She needed that.
He took her easy kiss and made it bold, rude, and addictive. An invasion of his tongue, the quick strike of grazing teeth, lips uncompromisingly firm and possessive. His hands stayed by his sides, while hers fumbled with his buttons. When they found his ribs, she felt his heart pounding under his skin. She broke off to look at his face. He was watching her, eyes heavy-lidded, the memo of his desire.
When he’d finally spoken it’d been confidently, but his pulse was racing. He’d been so uncertain about them, but he’d laid his feelings out anyway, courting rejection. She put her face to his chest, the smell of him; the soft fur. She dragged her mouth to his neck and his hands came up, hauling her t-shirt up her back, then over her head when she lifted her arms.
He caught her hands in the shirt above her head and held them there while he looked her over, slowly, with a gaze that made her shiver, raised the fine hairs on her body.
“You’re beautiful, but I’ve told you that before.” He came close, his mouth skimming up her arm, his other hand on her breast. She was small, but he didn’t seem to care and for once neither did she.
“You’re body does mad things to me. Thinking about you gets me like granite. Being with you is bad for my sense of self-preservation.” She knew exactly what he meant. Her preservation instinct was extinct.
He rolled her nipple between his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger, languid teasing, then pinching. She gasped and arched into him. He laughed and pulled away to look at her again. It didn’t matter what rules she made, he could touch her and they’d all crash, crumble, fall apart when they were together like this, because nothing she knew of was as good.
“I couldn’t sleep till I’d had my fill of imagining you.” He rocked his hips into her belly and groaned at the contact. “I haven’t jerked off so much since I was fifteen.”
“Oh God.”
“Yeah, almost as good as seeing God is watching you take me inside you, hard stone in your soft wet pussy. Fucking nothing like it. And I thought I’d lost you and all I’d have was the twist of you in my head. It was good, but this.” He broke off to drop her hands and palm her naked butt, while kissing her so demandingly she would’ve thrown the rule book out if he’d had breath to ask it of her.
They made it to the bed and he was rock and steel and all things hard, but he flexed like bamboo, strong yet pliant and wrapped around her like a ribbon around a precious gift so she was cradled in his shape and scent, in his motion and grip, and driven to a release that was both tongue biting hard and eyelash curling sweet.
She slept as heavily, as completely as he did, but woke before him, sun streaming into the apartment. He was curled around her, his hand on her hip, his knee folded into the back of hers, his arm under her pillow. He breathed deeply and he didn’t wake when she shifted apart.
She was inordinately pleased about having Mace in her bed still, on a day she had no need to be anywhere else but beside him. The itch to sketch him again was strong enough to have her forgoing a shower for a quick wash and coffee for a pad and pencil. She pulled on her t-shirt and crawled back into the bed, and got lost in the wonder of him. He needed a shave and his face at rest showed his stress, the toll on his health. His body looked harder, his weight loss most evident in his face, at his hips and across his chest.
“What are you doing?”
She’d been studying his arm, the thick bicep tapering to his elbow; the curve where the muscle narrowed was particularly touchable. He looked at her with one eye half open. He took in the pad on her lap.
“Don’t you need my permission for that?” His voice was raspy, half awake. He could ask for anything with that sleep sodden crackle and she’d struggle not to give it to him.
She struggled. “Finders keepers.”
He smiled and lifted his arm and he didn’t look tired anymore. She dumped the pad and pencil and snuggled into the spoon of his body. He grunted happily, folding further around her, but she wasn’t sleepy anymore. “Are you just going to lie there?”
He didn’t answer, she half turned to look back at him—he can’t have gone to sleep again that quickly. She caught the grin he tried to hide. “We could fool around.” She thought that might wake him sufficiently but she got nothing from him. “Mace?”
“If I kiss you, this fling will be over before I get breakfast out of you.”
She laughed. She liked the word fling. It was a perfect fit. “I think I still have the toothbrush I loaned you last time.” She lay a moment in his stillness. “We could talk?”
He rolled and pinned her beneath him. “Rather risk starvation.” He rubbed his scratchy cheek against hers, making her squirm to get away from him. She pushed against his shoulders and he rolled them again so she was lying over him, their legs tangled.
“Did your foot scar?”
“Yeah.” He pulled the covers back over them, but his hand was under her t-shirt, fingers splayed across her lumbar spine.
“How old are you?”
He squinted. “Twenty-nine.”
She sucked her cheeks in, he was younger. She’d expected to be Wentworth CEO at thirty-five or thirty six, thirty-eight if the board let Malcolm stay past sixty-five.
Mace gave her a shake. “I’m thirty-two. And if you give me that older woman crap I’ll hurt you.”
He laughed and made as if he was going to lift her away, but ended up wrapping her closer. “Relationships are a new language.” He brushed hair away from her face. “There’ve been women in my life, but nothing long-term. I had Buster to look out for. She had Parkinson’s for ten years.”
He’d spent his twenties taking care of someone. She’d spend hers selfishly pursuing her career. She propped her chin on his chest to look at him.
He laid his hand over her ear, rubbed the curled edge gently. “I was busy, sex was sport.”
