“Are you challenging me?” she asked incredulously.
“Really never saw a gauntlet I could resist picking up.”
She slid her fingers under the band of his briefs, to the thicket of curly hair.
His breath hissed. His fingers sank more firmly into her butt, and he pulled her against his thigh, drawing her up and down against that muscle in one long delicious rub.
Challenge and play was so much easier than softness and intimacy.
“Me, neither,” she murmured menacingly and trailed just her fingertips to the base of his erection.
“Oh, baby.” He pressed toward her hand. She drew it instantly away. He tried to grab her hand.
She laughed and wormed it under his butt, hiding it from him even as she kneaded that hard muscle.
“I’m a poor, lonesome, war-weary soldie—security guard. And you should not be mean to me.” He tried for big, pitiful eyes.
“Were you a puppy in another life?” The kind of puppy that grew up to be a wolf.
“Were you a gorgeous siren?” He sank his hands into her hair and pulled her down to kiss her, taking his time, running his hands over her in deep, kneading strokes as he kissed her and kissed her.
In the heat of those kisses, she forgot to tease him, her hand sliding past the loosened denim and under his briefs to cup his bare buttock, hot and smooth and curved against her palm.
“Mmm.” A low, hungry-satisfied sound in his throat. “More.”
“Greedy,” she breathed into his jaw.
His fingers dug into her butt, rocking her against his pelvis as he thrust up. “Oh, yeah, I want it all.”
Yes. All. And that was what he felt like—all. All life, all humor, all energy, all challenge—everything she wanted, right there grinning up at her and daring her to take him.
He made her want to toss those fragile, colorful, silky feelings up in the air and let them rain down around them, beautiful and joyous.
She nipped his shoulder again, expanding into the joy of their bodies tangling and touching, and he got her cami over her head and threw it somewhere, then went to work on her bra.
“Oh, God, yeah,” he said, as the cups fell away. He clenched his fist around the black lace and kissed it like an Olympic champion might kiss his gold medal, then tossed it away, too.
She laughed, clasped her wrist above her head, and stretched, twisting her hips down into his as she did. Vivid and alive and thrilled to be her.
“You are always trying to kill me,” he said, and lifted her suddenly to set her on the couch, coming to his knees between her legs so that he could cup her breasts and bury his face in them, kissing and sucking and squeezing as if he couldn’t get enough.
You and me both. She slid her good hand down his back, trying to knead him in closer, trying to use her right arm to squeeze him in, too, since she couldn’t use her right hand. I can’t get enough of you either.
One of his hands slid around her back to hold her to him, the other slid down under her pajama elastic to cup her bare butt. “God, I love you,” he said into her breasts, and the words rolled through her, like the roll of land in an earthquake.
Damn him for saying things like that, so easily and so carelessly. Too cocky and too flippant to remember the damage he could wreak. She pushed the words away, into the compartment where she kept all his ridiculous marriage proposals, but it wasn’t as easy this time, as if some little part of her wanted to catch the words back out into the open and think about them as if they might be true.
She thrust her good hand down and wrapped her hand around his penis like it was his throat, strangling.
He made a harsh sound into her shoulder, and thrust hard. “Sweetheart…honey…gorgeous…” He really was babbling now, or almost, losing coherence as he yanked her pajama bottoms off. “So pretty, pretty, pretty…” His hands stroked over her bare, spread thighs as if they were a miracle, and then gripped too hard as she tightened her hand again to try to get him to shut up.
Pretty and fine were one thing. Combining them with love was another. A girl could get all messed up that way.
If she was stupid.
If she let him get away with that crap.
So she squeezed her hand down his erection hard, punishingly, trying to force him out of his mind.
He made a sound that could not possibly be deciphered as a word, and slid his hands up her thighs, gripping them wide, thumbs massaging the lips of her sex, sliding down the folds, parting and playing and sliding back up.
She jumped at the intimacy, and then she loved it, oh, hell, she loved it, her whole body trying to liquefy in reception. Even the strength of her grip wanted to go, and she fought it, tightening her hold and sliding up and down, because he was going to lose his mind this time, she was going to win over him.