About Last Night (6 page)

“Yeah.” Her voice came out weak. She was more than all right. She was stripped down, naked and reborn. She was rippling with pleasure from her baby toes to the roots of her hair. Holy mother of God, City had just blown her mind.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said, smoothing one hand over her breast and leaving it there, a warm, comfortable weight.

Oh, he was perfect. An orgasm—just for her—and a compliment. She would bottle him and sell him and make her fortune.

“And you’re one sexy banker, City.” His hair had gone dark at the temples, and sweat gleamed in the hollow at the base of his throat. On an impulse, she sat up and licked it. Salty and wet, his pulse pounding slow and steady beneath her tongue. She could just eat him.

A breeze blew in the open window as she raked her nails lightly across his stomach, making the muscles tighten. “Have mercy,” he said, and he smiled, but there was a desperate edge to it.

“Give me, like, thirty seconds to recover, and then I’ll take care of you, okay?” She didn’t mind the prospect one bit. She’d enjoy getting her mouth on him, giving him as much pleasure as he’d given her.

He caught her wrist and brought her arm above her head, raising the other to join it. Throwing a thigh across her hips, he centered himself between her legs and smiled. “I appreciate
the offer, but I’d rather take care of both of us.”

Damn if her heart didn’t skip a beat or two at the sight of him above her, the feel of him hard against her most sensitive of places. And, yeah, at the idea he’d just turned down a blow job because he wanted to get her off again. That was pretty arrhythmia-inducing, too.

It was hopeless, though. She always needed hours to recover from an orgasm. Not that she minded. It had been one hell of an orgasm. “I’m all tapped out. Sorry.”

“Mmm.” He ran one hand down her thigh to curve his fingers behind her knee. “That sounds like a challenge.”

“No, just one of those tragic facts of life. I’m a one-orgasm gal. What can you do?”

“Try harder,” he said, and then he kissed her and moved inside her with one smooth thrust, and she had to close her eyes and tear her mouth away to gasp, because he felt exactly right. Astonishingly perfect. When she opened her eyes, he was looking down at her, and she stopped breathing for a moment, her throat tightening with some emotion she couldn’t understand. As if they’d pressed a
PAUSE
button on reality, she and this man, so they could stop and just … 
be
together. More together than people ever were.
Together
together.

She couldn’t make sense of what she felt. This was sex. Hot sex with an almost-stranger. Except when she met his eyes, it wasn’t. It was the two of them. It was bigger.

“What’s your name?” she asked. The question came out a breathless whisper.

He laughed. “Nev.”

It was a nice name, unusual. A nickname, she supposed. A nickname for—

She sat up suddenly, bracing her elbows on the bed. “Short for Neville?”

The dimple appeared. “Only my mother calls me that.”

Dismayed, she dropped back onto the mattress and covered her eyes with the back of her hand. It was the world’s dorkiest name. Nearly as bad as Rupert. No, maybe a little worse than Rupert. Neville. For goodness’ sake. “I never thought I’d be penetrated by a Neville,” she said wonderingly. “Maybe a Colin, or a Simon, but—”

“Shut up.” He drew her other knee up and ground into her with a groan.

She’d have said something more, something witty, but she got distracted by the full-body shudder that racked her when City got serious about making her pay for teasing him, and by the sudden knowledge that she might not actually be a one-orgasm gal after all. Maybe it had just been a matter of finding the right guy.

Holy hell. That felt— Wow. “Okay.”

Then he kissed her again, hard and deep, and his fingers found her nipple and proceeded to do something cruel and terribly electrically pleasurable to it. Before she knew quite how it had happened, the rest of the world had slid away, and there was nothing else but the exquisite way they moved together, the pressure building at her core, the sound of their stomachs slapping as he gradually increased his speed and force. In the end, she had to dig her fingers into his back and bite his shoulder to keep a handle on something, anything, and even that didn’t keep her from tipping over the edge. But at least this time he went over with her.

