Princes of the Outback Bundle (11 page)

As long as she didn’t expect too much.

On the threshold he paused, eyes fixed on the king-size bed that half-filled the room, covers turned back to reveal an expanse of pure white sheets. Twin bedside lamps cast a pale glow that did nothing to warm the starkness of that bed or to prevent the breakout of sweat, cold and sudden on his skin.

And Angie? His gaze swept beyond the bed and found her standing in front of the dresser, stalled in the act of brushing her hair. Their eyes locked in the mirror, as she slowly lowered her arms and put down the brush. The soft clunk sounded preternaturally loud in the stillness and he realized that her music had stopped. That the silence was so intense he could hear the thick thud of his heartbeat. Too loud, too hard.

“Damn moisture,” she said, turning to face him. “Once it gets a sniff of steam, I can’t do a thing to contain it.”

Her hair. She meant her hair. But stupidly it took him a moment to get past the reference to moisture and steam and containing it.

“I like your hair like that.” His voice sounded gruff and rusty, his compliment about as stiff as his body. “The other way, this afternoon, it was too…sleek.”

“Really?” She paused in smoothing the thick mass be
hind her ears—a pointless task since the curls sprang free as soon as her hand dropped away. “You don’t think sleek is a good look?”

“Hell, no.”

“You prefer the wild look then?”

“On you,” he said simply and her lips tilted at the corners in the tiniest hint of a smile. That probably would have relaxed him a notch, that connection, if her gaze hadn’t drifted off to the bed—that endless stretch of cold, clinical white—before slowly returning to meet his.

“I intended taking off the robe and being all laid out on the bed waiting,” she said softly. “But I couldn’t do it.”

“You could have left the robe on.”

“I could have, if being naked was a problem.” Three slow steps, three thick pulses of blood in his lower body, and she stopped in front of him. “Being naked alone was.”

“You want me to get undressed?”

Dark and luminous eyes lifted from his chest to his eyes. She moistened her lips. “Do you mind if I do it?”

Not if you do it real quick.

That answer lodged in his throat when her silky female knuckles grazed his abdomen. When he sucked in hard, she got a firmer grip on his shirt and pulled it free of his trousers. Before he could think
holymotherofmercy
she’d unthreaded every button and pushed the sides of his shirt apart.

Maybe it was his vision, his thoughts, his whole body that trembled…or maybe it was her hands as they slowly traversed his bare chest, grazing his nipples, fingering the thick growth of hair, tracing the line of his collarbone. With growing confidence, her palms slid over his shoulders and down his biceps in a long, slow caress that peeled his shirt away until it dropped to the floor at their feet.

“Undo my robe,” she whispered, so close that her breath
sloughed over his skin and seeped into his blood. He watched her lean forward and kiss his chest. Watched her eyelids flutter shut and that sight—soft and engrossed and sensual—brought on a surge of lust so intense his knees all but buckled.

He needed something to hold on to, to ground him against the dizzying roar of heat, and he found her robe, her sash, and a simple knot that came apart in his hands. She made a husky sound of approval as the thick toweling fell open. He made a rough sound of unscripted awe as her breasts came into view.

Full, luscious female things of beauty, with wide tawny aureoles and tips that seemed to tighten and darken as he watched—and, hell, he couldn’t stop watching until he feared his mouth was watering, until he had to swallow to stop from drowning. Behind his fly, his body pulsed with an ache to reach for her, to drop to his knees and draw those distended nipples into his mouth, to take her down onto the bed and bury himself without preliminary.

Except he’d be lucky to last a minute and he owed Angie better than that. Only sex, he told himself, didn’t mean it had to be bad sex.

The hands that itched to shape her body lifted instead to cup her face and he leaned down to take her lips, closing his eyes to shut out the lush appeal of her body. Their thighs brushed and her nipples grazed his chest as she came up onto her toes to meet his kiss. Restless, impatient, her hands shimmied over his ribs and sides before settling against his back and drawing their bodies into perfect alignment.

Heat billowed, a furnace of desire in his chest and his thighs and everywhere in between. Especially in between. In a slow, deep sweep his tongue stroked over hers and re
treated. Her complaint was a rough sound that vibrated low in her throat and her hands tightened their grip on his back, forcing him to take notice, driving him past the edge of his control.

He kissed her harder, tasting her lips, drawing on her tongue, forcing himself to ease off when he wanted to devour.
Only sex,
he told himself,
only lust,
and that was okay. It had been so long, too long, since he’d indulged his male nature. It was understandable that he should feel so primitive, so carnal, so desperate.

