Hooked (16 page)

When he pulled my flesh into his mouth it took my breath away. The gentle nibbling of those feral teeth inflamed me. He drew his tongue across my opening, flattening it against my clit; putting pressure on my throbbing sex. My clit was achingly stiff when he took it firmly in his mouth and began to suckle me there. I didn't have to tell him how to taste me; I thought he must have been born knowing that about me. Soon I was pushing back against his talented mouth, urging him on. Our pace quickened when he hummed noises of sweet surrender into my pussy. I couldn't have stopped it, my need took hold of my hips and I thrust back against him. His noises increased with the pace of my bucking body and there was nothing left in the room but the fire he had set in me.

Orgasm's flames flared somewhere deep inside my core. His growls deepened. He could feel me burning. My climax rolled over me in great spasms that began at my clit and engulfed me. It seared me in leaping flares of pleasure until it reached every cell in my body.

"Morgan, Morgan. Oh God, Morgan," I said again and again. I pressed his head against my grateful belly and let the aftershocks flicker to ashes within me. He slipped himself over my body and his kisses tasted of the salty embers of my spent fire.

Now twice he had brought me to a place I'd never known with a man. I could feel the hard need of his cock against my thighs and more than anything I wanted to make it mine. I had to feel his control slip away from
him
now. Had to know the force of him inside me. It was his turn. It was my turn.

"Are you ready for me? Will you have me now, Lara?"

"Yes, Morgan. I'm so ready for you."

He moved to stand by the edge of the bed and slid me onto its edge. I knew he was going to take me from behind and take me in the most basic way--the animal way. He bent over me and kissed me again, deeply and passionately before he raised me up onto my knees, my ass high in the air in front of him.

"You have a perfect ass. Just perfect." He slid his hands over both cheeks and then I felt the head of his cock slide up and down over my folds, wetting his erection against me. He slid himself up and down teasing at the opening. I gasped when he ran himself over my asshole and felt a momentary jolt of vulnerability. It was then, ass skyward and presented for his use that I found I trusted him, at least at that perfect moment of found pleasure.

"Now baby?"

I managed to mew out a noise that was good enough for yes. Ready had come a long time before that moment. Maybe it had come before I even knew what it would be like to take him inside.

He entered me. He slid himself in to the hilt and pushed the air out of my lungs. It was a gentle force but he was big. I had never felt so full. So deliciously full. So utterly occupied by
man
.

He began to stroke very slowly. I arched against him, trying to take as much of his length inside as my body would allow.

Then he reached around me and took my hand, placing in down between our legs so I could feel the union of our sex. He groaned when my hand found his tight balls and stroked them in time with his thrusts.

He moved my fingers closer to my clit and whispered for me to touch myself while he fucked me. It was more newness. More discovery for me. I hesitated for only a second. This man knew me. He knew my body as much as I knew it. He read my desires without my ever giving them a voice.

"That's it, baby. Do it, make yourself come for me." He thrust faster and harder as my fingers played against my rock hard nub.  The more I turned myself on, the more excited he began.

His breath quickened and his grip on my hips tightened. I listened to the slap of our bodies fill the room. Morgan's urgent grunts became more incoherent, less a human voice than a wild creature.

"Oh God Now." He thrust into me and held me fast against him and I knew he was there. His climax took me over the edge. I rubbed myself harder and harder bringing the contractions that would milk him until there was nothing left. The hot spurts splashed inside me as my channel pulled against the cock buried deep within me.

We collapsed onto the bed, panting and utterly spent. His weight felt solid and comforting against my back.. After we caught our breath he climbed over me and drew me next to him on the big bed.

We looked at each other for a long time, just studying each other's face and smiling goofy smiles. It was easy in the afterglow. We traded tender kisses that left questions unasked. The gratitude of desire well sated gave tenderness to the moment.

We drifted off, wrapped around each other and when we awakened the desire was back. We fucked less urgently, more delicately, but it was equally satisfying for us both. I reluctantly pried myself from his arms late in the afternoon. Duty called. I left him sleeping on rumpled, sex scented sheets.

