“I wasn’t going to let you guys go without saying good-bye, you know. And I will be in touch, just as soon as I can.” He was still being mild, and that mildness killed her. Caused her actual, physical pain in the region of her heart. Because, she realized, it meant that he didn’t care that he wouldn’t see them anymore. Not nearly as much as Tyler would. And not anywhere in the same universe as much as she did.
“What are we talking about, letters from prison? Or, that’s right, Groves said you’d made a sweetheart deal with the government that’ll probably put you in witness protection for the rest of your life. So are you saying the plan is to give us a shout-out from your new secret life? Get real: you won’t.” Afraid she might be revealing too much about the pain that she was so unexpectedly experiencing, Sam broke off and turned away, throwing the rest at him over her shoulder. “All you have to do is lie to Tyler tomorrow. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Sam, wait. Come back here. Damn it.” Lunging after her as she stalked toward the door, he grabbed the trailing skirt of her robe and yanked. Caught by surprise, Sam stumbled backward and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Immediately his arm snaked around her waist, capturing her, hauling her back against him, holding her in place with her back against his chest. She was all too conscious of how nearly naked he was, and the knowledge made her pulse quicken. He felt warm and solid, muscular and overwhelmingly masculine. The scent of him—the faintest whiff of soap and toothpaste and man—was so familiar that it scared her. Her hands found his forearm, curled around it as if she would sink her nails into the firm, hair-roughened flesh in an effort to make him let go, but she didn’t. Pride kept her stiffly resistant in his hold, but she made no attempt to get away.
“What?” She turned her head to glare at him, and found that his face was just inches from hers. His dark eyes were so close that she could see herself reflected in them. His broad shoulders curved around her, solid as a wall and breathtakingly sexy. She could see the smooth texture of his skin, and the slight yellowing of his bruises, and the tiny lines around his eyes and each individual whisker in the new stubble that darkened his jaw.
Bruises and all, he was so handsome that just looking at him made her pulse quicken. Their eyes held, and a sizzling tension seemed to shimmer in the air. Chemistry, she identified it instantly, but then she realized that the sexual attraction that blazed between them didn’t tell the whole tale. In the brief time she’d known him he had become incredibly important to her, someone whom she’d come to feel that she could confide in and seek advice from and depend on. A friend.
More than a friend.
You should have known better, she told herself savagely even as the ache in her heart at the idea that she was never going to see him again intensified times about a thousand. How many times do you have to get the rug pulled out from under you before you realize that the only person you can depend on is yourself?
He was watching her. His eyes were dark and intent. His mouth—what was she doing looking at his mouth?—was way too close to her own.
“Have a little faith in me,” he said as he had once before. His hand came up to slide along her jaw, a little abrasive, very warm, keeping her face turned to his. Then, even as she glared at him some more, he leaned forward and kissed her. Softly, tenderly, devastatingly. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Her body started to tighten and throb. For a moment, a hard-won moment, she let him ply her lips with his but didn’t respond, knowing that the smart thing to do would be to pull her mouth free of his, to jump up and leave the room and banish him permanently from her mind. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was, she discovered, weak where he was concerned. Her blood heated and her bones liquefied and she gave in to temptation, gave in to the hunger he roused in her and that she could no longer resist. Slowly, slowly, she closed her eyes and slid a hand behind his head and kissed him back. The instant she surrendered he deepened the kiss. Electricity shot through her, making her shiver, making her burn. It was then that she knew that this was why she had come marching into his bedroom. This was why she had shaken her hair loose, why she had locked his door, why she was naked beneath her robe. This was what she’d been seeking, what she wanted, what she craved.
I’ve fallen in love with him. The thought was terrifying. As soon as she had it, as soon as she knew, she would have pulled back if she could have. But it was too late, impossible to do, because she was already lost in the hot sweet elixir of his kisses, of his hands sliding beneath the edges of her robe, of her own passion.
When his hand found her bare breast, covering it, caressing it, hard and warm and yet exquisitely gentle, the bolt of excitement that shot through her made her dizzy.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Panic beat in her breast like the fluttery wings of a frightened bird. You need to stop this now, because you’re going to get badly hurt. She knew it with an icy clarity that managed to surface even through the flash fire of arousal that was hotter than anything she had ever imagined. But the sad truth was, she wanted his hands on her too much. She wanted him too much.
She was going to go with it, and to hell with the consequences.
“You okay?” He must have sensed her agitation, because he gave her a chance, she had to give him that. He broke off the kiss, stilled his caressing hand on her breast, asked the question in a husky voice that, funnily enough, just ratcheted up the level of her desire. Because he asked, she opened her eyes and looked at him. So there the opportunity was: she still could have stopped, still could have stood up and walked away. But his eyes as she met them were hot and dark with passion, and his face was hard with wanting her, and she could feel the uneven rhythm of his breathing feathering across her lips. Instead of saying forget this, or shoving his hand off her breast, or even turning her face from his, she went all light-headed and shivery with longing and nodded her head yes in reply. And that was when she understood: she was going to do this because if she didn’t she would regret not doing it every single moment for the rest of her life.