Especially when she met him kiss for kiss, biting at his chin when he drew back for breath, sliding her hard-tipped breasts down his chest as she dipped lower and reached for his trousers. He sucked in another quick ragged breath but that oxygen didn’t make a lick of difference when she undid the waist button and started on his fly.

The accidental brush of her fingers against his erection completely zapped his synapses, and before the red-fire haze cleared she was ducking lower, her hair a dark whisper of sensation across his stomach. For one gasp of a moment he thought she was going to take him into her mouth, and in his explosive state that would have been too much, too soon.

Thinking about that hot, moist suction was damn near enough to bring him to embarrassment.

He backed away abruptly, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Sorry.” In the low light her eyes gleamed dark and hot. “I was just helping with your trousers.”

The way she was looking at him didn’t help a bit. Especially with his trousers. Finally he managed to extricate himself from the rest of his clothing, and she was still watching him with a powerful hungry intensity.

“I bought condoms,” he managed to say, amazed that he remembered the earlier shopping expedition. “I’ll get them.”

Something in her eyes darkened, as if with a sense of purpose, and through the shimmering haze of lust Tomas felt a pang of misgiving.

“You could,” she said, her gaze not leaving his. “Or we could leave them right where they are and try to make a baby.”

“A
ccording to the book, this is my prime conception time.” Sure and steady and dark as the night, Angie’s eyes held his. “Do you really want to waste this chance?”

Deep inside Tomas felt a keening cry of resistance. No, he couldn’t do this wholly naked.
He
needed protection, a barrier in any shape or form, some sense that he could hold himself apart from the intimacy of their bodies joining.

And how will you make a baby then? How will you keep Kameruka Downs?

His heart raced erratically, sweat sheened cold on his skin, and without a word he stood and stalked from the bedroom. Halfway across the sitting room he stopped suddenly, and for one numb second he couldn’t think what he was doing or why he’d come out here.

The condoms.

His gaze closed on the box he’d tossed onto the bureau
earlier, when he’d come through the door and heard the music and realized that she was here. When it really struck home that sex with Angie was going to happen.

Do you need birth control? Do you really need this bedroom session as a trial?

Obviously he wasn’t going to have any trouble functionally. Obviously Angie had made up her mind about having a baby. He could get this over with now. If luck was on his side he wouldn’t have to go through this feverish ordeal of wanting and not-wanting-to-want ever again.

All you have to do is go back in that bedroom, shut down your mind and follow the lead of your body. It knows what it wants. It’s not having any problem with intimacy. It wants inside Angie, naked, now.

With a grim grunt of determination, he turned and followed where that leading part of his body pointed.

Several things hit him right in the face when he walked back into the bedroom. The shapeless form of her discarded robe, stark against the wine-red carpet. How the white sheets no longer looked cold and clinical, not with Angie’s darkly sensual beauty spread across them. And the fact that no amount of rubber or latex or reinforced steel could have protected him from the impact of her lying there naked.

Sucker-punched, he watched her roll up onto her knees, all tumbled black hair and perfect smooth skin and wildly generous curves. Her gaze had fixed on the highly functional and grossly underprotected body part that had lead him right back to her. He felt it thicken and pulse. Saw her moisten her lips and then move on to study his empty hands.

“You couldn’t find the condoms?”

“I found them.” Slowly he walked to the bed. Her eyes
arrowed back for another up-close look, probably to see what he was wearing. Or not. “I left them where they were.”

Heavy-lidded eyes slid up to his. Something flickered in their dark chocolate depths. “Are you sure?”

“That I left them there? Yes. That I should have? No,” he admitted, honest for once.

“If that’s because we haven’t talked about STDs and such…I want you to know that I’m good. I had tests done when I last gave blood, and I haven’t been with anyone since.”

He swallowed the spontaneous question—
how long since someone else?
—and looked away.
Irrelevant. Too personal. None of your business.
And in his mind that justified not telling how long he’d been without. Instead he just nodded and said, “I’m clean.”

There was an uncomfortable moment as their gazes connected and a measure of the unasked personal and intimate shivered between them. She made a rueful sound, half sigh, half laughter. “Okay, and now we’re back at the awkward stage.”

“Us, standing here wondering what to do next.”

She smiled, appreciating his recall of their earlier conversation. “Except this time we’re already in the bedroom.”

“Naked.”

“All over.”

