by Harper Allen
He was wrong, she thought shakily. She wasn’t tough. And she’d been wrong too.
She’d told herself that if this was all she could have from him she would take it, and no harm done. She’d told herself that if the only part of him she could have was the dark side, the side of Max Ross that was the edgy, compelling lover, it would be almost enough.
And it was almost enough. One night with him, or maybe a handful of nights, would be erotic satiation. She would feel those hands on her, and she would bite her lip to hold back her sighs of pleasure. She would have his mouth on hers, and her nails would score his skin. He would be in her, and she would cry out his name until she was beyond making any sound, beyond doing anything but sinking into his arms and letting him catch her as she fell back down to earth.
But he’d just smoothed her hair back, and the man who’d done that, the man who’d stroked her as if she was infinitely precious to him, was the other side of Max Ross. That small gesture was all that was left of the man in the video, Julia knew, because the man in the video was almost completely a ghost.
She wanted that man too. And that meant that whatever happened tonight could never be enough. She saw him looking at her, waiting for her answer. Although his face was only inches from hers, she felt as if he were already turning away, already walking out of her arms. A terrible loneliness swept over her, and she knew that the pain tearing through her heart wasn’t for herself, but for him.
“Come on, Jules, you can tell me—did it work, even a little?”
The husky, teasing note in his voice came close to undoing her. He traced the line of her bottom lip with his finger, and she found herself swaying infinitesimally toward him, her legs barely able to support her.
“Whatever else we are we’re two straight shooters, you and me, honey. Give it to me right between the eyes.” His mouth lifted wryly, and the still slightly glazed green of his eyes seemed suddenly darker.
He felt it too, Julia thought. He might not acknowledge it, but he felt that cold wind cutting through him on nights like this. It was part of the reason for what he wanted from her, but like her, he needed a more solid, if still only temporary, shelter from that lonely cold.
She knew how she could give him that. She knew how she could come close to giving them both what they needed, and would never truly have.
“We are straight shooters, Max,” she said unevenly, meeting his eyes. “Neither one of us believes in fairy tales anymore, and we haven’t sugarcoated anything between the two of us, have we?”
As if something in her tone had alerted him, his gaze sharpened and focused. Slowly he shook his head, the movement so controlled that she almost missed it. “No, Jules,” he said steadily. “We haven’t done that.”
“Then that’s what I want.” She drew back from him. Taking a shallow breath, she continued, her voice a little higher than normal. “You told me yesterday I could have whatever I wanted from you, Max, and that’s what I want. Just for tonight let’s not be straight shooters. Just for tonight I want you to lie to me.”
Even before she had finished he was shaking his head again, and this time the movement was impossible to miss. “You can’t want that, honey—”
She cut him off, her tone shakily determined. “I do want that, Max. I’ve had two years of grim reality, and I want the fairy tale, dammit!”
She pushed her hair back from her face with a suddenly trembling hand. “I’ll know it’s a fairy tale. I won’t expect it to last, because that’s how these things work, isn’t it—when the night is over Cinderella goes back to the real world. But she goes back with a few memories of magic and illusion, and that’s what I want. I want the illusion. I want you to lie to me, Max.”
His gaze searched her face, as if he was hoping to find some reassuring sign there that she’d been joking. But he wouldn’t, Julia thought, holding on to the last of her determination and not allowing her eyes to waver. No matter how insane her request had sounded, she’d never been more serious in her life. He sighed heavily, and took a step away from her.
“I can’t do that, honey. Ask me anything else you want, but not that.” He turned slightly, wearily rubbing the side of his face with his hand.
She’d thrown the dice, she thought hollowly. It looked as if she was leaving the table empty-handed. She’d lost.
“See, Jules, when I held you in my arms two days ago after you’d walked out in front of that bus, I found myself wondering why I always seemed to be the one who had to give you the bad news—why I always ended up telling you the hard truths and making you hate me.”
