by Cindy Dees
For once, she was a little afraid of him and what he might be thinking. She’d been an idiot to throw herself at him. She couldn’t blame him for thinking the worst of her. Not to mention, he thought she’d thrown herself at him even though she was involved with Mark Sampson. He must think she was the lowest form of slut.
She sighed and rolled over, turning her back to him. She tried her darnedest to go to sleep, but it wasn’t happening. The realization that she was pregnant loomed huge in her mind. Was it a boy or a girl? What color hair would he or she have? Would he or she be small like her, or built more like his or her father? All of a sudden, she understood all those expectant parents who, when asked if they wanted a boy or a girl, fervently answered that they just wanted their baby to be healthy.
And then there was the show to think about. She’d love to do some of the songs she’d written. They were completely different than anything she’d ever sung, more soulful, more meaningful than the pop tunes she’d belted out a decade ago. But Saul was undoubtedly right. If she was going to make a comeback, she had to do what people expected of her. And that was the old Silver, hot and hip and naughty.
To think she’d spent the past seven years doing her level best to shed that image. And now she had to pick it back up again. How was she supposed to do that at the ripe old age of thirty? Heck, even Austin wouldn’t jump into the sack with her, and he hadn’t been near a woman in two years! She was never going to pull this off. It would be Harold’s last and greatest revenge on her for all the crap she’d pulled on him and that he’d never really forgiven her for. He was going to ruin her career once and for all.
She sighed. It was a mean thing to think of him. But she’d seen him exact worse vengeance on people who wronged him far less than she had. She honestly wouldn’t put it past him. Not unless he’d changed a whole lot recently. Was it possible that Candace’s death really had changed him that much? She had a hard time believing it.
Her thoughts in turmoil, she finally drifted off into restless sleep.
The sound of a baby—her baby—crying in terror jerked her harshly from her dreams, disoriented and frightened. She sat up wildly, looking around in the dark in panic. Where was her baby? Where was she? This pitch black room was not hers. The bed was too hard, the pillows too soft. And, good grief, someone was breathing smoothly beside her! Please God, let it not be Mark! She squinted down at the large form sleeping beside her.
Austin.
She sagged in relief.
And then it all came back to her. This was his bed. His suite. He was protecting her from whoever was trying to kill her. One man against unseen and unknown forces of unknown strength. She couldn’t die! Her baby deserved a chance at life!
So much for being relieved.
“Bad dream?” Austin murmured from beside her.
She exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
She looked down at him, and he gazed back up at her sympathetically. “I’m not surprised. You had a rough day.”
He had no idea.
“Breathe nice and slowly. Concentrate on long, even exhalations.”
Following his soothing instructions, her heartbeat slowed and her breathing returned to a semblance of normal. But the idea of lying down and going back to sleep, back to that horrible sound of a desperate baby, kept her sitting upright.
The bed shifted slightly beside her, and she glanced over at him. Wordlessly, he held out his arms to her. And without a second thought, she went to him, cuddling against his warm, solid, naked chest. She didn’t dare move any closer and find out if he was wearing another pair of those biking shorts of his—or not. The idea of ‘or not’ made her pulse pound. Hesitantly, she draped an arm across his broad rib cage. Springy chest hairs tickled her nose. She nuzzled her face against him, enjoying the sensation.
Man. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man like this. She really had withered and dried into a prune of her former self in the past few years.
“Comfortable?” he murmured.
“Uh, yeah. You?”
“Not particularly.”
She started. “Why not? Am I poking you?”
He sighed. “I’ve been in the field a long time, honey, and you’re not exactly chopped liver.”
“Gee, thanks,” she laughed. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s called me in years.”
“What do you want me to say? That you’re possibly the sexiest woman I’ve ever met, and I can’t help thinking all kinds of dirty thoughts about you and wondering what you’d feel like underneath me? That I’ve been lying awake here all night fighting like hell to keep my hands off you and wishing like crazy that you’d roll over and have your way with me?”
Something in the timbre of his voice told her he was being dead honest with her. Whoa. “Uh, that’s better. Much better,” she stammered.
Silence fell between them. What was she supposed to do now? Roll back over like she ought to and go to sleep? Crawl up his chest like she wanted to and kiss him senseless? He’d already told her that it wouldn’t work between the two of them. And he was absolutely right. But dang, she got tired of being alone, sometimes. She had so much on her plate right now and not a soul in the world to share it with. The least she could do was allow herself to scratch this particular itch.
They were both grown-ups. They knew the rules for these things. One night. Hot sex with no promises of anything more. Mutual pleasure. Mutual release. No more, no less.
A sigh rattled in Austin’s chest beneath her ear. “It’s late. You need your sleep.”
Desperation erupted in her gut. Their moment was slipping away. Like the coward she’d become sometime in the past seven years, she was turning away from going after what she wanted…from really living…again. “No!” she blurted.
Austin started beneath her. “I beg your pardon?”
God, she was an idiot. She was messing this all up. “I…I don’t want to sleep.”
