by Lora Leigh
He had never known, never understood how intimate this act could be. How it could feed his arousal, feed that deep, uncharted core of emotion he kept trapped in his soul.
It wasn’t trapped any longer. It spilled from inside him, filling him with blistering pleasure and acceptance. She was accepting him. Giving to him. Letting him inside her soul as he drew the tender bud farther into his mouth.
He drew on the hard, silky flesh, lashed it with his tongue, and felt his own body tighten in pleasure as her thin, sensual wail filled his ears.
Her fingers pulled at his hair, her nails kneaded his scalp, sending tiny pinpoints of fiery pleasure to erupt through his head before it exploded straight to his dick.
Dawg lifted his head, tore his T-shirt from his shoulders, and stared down at her for a long, intense moment.
As her lashes lifted, he watched the pleasure rising inside her, the hunger and needs, and keeping a rein on his own was almost impossible.
“Now,” he growled. “I need you now.”
Crista stared up at Dawg as his fingers hooked in the loosened waist of her jeans and began to draw them, along with the thong she wore beneath, slowly over her hips.
Naked, aroused, his eyes glowing with unsuppressed hunger and raging need, he looked like a vanquishing conqueror. All the warriors and warlords that the best romances wrote about.
But this wasn’t a story. It wasn’t a book, and it wasn’t fiction. It was the man blackmailing her into his bed and stealing her soul with his touch.
“Dawg.” Trembling fingers slid over his shoulders as she tried to force strength into her arms to push him away, to push herself away from the temptation.
“I dreamed of you, Crista.” The material slid over her thighs as he drew back. “I dreamed of your kiss, your taste. I dreamed of every wicked fantasy a man could have about his woman for eight years.” His voice strengthened as he tossed the jeans and panties to the floor, and his eyes sharpened with angry desire. “Eight years, damn you. One fucking night, and you didn’t give me a chance to make up for it. You didn’t give me a chance to prove you’re fucking mine!”
The snarl that drew his lips back held her mesmerized. Possessive, dominant. His eyes slid over her naked body, heating her insides and sending her juices spilling between her thighs.
Crista felt her head shaking, felt the denial born of a sudden knowledge that Dawg wasn’t what she expected. This wasn’t going to be an affair she could walk away from. Dawg wasn’t a man she could watch walk out of her life a second time and survive it.
“Yes, damn you,” he cursed, calloused hands pressing her legs apart as he slid deftly between them.
His lips lowered, stealing her protest and replacing it with passion and fire, with a whipping hunger she had no defenses against. As his tongue entered her lips, she felt the blunt pressure, the heated head of his cock pressing against the swollen folds of her pussy.
Tingling fingers of sensations began to play across her flesh. She froze beneath him. She remembered this part. Clearly, so clearly.
Her eyes struggled to open as she felt Dawg lever up, looking into his absorbed expression before she followed the point where his gaze had locked.
There, between her thighs. Her legs were draped over his thighs, spread wide, her hips angled to the thick spear of flesh pressing into her.
Crista watched as the wet folds parted, separating for his cock, hugging the wide crest as he pressed closer, penetrated the tender opening, and he groaned with hoarse male pleasure.
“So sweet. So hot.”
Crista whimpered as her body began to stretch to accommodate the impalement. She shook her head against the cushion she lay on, dazed by the pleasure beginning to build inside her.
No, this went beyond pleasure. It went beyond words that Crista could compare it to. It was like being the center of a flame. It was burning in rapture.
“Dawg…It’s so good.” She watched. Watched as the wide crest disappeared inside her. As aching pleasure-pain began to fill her.
“Easy.” He held her as her hips twisted, as she fought for more. A deeper stroke, a hard, filling thrust. “You’re too tight, Crista. We’ll go slow. Easy.”
“You didn’t before,” she whispered feeling the agonizing need clawing through her system as her gaze lifted to his. “Like before, Dawg. All of you. All over me.”
His hips bucked, piercing her another inch before he controlled the impulse. She didn’t want his control. She wanted his hunger. As frightening as it could be, as dominant and possessive as it was, she wanted it all.
Her hands lifted from the cushions her nails had been digging into. Lifting her arms, she arched them behind her head, stretched, lifted, then lowered them until her hands could cup her breasts, and her fingers could play erotically with her nipples.
“You were wild that night,” she whispered.
She had seen his desperation to separate dream from reality, and now some wicked imp insisted that she help him remember.
“How wild?” His gaze blistered her with erotic hunger.
“You didn’t hesitate.” She brought a finger to her lips, dampened it, then painted her hard nipple with the moisture.
His gaze sliced to the motion before pulling back to her eyes, hotter, darker than before.
His breath was sawing in and out of his chest; moisture clung to his forehead, his shoulders.
“It might hurt,” he groaned, easing back.
“It destroyed me,” she assured him. “Pleasure and pain.” Her breathing hitched at the memory. “And you were wild and hungry…”
Her head tipped back as a ragged, strangled scream left her lips at the penetration.
Halfway. He was buried halfway inside her, but he pulled back quickly, his muscles bunching as he gripped her hips and plunged inside her again.
All the way.
