Awakened (Intimate Relations) (5 page)

She cried out as his thrusts went from long and hard to short, fast, and wonderfully deep. His arms tightened around her as all her internal muscles clamped tightly around him, her back arched and Marc’s primal groan sent shivers racing across her skin. They collapsed together, the two of them in a wet and sweaty heap, trembling with the aftermath of orgasm.

She’d never experienced anything even remotely this amazing. Not that she’d had all that many lovers—there’d actually been very few—but having a mother who changed boyfriends the way most women changed their clothes had deeply affected both girls. Lola had been every bit as choosy, especially after one of her exes turned out to be totally psycho.

Now Lola had Ben, and Mandy hoped like hell she had Marc, because that crush she’d carried around with her for so many years? After tonight she knew it was so much more.

She didn’t want to risk their friendship, but she wasn’t about to give up on love, either.

*   *   *

Marc awoke with a start, and realized he’d fallen asleep in Mandy’s bed, which was exactly what he didn’t want to do. It was too dangerous. At least there’d been no dreams, but they needed to talk about what had happened, figure out a way to do this again that wouldn’t put Mandy’s safety at risk. That meant telling her everything, stripping himself bare. So that she would at least have the chance to tell him to leave, before this went too far.

But not tonight. She was exhausted. And he was selfish enough to hold on to the fantasy for just a little bit longer.

Carefully, he slipped his arm out from under her and rolled away. She came with him, wrapping her arms around him, nuzzling his throat, kissing his shoulder as she came awake. Then she was kissing her way down his side, pausing over his hipbone. Her hair tickled the root of his cock.

She hadn’t said a word, hadn’t made a sound, but he was rising hot and hard against her cheek when she turned toward him and unexpectedly licked the full length of his cock from root to tip. His hips bucked and he went from semi to full-blown erection in the course of a couple of heartbeats.

Mandy rolled to her knees and took him in her mouth. The firm pressure of her lips, the wet warmth of her mouth enfolding him as she sucked him deep and then slowly slipped back to the tip before sliding down again, was unbelievable. Looking into her dark eyes in the soft glow from the nightlight in the hallway, her lips stretched around the thick girth of his cock as she rhythmically glided her mouth up and then down over his length was a visual he’d never forget.

The other women, every single one of them, had performed oral sex on him, but that’s all it had been—a performance. This—what Mandy did—was something else. The intimacy of her lips on him, the way her mouth stretched around his thick length, the tip of her tongue sweeping over him when she reached the end and, holding him in her fist, used her tongue to lick across his slick, plum-shaped glans? Heaven.

She took him to the edge. When she cupped his balls in her hand and her mouth tightened around his entire crown, he groaned. There was no stopping a sound he hadn’t consciously made, but as he reached for her, she turned him loose, backed away, and grabbed a condom. Kneeling between his legs, she carefully placed it over the broad tip, shiny now from her mouth, and rolled it down his shaft.

Her touch almost took him over the edge. He’d been hanging precariously since she first turned to him in her sleep, but now he fisted his hands around the blankets twisted beneath him, and held on. Barely.

“I know in theory how this is supposed to work.” She studied the way the sheath covered him. “I’ve never done this before, so tell me if it’s on right. I’m not ready to be a mom.”

“It looks perfect.” He lay back. “For what it’s worth, when you are ready, you’re going to be a perfect mom. Now straddle me. You be on top this time.”

“What? No control issues? You’ll let me be in charge?”

He laughed. “Actually, I’m letting you do all the work.”

“I should have known you’d see it that way.”

But she crawled closer, planted her knees on either side of his thighs, lifted herself over him, let him grab hold at the base of his cock and aim while she positioned herself until she could just sit down on him. Only she did it slowly—much slower than he’d expected—forcing him deep, but moving at a snail’s pace until he was gritting his teeth by the time she settled herself against him.

Her feminine muscles rippled over his shaft, a subtle, rhythmic pulse of surprising strength. He lay there a moment, absorbing the feelings, the sense of connection that was so new, so unbelievably powerful.

