Holding Out for a Hero (14 page)

“You don’t have enough control of your stick,” he murmured, feeling like a total hypocrite. At the moment he was damned sure she had better control of hers than he had of his. He was trying to keep his distance down there and hoped she couldn’t tell he was hard as a rock.

“You have to slide it like this.” Jake demonstrated the motion, gliding the cue between her knuckles in smooth, easy movements. Back and forth. Back and forth. He thought he heard something remarkably like a whimper reverberate in the back of her throat. He swallowed, his hand tightening on the cue. Her smell was intoxicating and it took all his willpower not to drop his head and bury his face in her neck.

“Do you see?”

Ella was still none the wiser. She’d taken nothing in since he’d pressed himself against her. His voice, thick and rough went straight to her nipples and the sliding motion of the stick was utterly entrancing. It took a second or two to find her voice and then it was totally unintelligible. “Hmm.”

Jake wasn’t sure what she said but she didn’t sound very confident. “Let’s do it together,” he suggested. “Draw back,” he murmured into her ear, pulling the cue back a few inches, “and strike the center of the ball.”

He punched the cue’s tip into the white and it sailed down the table, hitting the cluster with a resounding smack and sending the balls flying around the table in a satisfying spider’s web of color.

Neither of them moved. Balls careened crazily around their joined hands, narrowly missing them. Still they didn’t move. Ella watched the spectacle without taking any of it in. Not the wonderful randomness or the mathematical possibilities or the sheer prettiness as the balls bounced and collided, spiraling off each other like fireworks squirming into the night.

They still hadn’t moved when the balls eventually settled. The silence grew thick around them. Jake, stretched to the limit of his resistance, turned his face slightly and rubbed his nose against the tiny flutter at her temple. It was soft there, the fruity perfume from her hair infusing his senses. He barely hung on.

Every millimeter of Ella’s skin felt alive, vibrant, waiting for Jake. When his lips touched where his nose had been an involuntary moan escaped her throat and even more involuntarily she pushed back into him, her butt cheeks grinding against the full force of his arousal.

Jake’s pulse skyrocketed.

“Ella,” he groaned and buried his face in her neck, her soft hair caressing his face. She pressed into him again and he shifted his hand from the cue to her hip and held her firmly to him.

Ella dragged in a breath that sounded like sandpaper rasping over wood. This was all kinds of crazy. She grasped for some sense. If they didn’t stop this now it would be unstoppable. She moved, turned in his arms and he straightened up, allowing her to do so but keeping her against the pool table, his hand firmly attached to her hip.

She drew in another husky breath. “Jake. This is crazy.”

Jake nodded. “I know.”

“I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. I can’t … stay.” She looked over his shoulder toward the exit. “I have to get out of here.”

He nodded again. She was right. This would mess up their professional relationship big time. “I know.”

Ella didn’t move. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself he was backwards, her body was screaming for his touch. For the magic she knew he had in his fingertips, his mouth, the rock of his hips. She made one last appeal.

“Please, just send me away.”

Her entreaty had the opposite effect. There was a note of desperation, a husky tremor in her plea that clawed at his gut, stroked along his muscles as surely as if she’d trailed her fingernail across them. And God help him, he wasn’t strong enough to do what she wanted.

“Shit, Ella,” he groaned, stroking her face, cupping her cheek, rubbing his thumb over the plump contour of her bottom lip. “I can’t.” And then he lowered his head and captured her mouth in a kiss that was out of control from the first touch.

All Ella could do was hang on as the kiss exploded around and inside her. She rose on her toes, her arms circling his neck, a hand snaking into his hair, bringing him closer, nearer. Jake’s hands found her ass, squeezing her cheeks, pulling her in and then lifting her, until she was sitting on the edge of the table.

She tore her mouth away, staring up at him dazedly, his mouth smeared with moisture, his green gaze as infused with lust as hers, as bewildered by it as hers, his chest heaving air in and out like an ancient bellows. He looked so goddamn lust-drunk and confounded she felt a rush of pure feminine power knowing she was responsible.

