Explosive (22 page)

His cock stirred and stiffened.

He may not know what the hell he was doing with Sophie, but his almost rabid need for her couldn’t be denied. He
wanted
to deny it, but it felt almost ridiculous to try, as stupid as the idea of willing his blood to stop surging wildly through his veins.

He jogged to the back door.

“
Sophie
?” he called out harshly for the third time several seconds later as he came out of the hallway back into the living room. The flicker of flames caught his eye through the large picture window that faced the lake. She must have started the lakeside bonfire before the sluggish rain began. He rushed down the hallway and swung open the screen door on the porch.

Dammit, why did she always leave this place wide open to all comers? She was too trusting, he thought in growing agitation.

He stalked through the grass and the pitch-black night, as silent as a hunter stalking prey. He couldn’t explain why, precisely, his breath was coming in short, ragged pants and his cock was fully erect, his heartbeat throbbing dully along its turgid length.

When he was twenty feet away from the bonfire, which now hissed and sputtered from the sprinkling rain, he paused. The double-wide chaise lounge that had been pulled up to it was empty. A feeling of profound frustration and anxiety went through him. He scanned the area, but she was nowhere to be found within the globe of flickering light cast by the wildly dancing fire.

He opened his mouth to call out to her when he heard a sound like a stick popping beneath someone’s foot and then a low, murmuring voice. His cock tingled in anticipation as he headed in the direction of the boathouse, his footsteps rapid and silent.

He paused when he rounded the back corner of the building. She carried a small handheld flashlight and knelt. He could see the dim outline of her behind the beam of light, which fell on the paw of the fox they’d seen earlier.

“It looks like it’s healing okay, Guy. Shhh . . . I know. I won’t touch the wound, I promise,” she murmured soothingly when the animal whimpered and flinched away from her. She lifted the flashlight, tracking the animal and sighing softly when it retreated back to the woods. Thomas realized the fox had probably sensed his presence, even if Sophie hadn’t.

“Sophie.”

The hand that held the flashlight jerked.

“Thomas?” she gasped. The light wavered and fell on him where he stood several feet away. For several taut seconds, neither of them moved. Something dark and nameless rose in Thomas’s chest and caused his cock to jerk in his boxer briefs, some primitive, biological mandate.

“That animal could hurt you,” he breathed out, his emotional state making his voice low and harsh. He stepped closer to her. “How can you be so stupid?”

She made a sound of protest, like she’d started to rebut but suddenly checked herself. The light shifted, alerting him to the fact that she’d stood. He drew nearer. The air seemed to vibrate between them with electrical energy. The darkness in him, the bundle of twisted, taut emotion, felt like it’d burst out of his chest.

It had coalesced into a powerful, almost alarming need.

She made a little gasp of surprise when he swooped down and took her mouth in a voracious kiss. He swallowed her surprise and gave a groan of satisfaction when he felt her mouth soften and mold against his own. She pressed closer, participating in the kiss fervently, making the blood in his veins roar.

“Sophie?” he asked roughly next to her seeking lips a moment later.

“Yes?” she asked, her voice audibly trembling, making him wonder if she knew precisely what was happening between them.

“Better run.”

“Thomas, I’m not going to—”

“
Run
, Sophie,” he hissed.

The flashlight dropped to the grass. His erratic heartbeat made it almost impossible for him to hear her tennis shoes rustling in the damp lawn. But he made out the direction of her flight.

He lunged after her.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

Sophie tore through the soft grass, the bonfire by the lake and the distant lights in the house her only guides in the pitch blackness. She had no idea why her heart bounded in her chest with so much excitement; no idea why she was running from Thomas when she wasn’t afraid of him.

Not really.

But something elemental was making her run, causing her blood to race through her veins. Every nerve in her body was suddenly vibrating with energy, making her hyperaware of the velvety, thick cloak of darkness that surrounded her, of her straining muscles and drumming heart . . . of the mounting tension in her sex that was amplified by the friction of her pumping thighs.

