Page 7 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Elle let go of Nick, and sweater and bra simply slid to the floor, as did pants and panties.

He lifted her effortlessly and she kicked her clothes off and away.

He held her around the waist with one strong arm and reached down to pull her wool socks off.

There was a hole in one sock but he wasn’t looking at her feet, he was looking at her face.

She was now naked. The first time she’d ever been naked with a man. There was no heat on…she should be cold, but there was no question of feeling cold, not with Nick looking at her like that.

“God.” His jaw muscles clenched as he looked her up and down, slowly. “You’re beautiful.”

She didn’t look down at herself, she knew what she looked like. “Am I, Nick?” she asked softly, watching his eyes.

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded his head in a quick jerk. “Get under the covers, it’s cold in here.”

Standing so close to him was like standing next to a man-high radiator, but under the covers meant the bed, and getting in bed meant they were going to make love, so she obediently pulled back the bedclothes and slid in.

And oh, he was stripping fast and he was just so beautiful he seemed unreal.

She couldn’t even tell what clothes he had on, really.

Whatever he was wearing was dark and it all drifted to the ground, and then he turned and she had a view of him, full on, so heartbreakingly beautiful she nearly closed her eyes.

He’d grown a few inches and had put on a lot of pounds and it was all muscle. He was so finely built, exactly what she imagined a man should look like. A perfect man. Broad, thick shoulders, lean waist, long, strong legs. The vee of hard tendons running from belt level to the groin.

It looked like his penis weighed several pounds all on its own. It was fascinating, long and thick and upright, dark-tan with a dark-red tip shiny with his juice.

Even more fascinating, when her gaze drifted down from his face, over his chest, to fix on his penis, it swelled even larger. Oh my God. Just her looking at him aroused him!

It was huge, lying almost flat against his belly. She could see his heartbeat there.

This was pure magic, something so extraordinary she hadn’t even thought to dream it. How on earth could she have known it was like this? How could she have guessed that it would feel like this?

Two kinds of heat—one slipping through her veins like a flow of warm honey, and the other, almost painful, a prickly heat flashing over her skin. And her breasts and her sex—they felt like sources of heat themselves. Hot and swollen and in the case of her sex, wet.

Her eyes drifted back up Nick’s body and fixed on his face. He looked serious, almost grim, narrow-eyed, unsmiling, a muscle twitching in his jaw. If a thousand books hadn’t told her that a man’s erection spelled pleasure, she would have thought he was in pain.

Well, she sure wasn’t in pain. This was, hands down, the most glorious moment of her life. It was as if pain had been banished from the world and only pleasure existed.

She pulled her hand out from the covers, astonished that it didn’t feel cold. Cold had been banished from the world, too. She curled her fingers in the universal come here gesture.

Just in case he didn’t get it, she said the words. “Come to me, Nick.”

Her words seemed to release him from some invisible bonds.

In a second, he was slipping on top of her under the covers and oh, she nearly fainted from the sensory overload.

He felt so damned good . It was all so new and so incredibly enticing.

The heavy weight of him, the rough hairs sliding against her skin, the hard muscles.

Elle didn’t know what to do but her body did, without any help from her.

Her body just naturally opened to him, in every way possible.

It offered itself to him, naturally, as if it had been born to do this with Nick.

Her mouth was already open when he bent, smiling, to kiss her, a heated, deep kiss that melted her bones.

Her back arched, so her breasts were crushed against the cut pectorals of his chest, the rough chest hair tickling her breasts.

Her legs slid apart, lifting slightly, the inside of her thighs hugging his lean hips.

The wiry black hairs around his penis felt harsh in contrast to the velvety smoothness of his penis.

She was open completely to him there, feeling empty, wanting him to fill her, and then there he was, sliding into her, so hot and hard, and there was pain, yes, but life was pain and joy, she knew that, but there he was, inside her, and this was Nick.

Nick inside her and it felt so wonderful tears gathered in her eyes.

But then the wonder stopped because Nick withdrew from her, pulled out, pulled away, and instead of there being heat and strength against her entire body there was nothing but cold and emptiness.

It was shocking. All of a sudden she was freezing, bereft. Trembling.

