“My eyes were meant to see you,” he whispers in his voice of thunder as he slowly unbuttons my shirt.
“My tongue was made to taste you,” he moans against my breasts. His kisses sucking, licking, branding me.
Then I feel him leave me, and I see him fall back until he’s lying on the ground. I find myself following him. He takes my leg in his hand and hooks it on his hip so I’m straddling him. The wind brushes my hair against my back, and he’s lying beneath me, his arm behind his head, his other hand brushing the outside of my thigh, rubbing me just how I need him to. But his eyes. Fuck, his eyes. They are drilling into me. Looking at me. Looking for me.
They are steel-gray, practically glowing in the dark. The moonlight casts shadows on his face and he looks like a wolf waiting on his prey. He looks like he wants to devour me. He looks like he’s challenging me. Daring me to lose myself in him, with him.
Daring me to let him have me, every part of me.
I bend down and kiss him with everything I’ve got. I pour all I have into him. Everything I want to say, every fear and anxiety ripping me apart because I’ve found out that a part of me does belong to him. A very big part of me belongs to him. A part that I cannot bear to live without.
He kisses me back, his hands rubbing my back, sliding lower to my ass. His hands completely encompass it, and I groan because his erection is pressed against the one part of me I need him to touch.
He kisses my collarbone, his hands on my hips coaxing me into a delicious, grinding, maddening rhythm. A rhythm that makes me want to come apart for him. He takes my lips and groans, “Give me your tongue,” against my mouth.
I slip my tongue tentatively into his mouth and he starts sucking on it gently.
I feel my body go weak. He holds on to me like I’m his anchor, and he kisses the life out of me.
We’re both panting, moaning, grinding, dying with every second that goes by and we’re apart.
“What do you want?” I ask him.
“What do I want?” His eyes flare open and his hand grips my hip. His eyes search mine, pure, lovely, flowing gray. “You know what I want, Reese. I want you now. And I want you in my arms tonight.”
“Whatever you want, take it,” I groan.
He studies me, devours me.
“Please,” I whisper.
I don’t need to say anything else because he flips us over until I’m on my back, and he’s on his side, looking down on me.
I caress his face, run my fingers down the scruff on his jaw. Rub my thumbs on his cheeks.
Trace his lips.
“You drive me crazy,” I whisper.
And we kiss and kiss by the lake in the park, my picnic basket forgotten because there’s no other hunger for me than him—and I can tell, his lips tell me, that there’s no other hunger for him greater than me.
? ? ?
LATE AT NIGHT, he leads me into his room and I strip and slide naked into his bed. And as soon as he strips and joins me, it’s warm beneath the sheets, his body steel-hard and smooth and muscled and hot. And I link my legs to his and rest my cheek on his chest.
I trace his nipple with my finger. His breathing changes when I slip my other hand down his waist to stroke his abs. “It’s not that your chest is muscled and beautiful and tan and perfect,” I whisper, almost to myself. “It’s that it’s warm and wide and strong and all your male strength just surrounds me when I’m on it.”
His breath catches, and then he lets out the most delicious groan. He flips me to my side, and he spoons me and tongue-fucks my ear as he starts to fuck me slowly in the dark, sliding his hand down my abs to caress me between my legs as he drives inside me, over and over, and then he rasps in my ear, “I love you hard.”
“Mmm. How hard?”
“This. Hard.” Driving deeper. Faster.
A low moan leaves me. I turn my head to him and we start kissing, and after we fuck as hard as we love each other, we settle down to fall asleep, spooning for the rest of the night.
FORTY
THE PHOENIX AND THE SCORPION
Maverick
It’s pitch-black when my cell wakes me. Reese stirs beside me, and I blink to focus. I smile when I see her curled up to me, warm and soft, her hair tangled up somehow around my arm. I ease it from beneath her, hearing her mumble, “No,” and I smile.
The Tates’ hotel was fully booked, but I’m staying just down the block.
I want her close.
I ease off the bed, snap on some boxers, and head out to the living room to take the call.
“Maverick Cage?” a female voice asks.
“Yeah.”
Fuck, it’s 3:00 a.m.
I pull the phone away to scan the number. I’m frowning as I put the phone back to my ear and peer out the massive window at the blinking lights of New York and the long, shadowed rectangle of the park. “It’s about your father.”
I hear the word “father” and I’m immediately transported to the moment I first saw him; the broken man I last saw in the hospital bed.
My body engages like it does before a fight. “He’s awake?”