Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (57 page)

Now she was here, and the sweet shape of his ear—
God
. The tender line of bumpy pink skin along the edge of his beard where he must have trimmed it recently made her want to cry, and she didn’t know what to do with that impulse.

That was the thing about Noah. She didn’t know what to
do
.

She’d left her clipboard in the car.

She’d left her sense back in Coral Gables.

“I woke you up,” she said, because he looked drunk with sleep, and it seemed necessary that she begin by outlining the mistakenness of her every action since she’d seen him last. “You said to call, but I didn’t.”

“That’s okay.”

“I can come back in the morning.”

“What are you wearing?”

She looked down at herself as though she couldn’t remember, but there wasn’t any way to not remember when you’d put on a vintage pink Chanel suit and four-inch black patent leather pumps and driven for nearly two hours in the middle of the night.

There was no way to miss the fact that you were doing something outlandish, and you were doing it badly. Carmen had spent most of the first hour of the drive convincing herself not to turn around and the entirety of the second trying to figure out what to say.

“A suit?” she asked.

She’d dressed for battle. In the car, she’d carefully worked through her reasons, picked apart her behavior, and constructed an explanation and an apology.

She had nerved herself up for his displeasure, but when their eyes met, she felt as though she’d arrived for the wrong event at the wrong address.

He looked so fucking happy to see her.

Pleased, excited, aroused. All of it right there in his eyes, and when he stared at her this way she didn’t know what to do, because her
supposed to
clashed spectacularly with her
want to
, and she got all turned around.

“You look amazing,” he said.

“I … I can’t … I don’t know how to start.”

Noah reached for her waist and pulled her across the threshold, catching her up against his chest. The sleep-soaked warmth of his skin hit her like a rogue wave, wiping her mind clean of all thought.

He nuzzled her neck. “You smell good.”

“Perfume.”

“It’s sexy.” His hands slid up her rib cage, and he shifted his stance, moving into her with more purpose. One palm found her thigh and dragged up it, forcing her skirt to form ridges and valleys, a glacier moving slowly toward her hip.

The plate tectonics of desire, its effect on her as undeniable as shaking earth and drifting continents, crashing into each other.

“The shoes, too,” he said. “Fuck, those shoes are hot.”

Her shoulder blades hit the door frame.

Her hands found his furry bare chest. “Noah …”

“I missed you, baby. Missed this.” Then he was stroking between her legs, over her panties, blunt and firm, as sure of himself as he’d been a week ago. “You gonna let me call you
baby
tonight?”

She’d told him not to right before she walked away. She’d insulted his intelligence, threatened him, turned her back on him, and left without saying goodbye because she’d needed to believe she didn’t want to be that woman.
His
woman.

What a liar she was.

“Yes.”

Yes
apparently gave him permission to push her panties aside and move two fingers deep into the wet core of her.

Yes
meant that all of the terms of her apology flew out of her head, and Carmen was left with the dawning understanding that Noah was going to fuck her. Very soon. He was a nude animal, and she’d wandered into his den in the middle of his hibernation. Of course he was going to fuck her. That was what happened.

Probably she ought to stop him.

His thumb found her clit. She tightened around his fingers. His mouth moved up her neck, kissed over her jawline, found her lips, and smiled on them. Smiled into her. “Say hello to me, baby. That’s how you start.”

Carmen wasn’t a person who said hello. She didn’t believe in mincing words. She didn’t let herself feel this much, this fast, with anyone. Not usually.

“Hi, Noah.”

He pushed under her skirt with his free hand and cupped her ass, lifting and separating one cheek to fix her in place as his fingers worked in and out of her, relentless in their assault. “And what do you say when you leave?”

“Bye, Noah.”

“That’s right. Next time, say goodbye to me. Lift that leg a little higher.”

She did, and he pressed against her in response, surging and crowding in, hot and perfect. “You want it right now? Right here, with the door open where anybody can see you?”