In a fragmented manner she recalled the excitement of having a boy chase her on the playground for a kiss, an innocent reenactment of some atavistic instinct, some old trace of a primitive thrill.

But Thomas was no seven-year-old boy. And that kiss he’d just given her hadn’t been a prelude to anything innocent. Warm liquid surged between her legs, dampening her sex.

She heard the sound of the fabric of his shorts swishing as he pumped his legs. He was just feet behind her.

Her eyes went wide and adrenaline poured into her veins, bursting into her muscles with a surge of electrifying chemical energy. She ran toward the house, some part of her brain associating it with normalcy and safety, but she could tell by the sound of his breathing that Thomas was closing in on her, her flight no match for his long, powerful legs. His low, harsh voice echoed in her brain.

Run, Sophie.

She nearly choked in rising anxiety. This was madness . . . pure lunacy.
Why
was she running from him? She considered spinning around and confronting him, but she wasn’t ruled by logic at that moment.

She cried out sharply when she felt his hand on her elbow. He jerked her to a stop, cutting off the cry in her throat. She pulled at her arm like a wild creature caught in a trap, but he grasped her shoulders with both hands and spun her around.

He pulled her against him. She could feel how rigid his muscles were and the heat resonating even through his damp clothing. She felt his breath striking her face in warm, irregular jags.

He shook her lightly, causing their pelvises to thump together.

“Why did you ask me here? Why do you keep asking me all those questions about my father? What do you
know
? What are you trying to accomplish?”

She gasped at the impact of his staccato, harsh words striking her like gunfire.

“I don’t know what you mean—”

“Good girls don’t make good liars. Stop playing games, Sophie,” he growled softly before he sank his tongue between her parted lips.

He ravaged her mouth; owned it. She not only allowed his possession, she gloried in it. Heat rolled through her body in an unstoppable torrent. Her awareness became a riot of broken thoughts and overwhelming sensation.

“Thomas,” she moaned, half in desire and half in dazed confusion when he pulled her down into the cool, damp grass and rolled on top of her, his weight pinning her to the ground. His cock felt almost alarmingly engorged when he pressed it along her pussy and lower belly. She inhaled, her eyes going wide when her brain recognized on some instinctive level the scent of a male pitched into a feral frenzy to mate.

Her vagina contracted painfully, answering his silent summons. He reached between them and ripped roughly at the buttons of her shorts, shoving them and her panties down her thighs. The damp grass felt cool next to her heated skin. He ground his cock against her now exposed sex, grunting at the stimulation, before he lifted himself and clawed wildly at the fastenings of his own shorts. She panted as he lowered his clothing, anticipation building in her until it felt like the blood would burst through her veins.

She went entirely still beneath him, her breath catching on a jagged inhale when he grabbed her wrists and transferred them to one large hand. He pinned her arms to the ground above her head.

“I told you to make me go,” he rasped.

“I don’t want you to go. I want
you
, Thomas,” she replied in a strangled whisper. Tears flowed down her face, their temperature hot compared to the cool drops of rain that mixed with them.

“Then you’re going to have to take the consequences.”

She gritted her teeth, moaning shakily between them when he thrust his cock into her slit. She was wet, aroused like a female in heat—the humid, thick air kissed her moist tissues—but Thomas was enormous with need, and her shorts and panties were gathered around her thighs, constricting their joining, making it impossible for her to open herself to him.

He grunted in profound frustration and whipped his hand down to her thighs, shifting his body and shoving her shorts and panties farther down her legs.

“Get out of them,” he ordered starkly and she lifted her feet, allowing him to work the legs holes over her damp tennis shoes.

She moaned in rising lust when he was back over her a second later. He spread her thighs wide in the grass and pressed the steely head of his penis into her slit. He pushed her arms once again above her head, rearing over her, restraining her as he supported his upper body. Her cry mixed with his deep growl as he drove his cock’s full length into her. Without pause, he began to thrust.

“God,
yes,”
she heard him mutter through a haze of rioting sensation.

