“Do I look like Florence Nightingale?”
A smattering of freckles across her nose, a keen intelligence in her eyes, and a mouth that smiled as readily as it argued, she looked like exactly what would make him feel better. “I’d say a dead ringer.”
Sunny reached up and feathered her fingers along the outer edges of the bandage, her touch gossamer-light but still sending a shaft of want through him. “It’s swollen.”
“You have no idea.” One touch and he was hard for her. He tangled his hands in her hair, burying his fingers in its thick softness, and her eyes darkened at his touch.
“You’re staying,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She slid her hands along his neck and clasped them behind his head. “I’m still trying to decide,” she murmured huskily.
“I’ll buy you a Christmas present.”
“You think I can be bought?” Amusement gleamed in her eyes.
“I sincerely hope so.”
Her lips parted and her eyes searched his.
He didn’t try to mask his hunger for her. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He’d never felt desperate for a woman. What the hell was it about her that tied him up in knots? Who knew? He only knew he wanted her. Needed her. And he meant to have her.
She uttered a soft sigh and pulled his mouth down to hers. He kissed her like a man who’d stumbled on an oasis in the middle of a desert trek. Instead of quenching the fire raging inside him, the softness of her lips, the play of her tongue against his, the taste of her mouth fanned the flames licking at him.
“About that present…I want something nice,” she murmured against his mouth, sliding her hands over his shoulders. She caught his lower lip between hers and sucked gently, a long, slow pull.
“I’ve got something nice right here for you.” He shifted against her.
“Neanderthal,” she said as she rubbed against him, her eyes agleam. “Expensive.”
“Expensive?”
“Mmm. Think of all the money you’ve saved over the years,” she teased and leaned into him. The stiff tips of her nipples stabbed at his chest through their clothes. His cock stirred against her belly.
“How expensive?” He nuzzled her neck, inhaling the scent of her hair, her skin. She canted her head to the side, allowing him unfettered access. He slid his tongue along the soft flesh and she trembled against him.
Her lips found his jaw, her fingers the rigid line of his cock. “Don’t make me call you a cheap bastard again.”
She stroked up the length of him through his jeans and every ounce of blood in his body gathered there to experience the rush of her touch. “Expensive, then,” he said. Whatever she wanted, it was hers. At that moment he would probably trade his soul to the devil to have her.
He scooped her up and tossed her over his shoulder, her delicious ass next to his cheek, her breasts pressed against his shoulder.
“I’m perfectly capable of walking up the stairs,” she said, breathless but without any real protest as he strode down the hall.
She could say what she wanted to say, he’d seen the heat in her eyes and he’d guaran-damn-tee none of the men she’d ever known had carried her anywhere.
“I’m sure you are.” He took the stairs two at a time.
“I suppose I should again be thankful you’re not dragging me by my hair.” Her wry humor delivered in a sexy, breathless rush was heady stuff.
He smiled at the back of her knees. Even he knew that would be taking it too far. “I told you before, your hair’s too short to drag you.”
He walked into his room and tossed her onto the bed. He traced the delicate, elegant indention of her ankle with his fingertips and her violet eyes grew smoky.
“You know the deal,” he said. “Four weeks.” They’d talked about the four-week thing this morning, maybe yesterday. Sometime. All he could think about was the press of her body against his, which was now absent, her scent, the way she’d taste, the sound of her sighs, the reverberation of his name when she came.
“New day, new deal.” She smiled sexily from where she lay sprawled across his mattress. “No four-week plan.”
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. She’d misunderstood. “There’s always a four-week plan.”
She rolled to her side and propped on one elbow, tugging her sweater down where it had slid up. “Not this time. Any woman who agrees to that is either desperate or stupid and I’ve never considered myself either.”
Another woman would’ve begun to undress, would’ve flashed some skin to reinforce the issue. Dammit, why’d she have to be so contrary? And why’d he still want her with a throbbing ache?
Because Sunny was…Sunny. Unlike any woman he’d ever known before.
“You’re not giving me a choice.” He sent her a glare that left most grown men trembling.
She laughed, a low sensual sound that feathered down his spine like a lover’s touch. “There’s always a choice.”
“I’m the one making all the concessions.” No four-week safety net. A damn present, expensive at that, for Christmas. “What do I get out of this?” She arched an amused eyebrow. “Besides the obvious.”
A slow smile curved her mouth and ricocheted through him. “You—” she rolled to her back “—get to throw out the rules and know what it’s like—” she stretched her arms over her head, arching her back, her nipples outlined against her sweater “—to not be caged by four weeks.” She rolled to her knees and knelt on the bed, facing him across the expanse, challenging him. “You get to run free.”
* * *
Cade stood poised by the bed, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed, and time stretched like an eternity between them. Would her wolf turn and run away from her or choose to run with her?
He pulled off his shoulder holster, gun still in it, and placed it on the floor. “No four weeks,” he conceded.
Finally. Sunny felt as if she’d waited a lifetime to be here with him. The taser and mace joined the gun on the floor.