She looked up, a denial on her lips, but he forestalled her with a shrug.
“Maybe you didn’t hate me. Maybe it was just that I hated myself for having to do that to you. But I held you there on the street and I wondered if there was some way I could soften things for you, Jules. And then you opened your eyes and I knew I couldn’t.”
“Why?” The one-word question was desolate.
“Because no one else had ever cared enough about you to play straight with you, honey,” Max said hoarsely. “And when I looked into those incredible eyes of yours my heart turned over and I knew I couldn’t give you any less.” He met her gaze directly. “That’s when I had to face the fact that I was already half in love with you, Jules.”
“That’s when you—”
Julia stopped. He was watching her, and though his face was in shadow she could see the tenseness in his expression. He was so still he gave the impression that even his breathing had been suspended. She felt a sudden, foolish moisture behind her eyes, and blinked it away.
Lie to me…
“Tell me more, Max,” she said shakily. “Tell me more about when you knew you were falling in love with me.”
He let his breath out softly. Turning back to her, he brought both his palms up to frame her face, his touch as light as a whisper. “It started the night I met you in the coffee shop. I couldn’t admit it to myself, of course, but even while I was playing the bad guy with you I kept finding myself looking at your mouth. When I grabbed your wrist, some part of me knew that it had only been an excuse to touch you.”
His breath was warm on her lips. She gave him a small smile. “And then I walked out on you.”
“You walked out on me,” he agreed. He let his hands slide slowly back into her hair. “I told myself that was a good thing. Then I went back to the office and pulled every damn photo I could find of you, and stared at your face all night.”
A little laugh bubbled up inside of her. “Really, Max?” She looked at him with feigned innocence.
“Really, Jules.” His grin flashed white in the shadows. Before she knew what he intended to do, he bent down swiftly and scooped her up in his arms. She gasped. “Except looking at your face in a picture wasn’t enough,” he said quietly. “Reading about you in your file wasn’t enough. I kept feeling that I was missing the essence of you. I felt like maybe I’d been missing that from the start.”
He looked down at her, cradled in his arms. “It wasn’t until you’d walked away from me the second time that I allowed myself to see who you really were, and then I knew that I’d just let the woman I loved slip out of my hands.”
Tell me lies, Max. Just for tonight, lie to me. Julia traced the line of his mouth with a light finger. “But you came after me.” She wouldn’t think of it as a lie, she thought. She would let herself believe it was all true, from the words he was saying to the tenderness in those green eyes only inches from hers. She let her lashes drift down to her cheeks. “You came after me, because by then you knew you loved me. I think I knew I loved you by then too.”
“Really, Jules?”
Even with her eyes closed, she could tell that he was smiling. She smiled back, and felt him lower his mouth to hers. She opened her eyes.
“Really, Max,” she said softly.
This time there was nothing aggressive about his kiss. He entered her slowly, his tongue touching hers, circling it, and then
lightly flicking against the roof of her mouth. She reached up and let her fingertips touch his temples, move into the coarse silk of his hair, like a blind woman relying solely on her sense of touch to discover the face of her lover. She could feel one arm, solid and hard, under her thighs, the other holding her securely around her waist. A dreamy warmth spread through her limbs. She felt like purring, she thought, feeling his mouth come down more firmly on hers. She felt as if he were stroking her with his tongue.
“I want to see all of you, Jules.” He whispered the words against her lips. “You’re so beautiful, honey.”
Instinctively she pulled the edges of her shirt together as he lowered her to the bed. She looked up at him and shook her head in automatic denial, for the moment forgetting their agreement.
“I’m too thin, Max.” She bit her lip. “The last time my hair was trimmed it was by a prison barber. And there’s this.”
She was clasping her hands against her chest. Not looking at them, she slid them apart, and held up her left palm to his gaze. She lowered it again, covering it once more with her right and averting her gaze from his.
“That? Hell, Jules, that’s nothing.”
