Nauti Temptress (26 page)

“Fuck, yes,” he snarled behind her, straightening, both hands gripping her hips firmly as he began to move harder, faster behind her.

He dragged his cock fully from the gripping channel, only to return immediately, fucking her to the hilt as an agonizing ecstasy tore through her, raking her senses with burning force.

Each hard thrust pressed the dildo deeper inside her, as each retreat lessened the pressure. Harsh groans spilled from her lips as each rasp of the vibrator’s tip against inner muscles connected directly to her clit had her begging—begging, pleading with the rapidly increasing pace of the strokes of his cock.

Eve couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She wasn’t going to survive.

“Fuck. Eve . . .” The growl of male ecstasy came as she felt herself unraveling.

Sensation. Agony. A pleasure that bordered on insanity.

Her orgasm tore through her, melting her senses as her pussy, the spasming muscles of her milking anus, the hard throb of her clit exploded in excruciating sensation. She was flung into rapture. Brutal waves of agonizing pleasure battered her senses as each nerve ending seemed to explode, sparking a conflagration inside her body that wiped her mind and sent her hurtling through chaos.

Fear could have dragged her back. The complete destruction of her senses could have been weakened by an inborn sense of survival that would have driven the sensual creature exploding in rapture back into the confines of her body.

But she wasn’t alone.

Brogan flew beside her, his spirit wrapping around her, infusing her, holding her secure in a world of blinding, overwhelming ecstasy.

She was crying. She could feel it, sense her own tears as the exploding pleasure threw them higher, harder, and bound her closer to the man leading her through each chaotic storm of rapture that tore through her.

The feel of his release spurting against the naked nerve endings inside her anus was an added pulse of sensation, another explosion.

“Mine,” he snarled, his lips at her cheek, the growl surging through her with another pulse of sensation. “Tell me, Eve. Tell me.”

“Yours. Yours,” she said in a sob. “Oh, God, Brogan. I love you. I love you . . .”

He owned her.

EIGHTEEN

Brogan awoke with Eve cradled in his arms, the
warmth of her naked body invoking a response he was certain he wasn’t quite ready for.

Hell, he wasn’t ready to face the warmth he could feel moving through him. The warmth threatened to overtake him and claim parts of him he hadn’t known existed until Eve. He felt drained, physically and emotionally, but his cock was assuring him it was more than ready to rumble.

He smiled against her hair at the thought. Her cheek was cradled against his heart, his arms holding her snugly to him, and for a few short minutes he actually contemplated going back to sleep. Until he felt her breathing pattern change, and he swore he felt her wake up.

There was an awareness that he could feel moving through him, a gentleness, an initial confusion and then a feeling of contentment and satisfaction.

“I didn’t expect you to be here when I woke,” she muttered with a drowsy smile against his chest as the fingers of one hand curled against the mat of hair that covered his chest. “Do you know how good it feels, Brogan, to awaken with you?”

He knew, because he felt the same. He didn’t just feel his own contentment, but he knew he was feeling hers as well. It had to be hers, because it was completely different from what he knew contentment felt like.

It was gentle; it was innocent. And Brogan knew he had no innocence left inside him. His innocence had been ripped out of him the day he learned his child had been deliberately destroyed before it could even begin to live. An innocent life barely formed because a condom had failed and had somehow acquired a tiny, tiny hole at the tip.

It had been so long ago, he should have forgotten it by now.

It had been years ago, and it still felt like yesterday.

“What?” she asked, watching him closely.

“What?” He shook his head, confused.

“That look on your face,” she told him. “What were you thinking?”

He breathed out heavily. “I was engaged once.”

“The fiancée who aborted your baby?” She nodded, her palm flattening against his chest comfortingly.

Pushing her hair back from her cheek, he watched as it fell about her face and over her shoulder.

“Like you, my father wasn’t married to my mother,” he told her softly, his fingers tangling in her hair as he felt a sense of comfort wrapping around him. “Like yours, my mother struggled—until I was five, when she was murdered by a drug-crazed teenager who had stolen a gun from home and came to the diner she worked at looking for a meal.” He shook his head bitterly. “If he had asked her, she would have bought him a meal, but he asked the owner first. When the old bastard wouldn’t feed him, he pulled the gun and shot Mom in the head. Then he turned back to the owner and asked again. He got the meal. He sat and ate it as Mom bled out on the floor and the customers in the diner rushed to save themselves.”

