Blindsided (8 page)

That didn’t mean he was dead. He was pretty sure Chelsea was naked under that blanket. He couldn’t take the suspense anymore. His unfulfilled need suddenly roared back into new life and he needed to have her, needed to be inside her. Now.

“Come here,” he said as he stubbed out his cigarette.

She wouldn’t have a chance to go to sleep this time. They weren’t leaving this room, and there was no soft, comfy bed here. He held out his arms and made crooking motions with his fingers.

“I don’t think we’ve known each other long enough for you to be ordering me around,” Chelsea said teasingly.

Her eyes shone and she wriggled under the blanket. Christ, she was so little and sexy and she was driving him nuts, even under the blanket.

So the song wasn’t coming together the way it should, and he was too old for this beautiful woman. This woman who was standing not only in his sanctuary of a house, but also in the private space he used only to write. Nate didn’t care. Not right now. Right now longing and desire surged through his body as he anticipated the removal of that damn comforter. She dropped the fabric back onto the couch and turned towards him. Nate’s throat clenched closed for a moment and his breath stopped in his chest.

Long slim legs curved into beautifully formed hips. Her waist was so tiny it looked fragile, but her breasts were high and firm and round, tipped with pink nipples. A red triangle of hair disappeared between her thighs. As she walked towards him, hips slowly undulating with each step, her breasts swayed in a hypnotic arc. When she got within reach, he pulled her to him with one arm, caressing her back with his hand, while he brought his other hand up to touch her face.

“You are quite possibly the sexiest woman I have ever seen.”

It wasn’t even a line. He had seen beautiful women in his time, plenty of them, but Chelsea was something else all together.

She straddled him easily, resting her feet on the rungs of his stool, settling herself onto him. He all but lost his mind, seeing the darkened cleft for a split second before she positioned herself to cradle his erection with the warmest part of her. Nate let out a primitive groan of pleasure and reached up to gently tease her nipples while he sucked on the delicate skin of her arched neck. Chelsea ran her fingers through his hair and moved her hips in a slow arc, pressing them together with delicious pressure. Nate grabbed her hips with both hands, savoring the feeling of her warm skin under his palms.

“Better than all the groupies?” Chelsea asked.

She looked at him with a glint in her eye. Her hair hung over her face, making her mysterious, enticing. As he looked at her, Nate wondered how he could have ever thought he would be able to get away from her without getting inside her at least once. More if at all possible. She was feminine softness, sweetness, ripe and ready.

“Oh, babe, you have no idea,” Nate said “I noticed you don’t mind that I call you babe and sweetheart anymore.” He nuzzled her neck, unable to feel that her acquiescence to pet names wasn’t a small victory on his part.

His voice was husky, rough. He wanted to just throw her on the couch and have her like some horny teenager, but he made himself regain some control. If she did leave tomorrow, he wanted this to be a one fabulous one night stand. Of course, if he did this right, she wouldn’t be able to leave. She’d be as unable to get enough as he was. It might be idiotic, but it was the best he could do.

Chelsea laughed and pressed her groin harder into his. Nate caught his breath and growled once before regaining control of himself.

“Now you say it nicely,” she said, “Before you were being mean, using it like it was derogatory.” Her little fingers stroking the back of his neck felt like sweet torture.

“It was. I thought you were a groupie. I get very little time to relax,” Nate said.

Each word was a chore to grind out, and he was having trouble concentrating when Chelsea was warm, soft and wiggling in his lap. And naked. He couldn’t forget naked.

“Are you relaxed now?” Chelsea asked as she ran her hands down his chest. His nipples tightened in response to her hot little fingers.

“Yeah, something like that,” Nate said.

Enough of that. He stopped their conversation with a blistering kiss, his tongue exploring and tasting her mouth more fully than he had before. Nate’s mind left him then, all his focus going to thoroughly ravishing this woman he wanted so much.