Jake swooped again, his pulse ratcheting another notch as her tongue pushed into his mouth. He eased her back against the table, pushing balls out of the way as he went. His lips left hers, travelled to her neck, the spot behind her ear, her collar bone. The V-neck of his jersey tickled his chin and he was overcome with the urge to get the bloody thing off. Now!

He straightened and looked down at her, the light spilling over her, her breathing harsh, her chest expanding emphasizing her assets. He placed a hand on her belly and watched her breath hitch. Then he grasped the hem and pushed it slowly up exposing her stomach and belly button, her ribs and then the ultimate prize. Two purple satin mounds of pure woman.

He lowered his head to her stomach and buried his face in the soft skin there. He inhaled and she smelled like beer and he wanted to lick her all over. Her stomach muscles tightened and he moved slightly as she curled up to remove the jersey.

Ella threw it on the ground and kissed him full on the mouth.

“Now you,” she requested, grabbing his T-shirt from behind and pulling it up over his head.

There were a few seconds when they both just looked at each other, their hungry gazes devouring the playgrounds before them, remembering them, anticipating them. And then they were on each other. Ella pulled on Jake’s shoulder, yanking him down as she fell backward. He climbed onto the table with her dragging her further up as he went, pressing her into the felt as his lips plundered the sweetness of her mouth. His hand groped behind her to unhook her bra, then moved to her waistband as she put her hands on the fly of his jeans and tugged it open.

His skin felt warm and smooth beneath her hands, the muscles bunching enticingly as she played her palms across them. She’d forgotten how broad he was, how perfectly her hips cradled his, how his stubble grazing the aching tightness of her nipples propelled her closer to orgasm. His hands were everywhere, his mouth hot and wet, blazing trails and leaving devastation and pleasure in equal measure in its wake. Her hand reached for his erection and the groan that tore from his throat was so base, so male, Ella practically purred her satisfaction.

She was vaguely aware of the jukebox singing ‘Lay Back in the Arms of Someone’, vaguely aware of the scratchy felt pressing into her back as she wrapped her legs around his waist. “Now,” she demanded.

Jake chuckled. “Patience,” he said and bent to suck an impossibly taut nipple into the heat of his mouth.

Ella moaned and her eyes rolled back in her head for a moment before sense returned. She tugged his head from her breast and yanked his face close to hers. “I need you in me. Now.”

“But—”

“I don’t want the fancy stuff. Not now. All I need is this.” She grasped him with rough hands and squeezed. “Inside me now.” Ella didn’t care that she still had his sweat pants caught around one knee or her bra wrapped around one wrist or that Jake had one shoe on and his jeans barely off his hips. All she cared about was Jake finding his wallet, putting the condom on and pounding all that hardness into her over and over.

For his part Jake was past caring about everything too. Not about the carpet burns he was sure as hell going to have on his elbows tomorrow or the fact that he was going to have to make up some half-arse excuse for Pete when he sent the pool table away for a professional clean.

Because once he pushed inside Ella everything else ceased to exist. There was just her and her breathing and her smell and her
yes, yes, yes
every time he thrust like his own private cheer squad and the tight grip of her muscles around him. He’d forgotten how good she’d felt under him and how responsive she was to his every movement.

Ella could feel the edges of her orgasm slowly coming together as Jake went from long, slow, teasing strokes to quicker, shallow ones, hitting that spot he was so good at finding. The spot that only Jake seemed to know existed.

“God, Ella,” Jake panted, “you feel so good.”

He gripped her already bent knee and pushed it back further, lifting her foot off the table, and thrust again.

Ella cried out as the different angle went deeper and pulled down hard in all the right places. Heat coalesced in her stomach, then bubbled and finally rippled out in ever increasing waves. She shut her eyes, trying to hold it back, wanting him to stay here forever, do this to her forever.

But then Jake groaned and she could feel the tremble of his biceps beneath her hands. Knowing he was near pushed her over the edge and she fell into a pool of such intense pleasure she didn’t think it was possible to survive it.

Until Jake joined her, and they drowned together.

Jake woke the next morning to a hand sliding up his chest. He cracked his eyes open as Ella draped a leg over his thigh and snuggled her head into his shoulder. Her hair brushed his chin and he shut his eyes again. He’d only been asleep for a few hours and the post-coital buzz had set firmly in his marrow, leadening his bones and eyelids.