“I’m so sorry, Brogan,” she whispered, her compassion wrapping around him.

A bitter smile tugged at his lips as he let his hand cup her cheek for a moment, drawing in the gentleness that was so much a part of her.

“I want you to understand,” he explained. “As I said, I was five. My father didn’t know I existed. When Child Services showed up on his doorstep with me, he looked down, and I saw disgust curl his lip when he said, ‘Hell, I paid her to abort the little bastard.’”

Her eyes widened in outraged pain.

“He took me in, though.” He sighed. “Two weeks later I was in a military school four states away. I came back to Somerset during the holidays and for summers and stayed with my aunt until she died in a car crash when I was sixteen.”

“What an abrupt change from a loving home to a cold, emotionless world,” she whispered, her emerald eyes dark with distress, with banked anger at the thought of his father’s cruelty.

And yes, it had been cruelty.

“I was eighteen and working with the FBI as an informant against a particular clique of students I was a part of when John David Bryce was assigned as the director of the bureau office I reported to.” There was something about the fact that he was holding her, his hands stroking her shoulders, his fingertips relishing the feel of her soft flesh, that dimmed some of the fury he usually felt at those early memories.

“What happened?” she asked.

He snorted at the question. “I was the pride of my regional office because of the information I was reporting on a small, select group of students creating their own homeland militia group. I was pulling in information on their parents, political and military figures, their sharing of information and top-secret files. And when John David, or JD as I usually call him, came into the office he felt the need to announce the fact that I was his son. Pride and all that.” He grunted in disgust. “Thirteen years of being ignored by the bastard and suddenly I was his son. When graduation came I dropped out of the program and went my own way for a while. That was when I met Candy.”

The feel of her lips pressing against his shoulder soothed him, and he found he didn’t want to get pissed. He didn’t want that darkness to mar the peace he found with her.

“I missed you, Eve,” he admitted as she lifted her head and stared up at him.

Regret filled him at the memory of the pain he had caused her the week before, the feeling of betrayal he knew she felt. Hell, he didn’t blame her for feeling it.

“I missed you. More than you know, Brogan,” she admitted as his lips lowered, taking a small, lingering kiss before pulling back.

The memory of last night swept over him again. The feel of her coming for him, destroying his senses with their combined pleasure and the heat that had built between them. Even clearer, though, was the memory of her crying out her love for him, and how he’d known in that instant that the emotion that swirled and drew them together was indeed love.

Yet he hadn’t told her he loved her as well.

He’d tried. His lips had parted, the words lying ready on his tongue before instantly shrinking back in response.

As that memory tempted him, as the words waited, once again at the tip of his tongue, he found himself once again unable to utter them.

Why? What could be holding him back?

She stared up at him expectantly, waiting. She wasn’t going to ask, and she wasn’t going to beg for his love. He would give it willingly or she wasn’t going to take it at all.

She wanted more than what he was giving her. It didn’t take an extra or heightened sense of what she was thinking to figure that one out.

She was going to make him say the words, he thought, feeling his throat tighten at the thought of it. He hadn’t said those words in a hell of a lot of years. More years than he often cared to remember. He didn’t even know whether he was aware of how to say them now.

“I missed you a lot,” he tried, brushing his lips against her brow as she continued to stare back at him.

A backbone of pure steel, Timothy had once accused her. As stubborn and determined as the mountains themselves.

And she was at that. But his block against the emotion that he had lived with for so damned long was just as stubborn.

He couldn’t say it. He wanted to, but there was always the chance he could have the girl and protect his heart at the same time.

And that was important.

Eve stared back at him for long moments, feeling a hint of nerves, a bit of uncertainty, but also a great capacity to love that he was still holding inside him like a miser held on to his gold.

She wasn’t satisfied with that now. She wanted the love that he was still holding inside his soul like a captive he refused to release.

She wanted all of him, not just the parts of him that he was willing to give her right now. She wanted the heart he was so protective of, the one she knew belonged to her, yet that he kept just out of reach.

She wasn’t satisfied with just knowing he cared about her. She didn’t want to just sense those emotions held trapped inside him. They weren’t going to do her any good if they weren’t allowed to be free.

