She’d just swung at a hot button with a sledgehammer, but for once it wasn’t an impulse. Her reward was a second glimpse of the searing, wild emotion lighting up his eyes. The long muscles in his forearms, exposed by the short-sleeved Eye Candy T-shirt, tightened, standing out in stark relief under his skin. In the still darkness of her apartment emotion poured from him in waves. It was like standing in a lashing, pelting thunderstorm, the air crackling with electricity, sheer human feeling buffeting her like slaps of wind and rain.
The white-hot threat didn’t disappear from his eyes this time. She lifted her chin defiantly and waited. Bring it on. For once, for just once in their ill-timed relationship riddled with lies and fictional identities, she wanted the man locked away in Matt Dorchester’s soul.
She wanted the truth of him.
In the next instant, he was against her. He trapped her body between his and the door and kissed her. The pressure of his mouth on hers, demanding she open to him, was near enough to brutal to make her gasp in fierce delight. She kissed him back, hard enough to draw blood from her inner lip. He gripped her wrists in one hand and with the other held her jaw and throat for his demanding kiss.
His arm slid down around her waist, lifting her against his hard torso to walk into the bedroom and fall onto her bed with her underneath him. Air rushed out of her at the sudden impact. The old metal frame squawked in protest but held. Again he trapped her wrists over her head and with his free hand he yanked at the tie of her wrap dress and spread it open so she lay in a pool of red silk. His eyes were fierce and desolate as he straddled her, opened his jeans, rolled down a condom, and dealt with her panties with a swift yank of his fist.
She threw back her head in adulation. Then she couldn’t talk because he’d shoved himself inside her, the impact of his thick shaft inside her and the pressure of his chest against her breasts forcing the air from her lungs. Her vocal cords turned the gasp into a whimper as the pressure sharpened to pain. She willed herself to stay open to him, and the edge softened into a swell of pleasure that rolled from her center into the pitch-blackness, where it melded with the tempestuous emotion emanating from Matt.
Every time they’d had sex, all she’d sensed from him was a firm grip on his control. Even in the most intense, heated, erotic moments when sheer masculine need seethed under his skin, he’d never let himself go. But now he was actually feeling—anger, fear, desire, a soul-deep longing she didn’t dare put into words.
It was wildly, compellingly real.
She stripped his shirt over his head, leaving his carved torso bare to her hands. In response he shoved her bra to her collarbone and braced his elbows just above her shoulders to hold her in place. The searing touch of skin against skin brought a rough groan from his throat as he began to move.
There was no clawing at his back, no pitching and heaving under him, no sexy pleading. She gripped his biceps and lifted her hips to meet each thrust, every nerve ending in her soft channel screaming with heightened awareness. He pounded into her, a soft grunt huffing from his throat with each impact. It was raw, it was purely male dominance in search of release, and she loved every moment of it.
Emotion and sexual heat twined together and spiraled through her body, until, without warning, the tight fist at her core flew open and flung her into a star-spattered blackness. As if from a distance she heard her stuttering gasps of release. He buried himself deep inside her and shuddered, jaw clenched, to his own orgasm.
Long moments passed as he lay on top of her, sweat trickling from his ribs to hers, his breath gusting in her ear. Then he pulled away and went into the bathroom. She slipped her arms from the sleeves of her dress and curled up naked on her side, ribbons of pleasure fluttering against her nerves as she waited for him to return.
He didn’t. Her stomach seized when she heard him pull on his Army running shorts, then lace up his shoes. “I’ll be downstairs,” he said abruptly from the doorway.
She pushed herself up on one elbow. “Matt, what’s—”
“Not now,” he said. Then he turned and left.
When the door closed with the faintest of clicks she understood. He might not be able to resist her, but giving in to her didn’t feel like a respite from the staggering burdens he shouldered. Giving in to an impulse, giving in to her felt like a failure of character, a weakness. She might be his drug, but he hated the addiction as much as he craved the rush.
She loved him.
Being with her was tearing him apart.
*
He got as far as the top of the spiral staircase before his knees gave way. His palm slipped on the wrought iron banister, nearly pitching him down the stairs before he caught himself and sank down on the landing. The edges of the posts dug into his spine, and he latched onto the pain, welcomed it, braced his foot against the opposite railing and shoved. Hard.
What had he done? What had he just done?
You just made the worst mistake a man can make.
Cool air drifted over damp skin, triggering tiny flashpoints of memory—her soft mouth under his; the sharp, exhilarating tang of blood; the visceral, terrifying rush when he embedded himself deep inside her and everything disappeared, he disappeared, in an obliterating wave of infinite black energy. Into Eve.