A smile touched his lips as his mind drifted back to their brisk walk from the pub to her place as the first blush of dawn streaked the sky. They’d slipped into the darkened house like teenagers late home for curfew and hit her mattress, Ella’s hand over his mouth, smothering his laughter, finally kissing him to shut him up. And then passion reigniting, racing to shed their clothes and do it all over again.

And then again. And again. Before finally falling asleep from sheer exhaustion. Ella Lucas was insatiable. To prove his point her hand drifted south and his smile grew wider. Very insatiable.

“You asleep?” Ella murmured as her hand stroked over his flat belly.

He grinned. “Not anymore.”

Ella trailed her finger across the soft vulnerable strip where belly met groin, his appreciative purr encouraging her to stay and play a little longer.

“Mmmm,” Jake sighed, his dick currently wide awake. Even the brief, loud knock at the door before it opened wasn’t enough to kill its interest despite Ella withdrawing her hand like a child who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. His cookie jar.

“Ella, are you awake?” Rosie whispered loudly into the gloom as she approached the bed. “I’ve been worried about you.”

Jake chuckled and Ella dug him in the ribs as she raised herself up on her elbows. “I’m fine.”

Rosie heard the chuckle. “Jake? Is that you?”

Jake lifted his head off the pillow and gave her a brief salute before flopping back again. “Morning, Miss Rosie.”

Rosie grinned and raised an eyebrow at her best friend. “Well, well, well.”

Ella blushed and held the sheet firmly under her arms. “Rosie, it’s not—”

“What it looks like?” Rosie interrupted, still grinning like an idiot. “I see you took good care of her then, Jake.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m a man of my word.”

“I didn’t mean seduce her.”

Jake smiled. “What makes you think
I
seduced
her
?”

Rosie snorted. “Twenty years of friendship. Ella thinks too much.”

Jake laughed, remembering the moment she almost backed out. “That she does.”

“Hey, smart asses, I’m right here,” Ella grouched.

“I’m making bacon and eggs,” Rosie said. “You must both be famished?”

Jake was starving. But now Mr. Woody was involved, food was low down on his list of priorities. “No.”

“I do some mean mushrooms.”

“No.”

“And grilled tomatoes to die for.”

Jake laughed. “Go away, Rosie. Ella needs some more TLC.”

Ella was starving and Sunday breakfast was Rosie’s forte. She knew seven-foot bearded bikers who wept at Rosie’s breakfast table. “No. I’m fine.”

“Really?” Jake asked sliding a hand up her side and cupping a breast.

Ella swallowed. “Well …”

Jake brushed a thumb over a nipple that seemed more responsive to his suggestion than Rosie’s. “Really?” he murmured again, lower this time.

Ella collapsed back against the bed as her abdominal muscles twisted. “Maybe I’m having a relapse.”

Jake smiled. “Another time, Miss Rosie.”

“Okay, okay,” Rosie said, backing out the door. “But you know you’re passing up one of the best experiences of your life.”

Jake smiled into Ella’s eyes. “No I’m not.”

The door clicked shut and Jake rolled himself on top of her. She spread her legs and he settled into the cradle of her pelvis.

“Rosie really does make the best Sunday breakfast in Australia.”

He kissed her eyes, her nose and her mouth. “That’s okay. I make the best Sunday love on the planet. Bet I can make you forget all about food,” he whispered as he nuzzled her neck.

Ella shut her eyes as his tongue traced her collarbone and a wave of goose bumps marched across her body. “Hmm, that good, huh? Think you’re up to it?”

Jake ground his pelvis against hers. “What do you reckon?”

*

Twenty minutes later, having thoroughly succeeded in wiping Ella’s brain of not only food but even more basic things like speech and the ability to name simple objects, Jake rolled onto his back, dragging in ragged breaths. Ella lay beside him in a similar state of breathlessness.

For the first time, as he lay struggling to return his breathing and pulse to normal, he took in his surroundings. In the dawn hours he hadn’t paid any heed to her room. Only her and her naked skin and the mattress behind her had entered into his tunnel-visioned world. And it had been too dark. But the mid-morning sun pushed its bright fingers around the drawn blinds illuminating the space. He looked from side to side. Ella’s room was very
girly
.

