She was far from inexperienced, but she had honestly never felt this wild craving before, this insatiableness vibrating throughout her body that was silently begging, More! Please, more!
Skillfully, he had caused more than one climax to shoot through her. Brianna felt herself coming as close to expiring from exhaustion as she ever had in her life, but she was determined that what was happening was going to culminate in a mutual crescendo. However insane this whole thing was, they were in this together, and she wanted him to realize that even though no words went between them.
Her body desperately wanted to receive his. She might have even pulled on his shoulder to convey her eagerness. But then, with her heart slamming against her rib cage, using up the last of her energy, she felt Jackson lacing his hands through hers.
And then, with a movement that was gentler than she’d expected, she felt Jackson enter her, sealing them together.
The moment he did, he began to move urgently and deliberately, feeding the fire that was threatening to consume them both.
She mimicked his rhythm, going faster and faster until there was no more hill left to climb, no place else to go. An explosion overtook them, rocking the very foundations of the world they had so recently created.
His arms tightened so hard around her, she couldn’t breathe.
The next moment, as air came rushing back into her lungs, she realized that she had just had the most exquisite experience of her life.
He felt Brianna panting against him. Why that would excite him to such a dizzying level, he had no idea. He only knew that it did.
He went on holding her, because he knew that once he released her, everything that he’d just felt would fade away. And he didn’t want it to.
Not yet.
Chapter 19
Jackson didn’t remember falling asleep.
When he woke up, dawn had only started unfurling its crimson banner through a still mostly darkened world. He sensed before he opened his eyes that he was alone in his bed. The bed where he and Brianna had retreated in the wee hours and, amazingly enough, made love for a second, equally exhausting time.
He’d never experienced anything close to what he’d felt with her.
And now she was gone. And the emptiness that had been filled because of her would come rushing back.
She—
A noise caught Jackson’s attention as he struggled to get his bearings. When he looked in the direction of the noise, he was astonished.
“You’re here,” he heard himself saying, looking at the figure sitting at his desk, sifting through what looked like a stack of papers.
Brianna.
Half-hidden in shadow, she was wearing one of his old, threadbare T-shirts. The worn garment barely came down to the tops of her thighs, emphasis on the word barely.
Damn, but he wanted her again. “I thought you’d be gone,” he told her.
Brianna looked up at the sound of his voice. Last night had been breathtakingly fabulous. But that was last night and this was now. She wasn’t sure just what footing they were on or where they would go from here.
“Thought?” she asked. “Or hoped?”
Jackson didn’t answer her. Instead, he grabbed a pair of pants, shrugged into them and crossed over to see what had her attention.
“You’re writing,” he said in surprise.
Brianna nodded, jotting one more thing down. “I thought if I put down everything about this case, maybe it would fall into place, or maybe something would come to me that would shed light on the whole thing.”
Her words were finally sinking in. “You’re working?” he asked incredulously.
She put her pen down for a moment. “Why do you look so surprised? You’re the one who wanted to get back to work on the murders. You even agreed we should get an early start in the morning,” she reminded Jackson. “This is morning.”
He’d always been all about the job. It was his lifeline, what kept him from sinking into the abyss that his past and his fractured, dysfunctional family had created for him. But suddenly, the job wasn’t the all-important center of the universe anymore. There was something else.
There was Brianna.
“Yeah,” he responded, “but all that was before.”
“Before?” she asked, waiting for him to complete the thought, to go on record about what he was feeling.
But Jackson found himself in a brand-new, shaky world, and the bravado that had held him in good stead dialed itself back. All he was willing to admit was the same word he’d just used.
“Before.”
“Oh.” Turning away, Brianna went back to jotting her miscellaneous thoughts down on the notepad that was already filled with her writing.
“By the way,” Jackson said to her back, in response to the question she’d asked when he’d said he’d thought she was gone, “thought, not hoped.”
“Oh,” Brianna murmured, her back still to him as a smile spread over her lips.
“So,” Jackson continued, as if all of this—making love with her, waking to find Brianna at his desk writing, nude except for his T-shirt adhering to her body—was all perfectly normal and just business as usual, “come up with anything brilliant?”
As he talked, Jackson absently gathered her hair together, forming a makeshift ponytail at the nape of her neck. The silkiness of her hair felt almost erotic as he sifted it through his fingers.
“Brilliant, no,” she confessed, finding that breathing was not quite as easy as it should be for her. “Maybe offbeat.”
“Talk to me,” Jackson encouraged, doing his best to focus on the subject and not the woman. “Offbeat sounds pretty good right now.”
Brianna pressed her lips together, struggling not to allow herself to get distracted by the way Jackson’s strong fingers were gliding along the sensitive skin on her neck.
“Sometimes,” she said slowly, “if you pull at just the right thread, a whole sweater can come unraveled.” She turned to face Jackson. Her heart began doing small backflips. “We just need to find that thread and start pulling.”
It took effort not to give in to the rush
