Unforgiven (8 page)

His eyes were heavy lidded, and the flush sitting high on his cheekbones wasn’t just alcohol and spicy food. The air between them popped and crackled, lifting the hair at the nape of her neck.

She smiled, then tucked her hair behind her ear and sampled another dish. Working her way counterclockwise around her plate she sampled everything he’d ordered. He ate most of the kaeng phet while she made a dent in the pad thai.

“So you traveled to avoid temptation,” she said.

“Among other things. Ship duty is one thing, but it’s hard when you’re deployed to come down from the adrenaline rush of combat. Sitting on a beach sipping drinks with fruit on little umbrellas didn’t appeal. I figured I’d marry Delaney and settle down in Chatham County, so I got everything I could out of it. The LT had two speeds—
off
and
balls to the wall
—so he didn’t want to sit around on beaches, either. One day we’re sitting in the mess and he drops a map of Thailand on the table with a mountain circled and says ‘Next shore leave I’m climbing that. Who’s in?’ But his first love was sailing, so we started planning sailing excursions. He’s been sailing all his life and didn’t see being deployed as a reason to stop.”

She watched him come alive in front of her eyes, glowing from the inside out as he talked. “So that’s how you did it. Stayed faithful to one woman for twelve years.”

He pushed what was left of his rice around on his plate. “It was part of it, yeah.”

“What was the rest of it?”

“Tell me about the books.”

She’d tweaked him over Delaney to change the subject; now he’d tweaked her right back. “It’s no big deal,” she said.

“Whenever someone says that, they usually mean it’s a very big deal.”

“I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands,” she said, striving for casual. “When I’ve got a job, I work, sleep, and eat, but when there’s no work, I’ve got hours of free time. I read. I read lots of different things. This is just what I’m reading now.”

“What else have you read?”

“Construction books to work on Brookhaven—wiring, plumbing, framing—tons of stuff on architecture,” she said promptly. “I’ve also read everything in the library’s Classics section—although I can’t get into the Russians—most of the Poetry section, and a good chunk of Biography. My interests vary, and I go off on tangents. That’s all this is. A tangent.”

“Alana called it ‘your average, run-of-the-mill obsession.’”

She and Alana were going to have words when she got back to Walkers Ford. “It’s not.”

He sat back and studied her, the focused gaze threatening on so many levels. “You’ve never been sailing.”

She laughed. “I’m fifteen hundred miles from the nearest ocean, so only in my dreams, as they say,” she said lightly.

“Speaking of dreams,” he said. An odd sensation expanded in her chest. “I want to help with the paneling.”

It took her a moment to recognize disappointment, the emotion unfamiliar because she’d tamped down what caused it—unfulfilled anticipation. She’d anticipated that Adam would say something else, like,
Let’s go sailing,
a laughable statement when South Dakota was last covered with ocean during the late Cretaceous period; or even,
Let’s go to bed
. Instead he brought up Brookhaven. Her real dream. Her obtainable dream. Because she wasn’t going sailing, and he was leaving.

She shouldn’t do this. One day with him and they were already right back where they left off.
Not quite where you left off . . .
Maybe getting Adam involved would make her take the step she couldn’t seem to take. “You’ve got other things to do,” she said.

He held up one long finger. “Prepare a best man’s speech.” A second finger went up. “Find an apartment so my mom gets her garage back. That’s it.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s the whole truth,” she said, and was rewarded with a slight widening of his eyes. But the last thing she wanted was Adam Collins rising to the challenge. “We can talk about it on the way home.”

8

T
HEY RODE IN
silence back to Walkers Ford. Marissa had spent plenty of time riding shotgun with Adam, both in the passenger seat of whatever car he was fixing up and driving, and on the back of that dangerous motorcycle. Sometimes they talked. More often than not they just drove around until they found their way back to Brookhaven’s barn. She knew his silences as well as most people knew their lovers’ words, so she sat in the stillness heating between them as the car prowled the county highways, toward Brookhaven. In the cocoon created by the car’s solid feel, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and soft rock playing on the radio, the mood in the car shifted. He didn’t touch her, didn’t look at her, but she didn’t need a hand on her knee or a quick glance to know what he was thinking. What he finally, finally would do.

