Closer to My Heart (12 page)

Lucas thought he was surely gazing down into the face of an angel. All of the torment and anguish and anger of the last two years melted away in the cleansing emotions that Jane drew out of him. She made him want to be a better man—the man he’d been before he took the undercover assignment.

She made him want to live for someone, for her.

To love again, laugh and have a future. He reached down to cradle her head, running his fingers through the soft strands of hair, his heart in his eyes. “Jane I—”
Oh, shit!

He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw as tightly as he could to keep from blurting out how much he loved her. Oh, man, he’d only known her a couple of weeks, but he felt it down in his bones. Jane was his woman. He knew he needed to wade it out, turn down the intensity for a while longer. Then he could let loose the true feelings in his heart without the fear of scaring her away. Well, that and he still needed to tell her what was wrong with him. What he’d done for the last few years.

Then she rocked his world. She sneak attacked him when his guard was down. Instead of easing into a great blowjob with delicate and playful licks of her tongue, she leaned in and sucked the head of his dick and half of his shaft deep into the vortex of her scalding mouth.

“Whoa!” he yelped.

Jane didn’t fuck around. She set a steady rhythm, rippling her fingers up and down the length of him and over his heavy sac. She stretched her two longest fingers so that they could lightly stroke the defined seam of his vas deferens from the bottom edge of his rectum to the edge of his testicles. The pull and release of her mouth nearly had him in a trance, but then she started swirling her tongue around and around—all while it was still deep in her hot mouth.

“Jane, pull back,” he said urgently. She didn’t hear him, and he was approaching emergency status.

“Jane!” he yelled. She jumped, but tightened her grip on his balls and he stiffened for a second. “Janie, damn it! I’m going to come. Let me pull out.”

She shook her head no and whimpered. She had been squirming around on her knees for a couple of minutes. In fact, the more inventive she’d been with her hands and her tongue, the more turned on she seemed to be. She could feel the push of his body towards release and moved her hand down to toy with herself. Lucas could see her elbow pumping up and down next to her hip and knew she was working herself over again.

Mine, mine, mine
echoed in his mind. But when he murmured it out loud—“Mine”—she said, “Hmm?”

The vibrations felt so incredibly good. He could feel his control snapping.

He knew he couldn’t dislodge Jane from his body without hurting her, so he just let go. He shouted through his release and when he was finally drained, she slid his dick—which was still remarkably as hard as granite—from her mouth, licked him clean and sat back. She delicately wiped the corners of her mouth and he noticed that her other hand had moved to rest on top of her thigh. He chuckled.

She smiled seductively. “That’s not what I had in mind, but it worked, huh?” She giggled.

In hindsight, it was probably the wrong thing to say. It was like catching the tiger by the tail.
 
Growling, Lucas grabbed Jane beneath her arms and tossed her on the bed. She squealed in delight and scrambled to get away from him. But he was a big, strong, healthy animal that was done playing around.

“Stop moving, Janie,” he commanded as he stalked her across the bed. His tone was deadly serious, but he did try to soften it with a smile. Well, sort of. It was more like a maniacal twisting of his lips. “I’m going to fuck your brains out and it’ll be worse if I have to chase you down.”

She stilled immediately and looked up at him like a rabbit caught in a snare. He growled again. She should be scared. She had worked him up into an uncontrollable frenzy and he was beyond manners and gentleness, and he was going to have to bear the brunt of his earthy possession now.

He sat back on his knees and grabbed Jane by the hips in one swift motion. He waited until she looked him in the eyes, and pulled her body down onto his dick in one violent motion. She screamed and he stilled and said, “Ohmigod, did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said breathlessly.

So he just wrenched her higher up on his hips so she was bowed completely off the bed. Her pelvis was in perfect alignment with his and he took uncivilized advantage of it. He pumped into her harder and harder, increasing the velocity of his pistoning hips to a blur. Jane let out a low, keening moan that continued as Lucas plowed into her hot core. She came so violently that stars burst behind her eyelids and her fingertips tingled.

Lucas let his own orgasm rip and yelled in triumph.

“Oh, God.” His arms gave out and his whole body rested atop the length of hers. After a minute, once his breathing was back in order, he murmured: “You know I can’t just walk away when Amber gets back.” He shifted his torso next to her so he wouldn’t crush her, and laid his head gently onto her chest. He cupped her face and placed reverent kisses on her cheeks and across her brow. “You’re mine now.”

Their affair had progressed beyond anything she’d ever experienced. She liked Lucas; he was a nice man, even if he had a private side that was driving her crazy with curiosity. He was incredibly smart, fun and sexy as hell. He’d burrowed past her defenses and gotten under her skin. He was like an invading army to her senses. It was a little scary, but mostly it was exhilarating. Jane decided she was in for the ride of her life, and she was game. Yes, she was definitely his.

She opened her eyes, swimming with unshed tears, and smiled at Lucas. She leaned up to place a reverent kiss on the top of his head. “And you’re mine,” she whispered.