###

Chelsea pulled away and looked down at Nate, her eyes hazy with lust. His kisses were one thing, but now he had moved his hand down to the downy, burning spot between her legs. He raised one eyebrow at her as he stroked her clit with the knuckle of one finger, the pressure teasingly light. Moaning in delight, she arched her back, pressing against his hand. Had it not been for Nate’s strong arm supporting her, she would have fallen backwards in her abandon. It was like torture, yet so pleasurable Chelsea felt her mind go blank.

His lips found her nipple and he nibbled it gently. Chelsea tried to moan, tried to cry out, but she had moved beyond that into a world of pleasure beyond sound, beyond anything but body and movement. She wiggled her hips against Nate, encouraging him, asking him for what she wanted with her body.

After what seemed like an eternity of sliding his fingers along her slick swollen flesh, he finally slipped one long finger inside before teasingly taking it almost all the way out again. Chelsea pressed her hips down against him, mindlessly needing the pressure there. He obliged, finding a rhythm with his finger that he matched with his tongue against her sensitive, hard nipple.

Nate slipped his finger out again and Chelsea moaned in protest. He had gotten her so close, the tension coiling in her, ready to release. She glared up at him and he growled as he picked her up and carried her the few feet to his desk. He set her down gently, allowing her legs to dangle from the edge.

“Comfy?” he asked with a grin.

She was spread out before him, her body naked, thrumming with need. No, she wasn’t comfy. She was nearly crazy from wanting him and he was standing there with his jeans on. The sight of his abdominal muscles curving into the low slung waistband made her mouth go dry. Near frenzied, she pulled at the button of his jeans, running her hands down smooth skin as she slid them off his hips and smiling with delight when his erection bobbed out to greet her.

“Better now,” she managed to say.

She leaned up to kiss him, licked his lower lip while sliding her hand up and down his hard shaft. He groaned and soon took control of the kiss, sliding his tongue along hers and reinserting his finger in her. Her pussy was wet and pulsing with need and his finger was no longer enough. Chelsea grabbed his ass with both hands, urging his hips towards her own.

He made a noise for her to wait and in a moment he had a condom on and had brought his hips back to meet hers. Nearly dizzy with anticipation, Chelsea pushed forward to meet him, gasping when his full length slid inside her, feeling her muscles tighten around him to pull him in further. She brought her legs farther up his rib cage, clutching at him as her orgasm built up, pushing her forward.

As he increased his tempo, she tipped over the edge, grabbing his shoulders and hanging on as he drove into her, sending them both into blissful oblivion.

Chapter 5

Where the hell was his sister? Tony stared out the window above his desk and worried. He should have been working on his latest project, a complete site overhaul for a client, but he wasn’t focusing. Chelsea had left early yesterday and all he’d heard from her since was a fuzzy message on his machine that told him her damn car had broken down – again – in the middle of nowhere. She hadn’t told him where, or he would have been there by now.

Chelsea was a good kid, a smart kid, but she was gone so much Tony wasn’t sure she still knew how to be careful. He couldn’t stop worrying that she’d run into some idiot on a bike and run off with him. That would be like Chelsea. No, Tony corrected himself, that would be like Chelsea used to be, hauling a string of leather clad bikers home to shock Mom. Of course, she was the one who had a broken heart when they left, not Mom, but it had taken Chelsea a while to figure that out. Lately, she seemed to have gotten a grasp on that concept.

Tony hauled his mind back to the html he was working on, but it just looked like a bunch of nonsensical letters and symbols. Dammit. When Chelsea was off running around, he never gave her a second thought except to miss her. But since she’d returned from Sydney, everything had been different.

When she had left yesterday, Tony had almost called her back and told her not to go. She looked like shit, which he’d told her, but it obviously hadn’t gotten through to her. She had probably taken it as more teasing from her big brother. But she had lost weight and her coloring was off, paler. Mom was overreacting, but Chelsea was under-reacting. As usual, it was up to Tony to find the middle ground.

