Page 23

I did exactly what he had suggested. I just shut up. The nervous talking, the worries, the fear, the clamorous noise in my head. I just watched Liam touched that flower.

His clear eyes were endlessly patient, gentle. He looked willing to take his time. Willing to wait for me to get it, even if I was slow, or thick. He was in no hurry at all. He reached out, touched my cheek, stroking it as softly as he’d touched the flower petal.

And I got it. Right in my chest, just like he said.

Oh, yes. He was beautiful. The realization pierced through me like a knife.

This was against all my rules, all my better judgment.

The power dynamic was whacked, wrong. He was the one who had saved me.

He was the one offering protection and comfort.

I was the one who was desperately in need of it.

He had everything, I had nothing. And for fuck’s sake, I couldn’t even guarantee him a good time in bed to compensate him for his trouble, not with all my sexual hang-ups.

That was a crass assessment of the situation, but I called it how I saw it.

I preferred to have something concrete to offer a man, something that would keep him connected with me after the initial flash of desire flickered and went out, as it inevitably did. Not that the trick had ever worked before, considering my track record.

Liam didn’t need me. I had nothing to offer him but myself. When he lost interest in that, I would be destroyed.

Liam sensed the direction my mind was running. I saw it in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked warily.

He sounded exhausted. I didn’t blame him. I was nothing but problems, traps, tangled knots, thorny difficulties. My mind raced to come up with a plausible lie. Letting him see how small I felt would embarrass us both.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

He let out a quiet sigh, and leaned back, laying his head against the back of the futon couch. Covering his eyes with his hands, which made me notice his hand.

Crap. His knuckles were torn and raw, encrusted with blood. God, I hadn’t even given a thought to his injuries, his trauma, his shock. I’d just zoned out, floated in my vacuous bubble, and leaned on him. As if he were a mighty oak.

But he wasn’t an oak. He was a man. He’d fought like a demon for me, and risked his life, and gotten hurt. And I was so self-absorbed, I hadn’t even noticed.

I was mortified. I didn’t even like to imagine what Lucia would have said. “Liam, your hand! Let me get some disinfectant, and some?—”

“It’s okay. Forget about it.”

“The hell I will! You’re bleeding!” I bustled around, muttering and scolding to hide my discomfort, gathering gauze and cotton balls and antibiotic ointment.

He let me fuss, a martyred look on his face. After I finished taping some gauze over his hand, I looked at his scraped, battered face and grabbed a handful of his sweatshirt, tugging it upward. “What about the rest of you? Let me see.”

“Just some bruises,” he hedged.

“Where?” I persisted, tugging at his shirt. “Show me.”

He wrenched the fabric out of my hand. “No.” His voice was grim. “If I take off my clothes now, it’s not going to be to show you my bruises.”

Oh … my ... goodness. I blinked, swallowed, tried to breathe.

There it was, finally verbalized. “After all this? You still want to, um ...”

“Fuck yes.” His tone was low and savage.

“I’ve wanted it since I laid eyes on you.

And it keeps getting worse. Plus, combat adrenaline would give me a hard-on like a railroad spike even if there wasn’t a beautiful woman in my face, driving me nuts.

Which puts me in a bad place, Nancy. The timing’s been piss-poor since the moment we met, but it never gets better. It just keeps getting worse and worse.”

“It’s okay.” I patted his shoulder shyly. He was usually so calm. It unnerved me a bit, to see him wound up like this.

“And the worse the timing gets, the more I want it,” he went on. “Which makes me feel like a jerk, a user, and an asshole. Promising to protect you?—”

“You did protect me,” I reminded him. “Spectacularly, I might add.”

He waved his hand impatiently. “It wasn’t an exchange.

You don’t owe me sex. You don’t owe me anything.

And that really fucks me up. Because I can’t even remove myself from the situation.

I’m scared to leave you alone, but I can’t keep my hands off you if I stay.