When he came to his senses, Nev rolled onto his back straightaway, fearing he’d crush her. She was so small, no more than seven stone to his thirteen. Though it had been easy to forget when he was inside her. Then, she’d fit him perfectly.

They were incredible together. He couldn’t begin to understand it. She didn’t look like the women he usually went for, didn’t act like them, either, but something about her sent him straight round the bend. She was so responsive, so alive. So
there
.

He hadn’t been with a woman in months, not since Grace. She’d put him off, with her manicured fingernails and her theatrical moans. Sex for Grace was a performance, which made it something very near a chore for him.

But not with Cath. Learning what she liked, what made her thrash and moan and mumble obscenities, he’d lost all sense of time, of where the boundaries were or ought to be between them. Her first orgasm had elated him, the second nearly killed him, and his own erased him
from the face of the earth for a few long, ecstatic seconds.

He already wanted to do it again.

Cath rose up on one elbow, studying him. Her skin was pink, her hair mussed. She looked elfin, lovely. “You’re kinkier than I expected,” she said. “I figured you’d be strictly a missionary position kind of guy.”

He’d very much like her to list all the things she thought about him so he could prove her wrong, one item at a time. Strictly missionary position. What a bloody depressing thing to say.

“You were hoping I’d tell you to close your eyes and think of England?”

“Not hoping. Possibly fearing.”

Her smart mouth made him smile. “I reckoned I’d better branch out. I didn’t want to disappoint you, Mary Catherine. I understand you Catholic schoolgirls are quite sexually adventurous.” He rolled onto his side so he could cup her breast, running a thumb over her nipple. She had gorgeous breasts, small but perfect, with nipples that sat up and begged to be sucked. Never the sort of man to turn away a beggar, he obliged this one, and she rewarded him with a soft gasp, her eyelids falling to half-mast.

“I didn’t last long as a Catholic schoolgirl,” she said after a while. “Got kicked out.”

“Imagine that. Whatever for?” He brought his tongue to her other nipple, drawing it into his mouth. She flopped onto her back.

“Stealing. And drinking the communion wine.”

He’d liked to have seen her at fifteen. He could imagine her spoiled and reckless, lacking good sense but with vitality to spare. Stealing and drinking—she’d have been hell on her mother. The thought pleased him.

Nev dropped his hand between her legs, enjoying the way she squirmed closer. “You shouldn’t drink, love. It doesn’t agree with you.”

“Shut up. I only had three glasses of wine last night. And some kind of tequila thing with Red Bull.”

“See, you’ve proved my point. You’re a very poor lush.”

She stuck her tongue out, but he rather liked her tongue, so he kissed her, encouraging her to put it in his mouth.

They didn’t talk for a while.

Later, she lay on her stomach, and he stretched out beside her with one hand on her arse, studying the figures on her lower back. “Tell me about your tattoos. What do the numbers mean?”

There turned out to be four tattoos, each with its own small Copperplate numeral. The songbird came first, then a lit match, a book, and the intricate tangle on her stomach. All four images were interconnected with a matrix of lines and swirls.

“They’re my mistakes,” she said. “Each tattoo represents one of my worst mistakes. So I won’t forget.”

He traced the shape of the bird, wondering what she could have done to merit writing herself a memo on her body. “It’s a very permanent sort of reminder.”

She raised herself up slightly, catching his gaze and holding it. “They were really bad mistakes.”

She didn’t say
Back off
, but she told him all the same.

He tried a slightly different tack, wondering how far he could push her before she turned as fierce as she looked when she ran in the park. “What about the phoenix?” He slid one hand to her shoulder, picturing the tattoo beneath her collarbone. “It doesn’t have a number.”

Apparently this was a permissible question, as she relaxed slightly. “That one’s from when I decided to start over. You know, clean slate. No more mistakes. Phoenix rising from the ashes.” She gave him a small smile. “I was doing pretty well there for a while.”

