Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) (16 page)

“How is it that you could sleep down in Sumptown, and not here?”

“I didn’t. You never woke up, that’s all.”

She leaned back on one hand, causing her body to curve so nicely before him, presenting a place on her hip where his hand would fit perfectly. “Sounds like you don’t get much rest.”

Her hair swept about her shoulders and his fingers twitched to reach for it. “Insomnia becomes a lifestyle after a while,” he said.

“There are cures for it, you know.”

His cock hardened in agreement. He needed her in bed or out of the room. Her being
on
the bed was killing him. “If you say so.”

She gave a soft growl of annoyance. “I know so.”

He gave in. He touched her hair. It was meant to be a quick, one-time gesture, but his hand slipped through her hair again and again, lifted the strands upward until the moonlight caught them, then filtered them through his fingers. Lindsay tilted her head back, sinking into the simple caress, and Jack automatically cupped his hand around her neck to give support. His thumb began gently stroking the softness of her throat. She made a low purring noise.

Too far. Don’t make this painful.

“Linds—” he whispered. Her palm passed over his mouth in a gentle request for silence, then traveled downward past his throat and across his chest.

“Linds,” he repeated uncertainly. “What are you doing…?”

Her lips moved dangerously close to his own. “What would you like me to do?”

Jack could not have her this close and not do something. “Stop me,” he said, then curling his fingers back into her hair he closed the gap between them.

The kiss was hard. Vital. And as it deepened Jack was spurred by a raw need that sent his heart racing with fear as much as lust. Again, he tried to pull back. She followed him, leaning her body over his, the soft weight of her breasts upon his chest.

“Don’t run from me, Jack,” she whispered into his mouth.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Linds.”

“You won’t. I want you, Jack. I want you.”

His fingers tightened in her hair, his other hand moving over the curve of her breast, and not gently.

His mouth still on hers he pushed her onto her back, then grabbing hold of her nightgown, he pulled it up, breaking the kiss only long enough to bring it over her head. It caught around her wrists, and straddling her Jack looked down. Her arms were bound over her head, her chest heaving, breasts bare and nipples hard.

She looked up at him in the darkness, trusting, wanting, begging him to give into his carnal instincts. He felt the rise of the caged animal inside him, the dirty inhuman thing that tore at flesh. In an instant he was off her, away from the bed, slamming his hands against the wall and leaning there, eyes shut tight.

Silence.

“Jack…”

“I can’t, Linds…I can’t undo what they did. I won’t hurt you. Not you.”

He stood there, facing the wall, teeth clenched in frustration. In humiliation.

He heard her slide from the bed
. Go, Linds. Go!

But when had she ever listened to him? Her arms slid around him, and she pressed her naked torso against his toughened back, her head resting against his shoulder blade.

“Hey,” she said softly. “Back when we were teenagers, did you know that I had a huge crush on you?”

He remembered her smiling up at him as he came up alongside her locker. “No. No, I didn’t.”

“Or, for that matter, that practically all eight hundred girls in the school did?”

He felt the hard lump inside him ease. He turned inside her arms until he was facing her, and there didn’t seem anything for it, except to let his own arms come around her, too. His back was against the wall, and she leaned against him, the two of them falling into the classic pose of smitten teenagers. “No. I didn’t know about the eight hundred, either. If I had, it would’ve made dating a lot easier.”

She made a noise. “If you’re not picky.”

His arms tightened around her. “Yeah, but I was. That’s why I didn’t know about the other eight hundred. I only had eyes for you.”

Her eyes widened and then he lost sight of them as she pressed her cheek against his chest. “That’s something the old Jack would say.”

He thumb-stroked her spine. “I’m not sure that he exists anymore, Linds. Sometimes I don’t know if he ever did.”

She pushed away from him, the fierceness of her move belied by her huge grin. “That I can prove beyond a doubt.” Naked, she ran to her walk-in closet and with a thump and a crash, hauled out a storage tub. “Come. Look.”

He came over as she stripped the lid off. “Can you see? Do you want a light?”

He shook his head in answer to her questions and in disbelief at what he saw. A box filled with him. Letters and postcards from him, framed pictures of them together and a rock the size of a cabbage.

“The atacamite. You kept this?” He crouched down and touched its roughness.

She grinned. "For my fifteenth birthday. . You remember?"

“Yeah. I’d found it down in the tunnels. Some hole in a wall. It was shoved way back on this ledge, and I don’t even know why I hauled it out. When I did, I realized that it wasn’t just any old rock—”

“Oh no,” Lindsay said and lifted it out, kneeling to set it on her lap. “Not just any old rock would do for me.”

“It wasn’t. It had bright green crystals growing on it…that are normally only found in the driest deserts. I remember wondering how it got there. It wasn’t all that valuable money-wise, those crystals grow in Arizona—”

“You telling me that I’ve been packing around a worthless rock?”

“—so why go to all the trouble of storing it away? That was the only thing down there in the hole, I checked all—” Jack stopped. She hadn’t forgotten him. Ever. This woman with all her compulsion for things to be neat and complete, had packed away a memory of him, no matter that it was heavy and awkward and probably dirty. “Why would you do this? Why keep all this when you wouldn’t even keep in touch with me?”

She rubbed the rock over and over. “After my family passed,” she whispered, “it wasn’t that I didn’t need you. It was that I needed you too much and I’d nothing to give back. That's why I shut myself off.”

