Since I Saw You (14 page)

It was too much. He couldn’t take any more. His cock couldn’t. He grasped it and pumped, his intent single-minded. His rough moan strained his throat as he fell over the edge and began to ejaculate. Lin’s cries of bliss fractured and turned to moans as ropes of white semen fell onto her heaving breasts and ribs. He couldn’t stop it, the claws of pure pleasure clutching at him, ripping at him.

When he came back to himself, he was leaning down over her on his knees, one hand supporting himself on the upholstered headboard, the other still pumping his supersensitive cock. A few more thick drops of semen fell on Lin’s nipple. For several seconds, he struggled to recover, the only sounds in the still room that of their combined soughing, erratic breaths. Their blended pants joined them somehow, the connection remaining even when both of them began to slow.

•   •   •

Lin lay there, completely undone, melted by blasting pleasure. Neither of them spoke when he finally moved, leaning back onto his knees. He rapidly unwound the band from her wrists, freeing her.

“I’ll be right back,” he said gruffly. She didn’t have any strength to protest against his getting off the bed and walking toward the bathroom. He returned a moment later with a washcloth and a box of tissues. He tossed the tissues onto the bedside table and sat down next to her.

“That feels good,” she murmured as he gently moved the warm, damp cloth over her skin.

“You’re not mad at me?” he asked, his brow quirked upward as he attended to his task of carefully cleaning her right breast.

“Mad at you?” she asked, confused.

“For this,” he clarified under his breath, nodding to his task of washing her.

“I’m not as much of a neat freak and perfectionist as everyone seems to think I am.”

He glanced up and met her stare. “Funny.”

“What?”

“I told Ian much the same thing.”

For once, his reference to his brother didn’t fracture her complete attention on him. “It was very erotic,” she said in a hushed tone. “And I did tell you I wanted to watch you come.”

Her core clenched yet again in desire when she saw his sheepish smile. She smiled back. The moment struck her as sublimely sweet, even more so because it was in direct contrast to Kam’s typical raw, primal intensity.

After he’d cleaned her, he dried her with a few tissues. Then he came down next to her on the bed. The air against her damp, naked skin had chilled her, but Kam was like a cozy fire. She sighed in satisfaction when he rolled her into his arms and her cheek pressed against a dense pectoral muscle. She nestled her nose and lips in the crook of his shoulder and neck, thinking of how good it felt, how right the fit. He smoothed her hair back off her face and continued to stroke it.

“It’s straight tonight. Your hair,” she heard him say.

“It’s dry outside.”

“I can’t decide how I like it better. Curly or straight.”

She pressed her face to his chest and planted a kiss. She liked the sensation of crisp male hair and thick, smooth male skin against her lips. “I hate when it goes wild.”

“Why? You look pretty with it curling around your face.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, stroking his biceps, wondrous at the density of the muscle, the curving shape. “I can hear your heart beat,” she said after a moment of silence.

“What’s it telling you?”

She listened carefully, taking his idle question seriously. She absorbed the strong, steady beat. “That you’re a very healthy man who is quite content at the moment?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” he asked, and she heard the smile in his voice.

“Telling you,” she whispered, her mouth moving against his skin. She closed her eyes and purred when he kneaded the nape of her neck with his fingertips. “Who will you use for a test subject when you do a test of your biofeedback mechanism?”

“I don’t know. What about you?”

Her eyes blinked open. “Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Yes,” he stated unequivocally.

“Well . . . if you need me . . .”

His low grunt as he leaned down to kiss the top of her head seemed to say,
Isn’t that obvious?
She smiled. It was a nice, having him tell her he needed her even in such an indirect way.

“Did Ian tell you that I’m going to move into an apartment in his building?” Kam rumbled.

“Yes. We have things arranged so that you can move in tomorrow morning, if you like.”

“I know, he told me. Will you come by in the afternoon?”

“I’ll be working on a project that I have to get done before leaving town on Monday for a couple of nights in San Francisco,” she murmured.

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” he said disapprovingly. “Don’t you ever take time off?”