Nev frowned, unhappy with the implication. “I’m a mistake then?”

“I don’t know yet. You have to admit, we didn’t meet under the most auspicious circumstances.”

“True.”

He did have to admit it. He didn’t have to like it. And it didn’t have to matter how they’d
met. She was here, wasn’t she?

Cath didn’t feel like a mistake to him. She felt like a beginning. A clean canvas, ready to be painted. A gorgeous new idea.

She lowered her face to the pillow. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Want me to distract you again?”

“Yeah.”

He turned her over, kissed his way down her soft stomach, and spread her legs wide with his shoulders. No doubt he’d been someone’s mistake in the past. Perhaps more than one person’s, at that. But he wasn’t hers.

He’d simply have to prove it to her.

Chapter Six

Cath was dozing on Nev’s chest, his fingers tangled in her hair, when a loud knock at the front door startled her awake. He tensed beneath her.

“Expecting someone?”

“No.” He slid her onto the mattress and sat up, reaching for his jeans. “Stay here a moment, I’ll get your things.”

Half dressed, he disappeared down the hallway and returned with her shirt, skirt, and shoes, placing them beside her on the bed. Then he leaned down and kissed her quickly, her face cupped in his hand. “I’ll just go see who it is.”

Cath sighed and sat up, dismayed to find herself plunged so suddenly back into reality. She’d been perfectly happy, lying there with Nev. Maybe it had been a false happiness, a soap bubble headed toward the floor, but it still sucked to have it punctured, because now all the thoughts she’d pushed firmly to the back of her mental space were crowding around the barriers, ready to break loose. None of them was going to make her as blissful as ignoring them had.

She pulled on her clothes. They were stiff from air-drying, but at least they were clean. There wasn’t much she could do about the wrinkles—or about the rest of her. She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing down the worst of the bed head.

At the door, Nev was speaking in a low voice to another man. She heard them move into the hall. Whoever it was, he didn’t seem to be leaving, so Cath shoved her feet into her heels and opened the door. Though she had no idea how the visitor would react to her presence, she wasn’t going to cower in the bedroom like a dirty little secret.

They didn’t notice her right away, giving her a chance to check out the other guy. He was attractive, nearly as tall as Nev but noticeably older, his neatly combed dark hair going gray at the temples. Dressed in a polo shirt and slacks, he had a casual polish that made a stark contrast
to Nev, whose bare chest and mussed hair gave him a feral aspect. The bite mark on his shoulder didn’t help.

The visitor caught sight of her and stiffened. His eyes raked over her slowly, his mouth—a less friendly version of Nev’s—set in a disapproving frown. This guy had to be a relative, maybe Nev’s older brother. And he was looking at her like something he’d found on the bottom of his expensive loafers.

Nev turned to look at her, too, his eyes cool and his expression unreadable. Suddenly he was a stranger again, not the man who’d kissed her moments earlier. He was City waiting impassively for the train.

There was an awkward silence as Cath realized he wasn’t going to introduce her.

She’d been called a lot of things, but no one had ever accused her of being slow on the uptake. He wanted her gone. Whatever had been happening between the two of them, this man’s arrival had brought it to a close, and now it was time for her to hit the road.

And that was fine. That was what she would have expected, if she’d bothered to form expectations. It still surprised her, which was probably why her eyes were watering and her chest felt sort of squeezed and smooshed, like a big dog was sitting on it. But tears and moderate physical discomfort were no big deal. Symptoms like this were bound to strike on a day like today, when she was already off-balance from the whole waking-up-in-a-strange-place thing. Plus the drunken-night-on-the-town thing. The incredible-sex-with-Nev thing.

Not a problem. She knew how to leave. She practically had a degree in it.

Spying her purse near the door, she slid past the two men, her heels clattering on the parquet floor. “I’m off, then. Thanks again for everything. I’ll, uh, see you around.” She snagged her purse, wrenched the door open, and escaped, refusing to look back.