Claiming Her SEAL (ASSIGNMENT: Caribbean Nights Book 1) (14 page)

He wanted Emma. Wanted to soak up a little of that brightness she carried around inside like a corona.

Gathering her up, he nestled her into his body, and the heat of her bled through his clothes. Heavenly. He wanted to take and take until he couldn’t hold anymore of her inside. But first, that luscious little mouth—he needed it under his.

Without checking his passion, he kissed her. Hard. She opened instantly, inviting him in. Sucking him in. He fell headlong into a spiral that left him breathless and dizzy as her hot tongue found his, slick and purposeful, stirring up his juices with erotic little moans.

His hands loosened and spread as he familiarized himself with her bare back. It felt lush under his abused fingertips and he kept going, skating downward along her spine with his thumbs until he hit that thin bit of fabric.

Her bottom was bare. Thong. So sexy, he couldn’t even… he groaned as he dipped under the string between the rounded globes, threading it to his knuckle as he kept going until he hit the slick paradise at the juncture of her thighs.

Her head tipped back as she panted his name—James—and hearing it on her lips pleased him so much he pushed farther, deeper, sliding into her damp heat until he was the one gasping as his lungs hitched. Tight and wet and hot. The trifecta. His erection throbbed as an unholy desire to bury himself in her nearly drove him to his knees.

He withdrew instantly and took a deep, fortifying breath that did nothing to beat back the need to possess.

“Emma,” he murmured with a presence of mind he pulled from God knew where. “I wasn’t exactly prepared for this.”

Her eyelids fluttered open. “Oh. I guess I wasn’t either. I didn’t even think—But it’s okay, I’m on the pill.”

“That’s… not the only issue.” Not quite sure how delicate he needed to be, he opted for truth. “I was stationed in the Middle East. I wouldn’t blame you if you insisted on a condom for that reason alone.”

Any man in uniform had a history of conquests. Of course, he had a clean bill of health, and he couldn’t even recall the last woman he’d been with. It had been months and months.

“Do I need to worry?”

“No. But you shouldn’t take my word for it.”

“We’re in the water. If you say it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Her geographically based faith in him was borderline ridiculous. He was Dexter no matter where he was. But moonlight spilled over her expectant face, painting it a strange tinge of bluish-silver, and something shifted inside.

What if he could be the hero she thought he was? What if the water did hold some kind of magical properties that would allow him to be the lover she deserved? She wasn’t a nameless woman who knew the score and had her own pain to kill. That alone made her different. Gave him permission to be different too.

“It’s okay,” he assured her, and somehow it was. Amazingly so.

Almost tentatively, he cupped her face and touched her lips with his, testing. Seeing how it felt to be slow. Gentle. To let himself feel every stroke and savor every taste instead of driving them both to completion as fast as possible, which was his normal M.O.

She sighed, her breath mingling with his, and with the condom discussion out of the way, he was free to explore her with a leisurely perusal that he’d have sworn he didn’t care a thing for. Hard. Fast. Ruthless. These were the elements of foreplay that he understood. But all at once, he wanted to please her and her alone, instead of seeking a mutual cataclysmic orgasm at warp speed.

Walking her backward, he took her to the edge of the shore and laid her back against the wet sand where the waves rushed over their legs and then receded in a timeless rhythm. Ravenous to see all of her, he knelt on the sand and gathered up that scrap of pink, drawing it off reverently. Then he spread her legs to reveal all of her secrets to the moonlight as she watched him with heavy eyelids.

“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured and leaned in to kiss her belly, at the spot just below her navel, which had been taunting him from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her in that white bikini.

He meant to nibble his way down the line of her abdomen, planned to follow the crease where her thigh started, and then acquaint himself with the taste of her in her wet center, but as he laid his lips on her skin, her fingers tangled in his hair. She exhaled, and his name floated to him on a whisper. Not Dex, but James.

Suddenly he didn’t want to move. His head drifted to the side and he laid his cheek on her stomach, breathing her in. A smoking-hot woman was spread out naked below his head, a woman whose hot, slick desire for him he’d already felt with his own fingers, and all he wanted to do was this?

Dear God. He was in so much trouble.

Enough. It was sex, not some spiritual quest to enlightenment. What the hell was wrong with him? He was going too slowly; that was the problem.

With renewed purpose, he crawled up on his knees, lunged forward, and took her mouth in a punishing kiss, though who he thought he was punishing became painfully unclear when she opened her lips to him, kissing him back with instant enthusiasm. Heat exploded in his midsection and raced along his skin with a sense of urgency he couldn’t ignore. Bracing his forearms in the sand on either side of her head, he tried to take back control of the kiss, but she was having none of that.

Her fingers danced along the hem of his shirt and yanked, pulling until their locked lips prevented further progress. Drawing back, she got his shirt off in seconds and then went to work on the ties of his shorts, which only made things worse as her fingers brushed the bare tip of his erection.

His lungs collapsed as he fought to keep his reaction under control while simultaneously trying to get her hands away from his crotch. He half rolled away, but she followed, throwing a leg over his as they grappled with the last barrier between them. Finally, blessedly, the ties loosened and she slid off his shorts. Only to eagerly turn her attention to what she’d uncovered.

Gaze firmly fastened on her prize, she pushed him onto his back in the sand, turning him into a sand-encrusted sugar cookie instantly, and he let her because his whole body had gone weak under her hot perusal. Then her sweet hands cupped his erection and tightened, and that was nearly all she wrote.

Jackknifing involuntarily, he pulled her hands away and held them over her head. “Sweetheart, you must not be very clear how this works.”

“I just want to touch you. You’re so magnificent,” she whispered. “Hard but soft and so very beautiful. Please.”

