Darkness (31 page)

“You must work out a lot,” she said as their eyes met, and knew she sounded idiotic even as the words left her mouth. But the thing was, she was so intoxicated by the thought of what they were getting ready to do that she wasn’t quite thinking straight.

The slightest of smiles curved his mouth. “Some.” His voice was gravelly and low. “Did I mention I want you like hell?” What she read in his eyes made her shiver.

Before she could reply, he leaned toward her and kissed her, his hand sliding along her cheek to bury itself in her hair. The touch of his mouth was a total aphrodisiac for her now. She kissed him back like she would die if she didn’t and felt a hot, intense throbbing pulse to life between her legs. Reveling in the fact that she could touch him at will, she pushed her fingers through the crispness of his chest hair, stroked his wide pecs, slid her hands up over the bulging muscles of his upper arms and along the firmness of his broad shoulders. She felt her bones dissolve at the feel of his chiseled body beneath her hands—and at the intensity of his response to her touch. His breath seemed to rattle in his throat. His body grew harder, hotter. His kisses scalded her mouth. Everywhere they touched she burned.

She let him ease her back down onto the silky gray expanse of the sleeping bag as the delicious feelings surging through her turned into a tidal wave of need.

“Gina.” Leaning over her as she lay flat on her back looking up at him, he smoothed her hair away from her face in a gesture that was surprisingly tender. Then he took her mouth in a hot, lush kiss and slipped a hand beneath her shirt to find her breast. She could feel the whole hard-muscled length of him stretched out on his side next to her, and the weight of the leg he’d thrown over her thighs. She could feel the body heat he radiated, the brush of his bare skin. She could feel the slide of his hand up her rib cage. His touch was electric, searing her skin.

“Cal,” she whispered against his lips as his hand covered her breast, and she gave a little gasp as her nipple tightened and her breast surged into the hardness of his palm. Her body pulsed with need as he fondled her, caressing her breasts like a man who knew what he was doing. He was shoving her shirt up out of his way and kissing a blazing-hot trail down the side of her neck when a not particularly welcome thought occurred to her, penetrating the steam fogging her brain. On a ragged little laugh she said, “Oh, God, I don’t even know if Cal’s your real name.”

“It is.” Her breasts were bared to him now. He’d lifted his head to look at them, and as he shifted his gaze to meet her eyes her world went slightly out of focus at the intensity of the arousal she saw in them.

“Is there more? Like, say, a last name?” She was determined to get an answer even as her mind threatened to shut down to everything except the way he was making her feel.

“James MacArthur Callahan. I go by Cal.” The thickness of his voice, the way he was looking at her, threatened to undo her completely. His eyes gleamed with sexual intent. His face was tight with it. His mouth was hard with it. So was his body.

She was shaky with excitement, breathing way too fast, and so hot for him she suddenly understood how spontaneous combustion might work. Long-fingered and dark against her pale skin, his hand curved around her breast. She knew what he was doing: the same thing he had done before. He was holding her breast ready for his mouth. Only this time she was going to let it happen. Her nipples were puckered and tingling. She wanted his mouth on her so much that she trembled.

“Cal.” There was something else she needed to know first.

Leaning down, he just grazed her nipple with his lips: a tease, a promise. The jolt of sensation that went through her at that featherlight touch was unreal. Her nipples instantly hardened into tight little points. She barely managed to hold back a moan. As he lifted his head, her back arched in a futile attempt to keep her breasts in contact with his mouth. She went all hot and liquidy inside.

“Um?” He looked down at her with hungry, heavy-lidded eyes. He was breathing hard. Twin flags of color rode high on his cheekbones.

She took a steadying breath. Oh, God, he’d almost made her forget what she’d been about to ask. Looming above her, he shifted his gaze to watch the rise and fall of her breasts with concentrated interest. His body was taut and primed for sex. She could feel the leashed power in him, the latent strength. She could feel the carnal vibes he was giving off. Heat raced through her like a flash fire. Deep inside, she felt her body clench. It was all she could do not to squirm with excitement beneath the heavy leg that was pinning her down.

