“I think I’m okay for right now,” Max said. “Maybe for breakfast tomorrow. Kimchee eggs, mmmm.…”
“Oh ho! So you think you’ll still be here for breakfast?”
“I think you’re going to have a hard time kicking me out before the hot and spicy eggs, since I plan to be doing hot and spicy things to your body all night long.”
“You’re incredible.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Haven’t we discussed this before?”
Jules huffed out a breath as they finally hit the fifth-floor landing. “What I actually meant was, where do you come up with these lines? All I can assume is that they’re bad English translations of something smooth you heard in Russia or somewhere.”
“I’m shocked and appalled that you would dare to suggest I might not be completely original and unique in every way. I’ll have you know that I’m a very special snowflake, Ms. Cavanaugh. There’s no one like me anywhere in the world. I know, because I checked.”
“I believe you,” she said feelingly, stopping in front of a door at the end of the narrow hall. “The universe has a sick sense of humor, sometimes, but two of you? That would just be cruel.”
Max clutched at his heart and staggered into the door frame while she jiggled her key in the lock and bumped the door open with her hip. “Abuse! Abuse! Isn’t there some hotline I can call to report this kind of thing?”
Jules grabbed his wrist, her face bright with laughter. “Shut it, you! Or I’ll give you something to report. Come on, I’ve got neighbors.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her and twisted his wrist, just to feel her grip tighten on him. “Your neighbors aren’t used to you carousing in the corridors with gentleman callers at all hours, huh? Good to know.”
She tugged him into the apartment with her, shutting the door behind them and spinning him until his back was up against the solid wood.
“My neighbors are a nice little old lady who gives me rugelach every time she makes a batch, and a lesbian couple who run a design consulting firm out of their apartment. They get up early to walk their daughter to school. Do you know what time it is?”
Max savored the way she leaned into him, matched hip to hip, belly to belly, chest to chest, for a long moment before sliding one long arm around her waist. “It’s time to step away from the door and find someplace soft and cushiony, so I can make love to you the way you deserve. I like wall sex as much as the next guy—more, maybe—but right now? I want to lay you out and take my time with you.”
Her breath sped up, rib cage jumping against his. Someone’s heart was banging hard against Max’s chest, but he wasn’t sure if it was hers or his.
She still had his wrist trapped in her fingers, and without taking her eyes off him, she pressed that wrist back against the door beside Max’s head and stretched up the last inch to touch her mouth to his. Something about the gentle restraint of her grasp revved Max up like a Formula One racing engine, and the instant she opened her lips to him, he thrust his way inside and tried to devour her.
Gasping together, they stayed pressed against the door for long, lovely minutes, bodies rubbing slowly, lips and tongues stroking, teasing, playing. Max kept his arm around her slender waist, his hand flexing against the small of her back, and didn’t try to shake loose of her hot grip on his other hand.
In a way, he liked the security of it; if she had his hand, if she kept him where she wanted him, he didn’t have to worry about pushing her too hard and scaring her off. She was still a flight risk, he knew—something deep inside her didn’t trust him all the way. And that was okay, he could work with that. Trust could be earned. But not without patience, and patience was a thing Max hadn’t struggled this hard for in a long, long time.
So he let her keep him pinned when his instincts told him to reverse their positions and ravish her against the door. And he lifted his head from her soft, sweet mouth and said, “This is your show. Your house, your rules.”
Chapter 18
As always, Max’s kiss told her something new about him. He didn’t kiss like other guys, who all seemed to want to take charge and establish dominance immediately, as if losing control of the kiss would mean they were weak.
Not Max. Even when he was voracious, like now, with his tongue tracing patterns of pure fire across the roof of her mouth, it felt like genuine hunger—not a battle for supremacy. And when Jules melted into him, he backed off, his lips going soft and searching, trading control back and forth between them as easily as tossing a softball.
Then he said it.
This is your show. Your house, your rules.
Jules felt his words all through her, like the blast of searing heat from opening a hot oven.
The very idea of it soothed something inside her, something that had been there so long, she hardly remembered a time when she hadn’t felt the thin, cold trickle of helplessness. No matter how strong she got, how independent and in control of her life, there was part of Jules that had always associated sex with danger, fear, and struggle. She hadn’t let it rule her life, but she’d never exactly healed the damage, either.
But this. What Max offered her now? Was a whole new way to think about sex.
There was something indescribably empowering about the way Max was staring at her, his eyes burning with desire, but his body loose, relaxed—almost yielding against hers.
“Do you mean that?” she said, lust rushing through her in an overwhelming wave.
He tensed and released every muscle at once before nodding. His gaze never left her face. “Whatever you want,” he said. “As long as it ends with you and me together, naked and exhausted, I’m good.”
She had to swallow hard to speak past the picture that popped into her head. “I could go for that,” she said, before letting her heels touch the floor so she could step away from the support of his lean, hard body.
He made a sad noise. “Nooo…”
Jules couldn’t help smirking a little. “Wow, you need a quick lesson in how to take direction.”
