hair.
She felt his hands leave her, and heard the clink of metal; opening her eyes she caught the flash of sunlight on his belt buckle, and on a square scrap of color thrown aside—a condom wrapper.
“Declan, I think—” she started to say in shock.
His mouth captured hers again, and his hands slid up the sides of her body, then captured her other arm and raised it above her head. He nuzzled her neck, and as he did he wedged his hips between her thighs. “You think too much,” he whispered against her ear. And then he entered her.
Grace gasped, her legs tensing, her feet going up on their toes as they balanced on the edge of the bumper. He wasn’t asking permission; he was taking what she had so deliberately obliquely offered him.
He raised his head and met her gaze as he thrust. Her eyes widened, and he held motionless for a moment, as if letting her adjust, and then continued. She felt the dull pain of tight inner muscles forced to stretch, but mingled with it was a hint of an ache just beginning to be soothed. She tilted her hips against him, silently asking for more.
He planted one hand on the car and slid his other arm under the small of her back, gripping her hips, and then there was no turning back. He lowered his face again into the crook of her neck as he took her, his arm at her hips ensuring she met him with as much force as he gave. Grace raised her knees up to his sides and hooked her feet around his back.
“Grace,” Declan cried into her hair, “oh God, Grace—” His movements slowed, his grip on her tightened. He held her locked in his hard embrace, and then started to relax. He raised his face from her neck and looked at her, and she blinked against the bright sunlight. She could still feel him, full inside her, and shifted her hips.
“You’re done?”
He laughed, his belly vibrating against hers. “Only for the moment.”
He separated himself from her and helped her off the car. Grace stood on shaky legs, and retied her halter. She was throbbing with unsatisfied arousal, but other than being dazed, she didn’t know quite what she was feeling. She’d just had sex with Declan.
With Declan!
She blinked in a sort of stunned shock. She still didn’t know what she felt. Her body throbbed and ached and hungered, it shook with exhaustion, but her heart? Her mind? Vaguely stunned, was all she could determine.
Declan cleaned himself up and found an old aluminum trash bin by the garage. Grace looked for her underpants, but Declan spotted them first. He looked at her, then shoved them in his pocket.
Her lips parted. “What are you—”
“I said I wasn’t done with you.”
A shiver ran through her. “You can’t expect me to drive with no underwear.”
“What do they have to do with driving?”
“My skirt is short! I can’t put my bare … parts on the leather seat!”
He shrugged.
She pursed her lips and pulled the slender scarf from her hair. Back at the car, she neatly pleated the scarf on the seat, forming a protective square of tangerine silk. Declan shook his head as she got into the driver’s seat, carefully sitting down upon it. The smoothness of the silk felt cool against her tender flesh.
He got in beside her, and she looked over at him. “I never asked for it,” she taunted.
“But you did, Grace. In a hundred ways, you did. But most of all, you wanted me to make the decision for you.”
“I did not!” she said, offended to the marrow.
He laughed. “It’s okay, I get it. It’s more of a turn-on for you to have me take control.”
Grace sputtered. “It is not! That’s, that’s … a grossly chauvinistic thing to suggest!”
“No, it’s a human thing to suggest. We can’t help our appetites. You can’t help wanting a man who’s stronger than yourself, and who will take charge of sex. If I was going to blame anything beyond biology for that, I’d blame your Women’s Studies program. It’s created a sort of reverse reaction.”
Grace gaped at him. “You are unbelievable! You don’t honestly think I think that you’re stronger than I am in any but a physical sense, do you? Or that I want you taking charge, being a ‘man’?”
“I think we’ve already established the truth of that, as far as sex goes. Don’t you?” he asked with irritating confidence. “But beyond that? Sometimes, yeah, I’ll bet you’d like it if the guy you were with took charge and didn’t offer you choices.”
Grace slapped her hand to her forehead and shook her head. “I’m talking to a Neanderthal. You’d take us back fifty years, to when women couldn’t even order their own dinner in a restaurant.”
“Hell, Grace. Most of the time, I’d rather have someone else order my meal for me. Wouldn’t you? Really? Instead of having to decide what you want to eat?”
She shook her head. “It’s patronizing beyond belief.”
He laughed. “If you feel that way, then it’s obvious you’ve never had any real responsibility in your life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you’ve never had a chance to make your own decisions, then yes, it’s patronizing. But if you’re an adult in the real world—as opposed to in school, where you’ve apparently spent your entire life—then every day you have to slog through endless choices and decisions, about everything from what to eat for breakfast to whether you should rent a home or buy one, to whether the ache in your tooth is worth the money to see a dentist. It’s a gift for someone to say to you, ‘Hey, sit back and enjoy yourself. I’ll take care of things.’”