He was sitting up, the noise of the sheets shifting loud in the silence of the room.

“N-Nick?”

Oh God. She’d done something wrong. Whatever she’d done it had been wrong. The wrong thing to do. She thought she’d been moving so naturally, but clearly she’d done something she shouldn’t. Or hadn’t done something she should.

And now he was angry. She chanced a peek at his face. Or…if not angry, then something. Whatever, he wasn’t happy. That was clear.

Nick swung his long legs over the side of the bed and sat, hands gripping the edge of the mattress, head slightly bowed.

This was frightening. What kind of mistake could she have made to have him so cold and remote, all of a sudden? “Nick?” she whispered.

He was turned away so all she saw was his broad back, the dips and hollows of the muscles, the strong neck. She had no idea what he was thinking, feeling, none at all.

What to say, what to do? She had no idea. She was suffering from whiplash, from extreme pleasure to extreme distress in a few seconds. It was hard to keep up, even to know what she was feeling.

Cold and alone, that was what she was feeling.

Nick turned to her and she couldn’t know what he was feeling either. The smile was gone and all that was left was an impersonal remoteness.

“You’re a virgin.” His voice was distant, flat. He gestured down at himself, at his erect penis that had some blood on it. Her blood. “Were a virgin.”

Well…yes. Of course. It had never even occurred to her that Nick might think otherwise.

Of course, he couldn’t know that these past five years there’d been no question of dating anyone, she’d graduated from high school by a miracle, and frankly, by the indulgence of her teachers, who knew what was happening at home.

A boyfriend had been out of the question.

But beyond that, well…no boy and no man had ever attracted her, in any way. She’d been waiting for him.

How pathetic was that? He wasn’t happy she’d waited for him. He was…what? Annoyed? Impatient? Exasperated?

She made a noise in her throat because she had no idea what to say. Words weren’t coming to her. Words had completely fled her mind.

His dark eyebrows came together. “Why the f—.” He stopped himself visibly, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed the word. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? What he really wanted to say hung there in the air.

Oh God. He was edging toward angry.

Elle sat up, clutching the sheets, bringing her knees up to her chest. Where before she delighted in feeling his bare skin against hers—such a mind-blowing pleasure—now she felt naked. Naked in every sense.

She opened her mouth but no words came out. Not even air. She coughed and tried again. “ Sorry.”

She should say something else but nothing else would come out.

And then his face changed, almost melted. “Pixie,” he said. All of a sudden that deep voice was liquid with tenderness.

Pixie. His pet word for her. Usually accompanied by a tug of her hair. Elle’s muscles relaxed, she gasped in a big breath of air, let it out again on a sigh.

He was back. Nick was back.

The tip of his forefinger ran over her cheek. “You really should have told me…I’d have done it differently.”

Elle blinked. There was another way? She shook her head sharply, quite beyond words.

Nick sighed and lifted his head, as if he’d suddenly heard something.

In a second, he was in her ensuite bathroom, the one he’d teasingly dubbed Fairyland when she was a kid.

It was a little over the top. Her father had redecorated when her mother died.

Her bedroom was an ode to frills and her bathroom—candy-cane pink and cream, with roses hand-painted in the washbasin—was embarrassing as an adult.

Her senses expanded back out as she watched Nick walk naked into her bathroom. For a few seconds she’d imploded on herself, a black hole of negative gravity threatening to suck her through it, totally incapable of thought and observation.

But she was a little more relaxed now, capable of feeling a little electric thrill of delight just watching him walk across a room. His buttocks were firm as apples, round and tight and absolutely delicious.

So utterly different from her father’s flaccid muscles as she tried to wash him in the last months of his life.

No. No thinking like that.

Her father was dead, and wherever he was, he was truly in a better place.

That was the past, this was now . A better now than she’d even dared to dream of just this morning.

A magnificent now that held threads of hope for the future.

A future with Nick in it, of watching Nick, listening to him, just being with him.

He hadn’t bothered to close the bathroom door and she could see him, all rough male in her ridiculously prissy bathroom, like a foreign species.

He’d taken a washcloth from the pile by the sink and was washing himself.

Washing his penis briskly, drying off, wetting another washcloth and walking back to her.