She waited.

If she didn’t get the words verbally, even though she could feel them as he stared back at her, then she wasn’t going to accept any of it. She deserved much better. She deserved all of the man she loved, not just an awareness that he could love her if he let his emotions free.

She wasn’t going to let it break her, though.

No matter how much it hurt, no matter how much she ached for him or how it would kill her to lose him, she wouldn’t let it break her pride. There was no way to keep it from breaking her heart, but the rest of her emotions were salvageable.

Besides, if she was pregnant, her child would need a mother fully capable of caring for him. If he had to do without a father, then he at least needed more than just half a mother. Or a mother who couldn’t forget that she had had to beg his father to love her.

He. She kept thinking of the baby as a he. Just as Christa, Chaya, and Kelly had claimed they had done with their daughters, she had already assigned a sex to the child she might have conceived.

As she stared up at Brogan, he laid his forehead against hers and closed his eyes as though he meant to nap a bit more this morning.

It was apparent he wasn’t going to say a damned thing.

This time she didn’t have to fight the tears back, though her chest tightened with aching regret. There were no tears filling her eyes; there was only acceptance—an acceptance tinged with bitter regret.

“It’s time for me to get up,” she told him, pretending everything was fine. “I have things to do this morning.”

Slowly, watching her carefully, he let her go.

Uncertainty flickered in his gaze, and despite having sensed it in him before, she still found that small bit of vulnerability endearing. Brogan wasn’t a man who admitted to any sort of weakness, and he would see uncertainty in any area as a weakness.

“Will I see you this evening?” she asked as she moved to the closet and pulled out a light blue casual chiffon skirt that fell just below her thighs, along with a loose matching camisole top.

“Definitely,” he answered, propping his hand on his palm as he watched her, his gray-blue eyes reflecting simmering lust. “I may even be able to get away from the job early. We could go out to dinner.”

He was willing to take her out now? Why now? Because he was afraid she wouldn’t wait until he was ready to stake his claim? Her dinner with Chatham—or Doogan, as Brogan had called him—hadn’t pleased him in the slightest.

Brogan was ready to stake a public claim on her now, while he was always willing to walk away from the more private claim.

Her jaw tightened in anger as she turned away from him and moved back to the closet, where she pulled free a pair of flat, strappy leather sandals. She was not going to let him see how hurt she was, or how angry. If he didn’t want to own her heart, then screw him; she had no problem at all trying to take it back from him.

“If I’m not back when you return, then I won’t be much longer,” she promised, fighting to keep her voice even, her tone casual.

The last thing she needed was for him to suspect her plans.

But if he thought she was going to hang around Pulaski County and watch him flit around like a buck in rut while all the women swarmed him, like they had since he’d arrived, then he was crazed. She’d be damned if she would have to deal with the smart-assed territorial women who seemed to think he was their own personal prize.

It wasn’t going to happen.

“Where will you be?” Suspicion entered his gaze as well as his voice, though maybe he was finally figuring out that things weren’t going to go all his way any longer.

“I had a job offer.” She shrugged as though it didn’t matter, while she gathered clean underclothes together before heading to the shower. “I’m going to meet with the company’s owner today so he can explain the job.”

The offer had come from another of John Walker’s friends from Boston the day before. He had enough of those to go around, it seemed. At first she hadn’t been interested, until she had talked to her mother the night before.

“Where is this job, Eve?”

Brogan could sense the ax getting ready to fall, and he could kick his own ass for letting it go this far.

Staring into his eyes moments ago, Eve had shown him more clearly than words what it would take to keep her, and he had ignored her.

Stubborn arrogance, his father called it, and now Brogan might very well pay for it.

“Where do you think?” She laughed as though he should know. As though the question were moot.

“My guess is, outside Kentucky,” he stated.

Eve turned around slowly to face him, and the answer was in her eyes.

“Boston.” She confirmed his guess. “It’s a wonderful opportunity. I’ll be managing several offices and client lists. My degree is in business administration, and there are just so few—”

“I love you, Eve. . . .”

She froze.

Shock registered on her face as she stared back at him as though she were certain she hadn’t heard right.

“What did you say?”

Rising from the bed, he moved to her. Clasping her shoulders in his hands, he stared into the naked vulnerability of her gaze.