***

Dinner came and went with no sign of Morgan. Finally, after we'd cleared everything up he padded into the kitchen dressed in only his shorts and looking very much like a rumpled kid who'd overslept.

"Hi."

"Hi." I didn't know what was expected. It wasn't a date. I couldn't go home gracefully. I
was
home.

"I guess I missed dinner."

"I can get you something."

"No. I think . . . I think I'll just have a drink." He reached into the cooler and got out his bottle of Grey Goose. I looked at him, trying to ask him without asking him if anything was wrong. It wasn’t a good time to go all 'needy' on him, of that I was very sure. He saw the question and came over to me. He tilted my face up to his and brushed my lips with a sweet kiss. "It's okay, Lara. It was beautiful. But . . ."

"But?" WTF was the 'but' about?

"I'm not used to this. It's me. I don't quite know what to do next."

I understood. I didn't know either. "It's okay. I know the feeling. Let's just get some rest."

He looked relieved. Too damn relieved. I could feel the bile of shame gurgling at the back of my throat. Too much, too soon. The siren cry of a big mistake.

I deliberately lightened the tone. We'd had a nice roll in the hay, right? "I guess you and Richard are setting some marlin baits in the morning?"

"Uh, yeah?"

"He told me there'd be an early start tomorrow. I'll have the coffee hot and ready."

"Oh. Right."

"Well then . . . you need some sleep. Don't do too much damage to that Goose tonight." With that I raised myself onto my tiptoes and gave him what I hoped was an appropriate--not pouty, not needy, not desperate--kiss.

Then I went into my room and cried myself to sleep.

Chapter 18--Morgan

I went back to my room and got drunk as a fucking skunk. I drank fast and hard until all the confusion just melted into a puddle of alcohol induced numbness.

When I awakened from my nap and she was gone I panicked. It was irrational. It was crazy. But the first feeling I had was abandonment and it scared the shit out of me. Literally. I had to run for the head where my bowels emptied in a sick rush of watery sludge.

I looked at her sweet face in the kitchen and saw that she was ready to understand anything. She was there for me in all the ways a woman could be there for a man. I felt like an ass. I felt like a child. A damaged child.

So I ran away and hid in a bottle of vodka.

When the alarm woke me the fog of the hangover I so deserved lifted just enough for me to drag myself to the table in the dining salon. She brought me a cup of coffee and I couldn't meet her eyes.

I had a vague understanding that Richard was already setting the lines and there was a faint possibility that we might get lucky and hook up. For the first time in my life I wished it wouldn't happen. I wanted to crawl back into my cave and hide.

Lara eyed me warily and tiptoed around. She was walking on eggshells and didn't know what to do with me. I knew it; I just didn't know how to make it right.

What kind of small talk do you make when your special hell is swirling around your head and you can't make sense of it yourself, let alone share it?

"Breakfast?" she ventured.

"Not just yet, but thanks." I wanted her to stop being so nice. It wasn’t her fault I was so fucked up. I was giving her every reason to believe that her first instincts had been right about me. I was a mistake, but she didn't know why.

She'd blame herself and it wasn't her fault. Not at all. I was a bad choice but not because of anything she had done.

I put my head in my hands and stared into my steaming mug. I watched her body move as she lined up a few more mugs for the guys out on deck. She moved toward just slightly past the table and then I heard it.

Chapter 19--Lara

"Fish on! FISH on! Fucking FISH ON!" They were urgent words I only half understood.

Morgan's ice-crystal eyes flashed at me for the briefest moment. He sprang up from his seat at the table and knocked the tray out of my hands. Cups crashed on the floor as long urgent strides carried him toward the salon door. The predator in him came alive and I thrilled to witness the beast awake. He seemed almost comatose only moments before.

The mess of broken china and the brown coffee stain spreading over the polished hardwood could wait. The door was just closing behind him when I pushed my way through on his heels. Captain Richard came flying down the ladder from the bridge. His feet never touched the rungs; he just slid, fireman style, down the side rails.

