Noah sensed the shift in her, and heat crackled and leaped between them instantly. His raw sexual sorcery was so potent. She couldn’t get enough.
She kicked off the shoes, the socks. Peeled the tight sweater off her head, and tossed her hair back. Shimmied out of the jeans and stood there in only bra and panties.
“Come here,” she said.
He came closer. “I’m yours for the taking,” he said. “Anytime, anywhere.”
“Good,” she whispered as he approached. “Right now, then. Right here.”
“Nice lingerie,” he said. “Take it off.”
“You do it.”
Her words were cut off by his hungry kiss.
They only stopped long enough for him to rip off his sweatshirt. He pressed her against him, unclasping the bra, tossing it away, clearly enjoying the way the tips of her breasts rubbed against his broad, scarred chest. He hooked his thumbs into her panties, nudging her back until she ran into the bed and sat down on it, bouncing.
He crouched by the bed to peel the panties off her ankles, then knelt between her knees and pressed hot, demanding kisses against her inner thigh, caressing her knees with his warm hands. The contact left a shimmering glow that spread out, everywhere.
“I want to go down on you.” He stroked the seam of her labia, just a slow, tender swipe with his thumb, up and down. That teasing contact and the aching hum of tension between them made silky wetness pool inside her. Her body’s instinctive demand.
Noah’s fingers slipped inside her and emerged gleaming, slick and hot. He made a low growling sound of pure satisfaction and sucked on them hungrily.
“So sweet,” he muttered. “You taste amazing.”
He put his mouth to her, his lips and tongue lavishly caressing every tender fold, lapping them, loving them.
And all she could do was give into it, lost and incoherent with the exquisite erotic sensations. Every part of her opening wider with every pulsing surge.
Chapter 26
Noah was deep into his analog dive. It was one of his favorites; a moonlit rock climb high in the Cascades, an old standby that chilled him fast. He could do it driving, during martial arts, while conducting business. Even when working on engineering designs.
It kept the restless, twitchy, damaged part of his brain too occupied to mess him up while he had an actual, real-world job to do. He’d even used this dive during sex on a few occasions, to keep from coming too fast. But that was pre-Caro.
Everything was different with Caro. Like night and day.
Every detail of the actual climb was burned into his memory. Every instant of the muscle popping, finger-bleeding effort as he crawled up under the last steep overhang. The physical, real-world climb was dangerous even for him, and he only undertook the real thing when no one could see him free-climbing it. Doing things that should be physically impossible attracted unwanted attention. His feet dangled over the empty abyss, wavering and jerking with each lurch upward.
Suddenly, freezing rain was pelting down on him. Out of nowhere.
What the fuck? This was his own goddamn analog. Like always, he’d gone with cool, sharp moonlight. A clear, empty sky. He had not visualized sleet into it.
Imbed.
Fuck. Imbeds were floating triggers for stress flashbacks. They sometimes drifted up from his subconscious mind and appeared in an analog dive without warning. He didn’t know what provoked them. Not only stress. Fallout from long-ago brain damage was his best guess as to their origin. Always scary. Always painful.
Cerebral implants and brain stim, the gifts that kept on giving.
It had been stupid to analog dive within twenty-four hours of pitched combat. Stupid, too, doing it while touching her. Contact with Caro flooded him with hormones, and affected his judgment. His heart and mind raced and his dick throbbed, still more than half hard even after a long bout of desperate sex. He was in a state of constant wonder and astonishment.
That was why he dove in the first place. To force himself out of this oversexed mindset. He needed to focus with laser-beam intensity to find a way to keep her safe from Mark forever.
He gently disentangled himself from her embrace, retaining his mental connection to the compromised analog. It hurt him to break physical contact with her. Every nanosecond that he wasn’t touching her was a nanosecond wasted.
He lay down naked on the floor. The contact cooled his hot skin as he dragged himself back into the mental rock climb, grimly resolute. He was going to beat this, damn it.
An icy imaginary wind blasted around him again. Night vision and infrared revealed every crack in the rock, each dangling root, scrap of lichen and creeping insect. He remembered it all. The images were in his long-term memory. Catalogued, indexed and available for instant recall whenever he needed them.