Whispers at Midnight (35 page)

Hey, it was a bachelor pad. Sin Central.
The
place to come for a hot time in the old town tonight. Who knew what he got up to in it?

It occurred to Carly with equal parts dismay and fascination that
she didn’t have the slightest idea what Matt the grown-up sheriff liked to do in bed.

“Shoot, I knew I was forgetting something,” Matt said. He was still behind her, and she turned to look at him almost thankfully, glad to have anything to look at besides that bed. At least, she was until she realized that he was looking really amazingly sexy, and his dark eyes were tinged with humor and something else—heat. For her.

“What?”

“I left my whips and chains at home.”

It took Carly a second. Then she narrowed her eyes at him.

“You are so not funny.”

But she had to smile. And with that smile a great deal of her nervousness left her. He might be the kind of tall, dark, and handsome stud muffin that women dreamed about, but he was also Matt. Matt of the protective instincts and corny jokes and ability to read her like a book. Her Matt.

If it turned out he was kinky in bed, she would just learn to deal.

He gave her a wry half-smile and reached for her hand. His hand was warm and strong and familiar, and Carly held on to it like a dying woman to a lifeline as she went with the flow and let him lead her across the room toward the bed. By the time they stopped at its foot and he turned to face her, her fingers were twined with his and her heart was thudding and she was hot from just thinking about what his next move might be. Also, face it, she was nervous as hell all over again.

This was the part where they got naked and—

“Look up,” he ordered.

—kinky, apparently. But okay, she was up for it. If he wanted to jump her bones while she was looking up, she could do that.

She looked up and waited. Textured white ceiling tiles, a little dingy, met her gaze. There was a cobweb in the corner where the two walls met. No spider, she was thankful to see. When nothing happened, she got fed up with waiting and looked at him again. He was watching her with that wry little smile still on his face. The bed, covered in a perfectly ordinary looking comforter in a kind of earth-tone Aztec print, loomed like the proverbial elephant in the room. It was
there, right there, so close her leg practically brushed it, but she was doing her best to ignore it.

“So?” she said.

“No mirror. No camera. No peepholes. Nothing deviant.” He grinned at her and shook his head. “Jesus, you’ve got a dirty mind.”

Carly felt instantly self-conscious. “I never thought—”

“Oh, yes you did.” His eyes twinkled. He took her other hand so that he was holding both of them now. “Just for the record, what I basically do here is watch sports on TV. I can never get the remote at home.”

Carly eyed him. “Yeah, right.”

It was a nice lie, a gentlemanly lie, but—pay for a garage with an apartment over it just so that he could watch sports?

“Anyway,” he said, “I haven’t been here in a while.”

Now
that
she believed. She’d already detected a fine layer of dust on the wood surfaces.

“Good,” she said, before she quite thought through how that might sound. Did expressing satisfaction with an apparent lull in his sex life before they got together mesh with her great sex, no-strings pledge? Who knew? And who was clearheaded enough at the moment to try to figure it out?

Not she, that was for sure. That bed was getting under her skin. Any second now, he was going to throw her on it and—At the thought of what the
and
might entail, her body tightened deep inside and began to quake.

“Okay,” she said, desperate to get on with this before she gave herself away, or he decided to run, or the roof caved in, or something else happened to mess this up. “So how do you want to do this?”

He’d been in the act of raising her hand to his mouth. He paused, looked at her, then grinned a slow-dawning grin before kissing, not the backs of her fingers, but her palm this time. Carly watched in fascination as he turned her hand over and pressed his mouth to her skin. She could feel the whisper of his breath, the prickle of the five o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw, the moist heat of his mouth all the way through to her solar plexus.

She took a deep breath as the quake intensified.

“I don’t know,” he said as if he were giving the matter serious consideration, lifting both her hands to his shoulders and then reaching down to lightly clasp her waist and pull her a step closer to him. There was humor in his eyes still, Carly saw, but a flame had ignited in their depths and his mouth had a sensuous curve to it now that made her heart skip a beat as she looked at it. “I thought maybe I could take your shirt off, and then you could take mine off, and then I could take your pants off, and you could take mine off … something like that.”

Her loins clenched, her breasts swelled, her breathing grew erratic.

“Sounds good,” she said, her voice unsteady. And thought,
is that the understatement of the year or what?
Sounds good didn’t even begin to cover it.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said as his fingers slid up under the hem of her shirt and he started inching it upward, “want to tell me why your shirt’s on inside out?”