He was a different kind of awesome from the tough guy she’d expected. “You had fantasies about me.”
He grinned and pinched her ear. “Not going there.”
She tickled her fingers up his rib cage. She really wanted him to go there. He responded with, “Give it your best,” but didn’t twitch.
She was hungry and she needed coffee and a shower but that was a challenge. She’d get the information out of him before she let him out of her bed. She flattened her hands on his sides and slid down his body, shifting her knees so they were inside his, trailing kisses down his sternum and onto his abdomen, and making space for herself. He caught on fast, grabbing for her hand, lifting his torso from the bed, those abs laddering, to watch her progress.
“Torturing the prisoner,” he said.
She bit his hipbone and this time he flinched. She liked the idea of him as her prisoner. She loved the idea of rendering him incapable of fending her off.
He caught her chin in his hand. “Too early for this.”
Who was he kidding? He was more than ready. She shook her head then licked a line across to his penis and thrilled at how his breath caught.
He stroked her hair and watched her. “I’m still not talking,” but his voice had thickened from edgy rasp to sexy husk. She scooted further down the bed and went to work on him, using her mouth in a way that loosened his tongue, but killed his vocabulary.
Her ears filled with the guttural sounds of his pleasure. But she was only going to get one thing she wanted, to make him lose that stoic cool of his from pure need instead of in anger.
He curled his torso up and gripped her shoulders and she felt him shake all over. His eyes were wide open now, fixed on her. She’d not touched him like this that first weekend; she’d not seen him so open to her, so come undone.
“Fuck, Cinta. That’s it.” He dropped back on the bed as she swallowed her first little taste of him, but then he pulled her away, dragged her up his body, his fist in her hair, too tight, making her the prisoner now.
He flipped them. “Coming inside you.” But then he sat back on his heels, with a groan, looking momentarily disoriented
.
“I’ve been with no one else and I’m on birth control.” She could’ve told him that last night, but everything had been so uncertain.
He lowered himself over her. “Feel like I’ve been with no one else ever.”
“Oh God.”
He palmed her knee and pushed it towards her chest, his eyes raking her body. “No one before you. No one since. No one after.”
She died. The sensible career woman for whom sex had a place, like food and water, like shelter and warmth, turned to salt, to ash and crumbled away. In its place a creature formed from aching want and stunning need, of physical greed too strong to tame. It knocked the sense out of her.
He braced against her core. He was trembling too. “Keep you safe always.” When he opened her she clamped him tight, her eyes rolling back and closed as he started to move. She took his mouth and clawed at his shoulders wanting him closer, harder, faster, longer and getting all that, and starlight too.
25: Words
It was well past time to get his own place. It was insanity to ask Cinta to move in with him. So he didn’t ask. He dangled it in front of her.
Six weeks they’d been together and Mace had spent every night at her place, sleeping with her curled in his arms. He’d begun to wish the summer wouldn’t come because it would get too hot to lie so close to her. Six weeks and he’d stopped obsessing about Ipseity and convinced Dillon he didn’t need help with his grief. He felt good. He didn’t think about being bipolar. He got a haircut. He was eating better, so long as he did the cooking, and his jeans fit like before.
He had a job too, nothing special, casual hours on a help desk, for a hardware vendor. He could earn enough to cover his expenses, stay out of his savings, and still have time to tinker with Ipseity. So it was the right time, he just didn’t know if it would be the right place, right thing.
He packed a picnic dinner. He told her he had something to show her and brought her to the loft. She got suspicious the minute he showed with Dillon’s basket, but since it had edible food in it, he was guaranteed she’d play along at least until she got fed.
She didn’t say a word on the walk there. She avoided his eyes, but she let him hold her hand. That was so like her. She was both ends of a magnet, pulling him in and pushing him away at the same time. She got anxious if he wanted to make plans more advanced than the next day or two, but she clung to him at night and gave him shelf space in her bathroom.
He’d have been confused but he understood her motive. They were friends who fucked, though more accurately it was the other way around; they fucked, therefore they were friends. It wasn’t what he wanted but it was all she could deal with. She wanted them easily breakable, separable. He wanted that damage prevented.
Dillon said he was punching above his weight. That wasn’t news. Had Jacinta’s life not gone so far off the rails he’d never had had the second chance. She’d have eventually sketched the crap out of the memory of him and moved on. In six weeks she’d not given him any reason to think he’d gotten that wrong, except when they fucked and then it was impossible to believe there wasn’t something more permanent between them.
Under the circumstances, Buster would’ve called what he was doing now scaring the horses. She would’ve liked Jacinta. She would have loved her because he did.
Straight up, no dodging it. He loved her fighter spirit and her determination, and he loved her sharp mind and the softness in her she tried to deny. She really could not do anything useful with food. She got antsy when he got the job, and not because she was jealous, because that left her with art school and Pilates and time on her hands she didn’t know how to use.
She could be moody. She could be a bitch. She would draw but not paint, wouldn’t even talk about it. But he could swear his heart, dumb pump that it was, swelled when she smiled at him. He felt her tension in his chest. He tasted her restlessness on his tongue and he could smell her indecision about them from half a room away.