To illustrate her meaning Angie’s gaze dipped, and the mood took on a new sultriness, as if a blanket of heat billowed high before descending to settle heavily over their bodies. One silken finger traced the length of his nakedness. Her breathing hitched. His, more so, as she cupped and stroked him more firmly.

Nope, he wouldn’t be having any trouble functionally. Not if he made it inside her body before embarrassing
himself. And if she kept touching him like that, and looking at him with her eyes kinda hazed and her lips softly parted, then that was quite on the cards.

“Enough,” he bit out sharply. Then to take the edge off he tried a laugh, a laugh that came out all raw and strained. “It’s been a while.”

She let him go and for a long silent moment she watched him with unsettling intensity, as if she was delving inside and grabbing hold of his fears and laying them out for open examination.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
Reflexively he slammed down the shutters on the tiny window of vulnerability he’d unintentionally revealed.

No more private stuff, no expectations, no emotions.

Something of the unspoken must have shown on his face, because her expression slowly transformed from I-have-questions intensity to now-where-were-we? teasing. Settling back on her heels, she pointed at an erection that didn’t need any pointing out. “I thought you told me not to expect too much.”

Okay, so this was better. This he could play along with. Frowning, he pretended to inspect himself. “Too much?”

“Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

Despite the sexy banter, there were no smiles and her eyes flared with dark heat as their gazes connected. “I guess so.”

Slowly she reached out and touched his forearm in a barely there caress, then her hand slid down to link fingers, and slowly, inexorably she tugged him down onto the bed.

They came together in an unchoreographed duel for position. It wasn’t elegant, but it was so hot Tomas swore he heard the slow sizzle as their limbs parried for optimum sensual contact. One of his thighs settled between hers, and he couldn’t stop himself pressing into her heat.

She responded with a deep hum of satisfaction.

For a second their gazes collided and he felt such a jolt—a left-right combination punch of need and fear and dread and desire—that he immediately ducked down to her mouth. They met with lips and tongues, with teeth and passion, and Tomas closed his eyes against the onslaught.

He closed his eyes and thought,
yes!
I can shut it all out. I can dive into the carnal delight of French kissing, I can shape my hands over these curves and immerse myself in the pleasure of all the scents and textures of a woman’s body. I can absorb the throaty sounds of a woman’s enjoyment and I can stand the roar of need in my ears.

I can handle the rush of lust because that’s all it is. Only sex.

His hand shaped one breast, his thumb rasped across the nipple and she sucked a breath from his mouth, an act so intimate he felt its effect raw and deep in his gut. He jammed his eyes closed tighter and breathed more deeply, until the indelibly delicious scent of her skin filled his lungs and his veins.

“What the hell did you bathe in?” he breathed huskily near her ear.

“Cinnamon and honey-milk.”

And he gave a half-grunt of laughter because that’s what he’d been about to ask. Honey-milk. She tasted so sweet, her skin was so soft and pliant. Unthinking he opened his eyes and saw her roll her head back against the sheets, her dark curls a wild and wanton spread against the white.

“That’s what the bottle said.” She blinked slowly. “Do you want to taste me?”

“Later,” he growled because even the thought of going down on her damn near brought him undone. He could feel
a rawness gathering inside, a desperation he didn’t want to contain.

Her mouth tilted into a sultry smile. “I can hardly wait.”

“Right now,” he said, repositioning himself to settle thickly between her thighs, “It’s this way.”

“Okay,” she whispered on a broken murmur of breath.

Okay. That’s all this would be, he told himself as he deliberately drew out that initial slide of entry. This would be okay. Not wonderful. Not wild and untamed. Not earth-shattering or mind-altering. Just okay. All he had to do was take it easy, maintain control, keep his focus on the wall or the pillows or on visualizing the twisted thread of his restraint. He wouldn’t look into her eyes, he wouldn’t indulge in sweet words or tender kisses, and he wouldn’t think about the incredible moist pleasure of her body molding to accommodate his penetration.

Slowly. Take it slowly.

Sweat broke out along his back and on his forehead as he stopped himself giving in to what his body craved. To just plunge into her, hard, fast, wild. He sucked in air through his teeth, stared harder at the beige wall, and then he felt the tremulous touch of her hand on his face.

“If you’re worrying about the ‘too much’ comment, then don’t.”

For a moment he forgot himself and looked down, right into her eyes. Not teasing like her husky-voiced comment, but serious, intent, burning. He drew back slightly and then let himself go in one long hard drive that took him all the way inside and he couldn’t contain the long, deep sound of satisfaction that rose from his throat.

