by Lora Leigh
She ached for him. There was no denying the fact that she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything or anyone in her life. Just as there was no denying the sensual and emotional abyss that opened within her each time she had to deal with the conflicting pleasure and hungers that attacked her with each touch he gave her.
What the hell was she supposed to do with all this need? With the hunger for his touch, for his kiss, mixing with the overwhelming, overriding desire to challenge his arousal and his hunger.
It was like playing tug-of-war with herself.
His fingertips stroked against her knee before caressing above it, then back. Delicate velvet-soft touches before they went higher, petting and stroking as he stared down at her until the caresses were at her thighs and she was fighting to keep from parting her thighs.
“Did you recognize anything about the voice?” he asked her.
She cleared her throat. “It sounded very mechanical.”
It was all she could do to concentrate on the fact that when he spoke it wasn’t anything sexy. Still, though, the dark rumble of his voice had her entire body sensitizing when combined with the dark dominance that filled Rafe.
“No. Nothing. It just sounded like a robot.” Her hips did arch this time as his fingers delved beneath her gown.
Her thighs parted, her senses becoming entangled in the insidious pleasure stroking closer to the swollen bud of her clitoris and the weeping center of her body.
Her nipples, though excruciatingly tender, ached with more than the pain of the callous treatment that had been inflicted on them by her attacker. They were hardened, throbbing with both arousal as well as the tenderness. It was an interesting, confusing pleasure-pain that she fought to make sense of.
Rafe’s gaze moved from his fingers playing at her thighs, moving ever closer to the aching flesh there as his gaze centered on the hard buds of her nipples beneath the silk of the gown.
“Let me take your gown off.”
Her breathing seemed to constrict in her chest.
She’d seen the bruises after her shower, and they were horrendous. Long, thick finger marks marred the flesh in shades of black, blue, and abraded red. Her nipples were swollen and a cherry red, rather than the pink they had once been.
“I don’t want—”
He laid his fingers to her lips, stopping the flow of words.
“Do I make you feel good when I touch you, Cami?”
She could feel her breathing accelerate at the very thought of the pleasure he could give her. Instantly heat flooded her body, like flames burning out of control.
“That’s not the point,” she whispered, her fingers digging into the sheet beneath her as she fought to control her breathing.
She didn’t dare touch him. Touching him would be the height of insanity. There was no way she could hold back then. No way she could pull back from that pit of dark, hidden emotions that swirled within her.
“You won’t answer my questions, and you won’t let me love your sweet body?” He reached over, picked up her hand from her side, and forced her fingers from their grip on the sheet. “Cami, love, is it so hard to be my lover?”
“We’re not lovers.” She had to deny it; she couldn’t let herself accept that they were. Accepting it meant giving in, and giving in was something she couldn’t allow herself to do. Not yet.
He only chuckled at the denial, though, his lips curving, his blue eyes filling with knowing amusement as she stared up at him.
“Ahh, so, Cami, what does ‘a lover’ mean beyond the fact that when we’re together we’re fucking like minks in mating season?”
She had to force her lips from a smile at the phrasing, as well as the fact that he was right.
He lifted her hand, forcing her fingers to curl around his as he brought them to the warmth of his chest.
“Lovers do more than fuck,” she reminded him. “They spend more time together than that which is spent in the bed.”
“We didn’t spend the whole weekend in the bed when you were snowbound,” he reminded her. “We cooked.”
“I cooked while you shoveled out the sidewalk.” And she had watched him through the window over the sink, and she had fought the intimacy of something so simple, so homey, as the fact that she was cooking and he was shoveling the snow.
“But we did more than fuck.”
There was no denying that fact.
“Those were very unusual circumstances,” she reminded him.
“Only because you made them unusual.” He unfolded her fingers until her hand lay, palm flat, against the crisp, light mat of curls that spread across his chest.
Cami felt herself trembling, her fingers shaking against his chest, the urge to whimper with the need rising in her chest.
“I will have the answers to my questions.” The hem of her gown began to rise. “And I’ll see this very sweet body every night I lie in bed with it.” There was a demand in his voice that brooked no refusal. “Tell me you’re not mine, Cami. Tell me I don’t own every response, every heated second of arousal.” The hem cleared her thighs, revealing the tiny scrap of silk she wore as panties.
“Arrogant, aren’t you?” But he was right, so very right, about the fact that she responded to no one else. That she wanted, ached for, and needed no other man except Rafe.
“Right.”
His head lowered as his lips touched hers. Just touched. It wasn’t a hard, hungry kiss. It was a tease, a temptation, the threat of that raw, erotic hunger flaring between them as he stared down at her.
The silk moved higher, over her hips, and she lifted for it.
She was insane, because she couldn’t refuse him. She couldn’t say no. She couldn’t pull away from him. She didn’t have the will to fight herself, let alone the will to fight him.
Within seconds, he pulled back and lifted her arms, pulling the gown over her head.
Cami closed her eyes.
She didn’t want to see the damage herself; she had already seen it. She had already seen the damage to her skin, the proof that another man had touched her. No matter the fact that it was forced, or rather especially because it was forced, her attacker had left the proof of that force on her flesh.
