SEVENTEEN
He’d lied. Nothing could have warned Darcy or prepared her for the kiss Jeff delivered. Because this kiss was like no other. Like nothing she’d experienced before. Not even with him.
This kiss was a crushing, urgent demand. An almost angry claim. A brutal stamp against her mouth so searingly hot and unexpected it terminated all thought, all reason, all response beyond the most base, primal instinct within her.
To take more.
More of him. His kiss. The heat surging through her veins. The high charge current coursing over her skin in search of an outlet.
She needed it with a desperation she’d never known. And when her mouth fell open beneath his in welcoming surrender and his tongue drove between her parted lips it was as if the circuit closed and this hot, shared, sensual energy overtook them both.
Her fingers were in his hair, tight and pulling him closer into more demanding contact. Her body arching into a firm press of breasts, and belly, and thighs to meet the hard bow of his. Oh, God, it was good.
All that heat against her sensitive, so long neglected body.
All that contact and promise.
All that want.
She was drowning in it. Lost in the desire ratcheting higher with each thrust of Jeff’s tongue. Begging him with every needy gasp and tug to take her deeper. Give her more. Make it last.
And it did, until the dizzying need for air had them breaking away, but only to move on in their greedy exploration. Hands roaming a restless path across her back and bottom, into her hair and over her arms, Jeff devoured her neck—each wicked pull of his mouth, firm stroke of his tongue and gentle scrape of his teeth acting as the trigger to another sensual detonation within her.
“It’s got to be you, Darcy,” he growled between deft flicks of his tongue into the shallow behind her ear, the palm of one hand finding her heavy breast. “If this needs to stop...”
He pulled back, his eyes burning down the length of her body before meeting hers. “I can’t make myself do it.”
She shook her head, hating the scant inches between them and the cool air threatening to carry reason back into the mix. “Don’t stop. I don’t want to stop. Just this once. Tonight. I don’t want you to stop.”
“Just this once.” His thumb swept across the soft cotton at her breast, and again when it pebbled tight against the confines of her bra. “And then we put it behind us.”
Nodding frantically, she asked, “Can you do that? Can we agree?”
“Right now I’d agree to anything.” His eyes dropped to the straining bud of her nipple. Went darker as he gently pinched it through the layers of fabric making her breath catch and stutter at the pleasure piercing her core, the molten heat spilling through her center. “But yes, I can do that.”
At the next decadent circle of this thumb, she moaned, pressing into his touch. “Jeff, please.”
His eyes blinked closed in an expression that bordered on pained. “You don’t know...Darcy, how many nights...I’ve replayed those two words in my head.”
This time, Darcy was the one to still. The sharp ache in her heart, clearing the sensual fog surrounding her in one stab. He’d admitted to thinking about them being together in the past. But always in the context of some emotionally barren, throwaway comment, underscoring the lack of meaning behind it. But this time, tonight, there was nothing throwaway in his tone. Only they’d just agreed—
Before she could think too much about it though, his hands were on the hem of her borrowed T-shirt and he was stripping it from her with the same efficiency he’d pulled it off himself.
And then his eyes were on her, reverent, filled with an awe that made her feel beautiful rather than self-conscious about the way her shape had changed.
“You’re so gorgeous,” he said in a voice so gruff, she felt the deep vibration of it down to her bones.
Catching her behind the knees and back, he carried her to the bed and followed her down, their mouths fused in a decadent, promising kiss that had Darcy’s hands coasting over the hard planes of Jeff’s chest, working down his abs, and then fumbling with his belt.
At her frustrated whimper, he brushed her fingers aside and backed off the bed. His skin was flushed with a combination of exertion, restraint and arousal. His defined musculature flexed with every motion.
He ran his palm over his mouth and from beneath, she thought she heard the word fantasy.
But then he was back at his belt. Never in her life had she seen anything so sexy as when, inside of two tugs, he had the belt loose and his fly open. Her eyes followed the neat line of hair arrowing south of his waist and—
Oh, yes, please.
His fully engorged shaft was thick and dark and jutting out from his body at an angle that defied gravity. And though she’d seen him like this before—had intimate knowledge of how he fit within her—the sight of him was shocking.