Watching as his thick shaft disappeared between her thighs, watching the way her body spread and stretched to accommodate him, had been absolutely fascinating. Now, the almost delicate waves of tiny contractions—a precursor to climax, maybe a sign of her arousal—held him immobile.

“Thank you,” he said. When she cocked her head and sort of frowned at him, he couldn’t stop smiling. “It’s amazing,” he said. “The way it looks when I fill you up, how your body opens for me.” He focused on her eyes—such a beautiful shade of brown, yet they looked almost black in the low light. “I’ve never seen that before. I think it’s my new favorite visual.”

They both laughed as he raised his hips and bounced her a couple of times.

This time, the frantic edge was missing. Marc loosely cupped her hips in his hands and knew they had discovered a perfect meeting of two bodies. He couldn’t imagine ever growing tired of this, of Mandy, and yet, until he figured out the meaning of those horrific dreams, he saw no way to make this wonderful connection growing between them work.

*   *   *

This time, at least, he didn’t try to sneak out. Lying there with her head on Marc’s shoulder, her body still quivering, she turned to him, wondering if he’d fallen asleep.

He lay beside her, eyes wide open, his forehead creased in thought. Raising up on one elbow, she leaned close and kissed him. “What’s wrong, Marc? I’m lying here feeling as if my whole body is still soaring, and you look like you’ve just lost your best friend.”

He turned to her with a hint of a smile. “I did lose my best friend one time,” he said, referring to the five years Jake Lowell had spent locked up in a juvenile detention center for a crime he didn’t commit. “This is actually more difficult to deal with.”

She shifted until she was sitting cross-legged beside him. “Sex with me is that bad?”

He rolled over and sat facing her. “Far from it. Pretty damned wonderful. I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you that I can’t stay with you, here in your bed, overnight.” He leaned close and kissed her and then slipped off the bed before she could stop him. Searched for his boxers in the tumbled pile of clothes and slipped them on.

“I have to stay in my own room, Mandy. There’s a lot I need to think about before I can talk to you about it, but remember when I said there were things you didn’t know about me? They’re important things, and one in particular is probably a deal breaker.” He shook his head and stared at the open bedroom door. Then he held out his hand.

She took it. What other choice did she have? He tugged and she stood beside the bed, naked, but for all the attention Marc paid to her body right now, she might as well have been wearing sweats and a T-shirt. She followed him to the door. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, but there was no joy in his kiss. No sense of anything other than despair.

“Lock the door behind me. If I come back to your room tonight, don’t let me in. We’ll talk in the morning.”

She forced a small laugh. “What? Are you a vampire? A werewolf that changes at the full moon?” She shrugged. “The full moon is over a week away. Just a tiny sliver out there, now.” Except her voice broke on the last words. When Marc closed his eyes, looking like a whipped puppy, she let it go. Let him go.

She gave him a quick kiss. “Go,” she said. “I care enough about you to do what you ask me to do, even though it doesn’t make sense.”

He sucked in a ragged breath, stepped out of her embrace and out of her room. Then he closed the door behind him. It was a heavy door, very old and solid wood, but she still heard him. Figured he must be leaning against the other side.

“I want to hear you lock this. Please, Mandy? Do it.”

She turned the deadbolt, turned away, and walked back to the bed, but she crawled under the covers on the side where Marc had been. At least it smelled a bit like him. Maybe she’d even be able to pretend he cared enough to stay, except she didn’t think caring had a damned thing to do with his leaving. There was something tearing him up inside. Something horrible.

Did a woman who loved a man let him work things out on his own, or did she go to him, help him carry the load? He’d been adamant that she stay away. If only she knew for sure.

*   *   *

The last time he’d cried had been the day the bailiff marched his closest—hell, his only—friend, Jake Lowell, out of the courtroom wearing handcuffs. Marc hadn’t even made it to the car. No, he’d stood there in the hallway outside the courtroom and he’d cried like a baby. Cried for Jake, for the end of Jake’s amazing Olympic career, and he’d cried for himself.

The only friend he had in the world, the only person he’d ever thought of as family, had just been sentenced to eight long years at the California Youth Authority. Marc was terrified of making it without Jake’s steady presence beside him.