Purple ceiling, pale pink walls, a purple-and-pink striped quilt. A large framed print featuring van Gogh’s
Starry Night
was pride of place on the wall opposite her bed. Then he noticed the little dolls stuck on bamboo sticks adorning the frame and anchored at other points around the room. They were everywhere. He’d seen them before of course, at the Ekka. Every little girl in Brisbane walked around the annual show carrying one of the damn things with their glittered hair and bodices, tulle skirts, netting wings and too-wide eyes—no doubt from the stick being jammed so firmly up their backsides. But it was kind of freaky to have so many wide kewpie doll eyes staring down at him like he’d been sullying their owner all night.

“Wow,” he said. “What’s with the dolls?”

Ella turned her head to face him. “Fairies,” she corrected.

Jake raised an eyebrow.

Ella shrugged. “I was never allowed to have one as a kid. Every year the show would come to town and girls like Sarah Charlton and Deidre Hillman would bring their fairies on sticks to school and I wanted one so badly. Rachel said they were unnatural but I just loved them. They were so sparkly and pretty.”

Jake thought Rachel had a point. They looked almost evil with their plastic mouths frozen in a little red Marilyn Munroe pout. He guessed it was a chick thing.

“The night Rosie and I left town she gave me one. She knew how much I adored them and, being a carnie kid, she had access to boxes of them. And then she gave me one for my birthday that first year together and it became a bit of a tradition. Now Daisy and Iris do it also. And of course the word went out to the extended family and they just show up from time to time.”

Jake rolled up on his elbow and looked down at her. “Doesn’t it … freak you out to have them watching you like that?”

Ella laughed. “No.”

Jake kissed her shoulder. “Your room’s not what I imagined.”

Ella raised an eyebrow. “You imagined my room?”

He grinned. “Well, only insofar as you being naked on the bed.” She laughed again.

“So what did you imagine then?”

Jake lifted his head. “Not so … pink.”

Ella smiled. “Does it offend your masculinity?”

He smiled back. “Absolutely not. But have you ever thought how good a big-screen television would look on that wall?” He moved his head, indicating the framed print.

Ella gave a horrified gasp. “That’s a van Gogh, Jake.”

He shrugged. “You could hang it in your office. Or, better still, have it as a screen saver.”

She shook her head. “Philistine.”

Jake looked around a bit more and was hit by a fragment of a memory. “Actually, Deidre Hillman had a pink room. Pinker than this. Frilly too.” He shuddered. “The whole catastrophe.”

Ella arched an eyebrow. “Really?”

Jake grinned. “Hey, just because Roger was a dickhead didn’t mean his sister was. Deidre was a very accommodating girl.”

Ella felt the bitch in her roar to life. “So I believe. Let me guess. She let you touch her breasts?”

Jake smiled at the memory before throwing her a look. “How do you know?”

“She did it for everyone, Jake, it was her specialty.” Ella pulled the sheet a little more firmly under her arms. “And they called Rachel a slut.”

“I have a lot to thank Deidre for,” he said, tugging on the sheet covering Ella’s breasts. “I’ve been a breast man ever since.”

Ella clamped down harder with her elbows, resisting his tug. “Did you and she …?”

Jake watched her worry her bottom lip with her teeth; she couldn’t quite meet him in the eye. He grinned. “Jealous?”

She shrugged unconvincingly. “Curious.”

“No.”

Now she’d started she couldn’t stop. She wanted to know which of Huntley’s bitchy bigoted girls had been lucky enough to deflower Jake. “Who was it? Your first?”

Jake gave her a stern look. “Ella, a gentleman never divulges that sort of information.”

Ella was surprised at his coyness. If only half the boys in Huntley hadn’t been so eager to kiss and tell about Rachel. “Okay, okay,” she said. “How old were you then?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen?” Ella squeaked. Bloody hell. Cameron was fifteen and she couldn’t even begin to imagine him being sexually active. He was flat out stringing a sentence together most days let alone something witty to convince a girl to do the nasty with him. What an articulate girl like Miranda saw in him was a total mystery.

But she
was
eternally grateful.

