shirt and she pushed his hands aside, all but ripping the garment off him.
His belt slithered from around his waist, and her hands were on his zipper in a trice. He sucked in his stomach, frantic to avoid her touch long enough to get naked before he totally lost control. “Slow down, honey. We’ve got all night.”
“It won’t be long enough for all I want to do with you,” she panted back.
He laughed, but even to his ears it sounded more like a possessive growl. Her palms slid around his waist to the small of his back, pressing him against her. Her breasts pushed impudently against his chest, and his erection pushed even more impudently against his zipper. And his control snapped.
He swept her off her feet and carried her over to the big bed. He followed her down to the cool sheets, lost in her sexual eruption. He had little recollection of how the rest of their clothes came off, but it involved her pushing him onto his back and crawling all over him, and his hands roaming all over her spectacular body while she moaned with need and pleasure.
They should use protection, but he wasn’t going to be around long enough to care about his own health. Nonetheless, out of respect for her, he drew back. “Hold on. I’ve got condoms in my pack.”
She pulled him back down to her. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“I insist. For your safety.”
She laughed bitterly. “I’m
His eyebrows shot up. She corrected hastily. “I don’t have any contagious diseases. I swear.” As he continued to hesitate, she added, “As I understand it, a person has to actually have sex now and then to get a sexually transmitted disease.”
That shot his eyebrows straight to his hair line. A woman of this passion, and she didn’t have sex on a frequent and regular basis? It was practically a crime!
Then she was kissing him again. And the lady could kiss like nobody’s business, her whole body getting into the act. She made a swear-to-God
And then her mouth was on his stomach, contracting his muscles so hard they hurt. He withstood it as long as he could, and then he surged up over her, returning the favor. Her flat stomach went soft and hard by turns under his mouth, her long fingernails raking through his hair in desperate pleasure.
And then she cried out sharply, her entire body trembling. The smell of her pleasure wrapped around him sweet and warm, brandy and chocolate. She drew him up the sinuous length of her body.
“Please, John. I want all of you. And you can have all of me in return.”
“I never could refuse a lady,” he murmured.
She all but sobbed in relief against him, her slender legs wrapping tightly around his hips. He sank down into her, body and soul, his gaze locked on hers as their bodies became one. Her eyes went wide with delight, fluttering closed on a sigh of pleasure he felt all the way to her core. Almost dizzy with the intensity of her reaction to him, he strained toward her, reaching higher and higher with her. His raw cries joined hers as they built a tsunami between them and rode it like a pair of death-defying big wave surfers.
She pushed on his shoulders, and he rolled onto his back, taking her with him to straddle him even more deeply. He groaned at the sensation. She rocked experimentally, then burst into laughter and rode him with abandon. He clenched his teeth, restraining himself by the thinnest thread.
“You’re killing me,” he ground out.
She threw her head back. “But what a way to go.”
His laughter mingled with hers as he sat up, gathering her in his arms, their bodies still one. She looped her arms around his neck, gazing deep into his eyes. The laughter faded from her expression, and something… unnamed…passed between them.
A moment of naked and total understanding. Of having found a kindred soul. Of seeing past all the artifice, all the emotional defenses, all the petty facades, to the bare truth of one another. Had it been any other moment but this one, they might have recoiled, might have looked away, might have attempted to hide from each other. But as it was, he surged up deep within her and her internal muscles gripped him even more tightly.
He groaned, and she laughed, and the wave of their lovemaking came crashing down upon them, racing up onto shore, tumbling them in its joyous chaos, depositing them upon the sands of a pleasure so intense neither of them could move, let alone stand up. The wave retreated slowly, leaving in its wake a sparkling diamond mist of joy hanging in the sunlight of their souls.
He collapsed onto his back, dragging her down on top of him. She sprawled, satisfyingly boneless, across his insanely sated body. He tingled from the top of his spinning head to the burning soles of his feet.
“Wow,” she breathed. “Double wow.”
He chuckled. “Triple wow.”
She lifted her head languidly, and a shaft of moonlight caught her hair, turning it to spun gold as it draped over her shoulder to tickle his chest. “Wanna do that again?”
“And again, and again, and again.”
“Only four times? I thought you looked like you’re in better shape than that.”
He laughed up at her. “Don’t tempt me. The night is young.”
“Hah. I dare you.”
He narrowed his gaze in a mock scowl. “Thing is, I need you to be able to walk sometime in the next week. Sorry, honey, but I’m going to have to restrain myself.”
Her fingernails raked across his chest just hard enough to make him flinch. They trailed down his side and across his hip. “Restrain this,” she murmured.
His willing body leaped to attention with surprising alacrity.
“Mmm. That’s more like it,” she murmured.
“The woman is a wildcat. What have I gotten myself into?”
“You have no idea,” she replied, abruptly serious. “I’ll do my best to keep you out of it, though. I promise.”
He rolled over, pinning her beneath him. “You’ll do no such thing. I’m involved with you now, whether you like it or not.” They’d looked into each other’s souls, for crying out loud. They were most definitely in this together. Whatever
Chapter 4
Melina woke up to bright sunlight the next morning, and the oddest sensation under her faintly aching head. Her ear rested on something warm and resilient and suspiciously like a…
She sat bolt upright. Her suspicion had been correct. It was a muscular, and very male, shoulder. And it belonged to John Hollister. It
Well, at least she’d managed one perfect night before she checked out of the ol’ mortal coil. She supposed that was something to be pleased about. John shifted beside her and she glanced down. She was startled to see gray eyes gazing steadily back at her, clear and fully alert. No hangover for him, no sir.
“How’re you feeling this morning?” he asked with a distinct note of caution in his voice.
She smiled down at him. “A little dehydration headache, but nothing a couple aspirin and some water won’t take care of.”
“I have some good painkillers if the aspirin doesn’t work,” he mentioned as he sat up, pooling the sheet in his lap. My, my, my. The man had acres of muscles her anatomy textbooks couldn’t have rendered any better.
She shrugged. “I never do anything stronger than aspirin.”
“Lucky you. In my line of work, I end up taking all kinds of stuff to keep going. Or at least I used to.”
And what line of work would that be, exactly? It occurred to her that he’d drawn quite a bit of information out of her last night but had failed to reciprocate with even the sketchiest details of his life. The sum total of what she knew about him was that he worked for a private courier company, he knew where to pick up a weapon in Peru, and he was positively unbelievable in bed. She’d never been with a man even remotely like him. He made the rest of them seem like adolescent boys fumbling their way through the act.
