“This,” he said. “I wanted this.” With characteristic bluntness, he looked at her. Looked for a long, breathless beat with his hair brushing her belly, his breath warming her skin.
She knew what he saw. A woman’s body, up close and personal, complete with flaws.
He didn’t say a word.
And she couldn’t take it, she just couldn’t, so she wriggled up to reach the light and turned it off.
With a low laugh against her skin, he surged up and flicked it on again.
Oh, God. She tried to relax, but she just couldn’t, and knowing it, she reached up and flicked it back off.
Silence reigned.
And then it grew, and grew some more, until it was like another person in the room. Realizing she was holding her breath, she let it out.
And Noah sighed. “Hiding again.”
“No, I…” Okay, yes. Yes, she was.
But he left the light off, and she breathed some more, her entire body quivering with anticipation.
“After all we’ve been through, you don’t have to hide, not from me.” Dipping his head, he stroked his thumb unerringly over her, just where she needed it, and then-oh, God, and then-his tongue.
He did it again, and then again, just a little harder, a little faster, and she gasped and arched up, right into his mouth.
“Ah, yeah. That’s perfect. You’re perfect.” And holding her open, he proceeded to drive her out of her own mind and straight into another mind-blowing orgasm.
While she was still shuddering, he crawled up her body, nudging at her center with a most impressive erection.
“Tell me the rest, Bailey.”
Was he kidding? She couldn’t even put a thought together, much less a sentence.
“What else are you hiding?” he wondered with another nudge that made her want to wrap her legs around his waist and draw him inside. “Bailey?”
“Nothing.”
Liar.
He didn’t say it, but the word danced around them in the dark as if he had.
“I need to know,” he said. “To keep us safe and happy.”
And then reaching out, he once again flicked on the light. Settling between her legs, he looked deep into her eyes. “And I want to keep us very, very safe and happy.”
Chapter 13
Bailey arched up, helplessly opening for him, but he held back, damn him.
“I guess the next question,” he said in a thick voice, pressing his lips to her throat, “is are you going to help me keep us safe and happy?”
“Noah-”
But he pushed inside of her and all thought capacity shrank to the pinnacle of sensations running through her.
Their twin sighs of pleasure comingled in the air.
“What else, Bailey?” he managed. “What else are you hiding?”
“Nothing,” she gasped. Everything.
Then he rocked deeper and she could scarcely breathe because he felt so good filling her, so right. Right. She’d never felt anything like it. He was inside her, thick and full and heavy. Perfect. She had to abandon all thought, abort all reason, because there wasn’t room for anything with what he was making her feel, which was alive, gloriously alive.
“It’s just you and me,” he ground out as he moved within her. “Just us. You can tell me.”
She clutched at him, needing him to move again. Then he did just that, his thrust scooting her up on the bed. She might have hit her head on the headboard if he hadn’t slapped his hands against it, bracing them as he slid in and out of her. Even as she lost her mind, she shook her head. Surely it couldn’t really be like this, this good, this amazing. They were two virtual strangers, and yet…and yet she’d never felt so in tune with anyone in her life.
Somehow he knew her, knew her body, knew what she needed, when she needed it, and how to give it to her. He filled her senses, had her writhing, arching, begging. Begging in some wordless, gasping voice she hardly recognized as hers, all while he brought her to the very edge and then, damn him, held her there, a panting, dewy, sweaty mass of nerve endings, reduced to total dependency…
“Come,” he demanded in a rough, low voice, and stroked a thumb over where they were joined.
She saw stars, and when he did it again, with slightly more pressure, she went off like a bottle rocket, coming, going…coming again. Or still…
Vaguely she realized he had stopped moving, except for the trembling of his arms where he held himself rigid above her, and she opened her eyes.
His expression was one of fierce concentration, his brow damp, his jaw bunched. “I can’t believe I nearly forgot-”
She looked at him blankly, on sensory overload with the feeling of him stretching her so deliciously.
“Condom.”
She closed her eyes. This. See, this is what happened when one went too long without sex. Severe brain cell loss. “I’m on the pill,” she whispered.
“Pregnancy isn’t the only reason for a condom.”
She wished the light was off again. “I’m…safe.”
When he didn’t say anything, she admitted to yet another truth. “I told you it’d been a long time. Almost two years long,” she admitted softly. “And I’ve been checked since then.”
He lowered his weight to his forearms, his fingers gliding into her hair, his face close to hers. He kissed her jaw, her ear, her mouth. “It’s been over six months for me,” he said softly. “And I’m safe, too.”
A long time for a man who probably had women throwing themselves at him, but she set that thought aside because her brain simply didn’t have room for it, not with him filling her so completely that she had to feel him move again.
Had to.
She glanced toward the lamp, but he shook his head. “On.”
“But off would be so much better.”
He didn’t say anything to that, instead began a set of hot, wet, open-mouthed kisses along her neck to just beneath her ear. She’d never thought of herself as a particularly sensual creature. Sex was very nice when done right, but it wasn’t always done right, and truthfully? In most cases, she’d found better release from a battery operated toy than a man.
But not tonight.
Tonight she had Noah, who knew his way around her body better than she did. How else to explain why just a kiss made her ache for more, or why her body felt fluid in his arms, or how mind-blowing it was to have him move within her, in a perfect rhythm that she never wanted to end?
He would never hurt her. He would never disappoint her. How she knew these things about him, she had no idea, but she did.
She knew them as certainly as she knew he’d give her his last breath.
He slid his hands down to the backs of her bare thighs, spreading them wider, allowing for a deeper penetration, which wrenched a groan from him and a matching one from her. No one had ever been so deep inside her before; no one had ever made her thoughts dissolve into mindless sensation and need, such desperate, clawing need.
He whispered her name and the sound alone had her body going taut again, her breath coming in pants as she heated, slickened.
Still on his forearms, his hands in her hair, his eyes locked on hers, he let her see everything he felt as he slid in
