Hot Under Pressure (16 page)

“Skye.” His voice was raw, ragged around the edges. “Please.”

She didn’t want to react to that voice, but it called to something deep inside her. Skye stopped walking, ankle deep in cold, brackish water. Chills zipped through her body, raising goose bumps on her arms and legs, but she didn’t try to cover herself up when she turned to face him.

He’d seen it all before, anyway. She’d been pudgy back then, she was pudgy now. Five months of pregnancy did that to a person. Maybe nine and a half years should’ve been long enough to take some of those pounds off, but … what difference could it possibly make at this point? She was too tired, exhausted from the emotional roller coaster of the last few days, to care anymore.

“What?” Skye hated the defeat in her tone, but didn’t know how to mask it. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

His expression tightened, sending his dramatic cheekbones into stark relief. With his chin-length hair swept back off his face, droplets of saltwater tracing rivulets over the smooth, bare musculature of his massive chest, he looked like exactly what he was … a warrior.

Battle scarred and battle hardened, changed by what he’d seen and done, he wasn’t the same boy who’d signed the marriage license with her in front of the Justice of the Peace.

But when he held out his hand to her, that mute appeal in his fathomless, shadowed eyes, Skye could no more resist the man in front of her than she’d been able to deny the boy anything he asked.

Without conscious thought, without ever making a rational decision one way or the other, Skye lifted her arm and placed her stiff, cold fingers on his waiting palm.

Something bright and fierce flashed across his enigmatic face, too quickly for Skye to read, but she knew exactly what it meant when his hand closed over hers and pulled her in close.

“You’re freezing. C’mere,” he said, wrapping his free arm around her shivering shoulders and sheltering her from the wind with his big, rangy frame.

And Skye let him, too cold, too tired, too confused to fight anymore. Tucking her nose into his chest, Skye let her eyes drift shut as the deep, steady beat of his heart drummed beneath her ear.

“You left me,” she muttered again, but this time it came out sounding less like an accusation and more like a plea. For what, she didn’t know—answers, maybe? “Why didn’t you come back?”

“After everything that happened, I didn’t think you’d want me to” was all Beck said.

How could he think that? Oh, right. Because after she’d sobbed out the ugly, tragic news—that their baby, the baby he’d joined the Navy to provide for, the baby they’d made together, would never be born—she’d paused just long enough to drag air into her tortured lungs and whisper that she never wanted to see him again.

“I was distraught! Eighteen years old, completely alone in the hospital, dealing with a miscarriage.”

“I know. But you were right. I should’ve been there.”

Ten years of going over and over and over this in her head, and Skye still didn’t get where it had all gone wrong. “No. I was wrong to tell you to stay away. I understood, even then, why you felt you had to join up.”

They’d had less than no money, and no support from her parents, who couldn’t believe their little love child had run off and taken up the hideous bourgeois state of matrimony. When she’d gotten pregnant, she and Beck hadn’t had any insurance, no way to pay for all the prenatal vitamins and ultrasounds and hospital stays …

Skye had insisted they’d get by and that they should stick together. But Beck had bigger plans … plans that had meant Skye was alone when that nurse came back with their baby’s first ultrasound photo and a strained, nervous smile. Skye was alone as she waited for the doctor to come in and explain exactly what was going on, what they’d seen in that blurry black-and-white photo.

She’d been alone when they told her she’d never get to hold her baby.

The memory swamped her, a swell of sadness and longing rushing over her head and dragging her down, catching her in the riptide of familiar grief.

Skye didn’t realize she was shaking her head until Beck’s fingers caught her chin, stilling the denial and tilting her face up until she had no choice but to meet his stare.

For once, she could read the emotion in his dark eyes, the torment there sharp as glass.

“I hate you,” she told him, but her voice broke pathetically as she said it. By the quirk of Beck’s hard mouth, she could tell he believed it about as much as she did.

“No, you don’t,” he said, not unkindly. “You wish you could hate me—it’d be a hell of a lot easier—but you don’t, Skye.”