Arousing. Incredibly, unbearably arousing.
Making every part of her achy and swollen. Needy. Desperate.
So she did the only thing she could think of, banking on it garnering the same powerful response it had the first time. Breathless and trembling, she whispered, “Jeff, please.”
It worked, because before she could draw her next breath, he’d kicked off his pants and shorts, returned to the bed and, body half covering hers, was kissing her senseless.
Supported on one arm, he stroked her greedily with the other, running a possessive hot touch up and down her thigh, catching the back of her knee in one hand so he could pull it alongside his hip and make hard contact with the soft needful place she wanted him to be.
Only she was still in her bra and panties. Too many layers between them.
She was about to complain when Jeff rocked against her just right, and her breath caught and her mind blanked of anything beyond the pressing, immediate need for him to do it again.
Her hips tilted in wanton invitation. Her hands running from his shoulders down his spine as far as she could reach, her heels sliding up the backs of his hard thighs to just beneath his butt as the steely length of him rolled across the wet strip of thin cotton covering her sex.
“Yes!”
Dipping into the cups of her bra, he carefully worked the lace beneath her breasts and sat back, eyes locked on the erotic display he’d made of her.
“Darcy—”
But whatever he’d meant to say was lost when he lowered his head and flicked his tongue against the turgid peak.
The fleeting contact wasn’t enough. Not when he blew a warm breath across the tip, either, and especially not when he brushed his lips in a wicked back and forth tease that on every other pass or so allowed the achingly tight bud to slide between.
More.
“Please, Jeff,” she whimpered. “In your mouth. Please.”
He groaned and closed over one nipple, drawing with a sweet suction as he slid a hand into her panties and cupped her tender flesh.
His touch.
She’d tried not to think about it after that first night, but there was something so incredible about the way he’d handled her. Like he knew exactly what to do, what would feel the best, how she liked to be stroked, when to tease and when to give her what she was desperate for. So in those weak moments when her thoughts strayed, they’d strayed to this.
His fingers pressing between her slick folds, playing over her cleft. One thick digit working slowly inside her swollen, slick channel, then a second, stretching and filling her in a way that was so good, it made her beg for more, open her legs wider and tip her hips into his touch.
“Yes,” she gasped, head tossing against the pillow as pleasure rocketed through her center with each gentle thrust. The tremor of need built fast, gathering strength with each guttural bit of praise, encouragement and promise of more.
He drew her nipple into the wet heat of his mouth, suckling in a rhythm that matched the slow stroke of what then became three fingers.
“Oh, God! Jeff, please,” she panted. “Please! I need. I—”
Her pleas cut off as his thumb settled firmly at the top of her sex and—
“Come for me, Darcy.”
—her world came apart, sensation and tension from every extremity surging, together, crashing through her in wave after wave of pleasure that was sharp and sweet and hot and, as was so often the case with Jeff, like nothing she’d known before.
* * *
Holy. Hell.
Darcy was coming against his hand, the pleasure he wrung from her body more satisfying than if he was the one finding his release.
An hour ago, he’d been about ready to sell his soul to get some sleep, but now? He’d forgo sleep for the rest of his life if it meant more of the silky sound of Darcy moaning his name. Only the rest of his life wasn’t an option. What he had was tonight, and he wanted to make it last. Draw it out as long as possible. Give her what she wanted first. Then start in on what she needed. And after that, what he needed to give her.
One night.
Hell, the dull edge of that thought was nearly enough to yank him out of this perfect moment. But with so few precious hours available, he wasn’t going to waste them dwelling on the things he couldn’t have.
When the last of her tremors subsided and her body melted back into the mattress beneath her, Jeff backed down the bed, peeling her panties off in the process. Then coming back up, he pressed a kiss against her sex, earning himself another pleasured gasp and Darcy’s full attention.
Pushing to her elbows, she stared down the length of her body at him. And damn, he’d never seen anything like it before. The silk of her long blond hair hung in a sexy tumble around her face and past her shoulders. Her eyes were all bedroom, slumberous and sated while somehow asking for more. Her lips parted and kiss swollen in a way that had him fighting about a dozen depraved impulses at once. Her belly softly rounded. And her breasts—
God help him, he should have finished what he started in taking off her bra, but some primal part of him was seriously getting off on the tight, peaked bounty of ripe flesh, overflowing the lace constraint he’d only managed to pull partially out of his way.