She shook her head. “It’s a trap. A soft, comfortable trap that will slowly disable a person.”
Declan looked at her in puzzlement. “Grace, it’s not a trap. It’s a temporary delegation of duties. Are you so uncertain of your independence that you fear it will be stolen from you if you leave someone else in charge for a few hours?”
“Of course not! But leaving the guy in charge sets the wrong foundation for a good relationship.”
“But aren’t you tired of thinking all the time? Tired of loading every decision with what it says about your personal politics?”
“If you have a brain, you have a responsibility to use it,” she insisted, even as she felt the temptation hidden within his words. Relax, don’t struggle, don’t strive, let someone else handle the difficult business of life. But on that route lay a wasted life, with dreams unfulfilled, goals abandoned. She feared that giving in to the lazy pleasure for even a short time would be like taking an addictive drug. She wasn’t afraid of someone else stealing her independence; she was afraid she might toss it aside herself.
“Poor Grace,” Declan said softly, “always thinking, and having such a hard time letting down her guard and enjoying.”
His words hit the vulnerable spot within her, the spot where she feared she might never enjoy the abandon that seemed to come so much more easily to other people. “I can’t not be this way,” she said softly.
<
br /> He reached over and stroked her cheek with surprising delicacy. “I know.” He tucked a stray hair back behind her ear. “Do all the thinking you want, if you must: argue with me, berate me, even chase after Andrew if you must; I can’t stop you. But for now, you’re going to give up some of your control. Your body is mine.”
“You’re not even offering me a choice about it?” she asked, a shiver running over her skin.
“Choices are vastly overrated.”
“But what would you make me do?”
Amusement pulled at his mouth. “That’s not for you to worry about. That’s the point. Let go, Grace. Just—let go.”
Damn the man! To have sensed something about her that she herself hated to admit, that she, of all people, might deep inside be tantalized by the idea of him laying his hands on her whenever he wished, without her permission.
And despite his claim to the contrary, she saw the question in his eyes, and the choice he offered. He talked a good game about taking decisions from her hands, but he was a man who played by rules. He was asking her permission to not ask her permission.
There was a kinky sort of honor to it, and a subtle sensitivity, too. For all his posturing, he actually seemed intent on protecting her sense of self-determination. It was a strange paradox.
Grace started the car and they left the vacant house behind them. The pine trees cast welcome shade on her shoulders as they wound back through the woods and neighborhood toward 17-Mile Drive. Declan spoke only to tell her where to turn, and she wondered if he was giving her time to think.
Her thoughts were in a riot. As she turned onto 17-Mile Drive she was reminded of the day she’d arrived, driving down the same road with Cat and thinking her summer would be spent keeping an old lady company while she watched Animal Planet all day. The last thing she’d have anticipated was that two months later she’d be driving a replica 1935 Speedster pantyless, having just had sex on the back of the car.
What was happening to her?
“Were you ill while I was away?” Declan asked into the quiet between them.
“Ill? No. Why?”
“You look like you lost weight.”
“I did,” she said, gratified he’d noticed. He’d been back in her life for less than twenty-four hours, and it already seemed as if her former anger belonged to someone else, long ago and far away.
What was happening to her? Had sex addled her brain?
“You’re not going to lose any more weight, are you?” he asked.
“Don’t you think I should?” she asked, glancing at him.
“I don’t know why you lost as much as you did.”
“If I’m ever going to have a body like Cyndee’s—”
“Cyndee’s? Jesus, why would you want that?”
“She’s … thin,” Grace said, and had the unfamiliar feeling that this simple, obvious reason was inadequate.
Declan snorted. “California’s got enough assless women. We don’t need more.”
Grace blinked. With one idiotic comment he’d made her feel happier about the size of her butt than she had since she was ten years old.
He’s getting under your skin, a voice inside her whispered. He burned you twice before. Don’t let him do it again.
Grace glanced over at him. His elbow was on the top of the door, the wind ruffling his dark hair, his face set in lines of easy contentment. He caught her looking and grinned, his turquoise blue eyes crinkling with what seemed to be genuine delight in her company. Her stomach fluttered: He was a startlingly handsome man, and when he looked at her like that …
“Maybe thinking so much isn’t a bad thing,” he said cheerfully. “You’ve picked up driving a stick shift faster than any guy I’ve taught. And to top it off, besides Sophia, you’re the only woman I’ve known who doesn’t fill every quiet moment with chatter. Thinking definitely has its benefits.”
“Are you trying to be obnoxious?”
His grin grew wider. “You have a hard time accepting compliments.”
“You have a hard time giving them in a form a person would want to accept.”
He chuckled, apparently not the least dismayed by her prickliness.