Because this was the only chance that he and she were ever going to get.
“Make love to me.” The words spilled out of their own accord. But she wouldn’t have called them back even if she could have.
“Sam.” His eyes blazed at her, yet she sensed a kind of hesitation in him. She could feel his chest expand as he inhaled. Like he was struggling with something, like something was holding him back. She knew, knew, that he wanted to make love to her, with an absolute certainty that left no room for doubt.
“Don’t you want to?”
“No condom.” His voice was thick and rueful at the same time.
She appreciated that he would think of that, that it would make him hold off. In the heat of the moment most males, as she knew all too well, didn’t consider such things.
“It’s okay. I’m covered.” After Tyler, she had vowed to take no more chances. She had chosen a long-lasting method that didn’t require any kind of daily or on-the-spot usage. Not that she’d expected to need it, and not that she really had, but there it was, just in case.
“Oh, yeah?” She couldn’t tell if he sounded relieved or not.
“Yeah.” This time she didn’t wait for him to take the lead. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around his neck and fitted her lips to his and licked into his mouth, kissing him as if she’d been waiting to kiss him for all of her life. She thought he said something like, ah, hell, against her lips but she couldn’t be sure because her blood was drumming in her ears and her heart was thundering.
Kissing him felt so good. So right.
She loved the taste of his mouth, the feel of his lips on hers, the bold invasion of his tongue, the hot wetness of the inside of his mouth. She loved how broad his shoulders were, and how heavy with muscle they felt, and the warm smoothness of his skin beneath her hands. She loved the way he tilted her head back against the hard bulge of his upper arm and took control of the kiss. She loved the way he handled her, like a man who knew his way around women
.
She loved the way her body caught fire.
When he slid an arm beneath her knees and lifted her across him to lay her down on the bed, then leaned over her and parted her robe and took a moment to just look at her, she went up in flames. When he found her breast with his mouth, pulling the hard little nub that her nipple had become into the wet heat and taking his time with it before moving on to her other breast, she trembled and arched up against him and buried her fingers in his thick black hair.
When his fingers slid between her legs, she moaned.
“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He was kissing her throat, her breasts, sliding his fingers against the most sensitive part of her, making her legs part, making her pant, making her move for him. Her blood sizzled, her heart pounded, her body softened and quaked. His fingers were inside her, slipping in and out, teasing and touching until he had her mindless and clinging to him and begging, yes, begging, for more.
She, who had never in her life begged for anything.
When her eyes flickered open, just for an instant, she saw that he was looking down at her with a blazing intensity that made her melt inside. His hair was ruffled and his jaw was set and hard and his eyes seemed to scorch her everywhere they touched. Knowing that he was watching her reaction to what he was doing to her embarrassed her. It also brought with it its own fiery thrill.
“Please,” she whispered, eyes closing again, moving against his hand, so turned on that she could feel herself starting to spiral out of control. She was asking him to do her, to come inside her and get on with it and get the job done before she expired from need, and although she was still too shy with him to be quite so explicit she knew that he knew what she wanted, what she meant. “Marco, please.”
“Trey.” His voice was low and rough.
“Trey,” she repeated obediently, and then her heart gave a great, shuddering leap when, instead of giving her what she was pleading for, he kissed his way down her body until, finally, he replaced his fingers with his mouth.
Her eyes opened wide when she felt his lips on her, felt his tongue on her, felt him kissing her there. Senses reeling, she looked down at her own slender body, at the full, pink-tipped slopes of her breasts that were still damp from his kisses, at the sleekness of her stomach, at her pale, slim thighs that were raised now over his broad shoulders and the dark masculinity of his head pressed between them. It was the most erotic thing she had ever seen in her life, and it ignited a wildfire inside her that was like nothing she had ever experienced. The intimacy of what he was doing to her, the heat of it, the sheer, mind-bending pleasure of it, was shocking and incredible and so intense that she came just like that, digging her fingers into the mattress and crying out.
After that, she was wild and wanton, willing to do whatever he wanted, to let him do whatever he wanted. When he thrust inside her at last, she was on fire for him. He was huge and hot and hard, and just what she had always wanted. Woozy with helpless pleasure, she kissed him and wrapped her legs around his waist and moved with him as he took her with a carnality that had her writhing and gasping and crying out at the sheer wonder of it.
When she came again, it was earth-shattering.
When he came, with his arms locked around her and his face buried in the curve between her shoulder and neck, he shuddered and called out her name.
For a long moment afterward he didn’t move. Neither did she. She simply lay in his arms, boneless, mindless, totally spent in the aftermath of so much well-satisfied lust.
About the time that it occurred to her that besides feeling warm and solid and deliciously masculine against her he was also as heavy as a cartload of bricks, he shifted slightly, sliding onto his side just enough to take most of his weight off her and, she thought, his injured leg. At that point she opened her eyes. And realized several things.
