Heat Seeker (23 page)

Tears threatened to fall as her heart actually ached with the knowledge of everything she had lost, everything she couldn’t have. She wanted to be in his arms, she ached to feel him against her, and yet a part of her refused to bend or to ask for what she needed most.

“I’m going to shower.” He moved away from the bed and turned toward the bathroom. “We can talk later.”

Later. There was always later.

She watched as he disappeared into the other room, noting the stress in his voice, in his shoulders. There were still so many things that she didn’t know about him, that she hadn’t known about him five years before.

They’d had so little time together. Not nearly enough time to know everything they needed to know about each other.

She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling as she heard the water in the shower turn on. She imagined him stepping beneath the spray, water pouring over his body.

She didn’t want to imagine.

Flipping the blankets away from her body, she moved from the bed and on silent feet entered the bathroom.

Shedding the long T-shirt she had worn to bed, she watched through the shower doors as he put his head back and let the water run over his face and head. His dark blond hair plastered to his head and neck. Water streamed over his hard, muscular body, giving it a golden sheen that tempted her hands to touch.

She watched, simply watched as he kept his back to her, poured shampoo into his palm, then replaced the bottle before working the gel through the thick strands of his hair.

Thick, heavy lather streamed down his back and buttocks, sliding down like a lover’s caress before slipping to the floor of the shower.

Bailey reached out, touched the glass as though she could actually feel the warmth of his flesh, and felt the need exploding inside her. Just to touch him, to taste him, to kiss the bronzed flesh and feel the flex of muscle beneath. To feel him against her, inside her.

She licked her lips as he stepped beneath the water once again, the suds flowing down his body, disintegrating beneath the force of the water as she slid the shower doors open.

He had known she was there. She watched him tense as she entered the cubicle and glimpsed the heavy length of his erection.

Warm flesh met her palm as she reached out and touched the flexing muscles of his back. His head lowered beneath the spray, one hand reaching out to brace against the wall.

“Wrong time, Bailey.” His voice was rough, guttural. “Go back to bed, baby.”

She paused, hearing something in his voice that she had never heard before, something she had only sensed in him a few times in Australia. Those had been the times he had simply disappeared a day or so before returning with his familiar, ever-present smile.

“Go back to bed?” She slid the door closed behind her, enclosing them in the heated moisture of the shower.

His other arm rose, his hand bracing against the shower wall as he drew in a hard, deep breath.

“Why would I want to go back to bed?” She let her fingers trail down the tense muscles of his back. “What are you hiding from me, John?”

She knew parts of what he was hiding. He was hiding who he was, what he was. He was hiding the man he had been, not just the man he was.

“Maybe I’m trying to protect you.” His voice was a rough growl.

She stared at his profile. His eyes were closed, his thick, long lashes spiked from the water as he obviously fought for control.

“It’s too late to try to protect me,” she whispered as she
leaned her head against his shoulder. “And protection isn’t what I want from you. It’s not what I need from you.”

Before she could finish, he moved. One arm snaked around her waist, jerking her in front of him before he pressed her back into the shower wall.

His expression was tight with lust, his gray eyes nearly black with it. The erection that pressed against her belly was steel-hard, iron-hot.

Water flowed around them now, washing between their bodies, over their shoulders, enclosing them in a heated world of hunger and need.

She reached out to the side of the shower cubicle, her fingers closing around the bottle of shower gel that sat on the narrow shelf.

“Don’t, Bailey.” His arm tightened around her back as she snagged the clean cloth hanging on a ring to the opposite side.

“Don’t what?” she asked as she felt his cock throb against her lower belly. “Don’t be here with you, John? Don’t touch you when you can feel everything you want or need slipping through your fingers? Or are you just too damned scared to reach out and touch it?”

She poured the soap onto the washrag, staring into his eyes as she worked up the lather. There was something tormented, something desperate in his gaze as he stared down at her.

“Don’t you want me, John?” she asked him then. “Did you ever truly want me?”

There was an edge of pain in her voice, a shadow of it haunting her gaze, as though she were asking not just about the present, but a past she couldn’t know that they shared.

John stared down at her, feeling the dark, overwhelming lust that rose inside him for this woman. It was a hunger, a need he had always had to force himself to combat. From that first meeting with her, from their first kiss, it had risen inside him like a fire he couldn’t control.

It had been like this before. There had been times in Australia that he’d had to simply walk away from her, to put
distance between them as he fought the unfamiliar hunger that he couldn’t name and sure as hell didn’t understand.

It had grown worse, he admitted. Five years ago, it had been like an ache he couldn’t put a name to. It wasn’t an ache now; it was a tide rising inside him, filling every part of his senses and demanding more from him, from her, than he had ever expected.

Being someone else hadn’t helped. He had thought it would. He had believed that coming here as John Vincent rather than Trent Daylen—working with her on his terms, with the knowledge between them that when the mission was over, they were over—would ease the desperation inside him.

It hadn’t. In ways, he believed it had only made it worse. She looked at him as though she knew who he was, what he was, and he couldn’t allow her to ever know.

Tightening his arm around her he jerked her to him, felt her indrawn breath, and watched the excitement that lit her green eyes.

“You should have stayed in the bed,” he growled as he felt that hunger ripping through him.

“Why, so you could stay in control?” The rasp of the lathered cloth moved over his shoulder as her nipples stroked against his chest with every breath she took. They were silken fire against his chest, burning into his flesh with sensual destruction.