“You’re not married, are you?” Her voice was faintly unsteady.

“Nope. No significant other. No sexually transmitted diseases. No condom, though. Is that a problem?”

She shook her head and sucked in more air. Shirtless, with the lamplight flickering over his body, he was the embodiment of practically every sexy dream she’d ever had, and her heart beat faster just from looking at him.

“Anything else you feel the need to ask me about right now?” The words were polite. His voice was a dangerous-sounding growl.

Gina shook her head. Her heart thundered so loudly that it was like a drumbeat in her ears. Her body was tight, pulsing, eager.

He bent his head and took her nipple in his mouth. For real this time. The scalding heat of it made her senses reel. Ripples of pleasure shot along her nerve endings. She gasped and buried her hands in the short, thick strands of his hair.

He kissed and sucked and licked until she was mindless, until she was arching up against him and moaning, and then he pulled her shirt up over her head and threw it to one side and started kissing her mouth again. Shivery with arousal, she kissed him back, loving the weight of his chest against her sensitized breasts, loving the roughness of his kiss, loving the possessive way he fondled her breasts before his hand slid down inside the sweatpants and between her legs, touching her where she most wanted to be touched.

She cried out, moving against his hand, burning, melting, absolutely on fire. Wanting more, needing more, she reached for his belt buckle, fumbled at it with fingers made clumsy by urgency, ran unsteady fingers over the rigid bulge in the front of his pants. He muttered something short and profane against her mouth and lifted himself away from her and sat up. Her eyes popped open and her fingers sank into the softness of the sleeping bag, but before she could ask him where the hell he thought he was going or what was up or anything like that, he hooked his fingers in her waistband and yanked her pants down her legs, pausing only long enough to pull off her boots before stripping her nude.

She lay propped up on her elbows on the silky gray sleeping bag, awash in golden lamplight, her tawny hair streaming down her back, her knees bent, her legs slightly raised. She felt just a little shy under his hard gaze but also incredibly turned on. He looked at her with open lust, and she found that the idea that he was seeing her naked brought its own fiery thrill. He took in every inch of her, and it was almost like she could see herself through his eyes: tousled hair, flushed face, lips swollen by his kisses; creamy round breasts with darkened, erect nipples; slim waist, flat stomach, gently curved hips; long, toned, tanned legs with a strip of fair pubic hair between.

“You’re beautiful.” His voice was hoarse. His eyes glittered at her like black diamonds.

Too turned on to answer, she murmured something wordless by way of a reply and watched him unashamedly. He’d shucked his boots and unfastened his belt buckle while he was looking at her, and the tiny sound his zipper made as he lowered it made her quake.

Then he was shedding his pants, and she saw that he was, indeed, as huge and hard as he’d felt.

Her heart pounded as if she’d been running for miles.

“Oh, my,” she breathed, and as he saw what she was looking at, a corner of his mouth ticked up in the briefest of smiles.

He leaned toward her, kissed her with a naked hunger that made her go up in flames, and bore her back down into their makeshift bed, his hands all over her, his big body pressing her down. When he had her wild for him, when she was moving beneath him and moaning and so hot, so ready, that she thought if he didn’t come into her right that very minute she would lose her mind, his mouth left hers and his body shifted. Opening her eyes, she murmured, “
Cal
,” and clutched at him in protest.

That’s when he kissed his way down her body to the cleft between her legs, and pressed his mouth to her and licked her and did other thrilling, secret things.

Until her body clenched hard. And she came, and came, and came.

She was still shaking, still shuddering, still gasping for breath, when he levered his big body on top of her and pushed himself inside her so fiercely that she cried out. He was hard and hot and filled her to capacity and then some. He took her with a single-minded ferocity that had her quaking and burning and wanting
again
, and she did the only thing she could do: wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and held on. It was the most erotic experience of her life, and the end, when it came, was so hot and intense that she thought she would die right there and then from the sheer explosive pleasure of it.

She bucked, and clung, and cried out his name. “Cal! Cal, Cal,
Cal
!”

He drove into her one final time, groaning as he found his own release. Then he held himself shuddering inside her.

