He nodded, his mouth slightly open as if he needed extra air.
“How did you fake the gunshot?”
“I didn’t. I told you. It was real.”
If he wasn’t going to be honest, she’d push him over the edge. “I like backbends.” His expression, close to pain, gave her a throb of power. “I tip over until my hands hit the floor behind me and thrust to the sky.” She made a chair-bound imitation of the move, letting her shoulders hit the chair back and her pelvis lift from the seat as she tightened.
His eyes dropped to her chest, and she sucked in a breath, then her words tumbled out too fast to stop, too fast to separate what was wise from what was foolish. “And downward facing dog. I like that too. Do you know that position?”
“Describe it.”
“What were you going to do with the wine money?”
“Refurbish a monument.”
That made no sense. But it sounded true.
“Downward facing dog. What is it?”
“I spread my legs.” She had to spread her arms instead, because her foot was on his side of the table. “And reach for the floor.”
His thighs closed and trapped her foot, pulling her closer until she balanced only on the edge of the chair. If she hadn’t had her other foot on the floor, she would be in a very precarious situation. Precarious indeed.
“Then I stick my ass in the air.” Her spine arched from the seat, completely unrelated to a yoga pose, but she felt as if only four thin connections tethered her to earth, her shoulders at the chairback, her tailbone at the seat edge, the foot on the floor and the other between his thighs. The rest of her body had disappeared into the atmosphere, leaving her panting and adrift until her curled toes brushed the hard evidence of his arousal. That was the solidity she wanted. That anchored her. Anchored her to him, to wanting more.
He tugged her foot closer to the bulge she’d found, and she flexed her arch as if to wrap around him through the fabric. His fingers found secret places on her instep that made her close her eyes and moan with pleasure.
“Tell me.” He didn’t let her keep her eyes closed. No. His voice commanded her to look at his face, at the flush on his cheekbones and the glitter in his eyes. His knuckle dug into the ball of her foot, releasing pressure there but tripling the tension inside her. His expression promised sex, hard sex, sex from behind while she did a downward dog, or sex with her legs wrapped around his neck, or sex with herself spread yearning and open. “What do you...wear...for yoga?”
“At home—” Naked yoga was a joke, but across the table from Stig she understood the allure. She saw them naked and connected, every pose doubled with him. “Sweat.”
Through her toes she felt his hips jerk and she rubbed harder on his cock. Could it happen like this, here, with their clothes on? Every word he spoke, every move, his or hers, tightened the muscles in her thighs until she didn’t think they’d ever unknot. She wanted to reach for the ceiling, to stretch herself open for him to stroke her body the way he stroked her foot.
“Touch your breasts.”
Chapter Thirteen
Christina stared at Stig. His lips had moved, she’d heard the words, but she didn’t understand.
“Put your hands on your tits.” His precise diction contrasted with the sweat on his forehead.
She raised her hands to the soft T-shirt. Her back was to the room, but she could picture the gap in the curtain behind her. Even knowing that anyone could see, if they looked closely, didn’t prevent her from lifting the weight of a breast in each palm.
“I can’t stop imagining them. Your nipples are dark, aren’t they?”
Hearing him talk about her nipples made her hands tremble and her breasts ache until she had to soothe them. Had to touch herself where his eyes touched her. Her thumbs and first fingers rolled the tips through the fabric and it felt good, too good to stop.
“That’s it.” His roughened voice scraped her nerves and added strength to her fingers, but the pressure still wasn’t enough. “I can see the points.” His thumbs stroked her arch, pressing deeply at a spot that made her hips lift higher, as if a string pulled them. “Pinch your nipples. Hard. As hard as you can.”
“People will see,” she whispered, but only because she should, not because she wanted to stop. Her fingers were already doing his bidding, her body becoming his instrument.
“I’m the only one who can see what you’re doing.” His command released her. “I want you to put your hand between your legs.”
She stopped breathing.
“You do this to me.” He pushed her foot hard against his cock. “I’m hard enough, you make me want to drill you like a safe. Right here.”
She had no words. All her mouth and heaving chest could do was perform the life function of breathing, so she couldn’t say anything, not with the words I want to drill you lingering in the air and the feel of the shaft he would use to do it under her ultra-sensitized foot.
“But I can’t fuck you here. I can’t lick you or suck you or finger you.” He was a different man, a harder, coarser one.
One who would do her dirty.
“You have to do it yourself.” His stare pinned her to the chair. “I’m going to watch your expression while you touch your pussy like I tell you. Put your hand under the table. Now.”
She obeyed. Her hand found the heat between her legs, all four fingers stroking from the top. Her leggings and underwear were the thinnest barrier, and she pressed hard until she cupped herself. It wasn’t enough. No matter how she pushed back against her hand, she was still empty.
“Your middle finger’s the longest. Use it.” His eyes were slits and he breathed as if he was in pain. “Slide it from the top to the bottom.”