“Yes.” She sounded like she was right on the verge of sobbing, and she didn’t care. There was a part of her that had to sob, to be broken, to sit with its brokenness and acknowledge it, live with it, so she could start to figure out what she needed to do and who she wanted to be. “No. Can we—can I have you?”

“You can have me anytime you want.” He eased off, took his fingers out of her, and then she really did sob, once.

He made a soothing sound and closed the door.

He carried her into the bedroom, where he undressed her, kissing the swell of her breasts, thumbing over her nipples, making appreciative noises at her navel. She let him strip off her flimsy defenses. She lay in his bed and held out her arms, because she wanted him to come to her under this faded sheet printed with daisies.

She wanted him to do that more than she wanted to plan or deflect or
know
.

More than she wanted to be careful.

Flowers on his sheets. Hair all over him, on his corded arms and thick over his chest, arrowing down his stomach, a dark bush between his legs that his hard cock protruded from, and somehow all of it was of a piece, as though he was always exactly the same amount of naked. The reality of Noah was that he was forever being Noah, right out in the open, day in and day out. When he took off his clothes, he wasn’t revealed or diminished. He was himself.

He didn’t have armor, because he didn’t need it.

Carmen spread herself open to his invasion.

He entered her, leaving nothing between them but condom and lubricant, nothing to stop her from feeling his heat or his chest hair brushing her nipples, the heaving rising-falling motion of his chest, nothing preventing her from noticing that his arms trembled and his eyes were hooded, dark, his mouth open with the ecstasy of feeling this good.

He kissed her and stroked her hair back from her face with both hands, a hard firm pressure over the crown of her head and his gaze on her face, right on her, forcing her to look at
him as he moved inside her body, as her nerves fired with the dragging heated pleasure of every stroke, and he was so big, so heavy, it was too much.

Too much. But she kept herself open.

Pushing her heels into the bed, flinging her arms wide, and clutching at the bumpy egg-crate surface of the pad beneath the sheet as he bore her down into softness and touched her, kissed her, grunting and gentle, weighted and furry, powerful and male and sweet, so sweet with her, she didn’t know how to respond.

She didn’t know. But she stayed open, made herself be open, kissed him eagerly, and bucked up her hips to draw out every grunting happy pleasurable exhalation because she couldn’t bear not to, couldn’t
bear
it, not anymore.

Even though it hurt to hold herself here this way, even though it tightened her lungs and closed down her throat and called up the tears, she did it, because she could with him.

She could.

She could be open and afraid, crying in his bed, and he would just move inside her with gorgeous slick slow strokes.

He would push her hair back and press his hands right over her crown, kissing her forehead and the space between her eyebrows, kissing her nose and her cheeks and her mouth, biting at her throat and licking her neck and saying her name,
Carmen, Carmen
, as though he’d asked for this.

As though he’d hoped for God to send him some fucked-up Latina with attachment issues who he could soothe and fuck and fall in love with.

If that was even what was happening.

She didn’t know if it was or if she only wanted it to be. But she knew that she could do this—be with him, scared, not understanding everything but choosing it anyway.

Her revelation must have crumbled a bit off the edge of another dam, made her cry harder and shake with it in a way that Noah couldn’t ignore. He stilled, and she was glad for that, even as it embarrassed her. Last time, the time before, she’d cried quietly at orgasm, and he’d held her and said nothing—which had been, for some reason, both too much and not enough.

Now he said softly, “Carmen.” He touched her wet cheek. “What is this?”

“Don’t stop.”

“I have to. I can’t …”

She wrapped her arms and legs around him. “I’m sorry.”

“Baby, don’t be sorry, just talk to me. Tell me what this is about.”

And because she was so open, because she
could
, she tried. “It’s just this.” She laid her hands over his hips where their bodies were joined. “This can be such a horrible betrayal. It can be the thing that breaks your trust and teaches you you’ll never be safe in the world. That there won’t ever be anywhere you can rest.”

“It’s been that way for you before?”

“Yes.” The word broke her open a little more, and she had to squeeze him tighter. “Yeah, it has. And when that happens, the thing is, you survive it. But you survive it by figuring out ways around trust. You have a life, and it’s your life, because you’ve hacked it and it works. Until there’s this other thing.”