What she’d always wanted.

He parked at the apex of the semicircular drive, and when he got out of the car to open her door, the gesture no longer felt gentlemanly. He stayed close, letting her bump into him, feel the heat and strength of his body as they walked around to the servants’ quarters entrance. While she unlocked the door he ran his palm over his buzzed hair and flung the collected water to the side, and something in that automatic gesture stripped away her resolve.

“I told you about the books,” she said. “Tell me how you stayed faithful, seeing Delaney once or twice a year.”

“It loses something in the telling,” he said. “I could demonstrate, though.”

Her pulse stuttered, then shot into high gear. She liked men, loved sex, wasn’t afraid to own her sexuality. Given explosive chemistry with a man disciplined enough to remain utterly faithful to one woman for twelve years, the possibilities for sexual exploration were endless, intriguing. Silently she pushed the door open in invitation. He tilted his head.
Ladies first.
She walked into her tiny kitchen and flicked on the wall sconce over her little kitchen table. Dim light pushed at the shadows in the room.

“Would you normally do this after a first date?” he asked, his head bent as if he was studying the floor.

“That was hardly our first date,” she said lightly. When he lifted an eyebrow, she relented. “Depends,” she said.

“On what?”

That was harder to answer. “On lots of things. The guy. The date. How long it’s been.”

“How long has it been?” he asked, still not looking at her.

“Three days,” she said. “You were there. Shots of whiskey, pantry. Remember?”

Then he lifted his head and nailed her to the wall with his heated hazel gaze. “Before that.”

Months. Months and months and months alone, because she was busy in the summer, and worn down, and in the winter the weather kept her off the roads. The longing for touch, for a man’s hands on her body, against her body, swept through her. Maybe it was a betrayal of honor and self-respect. The night in the pantry probably was. But she’d long since given up denying what her soft, animal body wanted. Needed. “A while,” she said.

“I know how that feels,” he said.

“I expect you do,” she said. Longing surged in the room like a rising tide, engulfing them by degrees, rhythmic, predictable.

“It’s an ache,” he went on. “Low and tight. Heavy.”

Her mouth went dry. “Yes,” she said.

He crossed the tiny kitchen in a single step, backing her against the wall by the door to her bedroom. One elbow braced by her head, he laid his big palm flat against her lower belly, not quite cupping her sex. “Here. It’s steady. Relentless. After a while it doesn’t matter if you get yourself off or not. It never goes away.”

Air slowly left her lungs, drawn to the heat simmering between them. She inhaled shakily and looked up at him, then cupped the thickening bulge in his jeans. “Is it the same for you?”

He shifted, rubbing against the heel of her hand, while his fingers gathered the loose fall of her hair. “Lower,” he said. “Right at the base, and in my balls.” When she turned her wrist and applied a little more pressure, he groaned and ground against her. “It’s a need,” he said, low and rough. The hand slowly twining in her hair tightened for a split second, then released. “But the Marine Corps taught me how to deal with needs.”

Two steps, her retreating, him advancing into the dark, warm air of her bedroom, and they were up against her double bed. She stopped but Adam didn’t. He slipped an arm around her waist and lifted her, bearing her back onto the unmade bed, breaking their descent with his other hand. He was braced on one arm, stretched out beside her, his hazel eyes dark with restrained desire. Her heart thudded hard against her breastbone. This was a moment she loved, when the promise of sex began to permeate the air. But they were both fully dressed, and something unknown glimmered under the building heat.

His long fingers curled under the hem of her sweater, caught under its bottom, and began to tug it up. Adam, a bed, darkness, and privacy—her teenage dream. Cold air kissed her belly, then her ribs, puckering her nipples inside her lace bra. A little shifting and he tugged her top over her head and dropped it on the floor.

