Mr. Personality (25 page)

Still saying little, he opened the door and they went inside.

“Well,” she said airily, self-conscious all at once, “I guess I’ll get on with the typing.”

His keys still in his hands, Max pushed the door shut, his dark eyes on her face, his body seeming tensed with the electricity between them. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Not sure what to say all the sudden, she pivoted away and went into the office.

Watching her go, Max muttered something inaudible and walked away toward the stairs as if he could flee his own internal disarray. The woman did things to him.

How could he be so damned distracted by her and yet her presence set his working mind afire? All he wanted to do was screw her and then write furiously for hours before screwing her again. Even food and water were negotiable beside what felt like his primeval need for her.

Shouldn’t he be upset at having talked about the mess with Alexa? He’d answered Nicole’s questions with an honesty that was surprisingly painless. Her fault, this change in him? Probably. Why wasn’t he appalled at her effect on him? That she even had an effect on him. In truth, he was scared, but like a child drawn to fire, he couldn’t help enjoying the heat.

It was crazy, but having her there with him at Ryan’s ball game felt good. He kept struggling with a crazy impulse to lean on her strength. Smaller and less physically powerful, she still embodied strength to him. Undoubtedly, she was better at these kinds of interactions than was he. Seeing his brother made him anxious and edgy. But it had gone well and Max knew having Nicole with him had made it easier.

How could one woman make things easier and yet more complicated? And how could he dull the gnawing ache he felt for her? The sensations never seemed to leave him now. The hunger to touch her and kiss her sweet mouth.

Max climbed the stairs to his bedroom level. He considered returning to where his writing pads lie scattered before his bedroom window. Instead, he turned and went into his workout space across the hall. Maybe lifting weights awhile would burn off some of his sexual energy. At least, enough to help him get the torrent of ideas bouncing in his head to settle down on paper.

An hour later, muscles tired and relaxed, he emerged from his shower in the big bathroom that gave onto his sleeping area. One towel knotted around his waist, he absently dried his hair with another as he walked into the bedroom to dress.

Coming through the door, he halted abruptly.

There reclining on his raised bed was Nicole, completely naked.

His mouth going dry as his throat constricted, he could say nothing, but his body betrayed him. Stiffening, his guileless member eagerly prepared for her, instantly tenting the towel around his waist.

The smile on Nicole’s face was wide, but tremulous and he could see the intensity in her eyes.

“Come here,” she said huskily.

No thought of denying her entered his consciousness. She was here, erotic and available. Eager even, for the very contact he urgently craved.

Why she was offering herself up to him now, he didn’t know. He should care, but he couldn’t. He’d been fighting his own lust for her for so long.

Crossing the wide space between them, Max gave his short hair a last tousle and dropped the towel to the floor. His gaze melding with hers, he loosened the terry cloth at his waist and let it fall as well.

Mounting the dais that held his raised bed, he stood at the foot, looking down at her glorious nakedness, the creamy satin of her skin, her rounded breasts and peaked nipples.

The power of speech having almost deserted him, he croaked, “Are you sure?”

“I…want you,” she said in that same husky tone.

His heart seemed to hesitate before firing into a rapid rhythm. Whatever considerations his rational mind might have had did not register at this moment.

Putting his hand out, Max stroked the arch of her naked foot, his fingers circling her slender ankle before rising up along a sleek, firm calf. Objectivity cast aside in the welter of his rioting senses, Max crawled onto the bed with her and lie down next to her.

His mouth sank onto hers as his hands caressed her cool golden flesh. Her strong, yet delicate back, the wonderfully feminine curve of her naked hip flaring from her waist. Tongues meeting and withdrawing, their breath mingled. Nicole sighed as he pulled her closer, her smooth thighs brushing his, her breasts erotically soft against his naked chest.

