Project Virgin (8 page)

There was an emphatically loud silence from Damon’s direction. He stepped farther out onto the balcony and let the glass door slam shut behind him, and I stood there and smiled as if he wasn’t dangerous to me in any way.

“I don’t know which part of that astonishing little monologue to address first. And I like cilantro, for your information.”

I waved a hand airily.

“Listen, Damon,
I get it. You’re used to depravity. I might as well be Amish in comparison.”

“You’re about the furthest thing from Amish I can imagine.”

But it was working. He didn’t look unsettled or hollow any longer. He looked as purely confident and devastatingly male as he had earlier tonight. My heart was thumping at me in response, and my pussy joined in, pulsing along to the same shuddery beat as he
started toward me.

I had to tilt my head back to keep holding his gaze, blue and ruthless as it was.

“This is a one night thing,” I told him sternly, and I ignored the part of me that protested. That whispered what I already knew—that one night was never going to be enough. Not with him. But he didn’t have to tell me that wasn’t how things worked with him. He was Damon Patrick. I already knew
how it worked. “We might be associates at the same firm, but all I know about you is what you do. We’re slightly acquainted strangers, that’s all.”

“Are you sure about that?” He was still moving toward me with a certain intensity and focus that made everything inside me pull tight and burn hot. “I’m a fifth generation San Franciscan, for one thing. That makes us both rare, mythological creatures.
A fifth generation San Franciscan native and a twenty six year old virgin. This is obviously destiny.”

“That sounds a lot like attachment, which completely defeats the purpose of a one night stand, I think you’ll agree.”

“I went to boarding school back East,” he continued. “And summer camp some five hours up the coast in Maine since the age of eight. My parents believe in as little contact with
their children as possible and it makes us the happy family we are today. It gives us things to talk about over the holidays, since we’re complete strangers. I recommend it.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’ve never met a stranger, Scottie.” That wasn’t quite amusement on his face. It was too dark. Too edgy. “I’m a friendly guy. And my life is an open, easily Google-able book.”

“If I knew
you better, maybe I’d be able to tell if that was sarcasm, but I don’t know you at all. So I’m going to go ahead and take that at face value.” I eyed him as he bore down on me. “Notice how I’m not telling you about my parents’ acrimonious divorce or the broken home I was raised in far off in the wilds of Montana. Why? Because that’s not appropriate for a one night stand. You already know too much
about me as is.”

“An ex told me my only form of human connection is sex. That makes me tragic, apparently, but also really, really good at it. Just FYI.”

“Did she tell you this while you were together or when she was already an ex? Because each would have a different interpretation, obviously. Context matters.”

“Oh no,” he said, stopping in front of me at last. “I think I’m a tragedy.” But
he grinned at me as he said it. “Set down on this earth to fuck my way free of my terrible, soul-crushing loneliness. That was the diagnosis.”

“I don’t actually have to know you to know that’s deeply sarcastic.” I tilted my head back even further, aware that he was taller than me and that he would be
even taller
when I wasn’t wearing four inch heels. Something that shouldn’t have made me feel
something a lot like
swoony.
“Or that you shouldn’t take the psychological assessment of an ex to heart. Don’t worry, Damon. I don’t think you’re all that lonely.”

“That almost sounds like a personal observation.”

“The point is that it doesn’t matter. You’re going to perform a simple task for me. Like a plumber. If you’re lucky, I’ll leave you a Yelp review.”

“A plumber,” he repeated, his voice
as edgy as it was astonished.
“Yelp.”

He was standing in front of me, all gorgeously offended male and glittering dark blue eyes, and I knew that the storm had passed. That whatever that hollowness was that yawned wide in both of us, I’d pushed us through it. That this was still going to happen, and it would still be worth it, and I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life regretting the things
that didn’t happen between us tonight.

Thank God.

I studied his expression as if I was looking for cracks. As if he’d broken down in front of me and I was trying to soothe him out of a crying jag. His dark brows rose in disbelief.

