The Thrill of It All (13 page)

Her breath caught as he approached the halfway point—the point where the other man had fallen. But she wasn’t worried about Magee. He would have no trouble surviving this.

She wasn’t so sure about herself.

Because each step of his animal-prowl brought her nearer to the brink of her own giant chasm. She sensed it yawning in front of her, she could feel it in the panicked fluttering in her belly and the pounding of her fist-tight heart. Each of his moves brought her nearer to the ledge.

Another step. Then another.

Magee didn’t wobble, didn’t strain, didn’t hesitate.

One step more.

He glanced down, his gaze touching Felicity’s face. As his bare foot reached the boulder on the other side, his intense, rawly male expression transformed into a boyish, look-what-I-can-do! smile.

Just like that, Felicity felt herself falling, her feet scrabbling on nothing, her stomach elevator-
whooshing,
and—

—then she remembered what had been written on the T-shirt he’d been wearing the night before.
WANTED: A Meaningful Overnight Relationship
.

With one massive, metaphorical effort, she slung up an imaginary arm and gripped the ledge’s edge. It
only took recalling another of his T-shirt slogans—
I’m The One Your Mother Warned You About
—to haul herself back onto solid ground.

To the tune of the crowd’s applause, Felicity turned away from the tightrope, cursing herself. How could she have put herself at so much risk?

Sure, watching him air-walk had given her the final nudge, but she’d been flirting with disaster since the first time she’d set eyes on him and felt that odd tug of recognition. But falling in love with Magee would have been flat-out ridiculous.

“Sheesh,” she muttered aloud. “What a near nitwit miss.”

“Are you talking to me?”

She swung around to confront Magee. Regarding her with a bemused smile, he slipped his arms into his shirtsleeves. Her gaze moved from his mouth and settled on the slice of golden chest between the unbuttoned edges. This time, when her heart squeezed, her inner thigh muscles followed suit.

“Charm-ish,” she added. “Embarrassing, irresponsible, and shameless.” He wasn’t her type. His T-shirts weren’t her type. The uncivilized way he went about sex wasn’t the way she liked it at all.

“Oh,
God
.” She closed her eyes.
Don’t think about the sex
. Don’t think about the control he had over his body in order to walk across that rope.

“You’re trembling.” Magee’s voice lowered. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She couldn’t let him guess she was anything but, because she was stuck in the area a few
days longer. If his magnet-and-metal-filings theory was true, she’d have to get real good at ignoring her inconvenient urges and at staying away from that looming ledge. “But I’m tired. Just get me out of here, please.”

Back in his car, she shut out him and his disturbing presence by closing her eyes and huddling into the hard plastic seat.
Hold on,
she told herself. In minutes she’d be alone in her own car and leaving him behind.

Without warning, he swerved, then braked.

Startled, her eyes popped open and then she was startled all over again. She must have dozed off, because outside the windshield was dark desert night and a black ribbon of road surrounded by scrub-covered sand.

“Where are we?” she demanded.

Stupid question. They were nowhere! “Take me back to the convention center. Take me to my car.”

“We haven’t had that talk. Look, Felicity…” He turned in his seat to face her and placed a gentle hand on her knee.

She nearly jumped out of her skin. It was the late hour, the dark, the desert. It was him and how her reckless, wicked body responded to him.

He frowned. “You’re trembling again. Is it the air-walk? I didn’t mean to scare you.” Reassuring and friendly, he squeezed her knee.

The top of her head almost hit the roof of the car, but this time she managed to find her voice. “Of course you didn’t scare me. Nothing about you scares me. I could never be scared by you or anything to do
with you. As a matter of fact, you so not scare me that…”

Argh,
she thought, edging her leg out from under his palm. On the scale of denials, what she’d let loose was much closer to Babbling Defense than Emphatic Truth.

He stayed silent a moment, then prodded her again. “That what? What is it?”

In search of inspiration, she shifted her gaze away from his dangerous, gorgeous face toward the bleak desert landscape.
Find something
. Telling him that she wanted him so much it was scaring her wasn’t a smart move.
Find something else
.

“Um…spiders, all right? I was thinking about spiders.”

His eyes narrowed as if
GRASPING AT STRAWS
were written on her forehead in big block letters. “Spiders.” Oh, yeah, he sounded dubious. “Just thinking of them makes your bones rattle.”

“Yes.” That part was true. “Ask anybody. Ask Ashley.”

His jaw tightened and he straightened in his seat. “Felicity, about Ashley—”

“She’ll tell you! So let’s go back to Half Palm, let’s go back right now, and she’ll tell you all about it.”