Attempting to quell his raging hunger, Max set about mapping her riches. He wanted to devour her lush body. The sweet spot where her neck joined her shoulder, the hollow beneath her collar bone. While his hands smoothed and traced the tautness of her thighs, his mouth suckled at her berry-tipped breasts. He supped on her, drawing her rigid nipples into his mouth, sweeping his palm over the sweetly curved width of her hips. Every inch of her a treasure, he lost himself in the wonders, growing harder and harder with each passing second.

She smelled of hunger and honesty, of a kind of open sensuality that rocked him to his soul. When he nudged her knees, she rolled onto her back and splayed herself for him. And her hands, God, her hands. All the while, she touched him. Touching his chest, his stomach and his thighs, taut with the effort of controlling himself. Her mouth open and eager beneath his, her breath urgent, she found and stroked his erection.

So overpowering was the sensation of her palm wrapped around him that he, gasping, had to withdraw himself.

“Wait. Wait a moment,” he growled, delving gently between her legs. Her wet folds promised the heaven he craved. To be drawn in and held by her, to feel himself cradled in the depths of her body. Pausing there between her legs, Max traced her delicate dampness, his own hunger rising with her mewling response. So eager, so needy for him. Feeling the urgent pounding in his groin, he let his fingers inventory her silken treasure. Her trembling thighs, the sweet, swollen labia, the small, hard kernel of her clitoris.

Bending forward to suckle again at her ripe breasts, he knelt before her, feeling weak and incredibly powerful in the same moment. They were both weak before the cataclysm of their flesh. On her back in the middle of his bed, her knees bent and open to him, she held him captive. The lure of her wanton arousal kept every particle of his attention. For him, this woman writhed and moaned. She craved his touch, yearning to know again his member cleaving the aching void in her. No power on earth could dissuade him from joining his body with hers.

His mouth joined with hers, a hand stroking and brushing her nipples, he toyed with her wet heat, entranced with the slippery, welcoming orifice. So lost was he in the sensation of her beneath his touch, he didn’t realize her intent until she reached for him and pressed his member against her cleft.

With a groan, he sank into her. Slowly, they merged, her body engulfing him. He felt so huge and hot he half-expected a sizzle when he thrust into her. Dizzy and blind with sensation, his body trembling and overcome with the pleasure of loving her, he gave himself up. This moment, this joining, this encompassing experience comprised the total of his existence. She moved against him, rising up into his thrusts, his name on her lips. Her hands clutching at his shoulders, his hips, she urged him forward.

Trying to make it last, he pulled out slowly and reentered her over and over, the effort almost superhuman. With each movement, he lost himself in her, hilt-deep, the marvel of her catching in his throat. He felt her rising tide, heard her panting breath between their kisses. Her body tightened around him as she arched her back, a high, keening sound breaking from her throat. Pushed almost to the brink himself, he strove on, withdrawing and cleaving into her, each stroke more powerful than the next.

Driving into her, slick flesh against flesh, his body tight and rigid, he could only thrust deeper.

Still moving eagerly beneath him, Nicole kissed him wide-mouth and, her hands on his hips, pulled him into her harder and harder until he was afraid of doing her damage. But then, her body tightened again, sweetly encircling and rippling around him. Past bearing it, he buried himself in her and bucked as he lost himself to orgasm.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Half an hour later, Nicole sighed contentedly, wondering why anyone would do anything else. With sex this great, how were they going to get anything done? Maybe that was why men were designed with a waiting period between erections.

A bagel with cream cheese and strawberry jam in her hand, she chewed contentedly and watched Max. He lie naked on the bed next to her, his strong back and tight butt hers for the admiring as he read the newspaper.

She didn’t know what the future held, but right now, she couldn’t care.

“I thought you read the paper first thing every morning when you got up,” she said, trailing her toe down his hairy, muscular leg.

“What the fuck!” Max dropped her foot abruptly and hauled himself upright bringing the paper with him. “The mother fucking dirtball! How the hell—What gives him the right—“

“What?” She leaned forward, concerned. “What happened?”

