Hoops (21 page)

He knew she was frightened. Shattering a marble mask took a lot of courage, a lot of strength. But the need in her— the need in him—was too great not to be answered.

I want you
.

He’d longed for those words, dreamed of them—to his chagrin and discomfort. But the words had echoed with so much confusion.

He stripped off the rest of his clothes and lay beside her quickly; he’d give her no time to cool. He skimmed his hands over the warm silk of her skin, just grazing the swell of her breast as he traced her side, then down the concave line of her waist to the curve of her hip and below to the smoothness of her thigh.

He’d craved the heat of her body, the heat of her desire.

He needed it. The light touch of her fingers on his shoulders was hesitant, shy. She’d said she was scared. So was he. He moved up to meet her eyes, to let her see his weakness and let her draw strength from it.

He saw the uncertainty seep from her eyes, replaced by passion. No longer shy, her hands pressed his head down to her, where she met his mouth with lips already parted. Her tongue tantalized his, dueling and feinting before dipping deeply in a kiss that left them both breathless.

Bending over her, he trailed kisses down her throat and pressed his mouth to the trembling pulse at its base, then journeyed on. Slowly, tenderly, his lips circled the softness of her full breast. When, at last, the deliciously torturous progress was over and his lips grazed the hard, tender button, she arched under him. Closer. They had to be closer. He drew her nipple deep into his mouth as she pressed against him.

Almost languidly he paid the same loving attention to her other breast, circling her higher and higher. But this time there would be no vertigo, no fear of heights, not as long as she held on to him.

His long body settled between her thighs with a sigh drawn from both of them. When his gentle hand found her moist and heated for him, her hips surged in a response that nearly pushed him over the edge.

“I . . . I want to go slow for you, Carolyn.”

His breath, ragged and shallow, stroked her breast with his words. She could feel him throbbing against her thigh. She twisted her hips to bring him closer to her and heard him groan.

“I don’t know if I can wait,” he gasped.

“Don’t wait.” Her fingers found the base of his spine and urged him toward her while her hips invited. “Now, C.J.”

“Carolyn... Lord—” Abruptly he moved away from her. For an instant she felt only disorientation and loss. Then small sounds came together in explanation of his movement. Protection—something she’d nearly forgotten. The gesture drove home to her how much he cared.

When he came back to her welcoming arms, he held just enough control to enter her slowly, to watch the widening of her eyes as the length of him filled her. She gave a small cry when he pulled back, and tried to hold him inside her. But he had only withdrawn to stroke into her again, deeper. Again and again. Slowly at first.

“C.J.” She wanted to tell him so many things, but she could only whisper. She wanted to tell him how his taste, his smell, his feel, his look filled her dreams. Those were the things she wanted to revel in, to relish when they made love—oh, yes, in her dreams she had always wanted to make love with him.

But he took all her senses reaching out to capture him and turned them inside her. So everything she was and could be was focused on the sensations he was creating in her.

Tension coiled tighter and tighter in her with each quickening thrust of his body. She strained to reach some goal she was certain was unattainable, but still his sweat-filmed body—and her own—drove her toward it.

And then they were there. Together. Spinning through waves of pleasure. From far away, but very near, she heard him call her name. And she answered.

“C.J.!”

It was astonishment, wonder, ecstasy and even a little fear. It was pure feeling.

Slowly she glided toward earth through this foreign atmosphere where nothing as coherent as thought existed. She didn’t want to move—ever. How could she move when she wasn’t sure where her flesh ended and his began, and felt no reason to find out? She had no sensation of his body on top of hers, but only of the two of them joined. She felt his heartbeat gradually regulate. She wasn’t sure hers ever would.

Sometime she would have to think about what had happened, how it had changed her. For certainly she was changed. But for now she drifted in happiness.

When he could move, he eased most of his weight off her, but couldn’t bear to leave the comfort of her body. He kept one leg across hers and claimed her rib cage with one long arm. His head found the curve between her neck and shoulder so his lips could always take the taste of her skin.