God help her. It was nothing but the truth. She didn’t hate him at all.

And as she gazed up at him, dazed under the intensity of his expression, the set of his jaw, the rise and fall of his solid chest against hers, she knew the rest of the truth.

In spite of everything, she still loved him.

Chapter 15

Skye stood there, trembling in the moonlight, the creamy paleness of her naked curves glowing like a beacon against the darkness. The sodden scraps of her underwear concealed nothing, clinging to her lovingly. And her expression …

She was broken wide open, like an egg dropped on the floor.

But she wasn’t denying anything.

Ferocious need swept through him—the need to touch her, to erase the memories from her eyes, the sadness from her trembling mouth, to take her and re-stake his claim on her.

Even if it was for the last time.

Beck didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about anything.

Framing Skye’s soft cheeks between his palms, Beck brought his mouth down to hers.

It was like taking a deep breath of cool air after hours of working in the galley kitchen of a submarine, with no ventilation and no windows and no way out.

He just inhaled her, taking the freshness and sweetness of her into himself and savoring the sugar-lemon taste of her mouth. Skye opened for him on a gasp, her small hands coming up hesitantly to clutch at his waist, and Beck immediately seized the tactical advantage by thrusting his tongue between her pink lips.

She molded her body to his, the soft ripeness of her flesh a perfect contrast to his hard, tensed muscles. Beck swept his hands down the sides of her neck and over her shoulders, curling around to her back to press her even closer.

The chill of her skin was replaced by a warm flush. He thought he could actually feel the hot blood pumping through her veins, pushed through her by the rapid beating of her heart.

He ate at her mouth hungrily, and she met his attack with a ferocious need of her own. Her hands, no longer hesitant, gripped and pressed firmly. She seemed to be trying to touch as much of him as possible without breaking the kiss. Beck approved, and twisted his torso like a cat, trying to give her more skin to play with.

Skye made a noise that Beck swallowed instantly, a familiar, kittenish sort of growl that threw him back in time and made his cock throb in his wet, clinging shorts.

He needed to get closer to her.

They were still standing in knee-deep water, their feet sucked into the marshy Bay floor, making it difficult to maneuver.

Not that Beck was about to let that stop him.

Bending down, he got one arm behind Skye’s knees and plucked her out of the muck. Primal satisfaction filled him as he pulled her in against his chest.

At some point in the last ten years, though, Skye had forgotten everything he’d taught her about being swept off her feet. She gave a little yelp as the world tilted around her, and flailed hard enough that he almost dropped her before getting a firmer grip on her wet limbs.

“Put me down! You’ll throw your back out, Henry, I’m too heavy for this.”

“Chill,” he told her. “The issue is that you’re all slippery at the moment. Other than that?” He hitched her up easily, until her mouth was in kissing distance again.

Stealing a quick one off her parted lips, he grinned down at her. “Other than that, you’re perfect.”

She melted faster than butter in a hot sauté pan. He could feel the exact moment when she forgot to be afraid of being dropped or worried about her weight as all the tension left her body.

He’d never understood what she was so worried about, anyway. No woman had ever felt better in his arms.

Beck considered his options. The beach was the obvious choice, but they didn’t have a blanket, and it’s not like it was covered in powdery white sand, which meant they’d run the risk of gravel in uncomfortable places.

Decision made, Beck waded deeper into the water. When he was in up to his waist, he shifted Skye in his arms, letting her legs drop down.

Except she didn’t drop them—she kicked up and locked her thighs around his hips, grinding her pelvic bone against the hard ridge of his erection and making Beck want to howl.

Working on instinct and memory, he cupped his hands under her rear to support her new position, his fingers pressing convulsively into the lush, silky flesh of her ass.

The scratch of her fingernails against the back of his neck, the flutter of her pale eyelashes as she tilted her head up for another of those ravenous, sucking kisses … Beck had to clamp down hard on his control to keep from shooting off in his boxers.

Being with Skye again, after a decade apart … it was as if the years fell away and the rough, scarred outer layer of himself peeled back to leave him new again, discovering the joy of his body and Skye’s for the first time.

