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She was a woman who survived by staying just out of reach. Now she was breaking that rule, pushing past her own borders, trying to get close. What would it mean if he turned away?
If she risked intimacy… and it proved her worst fear? That maybe she wasn’t enough.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t smile. He just looked at her. Like she was more than code. More than firewalls and systems and scar tissue.
Her heart jumped, her mind humming with something dangerously close to hope. That intangible, unquantifiable emotion that…depended on…him. What would he need from her?Presencewhispered low and in shadow like that was a sin. Could Nash be the one-in-a-million who didn’t flinch at the mess beneath her surface? Who didn’t see lack at all?
She might have run, should’ve, by her old rules, but for that look. Nash rewrote her code in a language without words. Like she washis answer,and it scared the hell out of him.
CHAPTERSIX
He groaned softly,his breathing going a bit ragged on the edges, need and control mingled in his obsidian eyes. “Judging from the way my body is reacting to you, I’d sayfuckno.”
“What? Reaction?” She looked down. An impressive tent in the terry told her what exact reaction he was talking about. The sight of his erection made her breasts grow heavy and achy and a wash of desire to curl low. Her whole body heated, sending her into sensory overload. Her heart stuttered, then resumed at a frantic pace. “Is the talk about your Adonis Belt turning you on?” she whispered.
He gazed at her through those thick lashes that had fallen to half-mast, just a glimmer of tenderness. “No, babe,youturn me on.”
She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. A frisson of excitement shot through her, yes, but beneath it, something curled deeper. It wasn’t just his words that undid her. It was the way they landed. Not casual. Not careless.Earnest.The truth hummed beneath her skin like a live wire.
Before Nash, she used to believe desire could be vented like steam, handled like code, parsed into manageable need.
Nashir Rahim wasn’t manageable. He wasn’t a pressure valve. He was acatalyst.
She didn’t want him to take the edge off. She wanted to be in this man’s sights, to be ruined by the way he saw her. With him, maybe she could understand herself better in the glow of his eyes. The need to get closer to him wasn’t just about surrender, although that unquantifiable emotion was astenuousas hope, Nash made it real, urgent, and mandatory, and that excitement she felt was more about the woman she wanted to be, not the broken analyst who didn’t know how to rewrite her own code, only how to run old scripts on an obsolete version of herself.
“In what way?” She wanted to know, since she was so clueless about any of it.
“That wild shock of rebellious, unbelievably red hair, and those unique green eyes of yours with an intelligence behind them that’sjust as sexy as your sweet little body. Your courage and sense of humor surprised me, your tenaciousness didn’t, and I’ve had fever dreams about how those hands will feel on my body, and fantasy pales to this reality. I’ve been with a lot of women, Grace…I have to move all the time to keep whatever I’ve suppressed from that night from consuming me. Fucking my way through bars and frog hogs, all their faces blurring and fading in the light of you. You make me still inside, like a held breath, like I’m waiting for you to tell me how to breathe.”
Undeniable desire darkened his eyes. He exhaled a long, harsh breath and curled his hands into tight fists at his sides, not allowing himself to touch her.
“Wow…all that,” she whispered.
“Fuck…Grace,” he started, but she silenced his oncoming protest with her fingers against his mouth. His lips were so warm and pliant and tempting, and all she could think about was tasting him and making that precious control of his shatter. Feeling the barely leashed aggression beneath his reserve, along with the solid length of his shaft pressing against her when she leaned in, she was close to doing that.
“I guess I am seducing you,” she murmured, staring into eyes that were dark and tormented with wanting, and the struggle within him was nearly palpable. “May I?” she asked again, but again, she was already following through. Sinking her fingers into the soft, richly textured hair at the nape of his neck, she lowered her mouth to his. A hair's breadth away, she sighed, and just before she really kissed him, she whispered, “I’ve always been more a fan of hands-on research.”
A low, untamed growl ripped from his chest, and that stubborn, unyielding control of his finally,finally, gave way to hunger that matched her own. His hands came up and tangled into her hair, tightening until it was almost painful. In the next moment, as she crushed her mouth to his, his panting lips gave her an opening into the rich taste of him, as spicy and delicious as his scent. She ran her hands over his back, reveling in the heat, the feel of the shape and structure of his achingly soft skin over flexing muscle.
What she was doing must have been good because the moment her tongue got inside, a groan tore from him, his tongue tangling with hers, his mouth going needy with deep, assertive strokes, echoing the decadent, erotic rhythm of hot sex. He circled his strong arms around her and pulled her close, skimming his flattened palms all the way down her back to her butt, hauling her deeper into the cradle of his hips, his thick erection fitting naturally in the hollow of her groin.
His hands slipped beneath her top and skimmed upward, stroking her skin all the way up to her plain white bra. She waited for him to cup her in his palm, nearly trembling with the desire to have him touch her there, to drag his fingers across her aching nipples. But instead, he merely caressed his thumbs just below her breasts, teasing her and making her moan in frustration.
Unable to help herself, she played with that indent, following the curve of muscle to his erection, palming him through the damp towel, his hips jerked, and she felt him grow and harden from her touch, needing him in ways she couldn't define. Physical need was more overpowering than she’d anticipated, living mostly in her mind. It was eye-opening how good it was in practice, but it was all the other emotional chaos swirling inside her that made her feel as though her carefully guarded life was spinning out of control.
She made a small sound of frustration when he deliberately slowed their kiss, soothing rather than arousing her with the slide of his lips against her yielding mouth. Then he grasped her wrist and rested her palm over his rapidly beating heart and held it there.
He ended the kiss and fiercely nuzzled her cheek, her hair. His shaft caught between them, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
She leaned back, needing immediate answers.
The shadows loved his gorgeous features and played with the depth of his midnight hair, casting him as the dangerous man that he was. But it was the candid, caring look in his banked eyes that captured her attention the most and made her realize how serious this moment was to him, and how formidable his control.
“Grace, as much as I want to take this to its obvious conclusion…” his breath hissed out as she shifted against all that hard heat, aching for him between her thighs. “We can’t do this.”
“What?” Her voice was almost a whine. “Why?”
“We have something important going here, bigger than the both of us. We have deep emotional feelings about it as we found out over dinner, and adding something else complex into the mix will be…overwhelmingto say the least.”