“Uh, okay. You wanna talk? Or I can make you some hot tea?”
She squeezed her eyes shut in mortification. Where had the aggressive, confident young woman she used to be gone? She hadn’t even known that other Silver had disappeared until this man had barged into her life, challenging her at every turn. Heck, it wasn’t like he was daring her to bungee jump off a cliff. It was just the two of them. Mostly naked in bed already, and she still couldn’t bring herself to go for what she wanted.
He shifted beneath her, partially sitting up. “What’s the matter? Talk to me.”
A simple request. Just tell him what she wanted.
“I…I…” she forced it out all in an awkward, jumbled rush. “I want to do more than just sleep here with you. I want to get naked and feel your skin against mine. I want to be alive again. To take risks. To be brave. To grab what I want and not always be looking over my shoulder for someone to catch me or disapprove of me. I don’t want to care what they all think anymore. I…”
She sat up, looking down at him miserably. “I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”
“If I’m not mistaken, I think you’re asking me to make love to you.”
She exclaimed in abject relief. “Exactly!”
“All the reasons I stated before not to do that are still in place.”
“I know. I’m not asking for a long-term relationship. Heck, I’m not asking for any relationship at all. Don’t you ever…” she paused, searching for words “…just need to feel alive?”
“Yeah. I know the feeling. More than you know.”
The sigh that escaped her came directly from her heart. “Thank God.” She draped her arms over his shoulders and her body over his chest. “You’re gorgeous, you know.”
His hands roamed up her back, under his T-shirt she was wearing, neatly slipping it over her head. He sighed in satisfaction as her naked breasts came into contact with his chest. Profound relief flooded her. Maybe she wasn’t on the verge of dead and buried after all.
“You’re not so bad yourself,” he murm
ured.
She kissed her way across his chest, tickling her nose with his chest hairs again. “I’ve wondered what being with you would be like since the moment I met you.”
His hands came under her armpits and he commenced dragging her ever so slowly up his chest until his mouth nearly touched her breast. His breath was a tantalizing caress on her skin as he rasped out, “Ditto, darlin’.”
That made her laugh. “Really? Even in that stupid pink dress?”
“You could wear a nun’s habit and still be sexy. Demure isn’t a bad look on you. Not that much of anything could be a bad look on you.”
And then his mouth closed on her flesh, and she lost all capacity to form words. Wave after wave of sensation broke across her as his mouth traveled from one breast to the other, via the valley between, all of it thoroughly explored with his tongue and teeth.
When he surged beneath her she rolled with him, glorying in his weight as his lower body pressed her deep into the feather ticking over the firmer mattress below.
“You sure you want to do this?” he muttered as he trapped her wrists over her head and inserted a knee between hers.
She’d never been more certain of anything in her life. She ached for him from a place deep inside her, from a dry well of desire that desperately needed him to fill her, to replenish her. “If you don’t ravish me pretty soon, I’m gonna ravish you.”
He laughed richly. “Next time, you get to be on top. Time after that, I want to go back into that swimming pool with you. And that sofa by the windows looked about the right height to bend you over—”
She heaved beneath him, dislodging his knee and capturing the length of his male member between her thighs. She simultaneously squeezed and undulated, drawing forth a hearty groan of pleasure from him. He turned her hands loose and reached between them to skim a hand down her body, following the curve of her belly to where she held his flesh.
“Open for me, Silver. Let me pleasure you, too.”
Her thighs fell apart as she pulled his mouth down to hers. He tasted like cinnamon, spicy and hot on her tongue. His teeth clicked against hers, and she tilted her head, fitting herself more comfortably to his voracious need. She grasped at his mile-wide shoulders, reveling in the power of the muscles flexing beneath her palms. His control hung by a thin thread, and she reveled in her power to snap it.
But then his finger took a long, intimate stroke across her swollen, slick flesh, and she all but unraveled on the spot. There was no need to pretend pleasure with this man, no need to live up to her reputation as a wild child, no need to force the sex to meet some celebrity standard. This was real.
Shock broke across her awareness. After all those guys, all those casual flings, had she never found real sexual pleasure before?
His fingers danced across her skin, rubbing in maddening, wet circles that drove her out of her mind with need. His knee was back, anchoring her to the mattress, holding her in place for his explorations.
His blunt fingertip slipped inside her and her internal muscle clenched convulsively around him. The pad of his finger pressed forward, rocking against the wall of her passage, and sudden, hot wetness flowed within her. Her limbs went liquid, and her entire being narrowed down to needing him inside her. Now. Filling her with his size and heat. Riding her into oblivion.
She gasped, “What are you doing to me, Austin?”
He murmured against her mouth, “Pleasuring you, I hope.”
This pulsing desire, this building torrent of electric sensations dancing across her skin, this sense of impending explosion were unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. How could Silver Rothchild, bad girl extraordinaire, have failed to discover this for all those years?
“Do it some more,” she begged. “I want…”
His finger drove deeper within her, sliding in and out until she could hardly form words. “What do you want?”