“Oh God.” Her eyes flew open at the feel of the violently intense pleasure that lashed through her system at the incredibly soft stroke of Rafe’s tongue over the abused flesh.
His expression was mesmerizing. Drowsy male lust, brooding sensuality, and absorbed hunger.
His cock lay against her thigh, heated and thick, rubbing against her flesh as his hips moved imperceptibly. The feel of the hard flesh against her, his tongue rubbing over her tender nipple as his hand stroked her other thigh, had her moving against him, her thighs parting further.
She needed him inside her.
“It’s been so long,” she whispered as her hands moved to grip his shoulders, her hands sliding over his skin, loving the warm, rougher texture of his skin against her softer hands.
“You’re a stubborn woman, Cami,” he crooned as his lips stroked against the vivid bruises. “You’re my woman.”
A soft cry left her lips as a sensation akin to a punch of exquisite pleasure lanced her womb and had her arching closer to him.
It couldn’t have been the possessive ring in his voice or the proclamation that she was his woman.
“Rafe, please don’t—” Don’t make promises he couldn’t keep. Don’t lie to her. To make her hope for something, dream for things that couldn’t be hers.
“Have you given another man what you’ve given me?” He breathed over the straining tip of her nipple before licking it again.
His tongue covered the brutally sensitive tip with a wash of such incredible pinching pleasure that living fingers of it shot straight to her clit, clenching her pussy and her womb as she gasped in response.
“You don’t give me a chance to think,” she whispered as her nails bit against the skin of his shoulders as she fought to hold on to him. To hold on
to something. She felt as though she was perched on a free fall into a whirlpool of ecstasy so vivid it was nearly terrifying.
This was what he did to her. He made her want to believe. He made her want to dream, to hope, and to hold on to the illusion that he would be there tomorrow, next week, next year, and next lifetime.
“You’ve had weeks to think,” he told her, his voice roughening as his hands stroked down her thighs and he began kissing his way down her body.
Pleasure attacked her nerve endings, pulling her deeper into the morass of erotic sensations building around her.
It was a roller coaster of pleasure. A thrill ride of extremes as each touch threw her ever deeper into the brilliant, heated rush of pleasure that she had only ever found in his arms.
As his lips and tongue painted a path of heated strokes and erotic caresses from her breasts to her hips, there was no pain, no remembered fear. There was nothing but the ever-increasing pleasure she could never get enough of.
The years in between his touch could be measured in the nights she had spent dreaming of his touch, dreaming of this.
Rafer in her bed, touching her, his lips feathering over the bare, silken flesh between her thighs, his tongue licking at the spill of juices that glazed her flesh.
“Have I ever told you that I’ve dreamed of the taste of your pussy?” There was no shame in him, no holding back.
Cami’s hips arched with a cry as his tongue delved between the swollen lips of her pussy.
Her leg lifted, knee bending, as his palm eased along the curve of her rear. She could feel the heated, aching flesh of her vagina, the clench of her muscles. She felt so empty, so empty and so in need of his touch.
The need to touch him had her hands delving into the long strands of his hair. Once they were there, her fingers tangled into it, hips lifting as she directed the path of his lips.
The swollen, desperate bud of her clit throbbed in need as he blew a wisp of his breath over the bundle of nerves.
“Rafe, please,” she gasped, the need for the touch of his lips against her clit flooding her senses with a pleasure she reached for with every part of her.
His lips surrounded it, but only for a second. Long enough to deliver a deep, quick kiss, the stroke of his lips too brief, too intense, to bear without crying out in ragged pleasure.
“Rafe,” the whimper rose unbidden from her lips. “I need more.”
“Tell me what you need, baby,” he urged, his voice rough, echoing with hunger. “Tell me what you want, Cami. Anything you want.”
Anything she wanted?
Her head thrashed against the pillows, a desperate effort to hold back the needs, to hold back the erotic, exotic fantasies she’d had for so many years.
The need for a touch she’d never had.
A need for a hunger she had resisted every step of the way.
His finger touched the lower curves of the swollen folds between her thighs, gathering her juices and easing lower.
Thrusting upward, she sobbed in need as his touch glanced over the clenched entrance of her pussy, then lifted again. Once again it stroked down, past the flexing entrance, then back.
On the next pass, it continued its journey until the heavy, slick juices were being eased along the forbidden entrance that flexed and echoed with aching pleasure at his touch. The press of his fingertip against her rear entrance had her moaning pleadingly as it slowly, gently, began to pierce the tender, nerve-laden area. Slowly, easily, the tightened entrance began to part, to open to steady impalement of his finger pressing inside.
His tongue circled her straining clit as his thumb caressed and stroked the entrance to her pussy. The sensations delivered to the three most sensitive areas of her body were doing more than throwing her toward ecstasy. They were tossing her about, flinging her closer, jerking her back, playing a devilish, agonizing game with her that had her arching, twisting, and sobbing out her need.
Fingers of pulsing pleasure were racing through her. Every cell of her body had sensitized to the point that she swore she could feel even the stroke of the air against her flesh. She was overwhelmed with sensation and begging for more, desperate for more.