With a growl, Tony stopped trying to make his work make sense and got up to get a refill on his coffee. He studiously ignored the photos of his sometimes girlfriend, Jen. Thinking about her would not help his mood at this point. Especially not after her call a few days ago. Even though he had deleted it, he could still hear the message she had left on his machine:
We need to talk.
That was always a fun thing to hear. He hadn’t worked up the guts yet to call her back and find out what that meant.

Chelsea’s disappearance gave him a good excuse to keep putting it off. Should he be calling hospitals and police stations now? Probably not, since she was an adult, but still. The problem was, Tony had no idea if it was normal for her to leave for days at a time or not. It could be perfectly within her normal behavior, or it could be a huge red flag. He wished he knew which it was.

###

Nate opened the fridge and revealed a mass of white wrapped packages. Chelsea raised her eyebrows and glanced at him. She was starving, and he had promised her food, but so far she had seen none. Hunger had been the only thing to rouse them from their stupefied slump on Nate’s desk, and now it appeared she would be going hungry.

“So what’s this?” she asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want me to cook for you,” Nate said with a laugh, “You’d be out of here long before tomorrow morning. My housekeeper cooks for me and leaves lunches and dinners in my fridge.”

“What do you do for breakfast?”

Nate gave her a funny look.
“I eat cereal,” he said, as if everyone in the world subsisted on corn flakes.

She spotted a gallon of milk on the door of the fridge, the only store bought item there.

“So, what are my options?” she asked.

“Lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, probably some tortellini,” Nate said as he rummaged through the packages, reading the handwritten labels.

“Oooh, pasta. I thought they had outlawed that stuff. I came back from a trip a few years ago and everyone had sworn off carbs. It was kind of disconcerting,” Chelsea said as she wrapped herself around his bare torso. They both still smelled of sex and contentment.

She kissed the soft skin on the side of his ribcage and instantly wondered what the hell she was doing. This wasn’t sex; it was tenderness. It was not working things out of her system, it was intimacy and, god help her, affection.

Affection? What the hell had she gotten herself into? She pulled away a little and unwrapped her arms. She took a few steps back and leaned against the counter, putting some distance between herself and his strength, his overpowering charisma.

“Yeah, I can’t do that sort of diet,” Nate said with a grin. He leaned over, easily closing the gap between them. He kissed the top of her head, sending her heart rate galloping. “If you’re on a low carb diet, I’m not sure what I’ll feed you. I pretty much live on pasta.”

“No, it’s okay. Pasta is pretty much found on every continent in the world. I eat it all the time,” she said with a forced grin. Pushing the thoughts of affection away, she grabbed the two containers Nate had taken from the fridge. “Here, I’ll microwave them.”

She didn’t want him to see how their ease together affected her. Sleeping with him was one thing, but caring about him, kissing his rib cage and thinking his incompetence in the kitchen was cute were entirely out of her safety zone. It amazed her that he was completely helpless to feed himself. Even she could make pasta. It wasn’t all that complicated. In some men, this type of shortcoming might have annoyed her, but in Nate it was an interesting quirk. Because it made him human, or because she was falling for him and willing to overlook his flaws? Chelsea didn’t know the answer to that.

###

The night had gone by way too fast. Nate had never been so unhappy to see the sun rise as he was that morning. It wasn’t fair. Even in the dim light, Chelsea’s hair shown a deep red, her skin creamy and smooth against his sheets. She lay on her stomach next to him, her eyelids twitching as she dreamed. Nate stretched carefully, not wanting to wake her. He liked watching her sleep and more opportunities.

When he had made his offer, he had known that it was possible he would want to call it off after one night. Nope. After what they’d done last night, Nate wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep his hands off her for the week of self imposed celibacy he still hoped for. He’d try, but the woman was remarkable. She gave herself up completely, dropping her masks and walls as she gave into him, into her body’s needs. Her pleasure had been his pleasure, and he had spent the night reveling in making her come, watching her abandon reason and thought. Waiting six whole days would be torture.