by Alison Kent
Eric dipped his head, rubbed his nose over and beneath her earlobe, nipping lightly, then kissing the spot he’d teethed, finally blowing warm breath against the skin between her jaw and her temple before he whispered, “I’m going to show you what it’s like to make love.”
She could barely swallow past the lump of emotion balled tight in her throat. She was shuddering from the inside out. Her bones, her muscles, her skin. No part of her failed to respond to his words.
“Then I was right,” she managed to answer finally in a strained voice. “You do want to sleep with me.”
“What I want is to love you.” He moved his lips to the corner of her eyelid and lightly kissed her brow and her lashes. “I’m going to use my mouth to show you what you won’t let me use my mouth to say.”
“Sure thing, sugar.” And maybe he hadn’t heard the crack in her voice. “Whatever floats your boat.”
“You just won’t give an inch, will you,” Eric said with a chuckle, his lips moving along her jaw to her chin. He raised up to look into her eyes. “Busting my chops from here to Tuesday every single time.”
What was she supposed to say? Admit the defense mechanism kept her from getting too close? Kept her heart safe? Kept him from controlling any part of her life? “C’mon, sugar. You know you wouldn’t have me any other way.”
He toyed with the choker, his finger teasing beneath the fabric band. “I’ll have you any way I can get you.”
“Hmm. Is that a touch of desperation I hear?” Even if it was, she couldn’t deny the small thrill she felt at his words.
He sat back on his heels, braced his hands on his thighs for a thoughtful moment before yanking his tie from his collar. He next went to work on the studs of his shirt.
Chloe couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She hated that she couldn’t. He had a smile on his face, but still his expression seemed pensive. Shouldn’t she be able by now to better tell what was on his mind?
“Let me tell you something, Chloe.” He shrugged out of the tuxedo coat and pitched it to the floor. And now that his shirt hung open, exposing the muscles of his abdomen, lightly dusted with golden hair, he moved to undo his cuffs.
Chloe swallowed hard at the pure masculine beauty above her. She felt tiny and feminine and on the verge of losing an internal battle. “What do you want to tell me, sugar?”
“Two things, really.” He held up two fingers, then went back to working his cuffs. “First of all, I gave up being desperate the year I turned thirteen. Up until then, I’d held on to the hope that my mother would show up from wherever it was she’d disappeared to ten years before.
“But hitting my teen years was like hitting a brick wall. I had a great foster family. And desperately wishing for the blood family I was never going to have was making me a miserable little dork.”
He tossed his shirt to the floor and loomed above her, his widespread legs straddling her hips, his hands moving to the fastenings of his pants. Chloe was torn between watching his economical movements, his agile fingers, his belly being bared, and wanting him to stop and put what he’d just told her into an understandable context.
She had no grasp on this conversation.
“Secondly,” Eric continued, “you’ve called me sugar at least ten times in the last ten minutes. You do that a lot when you’re nervous. I don’t want you to be nervous. And I want you to call me Eric.”
He was going too fast. Chloe couldn’t catch up when he was moving this fast. She was still back on his blithely made comment about a foster home and desperation, and he was complaining about her habit of calling him sugar.
“Eric, wait.” She raised a hand, then scooted from between his legs and up toward the headboard. “Why are you telling me this now, here, in your bed? Why didn’t you tell me when I told you about Aidan’s visit? Or when we went to the movies and I popped off about showing your mother respect?”
He showed less interest in her confusion or in answering her questions than he showed in her feet, having moved both to his lap, where his fingers were now busy stripping away her shoes. “You accused me of being desperate. But what you call desperation, I call impatience. Desperation is an entirely different animal. That’s all.”
That’s all? “And the foster home bit? Where did that come from?”
And where had he learned to do that to her feet? Rolling the knuckles of one fist into her arch like that, wrapping his other hand around her ankle, propping her opposite foot against the bulge behind his fly.