Darcy seemed to have noticed where his attention had been snared, too, because she glanced down at herself and then arched a questioning brow at him.
“I look—”
“Like a goddess,” he said, reaching for her and helping her to her knees.
He unhooked the back clasp of the bra that had served his purposes more than hers for the past minutes, and brushed the straps down her arms before ducking aside to retrieve a condom from the wallet he’d tossed on his nightstand. Then circling behind her, he pulled her against him so they were kneeling upright together and whispered in her ear, “Not of this world, you’re so incomparably sexy.”
The little noise she made suggested she didn’t entirely believe him, but it was true.
She’d been gorgeous that first night in Vegas, but now he couldn’t look at her without being blown away by the absolute lush perfection of her.
And tonight she was giving herself to him.
His erection was throbbing painfully with need where it rested between the press of their bodies. He had to get inside of her. Had to have what he’d been ruthlessly denying himself.
Pulling back he ripped open the condom—and Darcy turned, looking over her shoulder first at the condom and then at him.
Her eyes skated away and she quietly asked, “Do we need that?”
Which was when it dawned on him. She was pregnant. He couldn’t get her any more so.
But that wasn’t what she was asking.
Pressing his forehead against her shoulder, he told her the truth. “I haven’t slept with anyone since we were together.”
She stiffened. “Olivia?”
Her doubt made sense. Everyone had known it was serious with Olivia from the start. But in that moment, Jeff realized his need to make a connection might have been more a result of the one he hadn’t been able to keep with the woman finally in his arms, than the woman he’d found to replace her.
“We didn’t—we never had sex. I don’t know why, but I just—” He’d found and manufactured one excuse after another for them not to, somehow managing to convince them both it wasn’t about him. But it had been. Or more likely, about Darcy—whose breath had left her in a rush, though which emotion was behind that forceful push he didn’t know.
“The condom, it’s an ingrained habit. I wasn’t even thinking about it, but whatever you’re comfortable with. I can wear it.”
She looked back at him again, meeting his eyes over her shoulder and looking almost shy. “I want to feel you. Inside of me. Only you.”
His heart began to thump to a savage rhythm as some possessive part of him roared to life.
Only him.
He couldn’t wait another second.
Adjusting his knees, he positioned his shaft between Darcy’s legs. Groaning at the slick heat he found there, the skin on skin sensation that was only about to get better, he ran the length of himself through the spread of her folds.
“Lean forward, baby. I’ll go slow.”
God help him, the sight of her when she did was almost too much to bear.
Taking himself in hand, he notched the head at her opening, and at her eager plea for more, carefully fed the length of himself, inch by painstaking inch, into her tight, clenching sheath.
Heaven.
Bliss.
Nirvana.
Her bottom was pressed into his groin, the inner walls of her sex hugging him as he was as close to her as he’d ever been to another person. A part of him wanted to hold on to the connection forever, but another instinct-driven part urged him to move.
To draw back through all that snug, wet friction and then watch his uncovered length sink deep again, while Darcy’s fractured, needy cries stroked all the places within him her body couldn’t touch.
But he wanted more. Wanted to give her more.
Buried deep, he urged her upright. Thrusting slow and steady, he kneaded her breast with one hand, while letting the other ride the hills and valleys of her body to where she was slippery and wet for him. To the hot, swollen bud that made her inner walls clench like a fist every time he grazed it.
Made her mindless and wild and, for however briefly, his.
“Jeff, oh, yes, yes, like that,” she panted, pushing back into his groin even as her knees widened in a plea for more of his fingers on that secret place.
He circled, the slick orbits closing ever tighter until at last, she gave him what he needed. Another throaty cry of release as she came around his thrusting shaft and against the stroke of his fingers.
And while she lost herself in pleasured delirium, the hand he’d had at her breast coasted lower until he was cradling the place that was theirs together, and he gave in to the fantasy that for those few moments, everything he wanted was within his hold.