Everything You Need: Everything For You Trilogy Book 1 (13 page)

It’s too soon, too intense. I resist, turning my head aside, breaking our connection, pushing against his chest ineffectively.

The rasp of shadowed growth covering his jaw scrapes across my skin as he works his mouth back across my cheek to recapture my lips beneath his. Urging them apart, he holds my head firmly in place with a hand fisted in my hair. His muscular tongue explores my tingling lips and trips over the curve of my teeth. He invades me, teasing up against my palette and sporting with my own tongue; nipping and licking at my rapidly swelling lips. I’m gasping and feeble, held upright only by him, by the time he pauses, his forehead resting against mine, his breath ragged and torn.

I’m so out of my depth I don’t know what to do. He’s some wild, remote mountainous terrain I’m travelling in bare feet.

“I know you want me, Tabby cat.”

I cling to him and the only thing I understand. “I want Zee-Com.” It’s a pitiful affectation of indifference.

“Fight it all you have to but you’ll lose.” His self-assurance in this matter, like everything else is supreme.

Yet I’ve seen the way he looks at me. “Maybe it’s you who wants me,” I suggest.

His scrutiny penetrates so deep I might believe he’s trying to look inside my mind. His lips curve like a hunter spotting prey. “More than my next breath.”

Jack works soft wet tongued kisses along my jaw and neck, up behind my ear where his breath shivers through me. I might as well be standing naked in a white-out snow storm.

Perhaps he senses how much he overwhelms me, as he pauses. “I can be patient. Don’t be scared, I’ll make sure you’re ready for this.” His lips linger at the pulse beating savagely against my throat but I fail to subdue a fugitive moan.

My will to refuse him anything he wants fades like twilight with the rising dawn as I slip my arms over his shoulders pushing my fingertips up into his hairline. He murmurs his approval almost indiscernibly pushing his head gently back into my hands, enjoying my touch.

“That’s it, kitten. Abandon yourself to me.”

He wants me. Yet I know all about his wanting. It’s the excitement of an untried female body. An elevated sex drive and high-flying achievers like Jack go together like fire and pain. The rest of me doesn’t matter to him. Perhaps he wants to punish me for what I attempted this afternoon. I’m not that drunk after all. Not on Champagne. Not on memories.

Beneath his caresses, my body’s demands soar. I hang on tight as lips and tongue excite my skin. He’s moving far too slowly now, teasing out each moment, making me wait for him but I’ve been waiting since I stepped from the elevator. Waiting since I was eighteen. Soon he’ll know how ready I am and it no longer embarrasses me. Desire overrides all reason. I’m handing him the power to hurt me. This can only end badly but I’m beyond caring. I need to feel his body inside mine. I want him to make me come so badly I tremble.

“Yes.”

Jack’s fingers locate the hidden zipper tab which is all that holds me inside this dress. He draws it downwards, so slowly I think I’ll die before he gets it to the bottom. My internal muscles niggle as I cling for endurance with fists bunched in his black dress jacket. He makes sure he doesn’t catch my skin by sliding teasing fingers down between the metallic teeth and my tender vulnerability. Those minute sensations coursing over heated flesh push me to the limit.

The dress floats away in one soft movement as Jack eases back. It puddles round my feet in an ocean of silky waves leaving me standing like Venus rising from the sea, unsteady in heels and longing, wearing nothing but that miniscule blue silken thong.

Jack steps further back to observe my near naked body. His eyes scorch a quick path down my flesh and another, more dangerously arduous route back up leaving me burning beneath his gaze. “Such a glorious creature. Heavenly.”

He lifts his hand to cover my swollen breast, his fingers flexing gently against the firm resistance, an action that feels so intimately familiar, I’m ready to accept I’m losing my mind.

“You’re exquisite. So soft.” His fingertips stroke and sense and his eyes wander, gathering impressions and translating them into heady expressions across his features until I’m certain my body pleases him.

His pupils dilate and darken like islands of desire in ice-blue oceans and I rediscover the thickening evidence of his arousal when he rocks his hips into me once more.