She put her fingers in his hair, threading through, slipping over the mashed-up spot where he’d laid his head on the pillow earlier this night.

“This other thing feels like a miracle,” she said, and the words dragged out of her throat, the harshness an indication of how difficult it was to talk through grief. “Only you weren’t looking for a miracle. It’s so completely different, it’s like a passport to another world, like the first time you go somewhere and you don’t expect it to be beautiful because you’ve already been some other place, but this place
is
beautiful. You have to cry because it’s beautiful and because you never knew. You didn’t know it existed. People told you, but you didn’t
know
, you couldn’t trust them, and you can’t help but cry because there were so many years you didn’t know.”

The tears kept slipping out, and he looked down at her with understanding and sympathy, but she didn’t want his sympathy. She only wanted him.

He said, “Can I ask …?”

“Can we just not? Not right now? Because right now we’re here, and that’s where I want to be. Someday, I hope, we’ll be here long enough that I won’t have to cry anymore, because here will feel like all I’ve ever known.”

Her heart beat too hard, too fast. None of that was what she’d meant to say.

None of it had been in her plan, and she was afraid she’d said too much. That she’d lost him, left him behind, mired in pity instead of here with her.

Noah was still frowning. He took a deep breath, his belly pressing into hers, and said, “Okay. Okay, Carmen.”

She kissed him again, licking his lips, stroking his arms and back, rocking her hips to his. He was still inside her, their bodies joined even as she’d stolen most of the pleasure from their coupling.

Carmen wanted to put the pleasure back. She wanted the pleasure to be an affirmation.

She wanted to affirm that she could
do
, the way Roman had told her to. That she could keep doing and trusting until she could wear her trust like her own skin.

Impossible with Roman, because they’d both used their relationship to hide from themselves, to avoid intimacy rather than seek it out. But Noah was different. He drew her in. Looked at her and saw right through her defenses to the secret heart of her.

He wanted to know her in all the ways Roman never had, and she wanted the same thing—to know him. Completely.

So she rocked a little harder, and she appreciated the advantages of a hairy man, one of which was that all those hairs brushed against some very sensitive places. She added a grind at the top of her next lift, which felt so good that she had to clench around it, and Noah made a noise like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Then he was kissing her back.

He rolled them over, settling his hands at her hips. “I want to make you come. I want to make you come a hundred times after what you just said to me, but we’ll settle for one really good one. Tell me how.”

“Touch me.”

He touched her everywhere. Everywhere, as she rose and fell, the tender bottoms of her feet tucked beneath his thighs, his pubic hair teasing her lips, her clit, his fingers pressing there, circling, and she let her eyes fall closed so she could feel it.

His mouth at her breast. Heat and sucking, biting teeth.

All the tension drifting down, settling like sediment in her hips and making her so deliciously heavy, giving every grind and roll a gravity of its own.

He tugged on her nipples with pinching fingers. Tugged when she gasped. Tugged again when she tumbled down to lay across his chest. Carmen pressed her lips into the hollow of his throat and chased the orgasm and he tugged, the pleasure painful, the pain another form of pleasure. If he noticed the tears on his skin—if he minded—she was too full of everything, too open and wracked with feeling, to care.

Noah rolled them over again, knelt up, spread her legs wide. Balancing one hand on her rib cage, he thrust deep and fast, his gaze flicking from the bounce of her breasts to the sight of their bodies joining and parting, his free hand on her swollen clit, circling, flicking.

She toyed with her nipples to make his eyes glaze over. A dozen strokes, and he started to lose focus. Carmen watched the flush climb up his neck and disappear beneath his beard.

A dozen more, and she was coming apart.

Tightening down, she heard nothing but his harsh breathing, blocked everything out but the catch in his movement when he tripped into orgasm, felt nothing but the flurried rush of triumph as he stilled and came with one final thrust that sent her spiraling out and dropped her so deep behind the lines in this new country they would make together, she knew she would never get back to where she’d been.