Bianca slapped her hands on her hips. “I should have known better than to think you would behave like a gentleman.”
“I wasn’t one. Not that night. And that suited you just fine.”
His hand was still splayed against the door; she was trapped between his raised arm and the wall. Close. Too close. He was all heat and masculinity, and she didn’t like the feeling it gave her.
“You know nothing about what suits me. And what happened on that beach had nothing to do with making love. It was sex.”
“I don’t give a damn what you call it. It was fantastic. Why won’t you admit that?”
“Such a huge ego, Lieutenant. Did you have to buy two seats on the plane?”
He almost laughed, but laughter wouldn’t help this conversation.
“How about honesty, not ego? We had one hell of a night.”
“We had five minutes.”
His eyes narrowed. “It was a lot longer than that.”
“It is time you left.”
“It is time you were honest. “ His hands closed on her shoulders. “Look me in the eye and tell me that what we did that night wasn’t special.”
“Why must you say such things?”
He took a deep breath. “Because I need to hear you admit the truth. That I’m not the only one who can’t forget.” His voice turned low. Urgent. Rough. “All these weeks, remembering the taste of you. The feel of you…”
Her cheeks flamed. Her mouth was trembling. And, hell, were those tears glittering in her eyes?
“Bianca.” Chay put his hand under her chin and gently lifted her face to his. “Tell me that what happened shook you as much as it shook me.”
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“Because, goddammit, because I can’t get you out of my head.” She tried to look away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. “I’m a fool in a lot of ways, baby, but I know what we felt that night. I just don’t know why you won’t admit it— and why you didn’t let me make it better, let me take you to a bed, a real bed where I could have made love to you.”
“You just wanted to—to make me lose myself again.”
The tears he’d seen in her eyes rolled down her face, and he felt his heart turn over.
“I wanted you to lose yourself in me,” he said softly. “In my kisses. My caresses. Was that so wrong?”
She stared into his eyes.
He waited, and realized he was holding his breath. The next move had to be hers.
And just when he thought all was lost, she sighed.
“Chay,” she said brokenly. “Chay…”
She rose to him. Kissed him.
And then she was in his arms.
CHAPTER NINE
He kept his head just long enough to turn the pathetic lock on the door.
Then he carried her to the bedroom.
It was a room he wouldn’t have expected until he’d gotten to know her. Crazy as it seemed, he had gotten to know her tonight.
The walls were pink, as soft and delicate a shade as the inside of a seashell. The furniture was the shade of pale bamboo. Everything else was the color of cream. The curtains at the windows. The duvet on the bed. The throw pillows. Framed pictures were clustered on one wall. Family. A meadow of Texas bluebells. A house on a cliff.
There was more to see, to learn about her, but right now she was all that mattered. Bianca, in his arms, her mouth warm and supple against his.
He lowered her slowly to her feet, right beside the bed.
She looked up at him and everything he’d wanted to see was in her eyes.
Desire. Need.
Him.
Still, he had to hear the words.
“Tell me what you want,” he said softly.
“You,” she whispered without any hesitation. “I’ve wanted you for weeks and weeks and wee—”
Her admission, the words he’d been desperate to hear, beat through his blood. He kissed her, his hands in her wet, tangled hair, kissed her until the taste of her was a part of him.
Then, slowly, he began to undress her.
He unbuttoned her denim jacket. His denim jacket. Slid it from her shoulders, from her arms, and let it drop to the floor.
There were buttons on the jacket of her linen suit, too, and undoing them was more difficult because they were small and his fingers were big. She would have helped him, but he caught her hands, brought them to his lips and kissed the palms.
“Let me,” he said, and the rough heat in his voice almost made her knees buckle.
Her jacket fell beside his.
There were more buttons on her blouse, more indescribably small buttons. By the time had them undone, his hands were shaking.
Her pants had yet another button, but it was easy to undo and then—mercifully—he saw a zipper. He pulled the tab down slowly, slowly. As much as he wanted her, he also wanted to prolong these moments. She had never yet taken her eyes from his face and he loved seeing the hunger building inside her.
Hunger and… Was that trepidation? Was she afraid of him?
He caught her face in his hands. “Baby,” he said urgently, “don’t be afraid. I’d never—”
She rose on her toes and pressed her mouth to his. “Chay.” Her voice shook. “Don’t make me wait.”
Excitement spiked in his blood.
To hell with his determined need to be as gentle and slow as he had been rough and fast the last time.
She wanted him the same way he wanted her. The realization was almost more than he could take.
He pulled her pants down. She stepped out of her shoes, those eminently sensible flats.
All that separated them now was her bra. White again, but with a pattern of tiny pink flowers. And her panties, white with those same pink flowers.