And if Buster was right, if this idea fouled up, he’d have rooms and rooms to wallow in his bad idea by himself.
She didn’t speak on the street outside the warehouse, or on the stairs. When he keyed open the door she went inside without a word. He was pretty sure she did that just to annoy him.
He’d taken Buster’s furniture out of storage. It’d been big, clunky and old-fashioned but serviceable and he hadn’t known what to do with it when the house sold. In this open space it looked retro funky. He’d set the table, and now he lit candles. He unpacked the picnic basket and pulled out a chair for her.
“This is my new place. I want you to move in with me.”
She sat hard on the chair, her eyes on her hands in her lap. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He’d put words together for this, a script to go with the chequered tablecloth and the flowers in the jam jar. And then he spat out the first thing in his head.
He sat opposite her and she looked up. “All right.”
His chair tipped over when he stood, rounded the table and snatched her up. “It’s bigger; this room, bedroom, office and a whole room with a deck attached filled with natural light for you to paint in.”
“I see that.” Her words were going in the right direction but she was a tough negotiator. He searched her face for a clue to how she felt.
“Your lease is month to month. This place is cheaper and I can afford it on my own.”
“I’ll pay my share.”
“You will?”
She put her hand to his face, rubbed her thumb over his bottom lip. She frowned. “Did you really think I wouldn’t love this? I hate that I’ve done that to you.”
His turn to not get what was going on. “I know you don’t want us to be a full-time gig. The lease is in my name. This is not on you. I can’t stay at Dillon’s forever and I don’t want to sleep without you. I thought if you had room maybe—”
She stopped him with her whole hand over his mouth. Just as well, he was rambling.
She took his hand and drew him over to Buster’s day bed. It was thick dark cane and the spring base squeaked. It needed new upholstery or maybe it needed to be thrown out. He had no clue what she was going to say when she made him sit and climbed over his lap.
“I made a mistake, Mace.”
Shit, the horses were all over the road, spooked and soon to be hamburger.
“I thought I could keep things casual. I thought that’s what I wanted, because what I want more is my career back and it doesn’t leave much time for anything else. But I’m not giving you up. I wanted you in the hotel when the city was on fire. I wanted you at my apartment when it was deadlocked with fear. I missed you when I hardly knew you and I can’t see a time when I won’t want you in my life.”
His hah of disbelief sounded bitter, ungracious. She kissed him, but his doubt hung in the air around them, damp with expectation, and he couldn’t fall into it, his lips staying motionless under hers.
“I should have told you.” She cupped his face with both hands and his kneecaps tightened when he clocked her expression, so severe. “I love you and it scares the hell out of me.”
He took a moment to review that. She was on his lap, holding his face. She’d move in, she’d share the rent, she wasn’t angry with him. She loved him.
“Say something, Mace.”
Words were overrated. There were occasions that simply called for action. He stood with her, stripped her neatly, quickly, of her simple dress and underwear then ditched his own clothes, never taking his eyes off her.
“Mace?”
He lay her back on the day bed with the intention of touching and kissing every pixel of her skin, until she was crazy for him, clawing and moaning and so wet he could smell sex on her.
“Mace, I love this place.”
He started at her foot, his hand under her instep massaging, his lips on her arch. He moved to her calf and it jumped at his touch, while his mouth sucked the line of her shinbone.
“I love you found it for us.”
He st
opped at her knee, moved one hand to her inner thigh and her skin shivered. He grazed his teeth over her kneecap while he smoothed the pulse behind it and she laughed, the sound so free, so right.
“I love you, Mace. I love you and I want you to believe it.”
Maybe he did. He walked fingers up her inner thigh; he strung kisses up her quad. Maybe she was still using him to fill in time. One wild weekend and six weeks together couldn’t change a lifetime of career ambition. It hadn’t changed his.
She sat up abruptly and he followed her upright. “You don’t trust me.” She was flushed and frowning.
Not in this. This was right for now and he’d take it, but he didn’t think she’d want him around when her life was back on track.
“This is my life, right now. You loving me like no one ever has. I won’t live without that.” She was pleading.
He breathed in her insistence but it was too much like hope. “You can’t make that promise. How’s it going to be when you’re CEO of some mega company and I’m working night shift in some shitty call centre pulling a minimum wage?”
She grabbed his wrists. “That doesn’t matter to me.”
It mattered to him. “Maybe not now.”
“Not now. Not later. Mace, please believe me.” She let him go to push her hair out of her face. “I knew I’d blown this days ago. When you got the job and I was so off about it. I was scared you’d move on and not need me anymore.”
“It’s a part-time shift I couldn’t care less about.”
“But that’s the thing. You’ve put your life back together and I still don’t know how to do that. You lost so much more than me. Someone you loved dearly, and your dream. I need to stop waiting and stop running and start living. I’ll move in with you. I’ll prove I love you.”
He pushed his hands into his hair. These words were getting in the way of the pleasure quest of having her, of the roast chicken and her favourite chocolate tart. He’d planned to eat it off her petal skin for dessert and now there was this need to talk about things.
“Mace, Say something.”
“It’d be good if you could learn how to cook a meal.”
Insecure Page 20