Instinct arched her hips toward his touch. Her body burned and ached with need, but he avoided touching her most sensitive flesh. Two fingers eased her apart, finding her opening and rimming it with delicate pressure. A gasp escaped her lips, and she squirmed against him.
His erection pressed hard and hot against her buttocks, and she canted them so the shaft rode the crevice between. She reached up behind her to pull him closer, her fingers tangling in a mass of silky soft hair, surprisingly long and wonderfully thick. He resisted her attempts to guide him, making a soft tsking sound against her ear. His hand lifted from her breast, and he laced their fingers together, holding them together as he shifted, rolling to his back and pulling her over on top of him.
The blankets slid away, cool air caressing her erect nipples, chilling her fevered skin. He insinuated his legs between hers and forced her thighs to spread wide around his. She lay atop him, fully open to his touch, feeling the shift and play of his chest cradling her back. He purred again, the sound rumbling in her ear as he nuzzled it and planted kisses in the sensitive hollow beneath.
“Sweet,” he whispered, his breath another caress. The hand between her legs shifted, two fingertips pressing against her opening, sliding easily within. “Soft.”
She gasped and arched, trying to draw him deeper inside her, trying to get more of his intoxicating touch.
His mouth curved against her skin, and his fingers thrust suddenly harder inside her. Danice cried out. Her body clenched around the sudden invasion, the ripple of internal muscles making her shudder. She shuddered even more when his fingers twisted, probing deeper, scraping delicately against inner walls.
“Hmm, like that?”
His voice was a dark rumble that made her shiver above him. Or maybe that was his fingers.
“Just like that.”
He chuckled, and his fingers pulled away. Her hips followed him, greedy for his touch. He gave it back with three fingers, stretching and filling her until her breath caught in her throat.
“How about like this?”
She could only gasp.
He withdrew, thrust again, establishing a slow, driving rhythm. As in driving Danice right over the edge. Her fingers tightened in his hair, and she braced her heels against the soft mattress to get more leverage. It offered an infuriating lack of resistance, allowing her to sink deeper. She couldn’t decide if she should take the opportunity to get away or use it to press closer.
Her lover untangled his fingers from hers and shifted his free hand to close again around her breast, thumb flicking over the distended nipple, and that pretty much decided things for her.
“Please.” Her voice was a moan, a plea, a subtle threat.
He chuckled again, but his fingers drove deep into her softness, and his thumb rubbed tight circles around her clit. “Please, what?”
“Don’t…give me that…shit,” she growled, yanking hard on his hair. “You know what I want. Come inside me.”
She felt his hands still. For a moment, she wondered if he intended to leave her. His hand slid from between her legs, and she cried out, but he just shifted his grip to her sides. He lifted her enough to position himself, then brought her hips down, easing her closer as he pressed slowly and relentlessly inside.
She froze.
Breath halting on a ragged sigh, she stilled every muscle she could to savor the moment of his first penetration. She felt the burning stretch as he eased past her tight entrance, the endless, breathless parting as he tunneled deeper. Time stopped while he made a place for himself inside her, and it didn’t move forward until he hilted, every last inch of him gripped snug in her moist heat.
And, oh, but there were a lot of inches.
Her head tipped back against his shoulder, and her eyes flew open in the darkness. The lack of light blinded her, but she didn’t need to see when she could feel so damned well.
“This then,” he said, voice growling against her ear. “This is what you wanted. Me, inside you.”
“Yesssss.”
“Then you should give me something I want in return.”
Her teeth clenched against the rush of sensation as he guided her hips up off his shaft, then back down to receive his return thrust. “What do you want?”
His fingers tightened, hard enough to leave bruises against her caramel skin. “I want you to scream for me.”
He punctuated the demand with a jerk that forced her harder against him and butted the head of his cock against her womb. She didn’t scream, but she moaned, and he seemed to take it as a challenge.
Over and over, he lifted her as easily as a rag doll, forcing her to ride his shaft as he pounded his hips up against her bottom. Helplessly, she let him, their position preventing her from taking any sort of control over their primitive mating. All she could do was clench her fingers in his hair and moan, tightening her inner muscles around him on every thrust, milking him relentlessly. But those contractions affected more than her lover. They shuddered through her womb, making her hotter and wetter so that he glided inside her as if he’d been born to be there. She quivered and arched, her free hand closing around her own breast, kneading the flesh and pinching hard around her aching nipple. The rough sensation barely fazed her. It felt like a tickle compared with the driving, digging rhythm between her thighs.
“Not good enough.” His voice sounded rougher this time. Control was abandoning him as well. His breath panted, and he, too, sounded as if he spoke through clenched teeth. The thought made her smile smugly. “I said…”
His hands shifted, one sliding lower to get a firmer grip on her hip, the other reclaiming its place between her legs.
“…I want you…”
She moaned, the sound high and sharp, almost like a squeal as he spread her folds and found the hard knot of nerves at the top of her slit. She was swollen with arousal and sensitive to the slightest brush of air, let alone the brush of his fingers.