“I want you inside me. I want you to feel this, too. I want to share this with you. It’s incredible!”
He rolled away for a moment, his finger never leaving her, never breaking that mesmerizing rhythm that had her shamelessly riding his hand, seeking more and more of that incredible pleasure building deep in her core. His chuckle mostly masked the sound of latex, and then he was back, using his knees to lever her thighs apart.
“Sing for me, Silver.”
And then he was over her and in her and around her, filling her so full she thought she might burst. Smelling of man and pleasure, gloriously heavy on her, Austin was all heat and muscle, driving into her with just enough violence to match her surging hips.
And sing she did. She cried out as an explosion of intense ecstasy such as she’d never dreamed of broke over her. Her vision went black as he transported her out of herself for a moment, and she keened her pleasure on a long, shuddering note he wrung from her very soul.
He froze, his eyes closed in a cross between bliss and agony as her muscles pulsed around him. And then he began to move again, his fingers reaching between them to rub the swollen nub of her overly sensitive flesh. In a matter of seconds, another orgasm clawed at her, flinging her against him in an excess of abandon in her search for release.
And this time, when it broke, he went over the edge with her, his shout mingling with hers, his flesh pulsing as hard and long as hers, his awed collapse into a state of complete, boneless satiation as thorough as hers.
Her mind was blown. Totally, irrevocably blown. His heart thumped like a series of sonic booms beneath her ear, and her own pulse raced double-time in sync with his.
He found his voice first. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” she managed to breathe. “Wow.”
“Did I hurt you?”
That made her laugh. “If that was pain, I want to be tortured to death just like that.”
“I think you killed me.”
That made her lift her head—a monumental task—to stare at him in the dark. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
He laid a finger across her lips. “I meant that as a compliment of the highest order.”
“Oh.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Do all guys get that much pleasure whenever they have sex?”
“I dunno. In my experience, there are degrees of enjoyment. On a scale of one to ten, most sex is somewhere between a five and an eight. But this…” A smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “This was a twenty-two.”
Relief made her feel even weaker. Thank goodness. It wasn’t just her. She would’ve felt like a huge idiot if she’d experienced her first ever orgasm—and her second—and it had turned out to be only average sex for him.
“Only a twenty-two?” she asked lightly. “Next time I’m aiming for a thirty in honor of my birthday.”
His chest vibrated with a chuckle. “I hereby place myself at your disposal for the effort.”
“Such a noble guy.”
A shadow crossed his face. “I’m not so noble. I needed the reminder that I’m still alive. Thanks for giving it to me.”
She stared down at him. “What happened?”
He didn’t answer right away. She wasn’t sure he would at all, in fact. But then he spoke quietly. “A couple weeks back I was guarding a guy. A would-be assassin wired with explosives blew himself up, and I barely got between my guy and the bomber. I thought I was a goner.”
The thought of Austin blown to smithereens made her shiver in horror. She wrapped her arms tightly around him. “Thank God you’re all right.”
He shrugged beneath her cheek. “It’s all part of the job.”
Suddenly, vividly, she understood exactly what it was he did. He threw himself in the path of death for a living. “How can you do that?” she exclaimed.
“Do what?”
“Throw yourself in front of bombs? That’s insane!” She lifted her head to stare down at him, to communicate to him the absurdity of such behavior. He had to stop. She couldn’t lose him! Not like that.
He stared up at her, a perplexed look
on his face. “Somebody’s got to do the job.”
“But it doesn’t have to be you. Let someone else do it!”
“I’ve got the training and I’m the best.”
“Stop being the best, then. Can’t you retire or something?”
He dumped her on her back and loomed over her, leaning on one elbow and staring down at her. “What’s gotten into you?”
She couldn’t exactly tell him he was the first guy who’d ever given her an orgasm and she was desperate for him to stick around and do that some more. A lot more. She stammered, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
He smiled broadly. “Thanks.”
She swatted his upper arm. “It’s not a joke.”
“You’re right. It’s not. And I’ve got a busted eardrum to show for it.”
Ahh. The left ear he was prone to tugging on.
“Why don’t you quit?” she asked reasonably.
“I like what I do.”
“You like it?”
“Yeah. I give people peace of mind. Safety. Hell, I give them their lives. That’s a pretty cool gift to give someone, don’t you think?”
Almost as cool as multiple orgasms. All right. More cool, dammit. She was being selfish. But in her defense, her motives weren’t all self-centered. He was an incredible man, and it would be a tragedy if something bad happened to him.
He interrupted her turbulent thoughts. “And I’ll keep you safe and alive, too. I promise.”
That’s what she was afraid of. How could she ever live with herself if he came to harm on her watch? “Don’t you dare die on me. I’ll never forgive you if you do.”
“If I die, I’m not likely to much care whether or not you forgive me.”
“I’ll haunt you,” she threatened.
“Well, then.” Chuckling, he leaned down until his mouth nearly touched hers. “By all means, I’ll do my best not to die on you. Not tonight, at least. You still owe me a skinny-dip.”