Which puts me between a rock and a hard place. ”

I put my finger over his mouth. “Wow,” I murmured. “I would’ve never dreamed you could get worked into such a state, Mr. Liam-let’s-contemplate-the-beauty-of-the-flower Knightly.”

He snorted, and I shushed him again, enjoying the feel of his lips beneath my finger. “You’re not a jerk or a user,” I said gently. “You were magnificent. Valiant, selfless, amazing. Thank you. Again.”

He looked away. There was a brief, embarrassed pause. “That’s generous of you,” he said, trying to flex the wounded hand. “But I’m not fishing for compliments.”

“I never thought you were,” I told him.

I placed my own hand below his and rested them both gently on his thigh. My fingers dug into the thick muscle of his quadriceps, through the dirty, bloodstained denim of his jeans. Beneath the fabric, he was so hot. So strong and solid.

I moved my hand up, slowly but surely, stroking higher toward his groin. His breath caught and stopped as my fingers brushed the thick bulge of his penis beneath the denim.

Here went nothing. “I know what you mean, about the hard place,” I whispered, swirling my fingertips over it. Wow. That thick, broad stalk just went on and on. “Or was this what you meant by the rock?”

His face was a mask of tension, neck muscles clenched, tendons standing out. “You don’t have to do this.”

Aw. Still trying to be the gallant gentleman. What a turn-on. My fingers closed around him, squeezing. A shudder jarred his body. “I can’t seem to stop myself,” I said.

“Watch out, Nancy,” he said. “If you start something now, there’s no stopping it.”

I stroked him again, tighter, a slow, twisting caress that wrung a keening gasp from his throat. “That’s right,” I said, my voice low, throaty. “There will be no escape for you.”

He reached out, a little awkwardly and clasped his arms around my shoulders, staring into my eyes as if expecting me to bolt.

He pulled me close, enfolding me in his power, and suddenly we were kissing.

I had no idea who kissed who. The kiss was desperate, achingly sweet. Not a power struggle, not a matter of talent or skill, just a wild, yearning hunger to get as close to each other as humans could be. He held me like he was afraid I’d be torn away.

I tugged his shirt up, and he wrenched it off.

I almost purred when I saw him half naked.

Oh, yes, please. His skin was pale, and his lean, sinewy muscles were sharply defined in the dim light that dangled over the kitchen stove.

He was hot as a furnace. He smelled like soap—and the sharp, salty tang of sweat. From fighting to defend me.

Then he pulled my T-shirt off, and I was just as exposed, blinking through my tousled hair. The chill that hit my skin gave me goosebumps, but I still felt scorched by his eyes, his roving hands. My tight nipples tingled where they brushed his chest.

Shyness gripped me, but it was nothing like that usual cold, sinking feeling I got in these situations, when those iron-plated doors slammed shut, shutting my lover out and trapping my own small, numb self inside. That was how things usually went.

This was so different. I wasn’t numb. I was on the verge of shaking into a million pieces. It was almost unbearably intense. I crossed my arms over my chest, eyes squeezed shut. “Can we turn off the light?”

He froze for a few seconds. “Don’t hide from me,” he said, in a low voice.

“I won’t,” I assured him. “I just think it would be easier for me.”

He started to speak, and I cut him off before he could ruin it. “I don’t want to stop, I swear,” I said swiftly. “Just the light.”

He hesitated, peering at me like he was trying to read me.

“It’s because I care about this,” I hurried on. “I’ll use every trick I can think of not to shut down with you.”

Smooth move , Nance. Big turnoff, laying out my sexual problems to a prospective lover before I even got a chance to make him come.

But Liam didn’t look put off. “All right,” he said. “First, let’s put down the bed, though. I don’t want to do that in the dark.”

Oh. I’d forgotten that detail. I was so turned on, a bed seemed irrelevant.

A few deft tugs and wrenches with Liam’s big muscles, and my rickety old futon bed was flat and ready for business.

The mattress was already dressed with a sheet beneath the couch cover.