She couldn’t help it. She flexed her toes. And Eric smiled.
“It came from the same place as the issues you have with your father. The past. But that’s not where either one of us lives. We’re living now.” He turned his attention to her other foot, massaging it in turn. “You’re wary of men. I understand why and don’t particularly blame you. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you lump me in with the masses.
“That’s not who I am, Chloe.” His hands slowed in their manipulation of her very tired feet. “The family who raised me for most of my life taught me better than that. They taught me acceptance, not judgment. I realize that I have to earn your trust. That’s part of who you are. And I love who you are.”
Hope and fear wrestled for dominance, constricting Chloe’s chest. “Who am I, Eric?” This was the one thing she had to ask. The one thing she most wanted to know. “Why would you want to love me?”
He placed the soles of her feet flat on his thighs and worked his hands beneath her skirt to her garters. “I guess I should leave out the obvious guy-type things, like that fact that you have the most incredible set of knoc—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Though at least that I can understand,” she said, as he rolled down her stockings and bared both of her legs. His hands were warm, his touch incredibly distracting. But this time, the ache in her heart was too powerful for the one between her legs to overcome.
“Ah, Chloe. Guys aren’t all about tits and ass.” He lifted a foot, kissed her instep. “There are a few of us who like a woman with a brain.”
He kissed her ankle, bit at her Achilles tendon. “We like it when she stands up for what she believes in, what she wants, and doesn’t cower when the bad guys try to mow her down. And personally? I especially like it when she doesn’t mind working up a good sweat on the volleyball court.”
He nibbled his way up her calf to the pit of her knee, his fingers slipping beneath her skirt and up her inner thigh. Then he lifted his head to stare into her eyes.
“Chloe, you sweet, beautiful idiot. I love the way you can make me laugh even when I want to strangle you. I love the way you’d go to the mat with anyone who threatened one of your friends. I love your ambition. I love your energy. I love the way you snore.”
He smiled at her widening eyes, then sobered. “I love that you don’t treat me like a dumb jock and, because you don’t, I’m forced to think and act like a smarter man. A better man. Don’t you see, sugar?”
What she saw in his beautiful blue eyes shattered the last of the shell surrounding her heart.
“I love everything that makes you who you are, Chloe Zuniga. Now.” He lowered her leg to the bed. His hands went to the tie holding her wrap skirt closed at the waist. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”
He pulled the ends of the tie closures through their fabric slits, separating the skirt’s layers of gauzy material until she lay beneath him, bared to the waist but for her garter and thong. And then he stopped, his gaze sweeping over the treasures he’d uncovered.
Chloe felt the urge to suck in her belly, but she didn’t. If Eric loved her for who she was, then she had to give him her honesty. She couldn’t hide any part of herself, including the vulnerability seeping in as he scrutinized her barely clothed body.
“You’re making me nervous…Eric.”
“Aw, honey.” He blew out a choppy breath. “That’s nothing compared to the way you’re making me shake.”
His near tremulous smile was alm
ost her undoing, and she closed her eyes for sanity’s sake. What she saw was so real, so full of Cary Grant promises. She wanted to be bold, aggressive, to demand he show her body the way to heaven again, as only he, among all men, could do.
But none of those hard-hitting attitudes that had long served her well were within her emotional reach. At this moment she felt nothing but tenderness, gentleness and a softly loving response to Eric’s attention.
And when he shifted on the bed, when he leaned forward and sweetly kissed the skin of her belly above her navel, Chloe had to squeeze her eyes even tighter to hold back the tears.
Eric nuzzled his way up her breastbone, pushing her blouse up over her breasts and running his tongue along the lacy edge of her bra before taking one nipple into his mouth through the fabric.
Chloe arched upward, pressing her head back into the pillow and lifting her chin as Eric sucked hard, pulling with his lips and circling her areola with his tongue. She wanted to tug down the cups of her bra, to free her breasts and guide his head to her naked skin.