Magee’s eyes narrowed again, and it was obvious her eagerness to get away from him was reigniting his suspicions. “You tell me.”

She hesitated. Damn, she’d painted herself into a corner. He wasn’t going to be satisfied without a confession, and the only other one that felt ready to trip
off her tongue was drastically close to the David Cassidy variety. And she’d rip out her tongue—not to mention her heart—before she leaped onto the seat and belted out, “I Think I Love You.”

Because it wasn’t true.

It would never be true.

“Felicity?” He switched on the overhead light.

She blinked to adjust her eyes to the dazzle. “Freud would have a field day with the spiders, okay?”

Magee raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling
me
you’re nuts? I’ve seen those rubber gloves you sell.”

She smiled a little. “And almost bought them, too.”

“Okay, so we’re both a little crazy.” He stretched out his legs in the large space between their seats and crossed his ankles. “Go on.”

“The spider thing, well…” She’d toss it out there and then he’d take her back home. “We—me and a bunch of cousins—were camping out in Aunt Vi’s back yard. I was little—four years old. My parents were spending the weekend in Las Vegas.”

As usual, she closed her eyes, trying to conjure them up, and for a moment, for the first time ever, she thought she…But no. Opening her eyes again, she looked up at Magee. “It was tarantula migration season. When the grown-ups came to tell me my mom and dad had died in a car accident, they had these big flashlights that lit up the tent. And crawling all over it were…were the—”

She broke off, shuddering as she remembered the huge shadows creeping along the outside of the musty-smelling canvas—the hairy-legged embodi
ment of the bad news waiting to pounce on her. She’d always felt as if the tarantulas had carried away her security as well as her parents.

With a grimace, she lifted her hands. “Go ahead, laugh. Tell me I’m a basket case.”

Shaking his head, he reached out to tangle the fingers of one hand with hers. “Everybody has their kink or two. My brother, he hates the taste, even just the smell, of Tootsie Pops.”

She shouldn’t let Magee touch her again. But his hand was so warm. Not sexy at the moment, but…strong. “I didn’t know Tootsie Pops
had
a smell,” she murmured, fascinated by the interlocking fit of their linked fingers.

“Like your spiders, Tootsie Pops remind him of a bad time.”

After a silent moment, she looked over, tugging on his hand. “Hey. You can’t leave it like that. What ‘bad time’?”

He frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t—”

She shifted closer so she could swat at his shoulder with her free hand. “C’mon! I told you about the tarantulas!”

“Yeah, and thanks to you I’m going to spend the rest of my life listening for their long fangs clackety-clacking and their fat hairy legs rub-a-dub-dubbing.”

Now he
was
laughing at her. Diving toward him for another swat, in her over enthusiasm she half-slid off her seat. Magee caught her, pulling her toward him to keep her from the floor. In a blink, she was sitting on his lap.

From inches away, they stared at each other. Her heart started that fist-thumping against her breastbone again as she breathed in the scent of him. Were there enough words in the world to talk herself out of this strange sense of comfort and connection? “Magee, I…I…”

As if he were afraid of what she was on the verge of saying—something she didn’t know herself—Magee started talking. “They gave my brother—he’s my half-brother—a bag of Tootsie Pops at the police station after his father’s murder.”

She blinked. “What?”

Magee’s arms tightened around her. “His father was shot, almost right in front of him. He remembers unwrapping and eating those Tootsie Pops, every single one, while he waited for our mom and my dad to come get him.”

The shocking information should have acted like a dash of cold water. It should have had her hopping back into her seat and demanding he return her home. But his heart was thudding against her shoulder and his breath was warm against her cheek and the intimacy of their conversation made it hard to think clearly.

She ran her fingers over his glossy bangs and down the side of his face, lingering along his cheek so that his stubble scratched her palm. “Your poor brother,” she said.

Magee gave a little shrug. “So, see? You’re not the only person with weird childhood shit.”

She brushed his hair back, watching as the slippery
strands drifted through her fingers. “What about you, Magee?”

His gaze was focused on her mouth. “What about me?”

“What’s your kink?”

He tensed for a moment, then relaxed, smiling as he lifted one finger to start tracing her top lip. “You. I think my kink just might be you.”

She grabbed at the finger. “No ducking. C’mon, I gave you spiders. You give me one real kink.”

In a single smooth movement, he straightened up in his seat and flipped the interior light off. She was now in the dark, and though she was still on his lap, his thighs were stiff and hard beneath her and his voice was stiff and hard, too.

