Love's Rhythm (15 page)

She leant into his kneading hand. “Prove it.”

He shucked his legs out of his wet jeans, not an easy task to do while still in the shower cubicle. Even more difficult when his attention was fixed so firmly on Lauren as she walked across the bathroom floor. Her lush body still glistened with water, her arse cheeks bunching and stretching with sublime perfection every step she took. She paused, looking at him over her shoulder as she reached for a fluffy bottle-green towel and wrapped it around her body. “Coming?”

“You fucking better believe it,” he muttered, fighting with the last leg of his jeans as it clung to his foot with possessive force.

Lauren was out of the bathroom by the time he won the battle, and he all but sprinted from the room, pausing in the hallway for a brief second, water dripping from him. Shit, he didn’t know where her bedroom was.

A faint scratching noise pricked his ears from the right, and he turned and hurried toward the open door five metres away. Someone striking a match. That’s what the sound was. Someone striking a match followed by the distinct crackle as tinder took flame.

He entered the room, noticing three things at once. There was a fire beginning to build in the small brick fireplace on the wall to his left, the room smelt like its owner, clean and delicate and flowery, and Lauren lay stretched on the bed. Naked.

His heart slammed harder against his chest and his cock twitched again. At this rate, it wouldn’t take long at all before he would be sliding into her. Jesus, just
looking
at her turned him on. Turned him on and left him at her mercy. No, that wasn’t right. Left him…absolute. Without her in his life, he’d been insubstantial. A rock star who made his career singing of love. A man who’d stupidly abandoned it when he thought there was more to be had. Without her he had the word, but not the meaning. Without her, the rhythm of his life was wrong.

He would never abandon her again.

Ever. He’d once thought he needed to sing to live. He was wrong. He hadn’t been living all these years. He’d been existing. Just existing. The only time he’d lived had been with Lauren. In her arms, in her heart. And now that he was with her it wasn’t music he heard, but words. Three words. I love her.

He crossed the room.

She watched him come, her lips curling into a small smile, her gaze half-lidded. He climbed onto the end of the bed, curling his fingers around her ankles with a feather-light grip. A shiver rippled through her, an almost inaudible intake of breath slipping past her lips. He slowly spread her legs, his stare holding hers. She pulled another breath, her breasts rising as she did so. He dropped his gaze to them for a moment, reveling in the puckered tautness of her nipples, before returning to her face. For a surreal moment he remembered the day the video clip for “Night Whispers” had been shot. He’d been on set, a derelict building in Brooklyn crawling with film crew and musicians, and Lauren had walked towards him through a plume of dry ice mist.

He remembered his heart slamming into his throat. He remembered his balls contracting, his dick stiffening, and then the mist swirled away and he realized it wasn’t Lauren. It had been the actress the director had cast as the nameless lover Nick was singing about. He’d lost himself in a bottle of Chivas that night, and tried to lose himself deeper in the woman that wasn’t Lauren. But after a minute with her lips on his flesh he’d known it was a joke. A fucking joke, and he’d sent her from his New York apartment and fallen asleep to the sound of “Night Whispers” playing
ad infinitum
from the speakers embedded in the walls of his room.

But the Lauren on the bed before him now was the real Lauren. Her beauty natural and ethereal, not created by a team of makeup artists and cosmetic surgeons. Her smile reached her eyes, eyes shining with passion for life, not a predatory gleam. Her warmth, her humor, her intelligence…everything uniquely Lauren. And the real Lauren was watching him now, longing and desire and want burning in her eyes. For him.

His head swam and his balls throbbed. His Lauren. His heart. His goddess.

He lowered his head to her calf and pressed his lips to the smooth curve of fine muscle. He touched his tongue to her skin, feeling the tremble in her body through his hands. With slow strokes, he licked his way up her leg, bending it enough to explore the delicious back of her knee before straightening it completely and resting it against his chest. He stared down into her face, loving the way she watched him through lowered lashes. Her lips parted, her breasts rising and falling with shallow, shaky breaths. Holding her leg upright, he inched himself farther up the bed, drawing his groin closer to her pussy. She moaned, her hands moving to her belly. His throat thickened, his pulse kicking up a notch as she dipped her fingers to her sex.

