Whispers at Midnight (36 page)

He slid his mouth down her neck and then, while she was still pulsing and burning with need, lifted his head and pulled his hands out of her pants and stepped back.

“Matt—” It was a protest, uttered as she blinked at him out of passion-drugged eyes.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said, and picked her up, scooping her high up against his chest and kissing her hard and then, even as she clung to him and kissed him back, depositing her in the middle of that earth-toned comforter. Straightening, he pulled off her sneakers and her jeans in a series of quick efficient movements and tossed them aside, then stood for a moment beside the bed looking down at her.

For an instant she saw herself as he must be seeing her, slender and petite but curvy where it counted, her skin creamy in the dim light, naked except for the delicate black lace undergarments that barely kept her decent. She was leaning back on her elbows in the middle of the bed, sinking a little into the thick softness of the comforter, one knee bent. Her head was thrown back far enough so that she could feel her curls just touching her back, her lips were parted and her eyes were luminous with wanting as they met his.

“You’re beautiful.” He was unfastening his jeans, unzipping them, and the passion that blazed in his eyes shook Carly to the core. He shucked his jeans and she watched, dry-mouthed, as they went south along with his briefs. Then he straightened, and she looked and looked without even realizing she was staring.

He
was the one who was beautiful, there was no doubt about it, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped and muscular, with long, strong, powerful legs. But she had known that. Beautiful was Matt, and had been forever, for as long as she’d known him. What held her fascinated gaze was something else, something that she hadn’t known, or at least hadn’t remembered.

“Oh, my God,” she said, riveted. “You’re huge.”

He made a sound that was partway between a laugh and a groan. His eyes were hot and dark with the promise of secret, unspeakable deeds and delights as they moved over her. Everywhere they touched, Carly seemed to burn. Her fingers curled into the comforter. Her lips parted as she sucked in air.

“It’s your fault,” he said, thick and low but with the merest thread of humor too, and came down on the bed beside her, his weight rolling her against him.

26

S
HE WASN
’
T
the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Hell, she wasn’t even the most beautiful woman he’d ever fucked. But she was Carly, and that made all the difference. She was soft and sexy and sweet as she rolled against him, and he wanted her more than he had ever wanted a woman in his life.

Hell, he didn’t have a woody anymore. He had a goddamned giant sequoia.

Which she had, of course, felt she just had to mention. That was Carly, irrepressible to the end.

Normally, in his experience at least, humor and hard-ons didn’t mix, but he was still smiling a little as he kissed her.

She wrapped herself around him, and suddenly he wasn’t smiling at all as he rolled her onto her back and pressed himself down on top of her and took her mouth. He was consumed with lust, on fire with lust, burning up with the need to push himself inside her and thrust and thrust and thrust until he exploded, until he achieved the blessed Nirvana that was the best thing he knew, better than football, better than boating, better than being astride his Harley with an open road in front of him and nothing to hold him back.

He slid a hand beneath her thigh, pulled it up so that her knee was
bent and he was lying between her legs, pressed up hard against her, just shove that little bitty bit of lace aside and in he’d go…

Which was pretty much what he had done the last time he’d done her.

It was embarrassing to think that at thirty-three he didn’t have any more control than he’d had as a horny twenty-one-year-old kid.

Ordinarily he did. Ordinarily, if he did say so himself, he was pretty damned good in bed. He’d been making women come for years.

He didn’t doubt he could make Carly come. She was already breathing hard, trembling, clinging to him, her thighs all soft and parted for him, her nipples in that scratchy lace bra poking up against his chest. She was hot and wet and ready and he was hot and hard and ready and this could be a good thing if he just followed his instincts and dove in.

But this was Carly. He wanted to take his time. When he finished with her, he wanted her to be sated, exhausted, bedazzled. In other words, he wanted her to know that she’d been well and truly fucked.

He reached around between her shoulder blades and unclipped her bra with a deftness born of practice. The little moan of protest she made as he lifted his mouth from hers and tugged her bra off and slid his lips down her neck all at the same time almost made him change his mind. But then he saw her breasts, her succulent ripe breasts with the nipples round and rosy as raspberries. He had to taste them, had to take them into his mouth and suckle them, had to lave the nipple with his tongue and test it with his teeth and feel her gasp and squirm beneath him and clasp the back of his head while he slid his hands inside those sexy little panties and gave himself the worst case of blue balls he’d had since he’d first started scoring more home runs than strikeouts with girls at age fifteen.

By the time he licked his way south her fingers were digging into the bed and she was moaning and moving her hips in a way that anyone but a masochist would consider evidence of a pump well and truly primed. But he wasn’t finished with her, not yet, the feel of her all hot and wet and slick against his fingers wasn’t enough, he wanted more.

He pulled her panties down her legs and threw them over the side. Then, on all fours as he prepared to move back up her body, he paused to look at her. Naked, with her breasts all flushed and pointy from his ministrations and her legs parted in quivering surrender, she was as erotic as any sight he had ever seen. She was all lush curves and softness and sex, and he wanted her so much that he burned.

He moved back up her body and slid his hands beneath her butt, filling his hands with her firm round cheeks as he shifted her for optimum access. Then he pressed his mouth to the cleft between her legs and tasted her.

She gasped, stiffened, and tried to close her legs against him in instinctive defense, he thought, against the breaching of this last frontier. He squeezed her butt, lifted her closer, kissed the quivering little nub that was the center of her pleasure, licked it, slid his tongue inside her. By then her fingers were threading through his hair and holding him to her and her hips were coming off the bed as he took her with his mouth.