As his lips joined his stroking tongue, surrounding her swollen clit as his thumb pressed into her pussy and his fingertip eased deeper into her anal entrance, Cami fought desperately for a release that teased at the edges of pleasure.
She could feel Rafe beginning to lose himself in the taste of her, in the act of pleasuring her. She had never understood it. She had never heard her friends discuss their own lovers placing such emphasis on their pleasure. She had never known Rafe to touch her any other way.
His earthy male groan echoed around her as her hips writhed beneath him. His fingers fucked her with even, shallow thrusts as his thumb sank into her pussy, possessing it and rasping against the tender inner tissue with rapid strokes of intense sensation.
With each caress, each stroke of his tongue, his lips, his fingers, she flew higher, hurtling faster toward the center of an ecstasy she hadn’t expected.
It shouldn’t be this intense.
The bruising of her flesh, the memory of the night before, should have somehow affected her ability to reach so high, to strain so desperately toward the sensations building inside her. But she should have expected, should have known, Rafe could possess every part of her even to the point that nothing existed but pleasure. To the point that pain merged with the building ecstasy, erasing itself as it became part of the sensations Rafe stroked through her system.
Her fingers clenched in his hair as it continued to build. The sensations wrapped around her, flew through her, pulsed in her veins, and beat through her senses until they exploded through her with a surge of such incredible, blazing ecstasy that Cami swore she could feel herself melting. From the inside out she was dissolving with pleasure, exploding, imploding, and surging through a starburst of pure, erotic rapture.
It seemed never ending.
As she clenched, tightening over and again, the sensations arched her body, locking it in place as he continued to suckle at her exploding clit as his thumb fucked into her pussy and the tip of his finger worked itself rapidly into the clenched entrance of her rear.
As the exploding blaze of sensation reached its pinnacle, she felt each stroke, each touch, each caress begin to ease. As the aftershocks and waves of intensity began to shudder through her, he prolonged each one, using his lips and tongue to draw each sensation to its height.
When she finally collapsed, exhausted, to the bed, her body damp with perspiration, her senses ragged and laid to waste from the explosions that had torn through her, it was to feel the tender, soothing kisses at her thighs and lower belly as he eased his fingers from her body.
They were both breathing heavily, just as she realized he hadn’t possessed her in a way that would have given him the same release.
As his head lifted, his gaze dark with drowsy satisfaction, she stared back at him in confusion.
“You didn’t…” She wasn’t as adapt with the words as he was, she realized as she struggled to finish the statement.
“I didn’t come?” His voice was a deep, dark growl. “Sweetheart, you’re the only woman I know that has the power to cause me to come in the sheets because I’m so damned excited over your climax.”
Amusement gleamed in his eyes as confusion edged at her mind.
No, her friends had definitely never mentioned this when it came to their lovers, husbands, or one-night stands.
She swallowed tightly. “I could—”
“Shh.” He moved up her body, his lips brushing against hers. “Your sweet body can handle only so much, baby. I found my release and, even more important to me, you’ve found yours.”
With a quick kiss to her lips he eased from the bed before padding quickly to the bathroom.
Cami was too exhausted to move. Breathing out deeply, she let her eyes close and was almost easing into sleep when she felt the touch of a warm cl
oth against her thighs.
Opening her eyes, she watched him, so confident, so completely male, despite the fact that he was cleaning her and drying the sheets between her thighs and legs so thoroughly.
“Sleep, baby.” When he finished, he laid a kiss at the top of her mound, just above her clit, then moved to her lips and kissed them gently as she stared up at him. “I’ll watch over you. I promise.”
How had he known? How could he have known that she had worried about coming home before he arrived at the hospital? That even after he had tucked her into her bed and gone to shower she’d been too tense to sleep? Until the moment he promised to watch over her, there had been a fear she hadn’t realized she had.
That fear eased from her almost immediately.
Her lashes were suddenly heavier, lassitude invading her limbs as he slid into bed beside her and drew her against him, his arms sheltering her.
“Sleep, baby,” he growled against her ear. “We’ll work the rest out tomorrow.”
* * *
As Rafe felt her drift into sleep he stared across the room, his expression hardening. The marks on her breasts, the swollen flesh of her nipple, and the deep bruising at her hip and her head had rage building inside him.
The son of a bitch had thought he could rape, torture, and kill Rafe’s Cami in her own home. Thought that she was too weak, that she would be too frightened to attempt to fight back.
She had fought back. But her attacker had given them all a heads-up. They knew he was out there now, no longer a piece of the past. Someone was trying to resurrect the past instead.
The man who had raped, tortured, and killed Jaymi and the other women twelve years before was dead. Crowe had killed him as Rafe had held Jaymi’s dying body.
Now he was holding her sister, loving her sister. He and Jaymi had truly been more friends than lovers. She claimed he was her best friend, her last tie to the husband she had lost in a war so far away.
Rafe and Tye Kramer had been best friends. Tye had been from Aspen, born and raised there, and it was there he and Jaymi had lived before he had been called from the Reserves to go overseas.