“I don’t have a right to any kink, okay? You said it, I grew up in sitcom suburbia. My parents are still married, they’re still happy. I come from the most conventional, the most fucking functional family I know.”

Hmmm
. And yet he possessed one little quirk that pushed him into climbing tough mountains and air-walking across slack ropes. That last thought set her shivering again as she thought of his gleaming torso, those rippling abs, his glossy hair playing over the wide shoulders of his muscled back.

Don’t think about sex, don’t think about sex, don’t think about sex
. Trying to rein in her wayward thoughts, she restarted her mental exercise.
Z…y…x…

“Lissie?” His big hand ran up her spine.

At his touch, she quivered again, this time the shiver starting inside and moving outward. Oh, God, she wanted—

No!
Z…y…x…e…s…
X…e…s. S-e-x. She couldn’t get away from it, she thought, panicking.

But wait! It was s-e-x, not l-o-v-e. In this particular instance, s-e-x was good. S-e-x was safe.

He was right, they were a magnet and metal filings, but the bonus to acting on their potent physical attraction was that having sex with Magee didn’t leave room for gooey, ephemeral emotions and notions that might try moving into her heart.

Rough-and-tumble. Hot and earthy. When she was having sex with him she couldn’t think of the cool, golden statue. And she couldn’t think of anything terrifying and long-term like love, either. With him it wasn’t emotional or spiritual. It was all about being Lissie, with greedy, animal urges. Lissie, who wanted to roll on the floor, to scratch and bite the greedy animal inside Magee.

She wound her arms around his neck, pressing her upper body into his and sinking her teeth into his bottom lip. “You need a kink then, Magee? I accept. Let your kink be me.”

A
t her words, Felicity felt Magee jerk and his voice lowered in warning. “Lissie—”

She was already working on the buttons of his shirt. “C’mon, Magee, let me give
you
the thrill this time.”

He stilled. “What are you up to?”

She’d made it to the buckle of the slick leather belt. It gave way, leaving only a zipper between her and her goal of mindless, heartless, down-and-dirty sex. What would her fans from GetTV think about that?

The naughty idea put a sexy little throatiness into her voice. “The real question is,” she said, undoing the top button, then tugging on the little metal tab, “exactly how many inches are you up to, hmm?”

But the metal tab wasn’t budging. She gripped it tighter between her thumb and forefinger and yanked. Her fingers slipped off. Setting her jaw, she went after the zipper again, but its metal teeth were clenched as tightly as her own.

She sucked in a fast, deep breath through her nose. This was clothing, damn it. She was good with cloth
ing. She sold clothing, extolled the virtues of clothing, made people
yearn
for clothing. A simple fastener of fabric would
not
get the best of her.

With a small growl, she attacked.

And failed again.

No. She wanted sex! She wanted to feel that flood of heated passion, that flood that would drive everything dangerous and frightening out of the way. She wanted that Erica Jong moment when the clothes peeled away. That anonymous, zipless fuck. Her eyes stung. But she couldn’t even get the stupid clothes to cooperate! No wonder Erica Jong had called it a
zipless
fuck.

“Can I help you with anything down there?” asked a bemused male voice.

Magee. In her tempestuous passion and almost-panic, she’d nearly forgotten all about him.

Impatient, she tried to explain what she wanted. “It’s Jong—”

“You’ve said that before, dollface, and I appreciate your noticing,” he said modestly.

She shook her head. “No, really.
Jong
.”

“Thanks. Really long, I know.”

It made her laugh. She wasn’t sure if he was teasing or if it even mattered, because laughing reminded her not to take this so seriously. It wasn’t life-or-death. It wasn’t heart-whole or heartbreak. It was the opposite of all that. It was wanting sex with
Magee,
the most casual of all men.

So she took each open edge of his dress shirt in a
fist. “Listen up,” she said. “I want earthy, raw, bad-to-the-bone sex, and I want it right now.”

He groaned. “Hell, Lissie, what am I supposed to say to that?”

She slid off his lap, settling onto her knees on the metal floorboards between the two seats. From between his splayed thighs, she looked up at him and smiled. “You’re supposed to say yes, and the nastier you say it, the better.”

Now the zipper parted like butter. Inside it, he was hard, hot, and smooth. She took a bracing breath, then began indulging herself on his body, running her mouth up his sex and beyond, tickling his navel, licking one nipple, then rubbing her cheek over the lean, taut pad of pec muscle to find the other. It puckered against her tongue and her womb clenched.

He was murmuring something—cursing, maybe—but she couldn’t tell because her sense of hearing was subjugated to her other senses—the ones that were relishing the salty-citrus taste of him, the sleek, firm feel of him, the heated scent of the both of them together.