Nestling closer, she remembered her idle thought about how she might fit with someone so tall, and smiled to herself. They fit perfectly. She shifted a little to feel more of the delicious friction of his skin, still warm and slightly damp, against hers.

“Don’t do that.” The low growl into her shoulder was barely intelligible.

A stiletto stab of fear pierced her contentment. Did he regret it? “Why not?”

He lifted his head to look into her eyes, with their amber darkened to a passion-filled glow. “You’ll make me want you again.”

“Is that bad?”

Propping himself on one elbow he studied her. There was no coyness in her. She really wanted to know. So did he. He stroked the damp hair back from her temple. “It’s not if you don’t think so.”

She lifted her head to quickly kiss the nearest part of him, which happened to be his chin. His grin flashed into existence, then faded to seriousness.

“You know this doesn’t solve everything, Carolyn.” Again he stroked the hair at her temple. Slipping deeper into her hair, his fingers found the comb caught in thick, twisted strands. Disentangling it would require concentration.

“There are still things we need to straighten out between us.” His fingers gently tugged at a stubborn lock of hair. “About Ashton. About Frank and the team.” He looked down into her gaze that hadn’t left his face, and his voice dropped to a husky note. “About you and me.”

“I know.”

He saw the single crease in her brow and felt a clutch in his gut. He couldn’t let her slip away from him now. He wouldn’t. For four long months he’d wanted her. Now he knew he would continue to want her. The ache for her wasn’t sated. Would it ever be?

“We’re going to work those things out. All of them.” The comb came free of the last silky knot, and he tossed it aside. “Do you understand, Carolyn?”

His kiss prevented any answer. It was an openmouthed demand that she answered readily with no consultation with reason.

As long as he didn’t regret this, she understood only that they would work out anything. She told him so with the means of communication he left her. Her lips softened under his. Her tongue made bold forays to discover the sensitive caverns of his mouth. Her hands stroked and clasped. Her body writhed and tempted.

“Oh, God, Carolyn.” He pulled back while his lungs made valiant attempts to pull in air. “You feel so damn good. You make me . . . you make me forget everything.” He grinned in mild self-mockery. “All the lectures I’ve given the guys on their responsibilities and I nearly didn’t—”

She shushed him with her fingers on his lips. “But you did.”

The self-mockery remained, but it didn’t totally hide from either of them the huskiness in his voice. “Sometimes I’m not exactly levelheaded around you, you know.”

“Then I’ll be the levelheaded one,” she said with careful lightness.

“I’m not sure I’d like that, either.”

Some instinct told her this emotion was something new to C.J., too, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the volatile commodity. “There’s just no pleasing some people,” she murmured as her fingers trailed down his rib cage to his lean hip and onto his thigh.

“Oh, yes, there is. At least this person.” He covered her body with his and showed her just how much she did please him.

Chapter Ten

Carolyn woke with C.J.’s chest as her pillow, C.J.’s body as her blanket.

To get enough room for his long body, he’d stretched nearly diagonally on the bed. She curled against one side. It was the most wonderful sleeping position she’d ever found.

She smiled and shifted slowly so that she wouldn’t wake him. She wanted to watch him sleep. A stubble of light whiskers showed in the diluted sunlight of the February morning. The grooves his grin carved were just faint echoes of white in his cheeks. His strong mouth showed a sensitivity she’d never seen before. His mop of multishaded hair was tousled like a little boy’s.

But the body exposed by the covers drawn down nearly to his waist looked nothing like a boy’s. She remembered his broad shoulders deepening the shadows in the stairwell of Ripon Hall before he’d kissed her. And the way they’d looked in that sleeveless sweatshirt the day she’d interrupted practice. And the way they’d felt in the gym last week and again last night.

Softly she feathered her fingers across the collarbone that stood out in high relief under his taut skin. Boldly she touched her lips to the webbing of muscle that connected his shoulder and arm. Her tongue made dizzying patterns on his skin.

C.J. woke with an unexpected heat emanating from his shoulder and pulsing through him. Only one person, one dream, had caused that sensation. He groaned out her name before he was totally conscious.