But Max didn’t answer. Bent still over whatever had offended him, he gripped the newspaper with rough hands as if he barely managed to keep from rending it. “I’ll have his ass for this! Does this no-talent jerk off think he can get away with this? And he’ll want to interview me when the damned book does come out!”

Max’s face hardened as he deliberately balled the newspaper up, crushing the entire section into a wad. “It’s shit. Not worth reading.”

Launching the ball of newsprint across the room, he jumped off the bed and went into the bathroom. The sounds of opening and closing drawers followed.

Her half-eaten bagel returned to her plate, Nicole left the bed to retrieve the wadded paper. When she smoothed the sheet out she found a literary column with the headline “Has Maxwell Tucker Lost His Touch?” Scanning the piece, she shuddered over the phrase “…once breathtaking prose deteriorated into over-blown repetition….” The column went on to say Max’s work had grown derivative and flat. His current work was, the author claimed, hardly worth a glance. “He’s lost his golden touch,” the man concluded with something resembling pity.

Pity was something Max would never take well, especially about his work. Hadn’t he reared back on her when she’d said something about feeling sorry for him?

Dropping the paper, Nicole looked up as Max came back in the room fully dressed. “This is nasty! And so wrong!”

Max’s cool smile was a contemptuous offering. “He’s welcome to take his shots, the sanctimonious bastard. I’ve been leveled by the best. He doesn’t even come close!”

It was as if a different man had emerged from the bathroom. His face almost as saturnine as the first time she saw him, Nicole felt her heart give a lurch.

“But this is so…mean. It has to hurt you,” she insisted, the crumpled paper still in her hands.

“It’s nothing,” Max dismissed in a hard tone. He lounged over to the scatter of notebooks on the floor by the window, every line of his body casual and…distant. He’d withdrawn, it seemed, into the disconnected, uncaring Ogre.

Staring at him in consternation, Nicole felt a sudden urge to cross her arms across her bare breasts and run for cover…as if she were in the room with a stranger. Watching him in near-disbelief, she tried to piece together her scattered thoughts. She
knew
he was a loving, much-misunderstood man, but this sudden transformation seemed so complete. It was like watching a human being morph into an alien.

With one flip of a switch, he’d turned off his heart.

Or had he, she wondered. Was that hurt and fury emanating from him like a high, fine vibration despite his casual words?

Max glanced up at her, his face holding a shallow kind of compassion. “Are you worrying about my feelings, sweet Nicole? Well, don’t. I’m accustomed to low-level, profoundly mediocre literary hangers-on taking shots at me. This guy makes his living wanting to be me and, being unable, he makes do by writing this kind of dreck.”

His every scornful word was laced with an arrogance and a contempt that slipped easily from his mouth. As if he’d donned an familiar attitude with his shirt and jeans, he wore his condescension easily.

There was disdain on his face and denial in his words, Nicole thought with consternation. She knew he was upset despite his refusal to acknowledge it. His mask of cool ruthlessness was belied by the anger flickering at the back of his eyes.

Slouching back over to the bed, Max lifted her bagel from her plate and took a bite. “Like a lot of columnists, he strikes out from ineffectiveness. A masking of his own hidden deficiencies, which from what I hear, are as personal as they are profound. He’s trying to prove his manhood, which is obviously in question.”

“Max, it’s okay to be upset about this,” she told him uneasily. She hated seeing the man she loved revert so completely to his tough shell. “Anyone would be.”

A contemptuous smile flickered on his face. “Don’t waste your concern on me. This guy is insignificant.”

Nicole shook her head, unable to keep from saying, “He writes a book review column in a major paper. Thousands of people read this.”

“Nonetheless, he’s of no matter. One testosterone-challenged, panty-wearing, limp-wristed columnist out to meet his deadline isn’t reason enough for me to even blink,” he said crudely.