“Hey, I reserve the right to comment on the proceedings,” he said quickly. “But you’re not wrong. I don’t do this often. Or ever.” He ducked his head for an instant, long enough to tell Jules how true his next words were. “I’m not really big on taking orders. It’s kind of a thing.”
Her heart went as gooey as sticky toffee pudding, while other parts of her got even hotter. His honesty was like a hook in her guts, pulling hard and demanding the same in return.
“I love that you’re giving me this,” she told him, rubbing her fingers in a loose circle around the wrist she’d captured out in the hallway. “It makes me want to give you anything. Everything.”
She heard the click of his throat as he swallowed. “So what are we waiting for?”
Her apartment wasn’t a studio, but it was close enough. Her bed was in a separate room from the living/dining/kitchen area, but the bedroom was small enough that once she opened the door, they only had to take one, single step over the threshold before they could fall onto the queen-sized mattress.
As drunk with freedom and touch and body heat as she was, Jules’s brain still managed to send up enough signal flares to warn her to glance around the bedroom, make sure everything was put away, nothing incriminating or embarrassing was lying around. Nope, it was as bare bones and utilitarian as ever. She only used the apartment to sleep in, really, so why spend a bunch of money on décor she’d never see?
One quick glance around was all she could spare before Max loomed over her, blocking out the rest of the room, the rest of the world, with his broad, wiry body.
She felt herself opening to him, her legs and arms falling lax and inviting him down to lie in the cradle of her body. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Max fitted himself against her, all muscles and hardness and vibrating tension against the softer lines of her liquidly passionate body.
Smoothing the hair off her forehead, Max looked d
esperately tender—or maybe just desperate. “Tell me what you want,” he urged her.
Without meaning to, Jules bucked against him, their hips sliding in an achingly good rhythm for a moment. He groaned and closed his eyes tightly.
The possibilities were endlessly tantalizing—she could ask to be on top, riding his thighs and splayed open above him. Or she could try something she’d never done before, with him behind her, both of them on their knees. Everything low in her body pulled tight and wet at the images that raced through her mind, every one like a hit of an illegal substance, sending reality, the past, the future, whirling away into the void of the all-consuming present.
And in the present, she was on her back in the comfort and security of her own bed, her familiar pillows and cotton sheets under her, and Max over her, gentle and demanding by turns, his strong body like a barrier keeping everything bad away.
Jules smiled, filled with certainty and a sense of rightness.
“This,” she whispered, reaching up to feel the solid planes of his back stretched taut with his effort to keep his weight from crushing down on her. “I want this, you there and me here and both of us exactly like this.”
His eyes darkened, pupils expanding and eating up the blue of his gaze until there was nothing but smoky black want looking back at her. “Can we be…” He paused, swallowed. “I need you naked. Now.”
“Yeah,” she said, getting a grip on his shirt and skimming it up and over his head. “Skin on skin. I want that, too.”
Max reared up on his knees, making short work of removing his shirt and tossing it into a corner. He helped Jules lean up on her elbows and worked her shirt off, too. He hesitated, but she reached around behind and snagged her bra closure, fiddled it open, and sent the scrap of cotton and lace after their shirts. “Pants, too,” she said, then gave him a challenging grin. “Bet I get bare faster than you.”
“Oh, it’s on now,” Max said, laughing and going for his button fly. There was a mad scramble around the bed, jeans and underwear flying into the air and smacking into walls, and then there they were. Both bare and exposed, kneeling on the bed facing each other.
Jules shivered. They were really going to do this.
“God,” he said, reaching out one finger to trace the line of her collarbone, then straight down over her sternum, in a hot line all the way to her belly button. “You’re so much more beautiful than I imagined. And I’ve imagined this pretty often.”
In a dim way, she knew she’d usually feel embarrassed by that, or that it would make her tense up and wonder if he was using a line on her. But those fears seemed to belong to someone else. To Jules, who fretted and worried and was afraid to live.
I’m not that girl anymore. I don’t have to keep feeding her fears.
Reaching out a finger of her own, she mirrored Max’s move, enjoying the satin warmth of his skin, the hardness of bone under her fingers giving way to the different hardness of tense abdominal muscles.
His flat belly tensed under her light touch, making her want to press harder, feel the muscles jump and quiver under her hand. At the same time, she was utterly distracted by the tickling trace of his fingers around the shallow indentation of her navel.
Max looked at her from underneath his lashes, a long, seductive glance that had her hand changing direction and heading south to where his erection speared up between them, thick and insistent. Jules clasped the base and gasped, knees weakening, as Max followed her lead and plunged his long, agile fingers between her thighs.
Collapsing forward to rest her forehead against his hard shoulder, Jules panted and tried to keep her hand moving while Max did wicked things to the most sensitive part of her body. He shifted against her, free hand coming up to wander her back, sliding down the ladder of her spine. “Come on,” he whispered in her ear. “I won’t break.”
Jules firmed her grip, and pulled up, hard, saying, “Neither will I. Ah!”
All oxygen was sucked out of the room when Max took her at her word and twisted his fingers up and into her, giving her pressure and fullness where she needed it most. Her hand on his cock faltered again, and Jules swayed, but this time she let gravity take her down onto her back amid the pillows.