“…to scream.”
His fingers closed around the hard little nub, pinching firmly, and scream she did.
She came like lightning striking, all heat and energy and pyrotechnic glory. Her whole body clenched in a spasm of ecstasy. Her muscles closed hard around his invading length, squeezing until she thought she heard him cry out himself, but then she felt the hot pulse of his release, and she lost what little awareness she’d managed to hold on to. For hours it seemed she balanced on the head of a pin, buffeted by wave after wave of pleasure. Her breath came in gasping pants, roughening a throat already raw from her hoarse cry of completion, and every inch of her trembled as if electricity really did course beneath her skin.
She finally collapsed on top of him, limp and breathless. Her hand had clenched so tightly in his hair that it took a minute to convince the fingers to stop spasming and let go. She heard him grunt and felt the whisper of his breath against her ear as he wrapped his brawny arms around her to cradle her against him. She folded her arms over his, savoring his warmth and the thick ropes of muscle that had enabled him to move her so effortlessly for his pleasure. Fighting back a shiver of remembrance, she turned her head to rest her cheek against his chest and rub kitten-like against his warm skin.
Sleep came back to claim her, and she struggled briefly to fight it off. As comfortable and sated as she felt, she had that nagging feeling in the back of her mind that told her something was out of place. Something she needed to pay attention to…
Grunting, her lover stretched his hand over the side of the bed and returned with the forgotten blankets, pulling them up over their still-joined bodies. Danice felt her muscles relax even further and sighed. Maybe whatever she had forgotten wasn’t all that important after all.
He turned his head, brushing soft kisses over her forehead and her closed eyelids before he pressed his lips softly to hers in a tender, almost innocent, kiss. “Go to sleep,” he murmured, shifting slightly beneath her. “We’ll both still be here in the morning.”
Well, since he put it that way…<
br />
Danice gave one last sigh, snuggled back into his embrace, and let sleep claim her. Whatever she needed to do, she could always do it in the morning.
Seventeen
She woke the moment he stirred from their sleepy cuddle. Her eyes flew open and that “something” she hadn’t been able to remember last night became the only thought in her frantic mind.
Danice didn’t have a lover, but she did have hormones that went haywire every time they spotted a certain half-human hottie. Which meant that all her carefully laid plans about avoiding an entangling sexual encounter with said hottie had gone up in a blaze of lust. Great.
Scrambling off the pile of muscle and testosterone she’d been draped over for the last God-knew-how-many hours, Danice grabbed the sheet to cover herself and turned on the man in her bed. He watched her through wary eyes the color of a stormy sea and sat up, bracing himself with his big hands against the cotton-covered mattress. A waterfall of thick, golden hair cascaded over his shoulders.
Memory came flooding back to her. The last week of relentless stress, the search for Rosemary, the journey to Faerie. The unfortunate experience of being taken captive by a bunch of Amazon warrior women and locked in the stone-walled dungeon of some magical castle. But after that last bit, things started to get a little fuzzy. When the hell had they ended up in bed together? In fact, were they still in the small prison cell she remembered? Had there been a bed in there last night?
And where the hell were her clothes?
“Am I supposed to apologize?” Mac asked, his voice deep and rough with sleep.
“Yes! I mean, no. I mean—” Danice blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and groaned. “Those bitches who locked us in here last night are the ones who ought to apologize. But what do you suppose the chances for that are?”
Mac pushed himself back to lean against the carved wooden headboard. “I’d say…not good.”
She groaned again. “That’s what I figured.” She buried her face in her hands. “God, I was really, really trying to avoid this.”
A hand settled on her shoulder and rubbed gently. Danice took comfort in the affectionate touch even though she told herself she needed to pull away, to put some distance between them.
“Why would you try to avoid this?” he asked. “I’ve been fantasizing about it for almost a week now. Since the first time I set eyes on you.”
“Me, too,” she admitted before she could stop herself. She yanked her hair, hoping the pain would shock some sense into her. “But that’s no excuse! I hardly have sex with every guy I think is attractive. I’m supposed to have some self-control.”
“Clearly, you do. Like I said, it took me all week to seduce you.”
“I don’t know if you can call it seduction when you took advantage of me in my sleep.”
Mac dropped his hand, his features hardening to a stony mask. “Is that what happened? I took advantage?”
Danice shifted her gaze away uncomfortably. If she were being honest—with herself, as much as with him—she had to say no. The entire encounter had a dream-like feel to it, so that if she’d woken alone, she could have dismissed it as the work of an overactive and over-stimulated imagination. But she knew the truth: Mac might have initiated the sex, but she’d welcomed his advances. She’d been with him all the way.
Shame flooded her. “No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m as much at fault as you are.”
“See, I don’t think either one of us is at fault.” Mac reached out and seized the hand with which she’d begun picking at the embroidered duvet cover. “‘At fault’ implies that we did something wrong, and I hope I’m not alone here when I say that what I felt seemed very, very right.”
He lifted her hand to his mouth and brushed his lips against her skin. Danice shivered. The man could turn her mind to mush in about one-point-three seconds, flat.