“It’s a special circumstance,” she lied. She often worked on the weekend, although this really was an emergency situation. “I even had to ask some of the support staff to come in to help me finish. And then we have the dinner tomorrow night with Jason Klinf,” she reminded him.

For some reason, it made her feel guilty when Kam chastised her for working too much, which was ridiculous. Somehow, her work had gotten all mixed up in her head with her feelings for Ian. Maybe that’s why she was so sensitive talking about it to Kam. Maybe she
should
be ashamed of how dedicated she’d been in the past years to her work; how dedicated she’d been to a man who didn’t return her feelings.

It really was pretty pitiful on her part, she realized irritably.

“It’ll only take an hour or two to program the device for your body,” he said. She lifted her head and gave him a doubtful glance. “If I tell you it’s a work task, will that convince you?” he added dryly. “The Gersbach demonstration is on Wednesday, and you’ll be out of town on Tuesday.”

She thought there was a good chance Angus would arrive tomorrow afternoon and wanted to see his reaction to seeing the dog firsthand, so maybe Kam’s proposition was a good thing.

“Okay, I suppose I could fit it in . . .”

She was distracted by the sound of Kam’s stomach growling. She gave him an amused glance. He looked very appealing lying naked on her bed, his head on her pillow, his dark hair mussed and falling onto his forehead.

“You haven’t eaten?” she asked him.

He shook his head, his sexy lips tilted in amusement. “You?”

“No. I was going to when I got home, but then . . .”

“You made a meal out of me instead,” he muttered dryly. A flash of heat went through her at his reference and the erotic memory it evoked. “Can I take you to dinner somewhere?” he asked.

“Do you really want to get up and get dressed?”

“It depends.” She gave him a querying glance. “On whether or not you’re going to let me back in your bed after dinner. If not, I’d just as soon stay here and not forsake my claim.”

She laughed. His brows quirked and he palmed her jaw, running his fingers gently over her smiling lips.

“You have a very gentle touch when you want to,” she said, his fingertips moving along with her lips.

“Does that surprise you?”

Her smile faded as she considered him soberly.

“No,” she said at last. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

•   •   •

They cleaned up and dressed, then went downstairs. There was a nice restaurant in her building’s lobby. When the host seated them at a cozy booth, Lin started to sit across from Kam. He grabbed her hand, however, and pulled her into the seat next to him. The host gave them a rather smug, patronizing grin, which Kam quelled immediately with a glare.

“Have you been dancing a long time?” he asked after they’d placed their orders and the waiter had left them alone.

“No. I just started it as a hobby four years ago.”

He gave her a sideways glance that made her go warm. “You look like you were born doing it.”

She smiled, flattered. “Thanks. My grandmother wouldn’t have liked my learning traditional Chinese dance. She would have hated knowing about the Kung Fu classes I took several years back. That was both traditional
and
inelegant—or at least Grandmamma would have thought so,” she said, and laughed. “I actually kept both hobbies from her in the last years of her life, which made me feel terrible. It was ballet Grandmamma encouraged. My mother, on the other hand, holds my Chinese dance hobby up to our family as a stellar accomplishment.” She gave Kam a wry grin. “My
only
one, mind you, because I botch my Chinese, I don’t work on my cooking enough, and worst of all, I’m still not married to a nice Chinese doctor.”

Kam smiled. “Your mother and grandmother sound really different.”

Lin rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.” She looked over at him when he placed his hand on her thigh. She’d pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater after they’d washed up earlier. She could feel the heat of his hand through the denim as he moved it up and down, squeezing lightly as if he was experimenting with the sensation of her flesh in jeans.

“Tell me then.”

“Okay, I’ll try,” she said. His touch was distracting. It had the paradoxical effect of both lulling her and exciting her. “My grandparents and my mother were born in Hong Kong. For my grandparents, America truly was the promised land, and they totally embraced US culture when they immigrated. My grandmother especially was a very chic, modern woman. My mother never really seemed to assimilate here, though. My grandparents couldn’t understand why she was so resentful and withdrawn. It was a constant thorn in my grandmother’s side. She couldn’t comprehend why mother felt so out of place, when Grandmamma militantly embraced it and loved the life she built for herself here.”