He fumbled with the bra. He, the man who’d opened more bras than he could count since he’d turned sixteen, and she batted his hands away, reached behind her and undid the hook herself.
The bra fell to her feet and he groaned at the sight of her breasts. Small. Uptilted. The color of cream tipped with pale pink nipples and, God, he had to taste them, tongue them…
She cried out, and the world spun.
He said her name, sucked one nipple into his mouth and she cried out again, sobbed his name and, Jesus, could a man come from this? Only this?
He had to get inside her.
Now.
He was moving too fast. All his self-made promises to take her slowly were vanishing the way he’d seen a late-spring Dakota snow vanish under the golden heat of the sun.
He said her name. All but tore off those white panties with the little flowers all over them, toed off his mocs, stripped away his shirt, his jeans, his boxers.
Then he was on the bed with her in his arms.
He kissed her mouth. Her throat. Her breasts.
She moaned and shifted against him.
Her hands were on his face. In his hair. They spread over his shoulders, his chest, his back.
His heart was racing. His mind was blank. And then he remembered and he said “Wait,” and started to fumble for his jeans, but she said, “No, it’s all right. I’m on the pill,” and he almost wept with relief because the thought of having anything between her silken walls and his dick was more than he could take.
He kissed her belly.
Parted her thighs.
Knelt between them.
The world stood still.
“Bianca,” he said.
His voice was raw with command.
She looked up at him. His jaw was taut, his eyes almost black. She could feel the urgency in him, hot and sharp as electricity surging through a wire.
“Watch me,” he said. “I want to see you watch me.”
She raised her hips. Sig
hed his name, and he groaned and rocked into her.
Filled her.
She sobbed and arched towards him.
He rocked into her again. Deep. Fast. Taking for himself what he had to have. Giving to her what she needed.
Quickly, much too quickly, he felt it happening. The tightening in his groin. In his balls. The realization that he was coming apart even though it was too soon, too soon…
Her muscles contracted around him.
She cried out, and he put his hands under her ass, lifted her to him, felt her coming, heard her saying his name again and again and again.
He drove deep. One final time. She screamed, bit his shoulder.
And the whirlwind swept them away.
• • •
Time passed.
Seconds. Minutes. Hours.
An eternity.
Bianca didn’t know. Didn’t care. Nothing mattered but Chay.
He was on top of her, his face buried in her throat, his arms still around her. He was hard and hot and heavy; she could feel him pressing her into the mattress and that was fine.
It was wonderful.
She was where she’d dreamed of being.
There was no sense in denying it now.
The only question was… What happened next?
Instinct told her he wasn’t a man who’d stay for breakfast.
He lived hard. Lived in the present. Tomorrow didn’t exist for someone like him. He would take one day, one experience at a time. She knew that. She even understood it.
How else could he deal with the existence he’d chosen? Half the time, he was a guy who knew the right wine to order; the other half, he risked his life doing things he couldn’t talk about, in places most people couldn’t locate on a map.
She knew that much from Alessandra.
Tanner had settled down.
Maybe Tanner was the exception to the rule.
Chay would never settle down. Live a normal life.
And really, that was none of her business.
This was a fling. A weekend at most. Maybe not even that. For all she knew, he was flying back to California tonight—and what did it matter? She certainly wasn’t looking for anything permanent. Not now, not for the foreseeable future, not with a man who would surely see a suit and a desk as a prison…
“Hey.” Chay’s voice was low. Husky. He lifted his head, gave her a long, slow kiss, then rolled onto his side. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?” He smiled as he propped his head on his hand and looked at her. “Are you cold? We never did get around to drying off.” He leaned towards her, brushed his mouth over hers, stroked his free hand lightly over her throat, then her breasts. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetheart?”
“Yes. Really, I’m fine.”
“I’d say you were perfect.” He gathered her close, kissed her again. “For a minute there, you looked so serious. Want to tell me what you were thinking?”
What she’d been thinking were the dumbest possible things. Postcoital blues? No, not blues. Postcoital nonsense. If the term didn’t exist, it should.
“Baby?”
Bianca touched the tip of her finger to his chin.
“Lots of different things.”
“For instance.”
“Well, I was wondering where you got this dimple.”
He laughed softly. “It’s a cleft.”
“It’s a dimple,” she said, “and where did you get it?”
He paused, but so briefly that she figured maybe she’d imagined it.
“From my father.”
“And this?” She ran her finger lightly over the bump in his nose. “I bet you weren’t born with it.”
“Nope. That bump is strictly man-made.’
“From what? Unless you can’t tell me,” she said, fluttering her lashes. “You know, if it was on some secret mission.”
He grinned, caught her finger and brought it to his lips.
“It was quite a mission, all right. But not secret.”
“No?”