“Divine.” His hands and exquisitely long fingers tenderly explore downwards, stroking my waist, belly and hips.

“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off too?” I gasp. He looks so hot, standing before me sexually disturbed in that tuxedo but I want to see the prime male flesh I’ve only imagined until now.

“Oh no, sweet girl. Definitely not.”

Horror sweeps my face. And when he looks amused I want to die. I’m completely vulnerable standing before him all but naked. Just how badly does he want to hurt me?

“Why?” My voice is barely audible. He’s going to humiliate me all over again. I push against him to move him off me.

He grasps my face between his hands and holds me until I stop trying to escape and focus on him instead. “Hush, Tabby, sshhh. Because I want you to do it for me, baby girl.” He says it like no power on earth will prevent it.

I want to hit him. Kiss him. Instead I burst into stupid, stupid tears. I’m so on edge; living his rejection all over again.

He hugs me close. “Sorry, Tabby.” His voice croons, soft and soothing. He moves a lock of dark hair back from my temple but my shutters are up. Placing a finger beneath my chin, he raises my damp eyes to meet his. “It was insensitive. I shouldn’t tease you that way. I forgot. It’s been a while.”

I thump him on the shoulder then sink back into his arms for comfort. “No. You shouldn’t. We’re not like that anymore.” And the loss of something so simple makes me want to howl but I sniff back the rest of my distress until I almost see the funny side. He used to tease me all the time and I liked it.

“Can things ever go back?” He sounds almost wistful but laughs it off, kissing my forehead. “So, are you going to?”

“What?”

“Undress me.” He lifts a questioning brow and pulls a wary face. “Or have I blown it?”

I pull myself together, wiping the backs of my fingers beneath my eyes. “Well if you think I’m going to be the only one standing here butt naked, you’re delusional.”

He grins at me. “That’s my girl.”

Am I? Maybe for one crazy night. He stands, unresisting, letting me push his jacket off his shoulders to slide down his arms. He catches it in one hand, flinging it over the back of the adjacent sofa deftly, giving me that look that says he knows he’s a class act.

If it’s possible, he appears even bigger standing in his white shirt. He snatches my breath away for real. I want him more than seems reasonable. My fingers shake as I drag his shirt from his waistband and reach for the first closed shirt-button at the base of his neck. I have this overwhelming urge to sink my teeth into the strong column of his throat and bite the rise of the Adam’s apple buried beneath sun-browned skin. Gooseflesh surges all over my body in spite of the warmth from the open fire as I tremble with apprehension and mounting need. I want him so badly I’m all clumsy thumbs.

Jack encloses my quaking fists in his hands and clasps them tightly for a moment against his chest. “There’s no rush. We have all the time we want.”

That’s what I used to think too.

I feel his body heat against mine, warming my flesh like sunlight. With steady encouragement, my fingers deal with the rest of the pearly buttons while he caresses the sensitive skin on my back.

“You glow in this firelight, your skin’s so perfect.” Jack’s fingers trip over my shoulders, breasts and stomach again and again. “You’re a precious work of art, kitten.” He drops a kiss onto my collar bone.

It’s such a romantic thing to say, I have to remind myself it’s his experience that tells him what a woman wants to hear. The worship of his hands centres a dull ache of longing between my thighs which soars and tightens as his thumbs sweep back and forth across my tenderly engorged nipples, making me moan.

Reaching the lowest button, I part his shirt and spread my hands up and over his taut stomach muscles, exploring the dips and rises where the individual muscles separate between my fingers. He hasn’t neglected his body in his climb to the top. When my fingertips graze the hard tips of his nipples I feel a tremor of sensation shudder through him. I kiss his curved pectoral muscle, lapping and sucking at the flesh wanting to leave my mark on him.

A low hum of pleasure escapes his throat. That sprinkling of dark chest hairs over honey-gold skin mesmerises me. This is so much more heavenly than any dream I’ve ever had. It’s warm and alive and real. I reach up to ease the shirt from his broad shoulders.