The lamp had been on the entire time. The bed was bathed in a soft yellow glow that left absolutely nothing—like his big hand still wrapped around her breast, and his long, hard-muscled thigh that was still purple with bruises and adorned with a ridiculously small Band-Aid curved on top of hers—to the imagination. The covers had gone the way of her robe and his boxers, disappearing somewhere over the side of the bed so that they were both naked with no defenses. Her head was pillowed on the hard bulge of his upper arm, giving her a good view of most of his body. He looked even better out of his clothes than he did in them, all sculpted muscles with just the right amount of black body hair stretched over a tall, athletic build. His skin was tan all over except for his bathing suit area, and she thought it was supersexy that his small, tight butt—she could just see the uppermost curve of it—was a couple of degrees paler than everywhere else. And, oh yeah, even at half-mast as he was at the moment, the man was ridiculously well endowed. And when he wasn’t at half-mast—well, even exhausted as she was, she felt herself starting to tingle just remembering.
He had just rocked her world.
The bad news was, it wasn’t only the sex.
Impossible as it seemed, she had fallen head over heels, crazily in love. With a guy whom, after tonight, she was probably never going to see again.
To her dismay, at the realization Sam felt tears start to leak from her eyes.
“Sam?”
Oh, my God. His eyes were open and he was looking at her. She shut her eyes quickly, willing the tears to go away.
“Sam, open your eyes. Look at me.”
She didn’t want to, afraid of what he might read in them. The last thing she wanted was for him to guess how she felt. She didn’t think she would be able to bear it if he did.
“Sam?”
Okay, he wasn’t going away. Because the tears had stopped, because she was strong, because she could deal, she opened her eyes and met his gaze defiantly.
She was still on her back and he was lying on his side facing her. His arm and leg were still draped possessively over her. He’d snagged a pillow from somewhere and tucked it beneath his head. With her face turned toward his, she found herself looking directly into his eyes. At first they were heavy-lidded and slumberous, looking as sated with passion as she felt, but as they moved over her face she saw heat gathering at their backs and then they started to gleam. When they met hers a second time they were hot for her all over again.
“Great sex,” she said, proud of how cool and casual and gee-that-was-fun-but-really-no-big-deal she sounded.
“What’s the matter, baby doll?” He brushed a wayward strand of hair away from her face, smoothed the unruly mass that spilled over his arm.
It was the tenderness that did it. Nobody was ever tender with her. She was unprepared.
“Don’t call me ‘baby doll,’” she growled, and then shocked herself by bursting into tears.
“Sam.” He sounded as surprised as she felt. He gathered her close, rocked her against him, smoothed her hair, patted her as she wrapped her arms around his neck and wept. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. Talk to me.”
But she had nothing to say. At least, nothing that she wanted to say. Bursting out with I love you and please say this isn’t the end would be humiliating. Worse, it wouldn’t change a thing. So she shook her head, and did her best to suck it up, and then when he got done kissing her damp cheeks and moved on to kissing her mouth she kissed him back.
This time, when he made love to her, it was slower, more deliberate, but no less thrilling.
When it was over, she fell asleep in his arms almost at once.
Only to wake up to the sound of Tyler calling for her. “Mom?”
Struggling out of the warm male embrace that had her trapped, she kicked aside the blanket that had found its way over them at some point and scrambled off the bed. The room was dark. Trey—God, calling him that felt funny—had obviously turned off the lamp after she had fallen asleep.
“Sam?” He stirred as she frantically searched the floor around the bed for her robe. “What’s up?”
She couldn’t hel
p it. She had to turn on the lamp. Her robe was nowhere to be found. The sudden brightness made her blink. He propped himself up on an elbow, and despite everything that they had done together knowing that he was looking at her while she was just standing there naked made her self-conscious.
“Tyler,” she said, as if that explained everything, which for her it did. She was slightly surprised Tyler hadn’t called for her again. Had she imagined it? Because unless he had a nightmare, he didn’t usually call for her in the night. But it didn’t matter: she had needed to get up and get out of Marco’s bed anyway. Their sexy little interlude was over. Time for reality to bite.
“Want me to check on him?” He was blinking at her a little owlishly, obviously still half asleep. With his black hair mussed and his broad shoulders and wide chest bare above the striped blanket, he looked good enough to eat. A thunderclap of knowledge—this is probably the last time I’ll ever see him like this—caused a shaft of pain to pierce her heart.
No matter what, she wasn’t going to cry. Not over him, not over any man, not ever again.
“No thanks, I’ll handle it,” she told him, giving up on the robe to yank on the first items she found—sweatpants and a T-shirt that had been laid out on the chair in the corner. His clothes for tomorrow? Probably. He could find more.
Dressed, tightening the drawstring on the pants so they wouldn’t just drop to her ankles as they’d shown an alarming tendency to do, she took the few steps necessary to reach the lamp, and in the process found her robe, which had ended up almost under the bed. Too late, she thought, making a face at it as she clicked off the lamp. The last thing she wanted was a bright swath of light bursting out into the hall to pinpoint her location when she emerged from Marco’s room.
“Hey.” He caught her hand. A solid shape in the darkness, he was sitting up on the edge of the bed now. He drew her toward him, slid a hand in her hair, pulled her face down to his, and kissed her, a quick hard kiss that did screwy things to her insides.
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