“No.” He nipped her fingertip, then soothed the tiny bite with a kiss. “High school. Championship game. Fourth quarter. Tanner was supposed to pass to Roger Raintree, but he saw damn near the whole defensive line coming at him, so he threw to me instead.”
“Football!”
“Uh-huh.” He smiled. “The great American pastime.”
“Tanner was—what is it called? The quarterback?”
“Yup. I played tight end. Anyway, he sent that ball sailing over the heads of everybody, straight to me.”
“And you scored a goal.”
“A touchdown. Yes, I did—but on the way to the end zone, I met up with a guy from the Plains Pirates—the opposing team—who weighed seven hundred pounds.”
Bianca laughed. “Why do I think you’re exaggerating?”
“Okay. Six hundred pounds. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we won.”
“And you were…?”
“A Dakota Grizzly. Very imaginative, right?”
“You should have been called a wolf. Because that’s what you are. Big and smart and beautiful.”
His eyebrows rose. She blushed and buried her face against his chest. He rolled her gently onto her back.
“I like that,” he said. “Big. And smart. But beautiful? I think you’re looking at the wrong guy.”
“Beautiful,” she said emphatically.
Chay kissed her. Slowly. Tenderly, but with growing passion. She parted her lips, let him in, touched the tip of her tongue to his, and he gave a soft, sexy growl.
“Do you have any idea how it feels to have you in my arms?” he murmured. He kissed the hollow of her throat, kissed his way to her breasts, licked and then sucked on her nipples.
She could feel herself melting. Little sounds rose in her throat. Her breathing quickened. They’d just made love. How could she want him again?
There was no question that he wanted her.
He was hard again. Hard as a rock.
She put her hand between them and touched him.
He groaned.
“Do you like that?” she whispered.
He gave a broken laugh. “Too much. Unless you want this to end before it really begins.”
She loved hearing him say that. Feeling him surge against her hand.
“Baby,” he said in a warning whisper, and he caught her hand. Both her hands. Pinned them to the bed on either side of her hips. “My turn.” He shifted down over her body. Kissed her navel. Her belly. His breath was warm against her skin. “Do you like when I do this?”
Her answer was a sweet, sexy moan.
“That’s good,” he said on a soft laugh. “It’s absolutely the right answer.” His hand slipped between her thighs. “And this?” he said, all the laughter gone. “Do you like me to do this, too?”
His mouth followed his hand.
She reached down to stop him. “No,” she said quickly, “Chay…”
“I want to taste you,” he said, and her protest became a soft, keening cry as he put his face against her. His mouth on her clitoris.
Bianca cried out.
The room tilted.
Nobody had ever done this to her before. She’d never wanted anybody to do this to her before. It was—it was too intimate. Too intense.
Too everything.
She’d read descriptions, even viewed educational films, but, Dio, the reality of it, of Chay’s mouth, his tongue, his teeth…
“Come for me, honey,” he whispered.
His voice cajoled. Commanded. He was not giving her a choice—and she didn’t want one. She wanted this. What he was doing. What he was making her feel.
A cry broke from her throat.
She arched off the bed. Came on a hot rush of blurred colors only she could see, a swell of music only she could hear.
And when she said Chay’s name, he rose up and thrust into her, and the world ceased to exist.
• • •
Bianca came awake to darkness shot through with ivory moonlight.
The clock radio read four a.m.
And the bed beside her was empty.
She sat up, switched on the lamp that stood on the nightstand.
His clothes were gone too.
Except for the indentation on the pillow beside hers, her lieutenant might never have been there.
Her throat constricted.
She’d been right. Chay wasn’t a man who’d hang around for breakfast.
She told herself that was okay. That she’d known what to expect. That she had no right to feel lost—but she did.
She did.
Her eyes burned with unshed tears and for a heartbeat, she almost gave in to it, the feeling of pain, of emptiness.
No.
She had grown up watching her mother do that. Weep each time her husband left. Weep as she waited for him to return. Shout and scream and curse because his promises that the next time he would stay, the next time he would not be gone so long, were only that. Promises, ones he never kept.
At least Chay had made no promises.
What he’d done was make love to her.
And it had been magic.
Bianca rose from the bed, plucked her robe from the chair where she always kept it, pulled it on and tied the sash. She needed the bathroom and then some coffee—or maybe a glass of wine to make her stop thinking, keep her from slipping into self-pity.
She’d slept with Chay because she’d wanted to, wanted him more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life, and she’d known how this would end from the start.
Barefoot, she padded into the bathroom. Peed. Flushed. Washed her hands and headed for the kitchen…
The overhead light was on.
Her heart leaped.
It was on because Chay was sitting at the table, his hands wrapped around a steaming mug, wearing a low-slung towel and nothing else. His clothes were there, too, draped over the backs of her kitchen chairs so they could dry.
Privilege: Special Tactical Units Division: Book Two Page 14