He’d been bending over her. Now he straightened to his full height and stood at the side of the bed. Her eyes widened in confusion as he impatiently pulled his shirt out of the waistband of his pants and unbuttoned it.
“Now this—this is a scar, dammit.” Opening his shirt and lifting his right arm slightly, he pointed to a faded red line running along an upper rib. “Bullet wound,” he said complacently. “It ploughed along the bone and then hit a wall beside me. Sorry, honey, you’ll have to do better than that.”
He grinned sympathetically down at her, and she blinked, her throat suddenly tight. Her vision blurred as she looked up at him and the last bar around her heart shattered and fell. He wouldn’t have to know it, but nothing she would tell him tonight would be a lie. She gave an unsteady snort and abruptly sat up.
“Then what about this?” She pushed her sleeve back and raised her elbow at him, her tone challenging. “See that? I was four years old. I fell off my trike on the sidewalk. It needed stitches, for God’s sake.”
He peered at the almost-invisible mark and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “A trike accident? That’s just pitiful, Jules. Picture this—a skinny thirteen-year-old on his way home from the municipal pool with only his bathing trunks on, riding his ten-speed full tilt down a hill and wiping out in front of a bunch of girls.” He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers, his movements swiftly efficient. Impatiently he hooked his thumb under the edge of his briefs and pulled them aside just enough to expose one leanly muscled hip. “Bled like a stuck pig. Mary O’Sullivan laughed at me and broke my heart.”
His tie had come undone, the two ends hanging loosely down over his chest. He’d shrugged halfway out of his shirt, its seams straining over his shoulders, and Julia felt her breath catch as she looked at him. Under those concealing suits he always seemed to wear was nothing but hard muscle, she thought faintly. There was a scattering of fine hair V-ing its way down his chest to his navel, but except for that silky dark arrow his torso looked like a roughly carved slab of wood in the shadowy light.
She let her gaze go lower and felt sudden heat suffusing her face. She swallowed dryly.
“Poor baby.” She forced a note of unconcern into her voice. “Okay, Max, even you’re going to admit defeat with this one.”
She sat up on her haunches, her legs tucked beneath her. Briskly she slid the waistband of her panties past her hips, wriggling a little more than she had to but being careful to keep her shirttails concealingly in place. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him freeze to stillness. She went on as if she hadn’t noticed his reaction.
“Camp Minnetowanka. I was fourteen. I had the world’s biggest crush on my leathercraft instructor.” Her panties were halfway down her thighs. She looked at him solemnly. “The day we were supposed to be finishing up our punched-leather change purses he walked into recreation hall and told us he’d just gotten engaged. I was so devastated I sat down on my work-stool and and right smack-dab onto my newly sharpened awl. Cry uncle, Max.”
Leaning forward onto her elbows and lifting her rump high into the air, she looked innocently at him over her shoulder. She heard him draw in a tight breath. Very slowly, he shrugged out of his shirt, not taking his gaze from her upraised derriere. Even more slowly he stripped off his now-useless tie. He placed one knee on the bed behind her, bracing his arms on either side of her legs. Julia felt her panties moving down to her knees, and then coming off completely.
“Uncle,” he said hoarsely.
The next moment she felt his open mouth on the top of her thigh, and hot, immediate pleasure cascaded through her in a liquid rush. Her teeth sunk into her bottom lip, but not soon enough to stifle a small moan. She felt his tongue trace a wet, slow circle upward, and weakly she closed her eyes, almost unable to bear the swirl of sensations he was stirring in her with every teasing lick of his tongue, every rasp of his unshaven cheek against the tenderness of her inner thighs. Desperately she clutched the sheet she was lying on, and drew it convulsively toward her, her neck arching back in ecstasy. She felt him part her legs a little wider, and then his tongue went deeper.
“Oh, no, Max.” Her voice was a thread. “Please, Max—it’s too much.” His tongue flicked once more against the tautly secret bud between her thighs, and the world dissolved dizzily around her.
