Bared by Him (9 page)

He slicked his hair back and covered the scruff of his beard with shaving cream. “I’m
not attached to you. I’m playing with you, remember?”

The act of watching him shave felt so intimate, so erotic, she stood there for a second,
watching him. It took her a moment to realize it was her turn to answer. “I’m playing
with you, too.”

He smiled as he splashed water onto his face.

And yeah, that smile was still a great look on him.

*   *   *

Cade was on his laptop that evening, answering a thousand e-mails that had popped
up from his office. He’d never taken a vacation, never even taken a day off since
Laura had died. So he sure as hell wasn’t sorry he was taking one now.

Wiping his tired eyes with the heels of his palms, he glanced around the eclectic
décor of Ivy’s cozy little one-bedroom place, finding it so unique and colorful. So
like Ivy.

She still had the Christmas thing going on. Bits from Halloween splattered here and
there. All this in the middle of July. He’d asked why, and she’d said she didn’t have
good storage, and she didn’t want that to keep her from celebrating. He’d never heard
of anyone doing this, but it was damned cute.

She was a little box of surprises, Ivy.

Passionate, but shy. Courageous and stubborn, but also somehow frightened. What frightened
her? When she slept, she went into this tight little ball against Cade’s chest, like
she wanted to make herself very small next to him.

It made his chest hurt, when she did that, even though he always found himself drawing
her up even tighter to him. The way she needed him in the middle of the night, when
she woke up sweating and touched him like she wanted to make sure he wasn’t a dream,
called to every protective, primal instinct inside him. Instincts he hadn’t even known
he possessed.

He’d wake up to find her softly kissing him, delineating his muscles like she wanted
them memorized in her head, and he’d realize he was already hard from her attentions.
He fucked her unfailingly in the middle of the night, sometimes several times, and
he took care of her in the morning, too.

The reminders stirred his blood, for he hadn’t had her all day, and his balls had
started to ache a while ago when he kept remembering the way she’d looked in that
little blue dress before she left to see her friend.

He heard the door click shut and he closed his laptop, his heart kicking into gear.

Ivy strode straight across the living room and down the hall, failing to see Cade
sitting over by the unlit Christmas tree as she padded directly to her bedroom.

She may think he was still with his friends, he supposed, so he followed her to her
bedroom and heard the shower running in the bath. He tried the knob, and it opened.

For a moment he stood at the threshold, getting aroused while at the same time getting
emotionally assaulted. She … God, she
did
things to him. There were no words, no freaking words, to describe her slim, little
naked figure, and what it did to him. She was facing the water, scrubbing her face,
giving him an ample view of her lovely curved butt.

Heart pounding as animal instincts roared to life, he jerked off his T-shirt. Maybe
she would get pissed, for she’d made it clear a dozen times that she didn’t want him
to see her fully naked. Cade didn’t care. He shoved off his pajama bottoms and shut
the door quietly behind him, the sound muffled by the running water.

They’d been apart all day and it had felt like another decade.

He opened the glass door and felt the water mist over his skin as he entered. Soapy
bubbles slid down Ivy’s face, tilted up to the showerhead. Easing up behind her, Cade
curled his arms around her waist and splayed his hands possessively across her abdomen,
pressing his erection up her backside.

She stiffened in his arms as he bit her earlobe into his mouth. “You okay, baby?”
he asked.

“Cade.”
She melted on that whisper, melted back against him, and melted his insides as well.

His hands slid upward and covered her small breasts for the first time, flesh to flesh,
and his cock jumped like he was a teenager with his first feel up. They were small
and the nipples puckered in the water and he wanted to see them and lick them and
suckle them dry.

She turned in his arms and hid herself from him, burying her face in his neck, her
hands tight around his neck as the water pounded her back.

“I got you something,” he whispered into her ear.

“What is it?”

“You’ll see in a bit.”

He soaped her up first, and she let him, bringing her arms to cover her breasts several
times. He wanted to coo at her, to tell her not to be shy, but it endeared her to
him, and he didn’t want to pressure her. Genghis had been broken when Cade had gotten
him out of the pound, and the only way Cade was able to gain his trust was to back
off until Genghis felt like coming to him.

He got out first, toweled off, and brought a clean towel for her.

“I’m not looking,” he said, a hand covering his eyes as he handed it to her.

She took it, with a little laugh, then wrapped it around her small frame.

“You can look now,” she whispered, going up on tiptoe to kiss his jaw.

The small towel didn’t even cover him, hips to his knees, but it covered Ivy from
her breasts to well below her knees.

As she brushed her shoulder-length hair, he brought her the checks he’d wheedled out
of his friends today when he’d invited them to lunch. Luke, Daniel, and Graves had
each written her foundation a check for a million dollars.

Ivy set down her brush to take them and gasped when she realized what they were. She
covered the
O
of her mouth, her eyes lit with gratitude when she looked up at him. “Cade! Ohmigod!
You didn’t have to do this.”

A thousand knots twisted in his chest, then released in an explosion of emotions.
Making her happy suddenly made him feel like … like a man. Like
her
man. “My friends have money,” he said roughly, nodding meaningfully at the checks.
“They can help. Your foundation. And your friends.”

“They?” She slid her hands into his hair, then tucked her head down and cuddled. “You’re
helping, too, Cade.”

“Ahh, because I’m selfish,” he murmured against her scalp, holding her close. “This
way you don’t need to go search for donations elsewhere now. And I can keep on playing
with you a couple of more days…?” He glanced questioningly into her face.

Her head tilted further back as she regarded him, and a sadness he didn’t expect spread
across her expression then, taking him aback. “I still need to go.” She cupped his
jaw in both of her cool, small palms and kissed his lips, softly and sweetly, which
only served to open a rabid thirst for more inside of him. “Thank you, Cade. You have
no idea how much this helps.”