Not that he’d been exactly innocent or pure—or unscarred—when they’d met.

But she’d always made him feel like that stuff didn’t matter. When he was with her, he could be the person he so desperately wanted to be. The person his parents would have been proud of, instead of the kid no one wanted.

And she still had that magic touch, he realized as his heart raced and his blood took up a frantic, pounding rhythm.

No one had the power to make him feel like Skye did. Which made her dangerous, a real threat to the life Beck had built so painstakingly for himself—but it also made her irresistible.

*   *   *

Somehow, the water didn’t feel nearly as cold now that Skye was wrapped around Beck’s huge, solid form like a honeysuckle vine climbing a fence.

Panting lightly, Skye tilted her head to the side as Beck’s mouth went for her neck.

The lights of the Golden Gate Bridge sparkled at the edges of her vision. She knew they were close enough to hear traffic noise, the way sounds carried over water, but all she could hear was the rush of her own blood and the harshness of Beck’s breathing.

And when his teeth closed firmly over the sensitive spot where her neck sloped into her shoulder, Skye heard moaning. It took her a second to realize those particular sounds were coming from her.

There was something intensely liberating about being out here, at one with the water and the cool night breeze. She felt as if she was taking part in some ancient, pagan ritual of sex and fertility, an earth mother goddess being worshipped.

She tingled all over, prickles chasing each other down her arms and legs and up her stomach to tighten her nipples where they nestled against the planes of Beck’s broad chest.

She felt alive. Extra alive, as if she’d just woken up from the longest sleep ever, a coma patient suddenly sitting straight up in bed and gasping for that first breath of consciousness.

The whole world was new, charged with sensation and feeling, and Skye surrendered to it completely, let it wrap her up and send her flying.

It was so amazing to be naked and unashamed, to know what she wanted with utter certainty for the first time in … way too long.

Although she wasn’t totally naked, which she remembered when Beck’s fingers shifted on her behind, catching at the lacy edges of her thin panties. The damp material didn’t seem to hinder him in any way that Skye could notice—those long, agile fingers had her underwear pushed aside faster than she could blink, giving him complete access to the damp, aching secrets of her body.

“God,” he groaned against her neck, the vibrations making her shiver. “You feel amazing.”

“I do,” she said rapturously. “I really do feel amazing. More of that, please.”

But Beck wasn’t the type to get carried away—not if it meant dropping Skye on her ass. Instead, he walked a little farther out into the bay, until she floated weightlessly against him, only her locked ankles keeping her close.

Her locked ankles, her hands behind his neck … and the indescribably luscious glide of his fingers under the elastic band of her underwear.

His touch left a trail of fire that seemed as though it ought to be making the water around them steam like a pot over high heat. But above the surface of the water in their protected inlet, nothing stirred.

While below …

Skye hung motionless in Beck’s embrace, head lolling back and eyes closed, all her senses transfixed by the slow, sure strokes of his strong fingers.

He petted her gently, exploring the hot, wet seam at her core, before spearing first one, then two fingers between her lips.

She shook, nonsense words trapped in her throat, vibrating against the delicate pressure of his teeth where he’d bitten down again and was sucking up a circle of heat that prickled and stung deliciously.

More, more, more
was all she could think, and Beck gave it to her, his knife-callused thumb finding the knot of nerves at the top of her slit and flicking it teasingly.

He found a rhythm, a combination of glancing tweaks and deep, smooth invasion, and she followed it blindly, her body parting gladly around the thick intrusion of his long fingers.

When he finally lifted his head, she knew by the possessive glint in his smile that he’d left a livid mark at the base of her neck. She could feel it throbbing, all the blood called to the surface there, an echo of the thob lower down.

Squirming restlessly, Skye whimpered because even this wasn’t enough. “More,” she demanded, and Beck’s eyes flashed.

“Hold on to me,” he ordered, and Skye pushed her sore, aching muscles to obey the command.

Without taking his hand from her aching center, Beck let go of her rump and moved his other hand between them.