He stood there, unarmed. Sunny bridged the distance between them, grasped his black T-shirt in both hands and tugged it up his body. She stood on the mattress and he obligingly raised his arms. She tossed the garment on top of his weapons and quickly stripped off his bulletproof vest. She ran her hand over his bare chest. He looked like sculpted perfection but he was all flesh-and-blood male with rock-hard muscles covered in warm, satin skin. His heart thudded beneath her fingertips.
He grasped her hips, holding her in place before him. “Now it’s my turn.” He worked free the button and zip on her jeans. With exquisite, mind-numbing care he worked the denim over her hips and slid them down her legs. Still standing on the bed, she stepped free of them. Cade wrapped his big hands around her hips, bent his head and nuzzled between her thighs.
Sunny’s knees buckled at the wildly erotic sensation of his nose against her satin-covered mound, his lips mouthing her through the material. She held on to his sleekly muscled shoulders. Arousal dampened her panties. She knew he knew just how he affected her and she didn’t care. This was running free. Together.
“I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you on that billboard,” she confessed.
He eased her onto the bed, following her down, his eyes glinting. “And how did you want me?” He cupped her between her legs. “Like this?”
“Yes,” she managed to say, stroking the corded muscles of his back.
“Did you imagine my mouth, my tongue, my hands all over you?” He pulled her sweater up and off, leaving her in her bra and panties. He swiped his tongue against her collarbone and she moaned aloud. “Is that how you want me?”
She took him by surprise and pushed him to his back, straddling him midthigh. “Yes. I want to feel your skin against mine.” She worked his belt free and then unzipped his pants. She leaned forward and scattered kisses over his six-pack abs. “I want to know your touch, your taste.”
With impressive ease, he picked her up and moved her aside. That set her heart to
pounding. She was no lightweight and he’d picked her up and moved her off his lap as if she weighed no more than a feather.
“Then it’s probably a good idea for me to take off the boots and the pants,” he said, sitting up on the side of the bed. He made quick work of it.
He stepped out of his pants and his black briefs and turned to face the bed, his lips parted in a wolfish grin. Sunny’s eyes widened at the size of his erection. She’d always thought it was a line of baloney that size didn’t matter and it was all in knowing what to do with it. Cade was coming to this party double-armed. He’d definitely been blessed and she was altogether sure he knew precisely how to use it.
He knelt on the edge of the bed, his eyes glittering hot. “I want you naked.”
With a slow sensual smile she unhooked her bra and slid it over her arms, down her breasts.
He sucked in a breath and a ravening hunger slammed her at the heat in his eyes. She knew her breasts were small, actually she was more nipple than breast, her areolae were huge, but that suddenly seemed like just the right combination with him and that lean, hungry look.
He wrapped his hands around her waist and leaned her forward. He tongued her pale-pink nipple. Oh. My. God. Sensation rocked her. He rolled her onto her back and took her in his mouth, sucking on her turgid tip and she bucked against him.
He insinuated his leg between hers while he continued to feast on her breasts. One flick of his tongue and she writhed beneath him.
“Beautiful,” he murmured as he nuzzled the underside of one soft mound.
“They’re small,” she said.
“Honey, you’re perfect. These perky babies are never going to sag.”
She gasped and looked down at him. “I can’t believe you actually said that.”
“It’s a good thing.”
He caught her up in his lips and tugged, sucking harder and harder, her hips rising with each movement, her moans punctuating the air. Just when she thought she’d either die from want or actually come, he released her nipple. His breath rasped as harsh as her own.
“Turn around. On your knees.”
Recognition and anticipation shivered through her. The way of the wolf.
She knelt on the bed, still wearing her underwear, her buttocks thrust in the air in his direction. He slipped his finger past her underwear and slid it along the edge of her fold. Her world spun. His laugh was low, husky and arrogant. “Oh, honey. You are so hot and so wet. This excites you, doesn’t it?” He slid his large finger inside her and a low moan keened in the back of her throat. She pushed herself back against his finger.
“That sounds like a yes to me.” He withdrew his finger, grabbed her underwear in both hands and ripped them down the side seam. He pushed them aside and they fell drunkenly around her right thigh.
That was the mother of all turn-ons. He hadn’t asked permission, he didn’t apologize, he’d just ripped them off. How many times had she fantasized that?
“Sunny—” he murmured behind her. Her muscles clenched in anticipation at the crackle of a cellophane wrapper…
She instinctively spread her knees farther apart and dropped lower, looking over her shoulder and issuing him an age-old invitation.
He’d awakened something primal and instinctive deep within her. It was the call he’d issued the first time she’d seen him on that billboard. He was every inch the dominant male and she was his bitch in heat.
He entered her in one smooth, sure stroke, filling her until she thought she couldn’t possibly accommodate all of him. She dropped her shoulders, tilting her hips higher and he drove farther until he was fully sheathed inside her. They both stilled. The connection with him, to him, she’d sensed before she’d ever met him was complete.
He pulsed deep inside her and her muscles grasped him in an instinctive response. She fisted the comforter in her hands, every sense heightened. The scent of him behind her, the exquisite fullness of him inside her, the rightness, the union of more than flesh, the meeting of spirits. He began a slow in-and-out, give-and-take and she met each of his thrust with one of her own.