“I’m sorry I woke you.”

She was real. And she looked adorably guilty, even as her hand trailed down his chest to taunt his male nipple into reaction.

“You can wake me this way anytime you want.” His breath was harsh, irregular, but he wasn’t beyond thought. Not quite. Not yet.

“Can I?”

To his ears, she sounded distracted, maybe preoccupied by the way the interconnecting muscles over his ribs contracted at her lightest touch. Still, a persistent mist of anxious thought tugged at him. It felt so damn good, but did she want to do this? Did she really want to touch him with so much tenderness? It didn’t seem possible.

“Carolyn?”

“Hmm?” She’d just discovered how easily she could push the covers aside to explore the lean hips and long legs so artfully displayed by those indecent gym shorts she’d seen him wear.

“Carolyn!”

The haze of passionate absorption in the intricacies of his body was too thick to allow for anything more than another murmur. Sitting up quickly, he grasped both of her wandering hands in one of his and used the other to take hold of her chin to look into her eyes. The amber glow was there, glazed with the heat of desire and a wondering kind of triumph.

She smiled at him, then leaned against him to flick her tongue enticingly across his lips as she freed her hands from his unresisting grip. Stroking down his chest, she followed the light covering of hair that narrowed to a line at his navel before flaring out.

He dropped back against the pillow, letting the agonizing tenderness of her touch wash over him. Last night she had opened herself to him, given herself to him. Now she took. She staked her claim to his body. Maybe she already had his soul.

A shudder racked C.J. as her exploration with fingers, mouth and tongue continued down the elongated muscles of his thighs. When she got to his knee, she stopped to examine the lines of scars.

“Oh! I should have thought. Does it hurt when you... I mean last night…”

The nerves around the scars were dead. He knew they were, but they sent off crazy flashes of sensation under her touch that made it very difficult to focus on her words. “No. It didn’t hurt.” His half laugh, half moan was at his own expense. “It hurts a great deal more when I don’t.”

Satisfied, she rubbed her mouth across his knee as if to heal past hurts, then traveled on. He was so tight, every muscle clenched, every sinew tense.

She remembered what Rake had said about how hard it was for C.J. just to sit back and let someone else do the doing. But he was letting her do the loving now. Perhaps he just needed the reassurance that someone else would do the doing, the loving, if he didn’t.

Her tongue circled his ankle bone, and C.J.’s body contorted in an effort not to explode.

“Carolyn! For God’s sake.”

She answered his plea by moving up his body with a string of hot, moist kisses. His urgent hands tugged at her shoulders, and he started to roll her onto her back, but she resisted, and he understood. She rose above him, and he gripped her hips with a gravelly groan. This time she was the one who took him inside her.

“Carolyn. I have wanted you forever.”

He was sheathed in her, pulsing with the warmth of her surrounding him.

“Forever,” she repeated with a moan.

As the crazy, tightening ascent built, he held on to her for dear life unaware of her fingers digging just as tightly into him.

* * * *

Picking her way along a slush-filled path, Carolyn listened to Helene grousing about Marches that came in like lambs.

“It thaws just enough to cover the entire landscape in slush and mud, and then—just when you get a whiff of spring—wham, we’re back to blizzards. I’m going to retire to Bermuda.”

They’d left an alumni tea at Stewart’s office and were headed across campus in the damp chill of dusk to Carolyn’s car so that she could drive Helene home.

“You’ve said that every March for three years that I know of, Helene,” Carolyn said with a laugh. “I don’t think you’ve ever even visited Bermuda. And what would Stewart do without you?”

Carolyn looked up in time to see an astonished pleasure cross the older woman’s face. Was what she thought of Helene and Stewart’s relationship so important to the older woman? Had she—and possibly Stewart, too—read into Carolyn’s words and actions a disapproval she’d never meant to show?

Never meant to
show
. But did she disapprove? She remembered the dinner at Angelo’s and C.J.’s suggesting that when Stewart was ready he’d have someone to love him. Then, she’d thought how inappropriate Helene seemed for a university president. Now, she could only see how well the woman suited Stewart.