The two men vaulted the transom in unison.  "Right rigger, Boss," the mate announced. It was hardly necessary. Even my untrained eye could see the bent rod and the whizzing reel playing out yard after yard of line.

Morgan grabbed the pole and steadied his feet on the dive platform that jutted out from El Lobo's stern. Captain Richard grabbed a wicked looking contraption and strapped it around Morgan's waist and between tensed thighs. Then both men jockeyed the notched end of the rod into the gimbal on the fighting belt. The rod rose from his crotch singing with the release of line as Morgan adjusted the drag.

He seemed calm but perspiration beaded on the taut muscles of his neck. Soon the inky curls above his collar began to droop with the weight of his sweat. The spooling line slowed and the tip of the pole bent ever so slightly.

Morgan leaned back and pulled the tip of the rod high over his shoulder. "Set," he told Richard.

The Captain was peering off into the distance. I assumed he was looking for the fish, hooked at line's end somewhere far in the distance. Morgan wasn't looking. He was bringing back line as fast as he could put it on the reel. He pulled the tip of the rod up as far as his strength would allow. Just when it seemed that the rod was bent to the breaking point, he would furiously reel back line as he lowered the rod. He repeated the arc time and again.

I was mesmerized by his display of force and finesse. There was a grace in it that made his movements seem like a dance. Of course, that didn't surprise me. Morgan was a man who made every move recall his namesake. Morgan Wolf--alpha predator, wild and wily animal, naked night wanderer, bringer of ecstasy, messenger of disaster.

"Shirt!" He growled at Richard. The Captain stripped Morgan's torso with a few expert strokes of his knife. Apparently, the prey was more important than a shirt, however expensive it might be.

His naked back shimmered with sweat. I watched each sculpted muscle ripple with the to and fro of battle. His back was chiseled and tight. The trapezius muscles strained in steely resistance each time he pulled up and reeled back down.

He turned to follow the fish's desperate attempt to escape and his chest undulated under bronzed skin. Pectoral muscles looked ready to pop from his chest, nipples clenched and hard as the teak under his feet. His flat abdomen pulled taut, folding into his slim torso every time he heaved himself into one impossible show of strength after the other.

The shorts he was wearing drifted well below his navel and revealed the line of fur pointing down to the hidden perfection below. I fought the fish with him in my mind. I felt the arousal of the hunt and the desperation of the hunted all at once. Lust for blood fogged the air. Lust for him crashed like breaking waves inside me. He was a magnificent animal in his element. I forgot my confusion and my hurt. The drama in front of me wiped everything else away.

One of the mates handed down a fighting chair that was quickly mounted onto the center of the platform. Morgan shifted the pole to the slot on the chair between his legs. His body shook with exertion as he brought in the line. The sight of his flesh, pulsing and alive in the pursuit, aroused my senses in so many ways. I stood above him against the transom but I caught the scent of salt and man. I studied the movement of his arms and watched the patches of hair in his armpits grow wet with his effort. My heart beat quickened as the utterly masculine dance played out in front of me. There was heat spreading through me that had nothing to do with the blazing sun above our heads.

Richard ladled water from a bucket over his shoulders and mopped his brow with a bandana. Occasionally the Captain would massage the straining muscles of Morgan's shoulders as he worked the line. My own hands twitched with the thought of those hard muscles above me and the slick softness of his moist skin under my fingertips.

Having never caught anything more exciting than a catfish in a lake, I wasn't prepared for the marathon the fight became. It seemed to me that a normal human being couldn't possibly continue to pump and pull for so long. But Morgan wasn't a normal human being; continue he did, hour after grueling hour. He'd turn his head and Richard or the mate would fill his mouth with water. After the first hour, I was sent back to the kitchen for some Gatorade and he downed bottle after bottle. Morgan had been fighting the fish for more than five hours when he finally brought it close enough to the boat for us to get a good look at her. According to the Captain, she was a 'grander'--a behemoth of at least a thousand pounds. I had witnessed her many acrobatic leaps above the water as she fought for her life. She exuded raw bestial power against a predator who wielded what seemed to me an impossibly fragile stick against such a creature.