“Janie, I—” he stopped himself before he blabbed out how much he loved her. How alive she made him feel. Instead, he smiled and laid his palm flat over her left breast against her heart. He sighed deeply and then he nodded. He drifted off a few minutes later.

“You never finished telling me about the new book.” Lucas asked her over a midnight snack of apple slices smeared with peanut butter and dotted with raisins. And best of all, chocolate milk.

Jane took a big swig of milk out of the glass they were sharing. Lucas had lit three pillar candles he’d found under the kitchen sink, which now sat on the granite topped oval kitchen island. They sat nude on the stools around the island.

“It’s about a little boy who loves to wear his red superhero cape, but as he gets older the other kids tease him about being a baby so Pete—that’s the little boy—stops wearing it for a while.” She finished off the milk and reached across Luke’s chest to grab the bottle of Maple View Farms organic milk. She loved that milk and the dairy was just a couple of miles down the road in Pittsboro. The best days were when she could make it to the creamery for an ice cream cone.

He swiped the bottle so he could pour for her. “Well? What happens to Pete—is he going to follow the crowd or go back to doing his own thing?” He popped the last bite of apple into his mouth.

“You’ll just have to wait for it to come out, won’t you?”

“Aw, come on Janie,” he whined. “Tell me now. Please? Pretty please?” He spun her around so she faced him. Then he inched his fingers up the insides of her sleek thighs, just behind her sensitive knees. Goosebumps trailed in their wake.

“Nope.” She laughed and shifted so she could spin her legs the other way. He let her go.

But the sobering truth to him was that he really needed to know if he could get his own red cape, the one that had been stored away for so many years, and figure out how to stand on his own. Be who he really was. Jane was a smart woman. Traumatized by her sister’s death and filled with guilt and sadness for the loss, yet she had found her way out of the void. Did she have it in her to help him out?

Lucas moved over to clean off the kitchen island. He wiped down the counter, put away the milk and washed the knife in the sink. When he was done he gave Penny a puppy treat and grabbed a piece of the broken American cheese slices Jane kept in the fridge and gave Pop Tart two small squares.

He moved around the kitchen with the grace of a large stealthy cat; a man used to moving in total silence. What could his life have been like before he came to North Carolina? What happened during those two years he alluded to so often? His body was tall and strong. Always so quiet and watchful.

While he was busy, she read the roadmap of his body. The small scars dotting his chest and forearms caught and held her attention, though a really vicious one on his right flank was harder to make out because he tended to turn it away from her. A long, thin white scar bisected his right shoulder, and a small explosive looking circle marred his left ribcage. The small of his back, around his kidneys, had a cross-hatching of thicker scars. And as usual, when watching his beautiful body, Jane’s fingers itched to trace his scars and heal them with her love. She was dying to ask more about his life, but he spoke first.

“Okay, then what about the other book you finished the night we met. What’s that one about?”

A sad, stricken look passed over her face. “That one, huh? It’s number five in the series. It’s a teen read—” he looked confused so Jane spoke over him before he could ask.

“That’s a book written for kids around 13, 14, 15. Not really active, rebellious teenagers yet but older than young children. There’s no pictures, and it’s a good opportunity to write in conflicts so the characters can be in control of resolving things themselves. It’s not really role-playing, but most kids play over the things they read in their minds. So, you know, maybe if they’re in similar situations in real life they have already played it out in their heads and won’t make the same bad choices of the characters in a story.”

Lucas looked impressed. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and leaned back against the granite counter, smiling. “That’s quite a change of pace from the superhero picture book, isn’t it?”

She slid off the stool and popped him on the rounded curve of his ass. “Come on. Let’s go back to bed. I’m pooped, but if you’re lucky I’ll let you make love to me one more time before breakfast.”

“Wait—you didn’t answer me. So why the broad range of ages?” He picked up the pace so he could throw his arm around her shoulder. He tightened his arm and tucked her tight against his side, where he liked the way she fit.

They got to the bedroom and Jane went to use the bathroom and brush her teeth. Once she was done, Lucas followed suit.

They crawled into bed and got under the covers. The cool sheets felt good against his heated skin. “Well?” he prompted.

Jane looked at him for a minute before she spoke. She was working something over in her head, maybe gathering her courage, and then she took a deep breath.

“Lucas, before I answer you I want you to tell me a little more about yourself. What was so bad that you can’t talk about it? I mean, the last two years that you mentioned before.”

He scurried out of the bed and backed away from her. “Whoa, Jane.” He tangled his fingers through his hair, pulling it at the roots and letting it go. It stuck out like Albert Einstein’s.

“
Shit.
I wasn’t ready to do that yet. I don’t suppose we could sleep on it, could we?”

Her shoulders drooped and she looked so sad that he almost caved. So he said, “Did you know that in the two months I’ve lived upstairs, I got more sleep than in the past two years?”