She was close, close, circling and pressing and watching him watch her. It was like nothing in her life before. Her buttocks clenched and rose again and again from the chair, thrusting her pelvis at the air demanding a body to hump. Each time she found her hand, not the man she sought, her muscles released for a defeated instant before they tightened in fresh seeking, greater wanting, but never finding.
Her mind raced through the restaurant and up the stairs and to a room, any room, where they would take each other hard and fast like his talk promised. She wanted the sucking and fingering and fucking. She put her other hand between her legs and that gave her the pressure. That was the force she needed. Not as much as he would give her, but enough, because this time when her hips lifted from the chair and her head tilted back, the darkness behind her eyelids exploded with color. She rode the surge to the top, hips pushing up, until the crest passed.
What had she done?
She’d gone too far to hide from him. She’d have to look in his face, deal with whatever joke he made and ignore whatever have-I-got-a-plan grin he sported.
But it wasn’t like that. When she opened her eyes, he wasn’t grinning. He was barely leashed. The instant their eyes met worked like a whip lashing him to his feet.
“We’re leaving.” He slapped a stack of bills next to his napkin, circled the table and lifted her from the chair.
Anticipation tangled her feet with her abandoned shoes. She stumbled toward him, every sensitized inch of her wanting to press against him and trembling with the need for his hands, his big, rough hands, to cup her and shape her body to his. He’d made promises she wanted him to keep.
“Move.” None of his charm remained as he thrust her at her shoes. “Or I’ll take you on the table in front of the patrons and staff.”
She’d done this. Stripped him of his British civility. Left him a caveman. She’d never had that power in her hands, let alone in her toes.
With her shoes barely clinging to her soles, her purse and the messenger bag dangling from her free wrist, she stumbled to keep up. He led her down a hall away from the other patron
s. One hand on her elbow propelled her forward and the other was a fist clenched at his side. His shoulders stretched the blue oxford even more emphatically than they’d filled the wrap dress. The tempting thought snaked through her that he could take her here, standing against the wall. She was already slick and open, and he’d been hard enough under her foot that they’d both scream in less than the time it took him to steal a car.
He pushed a door and they were outside. He scanned left and right like a fox trying to cross a field, then loped down the alley toward a dark car port with her trotting next to him. Spring air slapped her cheeks, but it barely cooled her.
As he pulled her between two cars, she knew what he intended.
Before she could gasp his name, he’d lifted her out of her shoes and set her on the hood of a car deep in the shadows. She leaned back on her elbows and raised her hips. With one motion he yanked her leggings and underwear off, leaving her pale skin gleaming against the darkly painted hood. She was open and ready. So ready. Then he did what he’d promised and his fingers slipped inside.
“Honey of the gods, you’re wet.”
“Yes, yes.” She melted into his hands. His fingers were so much better than her own.
He shoved the clothes he’d pulled off her underneath her thighs, padding her from the metal before he pushed her body higher. Her hands stretched over her head to find the edge of the hood where it butted against the windshield. She needed an anchor in the storm roiling her, something concrete to keep her from being lost while his fingers thrust harder and deeper. She rose toward that peak. She wanted it like this, but she wanted more too. More of him. More of his body.
Dimly she heard his button and zipper. Then he yanked her back to the edge of the hood and stepped close between her spread thighs. “Look at me.”
Only a little light reached this far, but it gleamed off the whites of his eyes as he loomed above her. She wanted to see his cock, but the darkness hid him and she couldn’t wait another second to feel him fill the last empty place.
“Now. I’m protected.” She thanked her long-term birth control, really truly thanked the method that withstood the last two days and let her have this man. “Take me now.”
Her order released him, because he immediately slammed into her, the fullness like nothing she’d ever felt. She was open and ready. He filled her, but he didn’t stop. His hands gripped her hips and he pistoned in and out, taking her higher.
“Lift the shirt. I want to see your breasts.”
She struggled with the scarf at her waist, failed to untie it but guessed he couldn’t wait for her to succeed because he bent and took the shirt in his mouth. His teeth latched on the sensitive tip of her nipple through the cotton. Better than her own fingers, far better. With a fabric barricade between them, she didn’t need him to be gentle. “Harder.”
He obeyed. The tug on her breast tied straight to her core, connected every nerve into another climax, a bigger one, as big and hard as the cock thrusting inside her. Then he was coming too, pushing deeper than she’d imagined possible. His moans blurred with her voice calling his name. Maybe she said “yes” or “fuck” or “more,” she couldn’t be sure, because he plastered his mouth over hers and caught the words. Caught her.
When he pulled out, long panting moments later, the crazy urges pulsing in her body left with him. It was convenient to let her hair obscure her face as she felt around the car hood for her underwear. Without speaking, he helped her stand and turned her leggings right side out while she managed to insert first one leg, then the other, into her panties. A feat, considering her knees felt like overcooked pasta.
He cleared his throat lightly before he broke the silence. “What say you we go a little faster next time?”
“Next time?” She was covered on unintentional pregnancy, but they hadn’t used a condom. “We shouldn’t have—”
His finger pressed lightly on her lips, stopping whatever she was going to say. She didn’t actually know herself. “Give it a rest.”