“Oh, God.” Carly looked down at herself, barely able to think with his warm hands gliding up over her stomach, up the sides of her rib cage, heading slowly and tantalizingly north toward her swelling breasts and taking her shirt with them. Sure enough, her tee shirt was inside out. Instead of seeing embroidered butterflies on the navy blue background, she saw lots of little red and pink and green threads hanging from it. Like the rest of her clothes, she had put it on so fast that she hadn’t even noticed, or cared, because…“Annie. I was in a rush to get to Annie.”

“Hey, you heard Bart. She’s going to be all right.” His voice was low and thick, and as she looked up she saw the hot dark glitter in his eyes and her mouth went dry.

“I know.”

His hands found her breasts beneath her tee shirt then, covered them, caressed and squeezed them. Even with the gossamer layer of her bra between them, the sensation was unbelievable. Her nipples went rigid. Her breasts swelled into his hands. She gasped and trembled. At her response his eyes flared, and he leaned over, kissing her softly but thoroughly while she dug her nails into his shoulders and his hands played with her breasts. If his purpose was to distract her
from the bad memory, and Carly was fairly sure that was at least part of what he had in mind, it worked. It definitely worked. When he broke the kiss and the contact to pull her shirt off over her head she was dazed and breathless and weak-kneed. So dazed and breathless and weak-kneed that it took the sight of him staring at her chest to make her realize that she was now standing in front of him in nothing but her jeans and bra.

It was the black lace one she’d planned to wear for just this purpose. Underneath her jeans were the tiny matching panties that she’d been holding in her hand when Antonio had started yelling. Throwing on her clothes as fast as she could, she’d grabbed the first things that had come to hand—and by sheer luck they had turned out to be the sexy scanties she’d been scoping out for the express purpose of dazzling Matt.

Her bra, at least, seemed to be doing the trick.

“Nice,” he said, running his index finger along the deep décolletage of the cups. His eyes were hot as they followed the path his finger traced. Lips parted, breathing unevenly, Carly watched too. The plump white curves of her breasts filled the provocative bra to overflowing. His finger was long and deeply tan and unmistakably masculine against her skin. The entire effect was erotic, and Carly was visited by a moment of extreme thankfulness that, in an effort to please hypercritical John, she’d had her breasts enhanced. The last time Matt had seen them, they hadn’t been much to look at. Now, they were soft and round and sexy and beautiful. And sensitive. So exquisitely sensitive that she seemed to feel the touch of Matt’s finger with every nerve ending she possessed.

Oh, God, she wanted him. She wanted to drop the rest of her clothes and yank off his and … But no. It was better to take it slow, spin it out, make it Great Sex. The problem was, just getting it on with Matt fell under the heading of Great Sex for her. She had no idea what it did for him.

“My turn.” She didn’t know why she was surprised to find that her voice was unsteady, given the fact her insides were quivering like Jell-O.

“Okay.” His hand dropped to his side. His fingers flexed for a moment
as if he were having trouble keeping them there as his eyes blazed down at her. Breathless at the thought of what she was about to do, she slipped her hands up under his tee shirt and started sliding them up his chest, mimicking him, inching his shirt up while she slid her hands over him just as he had done moments before to her. His skin was warm, and smooth, and faintly damp over a layer of firm, resilient muscles that seemed to expand as he breathed in and out. His chest hair was silky, growing thicker and more luxuriant as her hands moved up his body. His nipples were flat round nubs that hardened as her fingers found them. At that instant telltale response, Carly felt her nether regions tighten as the quake that had been pulsing through her entire body homed in and solidified and began to pulse in a series of quick rhythmic contractions that made her shudder. She had his shirt pushed up under his armpits now, and she rubbed her fingers over his nipples again, deliberately sensuous, looking up to see what he thought of that.

“Jesus.” His jaw was hard; his eyes were so dark they were almost black. From that, and the uneven tenor of his breathing, she deduced that he liked it. Very much.

She took a deep, steadying breath, then tugged his shirt up higher, struggling to get it over his head. In the end, because he was so much taller, he had to pull it off himself. As he dropped it to the floor, Carly’s gaze went to his chest. His shoulders were heavy with muscle. His upper arms bulged. His chest was broad and solid-looking, with a triangle of thick black hair that tapered down over the six-pack abs to disappear beneath the waistband of his jeans. His hips were narrow compared to the width of his shoulders. Shirtless, he was bronzed and muscular and so sexy that she got wet just looking at him.