Oh, Christ. She’d said it. She’d said exactly what was happening to him. He needed her memories, her grip on life, her need for
him
.

He reached for her, his hand fisted into her hair. His touchstone to reality. She would know he wanted her, but not the way she deserved. “Linds, I could do all kinds of things with you, right here, right now. I could mate with you, I could copulate, fornicate, I could…fuck you. That’s what they left me. I can’t make love to you. Do you understand?”

In answer, she set the rock back into the tub and pressed her mouth to his, stroked his tongue with hers, teased his lips with her teeth. Then she pulled back until their lips barely touched.

“Then fuck me, Jack.”

That was enough.

He hauled her up against him, tumbled the both of them back onto the bed, lifted her so she was fully on the mattress, completely at his disposal. She laid there, lips open, legs parted, her breasts—. He clamped his mouth over a hard nipple and she gasped; he sucked and the gasps deepened to moans.

He cupped his hand between her legs and stroked her wet folds, and her moans deepened into something guttural. He sprung his mouth free to watch her face, her lower lip trembling, her eyelids squeezed shut from the sensation. Her breathing matched his, ragged and distorted with want. He raised himself to a kneeling position alongside her. Ran his free hand over her breasts, her ribs, her hips, squeezing and kneading her curves with raw abandon, his touch rough and hot and urgent.

Her mouth opened in a pant, and he shifted the hand between her legs upwards, a fingertip finding her clit, stroking it, his heart pounding. She laid before him, eyes still closed, her legs splayed, her hips still rotating in time as his finger played with her sex—primed and ready for fucking as any woman had ever been. His cock stood straight and hard, bumping the curve of her side, and wrapping his hand into her hair he suddenly thrust two fingers deep inside her tight channel. She yelped, her eyes snapped open…and she gave him a wide smile.

He pumped his fingers in and out of her as she arched and thrashed beneath him. Her body rose straight off the bed until only her shoulders and feet were on the sheets, then collapsed back down, her pussy gripping his fingers. He didn’t stop, and neither did she, till at last she came, hard and long and loud.

He slid his fingers from her warm cavity and held them before her, glistening fluid trickling down to his palm, then brought them to her mouth. Lindsay sheathed her mouth over his fingers, sucked them strong and deep, flicked her tongue on their undersides with pornographic hunger what his cock ached for. The display was so hot his every muscle screamed for her. Yes it was lust, but it was
his
lust. His choice. He who wanted her.

His balls tight, he straddled her, then leaned forward on one hand until his cock tip touched her navel. The tickle of her sweaty indentation pulsed through his shaft and he had to pause, get control. A soft, laugh-tinged sigh escaped from her mouth past his fingers. He eased forward on his knees, his cock trailing upward along her mid-line until it rested between her breasts.

He watched her mouth, waiting for the moment to replace his fingers with his cock when her hands came down and mashed her soft breasts around him. Fuck,
fuck
. His cock began to ride between the white mounds. He rocked himself and she rolled and massaged, the dark tip of his hardness pushing free of her breasts. He could come like this, spill onto the pale column of her neck. Much more of this and he would. Painful as it was, he lifted away from her, a bead of pre-cum suspended there. Her mouth immediately opened to catch it. He brought his moist tip forward, rested it on her lower lip. Her tongue skimmed the head, and rising above her and changing his angle, he slid further past her lips, into her mouth.

Fingers entwined in her hair, he worked his hardness back and forth along her hot, slippery tongue. His hips thrust, using her mouth. Again, it was getting too much, and he pulled free, his shaft slick with her saliva.

Every muscle in his body corded with need, burning to connect completely with her, and by the look in her eyes there was no doubt she burned for it too. He eased away and aligned himself with her wet pussy. She whimpered and bucked up her hips, her eyes pleading for all of him.

"You still want me to fuck you?"

Her answer was a quick and hard surrender. "Yes!"

He filled her in one smooth thrust and his name ripped from her throat. Jack fucked her with deep, pounding strokes and she paid him back as her nails raked his shoulders, and scored his back. She cried and gasped his name but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. All he could feel was her, and he drowned himself in the act of simply fucking her, letting that animalistic need tear through as he drove into her as deep and hard and savagely as he could. His muscles and mind ran white hot, and when she yowled in orgasm, felt her sex constrict around him, it threw him over the edge. He roared as he emptied every drop of himself into her core, and his mind went blank for what seemed like forever.

Tasha.

He had to tell Lindsay about Tasha. It was his first thought upon waking. He laid in her bed, still mostly asleep, his eyes not yet open but the clarity of his resolution was as bright and certain as the noonday sun. Once Lindsay knew about her, she would understand his insanity, he could find a way back to her. And after sex with her, he wanted that more than anything. He had thought he’d be an animal with her. Instead, it had made him feel halfway human again.

They’d slept in the same bed last night. After, she’d flipped out of bed and gone to the bathroom, a feat he’d thought miraculous given that he couldn’t move a muscle. When she’d emerged, he expected her to return to the couch. Instead she climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over the both of them. He’d panicked with anticipation and dread that she wanted to cuddle, have pillow talk. All she did was snuggle into the other side of the bed and mumble, “I’m beat. Let’s talk in the morning.” She was asleep two heartbeats later. And listening to her gentle breathing, he’d followed close behind.