“Hardly any?” Chloe managed to ask, gently grazing her clit with her fingers as she spoke.
Caine shook his head. “Rarely.”
This conversation should have felt wrong to Chloe’s rational side. Naughty. And much, much too dangerous for any sane, intelligent woman to continue enjoying with a man she knew only through his work. But it was also causing the throbbing between her legs to grow and so Chloe’s need for release forced her to urge it on.
“What happened when a woman did resist?”
Caine’s eyes stayed to the front, despite the way her question had been breathed out to him. Chloe watched him breathe in and out slowly as well. As if calming his own nerves now. Obviously, he too felt the buzz of talk too intimate to be sharing with a complete stranger. But his discomfort over their banter made her feel more at ease with her own discomfort. It was reassuring to her that he was as human as she.
She could only hope that he shared the other emotional and physical reactions the conversation was having on her. Chloe let her eyes wander down to where his cock was hiding in the darkness. Her fingers, the ones that still pressed against and teased her clit, itched to reach for it. To wrap around it. To see if it was as hard as she suspected it would be by now. As hard as she hoped it would be by now.
She already knew how long, thick and demanding it would be.
“They’re just stories, Chloe.”
She had heard his words. All of them. His spoken pause was a question as to her desire for him to continue and a statement that had told her that he didn’t know her well enough to answer this one for her. He didn’t know how she would react to details that he was quite sure she had already heard or at least conjured up in her own mind. And he wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear the details that could make her even wetter and even more ready for whatever he was hiding from her. Most of all, she suspected that he wondered if she was capable of thinking like one of his characters. One of his creatures.
Or better still, one of their mates.
The courage she used when faced with animals too hurt and sick to know that her touch on them was meant to heal and not inflict even more pain brewed up inside Chloe and she slid a little closer to Caine on the seat to help answer his less verbal questions.
“What do you think they would have done to ones who resisted, Caine?”
His grip tightened on the wheel. Chloe drew in a breath and his warm, comforting, masculine smell found its way into her by way of her nose and mouth. She could smell his scent as well as taste it. And she felt her pulse quicken behind her breasts as he didn’t move his body in any way that would hint at his wanting her to shift away from him or cease with her interrogation.
Her cunt spasmed with amazing clarity its desire for this man to be inside it.
She felt the truck roll to a stop but didn’t care where they were badly enough to look away from his face. When he turned to her, she was glad she’d stuck to her resolve on that issue.
“What would you have them do, Chloe?”
That invitation, from this man, in the dark and in the middle of no-damned-where was an orgasm in itself. But she managed to appear calm as she answered him.
“This is fiction.” She nodded. “Right?”
“Absolutely.” He nodded with her and turned his body to face hers. Chloe made her fingers still, but left them pressing against herself.
“Because these things never happened, right?”
He shook his head slowly. And then grinned before he shrugged adorably. “Did they?”
That question gave Chloe a spark of hope that she hadn’t felt since Maw had died. Caine had heard the stories. He knew them as well as she did. And even more of them. And that could possibly mean he felt the same way about sex and animal urges that all humans have in the bedroom. The forest. Same difference to Caine. Or so his novels would certainly seem to point to that.
“Are we writing one of your books together, Caine?”
He grinned at her again without answering. And then moved his body a little closer to hers. Had Chloe not been so hypersensitive to this man, had every fiber of her being not wanted this man to touch her, she most likely wouldn’t have noticed the gap between them closing. It was that subtle. Stealthy. But it put her within his reach.
Which was hopefully his plan.
“We could,” he murmured in a voice that sounded to Chloe like sandpaper against sin.
Her fingers involuntarily grasped at her pussy at the sound. Chloe wanted Caine’s fingers to grasp her. Every nerve ending in her body demanded to be heard by this man’s hands. She wanted to know that he couldn’t stop himself from reaching for her face. Her breasts. Couldn’t keep those hands from gripping her between her thighs.
She wanted him to show her the answer to the question they were considering.
And she’d put up a hell of a “resistance” for him if that was what he wanted.
Real Oscar caliber stuff.
“So what would you have them do, Chloe? It’s your call,” he smiled. And then bigger. “Or does that undermine your answer?”
He did understand. Perfectly. He understood humans making love as a primitive, animal response to something stronger than morality or religion or laws. He understood the predator and prey roles that some women like to live out in the bedroom. And he most likely understood a human female’s desire to sometimes be restrained and made love to under the guise of force. He was using his voice and body language and those eyes to let her know that he knew these things about her and that this was a game they were playing. The oldest game that has ever existed between male and female. Husband and wife. Man and beast.
“Man’s oldest ancestors were all hunters,” Chloe stated carefully. “They stalked and killed and feasted when their skills overpowered their prey. And they did so without regret or guilt. I think possibly their sons continue to this day to crave that natural rush.”
“So they would have simply taken what they wanted?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” she implored. “The animal side of them would have had no reason not to.”
Chloe shifted in the seat again and looked back to the stop sign where they had been sitting for a moment. She thought about her options. About what was safe and right and the thing that she should do as a woman of her day, education, and level of responsibility. About what she should do seeing as how she had just had sex with his twin. And then she did the exact opposite.
“I think they stole the women they wanted,” she started, her hands still now. Waiting. Both for the rest of her response and for his reaction to it. “And I think they forced the women to mate with them whether they wanted to or not.” She was sure he could see her pulse, even through her skin, clothing, and even through the darkness that enveloped her.