“Control can be a good thing.” He proved his point by pressing a thigh between hers and pressing it tight against the heated mound of her sex.

He could feel the heated slide of her slick juices, feel them searing his skin as she drew in a hard, deep breath.

Taking the cloth from her hand, he shoved it back into its ring, then caught her wrists, placing them in one hand and holding them over her head.

“What are you fighting, John?” she whispered. “Me? Or yourself?”

He stared at her, wondering himself what he had always been fighting, even though he knew. He had fought the
bonding, the need, the hunger that he was trying to hide from now. The certainty that life without this woman wasn’t worth living.

It was the reason he had tried to leave her in her bed, alone and escape to the shower. To hide from himself. To escape the need to give her more than he had thought he had to give to any woman.

“You don’t know what you’re doing to me, Bailey,” he rasped. “You don’t know what you’re doing to both of us.”

She was breathing heavily, her breasts rising and falling against his chest as he moved back from her slowly. But not to let her go. Hell no. There was no letting her go now.

“What am I doing to us, John?” Her soap-slick hands flexed within his grip as her hips arched to press his cock tighter against her belly.

“Destroying us?” he asked her softly, because he knew that was exactly what she was doing. Destroying them, one soft caress, one heated kiss at a time until he could feel his soul unraveling.

“Destroying us? How can touching you destroy us worse than this situation could?”

The question of the ages, a question he couldn’t answer because no other thought could penetrate the hunger growing inside him.

His head dipped, his lips taking hers in a kiss that only fueled the flames tearing through him. Looping her arms around his neck, he gripped the back of her head to hold her in place and fought himself, fought the impulses tearing through him.

It was like fighting a demon inside his soul. It refused to allow him any peace, refused to release him.

And this was the part of himself that he hadn’t wanted her to see. The dominance, the hunger, the sheer desperation for her touch that ruled his every sense.

“Damn you, I warned you not to be here,” he growled, fighting back the hard rumble in his voice, a flavor of an accent that he didn’t dare allow her to hear.

Throwing his head back he gripped her hair, moved her lips to his chest, and fought back the compulsion to simply take her.

Her hands caressed from his neck to his chest, then to his abdomen. The muscles of his stomach clenched almost violently at the feel of her silken fingertips tickling over them, moving lower.

Breathing in roughly, he stared down at her now, watching as he guided her head, watching her go lower, her swollen lips working over his chest, brushing his hard male nipples before angling to his abs.

As though she moved in slow motion, each caress took forever and seared into his soul as he watched her. Her lashes lifted, beaded with water that made her green eyes brighter, more brilliant than ever before.

“You know what I want,” he groaned. “Give it to me, Bailey.”

His fingers fisted in her hair as he pressed her lower and felt her hot breath against the swollen crest of his cock. Her fingers gripped the shaft and held it along his lower belly.

Violent sensations of pleasure racked him at the feel of her moist breath, the knowledge that her lips were so close, that pleasure was just a breath away.

She stared up at him, watching him, snaring his will with her gaze as her head moved lower, her lips parted, and the sweet, heated caress of her mouth struck a bolt of ecstasy hard and deep inside the taut sac of his balls.

“Fuck.” One hand slapped against the tile shower wall as he blinked water from his eyes. “Suck me.”

Her lips closed over the brutally sensitive crown as her tongue swiped over it, caressed it and stole his mind. He could barely maintain a semblance of control, so fiercely did the pleasure resound inside him.

God help him. He needed her in ways that he didn’t understand himself. He needed to possess her, to own her sexuality, her sensuality. Her heart.

His hips jerked, driving the iron-hard crest deeper into
her mouth as her cheeks began to flex and the suckling motion of her mouth sent white-hot flares of sensation tearing through his senses.

There was nothing else quite like Bailey’s lips at his cock, sucking him into her mouth, taking him with an intimacy, a silent promise that weakened any resolve he had to hold himself distant from her.

He could do nothing but let the lust have its way now. She stripped him of control. She had followed him when he had warned her to stay away. She had continued touching him when he had warned her she might be getting more than she was bargaining for.

Need was like a ravening beast inside him now. It was a hunger he couldn’t hold back.

He watched as she took the head of his cock into her mouth, laved it with her tongue, sucked him deep within her hot little mouth.

His hand clenched tighter in her hair as he fought to hold back the impulse to spill his release in that moment. God knew he wanted to enjoy this. The feel of her sweet mouth, so hot and snug as she sucked at the crown of his cock.

The sight of her, lashes half closed, lips reddened from sucking at him; the sight of his cock thrusting shallowly between her lips. It was the most erotic vision of his life. Bailey had the ability to do that. To make each encounter with her more erotic than the one before.

Fire whipped over his nerve endings, surrounding his cock and tightening in his testicles. The muscles of his thighs were so tight they ached, his arms bulging as he fought to hold on to just enough control to enjoy this a few moments longer.

To feel her mouth suckling him, her silken palm cupping his balls as she moaned against his overly sensitive flesh.

It was destroying him. He watched the shallow thrusts he made between her lips, the way her expression shifted, the pleasure on her face.

“Sweet Bailey,” he groaned as her tongue swiped over his dick. “Ah love, you’re destroying my control.”

She was destroying him, inside and out. He couldn’t hold
on. He could feel the need boiling in his veins, his cum rising through his cock.

He couldn’t hold on. His fingers clenched tighter in her hair, his teeth clenched, and before he could pull back, a shattered groan tore from his throat.