The Sweetest Taboo (9 page)

Her beauty caught him with a sharp sucker punch. Water streamed down her face, through lashes matted together over huge hazel eyes. Her nose was a perky button, her mouth wide and lush and the dream of a man and his dick.

He couldn’t wait to see her come again. To see her eyes flash and her nostrils flare and hear sounds she had no reason to hold back. Moving his hands to her shoulders, he backed her across the enclosure until her heels hit the base of the bench built into the wall. He wanted her to sit, to spread her legs and feed his hunger.

He wanted to give her pleasure more than he remembered caring to share with any other woman. And a part of him realized he was feeling that desire in more places than those so obviously physical and that made absolutely no sense. He shoved the thoughts away and bent to taste the skin along her jawline, his hands at her rib cage, his thumbs pressing into the plump sides of her breasts.

Her skin tasted like the sea, and she had the most gorgeous breasts, tipped with hard, dark cherry centers. Leaving tiny nips the length of her neck to her shoulder, he leaned down and sucked a nipple into his mouth. She gasped at first and then she moaned, her fingers digging into his biceps as she held on to him for support.

He slid his hands from her shoulders to her elbows, pinning her arms to her sides and urging her down to the bench built into the wall. She went without question. Sebastian followed, dropping to his knees between her legs. He glanced up and, in the swirling steam, he saw her eyes blaze.

Her expression kicked him in the gut. The heady mix of desire and uncertain anticipation would’ve been enough to make him rethink what they were doing if he’d been capable of anything resembling thought. As it was, he was nothing but a creature of appetite and a man’s most elemental focus. This moment meant nothing but her pleasure. He lifted her legs, draped her knees over his shoulders.

And then he moved his mouth to her sex.

At the first touch from the tip of his tongue, she cried out. And shuddered. He felt her tremors where his hands held her inner thighs, his thumbs pressed to her flesh so soft and firm and giving. He loved a woman’s skin. He loved this one’s taste. She brought to mind grapefruit, and olives, a salty sweetness warmed by her body’s heat and that of the water raining down.

He moved his hands closer to the creases where hips met thighs and slid his thumbs into the folds of her sex, pulling her open to expose her swollen clit and the slick opening to her pussy, a slickness that had nothing to do with the water beating down and everything to do with carnality and lust.

His kissed her, his mouth open on her sex, so plump and ripe and his balls drew up hard, his cock surging up toward his belly. He wanted to wrap his hand around his shaft and watch himself enter her body. That first thrust, the thought of being inside this woman…He shuddered and entered her with his tongue.

She gasped and arched against him, her hands braced at her hips holding her weight. She pulled her knees to her chest, moved her feet to his shoulders for leverage. Her eager response totally did him in. His tongue circled her clit. He sucked it into his mouth while he fingered her to the same rhythm his other hand used to stroke his cock.

Nothing in his memory, hell, nothing in his imagination had ever been this sharp, this intense, this ball-bustingly hot. He was going to come and that’s all there was to it. He had Erin Thatcher in his shower, her legs spread and his body screaming with weeks worth of pent-up want. He wanted to pull her down onto his lap and let her ride him hard. But he was so close and the thought of stopping for a condom was a killer.

It was only when he felt her fingers come to rest on his that he opened his eyes to realize that, some time during his fantasy, he’d abandoned the real Erin for the imagined. He had to be out of his mind. Reaching for the fictional when he had the real thing. Her feet now rested on his thighs and he didn’t even remember letting her go.

He looked up, caught off guard by the tongue she held to the bow of her upper lip while she watched him jerk off. Her fingers slid over his to the head of his dick then she pulled her heels up onto the bench and sat, knees up and separated, exposing herself completely.

And then she slipped her own hand between her legs, her own finger into her sex. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This wasn’t at all what he had planned but damn if he could find a reason to stop her. Or to stop himself. Especially when she met his gaze directly and said, “I want to watch you come.”

He got to his feet then, a move that put his crotch in her direct line of vision. And then he began to stroke in earnest, rubbing the flat of his palm up and over the head and back down the shaft. He pumped harder, his gaze flicking from her fascinated expression to her own sweet sex that she fingered.

