soft.” The wistful quality in Josie’s tone made him frown.
“So are you.”
She shook her head. “I’m hard. I don’t know how to be any other way.”
“Sometime I’ll show you how wrong you are.”
“I’m a virgin. I don’t have any experience at all.” She blurted it out as if it were something he couldn’t possibly have figured out on his own.
Unlike her, he had no problem reading signs. “And you want orange blossoms and white roses to accompany the first time you make love?”
She shook her head, her expression resigned. “I’m not the type. That stuff is for the fairy-tale wedding, and I’m not anybody’s version of a princess. I’m a soldier.”
“You used to be a soldier. Now you’re a student.”
She shrugged. “Our circumstances don’t always dictate what we are.”
“Right. I met you in the middle of a battle and watched you fight better than most men, and I still saw you as an extremely desirable and feminine woman.”
“You wanted me then?”
What did she think he’d been saying? “Yeah. It’s become an obsession.”
“They say to get rid of an obsession, you have to starve it.”
He laughed, the sound harsh to his own ears. He didn’t know what Josie would make of it.
“It doesn’t work. We had our first mission together more than two years ago, and I still feel like an adolescent with my first major boner every time I’m around you. I can’t even get rid of it by going to bed with another woman.” He spelled it out in case she hadn’t gotten it the first time.
“You tried?”
“I tried.”
“It didn’t work?”
“I told you, I don’t want other women.”
“You don’t have to want a particular woman to have sex with her, do you?”
“Not always, no.”
“But…”
“But in this case, that’s not an option for me.”
She licked her lips, her gaze probing him as if he was some kind of alien being.
He felt like it. The level of physical need he had for Josie wasn’t something he was familiar with, and frankly, if he had been able to rid his body of the compulsion, he would have. The kind of reaction he had around Josie was a weakness, and he’d learned living with his parents just how destructive it could be to be that vulnerable to another person.
“Either I feed my obsession for you, or I keep sublimating my sex drive in work.”
“Is that why you’ve gone on back-to-back missions since we worked with Wolf and Hotwire on Lise’s mission?”
“Yes.”
An undecipherable expression crossed her face, but the frown that followed it was anything but. “It’s bad soldiering not to take leave between assignments.”
He shrugged. He’d been trying to starve the obsession like she said. It hadn’t worked.
The frown grew fiercer. “You’re saying if I don’t make love with you, you’re going to keep up that kind of activity?”
“That’s not your problem.” But one way or another, he was going to convince this woman to share his bed.
“But you do want to have sex with me?”
“That’s been well and truly established. The question is, will you let me?”
Oh, yeah. That had been real smooth. Ask a woman in the middle of a park path to have sex with him. And don’t bother to dress it up at all. Just call it an obsession you want to feed. Right. That should do the trick.
Every virgin dreamt of having her first experience with a guy who offered sex and no finer emotions.
If he could have reached his own ass, he would have kicked it into next Tuesday. He couldn’t have messed this up worse if he’d been trying.
She licked her lips again, her moss green eyes focused on his mouth. “I think I’d like you to kiss me again before I decide.” She peeked up at him like a child admitting to getting into the cookie jar. “The first time I was so busy trying to keep it professional that I missed out on a lot of the finer points of what I was feeling.”
He felt drunk, but he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since breaking up a bar in Lubbock, Texas, after one too many beers and insults to his heritage. “You want me to kiss you?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He didn’t wait for her to change her mind, but pulled her body into immediate full-press contact. “Oh, I don’t mind, Josette. Not at all.”
Her expression turned wary at his predatory tone, but she didn’t pull away.
Smiling at that reality, he lowered his mouth to cover hers, and everything inside him went still. She tasted like Christmas, his birthday, and a successful mission all rolled into one. Sweet and delicious, warm and soft, her mouth was everything he remembered it being and more.
He ate at her lips as if he’d been starving to death and she was the only food available. She made a sexy little noise and pressed her body into his while encouraging him to keep feasting with lips that molded to his in total surrender.
He’d never worried about being overly gentle before, but he didn’t want to bruise Josie’s lips; he wanted to savor them.
And he did, carefully controlling the desire raging through him, so every nuance of the kiss was designed to give her pleasure and a lot of it.
Josie couldn’t believe the tenderness of Nitro’s mouth moving against hers. She hadn’t expected him to kiss her right then, not in full view of anyone going by the park. Even less had she anticipated the leashed force of his passion vibrating from his body to hers combined with a kiss so caring and gentle, she was ready to melt in a puddle of devastating emotion right there on the footpath.
Every nerve center in her body went on hyper alert, while her sense of time and space became hazy and indistinct. She rubbed her body against his, shocked at how tight and tingly her nipples grew. And things happened inside her, too, things that made her press her thighs together in shivery sensation.
His big hand moved down to cup her bottom, and she gasped from the pleasure of the unfamiliar contact. His tongue slid into her mouth, taking possession with unrelenting intimacy.
He tasted so intoxicating that if he were a bottle of wine, she would have been over the legal limit within seconds.
A growl sounded low in his throat as he explored every centimeter of her mouth, making it his.
She looped her arms around his neck, holding on tight and finally understanding why women kissed this way. They wouldn’t be able to stand otherwise.
Her knees had turned to rubber, and her insides were melting with lavalike heat. He lifted her, and she let her legs spread without thought, wanting him to do something about the shivery stuff happening between her legs.
Oh, yes…just like that. The hard-on he’d been so preoccupied with earlier was rubbing against the apex of her thighs, pleasuring and tormenting her at the same time. She wanted, no needed more, but she couldn’t make herself stop kissing him long enough to say so. She had to settle for making whimpering noises against his lips and trying to climb into his skin.
His other hand came up between them and cupped her small breast, rotating his palm over her tight nipple. Her tongue tangled with his, inviting him to higher levels of pleasure, and despite her lack of experience, he reacted to her efforts with extreme masculine enthusiasm.
The fact it was Nitro, the man she wanted and admired above all others, doing these things to her increased her sense of excitement and anticipation a hundredfold. For right now, his status as a soldier, his preoccupation with a life she wanted to leave behind, had no impact on her conscious mind.
He was giving her too much pleasure to think about anything else.