But she kept her hands where they were, on either side of her head, one still holding her purse. She couldn’t believe she still held her purse. She tossed it in the direction Eric had tossed her shoes, then slipped her hands beneath the pillows so she wouldn’t slip them behind his head.
He wanted to teach her about making love. Which meant she had to let him take control. She had to surrender her mind as well as her body, and give him access to parts of herself she’d shared with no other man.
But now that Eric was urging her up and pulling her blouse over her head, she couldn’t think anymore, because she was nearly naked in his bed and he was so close and the look on his face was way beyond her comfort zone. She was seconds away from falling apart.
Eric tossed her blouse to the floor and, before he lowered her back to the bed, rid her, too, of her choker and her bra. The bra went the way of the rest of her clothes. The choker he held on to. And when he returned his affections again to her breast, he used the fabric flower to tease the other.
Her nipple, already peaked with arousal, tightened further as he drew the soft gathered edges over the tip. But he didn’t stop there. In fact, he replaced the gauzy flower with his mouth, rolling her nipple with the tip of his tongue and drawing the flesh of her breast between his lips to nip and suck and kiss at her skin.
The fabric petals he skimmed down the center of her body. Chloe shuddered as Eric tickled and teased her belly, exposed between garter and thong. He moved his mouth to her breastbone then kissed his way down the flower’s path. Coils of expectation burned feverishly in the wake of his lips.
By the time his mouth reached the elastic band of her panties, Eric had opened her legs with his hand. He teased the lips and mouth of her sex with the flower, brushing the choker over her plumped flesh covered with the thinnest layer of pink silk and mesh.
His attention was mind-numbingly gentle, infuriatingly tender, when what Chloe wanted to feel was the pressure of his body stroking hers. She’d never known the arousal of waiting, of hovering at the edge of completion, of being pulled back and dangled, unmercifully, above orgasm’s precipice. She was used to going for broke.
This was what Eric was showing her, even as he moved the flower down the skin of her inner thighs, from one leg to the other, until he reached her knees. He was showing her pleasure’s torture, how much sweet suffering her body could take. All the sweeter because it was Eric doing the torturing.
When he’d moved the flower from her crotch to her legs, he’d sat back on his heels, so his mouth had never made it beyond the barrier of her panties. But still, he had to know how wet she was already. The damp, musky, sugary scent was strong enough to have reached her own nostrils.
Suddenly, he tossed the choker to the floor, then stood to shuck off his tuxedo pants, leaving them both in nothing but their underwear. Leaving them both open and exposed beneath material meant to cover.
The crotch of her thong was barely wide enough to hide her sex. And Eric’s erection strained at the fly of his long-legged boxers. The material showed a ring of dampness from his early release. Dampness of the same sort soaked into her panties.
He moved forward then, one knee on the bed, then the second, slowly sliding up the comforter and between her legs. He placed his broad palms on either side of her sex, framing her between his index fingers and thumbs.
And then he leaned down and tasted her through the material of her thong. He flicked the tip of his tongue over her entrance, pushed against her hard center of nerves with his tongue’s flat surface. Chloe clenched her fingers into the comforter, clenched her inner muscles to keep from coming in his mouth.
He slipped one index finger beneath the crotch of her panties on one side and out the other, twisting the material into a rope and exposing her feminine flesh to the air and his eyes. The air was cool, but his breath was hot when he opened his mouth and warmed her with a stream of blown heat. Then he spread open her sex with two of his fingers and inserted his tongue.
Chloe panted, pointed her toes, flexed her thigh muscles and froze. Because Eric wasn’t finished. While he made love to her with his tongue, stroking deep, withdrawing, licking between the folds of her flesh so wildly aroused, he rubbed the twisted rope of her panties back and forth until she thought she would burst.
“Oh, Eric,” she whimpered. “Please.”
“Please what, Chloe?” He lapped at her again, chuckled softly when she shuddered. “You want me to make you come? Is that what you want?”
