“I do.” But his brows furrowed. “I think. Somewhere.” He shot her a sidelong look and his lips twitched.
A giggle bubbled up her throat. She swallowed it, but the pressure emerged in an unladylike snort.
Then they were laughing together, a friendly, happy sound that dispelled the weirdness and made them feel like allies.
“I’ll try the bathroom, you search the bedside
tables.” Still snickering, he stumped to the master bath at the back corner of the bedroom and snapped on the light, adding more brightness to the bedroom. She heard him mutter, “Real smooth, Falco.”
The parallel to her earlier thought made her laugh again, as a strange joy expanded within her, a sense of having found something precious and wonderful where she’d least expected it. She’d found a friend. A lover. A love.
Don’t get ahead of yourself,
she cautioned, but deep inside she knew it was already too late. Somehow, impossibly, she’d fallen for Erik Falco. She couldn’t have said when it had happened, but the truth sparkled through her like free-falling through a rainbow.
Okay, you’re already ahead of yourself. But for God’s sake, don’t tell
him
about it.
Her internal voice had a point there, she thought as she pulled out the top drawer of one bedside table and found spare change and a few rubber bands. As she shut the drawer, Erik’s earlier words echoed in her head.
She made me meat loaf, told me she loved me and took me to bed.
Well, she’d already made him dinner and was fully intending to take him to bed. So she’d skip the declaration of love. He didn’t need the weirdness factor, and they’d get around to the emotions later.
“Any luck?” he called from the bathroom, where she could hear the sounds of rummaging.
“Not yet.” She moved to the other side of the bed. “These things aren’t going to be mummified, are they? Condoms do have expiration dates.”
That earned her another guffaw, a happy, masculine sound that lodged a bubble of joy beneath her heart.
“Seasoned, perhaps, but not mummified.” He popped his head around the door frame, expression open, looking young and handsome, and so unlike the brooding, suspicious man she’d first met. “My older brother, Nev, and his girlfriend used a ‘mummified’ condom and wound up pregnant their sophomore year of college. Everything worked out okay—they’re still married, three kids, dog, yadda yadda—but he beat it into Robbie and me that we had to change out our condom supply every six months without fail. January and June. Even if it was a new box, dump the supply and start over.” He shrugged. “I’ve kept up the habit. Stupid, really. I can’t tell you how many boxes I’ve chucked since the shooting.”
The admission made her want to hold him, but she knew he would see the action as pity rather than sympathy, so she grinned instead. “Yet you don’t know where they are.” She pulled out the bedside table drawer. “Aha! Found ’em. Right behind the gun. Where else would they be?”
She told herself there was a joke in there, but suddenly couldn’t find the humor as she stared down at the weapon, which was made of matte-black metal and showed worn patches on the molded plastic of the hand grip.
A strong arm reached past her and picked up the weapon, leaving the unopened, plastic-wrapped box of condoms untouched.
“It’s loaded, since I’m the only one here and I know not to mess with it. Thirteen bullets for luck.” He pointed to the bottom of the grip first, then to the side. “Clip goes here, safety here. It’s on now. This is off.” He slid a small button to reveal a red dot. “Point and shoot.”
“I don’t… I’m not…” She shivered. “Sorry. I was trying to find a joke there and I couldn’t.” The dark night outside the windows suddenly seemed closer than it had moments before, the danger not as far away as she would have liked.
He clicked the safety back on, returned the weapon to its drawer, and turned Meg to face him. His eyes were serious when he said, “It’s probably best for you to know where it is and how to use it. I’ll have the smaller 9 mm with me, but this was my service piece. It’s here if you need it.”
“I won’t need it,” she said quickly, then paused and said, “I don’t
want
to need it. But if I do, I’ll know where to look.”
But they both knew that if anything happened, there wouldn’t be time for her to look. So far, the attacks had been stealthy, and jarring in their unpredictability.
“Hey.” He touched a finger beneath her chin, tipping her head up so she saw the truth in his eyes when he said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I swear it. I don’t know if this bastard is after you because of me, or whether you were the target all along. At this point I don’t care. He’ll have to come through me first.”