“Matt.”

At that he glanced up to find that she had lifted her lids and was blinking down at him, her eyes all cloudy and dazed with passion. He found himself looking into those sex-drugged baby-doll blues and thinking that they could belong to no one else in the world but Carly. Knowing that it was Carly spread out naked before him, Carly who was watching him go down on her, Carly he was getting ready to fuck into next week, took erotic to a whole new level. It was the most carnal experience he had ever had in his life.

“Please.” She tugged at his hair.

To hell with it. He couldn’t hold out anymore. He knew what she wanted, and it was what he wanted too, so much that he was throbbing and aching with the pain of denial, so much that he couldn’t slide up her body fast enough. He kissed her and his arms went around her and her arms and legs wrapped around him too and he pushed inside her, all at just about the same time. Her sheath was so hot, so scaldingly hot and so wet and so tight as it closed around him, that he groaned into her mouth and then took her hard and fierce,
plunging deep, taking and taking and taking mindlessly because it felt so damned good that he was never going to stop.

Great sex? Oh, yeah.

But he couldn’t go on forever. The heat of her and the way she squirmed beneath him and her soft little cries were pushing him over the edge. He knew it, knew he was on the brink of losing it and slid his hand down between her legs to touch her in a way that could pretty much be counted on to make her come too.

She came all right, convulsing around him, shuddering and shaking and digging her nails into his back and crying out her pleasure: “Oh God Matt oh God Matt oh God oh Matt I love you I love you oh God
I love you, Matt.”

He thrust one last time and exploded, holding himself inside her, holding her tight while he rocketed through the universe and she rode her own wave.

It felt so good, so goddamned good….

Still, his last thought before he collapsed atop her, spent, was a surprisingly coherent
oh, shit.

It took a few minutes of near catatonia and a not-so-gentle shove on his arm before he was able to summon the energy to roll off her. Flopping onto his back, Matt rested his head on a bent arm and reluctantly contemplated what had just happened. Actually, he suspected that he had stayed where he was for so long because he didn’t want to face the awful truth: in another one of those patented brain-dead episodes of his, he’d gone and fallen right into the tiger pit he’d spent most of the last seven years avoiding.

That it was Carly’s tiger pit made it a little better, but not much.

He cast his eyes cautiously sideways to find that she was curled on her side with her head resting on a bent arm too and her face tilted so that she was looking at him. She was naked, but he couldn’t see much. Her knees were drawn up in such a way as to hide the sweet little nest of curls that he was already putting on his list of favorite sites to re-explore. Her arm lay across her breasts, deliberately shielding them from his view. He knew that it was deliberate because he knew Carly. Carly would be feeling shy about now, self-conscious about being naked, embarrassed at having just been so thoroughly done.

She was shy and sexy and naked and his for the taking. He could go back for a double-dip, he thought, and felt his body begin to stir.

Then he remembered why fucking her in the first place had been such a bad idea. Under the circumstances, fucking her a second time would be even worse, but he suddenly wanted to do it so much that the sheer effort required to resist caused his muscles to tense and his teeth to clench.

Don’t panic,
he told himself, but panic was already clawing at his gut.
You can still get out of this.

Just about that time his cute little cuddle-bunny rolled away from him, making for the edge of the bed without so much as a word or a nuzzle.

“Hold it,” he said, grabbing her wrist. He might have only had sex with her once before, in the back of a car when she was eighteen, but he knew Carly: silent flight was not her normal postcoital behavior.

Having made it all the way to the edge of the bed, she turned her head to look at him even as he noted with absent interest how very slender and fine-boned her wrist felt beneath his hand. She was sitting there with her legs already swung over the side, affording him a really nice view of her back and the sweet curve of her ass. He’d been ticked at her, a little, thinking that while he certainly deserved a large share of the blame for the situation in which they found themselves, she couldn’t be considered innocent of wrongdoing by any means, but the wary, defensive look she cast him went a long way toward dissipating his anger. He realized with a spurt of self-disgust that getting mad at Carly for being what nature had made her was kind of like getting mad at Bambi for being a deer.

“What?” she said.

He eyed her. She was still all flushed with sex, and her mouth was full and a little swollen from his kisses and the tip of her breast that kept jiggling into his view as she looked around at him was rosy and swollen-looking from his kisses too, and that plus the sight of her butt, which he really hadn’t gotten as thoroughly acquainted with as he might like, and the tangle of corkscrew curls and the big blue eyes and the soft wide mouth that equaled Carly in his mind were beginning to do a real number on him.

Wasn’t there a quote that said something like,
mighty sequoias from little acorns grow?
Or anyway, close enough. And it was happening again.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he was beginning to grow seriously fond of the idea of doing her again.

But wait, stop, no, that would be just about as stupid as deliberately wading deeper into quicksand. He was so close to getting his life back, so close to earning his freedom, so close to having all the females in his life in a place where they were able to function happily without him, that the thought of screwing it up (and if ever there was an appropriate expression, that was it) here in the home stretch scared him to death.

“Great sex, no strings, huh?”

If there was a sardonic note to his voice, well, he couldn’t help it. Damn it, this would have been easy to avoid; all she’d had to do was just let him stick to his original plan of staying the hell away from her.

“Hey, don’t feel bad. I know you tried your best,” she said.