“I don’t mean we committed some kind of sin,” she said, sighing, “just that it would have been better for both of us to keep this…this thing between us on a more professional level.”
He nibbled the tip of her finger, eyeing her over it. “Is that how you view us? As colleagues?”
Danice squirmed. She wanted to attribute it to discomfort, but deep down she knew it had more to do with the fire he was already stoking deep in her belly.
“Well, we are working together to find Rosemary.”
“True, but I hoped you had come to think of me as a friend. At the very least.”
He scraped his teeth over the skin between her thumb and index finger and nearly made her eyes roll back in her head. When she could finally focus again, she gave him The Look.
“Mac, I have lots of friends. I have never had semi-conscious sex while locked in a dungeon on an alternative plane of existence with any of them.”
“I think that just shows a lack of imagination.”
“Mac!”
Sighing, he reached out and grabbed hold of her, sheet and all, and bundled her up into his lap.
“Look,” he said, meeting her mutinous gaze with a level one of his own. “I realize that these are not the ideal circumstances for us to have taken this kind of step, but life happened, as John Lennon said, while we were busy making other plans. Frankly, I was hoping for an actual date first. You know, dinner, some dancing, a little necking outside your apartment. But this is where we ended up, and while it’s not precisely what I’d envisioned, I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry it happened.”
“You’re not sorry that Morag and the Ragettes took us prisoner and locked us in the dungeon?”
He squeezed her tighter. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, and that’s part of the problem. We shouldn’t be here talking about sex or us or whether or not we have a relationship. We came to his godforsaken place with a job to do, and instead we’re sitting here naked! I do not work naked!”
“And neither do I. But I think the problem here has less to do with us being naked together than it does with your inability to separate from your work.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
He shook her gently. “That’s because it is! We were locked in here overnight, Danice. What work on finding Rosemary were you planning to do? Were you going to check to make sure she wasn’t hiding under the bed? Search the bathroom? We were stuck here. I think that by default that gave us permission to put aside business for a couple of hours.”
Danice scrambled off his lap, taking her sheet with her. No way would she pace around this room naked in front of Mac. And she really needed to pace.
“That’s no excuse for losing control of ourselves. We should at least have been having a discussion. Planning our next steps.”
“In the ten seconds before we were knocked out with sleeping dust? Or after, while we were both unconscious?”
She shot him another Look. “Don’t be sarcastic. I’m saying that we both have jobs to do, and I, at least, am not the sort of person to forget that. At least, not usually.”
“I think that’s obvious, given how upset you clearly are. But what I’d like to know is what’s really making you so upset? Are you really such a workaholic that putting it aside for a couple of hours to get some sleep throws you into a tizzy? Or are you panicking over the fact that we had sex?”
Danice stared at him while her poor, overloaded brain tried to process his questions and come up with some sort of meaningful response. “Yes!”
Mac nodded slowly. “Okay, so there’s more than one issue going on here. I’m glad, because I wouldn’t like to think sleeping with me automatically causes a woman to lose control of her rational mind. At least, not once the sex is over.”
“Don’t joke,” Danice groaned, dropping to sit on the small wooden stool in front of the fire. “I’m really not in a laughing mood.”
“I can tell. So which did you want to deal with first?”
“Huh?”
“Which issue should we tackle first? Your stress over your job, or your s
tress over our relationship?”
Danice actually did laugh at that, which was odd, because she’d meant it about not being in the mood for humor. “You might think they’re two separate issues, but for me it’s all one big problem. I am a workaholic, Mac. I always have been. My job is the first priority in my life, so I don’t have time for a relationship, even if I wanted one. Right now, all my time and attention are focused on my work. I’m this close to earning a partnership.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, pinching them almost together to demonstrate. “I’ve worked for that for too long to let myself fail now. And I’m especially not going to let myself fail because I screwed up an assignment. So I need to find Rosemary and get her back to New York so I can finish my job.”
“Why?”
Danice lifted her head and looked at Mac. Was he crazy? Had he not been listening to a word she said? “I told you, this assignment can make or break my career. If I get this done, that partnership at Parish Hampton is in the bag. I’ll have it sewn up. But if I manage to screw this up because I let my attention wander elsewhere, they’ll probably boot me out the door without so much as a Have a nice life. I can already feel the breeze on my backside.”
“But why should that matter? You’re a talented woman, Danice. I can’t imagine you wouldn’t find a position at another firm almost immediately. One that suits you a hell of a lot better than Parish Hampton.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mac shrugged. “Just what I said. Frankly, I don’t know why you started working for those old boys to begin with.”
“Those ‘old boys’ happen to be the most prestigious firm in Manhattan.” She knew her tone probably sounded condescending, but she couldn’t understand why he was questioning this.
“Sure, the most prestigious and the most conservative. The one about which all the greedy, dishonest lawyer jokes are written.”
Danice drew herself up and glared at him. “I can’t believe you’d stoop to throwing that kind of stereotype at my head. Do you really see me as greedy and dishonest?”
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