Chapter Twenty-Four

S
he’d made him tremble. He was a grown-ass man, a highly trained veteran of battle campaigns, firefights, clandestine forays, and any number of life-and-death situations, to say nothing of countless rolls in the sack, and the last time he remembered trembling was when he’d lost his virginity at fifteen.

Dr. Gina Sullivan, ornithologist, college professor, uptight, angst-ridden twenty-eight-year-old widow, was by no means his type, which tended toward busty platinum blondes who liked to have a raucous good time in bed and out. She was beautiful, all right, but not in the eye-popping, head-turning way of his usual. Hers was a quieter, more refined type of beauty that Cal saw now had been sneaking up on him until finally it hit him over the head, which had happened with all the force of a baseball bat swinging for a line drive the moment he saw her naked. Then he’d realized: hers was a face and body to die for.

He’d wanted to fuck her senseless.

Instead he’d taken his time, reined himself in, been mindful of her hang-ups and history and almost certain relative lack of sexual experience, and set himself to making it good for her, first and foremost.

She’d been so hot for him, so hungry and eager, that it had been all he could do to keep himself under control. By the time she was coming hard against his mouth, his body had been screaming with the need to take her. As he’d lifted himself over her, more than ready to get down to it, his arms had trembled.

That was when, finally, he’d given up on the whole self-control thing and let his animal instincts rule.

The memory was making him hard all over again.

Right now she was sprawled on top of him, silent and sated and limp as a glove, because after he’d finished rocking her world he’d rolled with her, not wanting to crush her with his weight. The heavy mass of her hair lay across his shoulder like a blanket. He could feel the flutter of her breath just over his heart. He could feel other things, too: the swell of her tits against his chest; the small, hard points of her nipples. The brush of her sweet little bush on top of his abs. The heat between her long, sexy legs, which were open and sprawled on either side of his.

That heat was doing a number on his thought processes, to say nothing of his cock, which was assuming the approximate size and consistency of a log again. That heat was drawing his hand down from where it had been idly resting on the warm, silky skin of her back to stroke over the curve of her gorgeous ass on its way to investigating it. That heat was fogging his brain to the point where, when she stirred and braced a forearm against his chest and lifted her head to unexpectedly pin him with her big blue eyes, all he could think to say was, “Hey.”

She smiled at him. A warm, intimate, you-just-got-me-off smile that did a number on his heart rate. With her honey-colored hair spilling like a waterfall over one of her pale shoulders and her eyes all dreamy-looking from sex and her knockout body all slim naked curves painted gold by the lamplight, she looked hot enough to fuck into next week. Again.

“That was amazing,” she said. Her voice was husky and low.

“Yeah?” So he wasn’t up to making brilliant conversation. His cock was currently doing all his thinking. It was a wonder he was even able to talk.

“Yeah.”

“Glad you think so.” His hand was on her ass, palming the smooth, warm curve, and he tightened his grip and shifted her just a little so that she was lying right on top of his erection. Jesus, that felt good.

Her eyes widened as she felt him stirring under her. Her lips parted to give him a glimpse of her pretty white teeth. Then she gave a little wriggle, pressed her hips deliberately down, and—

Holy Mary Mother of God, if he got any hotter he’d catch fire.

His hand slid on down to check out that enticing heat of hers.

“Oh,” she said as his hand moved between her legs, parting her folds, stroking, exploring. He pushed two fingers inside her and was blown away by how tight she was, how hot and wet. She said “Oh” again, on a squeaky little note of surprised delight that instantly made him so big and hard that the marble monolith of the Washington Monument had nothing on him.

She closed her eyes with one of her sexy little moans that made every muscle in his body tighten, every time she did it. Then, with his fingers moving purposefully in and out, with her body undulating on top of his like she was deliberately trying to drive him out of his mind, with her panting and flushed on top of him and her nipples practically branding his chest and enough heat rising off the pair of them to steam up the air, she opened her eyes, gave him a dead-sexy look, and said in a throaty growl, “I knew there was a reason I pulled you out of the sea.”