“I was an early starter. Plus, if it helps, I was really bad at it.”

Ella snorted. She had a feeling bad sex with Jake would still be better than a lot of the “good” sex she’d had since she’d become sexually active at the decrepit age of twenty.

“Don’t tell me the great Jake Prince finished a little early?”

Jake laughed. “You could say that. But I was lucky—she was more experienced and very patient. Plus … I’m a fast learner.”

Ella gave him a half smile. “And I bet your teachers always said you had difficulty concentrating.”

Jake laughed. He tugged on the sheet again and flashed her a knowing smile when she let him have his way. He dropped his head to nuzzle the swell of her left breast, as his hand stroked down her body.

A loud banging on the door intruded before he reached his target.

“Jake. It’s Pete.”

Jake reluctantly released his mouthful, placing his forehead against Ella’s chest. He looked up at her. “Jesus, it’s like Grand Central Station here, isn’t it?” And then he turned to face the door. “Go away,” he called.

“Rosie invited me for breakfast. She says last chance.”

Jake rolled his eyes and threw himself back against the mattress as Ella muffled a laugh. “No, thanks.”

“She says you’ll be sorry. She says it’s like an orgasm for your mouth.”

Ella laughed again and Jake shook his head. “Does the kid not realise that I’m trying to score a real one here?” he murmured. “Pete,” he said, louder this time, “I hired you, I can fire you. Go away.”

“I hope we practiced safe sex.”

Jake reached over the side of the bed, groped around for one of his shoes and hurled it at Ella’s door. It connected with an almighty thud.

“Jeez, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”

Ella laughed out loud this time as Jake rolled up on his elbow again.

“Now. Where were we?”

Ella cupped his cheek. “What does ‘a hand up’ mean?”

Jake frowned. “A hand up?”

“Last night you said you gave Pete a bit of a hand up.”

“Ah.” He flopped back against the mattress. He was silent for a moment. “I paid some school fees. Found him a place to live.”

Ella could hear the dismissive note in his voice and could tell he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. She turned her head and studied his face. He was scrutinizing her ceiling like it was a Michelangelo masterpiece. “That was a good thing you did,” she said.

Jake waited a beat or two and shrugged. “Just paying it forward. If Sergeant Peters hadn’t given me a chance at thirteen, I’d have probably ended up in juvie. Or stayed in Huntley, become a loser drunk like my father.”

Ella rolled on her side, pressing her body down the length of him and snuggled her head into his shoulder. His arm came up around her and she said, “You did him proud.”

Jake shut his eyes. On the football field maybe.

Ella snuggled closer, halting the sudden rise of the sordid memories from his past. He stroked his fingers up and down her arm and smiled at her contented sigh.

Lying with women after sex had never been his thing. It didn’t usually take them long to get to the hard sell, the when-can-I-see-you-again speech. When he’d been younger, the hey-baby-sure-I’ll-call lies had been easy. The older he got, the more gnawing his arm off in the middle of the night appealed.

But being here with Ella, escape was the furthest thing from his mind; he could stay for hours. He opened his eyes, twisting his head from side to side, looking for a clock. He spied a set of large digital numbers on a bedside table draped in a purple gauzy fabric. Nearly eleven.

A flash of red caught his eye as he looked away and he turned back. Two little red vases sat on the table as well. A stray beam of sunlight pierced a path through swirling dust particles and struck one of the vases, throwing a deep ruby glow on the wall behind.

It triggered a memory. “Hey,” Jake said. “Aren’t they the vases your mother had in her room? High on that window ledge, opposite her bed?”

*

Ella had been drifting away to the deep rhythm of Jake’s heart beat when his comment ripped her by the roots of her hair back to consciousness. For a few seconds everything stopped as his words sank in.

How in the hell did he know that?

She pushed herself away from him, anchoring the sheet firmly under her armpits. Her heart was beating so hard it felt like bullets hitting her chest at close range.

She looked at the vases and for the first time in her life they revolted her. They’d been the only thing she’d taken from the house after she’d packed Cam up. A fragile link to her mother—not Rachel,
her mother
. The woman she’d loved and known before the ugly truth had infected the memories, eating them away like a cancer.