Making her way back down his chest, her lips bumped over his fascinating male topography. She wished she was a painter, able to capture all his hard, muscled beauty on a canvas, but she settled for making her tongue into a brush and stroking over every inch, rendering the image in her mind.

Her mouth found his erection again. It was hotter now, harder. As she bent over him, he speared his fingers in her hair, the urgency of the gesture driving up
her own need. Her blood was humming with it, singing. This was what she wanted, the flavor of desire in her mouth and the flame of it burning through her body.

Earthy, raw, bad-to-the-bone sex.

Her pulse jumped higher and she took him deeper, taking herself deeper into mindless sex. Heartless sex.

His fingers bit into her scalp, then he grabbed her by the upper arms. She found herself being pulled free of him, off her knees and back into his arms. They tightened when she squirmed, wanting to dive back into that heavy, throbbing place of desire.

“Don’t move,” he choked out. “You’re killing me, Lissie. Give me a minute. Just a minute.”

But nothing was going to stand between her and her need for earthy, zipless sex. She twisted against him and found his mouth, plunging her tongue inside. He groaned, the sound a buzz against her tongue and against her breastbone, plastered to his. He slid his hand between them to make quick work of her buttons. In short order he had her blouse undone, the front clasp of her bra unfastened, her garments spread to expose her breasts to his gaze.

He held her upper body away from him to look at her, and she watched his breath rasp in and out of his chest. With his nostrils flared and his hair mussed, he looked like trouble—a reckless, hot-blooded lover who was going to take her down with him.

She couldn’t wait.

“Magee. Magee, please.”

He glanced up at her, and she saw what she wanted
in his eyes. Risk and defiance and heated intent. He wouldn’t care if he marred her polish. He wouldn’t worry about fingerprints or scratches. He was the bad-boy, tempting devil of all her gotta-be-a-good-girl fantasies and he was going to give it to her hard and fast.

He smiled, slow and seductive. His voice was dark and bad. “I’ve got your number now, Lissie.”

She shivered.

“You’re the one who they trusted to work in the attendance office, aren’t you? But you’d help out guys like me, wouldn’t you? Cut class? Go see Lissie. She’ll fix it for you.”

The skin between her breasts prickled as he drew an idle pattern there. “You’d be my biology partner, too. The old fart who taught the class hoped that a sweet thing like you would keep me in line. But you’d do all the work yourself and then put my name on it, right next to yours.”

She tensed as his wandering finger edged toward her nipple. It was aching, hurting for his touch, but he was still talking, teasing her, telling just like it was.

“And you’re the one, Lissie,” he continued, “the one with the sweetheart image by day but who by night unlocked her bedroom window and let the scruffy boy with the motorcycle crawl into her room and into her bed.”

Her breath stuttered into her lungs. Yes.
Yes
. She’d never done any of those things, but she’d wanted to. Oh, how she’d always wanted to.

His fingers closed gently over the throbbing tip of
her breast. But it wasn’t enough. Not enough. She squirmed on his lap and he lightened his touch. She stilled, moaning.

His forefinger and thumb clasped her nipple again and he laughed, a rough, threatening, delicious sound. “Oh, yeah. There’s no doubt about it. You, Lissie, are a very, very bad girl.” And then he squeezed.

Every muscle clenched. She arched toward him, wanting more of that not-quite-painful touch, wanting him to unleash every bad-girl craving burning inside of her. As his head dipped toward her bare breasts, she managed to shuck her suit jacket, blouse, and bra.

“I’m ready,” she whispered to him as his wet mouth latched on to her. The devil could have his way with her.

But then something happened. Somewhere between the rasp of his tongue on her hard nipples and the shedding of the rest of their clothes, the devil and the bad girl slowed down. Urgency thrummed beneath her skin, but he stoked her fire with soothing strokes, lingering here, playing there.

Even when she found herself sitting sideways on the passenger seat, with Magee kneeling, her thighs over his shoulders, his mouth was gentle, his tongue not taking her anywhere, but exploring her
everywhere
. It was raw and it was earthy and it was…

Not.

It was Lissie and Michael—she kept calling out that
name, over and over. It was passionate, but when he made her come the first time she had tears in her eyes.

It was everything that Erica Jong described in
Fear of Flying
—passionate and exciting—except it wasn’t anonymous. Because as Michael entered her, his gaze didn’t leave hers.

“Lissie, Lissie, Lissie,” he whispered. “Oh, sweetheart. You are so, so bad.”

And he was so, so good. Hard and strong and parting through the folds of her body with the same sureness as when he’d parted the veils covering her secret self.