The banked passion behind his words shimmered through her, resonating as though he’d promised to love her rather than keep her safe. She suspected the two were inextricably intertwined in his psyche.
Or maybe she needed to think they were.
Either way, she stepped close to him and tangled her fingers with his. “I trust you to protect me, but right now I need you to do something else.”
I need you to love me,
she nearly said, but the words stuck in her throat.
He seemed to hear them anyway, because he reached up to frame her face, drawing their linked hands together so she was touching her own skin when he kissed her.
She murmured agreement and crowded close, welcoming the heat that drove away the chill of nerves and uncertainty. Where before there had been awkwardness, laughter or fear, now there was only the rush of blood and sensation.
Now there was only him.
She moaned as he feathered kisses along her jaw and down her throat, reawakening nerve endings that had gone too long unstimulated. When she loosened her hands from his and touched them flat to his chest, she could feel the heat of him through the soft cotton shirt, the layers of muscle and man over bone, and the quick, excited beat of his heart.
He touched her through her clothes, tracing her curves and telling her without words that she was sexy rather than solid, attractive rather than just athletic. A feminine warmth blossomed beneath his
hands, making her feel delicate and vulnerable, yet powerful at the same time.
She rode the feeling of power and slid her hands down, then up again beneath his untucked shirt so she touched his bare skin. She reveled in his indrawn breath and the quick shudder of reaction. She skimmed her fingertips along his muscled ribs, scraping lightly with her nails, testing his reaction, testing her power.
He muttered an oath and quickly unbuttoned the shirt and cast it aside, leaving him bare from the waist up. She wished she could have seen him in more than the reflected light from the hallway and bath, but the dimness lent an intimacy to the scene, a hint of unintentional romance that shouldn’t have mattered, but did.
Her heart pounded, sending heated blood radiating from her chest to her extremities with such force that her fingers and cheeks tingled with it.
She gloried in the rasp of sensation when he slid his hands beneath her shirt and teased the skin at her waist.
Higher,
she wanted to say.
More.
But his raspy chuckle as he retook her mouth told her that he knew exactly what she wanted, and was enjoying the torture. Enjoying the game.
Knowing two could play at that, and remembering having once been good at the push-pull of lust, she threw herself into the kiss, sliding her hands up along his bare chest to twine at his neck, binding the two of them together as they kissed long and deep and the world outside spun away.
It was like free-falling, only better because it went on and on and on, and there wasn’t that critical moment when she had to pop her canopy free. The feelings just built and built until she thought she might explode, but she never hit the ground.
Just kept falling.
She felt the give of the mattress beneath her, the unyielding weight of man above, and reveled in the intimate press even as she resented the friction of her binding clothes. Naked. She wanted to be naked with him, around him.
They rolled across the king-size expanse, grappling not for dominance, but for pleasure. Giving it. Receiving it. The dimly lit darkness became a cocoon for soft sighs and groans, for whispers of discovery and delight, even for a moment or two of laughter, as the easy accord they’d unexpectedly discovered during the condom search spilled over into their lovemaking. She remembered the heat from her other experiences, but not the intensity. And certainly not the physical freedom she found when they shed the last of their clothes and the dimness bound them in quietly frenzied intimacy.
She didn’t think of the faint sag from weight loss or the places where she was more strong than sexy, didn’t think of anything other than Erik’s body—the feel of his skin and muscle beneath her questing fingertips, the rasp of hair at his chest and tautly muscled stomach, the twine of their legs as they kissed and kissed again.
She slid her bare foot up his calf and felt the ir
regular ridges of scar tissue. He stiffened slightly against her, but she didn’t back down, didn’t move away, just kept up a slow stroke of toe against calf and the inciting glory of their kisses until he relaxed again and caught up with her, then raced ahead, skimming his hands up to cup her breasts. She couldn’t think then, couldn’t focus on anything but the quickening glide of his clever fingers and the intimate press of their bodies as the covers bunched up and over them, creating pockets of friction and heat countered by cool draughts feathering over their sweat-slicked bodies.