He wanted to be everywhere at once, in her sex, her hands, her mouth, her tight little…oh, fuck. He groaned and let go, shooting semen into the swirl of foggy air, working his cock, pumping, stroking, until he was spent. Spent but still amazingly hard. An anomaly of which Erin took notice.

He sank onto the bench opposite the one where she sat. Though she didn’t sit long, pushing up to her feet and crossing the enclosure to stand before him. He expected her to drop to her knees. Instead, she reached above him for a cloth and the bottles of shampoo and bath soap he kept there on a shelf. She set soap and cloth on the bench beneath the center showerhead and set about washing her hair.

Sebastian found himself transfixed. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the picture of Erin’s hands in her hair, her eyes closed, her chin up as the spray pelted her face, sending the suds streaming down her spine and over the sweet curve of her backside.

When she reached for the liquid soap and the cloth, he felt the first new stirrings of desire in his gut. He snorted to himself. What a lie. Desire hadn’t laid down once since the birth of this obsession. The proof was in his erection that remained at half mast.

And now, with Erin sliding that soapy cloth over her shoulders, down her arms to her elbows to her wrists, and even her fingers, his fixation sharpened.

She moved the cloth to her throat, across her collarbone and down over her breasts, cupping them as she washed the full swells and gumdrop nipples. She stood in profile and suds slid down her limbs, pooling at her feet, her body slick and gleaming.

His hard-on stiffened further, straining toward his belly and begging to be stroked. He refused, and he waited, feeling strangled as he sat unmoving, strangled, tied in knots, grabbed hard by body parts better left unbound.

But when she moved the cloth to soap her inner thighs, bringing the fabric and her hands up between her legs and turning to face him, meeting his gaze directly and putting on a show mortal man had never been meant to resist, Sebastian succumbed to human nature and the call of the wild.

He grabbed up a condom from where the stack Erin had brought into the shower had fallen to the floor and, in three quick strides he was there, and the suds soaping her skin provided an intoxicating friction when he wrapped his arms around her body and backed her into the wall.

Her breath whooshed out from the force of his motion. He told himself to back off, back down and be gentle. But then she dug her fingertips into his shoulders and worked her heels into the backs of his thighs, levering herself up between his body and the wall.

He slid a forearm beneath her for support then tipped his lower body toward her. She released her hold on his shoulder with one hand and reached between their bodies for his cock, guiding him to the opening of her sex and, even after he thrust upward, after he buried himself in her warmth and she gasped, she kept her fingers wrapped around the base of his shaft.

The pressure she applied would’ve made for a damn good cock ring but it was
her
hand and not a strip of leather or a metal circle and that made all the difference in the feelings surging through him. He shoved hard against her. It was all he could do. He had no room to withdraw, to feel the head of his cock breach her opening the way he wanted. Again and again.

To feel that first pressing thrust, that push of flesh on flesh, firm into supple, insistent into giving, his hard-as-a-wooden-bat erection buried in the rich complement of her glove soft sex. She ground down against him, squeezing him with inner muscles and that one friggin’ hand.

That was it. He grabbed her ass with both hands, pressed his chest into her chest for support as he drove himself into her body and exploded. Erin whimpered, both hands now clutching his shoulders, moving down his back, clawing and scratching as she tried to pull him farther inside to assuage her arousal’s itch and ache.

When she came her spasms rocked the both of them. She cried out, and would’ve fallen if he hadn’t braced her up, leaned against her, kept her safe. He felt her contractions grip and pull him farther inside and he shook from the force of her body’s response. She shook as well, her head back, her back arched, her hands slapped flat to the wall. Her climax nearly brought him to his knees.

When the force of her completion subsided, when her strength was taxed and her energy spent, he sank to the enclosure’s floor, still holding her tight, still buried deep inside. She curled arms and legs around him and he couldn’t tell where he started, where she began.

The water continued to beat down. The steam continued to swirl and rise. Sebastian leaned back against the base of the bench, wrapped both arms around Erin where she sat in his lap, and did his best to breathe.