“On me,” she said, reaching up to him.
Max looked down at her, his eyes hot and bright in the dimness of her room. “God, you’re so gorgeous like this. I never thought … this is better than anything I could’ve dreamed up.”
His words rushed through her in a flush of heat, and Jules was abruptly done with talking. She wasn’t as good at it as Max. She’d learned early on to keep her words safe inside, where they couldn’t get her into trouble. But she could show Max how she felt.
Pulling him down over her, she arched up into the muscled heat of him, the roughness of his body hair sensitizing her skin, his weight a solid, welcome reminder of how very not alone she was. They fell into a rhythm, writhing and pushing, his erection a burning brand against her thigh.
The room felt like a sauna, her bed sheets warm and damp against her heated flesh. Jules threw her head back, looking for a breath of cool air, her body strung tighter than steel cable. “In me,” she said. “Please.” Max shuddered and shook atop her, his hips stuttering out of rhythm for a moment.
“God, don’t beg. You don’t ever have to beg me. Plus, I really can’t take the overwhelming sexiness of it right now,” he said.
Jules’s head felt like it was filled with hot terry-cloth towels, and Max was still putting together sentences like that? He had some serious catching up to do.
Hooking one leg behind his thigh, she dragged him in closer and got her teeth into the taut muscle at the side of his neck. He made a strangled noise like a cross between a groan and a growl, deep in his throat, and Jules smiled against his skin.
“God, you’re so … Okay, that’s it. You’re in for it now.”
He kissed her before pulling out of her arms, and the bed dipped as he left it. Jules whimpered a little, the cold air blowing over her sweat-damp skin making her feel chilled. Hugging herself, her arms brushed against the high, tight buds of her nipples, which felt pretty good. She rubbed more purposefully—felt even better—and uncrossed her arms to palm her own breasts. Heat rose in her belly again; it hadn’t receded very far, after all. She could feel the beat of her heart pulsing between her legs, the wet flesh there aching and empty.
Twitching her legs against the sheets, Jules covered herself with the fingers of her right hand, touching gently. It was nothing like when Max did it, but it eased the ache a little, and when Max reappeared beside the bed, he made that choking sound again.
“Jesus. What did I just tell you about the overwhelming sexiness, woman?”
“You left,” she pointed out. Any shame she might ever have felt at being caught touching herself had burned itself out in the crucible of her body’s heat and her desire for Max.
“Well, I’m back now,” he said, crawling onto the bed and looming over her once more. “All suited up and ready to go.”
“Come on,” she said, straining up to nip at his lower lip. “I need you.”
* * *
Max would have dared any guy he’d ever met to resist Jules Cavanaugh at this moment. And that included Zen masters, Buddhist monks, and Vatican priests.
She was on fire, burning up from the inside, and Max could hardly wait to plunge into the hottest part of the flames.
It took everything he had to go slowly when all he wanted was to fall on her and touch every part of her, all at once, with every part of himself. He settled for stretching out on top of her, the way she’d asked, their legs and arms tangling and moving as they shuddered into perfect alignment.
His dick found the notch between her thighs as if drawn there by a magnet, and when she bucked up against him, he felt his latex-covered erection slide against the slippery wetness of her silky folds.
“Now, now, now,” she whimpered, the mindless murmur of her voice and the dazed heat in her
eyes pulling Max over the edge of rational thought and into a place where all that existed was the slip of their bodies against one another, and the pounding of blood through his veins.
“Now,” he told her, framing her face in his palms. He thrust home at the same moment as he took her mouth, swallowing her cry of delight greedily.
God, she was fist-tight, and hotter than anything he’d ever felt, even through the condom. He stared down into her lust-blown eyes and rocked his hips, nudging deeper into her and feeling her clench around him.
He wished for a moment that he could feel her with nothing between them, but he’d never in his life had sex without gloving up, and anyway, it barely mattered. She was so slick and open, so abandoned and responsive, Max was already fighting for the last of his self-control.
“More,” she said, bringing her legs up to wind around his hips.
The shift changed the angle of his penetration just slightly, just enough that on his next thrust in, he went even deeper, and they both moaned. Max felt something inside him straining to connect with something inside her, as if their bodies weren’t meant to be separate and he wouldn’t be happy until they were one.
He thrust harder, making her gasp and tighten with every stroke, his blood pounding out a feral beat his hips couldn’t help following.
And then she blinked those beautiful brown eyes open and said, “Max. I think I’m—”
Before she could finish the sentence, she threw her head back on a wail of pleasure, and her silky sheath clamped down around Max’s prick, pulling the orgasm out of him in an explosion of force.
Max collapsed against her, lungs seizing and body shaking with aftershocks. He couldn’t get his elbows to work right, so he rolled to the side to avoid crushing her. In the process, he slipped free of her body, and they both inhaled at the strange sensation of disconnecting.
Groaning, he hauled his ass out of bed to dispose of the condom. The room was a lot colder now that he wasn’t in a sex fever, and he stubbed his toe on the way to the bathroom. Shit, this place was tiny.
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