“In boot camp you never refer to yourself in the first person. No ‘I’ or ‘me.’ It’s ‘this recruit,’ with the objective being to graduate from recruit to Marine. Before Receiving, I had needs,” he said, then bent to the exposed skin. She expected a kiss and got the scrape of his teeth over her collarbone, then the kiss, a softer touch that zinged straight to her nipples, then to her clit. The shudder that ran through her had nothing to do with air temperature. “‘This Marine’ closed his mind to everything that might cause him to fail. This included all images and thoughts of sex.” His tongue slid into the valley between her breasts, then gently under the scalloped edge of black lace. “For example, ‘this Marine’ didn’t look at porn.”

The distancing effect heightened the sense of untouchability she found so desperately desirable. “No porn?” she said.

“We’re not supposed to have it in Muslim countries, but we did,” he said, dark amusement in his voice as he shifted over her. “‘This Marine’ didn’t think about breasts or nipples, either,” he said as he released the front catch, then brushed the fabric off to the sides. He gently squeezed the firm flesh, pursed his lips and blew a soft stream of air over her nipple. Her sex clenched as sensation wicked through her body. “Or about the way your nipples darken as you get aroused.”

“You didn’t,” she said unsteadily.

“No. Stay in the moment. Cleaning my rifle, packing for a mission, listening to a briefing, standing watch, running, lifting weights. Never let your mind drift.”

“You’re very disciplined.” It would have been easy to mistake his fidelity for a lack of sex drive. In fact, it was the opposite. Adam was an intensely sexual man, and just as intensely disciplined.

A smile she felt as much as saw, then he caught one nipple between his teeth, laved it with his tongue, then pressed it gently between his fingers while he turned his attention to the other nipple. She slid her hand into his hair, her attention divided between the way the lengthening buzz cut flattened under her palm and the hard biceps flexing under her other hand. A particularly firm pinch sent heat streaking along her nerves, and she arched and whimpered.

“‘This Marine’ didn’t think about sounds. Breathing.”

One warm hand skated down her breastbone to her abdomen, and indeed, anticipating the move lower made her breath catch. Everything he didn’t think about became the object of her attention, her taut nipples, her shallowing breath, and his responses. The heat and strength of his body, pressed against hers. The way his voice deepened, the words running together as his erection pulsed against her thigh. He gently stroked her flat abdomen with his fingertips, leaving her sensitized nipples to throb in the dark, warm air.

“Or buttons, or zippers,” he continued as he unfastened her jeans, stroked the swell of her hip above the waistband, then slid his hand inside to work them partway down. “No thinking about curves, either.” He paused, his gaze roaming her disheveled state, then traced a fingertip from her lowest rib along the flare of her hip, to the point where her jeans were stuck, along with the elastic of her panties. He tugged her jeans down her legs and off, leaving her bare to his gaze.

“I didn’t think about having you naked and spread for me,” he said.

He was looking in her eyes as he spread her legs, and for a moment Marissa’s heart stopped. Something dangerous and edgy flashed there, and the half smile that quirked the corner of his mouth shaved only the thinnest layer off the palpable tension.

He’d thought about it. About her. And whoever
this Marine
was, the only man in the room was Adam.

Still positioned between her legs, he sat back on his heels and pulled his shirt over his head. She sat up, drawn to the finely honed muscles of his shoulders and chest, but he pushed her back to the bed. “I definitely didn’t think about touch,” he said.

He eased down, the breadth of his shoulders widening her thighs. One hand curved under her leg and over her hip to stroke the soft curls at the top of her mound. With the other he urged her legs to open more. “This was off-limits,” he said. He stroked her folds with his index finger, opened them, but avoided her clit. “The soft, delicate skin, the scent. How vulnerable you are right now.”

He’d thought about that, too, about how each step in the dance heightened a woman’s surrender. When he bent and blew gently on the exposed nub, she made another soft noise.

“So slick,” he murmured, but she didn’t know whether that was an observation, or something else he wouldn’t allow himself to remember. His finger traced her inner folds, then slid inside. “So hot, and very, very tight.”