Then he went to the stove and yanked the string, and the room was plunged into infinite tones of shadow.

Even the blacks and grays took on subtle, delicate meanings—shaded nuances that I could never express in words.

And Liam was a fulcrum of deeper gray—an enormous, brooding presence.

Every hair on my body prickled at his proximity. Every sense was heightened. My eyes strained in the dark, my lungs labored for deeper gulps of his scent, my ears were tuned to the pad of his bare feet. I was hungry to touch his skin, to taste his salt.

He unbuckled his belt, kicked off his shoes, and shucked his pants, briefs, and socks. Quick, businesslike movements loaded with pure eroticism.

I admired the angles and contours of his long body in the shadows, the bulk of his thick shoulders. I shoved down my jeans, kicked them off my ankles, and curled up on the futon. Shaky with nerves, but in a good way, strangely. Which was a first, for me.

I saw him moving closer, but my body still jolted with a bright jab of shock when his arms circled me.

I was racked with long, delicious shivers.

They throbbed through me in waves, making my breath catch and my fingers dig convulsively into his hot skin, the taut bulge of muscle in his upper arms. His chest pressed against my breasts, his hand stroked down the curve of my back, the swell of my hip, fitting me against him.

Skin to skin. So hot. He burned me, and I loved it.

His cock prodded my leg. Thick, stiff, long. I could hardly breathe for the rush of excitement. The wild euphoria, and that keen ache of longing.

And the fear, too. Of how vulnerable this made me. It was there, vibrating like a plucked string. This problem was unique. Before this, sex was never all that central to my thoughts. I could pretty much take it or leave it, and I tended to leave it.

Not with Liam. My hunger for him felt like something clawing inside me. Desperate.

He bent over me, dropping slow, hot, tender kisses at the curve of my neck that made me whimper with excitement. “You’re not shutting down,” he said.

It was both a statement and a command. And it was true.

“No,” I replied, marveling. In spite of the terror we’d just been through, in spite of my tedious list of hang-ups, this was in no danger of derailing.

Always before, the harder a lover tried to get through my walls, the thicker those walls became. It was a reflex. But with Liam, there was no wall. Or maybe there was, but it didn’t matter. He was already so far inside it, pushing me deeper into those unknown parts of myself.

It was so new. I had no idea how deep, how endless that inner space was. Alive to feeling. Every sensation, every emotion was a revelation. I felt the wild thrill of leaping into a mysterious, star-bedecked, unknown nowhere, and the glowing tenderness of coming home, all at the same time.

He pulled me down onto the bed and arranged me until I was perched on his thighs, my arms wound around his shoulders, my nose buried in his thick, spiky, sweat-stiffened hair.

His cock pressed against my belly. His thickly muscled arms were tight around me, tense and shaking.

Tenderness for him melted me right down to liquid inside, a hot shimmer around my heart, and lower. I slid my hand down between us and curled my fingers around his cock. Stroking him. Exploring and teasing and inciting him. It made my breath catch with excitement. He was just delicious.

“Slow down,” he said. “I don’t want to come yet.”

I let up my grip. “When, then?”

“You first. Always, it’s you first. That’s just the rule. The way it needs to be.”

I wasn’t arguing with that. He slid his hand down over my ass, and slid it between my legs, caressing my exquisitely sensitive places with feather-light fingertips, all while his cock rocked against my clit.

He rubbed against me with a, slow pulsing rhythm, his fingers delving inside my pussy—sliding deep into my slick balm.

Feeling me. Petting me. Taking his time. Kissing my cheekbone. My throat.

His teeth dragged against the frantic throb of my heartbeat in there, working me from behind—skillfully thrusting inside while keeping up that slow, sensual pulse with his cock. My pussy felt hot, melting. Sweetly aching. Longing to melt and merge and be filled by him.

Then something opened—an upwelling rush—and all the feelings and sensations converged into a long, pulsing wave of pure rapture.