With a strangled groan, he lay back in the sand, bare to her and her sweetly expressed agenda. Who was he to argue with that?

Eagerly, she knelt over him, her hair dragging down the length of his body as she felt him up to her heart’s content. Meanwhile he struggled to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head as she lit him up like the Fourth of July with nothing more than her fingertips on his skin. And that was just the northern half.

As she traveled south, the heat built, stabbing through him like so many hot pokers of unfulfilled lust that he couldn’t have said his own name at gunpoint. Which he’d been asked to do a time or two and well knew the degree of difficulty.

With a wicked little smile, she tentatively touched the tip of her tongue to the head of his erection, and he genuinely feared that his bones might shatter under the pressure of holding back the gush his body ached for.

“Emma,” he gasped as her mouth closed over him.

And then she sucked, molding her tongue to his ridges, tasting him. Drawing him deeper into her mouth until his hips rolled involuntarily, seeking release that felt shockingly imminent. He didn’t want to come this way. It was too fast, too one-sided. She deserved better.

“Emma.” His voice broke as his control nearly snapped. “Please. I’m begging you—”

Her head lifted, and she raised her brows. “Was I not doing it right? Sorry, I could—”

“You were doing it right,” he growled. “Too right. I’m about to lose my mind.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Then I should keep going?”

For the love of God. “No. Please.”

If that wasn’t a mixed message, he didn’t know what was. But she interpreted it her own way and climbed his body to settle her hips at the juncture of his, wiggling experimentally until the tip of his erection was snug against her wet heat.

A primal instinct nearly overtook him, urging him to push upward. But he funneled every ounce of will into resisting because… he didn’t know why, but it seemed like he should.

His eyelids slammed closed as she kissed him, teasing him with her tongue as she dipped her hips, wetting his tip and then withdrawing.

“James,” she murmured. “Look at me.”

God help him, he did. Her blue eyes, darkened with passion, captured his, and the moonlight played with her hair as she manacled his wrists, holding them against the sand. Slowly, slowly she eased her body downward, taking him into her center millimeter by aching millimeter, and still she didn’t look away. When he was fully sheathed, she said his name again and clenched her muscles, holding him inside her for a perfect moment of union.

Something tore open in his chest, spilling warmth through his body that wasn’t at all sexual and came with a side of rawness tinged with danger he couldn’t explain, but it didn’t matter because his voice didn’t work anyway. Everything started and ended with Emma. She was curse and cure, all rolled into one enigmatic, unsolvable puzzle.

And then she started to move. Her hips rolled and bucked, sheathing and unsheathing him, in a rhythm that matched the surf. Pressure and heat built, spiraling on itself in a double helix of pleasure, and her gaze stayed latched to his as she drove them both into a frenzy.

He wanted… more. He wanted to touch her, to make her feel all the things she was making him feel. To ask if she was experiencing something that was nearly divine in its glory. But he couldn’t because he didn’t understand what was happening well enough himself to articulate it.

Relentlessly, she drove him toward release. She wasn’t gentle. She didn’t make it nice and sweet. It was a brutal stripping away of all the things he’d have sworn he knew about himself. And then with a cry, she came, contractions rippling down his length until it triggered his own orgasm. She collapsed against his chest, and he found his voice as he gripped her hips, emptying himself into her with a hoarse groan.

Empty. Because she’d taken far more than he’d meant to give, and instead of gathering up a bit of her light for himself, he feared he’d transferred some of the black part of his soul to her. Because it wasn’t as dark all at once.

But he couldn’t let go. He clung to her, holding her tight against his heaving torso as the waves crashed over their still joined bodies, and he experienced a moment of genuine, unexpected peace. Somehow it had turned out to be a spiritual experience after all, and he wanted to do it again as soon as possible.

That was just one of many problems that had no solution.

Dex solved the easiest problem first—the lack of clothing for a very naked woman—by giving Emma his shirt. It hit her midthigh and covered her enough to get her back to her hotel room without exposing her girl bits, as long as she didn’t raise her arms.

They walked in tandem along the shore until they reached the edge of the resort, stopping just shy of the rocks that marked the boundaries. They didn’t talk, which suited him since he didn’t have any clue what he’d say. All he had were questions—what came next? For example.

He hated questions like that. Hated the churn of uncertainty in his gut. She’d asked for a vacation fling, and he’d given her one. Another question—what more did she expect? Surely not a bunch of poetry and flowers and an invitation to sleep in his bed, did she?

What did she want from him?

His agitation rose the longer they stood there at the rocks, and she gazed up at him, blinking those baby blues. He had to do something so he could get out of here.

So he kissed her on the forehead and sent her up the path toward the resort pool with a lame, “See you later.”

Cursing at his clumsy extraction, he waited for the recriminations, tears, regrets, pleas.

But she didn’t do any of that and waved over her shoulder without a backward glance. He watched her go and closed his unhinged mouth. Had she really just participated in the same mind-blowing experience he had and then left? Like it was a onetime deal, and he was obsessing over it for no reason?

Looked like the joke was on him.

Fine. That’s what he’d wanted. One time, no regrets, no one gets hurt. He could go home and finally get some sleep now that he’d burned off his attraction to Emma. He’d nailed her; they were done.

It did not go down that way.

The moment he crawled into bed, her scent invaded his nose, and an image unfolded in his head of her poised over him at that moment just before she plunged down on him. Instantly, he went so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Cursing, he vaulted out of bed and took a very cold, very long shower that did not ease his frustration. At some point, Evan banged on the wall. Yeah, it was late and the pipes in their ancient bungalow rattled. So what? Couldn’t a guy shower in peace around here?