At the words, she spasmed around his finger. He bent his head and put his tongue to her clit. Her eyes dropped closed as all her attention focused on his tongue and what it was doing. A slow circle, another, then he stopped when she shivered and laved several deft strokes on the more sensitive side. “There?”

“There,” she said.

“Hmmmm.” A satisfied purr from the broad male chest.

The hand resting on top of her mound didn’t move, so she brought her hand along his arm and linked her fingers with his as he did it again, and again, the touch of his tongue light, almost teasing, enough to strike sparks under the swelling skin but not enough to satisfy. He dipped lower, circled her soft opening, then slid back up, developing a slow, steady rhythm.

Their fingers still linked, she reached down and spread her folds for him. This time when his tongue stroked along her clit, she bucked toward his mouth. The hand under hers flattened on her mound, holding her down, and then it was game on. He went down on her like he had all the time in the world and no end in mind other than her complete and total devastation. He worked two fingers inside her, stroking in a lazy, gentle reminder of what it would feel like when he fucked her, and drew tight, desperate gasps from her as molten pleasure built and built. When he turned his fingers and stroked the bundle of nerves in the swollen inner wall, ecstasy went supernova. She lifted into his mouth and sobbed out her pleasure as she came.

He backed off a little when she subsided, kissing her trembling inner thighs, the hand still clutching his at her mound, a veneer of lazy amusement over the intensity in his eyes. He straightened, looming over her as he shoved off pants, socks, and boots. Then she got her first good look at the body of a fighting-strength United States Marine.

Amazing. Hard, not an ounce of fat with the muscles so sharply delineated. Darker brown hair dusted his pecs and tapered to a line down his abdomen before thickening around his erect shaft. Completely unselfconscious, he removed a condom from his wallet and smoothed it on. The dim light from the kitchen starkly illuminated his broad shoulders as he knelt between her legs. He planted one hand beside either shoulder. She let out a moan when the broad head of his shaft stretched skin made vibrantly sensitive by foreplay and an orgasm.

He slid inside, slow and relentless, stretching her unbearably. She drew tight around him, the movement as involuntary as the helpless little gasp she made. He lowered his body to hers, taking some of his weight on his elbows, but she felt the strength and power of his torso covering her, the clench of his abdominal muscles as he withdrew and pushed back in.

“That’s my secret, Ris. I focus on whatever I’m doing. I block out everything else. Now I’m focused on how tight you are, how you’re slick and hot, and I’m paying attention.” He stroked in once, twice, and pleasure began to simmer. “That’s good,” he said. Then he adjusted the cant of his hips and his next stroke glided over the sensitive bundle of nerves inside her.

The contrast was electrifying, the difference between trundling along in her truck and screaming down dirt roads on the back of Adam’s Hayabusa at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Her toes curled, her fingernails dug into his biceps and nape, and a new, higher-pitched, demanding noise clawed its way from her throat.

“That’s better,” he said, and did it again.

“God, yes,” she said.

The only facets of her world were his voice, low, rough, utterly self-assured, utterly masculine, and the slow, slick glide of his cock into her sensitized channel. She was beyond thinking, adrift in a sea of hot, dark pleasure. His heart pounded against his sternum, the pulse reverberating into her body. Without knowing why, she cupped the back of his head and turned his mouth to hers. The taste of her juices lingered on his mouth, but then the kisses were deep and hard, as much an exchange of gasps and huffs of air as a battle of tongues and teeth. He fisted his hand in her hair and turned her head so his mouth brushed her ear. “I won’t forget, Ris. Next time I’ll remember this, and I’ll use it against you.”

She came, and this time her orgasm made her vision close to a pinprick. He thrust through the contractions, holding his breath, then let it out with a stuttering groan as he ground against her and came.

He lifted some of his weight onto his elbows, and the shift only heightened the sensations where they were connected. His hair-roughened legs against her inner thighs, the supersensitive flesh where they were joined. The muscular strength of his biceps alongside her upper arms. His fingers, entwining with hers as the tension ebbed from their bodies, but she was glad he couldn’t see her face.