“Do you think you can handle that, Damon? One night, no strings. Just sex.”

This time, the laugh he let out ignited something deep inside of me. This time, it rolled
over every inch of my skin and left me too hot and too weak to do anything but sink into it. I didn’t mind the sensation at all.

“I think I can handle it,” he assured me.

And then he bent, put his shoulder to my belly, and hoisted me up into the air so that I dangled over him.

My own breath deserted me in a rush, half laughter and half shriek. Damon ignored it. He simply wheeled around and
strode back inside with one hand holding me tight to his shoulder, somehow managing to walk in through the door without bashing my head into the wall. His beautiful condo was a swirl of luxury around us as he moved through the main space, carrying me across the whole floor until he pushed through a door on the far side.

Then he tossed me through the air, and I laughed as I landed in a heap in
the center of a very large bed on a raised platform. I looked up and there was only Damon, a wall of windows behind him, and the bright, magical city all around him.

He didn’t turn on any lamps. He let San Francisco light up the room from the other side of all that glass, gleaming gold and gorgeous in the September night.

And then he started taking off his clothes.

“What are you doing?” There
was nothing airy or convincing about my tone any longer. I sounded as if I hadn’t taken a deep breath in months. I felt as if I might never breathe again.

His dress shirt was already on the floor. He toed off his shoes and put his hands on his belt.

“Plumbing, Scottie,” he said, low and dangerous enough to make every hair on my body stand on end. And maybe dance a little bit, too, in delicious
anticipation. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Of course it is.” I made myself say it as brightly as humanly possible, as if I’d believed everything I’d said to him out on the balcony when I already knew this was going to scar me. But that was okay. Some scars were worth it. “Let’s get this done!”

I matched my feigned and hearty enthusiasm with action, despite the fact I felt nothing but fizzy
and fluttery from the inside out. I kicked off my shoes and heard them thunk against the floor. I shrugged out of my jacket and then stripped my camisole up and over my head before I could think better of it. I reached around and unzipped my skirt, then started to shimmy it down over my hips.

But that was when I realized he was watching me. Intently.

Wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs
that made me feel remarkably religious, all of a sudden.
Glory hallelujah,
etcetera.

Clothed, Damon Patrick was a work of art. A fantasy made flesh.

The actual flesh, though? That was a whole other thing. He was carved to mouthwatering perfection. Lean and cut and something far better than simply stunning. He exuded sex and power from every pore and I thought I might die if I didn’t get my hands
on him.

It took me a moment to realize he was looking at me the same way.

His gaze met mine and I might have thought he was angry had I not felt that same fury of need inside me, tearing me up. He made a
hurry up
motion with one hand, and I wasn’t simply conditioned to obey him. I wanted to.

God, how I wanted to.

I slid the skirt down my legs, then knelt up to tug it that last little way off
my ankles and toss it aside.

I didn’t care where it landed. I only cared about the man before me and the way he looked at me. I only cared that he moved closer and took his time about it, until I couldn’t tell which one of us was breathing so loudly in the quiet room. Me. Him. Both of us together—and then none of that mattered, because his mouth was on mine.

Again.

At last.

And it was even
better than before, because I could press myself against his naked chest. I still wore my bra and my panties, but they seemed like little more than minor irritants because there was
so much
of him to explore. Every flat plane and intriguing ridge. The diagonal furrows that pointed toward his groin. The symphony of perfection that was his shoulders, his arms, as he wrapped himself around me and
claimed my mouth with his.

He kissed me hard. Deep.

He made a noise I couldn’t interpret and then he was lifting me, positioning me on my back on the bed and then climbing over me.

We both groaned when he came down on top of me, pressing his whole body against mine. I let my legs fall open to cradle him against me, that hard cock of his separated from my aching pussy by two scant layers of
thin fabric. For a moment we only stared at each other, making a lie of my commentary on plumbers and possessiveness as we lay there stripped bare in the dark.