Her head thrashed on the pillows. “I want you. I want you to fu—I want you to make love to me.”
“Chloe, honey. I am making love to you.” He replaced his tongue with a finger, two fingers, three. He kissed her clitoris, sucked it into his mouth, then made his way up the length of her body to bury his face in the curve where her shoulder met her neck.
She turned her face toward him, kissed his forehead, shivered and seized his hand. “I want to feel you. I want you inside of me.”
Raising one knee, she leaned in toward him, hugging his body with her leg, since she was trapped beneath his weight. Her one free hand she moved down between their bodies, reaching as far as she could until she touched the waistband of his shorts and the swollen head of his penis stretching the elastic away from his waist.
“This is what I want,” she said, slipping her hand down the length of his shaft, so sleek, so smooth, so incredibly solidly strong. “I want you, Eric. Only you.”
He pulled in a strangled breath and rolled away and off the bed, padding barefoot to the bathroom for a condom. On his way back across the room, he pulled off his boxers. Chloe couldn’t take her eyes from his body, the long length of him, the hard muscles in his thighs, his lightly sculpted chest and the breadth of his shoulders.
Most off all she couldn’t look away from his flatly ribbed abs, his straining penis jutting upward and the sac of his balls drawn tight beneath. Her body wept with wanting him. And then he was there and he was crawling over her between her legs.
When he kissed her, she tasted herself, her salty sweet flavor mingling with his. He reached down and aligned their bodies and, in one smoothly controlled thrust, he filled her.
He filled her and continued to kiss her, moving his tongue in sex play with hers while his lower body pressed forward, pulled back, setting a rhythm that she matched with a measured lift of her hips.
It was the sweetest of matings, the gentlest loving Chloe had ever known. Eric took his time, patiently holding himself in check as Chloe’s fever rose. She dug her fingers into his tight buttocks, pulling him into hard contact when he insisted on a soft touch, urging him to press forward when he was content with an easy rolling pace.
So when the first jolt spiked through her, she wasn’t prepared. She was used to wildly reaching, not having completion unexpectedly steal her breath. It was the barest of tickles and it had no end. Spasms rolled like waves, one after another, drowning her in liqu
id sensation until she was gasping and spent.
Eric buried his face in the curve of her shoulder, buried his hands beneath her backside. His thrusts increased in strength and in speed, and Chloe followed him as he climbed toward release. He cried out, the sound muffled by her shoulder. But nothing muffled her sob when she came so suddenly again.
Together their bodies rested, comfortably joined for long, quiet minutes, until Eric rolled away, then drew her close again, working them beneath the bedcovers. Chloe heard his whispered, “I love you,” before she heard his even breathing and his satisfied snore.
She waited for his sleep to deepen before slipping out of his bed. He would be hurt when he woke up alone, and the thought of causing him pain after he’d given her such joy squeezed a tiny moan from her throat.
She froze, but he slept on undisturbed. More than anything in the world she wished she could stay, wished she could show Eric her love in return. But before she could allow herself that luxury, she had to make a break with her past.
If she didn’t, she and Eric had no future.
13
ERIC PULLED INTO the parking lot of Taco Milagro, having driven by on Westheimer and seen Chloe, Deanna and Annabel Lee walking out of the Tex-Mex restaurant.
He wasn’t going to question the coincidence, but he was going to take full advantage.
Since the night he’d made love to her, the night she’d walked out on him, ten days ago now, he’d called Chloe at home and at the office. He’d called more than once. And he’d left messages on her machine, her voice-mail and with her assistant.
He was tired of being blown off when he had something he wanted to say.
He’d told her he wasn’t desperate and, by damn, he was tired of looking like a liar. But her refusal to return his calls didn’t make it easy to look like anything else.
He knew he was out of wishes, but he still had one to make. If she turned him down this time then, yeah, okay. He’d accept that nothing was going to happen between them.