Just as she reached for her pleasure, just as she knew it would take only a few strokes more, three, two, she closed her eyes. A haze of golden warmth spread behind her eyelids, reminding her of something…. But she was too close to think any longer.

He thrust in, deep, and held there.

“Michael,” she cried out, and, pressing herself up against him, convulsed.

Neither spoke as they drove out of the desert and back to her car, parked in the convention center lot. Once there, he turned off the engine and ran his hand over his hair, then rubbed at the back of his neck.

“Well,” he said, looking over at her. Unsmiling.

Felicity swallowed. “Well.”

“That was—”

“Did you—”

They both broke off.

“Go,” he said, gesturing to her with his chin.

She didn’t remember what she’d been about to say. “Did…did you…um, oh, yeah, did you have something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“What?”

She swallowed again. “Earlier, earlier tonight, I think you mentioned…”

“Oh. Right. It was…it was nothing.” He looked away from her, out the windshield, then looked back. “So, you’re around a few more days.”

She nodded. “Just a few. Scouting locations. Spots where we can get some good shots of climbers.”

He rubbed his bristly jaw with the back of his hand. “I can help with that. I’ll show you some places.”

“Oh. Okay. That…that would be great. I guess.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, she knew that, but then neither did he.

Her fingers found the door handle.

“Lissie.”

She paused. “Yes?”

“You gonna be all right?”

“Truth?”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Yeah.”

“My knees are murder.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then he released a bark of laughter. “God, no kidding. Mine are screaming at me.”

She nodded in empathetic understanding.

Then he grinned at her—and he looked…happy. “We’ll take care of that tomorrow, too, dollface. I promise.”

Felicity gave him a squiggle-fingered wave and
hopped out. As promises went, it was more than she’d expected from Magee.

The next afternoon, she trudged after him along a dusty path. “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones,” she sang beneath her breath.

He glanced over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

She gestured at their surroundings. The arid landscape of the “wilderness area” they were walking through was studded with prehistoric-looking, tumbled outcroppings of sandstone boulders, most bigger than houses, many taller than office buildings. “I’m preparing for my introduction to Fred and Wilma. This place is seriously Stone Age.”

She paused a moment to study one of the Joshua trees that dotted the area. The twisted branches coming off its equally twisted trunk were tufted with speared leaves. “And these things have always struck me as something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up.”

He grinned. “Welcome to my world, baby.”

It
was
his world. Or at least had been, that was clear. Earlier that day he’d taken her by several popular bouldering areas—what they called the sport of climbing the strange sandstone beasts—and she’d been awed by what she’d seen. Women and men scaling walls like Spiderman, their fingers and flexible shoes finding cracks and ledges she couldn’t see.

Another group had been doing something straight out of a Marine recruiting film—rappelling down the side of a six-story rock. Farther off, she’d glimpsed specks on top of the tallest boulder yet—a sky
scraper!—her gaze landing on them just as one of the tiny figures tossed a coiled rope over the side.

Magee appeared to know everyone and everything about what they were doing, from their equipment to their routes to their chances for success. At their last stop, a climber in a bandanna ’do-rag and a ragged
Yosemite Mountaineering School
T-shirt had offered Magee a waist harness and a rope, but he’d shaken his head.

“I don’t climb anymore,” he’d declared, his expression closing off.

Mr. Bandanna hadn’t questioned any further. In silence, Magee had stalked back to the Jeep.

As he’d started driving again, she’d tried to probe what was going on inside his head. “So why does anyone do it? Climb, I mean. Why did you?”

He was quiet a moment, then answered. “There are as many whys as there are climbers. To appreciate nature. As a physical or mental challenge. To leave stuff like money troubles or the asshole at work behind—ordinary, everyday worries—because they don’t matter when your life depends on the very next step or the very next move.”

He’d subsided into a brooding silence again, and she’d let it go, though she suspected she wasn’t any closer to
his
why than she’d been before.

But now, as his strides ate up the ground in front of them, he appeared to be distancing himself from his dark mood. Hurrying after him, she was forced into a trot. Beads of sweat rolled down her temple, clearing
a sticky path through the layer of gritty dust covering her skin, and she grimaced.

“Hey, listen. I’ve seen plenty already,” she called out. “Really.”

The other locations he’d taken her to had been camping or picnicking sites as well, but this area appeared deserted. Felicity glanced over her shoulder. They’d left the Jeep behind ten minutes ago but thanks to a rise they’d headed up, then over, she’d lost sight of the vehicle. “Do you have the creepy feeling that we might be the last two people left on earth?”