Don’t fall for it, the voice inside warned her again. It’s the sex clouding your thinking. When a man touches you, bonding starts. It’s biology. Don’t let it fool you into thinking you like him or he likes you.
She forced herself to replay her first night at her aunt’s house, and the deliberate humiliation he’d caused her after seducing her on the couch.
She made herself remember that he’d left her bed without a good-bye, without a note, without a phone call.
He’d returned to Pebble Beach only because of the Steinbeck cricket. Never mind what he’d claimed about needing space to make sense of his attraction to her; it was a flattering excuse to get what he wanted.
Which was what? Sex? But he’d only want that if he was attracted to her, wouldn’t he?
Grace shook her head. He might find her physically attractive, but that had nothing to do with what he felt about her as a person. If she was thoroughly cynical, she’d say he wanted to have sex with her as revenge against Dr. Andrew. Any physical pleasure he got out of it was just a side benefit.
The pain was enough to remind her that she herself was supposed to be in this for one reason: to make Declan fall in love with her, win the bet with Sophia, and then crush his wicked, careless heart.
Any physical pleasure she got out of it would be her side benefit.
Or so she tried to tell herself.
Declan watched Grace change gears, her hand confident on the gearshift, her legs tensing and relaxing as she worked the clutch, and a tantalizing flash of tangerine silk appearing under the edge of one thigh as her skirt slid up her leg. His cock stirred. He tore his gaze away from the strip of silk, but couldn’t help imagining where it led, and the vulnerable part of Grace it was pressed up against.
A glance at her face showed her eyes sternly ahead, a small crease between her brows. Was she concentrating on driving, or was she thinking about him and what they’d done? He wasn’t going to risk asking, not with that look on her face.
Tangling with Grace was like tangling with a tiger. He had to be on guard if he was going to escape with only minor scratches, or have any hope of keeping the upper hand. He was surprised that he’d managed as well as he had today with her; he was even feeling hopeful about his chances of turning her affections away from Andrew and onto himself—which was a minor miracle. He’d been making everything up as he went along.
It was while they’d been trying to get the car up the driveway that he’d had his epiphany about Grace. She all but asked him to push her out of her perpetual, self-inflicted control. Locked in a cage of her own construction, she had handed him the key and asked him to open the door, for she hadn’t the power to do it herself.
He’d been half afraid to oblige her. He’d felt her surprise when he kissed her beside the vacant house, then felt the answering hunger in her mouth. He hadn’t been a hundred percent certain he had read her correctly about what she wanted, though, and it wasn’t the type of decision a man could afford to make a mistake about. He’d watched the nuances of emotion on her face and listened to the language of her body, alert for any hint of resistance, any intimation that she’d offered an invitation she didn’t want to honor.
When he’d started to enter her, her eyes had gone wide in surprise, but her body had pressed toward his, seeking more. And when she’d wrapped her legs around his waist, her heels pressing into his back as if kicking him to give her more, the last of his caution fell away.
He’d wanted her for two months, with a growing obsession unlike anything he’d felt before. To finally have her was a feast for a man who had been starving. The sex was as good as he’d hoped, but it was over before he’d had more than a taste of all he wanted. Leaving Grace unsatisfied had been unavoidable, but not regrettable. It meant she was still primed for a second round.
/> Assuming Grace continued to be willing. The question he’d have to help her answer now was whether escaping the protection of her cage was worth the rewards. Left alone with her thoughts for too long, Grace might chase herself back into the cage and swing the door shut.
Andrew would like that, no doubt. He’d add extra bars and locks of his own to keep her neatly contained. Andrew was no tiger hunter.
Grace turned down the driveway to Sophia’s house and coasted through the turns. She stopped in the courtyard, and Declan pointed toward the garages around the side of the house. Grace shifted into first and headed the car back to its stall.
To keep Grace from closing herself back in her cage, there was only one sure way he knew to distract her.
They pulled into the shaded interior of the six-stall garage and Grace shut off the engine and started to get out. Declan caught the end of the tangerine scarf and pulled it through his fingers, the silk creased and damp.
“Grace,” he said, reaching over and catching hold of the hem of her skirt as she stood.
“What?”
He slid over the bench seat to her side and grasped her thighs. A breath of surprise slipped from her; she looked down at him with parted lips and a question in her sea green eyes. Holding her gaze, he wrapped the scarf around her thighs and tied it, pinning her legs together.
She laughed nervously. “What are you doing? I can’t walk like this.”
“Walking is the last thing on my mind.” He got out of the car and took her in his arms, kissing her hard enough that she wouldn’t be able to think. His hand roamed down her backside and lifted the hem of her skirt. Her arms went around his neck, her body sagging against his, and a soft moan of hunger purred in her throat.
“I want you standing,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “There,” he said, turning her toward a support column a couple of feet away.