Oh, boy…

He’d watched Lauren play with herself before. She’d tease him sometimes in their small Sydney apartment. Had strutted through the living room buck naked, her fingers skimming her nipples as she threw him flirty looks over her shoulder. Had stroked at the trim darkness of her pubic hair as she waited for him to climb onto their bed. Never had she entered her own heat with her fingers like she did now with slow, deliberate penetrations accompanying low, breathless whimpers. Slow, deliberate penetrations followed by just as slow withdrawals, her fingers leaving her folds glistening with her juices. Fingers she rose to her lips and touched with her tongue.

Nick’s head swam.

The sight was so fucking arousing.

The smile of a sex goddess—
his
sex goddess—curled Lauren’s lips. “Do you want to lick my fingers, Nick?”

He growled, threw her leg aside and captured her offered fingers with his mouth. Her taste coated his tongue, exploded in his brain. He sucked at her fingers, holding her hand with both of his. His cock jerked, her taste on his tongue, her musk in his breath, her heat against his thighs were all too intoxicating. She closed her eyes and moaned, her other hand smoothing over her breasts, pinching at her nipples. His cock pulsed again, and again when she slowly inched that hand down over her belly to her pussy, replacing the fingers he now sucked in his mouth.

Jesus, Nick. She’s made you hard already.

She had. She fucked herself with her fingers, her soft moans of pleasure the most evocative song he’d ever heard, and made him hard.

So hard.

Hard enough to bury himself in her sex.

He did. He removed her hand from her pussy and sank his length, once again fully engorged, into her in one single thrust.

“Lord, that’s so fucking good.” The raw cry ripped from her. She arched on the bed, wrapping her legs around his hips. Her heels drove into his butt cheeks, pushing him deeper, deeper inside her. He pumped into her, one hand gripping the duvet beside her head, the other kneading her breast. She was tight, so wonderfully tight and wet. Her inner muscles squeezed his length, holding it with forceful possession as he thrust in and out of her. Her nails scraped at his back, raked at his shoulders, and suddenly, with a wicked groan, she was rolling him onto his back, straddling his hips and taking him deeper still. So deep, so deep.

She leant forward, brushed her breasts over his lips and pulled back when he tried to catch one nipple with his mouth, a throaty chuckle vibrating through her as she did so. He felt the laugh thrum around his straining cock, the sensation sending fresh blood to his dick. His balls ached. Christ, he didn’t think he’d get it up again so soon, and here he was on the verge of blowing his load already?

“Goddess,” he rasped, running his hands over her hips, up her legs.

“Lover,” she whispered back, threading the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of his left and moving his hand to her breast. It was heavy and swollen and ripe with desire. He scraped his thumb over her nipple, loving the way she closed her eyes and hummed in appreciation. He loved that she was in charge. He loved how she took pleasure from his body with such confident leisure. He loved how she squeezed her innermost muscles in pulse after deliberate, exquisite pulse as she rode his length. He loved how he was just that to her, her lover, not Nick Blackthorne rock star, but just the man she gave her body, her heart, her soul to. He loved her. Everything about her.

“Fuck, I need you, babe,” he groaned, rolling his hips upward, thrusting deeper into her heat.

“Like a rhythm,” she murmured, eyes fluttering closed, back arching into his penetration.
“Like a curse.”

And with those words her orgasm detonated in her core. Shuddered through her. Made her pussy contract and her cream flow. She opened her eyes and gazed down into his face, her orgasm gripping him, squeezing him until—with the words to “Gotta Run” whispering through his head—he surrendered to his own climax and pumped his seed into her with spurt after spurt after spurt.

“Goddess,” he rasped again. Or maybe he cried it. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. His body wasn’t his anymore. It was hers, Lauren’s, and he wanted it no other way. No other way.

Eventually, the convulsions of pleasure rocking them both subsided, and she slumped against Nick’s chest, his cock still wonderfully buried in her still-pulsing heat, and rested her cheek on his shoulder.

He smoothed his hands over the length of her back, up to her nape and back down to her hips. “I love you, Lauren.” He whispered the words against the top of her head, incapable of keeping them in his soul any longer. “Marry me?”

She didn’t answer.

