I slid my hands to her ass, picked her up, and strode the five steps it took me to get to the basement door. I flung it open and took the steps down at a pace that wasn’t safe for either of us, but I was suddenly in a hurry to be down on a bed where I could wrap my entire body around hers.
I’d barely reached the bottom when she was tugging at the button on my cammies, and I let her. I let her undo them. I let her out of my arms, and she pushed my pants and briefs down my legs where I stepped out of them. She tossed them into the room somewhere before sliding out of her last remaining item.
When she stood back up, I groaned because she was just like those ancient Roman statues: curves in all the right places, breasts full but not overwhelming, skin made out of stone with muscles threading through every part of her. She worked out. A lot. I knew what it took to get muscles like those.
“Last chance,” I said, my voice an ache of desire and remorse because I knew taking this step would end in nothing but pain. I was used to pain. It was a trade-off every SEAL made. Pain for warrior status, but it also damaged you. I just didn’t want the damage to leak onto her.
“Challenge accepted,” she said, her voice a husky mix of desire and wariness. Then, she was kissing me, maneuvering me toward the pull-out bed I slept on every time I was there.
I tugged away for a moment just so I could memorize her. She was breathing heavily, her breasts rising and falling with the motion. She was the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. A landscape I’d never be able to forget. I went to my duffel bag, dug inside, and came out with a strip of condoms.
When I rejoined her, her eyes were on the strip, and I thought maybe she’d back down, the condoms a splash of ice water over us. But like so many of the things I got wrong with her, she didn’t back down at all. Instead, she took me in her hand, stroking and teasing, making me even harder as she met my gaze as she’d done all night. Each of us daring the other to concede, and neither of us doing it.
We landed on the bed in a pile of skin and nerve endings. I wasn’t gentle because I don’t know how to be. I was all aggression and force, but she didn’t seem to care. She met it with her own. When I yanked her to me, touching every place I’d learned over the years that made the women I was with moan, tremble, and shake, she returned the touch with her own. My lips and tongue followed my hands. She arched and cried out, her body convulsing with expectation and relief. But she didn’t stop or slow down. Instead, her movements became faster. She straddled me, taking the condom and sliding it on me. Confident. Strong. Athena.
When she settled on me, I was gone. The clouds. Mount Olympus. That was all I could see. Shimmers of light and sound, and her dark hair swathed me in its secret garden as it swung over my face. My hands skimmed her front, pulling her toward the summit until we both reached the peak and dove off.
She laid her head against my chest, running a finger along the scar that went from my neck, along my collarbone, out to my shoulder. Running a finger along the spirals of my tornado tattoo. And I wondered if she was trying to call my bluff again. To see if I’d call or fold.
I’d already folded. I’d folded the moment she’d bawked at me. Maybe before. Maybe I’d folded the very first time she’d ever entered my life with her bright-blue eyes and daredevil smile.
Dani
MISTAKE
“Now that I'm thinking sober,
Don't you try to get no closer.
I'm just gonna get my car and drive, and drive.”
Performed by Demi Lovato
Written by Peiken / Pringle / Haywood
My body was deliciously sore. It was sated and happy. That was what I registered until I also registered the arm still draped across my waist, holding me tucked against a wall of muscles with my back and bottom tucked against his core. My skin broke out in prickles of awareness, goosebumps coating the follicles.
Nash.
Shit.
I would have loved to use the excuse of being drunk. It was the excuse I would definitely be using with him, but the truth was, I hadn’t been drunk when I’d undone my bra and sat on his lap. The alcohol had slowed me down, removed some of my guards, but it hadn’t made me forget who I was or what I was doing.
Instead, I’d just given in to the sensations my body had been craving. I’d let myself have a night of passion and sin. It had been too long. Too many nights of silent loneliness. With a touch, a blaze of light and smell and sensations, I’d found something different than any other time I’d been wrapped in a man’s arms.
Then I doubted myself. Doubted my senses. Maybe I’d just forgotten what it felt like to have a man caress me. I hadn’t had sex with another man in well over a year. Since Russell. Since the night of the Chinese Embassy reception which had started Mac and Georgie’s relationship but somehow saw the end of mine.
Russell had wanted me to stay that next morning, and I