Sweet, oh God she was sweet.

Tomas couldn’t stand it—not the enraptured look on her face or the softening of her lips or the do-that-again chal
lenge in her eyes. He had to look away, refocus. To remind himself that
she
wasn’t sweet. Sex was sweet. Being enclosed in that velvet female sheathing, the silky slide as he withdrew and drove back again, the hot friction of flesh against flesh, of male against female. This sex was so sweet because it had been so long and he’d almost forgotten the intensity of the pleasure. It was okay to enjoy it, to let himself go a little, to ease back so he could touch her breasts and flatten his hand against her belly and imagine that this was about making a child.

Only sex. And if it succeeded, never again.

Conversely his mind railed and bucked against that possibility. This was so good he wanted to do it again and again and again. Abruptly he pulled back, almost all the way out, then thrust himself in to the hilt. Too good to contemplate never doing again and that was all right, too, he justified, because tonight he could do it again and again. He could because it was necessary to make the child he needed.

It wasn’t about this rapidly escalating rapture, not about the gut-wrenching explosion of pleasure when his hand slid lower and thumbed her slick plump heart until she came apart in a shuddering cry that kept on going and going as he changed angles and drove into her until his own climax roared through him like a cyclone, rough and whirling and eddying through his rigid frame with uncontrollable force.

He could justify that he couldn’t disconnect immediately, not while his heart thundered and his blood roared and his mind clamored with the image of his seed spilling deeply into her fertile core.

For a minute his whole being succumbed to the intensity of that image and he slumped forward, his nose buried in that sweet hot spot where her neck joined with her shoulder. Their heartbeats raced one against the other and
he knew he should move but he couldn’t, not until she took a slow, shuddering breath that echoed right through him.

They were that close.

Too close, and when her mouth touched the side of his face with the kind of tender intimacy he’d vowed to avoid, he suddenly found his strength. He was on his feet and into the bathroom before her kiss had cooled on his cheek. Shower controls turned to maximum, he stepped under the torrent and let the cold water savage him for a count of ten. Then he spread his legs and planted his arms against the cold tiles and let the water pound out the torpor of sexual satiation.

Somewhere at the back of his mind he imagined it might also pound away a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Not with the sex—jeez, but that had been unbelievably satisfying. No, it was something deeper, probably tied up with those earlier chills of fear, but even after ten minutes or so of water-torture he couldn’t put a finger on the cause.

And he couldn’t stand here any longer, not without turning blue. Adjusting the temperature mix, he rolled back his head and let the warmth hit him full in the face. Then he raked his wet hair back from his face, turned off the taps and reached for a towel.

Bare-assed, he padded back to the bedroom, his muscles tightening reflexively with every step. She’d turned the lights out, he realized, but enough light filtered in from the city outside for him to make out the figure curled up on the bed. Motionless. Asleep.

He exhaled a long, audible breath. No need for post-coital conversation or cuddling. She’d left plenty of the bed for him, enough of a buffer zone that he could crawl in under the covers and spread out in his usual fashion without any contact. That didn’t help him relax. As the minutes
passed he grew tenser, more wide-awake and so attuned to the silence that he swore he could hear each ticking minute on the noiseless bedside clock.

Possibly because he was concentrating so hard on anything besides the soft sound of Angie’s breathing.

Damn her, how could she be so relaxed? Had what they’d done been so exhausting…or so meaningless that she could roll over and go to sleep within minutes? He turned restlessly and shucked off the eiderdown quilt. So, okay, he’d been gone more than a few minutes, but still….

Did she think that was it? One time lucky? And what about her earlier invitation.
Do you want to taste me?

His body reacted instantly, extravagantly, as if she’d whispered the incendiary words into his ear right then. Turning impatiently on his side didn’t help. Not when he could see the rise and fall of her breasts under the pure white sheet.
I can hardly wait,
she’d said.

Well, hell, he’d waited long enough. They only had this one night. What a waste to spend it watching her sleep when he was obviously up for making certain.

It was okay to smooth her hair away from her throat and taste her there, he figured. It was okay to kiss his way over her shoulder and whisper “wake up, Angie” when she stirred restlessly and rolled onto her side. Fine to kiss his way down the length of her naked spine and to learn the multitude of curves and valleys that made up her generous body. And when she stretched sleepily and pressed back into him with a lazy sigh, how could he not reach around to cup her breasts and rub her nipples and wake her by stroking her slick, wet heat?