“You might want to deal with the cuffs first,” he reminds me, holding his shirt-tethered wrists out towards me on either side.

I feel self-conscious again, an awkward young woman who has never properly undressed a man before. Not like this, while he waits, giving me space and time to explore and enjoy. I don’t want Jack to know I’m so inexperienced. The young guys I’ve casually dated have always ripped their own clothes and mine off in heated lust. Jack’s mature finesse is a first experience for me. I pull one cuff round and spot the cuff-links.

“You kept them?” I’m surprised.

I’d given him these very ones for his twenty-eighth birthday, long before I’d ever seen him wear any formal suit. They were white gold with the Tibetan Buddhist eternal knot I’d had engraved on each so he’d know I wanted him for eternity.

He discarded me.

The symbol before me taunts me, ridicules me, on the one and only night I might ever spend this way with Jack, for the silly notion I might order the world I live in. How very bloody Zen.

“Of course I kept them. They’re special. Aren’t you pleased to see me wear them tonight?”

Special? An eternal reminder of what a fool I was. The more I think about them, the angrier I become. How dare he mock my sincerity? My true heart. They were a token of eternal love. A love he so easily rejected.

I open the first link in a second. It’s so simple. Before I gift-wrapped them, I’d opened and closed them a hundred times, worn them in my own blouse sleeves, pushing little holes through the fabric, to imprint myself on them, even reached for them beneath my pillow and played with them in the dead of night whenever I thought of him. I could have opened them blindfolded.

I had the same symbol engraved on a pendant I’d worn secretly next to my heart and never taken off. Until he stopped answering my phone calls and avoided me completely. I flung it from Tower Bridge in utter wretchedness and pain after seeing a photograph of him in the Sunday newspapers, with his arm around some woman he’d escorted to a charity gala. She was blonde and super-model beautiful and nothing like me. He’d smiled at her.

I launch his cuff-link half way across the room as a memorial to that moment then grab his other sleeve, rip the link from his shirt and fling that one after the first.

Jack stiffens, stunned. “What the hell are you doing, Tabby?” He seems genuinely perplexed.

Why would he have any idea how much they meant to me? Why would he understand when my feelings meant nothing to him?

“What I should have done in the first place…”

I bend and heave the dress back up my exposed body, trying to move off at the same time, almost tripping over its length. I hear it rip beneath my heel and yank all the harder to free it. It’s a satisfying sound. Good. If he thinks he can afford to exchange Versace for sex with me, he can think twice. I’ll never wear this dress again as long as I live. I’ll send it back to him in a bin-liner, like the rubbish deal it comprises.

“…Leave.” Like you left me. I turn awkwardly and stumble forward.

Jack grabs hold of a fistful of fabric at the back of the dress to stop me tumbling headlong. I struggle in his grip holding on for dear life to the unzipped dress. I don’t want it to fall. I’m not planning on getting naked again around Jack Keogh, ever again.

“Let me go, you big ox.” I turn to swing a kick at him, lose my balance as the stupid fabric wedges in my heel again and begin to topple backwards.

In one movement Jack shrugs his open shirt back up his shoulders and swings me up into his arms before I get very far. “Whatever this is, we need to discuss it.”

“I’ve nothing to say to you.” I writhe to convey the message to put me down without having to say it. I can hardly do that straight after making that statement. I’d look ridiculous.

“I think you have plenty to say to me. And you’re going to say it.”

The hell I will. I’m done pouring my heart out to any man. Especially this one. To hell with not talking too. “Put me down.”

I kick and squirm but Jack holds on tighter. The dagger heel of my shoe lands on his thigh a couple of times, hard, digging in. I hear his pained hiss. I don’t care.

“Quit kicking.”

I don’t.

“Quit kicking or I’ll paddle your backside.”

“Just try it.” It’s an ineffectual warning. Almost a temptation. I realise I’m not in any position to argue. He’s much bigger and stronger. All pumped up, with an erection the size of Vesuvius, ready to blow. And I’ve just stopped him having some casual fun. I kick him again for good measure.