Crista arched to him, her hips jerked, writhed, undulated to the fiery stretching, the pleasure-pain and ecstatic sensations whipping through her like wildfire now.
“Like that?” He spoke, but he didn’t stop.
Hard hands held her beneath him, his hips thrust and churned, his erection plunged inside her, spreading the fire and sending it burning through her body. Across sensitive nerve endings, through her pleasure-dazed mind and back to the clenching, spasming muscles of her vagina as it struggled to hold him inside, to hold on to the sensations that built to cataclysmic proportions.
“Is that what you want?” he snarled, fucking her furiously now, building sensation on top of sensation.
Her hands latched onto his wrists as he held her hips, her gaze locking with his as she felt perspiration begin to roll off her body.
“Like this,” she panted, shuddering beneath him, her hands sliding up his arms, reaching for his face. “All of it. Like before. Just like before.”
Before, his lips had been at her nipples, his lips, teeth, and tongue ravaging the tips as his cock ravished her pussy.
And he knew. A hollow groan left his throat as he came over her, his lips covering her nipple as Crista became lost in the eroticism of being possessed by Dawg.
Hard plunging hips, the thick length of his cock, his lips suckling at her nipple, his hands latching in her hair and pulling at it sensually.
The band of tension in her womb began to tighten. Her hips flexed beneath him, arching to him as he fucked her with mindless hunger, took her with dominant strength.
She was possessed. Taken. Fingers of fire rippled and burned beneath her flesh, and within seconds the conflagration overtook her. The orgasm that tore through her had her crying out at the intensity of the pleasure that rushed through her system. It exploded through her; it ripped through the few remaining defenses around her soul as it released more than just the sexual tension.
She held onto him, her arms tight around his neck as she shuddered through each spasm of pleasure, felt his release tearing through him, and whimpered at the remembered sensation of his semen pulsing inside her.
>
The man was known for his paranoia with condoms, and twice he had forgotten while taking her. It was enough to terrify a woman.
As he collapsed over her, Crista let a weary breath leave her throat and felt her muscles become relaxed, slack. Weariness washed over her, and she gave in to it. Because it was better to give in to it than it was to think about exactly what had happened. Because if she had to think, then she had to remember. And if she had to remember, then fear was going to overcome her. The fear of losing her soul once again.
“Crista,” he whispered her name against her ear then. “Did I make it better this time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me the truth now.” He kissed the shell of her ear gently. “That first time, did I hurt you?”
Silence filled the room. Memories and regrets clashed inside her, tearing at her soul.
“More than you’ll ever know, Dawg. More than you’ll ever know.”
SEVEN
Dawg had learned years before how to read between the lines when it came to women. The survival instinct was strong, and as a boy he had learned that a soft smile and a gentle voice didn’t always mean a gentle heart. Just as he had learned that there were often a dozen different definitions to any one comment that a man could garner when it came to difficult questions.
Had he hurt her? He heard the flash of remembered pain in her voice, but the memory wasn’t of a physical hurt. He hadn’t forced her, he hadn’t taken her so roughly that he had destroyed girlish dreams of a first time. If her response to him in the living room was anything to go by, then she had hungered as much for him as he had for her over the years.
No, it hadn’t been her body that he had hurt. It had been something far more delicate. He had hurt her young heart and possibly scared the hell out of her when he spoke of bringing his cousins to their bed.
As he lay in his bed the next morning and stared up at the ceiling, he would have snorted at that thought if he weren’t more concerned about waking the woman now sleeping next to him.
Share her? He couldn’t imagine it. Even then the thought of sharing her had sent a spike of denial tearing through his chest, despite his stubbornness to remain dedicated to the extreme, raunchy pleasure to be had in the act.
And now? Hell, he hadn’t shared one of his women in years, despite Natches’s obvious dissatisfaction in his cousin’s recent lack of desire to participate in the games of their youth.
The truth had become obvious when Rowdy returned home from the Marines last year to claim his stepsister. Even as the sharing had begun to wane, Dawg and Natches both had been certain they had known what was coming. That when Rowdy returned, the need for the fun and games would return.
For Dawg, it hadn’t returned, though. He had seen the possessiveness his cousin felt for Kelly immediately. He had been amused. More understanding than Natches had been, but privately relieved. As much as he had once desired the little vixen that Rowdy was now engaged to, he found that over the years that desire had slowly changed. Affection and protectiveness had replaced the lust.
But the need for Crista had only grown over the years. Maybe he had understood Rowdy more than Natches did because Crista had been back in town when Rowdy returned, and Dawg had been fighting the demons that came with her return: the knowledge that he was missing something with her, that something had been taken away from him. And now he knew exactly what he had lost.
A night of memories. The knowledge of how she smelled, how she tasted, the sounds of her cries and the whisper of her desire as he took her. All the things he cherished about the sex act were missing from the night he had spent with her in his bed.
All he had were the dreams. Fragmented, broken, more tease than knowledge of an event that threatened to take his head off with the pleasure.
Oh yeah, he remembered that much. In his dreams, he remembered being consumed by a fire so overwhelming it had been all he could do to survive it. The same fire had ripped through him the day before when he took her downstairs on the couch, pushing into her, possessing her.