He possessed her thoroughly in those moments, so that she was barely aware of the gentle rain falling on her bare legs and face or the prickly grass beneath her bare ass. Her muscles would be slightly sore the next day, but at that moment, she could only think about how inevitable it felt, how primitive and strong.

How honest.

She couldn’t move much, pinned as she was to the ground, but she tilted her hips up eagerly to accept his powerful thrusts. A sharp cry popped out of her throat every time his flexing pelvis encountered her spread thighs. Distantly, Sophie realized the rain had increased to a steady patter. Their wet skin slapping together was what caused the loud smacking sound that intermixed with Thomas’s harsh grunts and her own cries as sensation jolted through her.

His driving cock created a hot, delicious friction, an almost untenable pressure that made her frantic. Thomas seemed even more desperate to quench the wild hunger that possessed him, however. He abruptly released her restrained wrists and came up on his knees, cursing as he tried to position himself in the increasingly wet, slick grass. He spread his hands on the back of her bare thighs and pushed.

Sophie bit her lip, stifling her scream when he rolled her hips back and her knees came down near her ears. Thomas didn’t bother to stifle his roar of pleasure as he rode her pussy fast and furious, like he thoroughly believed he could feel the breath of some dark demon prickling on his neck.

Like his only salvation lay at Sophie’s farthest reach.

She couldn’t have taken him like that for long, with her pussy spread wide and her legs pushed into the grass next to her ears and Thomas fucking her like his very life was at stake. But it didn’t matter, because he was so pitched with need, so wild for release that it didn’t last long.

She shut her eyes, her facial muscles pulled tight when she felt his cock lurch deep inside her, heard the almost amazed sound of his shout as he came. She knew she’d never forget the sound of his poignant, ecstatic moan as pleasure rattled and shook his body, driving his demons out of his mind.

The sensation of his cock twitching while he was sheathed in her body, of the warmth of his semen filling her, caused the unbearable pressure that’d grown in her muscles to break. Her pussy clamped around him as she joined him in an agony of bliss.

She welcomed his solid weight when he fell on top of her a moment later, gasping wildly for air. Her body felt overstimulated, like she was a buzzing, vibrating, riot of nerves. She still hadn’t begun to recover from the disorientation of their savage mating—and she knew Thomas hadn’t either, given his ragged breathing and still stiff cock—when he suddenly lifted his head from the crevice of her neck and shoulder and withdrew from her body.

He made a hissing noise.

Sophie groaned. It felt as if a vital organ had been ripped out of her. His heavy, streaming cock fell against her external sex before he snatched it away, as though he thought it’d burned her.

“Thomas?” she whispered through numb lips.

But he didn’t say anything, just rolled off her. Her legs lowered; her feet touched the wet grass. Raindrops fell on her bare legs, hips, and face. There was a rustling as Thomas adjusted his clothing and then he was kneeling over her. She murmured in surprise when he lifted her into his arms, and then stood.

“Put your arms around my neck,” he ordered bleakly.

Neither of them spoke as he carried her through the slow, steady downpour to the side entrance of the house.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Thomas was numb.

Every time he considered what had just happened out there in Sophie’s dark yard, his consciousness seemed to fragment, to ricochet away from the disturbing image. The fact that the memory still had the power to arouse him made it even more shameful and confusing.

But he couldn’t deny the truth for any more than a second, he realized as he carried Sophie into the bathroom attached to her bedroom. He really
had
just fallen on Sophie out there, held her down in the grass, and rutted on her like a mindless beast.

It hadn’t been rape—she’d consented—but it had come closer to it than anything he’d ever done in his life. Never had he possessed a desire to take a woman so totally, to mark her . . . to fill her with his seed.

He’d never wanted to run so much in his life as he did at that moment. To escape that wild, blistering memory . . . to escape
period.

But he couldn’t, of course.

He couldn’t leave Sophie. Not after what he’d just done.

He dropped a towel to the lid of the toilet seat and lowered her to a sitting position. He mentally braced himself and turned on the light.