A cold beat thumped in his temple. He swallowed, a heavy knot twisting in his gut. The words formed on his lips again, but he bit them back. She’d heard him. He could feel it in the way her body grew still. He slid a hand to her chin and tucked his fingers under it.

“Don’t, Nick,” she murmured, refusing to let him raise her face to his.

“Surely you can’t think I’m going to walk away from you again? Not after this?”

“What’s so different from what we had before?”

He swallowed, his stare jerking around her ceiling. He could feel her heart pounding in her chest. It struck his through the perfection of her breast with such force he didn’t know whose beat was whose. “I’m not leaving you, Lauren. You can’t tell me this wasn’t…this
isn’t
the way it’s meant to be. You can’t. And if you do, you’re lying.”

“When you came to me in the shower, I allowed myself this one moment.” Her breath was warm on his chest as she spoke. “But that’s all, Nick. I’m not strong enough to do it all over again, and I’d never expect you to give it all up. You’d grow to hate me if you did.”

He tugged on her chin again, needing to see her eyes, but she refused to let him.

“What if I tell you I want to give it up?”

“Then
I’d
be the one calling
you
a liar.” Her fingers drew small circles on his chest, and a part of Nick wondered if she even realized she was doing it. “Your Tropical Sin Tour concert tickets are already on sale. You’re in the middle of recording your next album. Those aren’t the actions of a man wanting to give it up.”

He closed his eyes, his mouth dry. “They
are
the actions of a man who didn’t realize the life he was living wasn’t the life he wanted though.”

She laughed, a short sharp snort. That he was still embedded in her sex made the sound all the more incongruous. “You’ve changed, Nick. I’ll give you that, but not that much.”

“And you’re the same, Lauren? I don’t think so. The Lauren I fell in love with all those years ago would have given me,
us
, a chance. She wouldn’t have kept a son a secret.” He threaded his fingers in her hair, wishing to fuck she’d look at him.

She moved, slowly rising away from his chest until she supported herself on her elbows and studied his face. “
That
Lauren didn’t have another living soul to care for, Nick. To protect. That changes everything. You can’t understand.”

The shift in her position made him all too aware he’d yet to withdraw from her sheath. That his cock, still semi-hard from their passion, was nestled within her wet heat. It was surreal. Surreal and terrifying at once. This may be the last time she let him make love to her and he couldn’t think of a more soul-aching end.

Then don’t let it end. Fight for her. Fight for this.

Nick’s head swam. He squeezed his eyes. Fisted his hands. “There’s an article in next month’s
Rolling Stone
—” he felt her stiffen at his abrupt change in topic, “—written by McKenzie Wood, a journalist I know very well. The woman whose wedding I came here to ask you to attend with me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s this got to do with us? With your…your proposal?”

He gave her a wry smile. “The article is an exclusive story about me.” He paused, long enough to pull a steadying breath. He hadn’t talked about the events of his life that changed him so much since the day he’d revealed it all to McKenzie and Aidan, almost nine months ago. It was still raw. Still…unsettling. But he needed Lauren to understand. If he stood any chance of the future he longed for with every fibre in his being, he needed her to understand. “My parents died two years ago, did you know that?”

She nodded, her eyebrows dipping. “In that car accident on the F3. It was all over the news, along with footage of the wreckage and you arriving back in Australia. I went to the funeral. I saw you grieving.”

He blinked. “I didn’t know that.”

She lowered her eyelids and turned her head aside. “I didn’t want you to. And I am sorry for your loss. I’m sorry it’s also taken two years for me to say that to you. They were lovely people. I missed them when they moved back to Sydney.”

“When they were killed, I learned I was adopted.”

Lauren gasped. Her eyes snapped open, her stare on his face. “Nick, I didn’t…why didn’t you…”

He smoothed a hand up her arm, drawing strength from her warmth. A warmth he’d stupidly denied himself for a lifetime. “I discovered I was adopted and that I had a younger brother,” he continued, needing to get it out as much as he needed her. “It took me a long time to find him, and when I did he was in a messed-up state, suffering from abuse both physical and emotional his whole life. Eight months after I met Derek, after I’d begun to form a relationship with him, the brother I never knew I had, he committed suicide.”