He should have known, he told himself as he turned his head to stare at her. All these years, he should have known that something had happened that night. If not because of Crista’s abrupt change, then because of her brother Alex’s.
Alex Jansen had become more mocking, if possible, and even more critical of the cousins’ lifestyles the same week Crista had gone from an emerging sex kitten in her flirtatiousness with Dawg to a cold, frightened woman running from a nameless terror.
Too young and too dumb, Dawg thought now. That was what he had been.
Which made him an even bigger bastard now in her eyes. His lips twitched at the memory of her fury the previous day as soon as she realized exactly how damned sexy she had been when he took her.
He couldn’t believe he had dared to blackmail her into his bed. He could still remember the shock in her eyes, the disbelief, the way she had watched him through the day as though expecting him to suddenly smile and declare it had all been a joke. Right up until she had opened her eyes, stared into his, and realized there was no chance to escape now that he had had her.
She was dreaming if she thought that was ever going to happen. Dawg had learned a lot of things in the four years he had been in the Marines and then the last four years training and working with the ATF. He had learned how to be hard. How to kill. He knew how to assess a situation in a single moment and make lightning-fast decisions that had saved his life on more than one occasion.
And he had known, standing outside that warehouse with Crista safely hidden in his pickup, he had known there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to come to his bed in any conventional manner. No, he would have to take the choice from her first, then work on making her forgive him for it.
He turned his head and looked at her now, a smile playing at his lips. It had taken hours to get her to try to sleep. She had spent the day pacing the downstairs section of his houseboat, railing and arguing and coming up with some damned good arguments as to why he was a class-A bastard and a disgrace to the human race.
Her last argument still had him holding back a chuckle.
“Alex is so going to kick your ass!” she had raged as he finally grew tired of the arguments, picked her up, and carried her to his bed. “He’ll have your balls for this, Dawg.”
As though she would tell Alex.
Alex most likely knew about the night they had spent together, but he didn’t know enough to want to kill Dawg. Eight years ago he could have done it. It would be a little harder job now, however.
She was in his bed, though. Still wearing her T-shirt and panties, but minus the jeans that had covered her slender legs when he pulled her up here. She might have been too angry to give him another taste of the heated arousal he knew she felt, but the knowledge that she felt it was still there.
He drew the sheet from her legs slowly, ignoring her mumbled little protest as she shifted on her back, one leg bending at the knee, the other stretched out along the bed.
A soft cotton thong covered her pussy, the material shaping itself over her mound and revealing the soft curls beneath. Dawg rarely liked that silky growth on a woman’s mound. It hampered his dining pleasure when he was going down on a woman. He wanted to taste her flesh, feel the responsiveness of each soft fold that hid the treasure beyond.
Those curls would have to go. Binding Crista to him wasn’t going to be easy. She was stubborn as hell, and she had already made up her mind that Dawg and his sex games were too far out of her league.
Because she was scared. He had seen that flash of fear in her eyes. That feminine knowledge that she had come up against something or someone that she wasn’t certain how to handle.
She would learn how to handle it, how to handle him, because the bottom line came down to the fact that he couldn’t risk letting her go.
The information they had on the female within the group of thieves that had stolen that arms shipment en route to the U.S.
Army garrison in Fort Knox was too similar to Crista’s description. There were no photographs yet, no one had managed to identify her, and Dawg was going to make damned sure that Crista didn’t get identified in the criminal’s stead.
He didn’t like the pinch in his gut that warned him that some bad shit was coming down the road. He could feel it, like a premonition. An instinctual warning that danger was moving in on his position like a bird of prey gliding over the valley searching for food. And Crista was sitting smack-dab in the middle of that valley, a tasty little morsel just waiting to be plucked into the jaws of whoever or whatever was moving in.
It had to do with these missiles; he could feel it. It wasn’t a coincidence that she had been there, but he couldn’t convince himself she was involved, either. He had found something else in the small house her parents had left her and Alex, though.
The freshly swept carpet had shown signs of traffic. He knew Crista; like most women she did things in a certain way, and he remembered Alex bitching years ago about how she always swept the floors before they left the house. She would sweep back to the front door, storing the sweeper in the hall closet before they left and leaving the carpet pristine and devoid of tracks.
Crista’s carpet had tracks in it. Tracks just slightly too large to be hers. Or so he tried to convince himself. They were subtle; he gave credit to whoever had made them, someone had tried to wipe them out, but they hadn’t completely managed it.
The tracks had started in the living room, just off the small foyer. They had walked through the living room, gone up the steps, and moved into her bedroom to her dresser, then to her closet. While there, Dawg had found the address to the warehouse tucked into a dark bronze blazer that had been hung haphazardly in the closet. There had been nothing else. Not a scrap of paper, not a stash of money, nothing to tie her to the theft of the weapons, other than that address. There had been just enough of a disturbance to allay his conscience in lying to his superiors.
Not that he needed to excuse that very often. He had a very high respect for the chain of command, there was no doubt; he was, after all, a Marine. But he knew that sometimes, some things needed a little closer investigation before he reported them. Crista was one of those instances.