Wrapping one arm around her, beneath her, he leaned forward and she turned her head to meet him in a kiss. His tongue stroked hers, tangled with her own even as he thrust into her, filled her with his sheathed hardness.
Maybe it was the angle, maybe it was his size, all she knew was that something inside her was being stroked that had never been stroked before, emotionally, mentally, physically. Tension built inside her, winding tighter with each thrust.
She raced with him across a plain of intense, erotic pleasure, filled with a wild exhilaration and an underlying joy that radiated from her core as they began to climb toward a pinnacle. Higher, faster, harder until they reached the top together and the world shattered around her, inside her in a kaleidoscope of fragmented sensation.
Her first coherent thought came to her with a startling clarity. She was marked for life. Regardless of the outcome, regardless of the present or whether it was four weeks or four years or four lifetimes, she was his.
* * *
Cade wrapped his arms around Sunny. Lying on their sides, still connected, she nestled against him, her head beneath his chin.
Cade wasn’t sure what had just happened. Sex was not a new game to him. He’d played it many times before but it had never, ever been like what he’d just had with Sunny. It had been like running free and she’d been with him, with him in a place inside him no one else had ever visited, had ever known. It had been magical, like sunlight and pleasure and a state of being that he’d never experienced.
Fast on the heels of that realization followed an intense territorial possessiveness. And once again, he’d never felt this way about any of his other lovers. Was it because he’d never invested himself, never moved beyond the motions because he knew in four weeks he’d pack up and move on? Or was it Sunny? He suspected it was both. He had known she’d be complicated. He smiled to himself and pressed a kiss to the top of her hair.
“What?” she murmured, stroking his forearm where it lay against her belly.
“I’m thinking that I knew you were going to be a pain in the ass before I ever met you.”
She nipped his shoulder.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, more surprised than anything.
With the element of surprise working in her favor, in one smooth motion she slid up, disconnecting them, and rolled, sending him flat on his back, leaning over him, pinning him to the mattress. Amusement and challenge danced in her purple eyes. God, she was magnificent. “Funny. I didn’t get the impression I was a pain in your ass a few minutes ago.”
They both knew he could overpower her in a second. What had started out as light teasing shifted to intense in the span of a heartbeat. He knew he shouldn’t ask. He knew it was boorish and bad sex etiquette and all that stuff but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He couldn’t abide the thought that another man had felt the same magic with her. “Sunny, has it ever been—”
She cut him off with a finger to his lips. “No. Never with anyone else.”
She left it there. Relief flooded him. Not only had she never gone there with anyone else, she didn’t need to talk it to death. Halle-effing-lujah! “Good.”
She stretched out across his chest, propping herself on one elbow on the other side of the mattress. “I had some great news today. Cecil will probably drop the felony charges.”
She gave him a rundown on the sidewalk Santa showing up and the subsequent discussions.
“Cecil will drop them,” he said, absently twining a piece of her hair around his finger. “He may stretch it out a day or two to play with your nerves, but it’s an opportunity for him to look forgiving.” He was, however, damn glad the possibility of her doing jail time would be a moot point.
“He’s not one of the good guys,” she said. “I’m sure there’s something out there on him. I’m not a sore loser. If I thought he’d truly do a good job for the people of Memphis…” He sa
w it in her eyes. It wasn’t about having lost. It truly was a matter of her caring about the city and the people and wanting to make a difference. “I’ve been nosing around because I’m sure he’s not honest.”
That clenched his gut, and not in a good way. He cupped her chin in his hand. “The more someone has at stake, the more dangerous they become.”
“But—”
“I’ve got a private detective checking him out. My guy’s a professional. It’s what he does for a living. And he carries a gun. Let him handle it.”
Her eyes widened and then narrowed. “You hired a private detective? When?”
“The day Meeks put out that flyer.”
“Why?”
“Because my gut had told me all along that he was bad news. Then when he did that…I thought it was the least I could do.”
“Maybe I could share the information I’ve got so far, which isn’t much.”
He nodded. “I’ll give you his number and you can call him.” He traced his hand along her arm and she shivered beneath his fingertips. “Tomorrow.”
She smiled and leaned forward to press an openmouthed kiss to his chest. Her hummingbird sat on her shoulder. He captured her hand in his, noticing not for the first time the silver ring on her finger. A hummingbird drinking from a flower. Her hands were broad and capable with long, slender fingers. Her nails were well-kept but blunt and unpolished. He traced his finger against the ring. “So, you’re a hummingbird? What does that mean exactly?”
He hoped like hell it didn’t mean she went from flower to flower. Not that there was anything very flowerlike about him, but…
“If you’re really interested, you should look it up. There’re lots of Web sites.”
Yeah. It interested him. Obviously it was very important to her since she bore two hummingbird symbols, one permanent. If it was that important to her, then he wanted to know about it.
“I will,” he said.
“Maybe you’ll figure yours out,” she said with a secretive smile that made him want to ask more. But then she slid down his body and swirled her tongue around the base of his shaft, sending an instant wake-up-and-play-again invitation to his dick and he forgot all about anything except for her invite.
The Big Heat Page 11