“Nice,” she said when she could speak again, flicking a glance up at his eyes. There was a definite glitter in them now, a hot, dangerous, predatory glitter. Carly’s heart skipped a beat as she realized that never before in the history of their relationship had Matt looked at her precisely like that.

“Think so, huh?” He was already reaching for her, hooking a hand in the waistband of her jeans, pulling her just that little bit closer, his fingers warm and hard against her stomach as he opened the metal
button that fastened them. She could feel the heat of him, smell soap and man, and it was the most amazing aphrodisiac, more of a turn-on than any fancy shaving lotion or expensive cologne or anything else she had ever smelled. Her hands were on his waist, holding on tight because watching him slowly pull her zipper down was making her dizzy; her fingers pressed into his skin; she loved the warmth of it, and the steely strength of the muscles beneath. She loved it that he was honed and hard and hungry and
hers.

A black lace triangle that was her panties appeared in the widening opening. They were tiny, sexy, barely covering her. Her breathing went fast and erratic as she watched him look, watched his eyes get all heavy-lidded and smoldering and sensual. She tried to control it, tried not to let him know just how very turned-on she was—but then he trailed his finger down the front of her panties, down to where the zipper stopped, touching nothing but black lace yet arousing her so much that she gasped aloud. It was the lightest of touches, but it burned through the thin lace like a brand.

“Matt.”

He glanced up.

“Hmm?” It was a husky murmur. His eyes smoldered at her. His hand slid inside her zipper, covering the lace, squeezing her mound.

“Nothing. Oh, God.” If she hadn’t been holding on to him she would have slithered to the ground.

His fingers pushed between her legs, rubbing her through her panties, and she couldn’t help it, she leaned forward so that her forehead rested against his chest, barely managing to stifle a groan.

“Just so you know, sexy underwear really does it for me.” His mouth was at her ear, murmuring in it before pressing hot and wet against the soft sensitive spot just below it. “And yours is sexy as hell.”

“I’ll—try to keep that in mind.”

It was all she could do to think, much less talk as his hand withdrew to slide flat-palmed across her stomach even while his mouth slid slowly down the side of her neck. She wanted to tell him that this slow striptease thing they were doing was too much, that she was on fire, roused to a fever pitch already, ready to get naked and get it on and slake her burgeoning lust before she melted into an embarrassing
little puddle right there at his feet. But if this was a game of sexual chicken she wasn’t going to be the first to cave, she wasn’t going to be the one to pull him down on the bed and jump his bones, she wasn’t going to let him know how very much she wanted it. No, wanted him.

What she was going to do was turn the tables a little. She pressed her mouth to his chest, kissed it, slid her lips along the firm contours. It was warm and damp and hairy and his skin tasted faintly of salt, and her heart slammed like a jackhammer in her breast and she could hardly breathe.

Then she reached his nipple and drew it into her mouth, licking and nibbling even as her hand slid over the hard bulge at the front of his jeans.

He stiffened and went still. She could feel the thudding of his heart, feel the sudden steely quality of his chest muscles beneath her lips and another, more personal muscle beneath her hand, feel the tension in him, the surge of heat.

He moved, catching her face in his hands, turning it up to his.

“Baby, you’ve grown up,” he said, thick and low, and bent his head and took her mouth. Carly’s blood superheated in an instant, and she wrapped her arms around his neck in urgent response. Sliding his arms around her waist, he pulled her close. His kiss was slow, sensual, drugging. He was naked to the waist and she was nearly so and he felt so good, so big and strong and hard against her, that she crowded closer still, greedy for contact. Her breasts in their flimsy lace covering pressed against his chest. Her nipples were so stiff that the sensation became almost an ache, and she moaned into his mouth in a response she no longer even cared to hide. The small sound seemed to electrify him. His kiss turned hard and fierce. His tongue was scalding hot as it thrust deep into her mouth, and his lips were hot too and unbelievably erotic as they slanted across hers. She trembled and clung and kissed him back, loving the way he felt against her, the taste and heat of his mouth, the hard insistence of his body. Then his hands slid down inside her loosened waistband, down inside her jeans, down inside her panties, and he was cupping her cheeks as he had once before and pulling her hard up against the stiffness in the
front of his jeans. He held a cheek in each hand, palms flat, fingers spread, gently squeezing the soft, rounded flesh, moving her against him, letting her feel the strength of his desire. Her whole body responded with a cataclysmic shudder and she wanted to die, just absolutely die, from the sheer wonder of what he was making her feel.