But he had made it. He’d survived and prospered, and eventually Jake had come home, almost three years early for good behavior, and he’d prospered as well. But this? This was something Marc couldn’t solve on his own, but he was afraid to risk Mandy’s safety by asking her to help him through it. Whatever it was.

He didn’t deal well with hopelessness. And with the image of Mandy’s concerned face in his mind, Marcus Reed, successful young entrepreneur and software wizard worth somewhere in excess of seventy-five million dollars, buried his face in his pillow and wept like a child.

*   *   *

Mandy stood it as long as she could—which probably wasn’t very long at all, even though it felt like forever—but when she got out of bed, pulled on her ratty old bathrobe, and unlocked her door, she knew it was the right thing to do. She paused a moment in front of Marc’s bedroom door and hoped he hadn’t locked his.

When she tried the handle, it turned easily, but the sounds coming from the bed were wrong. Wrong, but somehow not unexpected. She walked across the room, dropped her robe to the floor, lifted the covers, and crawled into bed beside Marc without saying a word. When she wrapped her arms around him, he turned and held on to her just as tightly.

He didn’t speak and neither did she. All she did was hold him. Whatever was tearing him to pieces, they’d figure it out, but there was one thing he was going to have to accept—she wasn’t going to let him deal with whatever it was on his own.

He was family. Her family. And he’d damned well better get used to it.

CHAPTER 3

He hadn’t expected the overwhelming sense of relief he’d felt when Mandy crawled into bed beside him and wrapped him in her arms. For a little thing, she was strength personified. It only took him a minute or two to get his act together, but she never said a word, not a thing, though her warmth and steady presence spoke volumes.

Finally he rolled away and grabbed a couple of tissues from the box on the bedside table, blew his nose, wiped his eyes and tossed the tissues in the wastebasket. When he lay down beside her, she snuggled close against his side, but all she did was hold him.

After a couple of minutes, he cleared his throat and spoke into the darkness. It was somehow easier with Mandy’s arms around him and her head on his shoulder. Peaceful, in fact, in spite of the visuals he’d never forget, the horrible sense he’d never be free of the nightmares.

Or even worse, proof that somehow, at some point in his life, he’d done something terrible. “When I was a freshman in college,” he said, almost as if he were merely telling a story about someone else, “I started tinkering with some software ideas. I was on scholarship to Stanford, but it didn’t cover everything, so I worked an outside job, too. My father had already lost at least two fortunes and was dealing with what he called ‘another financial setback’—which meant there was money for his playboy lifestyle and his scams, but not for my education. The stress of trying to keep up my grades, working nights doing website work for a couple of businesses, and using whatever time I could find to work on my own projects was killing me. My grades were suffering and I was falling apart.

“It was hard to see a logical application of some of the required courses to my overall goals, which meant the work just wasn’t getting done, but I didn’t want to fail because I knew I’d lose my scholarship if my grades dropped. I loved Stanford. I didn’t want to leave school.”

He turned his head far enough to kiss Mandy’s forehead. For whatever reason, that brief connection made it easier to talk. “Then I had a blackout, at least that’s what I think it was. I remember coming home from work around midnight and I still had to study for an English exam. Next thing I knew, it was hours later and I was wandering through a park not far from campus. I had no idea how I got there. I went home and slept, and flunked the test the next day.”

He sighed and Mandy merely held him tighter. “That was the beginning of my downward spiral as far as grades. I had at least three more blackouts that I recall. Once I sort of woke up while walking in Golden Gate Park. The last thing I could remember, I’d been leaving an evening class on campus, and Stanford is a long way from San Francisco. I have no idea how I got there. It was scary as hell, but I attributed it all to stress.

“Then the dreams started. Nightmares, really. Horrible nightmares where I heard a woman screaming, and each time I dreamed, I saw more. Her face was bruised, her blond hair matted with blood, but I couldn’t tell who she was or who was hurting her. I saw hands around her throat, and then the dream would end.”

He realized he was talking faster, starting to hyperventilate. Mandy hadn’t moved, except she was stroking his chest, her hand warm and comforting. He took a couple of slow, controlling breaths, enough until he got it back together.