He’d just compromised the entire reason he’d had this shower built. Solitude, personal safety, peace of mind. He’d never step inside again without thinking of Erin in his arms.

And he wasn’t at all sure he was comfortable with that.

5

CALI GLANCED AT HER WATCH, shook her head, blinked away the grit from her tired eyes—grit leftover from work and Thursday’s makeup she’d never washed away—and glanced at her watch one more time. Unbelievable. She’d never even made it home from work and now she was due in class in thirty minutes.

Last night after leaving Paddington’s, she’d joined Will at IHOP for a middle of the night brainstorming session over Cherry Coke and French fries. Both had been too wound up for sleep and agreed the time would be well spent in working through their screenplay’s plot elements.

For hours they’d played “what if,” scratching notes as they challenged one another to up the stakes in their collaborative story’s twists and turns, to dig for deeper motivation, to breathe life into their characters with added details of personality and goals…and to work on ways to increase the internal conflict between their two main protagonists, not to mention giving the antagonist a better developed back story of his own.

Half the night Cali found herself wondering when Will had become so hardheaded, and if they’d ever come to a meeting of the minds.

Toward that end, they’d stayed until the smell of maple syrup, sausage and hotbuttered pancakes had roused their stomachs for breakfast. Hot coffee had accompanied the meal and given them both a second wind. Had that really been two hours ago? Double unbelievable. She blew out an aggravated breath, shoving a hand back through her hair.

Now she was going to have to skip all the errands she’d planned to run this one free afternoon of the week and catch a nap between class and tonight’s shift at work. If not, she’d crash and burn big time. And she
so
did not want to piss off Erin by dragging ass on a Friday night.

Cali gathered her things, shoving pencils, spiral bound and colored index cards, a letter-size legal pad and a textbook into her tote bag, then dug out her wallet to pay for her share of the shared meals.

Will stopped her with a warm hand covering hers. “What’re you doing?”

“It’s seven-thirty. I have class at eight on Friday.” She pointed to her watch. It was now, actually, seven thirty-five. Even worse. “I’m never going to make it.”

“You’ve been late to class before.”

“I know, but I hate being late. And skipping is just so not me. I’ve paid out all this tuition and missing a lecture means I’m not getting my money’s worth.” Besides, she had to look like crap, being up all night. Baggy raccoon eyes. Splotchy skin. Frizzed out curls from too much tearing out of her hair.

And then there was the little tiny issue of realizing how comfortably intimate the night had been without anything physical going on when she’d actually been thinking of inviting Will to her bed. How could she risk screwing things up for the sake of sex? Sex that she could find elsewhere. Except she didn’t want sex elsewhere.

She wanted sex with Will.

“What if I make you a better offer?”

Her head came up from where she’d been looking through her tote for her car keys. Will’s eyes were bright, his gaze teasing but issuing a challenge that hit her hard enough to knock the air from her lungs.

She huffed out what breath she had left in response. “What could possibly be better than listening to Professor Smith yammer on about genre fiction?”

“A nap.” Will shoved his open legal pad into his satchel, dropped his number two yellow pencil in beside and stuffed his textbook into the remaining space. He wore a distracted look while packing up his things and Cali wondered if he was even aware of what he’d said.

She wondered even more exactly what he’d meant. “You want to take a nap?”

Will looked up, dragged a hand down his face. Then he grinned, a lopsided boyish expression that added a twinkle to his eyes. “That didn’t come out exactly the way I’d planned, did it? God, I’m exhausted.”

Exactly what she’d been afraid of, she thought, and sighed. Good thing she knew him well enough not to feel slighted that he’d taken back an offer when he really hadn’t made one at all. “That’s what you get for being a talk, talk, thinker. The worst openmouth, insert-foot type I’ve ever seen.”

Will grinned widely, crossing forearms and bracing elbows on the table to lean closer toward where she sat in the opposite booth. “I like to speak my mind and, yeah, it gets me in more than a little bit of trouble. But it also ends up getting me what I want.”