“So obviously your grandmother wouldn’t have condoned your participating in traditional Chinese dance or anything else Chinese.”

“Oh no. Grandmamma wanted both a very westernized daughter and grandaughter. She got her way in my case.”

“But not in your mother’s?”

“No. Not in my mother’s,” Lin said, giving him a quick, sad smile.

“What happened between your mother and grandmother?” Kam asked.

“My mother rebelled against Grandmamma. She swung in the opposite direction, coming to despise Western ways and becoming extremely traditional. It was pretty confusing for me when I was little. We all lived in the same house together. My mother started insisting I speak Chinese, for instance, which I’d never learned, having been born here. She wanted to send me to a Chinese school and only eat Chinese food. It infuriated Grandmamma. Mother and Grandmamma officially went to war.”

“And you were their battleground.”

Lin blinked at his grim intensity. “Yes. That’s a pretty apt description. Although probably misleading in one respect. I never resented my grandmother. We were always close, and had this natural connection from the very beginning. I think my mother might have felt like an outsider in that respect, which always makes me sad to consider. After my grandfather died, my parents decided to leave the States. Grandmamma saw my mother’s choice as a betrayal.” She paused as the waiter brought their drink orders. “It only made matters worse that they planned to live in Taiwan, near my father’s family instead of near either of my grandparents’ relatives. Grandmamma absolutely refused to let them take me. I was nine at the time. Grandmamma threatened to take my mother to court, although she must have been bluffing about her likelihood of winning custody.”

“And so your parents agreed to leave you behind?” Kam asked, frowning.

She laughed softly. “You didn’t know my grandmother. Ask Ian. She was a force to be reckoned with. Besides, it’s common for Asians to want their children educated in the States, and so Grandmamma had that as her trump card. Even my traditional mother and father couldn’t deny
that
was a desirable outcome.”

They paused in talking when their waiter brought them their salads.

“Do you see your parents often?” Kam asked when they were alone again.

“Once a year. They never return here. Maybe there are too many bad memories for my mother.” He gave her thigh a final squeeze and lifted his hand to begin eating. She sensed him studying her in the silence that followed.

“You miss them, don’t you,” he stated, rather than asked, after a moment.

“Yes,” she said quietly, picking up her fork. “To this day, I don’t think my mother understands how affected I was when they left. I don’t wish I’d gone with them necessarily. I love my life here. It’s just that my mom sort of looks at it in black-and-white terms. I’m an American, I live a similar lifestyle to Grandmamma’s, so I must be a clone of Grandmamma. In her mind, I ‘chose’ Grandmamma and everything she represents over her.” Lin sighed. “I didn’t ‘choose’ anything.”

“You were a little kid.”

“Right. But I’m an adult now, and my mother carries on seeing Grandmamma instead of me. She disapproves of my choices and automatically assumes I disapprove of her and my father’s,” she reflected. She forked her salad. “I
don’t
,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “I just want them to be happy. But I can’t seem to convince them—especially my mother—of that.

“Family, huh?” she said after a pause, feeling embarrassed when she realized how much she’d been going on about herself. It was strange, but even though Kam didn’t talk a lot, he was very easy to talk
to
. “What about you? You mentioned not going back to your residency when your mother became ill,” she said after she’d swallowed some salad. “You must have been close to her.”

“I was. She was an easy woman to love.”

She set down her salad fork slowly, studying his bold profile as he ate. “That’s a lovely thing for a son to say about his mother.”

He shrugged. “It’s true.”

“You must miss her,” she said quietly.

“We were all each other had in the world.”

“But now you have Lucien and Ian,” she said quietly after a moment.

“There’s no such thing as instant families, but yeah. I guess there’s some truth to that.” He gave her a flashing glance as he chewed.

“What?” she asked, sensing he wanted to say something.

“Ian is more family to you than he is to me,” he said before taking a swig of ice water. “Your work is your life. That’s what everyone says, anyway. Noble Enterprises became your family.”