“You taste like a flower.” His own voice was little more than a rasp. “Jules, I want more of you. I want all of you now.”
She was dimly aware of him getting off the bed and stepping out of his pants. How did he know? she thought dazedly, feeling the tiny aftershocks rippling through her and bunching her fist, still clutching its handful of sheet, to her mouth. How did he know so unerringly just how to bring her to this, and how did he know that she couldn’t delay her need to have him in her any longer either? It was as if his body could read hers, she thought, lifting her head and looking at him through her lashes. He pushed his briefs over his hips to the floor and returned her gaze steadily. She could see a pulse beating at the side of his throat.
“I want it too, Max,” she whispered unevenly.
She lifted herself up slightly from the bed, letting her shirt fall away from her as she did. Now she could see that the dark V of hair travelled down past his navel, thickening and coarsening into a shadowy tangle at the top of those tautly muscled legs. Very slowly she brought her palm close enough to brush against the tangle, and felt it curling against her fingers like fine wire. She opened her hand and let her fingers push past the rough hair to the shaft that rose from it.
She closed her hand gently around the solid column, and softly slid her fingers upward.
A shudder ran through him. Looking up at his face, she saw his eyes had closed, and the muscles in his neck were rigidly corded.
She let her hand slide downward again, farther this time, and opened her palm to cup the tautness nestled between his legs. Very carefully, she drew the tip of her finger along the tight fullness there, and heard him exhale with a gasp.
“I already cried uncle, Jules,” he said hoarsely.
Stepping away, he bent down to the floor, and fumbled in his pants pocket for something. He stood up, his grin crooked as he flashed the small square of foil at her.
Her eyes widened, and she was surprised into a soft amusement. “You’ve been carrying that around in your pocket, Max? Don’t tell me it dates from the days of Mary what’s-her-name.”
He shrugged, but she could see the quick gleam of his teeth in the shadows. “Naw, honey, I bought some yesterday when we stopped on the way home. Just on the off-chance.” He ripped the foil square open and pulled out the condom, but before he could put it on she stopped him impulsively.
“Let me.” Sitting up on the bed, she met his eyes, her lips curving. “I promise to be careful, Max. Lie down.”
He rais
ed an eyebrow, but he handed the latex circle to her. Julia shifted over as he lowered himself to the bed, and when he moved toward her she swung one leg over his and straddled him, kneeling. Holding the condom delicately, she fitted it over him.
“I think I know where this is going, Jules.”
There was a raw note in his voice. Looking up from what she was doing, she saw him watching her through his lashes, and she felt suddenly weak with desire. Carefully she rolled the thin latex down with her palms until it was snugly fitted.
“Really, Max?” she teased. She bit her lip in sudden uncertainty. “I’ve never done it this way. You don’t mind?”
“Being on the bottom, honey?”
In answer he sat up just enough that his outstretched hands could wrap around the flare of her hips. His grip firm, he raised her from her haunches to her knees and pulled her closer, until she was poised in position over him.
“I’m going to be able to see everything you feel,” he said huskily. “I’m going to be able to have my hands on you, feel your hair brushing against me when you bend over me. No, honey, I don’t mind you riding me at all.”
Slowly he began to lower her, his eyes never leaving her face. She felt a slight pressure as she began to press against him, and his grip tightened minutely, moving her a little forward. He continued guiding her downward, and this time she felt herself receiving him. Her eyes widened, and she stared at him in doubtful consternation.
“Don’t worry, Jules. We’ll take it slow and easy here.” His whisper was uneven, and the eyes meeting hers were half closed. The heavy muscles in his arms stood out. “If you want to stop, just tell me.”
“I don’t want to stop.” Gripping his wrists where they held her at her waist, she shook her head, feeling him going deeper inside her. “But Max, what if we don’t—what if we don’t fit?”