I thought we both knew it.

But Damon took my mouth again, with a certain ruthlessness that made my toes curl with delight.

And then he ate me alive.

He started at my neck. He tasted and teased his way down the length of it, sliding
his hands beneath me to prop me up into a better position so he could learn every inch of my collarbone. He tugged my bra straps down my arms as he tasted the curve of my shoulders, the upper swell of my breasts.

I felt his clever fingers underneath me, and then he unhooked my bra and bared my breasts entirely.

For a moment we were suspended there in the cocoon of the dark room. He looked up
from where he crouched there over my body, his mouth so close to one hard nipple that I actually shook with need. I tried to roll my hips into his for some relief but that only made him smile.

“Good thing I’m so comfortable with tragedy,” he murmured. “I have no trouble inflicting it. You’re going to have to wait.”

I tried to rock into him but he twisted “I don’t want to wait.”

“Too bad.”

And then he sucked one taut nipple deep into his mouth, and I lost track of the conversation. And the world.

He took his time. He used his hands and his mouth and a hint of his teeth. He tortured me and he worshipped me, moving from one breast to the other and then back, until I was mindless beneath him. I thrashed and I moaned and he only laughed and kept going.

When I was reduced to nothing
but a keening noise and writhing, he moved lower. He licked fire down the curve of my belly before moving even lower, hooking his fingers in my panties and then tugging them down as he went.

“Damon,” I said, or moaned, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to say. Only that I couldn’t seem to keep myself from saying it, singing out his name as if it really was a prayer. But the last
thing I wanted was deliverance.

He pulled my panties down the length of my legs, and then settled himself between them. I felt him smile against my inner thigh, and the width of his shoulders holding my legs apart was a kind of exquisite torture that I wanted to last forever and ever.

And I couldn’t pull in a full breath and I couldn’t seem to get that arch out of my back, and that was when
he moved even closer, slid his hands around to anchor my hips, and licked his way straight into my pussy.

I think I screamed. I might have died. But if I did, I came back again fast and he was still there. He teased my desperate clit with that wicked mouth of his, then licked into me hard and sweet.

I came apart on another scream, wild and long. I arched up off the bed and rocked my pussy into
his mouth, bursting into so many lights I should have blinded the whole city. And when I was done, when I thudded back down to earth feeling like a completely different person, Damon was reaching into the drawer beside the bed.

I tried to do something, say something, but he’d wrecked me. I couldn’t seem to do a thing but lie there in the middle of his bed, panting, with moisture in the corners
of my eyes and my arms thrown up over my head.

He glanced at me as he rolled a condom down over his cock, and smiled faintly at whatever expression I had on my face.

“It’s only a little bit of plumbing. You’ll be fine.”

“You must be kidding.” But I didn’t move from my languorous, flushed sprawl. “I’m replete and totally satisfied.”

“Yet still, alas, a virgin.”

I grinned without meaning to
do it, as if my mouth had an agenda all its own. “Oh, right. That.”

His dark blue eyes were so bright it was almost hard to look at him straight, but I managed it. He crawled back up over my body and gathered me beneath him, and I thought,
this is it. This is finally it.

I braced myself.

Damon… did nothing.

He simply held himself there, propped up on his elbows and his groin
against
me but
his cock not
in
me, his hands coming up to shape my face.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered. I pretended I didn’t notice the way my voice cracked on that last word. “Why aren’t you…?”

I rolled my hips again, and I could feel him pressed against me, hard and huge and as exciting as he was overwhelming. I was still trembling from what he’d done to me and I was so slippery and so wet I might have
been embarrassed by it if I hadn’t felt so deliciously wrung out.

“I told you I’d give you what you want,” he said quietly, and there was too much in his gaze then. Far too much for the rules we’d set. But I didn’t have it in me to point that out, or to push us back into solid ground. I’d tried that once already.

“You could have done that hours ago. Just shove it in and be done with it. Problem
solved.”