He was right. The tingling satisfaction all over her skin agreed.
“Tomorrow, after you’ve had a sleep, and we’ve got off three or four more times and you’re unable to walk without thinking about me, then we’ll talk.”
“Really?” She snorted, but at the same time she had to put a hand on the car to keep her balance when the promise in his words registered in her trembling thighs. “Three or four more times? That’s a bet I should take.”
“And I think this is a car we should take.” He patted the spot on the hood that she’d just vacated. “Late enough it won’t be missed until morning. We’ll be holed up in Belgium by then.”
He bent to the bag he’d dropped when he’d tossed her on the hood, and then in a repeat of his trick on the train he had the door open and was helping her in like a valet parking attendant. Minutes later he was backing out and cruising down the dark alley.
Stig’s efficiency at car theft chased the endorphins from her brain. She’d noticed him across the clichéd crowded room, flirted when she should have turned him in, admired his package in tights and a dress, and had the wildest sex of her life ten minutes ago, but he wasn’t someone she should trust. Screw, yes. Trust, no. He was a con man and a thief, not a lover.
He shifted gears as they approached the highway. His hand rested casually on the transmission knob, a study in masculine veins and shapes, blunt fingers and fine blond wrist-hairs. Minutes ago that hand had been all over her body, those fingers had been inside her.
“Sit still.”
“I’m not—” She’d been wiggling in her seat and fidgeting with the shoulder belt. Trying to find spots where nothing rubbed her skin.
He slammed the shifter to fifth, and the flat dark fields and occasional houses of rural France passed faster. Inside the car’s cocoon, she could hear him breathe. Hear the barely audible scrape of his thumb across the cotton shirt as he opened another button at his collar and the slightly louder slide of his pants on the seat fabric as he hunted for a position.
The stretch pants were hot and stuck to her sweaty legs, and she wished she could clean up the dampness in her panties. Every time she changed position, she caught the smell of sex. Three or four more times, he’d said. Where did a woman buy condoms in France?
She needed to stop thinking about sex. But everything made her think about sex. Her body knew what they’d done, and the conflicting messages surging through her system added confusion. Her soft places were sensitized and wanting, but her usually stiff shoulders slumped as if she had no muscles in her upper back. She couldn’t find a way to sit that didn’t increase her awareness of the stickiness between her legs.
“Please, for the safety all passengers on the road, quit writhing in your seat like you have a vibrator over there. Or I will park this bloody car and haul you across the gearstick and take you hard and filthy on my lap, then haul you out and fuck you on the bonnet in sight of whatever nocturnal creatures populate this corner of Flanders, and we do not have time to do that properly right now.” He blew air out in a loud sigh, as if trying to lower his voice. “So please could you sit still.”
Her heart started to pound like she was in his arms and he was taking her. The racing rhythm that had disoriented her before now paralyzed her muscles and issued contradictory commands. Move, don’t move, take him, reject him. She wanted Stig, he wanted her and they were two adults, but he was right. They had problems, and unfortunately hot sex wasn’t the solution.
The man next to her stared at the road in his headlights as if he could read the future in the dashes and lines.
She didn’t know whether the passing miles and the silent stretches of time made her more tense or less. More likely to rip each other’s clothes off, because they spiraled deeper into the seclusion of the ride, or less likely, because they’d passed further from the intimacy of touch. Like b
eing balanced on a beam, she could jump either way, do it again if he made a move, or laugh and shrug at a one-time interlude.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
“For yelling?” Fine, he wanted to move on.
“That too.” He glanced away from the road, and she saw his twisted smile. “But mostly for taking you before the wine course.”
“Oh.” She started to laugh, because what else was there to do? “It’s alright.”
“You’d been looking forward to that bottle. I’m a low bastard.”
“I never really thought it was mine.” The words coming out of her mouth were completely true. “The Chateau Perlus was a dream, and I woke up, that’s all.” Maybe talking would yank them away from the precipice. “Ready to tell me where we’re going?”
“Southeast Belgium. Ardennes Forest area, near the border of Luxembourg. It was the site of the World War Two Battle of the Bulge.”
“Why?” The darkness and relaxing motions of the car made her arms and legs feel heavy, not to mention her eyelids, but she forged ahead.
“To have a drink with a man who’s going to try to convince me to do a job.”
“The men at Paddington said—” she struggled to remember the name Wend and Skafe had mentioned, “—something about meeting their boss? They called him...” The name wasn’t Ian or Ivan, but similar.
“Ivar.” His voice dropped at the end of the name, making him sound grim. “He’s going to ask me to pinch something. It’s the only thing he ever asks me to do.”
“The kind of thing a person would enlist you to steal—we’re not talking a car or a laptop, are we?”
“I rather think not.”
She closed her eyes and leaned on the headrest, exhausted. “You can leave me at an airport, or a train station or a hotel. Anywhere. Just drop me off. I’ll get myself back to the U.S. and deal with Bodeby’s from home, like you suggested, and I won’t say anything about you or this Ivar or—”
The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Page 16