“I don’t even think the men had a choice,” she said quietly before clearing her throat and finding her steady voice again.
“It’s simple biology, Caine. The male of any species feels an urge to pass along his genetic code. And that urge takes over in some species.” She paused and considered the sanity of her next statement. “I believe it takes over in all species to a certain extent. And I think there’s a great deal of pleasure to be found in such natural urges and drives.”
She could hear him breathing. Carefully. And deliberately, taking the time to compose his thoughts. “You mean that’s what you think would have happened
if
the stories were true. Don’t you, Chloe?”
Her hand flexed on the handle beside her. She kept her eyes forward. And shrugged.
“You don’t believe those stories, do you?”
She wondered how smart this was, not for her physical safety, but for her emotional safety. Chloe’s dreams and fantasies and beliefs were precious to her and having someone poke fun at them or try and make her feel dirty or wrong because of them was one of the most painful things she could think of. Her nerve wavered. But not enough to completely protect her. She shook her head unconvincingly.
He was quiet. Except for his pulse and the soft sound of his breathing right beside her. He was studying her as she refused to look at him. Most likely deciding what would make such an educated woman even consider that such nonsense might be true. Despite the fact that it was nonsense that he himself created with his mind. Or quite possibly because he wasn’t as open-minded as she wanted to believe he would be when it came to natural attraction and so he was repulsed by the fact that she was so shamelessly flirting with him even though she had been with Luke. She heard him lick his lips again before he spoke.
“Would you like to believe in them?”
She shook her head. Too quickly to look believable, most likely. But her defenses had kicked in just as she had detected the same tone of disbelief in his voice that she had heard any other time she had conveyed her dreams to anyone. Her heart had become despondent at the sound.
Chloe had been so sure that Damon Caine, if anyone, would believe as she did. But often what one believed and what was the truth, Chloe had learned, weren’t always in agreement.
She felt him move again in the seat. Most likely to take his body away from the woman who would seem so excited over such fairy tales and who would seem to want such wicked and unnatural things to be true, she suspected. He’d seen her reaction. He’d felt it. It simply wasn’t something she had ever been able to hide very well. She wasn’t even sure now if he hadn’t known that she had been touching herself the entire time he’d talked about the fairy tales. And she had the very distinct feeling that he knew every naughty detail about what had gone on in the cabin’s living room just a matter of hours earlier.
Chloe had to turn her head to the window to keep him from seeing how visibly upset she was that he was just like the very few others in whom she had confided over the years. She wouldn’t let him see the story in her eyes that told of more than one man who took her admitting this fantasy to them as a sign that she wanted abuse. Chloe knew the difference in abuse and passion. She knew a love lick from a slap. And she knew the difference between uncontrollable desire and angry rape.
But she’d never found a man who understood it as well. And she knew for damned sure she had never found one who understood and who seemed compatible with her mentally, sexually, and emotionally.
Like Luke Caine had seemed to understand. But only until he’d finished making love to her.
She knew now that she could never tell Caine that each and every time she’d read one of his books, she’d hoped, if she ever were to meet him, that he would be one person who didn’t think she was childish or perverted or insane for believing in and wanting such things. And that she’d hoped that he too understood where that very thin, very fragile line between human need and animal lust truly lived. And most of all, she knew that she could never tell him what she longed to have a man do to her. Or that she had truly believed that he might be that man, even before she’d met him.
But he was just a writer. And his stories were as make believe as her own beloved stories and the imaginary man in her mind who would know how to fulfill such fantasies. And although Chloe felt no guilt whatsoever about what she had done with his brother, she suspected that Caine found her even greater attraction to him vile under the circumstances. This was most likely the truth, no matter what she longed to believe.
Chloe let her forehead rest against the cold glass of the window to try and cool some of the heat from her embarrassment-riddled face. And she vowed never to admit her dreams to anyone or even bring the subject up ever again.
The warmth of his breath in her ear made her quickly jerk her head around to face him again.
“Do those stories excite you, Chloe?”
He hadn’t moved away. By no means, in fact. Caine’s voice was still that low rumble of affection as he spoke to her. And he didn’t have the crazed look of a man who falsely believed he’d just been given free reign over her body, sex, and soul. Nor was it the look of a man who thinks he sees an easy piece of ass in front of him.
She couldn’t even manage a nod, let alone a word to confirm his suspicion. But he needed neither from her, apparently. Her eyes and her breath and something primitive that man detects from woman were her messengers.
The sting she felt was sharp and quick. And not what she considered painful in the least. But had it not been preceded by their conversation and some unspoken understanding that they had somehow come to just seconds earlier, the action and the sting would have been quite inappropriate.
He had her by the hair. His fingers woven into and around her curls, flexing, pulsing, it would seem. Mirroring the pulse sounding between her legs.
“Would you have resisted them, Chloe?”
His mouth grazed hers as he spoke. Chloe could taste the breath that came from his lips as he spoke. It intoxicated her, causing her head to spin and drop, giving his hand reason to flex once again within her hair. The renewed sting was more pronounced and even more exhilarating.
“Would you have tried to fight them off, Chloe? Creatures who were more animal than any man? Creatures who couldn’t be taken down by full grown human men?” She felt the tip of his nose drag down her cheek and then around her ear. His breath followed it, tickling her. Warming her even more. Teasing her skin with its signal of life and with the natural implications of what they could create together.