“It’s good to see you too, Dan…”
His name, spoken so softly, caused Dan to suffer a momentary loss of the present. The street and buildings around him dissolved into the swanky Novotel hotel in Malaysia. Time reversed itself and suddenly it was three months ago, when she’d pushed him back against the door of his room and they were on each other like icing on cake…
“Dan…”
She was alive in his arms, a warm, writhing mass of sweet femininity. Her mouth hot and hungry. Her fingers and hands…everywhere. It was insane. Amazing. Fast. Too fast. He didn’t have time to think. And maybe that was her whole plan, since not fifteen seconds ago he’d been about to put on the brakes and call the whole thing off.
She fumbled with his belt buckle and shoved his pants down his legs, pulling hers off a split second later. Then she was dragging him toward the bed and his eyes were superglued to her high, tight, panty-clad ass. Somewhere along the journey, his boxers went the way of his pants. And then she was crawling onto the bed, turning to beckon him with a sultry grin and bedroom eyes.
“Condom,” she husked when he was about to launch himself on top of her.
He spun to snag his discarded pants so he could root around in the pocket for the rubber he knew was in there. When he swung back, she was on her knees on the bed, her lush bottom lip caught between her teeth. She looked so damned beguiling. So damned tempting. So damned…everything he’d been missing. He hesitated.
“Do we need to go through it again?” She lifted a brow, referring to the speech she’d just given him about not usually doing this kind of thing, but being willing to take a chance on him because she felt they had a strange, unexpected connection.
And that was the whole goddamned reason behind his continuing reticence, wasn’t it? That strange, unexpected connection. Because even though he’d convinced himself that his wife would be the first person to cheer him on in finding life again, finding love or lust or even just companionship again, it still felt disloyal to her memory to have such an intense attraction to another woman.
And it was intense. Utterly carnal. Profoundly sexual. Stronger than anything he’d ever felt before. Which made the sense of disloyalty that much worse.
“If you’ve changed your mind, I understand,” she said softly. “We can just forget about it.” The way she smashed the words together in that quintessentially New York way made it sound more like fuhgeddaboudit.
Hell’s bells, she was adorable. A tough, streetwise, long, tall, sexy-as-hell Secret Service agent who made all his internal gyroscopes go so crazy he didn’t know which way was up.
“No.” He adamantly shook his head, the phrase he’d heard at his last AA meeting echoing inside his heated skull: Get up, suit up, show up, grow up, don’t give up…no matter what. And to his eternal dismay, the truth was he had given up. For a really long time. And he hadn’t shown up. For just as long. But he was done with all of that useless self-pity and narcissistic despair. He was taking his first step out of the darkness and into the light. And he was doing it with a wonderful, kind, intelligent woman. As for the growing up, if one particular part of him grew any more, it’d likely split its skin. And suiting up? Roger that.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” he assured her, ripping open the foil packet with his teeth. “Not on your life.”
When he rolled on the condom, she licked her lips. Her dark eyes sparkled hungrily as she watched the thin rubber slide over his painfully sensitive, angrily engorged erection.
He went to her then, pressing her back on the mattress, loving the way her shiny brown hair fanned out against the pillow. His pillow. His bed. This wonderful woman. He bent to claim her mouth, whispering the pet name he’d given her only minutes before. “Brooklyn.” And that’s when…BOOOOMMM!…all hell broke loose…
He came back to himself when her breath fanned over his cheek. She smelled like chocolate and the promise of a warm woman in the middle of cool sheets. He wanted to eat her up and take her to bed. Wait… Reverse that. He wanted to take her to bed and then eat her up.
Which wasn’t really anything new. He’d wanted to do that since day one.