Outside it was the crisp chill of a New England fall night, but inside held the tropical steaminess of summer. Meg tasted the salt of exertion, of sex. Urgency built in her core and radiated outward, begging for completion, demanding it.
“Where was that box again?” she asked, and laughed when her voice cracked, then laughed again when Erik rolled across the bed to retrieve the condoms. He was glorious in his nakedness, limned in the yellow hallway light, which cast the ripples, hollows and juts of his masculine physique in sharp relief as he punched through the plastic wrapper, withdrew a foil packet and rolled the protective layer down over his proud erection.
The motion should have been more practical than erotic, but the light, the heat and the man combined to leave Meg dry-mouthed and salivating at the same time, churned up and aching to have that hard, driving flesh within her.
Instead of waiting for him to return, waiting for more of those deep, weightless kisses, she rolled to him, threw a leg over his waist and kissed him, all in one smooth move that left her straddling him, dizzy with desire and the spinning, swirling heat.
He muttered an oath and brought his hands up to grasp her hips. His fingertips dug deep and held on as she eased back and down, seating the tip of him inside her wet, wanting cleft.
In the darkness, she couldn’t see the color of his eyes, couldn’t tell if they darkened with anticipation and desire. But she could see the intensity that burned in their depths when his hands urged her to slide down along his sheathed length, inch by filling inch until he was seated to the hilt and she was suspended above him, borne on the thick-feeling air, the brace of her numb arms and the strength of his fingers as they dug into her hipbones.
And urged her to move.
She eased forward and then back, riding the surge of pleasure and the power that came when his eyes clouded and then closed. Her next move wrung a strangled groan from his throat and she wondered what the other pharma-tech corporate raiders would think if they knew that Erik Falco could be rendered wordless by the pleasure they created together.
Then she thought nothing at all, as her own half-formed wordlets were swept aside, caught up in the rising tide of heat and motion as the pace quickened between them.
The room spun and grew dark, startling her until
she realized her eyelids had drifted shut. No matter, the swirling sensations were enough, they were everything as the pleasure built to a peak within her.
The world tilted as Erik neatly reversed their positions so he was above her, thrusting into her with building fervor and iron control. He eased the weight off his injured leg, creating an exquisite angle of penetration, one that touched new nerve bundles within her, setting off a chain reaction of pleasure that quickly built to a conflagration.
She grabbed on to him, seeking an anchor as gravity spun out beneath her and the free fall accelerated. She called his name as he surged deeper and deeper still. The blood rushed in her ears, sounding like windsong, and the anticipation built to a fever pitch.
Then, when she thought she couldn’t stand it, when she couldn’t wait any longer for the final moment, sensation exploded within her, around her, inside her with a noise like the
boom
of an opening canopy.
Then she hung motionless. The free fall stopped. The windsong stopped. She hovered hundreds of feet above the earth, suspended only by the feel of the man around her. Inside her.
Pleasure radiated outward, holding her in place, holding her helpless to do anything but feel.
She felt Erik’s arms tighten around her, felt him press his cheek to hers in a tender, binding gesture as he poured himself into her on one final, forceful surge. She felt his flesh pump within her, felt her
inner muscles contract to hold him in place and prolong the flight.
Then slowly, ever so slowly, from one heartbeat to the next, they floated back to earth until she could feel the mattress at her back and the good, heavy weight of man at her front, where he had collapsed on top her in the aftermath.
She didn’t want to turn her head to look at him, wasn’t sure she wanted to know how much it had—or hadn’t—meant to him. Deep in her soul, she knew it had meant far too much for her.
I love you,
her inner voice whispered. Too soon, perhaps, but no less real for the speed of falling. Of impact.
But he wouldn’t want to hear that. Not now. Maybe not for quite a while. She told herself she could wait, she could let this grow at its own speed, let them get past the hurdles still remaining for them—finding the attacker, working out the kinks in the licensing so they were both satisfied. Then she could use the words. But not now. Now was too soon.