He brought her back against him and kissed her harder, with his tongue, his appetite
voracious after their blood-stirring shower petting session. She squirmed in his hold
and whispered, “Let me put on something.”

“Why?” His breathing had escalated. Both of them were naked under the towels, both
of them wet and hot. “I’m taking it off anyway.”

“Hush, and don’t complain.” She cocked a saucy brow and spun free. “I got you something,
too.” She playfully stuck out her tongue before disappearing into her closet.

“It better be a fuck,” he growled.

“It is!” she yelled back.

His cock responded by lengthening the remaining inches under his towel. He dried off
his hair, hung his wet towel, and waited naked for her in bed, aching all over. His
blood stormed in his body, his skin crawled with need for her fingers, his legs tensed
in preparation to pounce and subdue her and fuck her with all his strength.

She came out in a camisole with a little lace bra, and he could still see her damp
nipples poking out of it. His groin throbbed. He’d never been so turned on at the
prospect of licking a woman’s breasts before. Of seeing them.

He couldn’t appreciate her visually anymore when she turned off the lamp. But the
moonlight illuminated her through the window, and then she was in bed, seeking him
with her hands in the shadows, her mouth already open when it found and fused with
his.

They groaned together. He pulled her up closer and she hooked her limbs all around
him as they lost each other in their mouths. Fire streaked across his veins, and the
always there closed feeling in his chest spread open within him. He felt unraveled,
unknotted, undone.

It all made sense to him, when he had her in his arms. Everything. Life, death, sex …
love. It all made sense to him these seconds when he held this woman, right here,
restless and warm and ravenous, in his arms.

His pupils adjusted to the darkness and he could make out her form more clearly now.
He ran out of air, completely eroticized by her.

She didn’t want a lot of foreplay today. Her need consumed her. Consumed him. Her
pain needed somewhere to go. And he wanted to take it all from her.

When she kicked her panties off and straddled him in only her camisole and bra, she
shoved down to take all of his thickened cock inside her. He groaned and pushed up
higher within her, giving her the deep thrust she craved.

She groaned as her pussy enveloped him, rippling wet and tight around him. She started
bouncing up and down. Ecstasy pummeled through his system as he shoved his hips upward
and slid even higher, deeper, where she was wetter, hotter, tighter.

Hungrily he sat upright and trailed his tongue up the curve of her neck as he stroked
a wandering finger down the crevice of her buttocks. The sight of her rump in the
shower today had made him mad.
Mad
.

She mewed softly as he caressed the tiny rosette of her ass, releasing a sound of
excited anticipation that Cade took as a yes. He eased his middle finger into the
warm, tiny channel and gritted his teeth at the cock-stirring, gut-wrenching tightness,
his balls twitching jealously. Her head rolled backward with a cry of surprise and
a drawn-out moan of pure bliss that purred up her throat, the sound magnified in the
darkness, completely erotic to his senses.

Her pussy grabbed tighter to his cock as he mimicked the thrusts of his cock with
his finger, feeling crazed mad horny because she liked being pleased like this as
much as he wanted to come from it.

Feeling out of control as her breathy moans became louder, he yanked on her camisole
with his free hand, so recklessly that it tore at the top seams. Grunting, he nuzzled
what he’d managed to expose of her breasts with his face and anxiously licked the
top swell of one, above her bra, where she had that lovely freckle. “Move your bra
so I can kiss your breasts, baby.”

“I … they’re too small.”

He groaned as he brought both his hands to urgently tug on her camisole, his cock
pushing in and out, in and out. “Please, baby. Let me kiss and touch and see your
breasts.”

“Cade, I’m
coming
!” Ivy clutched his head against her chest with desperate fingers, bouncing harder
over his straining length. She seated herself completely over every inch of his throbbing
cock, and when he held her down and started pumping, her clit scraped against his
pelvis, and she shattered.

He could feel as the sheer, blinding ecstasy broke inside her, shooting in spasms
down her slim limbs. Fevered and panting, he groaned and rolled her underneath him,
prolonging her orgasm as he pinned her body by the hips and plowed to the hilt inside
her, over and over again, making her scream, yelling out with her.

Her sex opened to receive him. The tiny flutters of her orgasm stroked around the
length of his pulsing dick. She was panting and beautiful, her nails clawing down
his biceps as she came back from heaven and watched him fuck her like mad. Jesus,
and he just loved fucking her. Was about to spill himself all over her. His muscles
tensed as he shafted her harder, poising him for his release. He could feel his face
straining from his efforts, his muscles flexing in his body.

“Come inside me.” Her smoky voice wrapped around his balls as she stroked her fingers
up her rib cage. “Let me watch you come.”

When he saw her cup her covered little breasts with her hands and fondle them over
her sexy bra, he couldn’t at the moment remember ever seeing a more erotic thing.
Aware of her watching him, her eyes glazed in lust, he roared out her name with one
last thrust and came undone for her.

*   *   *

The minutes flew by so fast, Ivy kept staring at the clock on her nightstand while
listening to Cade’s steady, comforting heartbeat beneath her ear. It was past midnight.

They’d stolen into her kitchen a while ago, and Cade had gorged on two peanut butter
sandwiches and milk, while Ivy had made herself another mango veggie shake. They were
never really able to slide back in bed together without wanting to fuck once more,
so they’d been all over each other as soon as they hit the sheets.

Ivy’s lust for him confounded her. Was it even possible to ever feel sated? Would
she ever feel like this for another man again? Her throat closed on the answer, because
she knew that Cade West was
it
. For her. And if she was half the decent human being she thought she was, then she
had to let him go.

Throat tight at the thought, she absently circled one of his nipples with her fingertip.
She hadn’t closed the drapes tonight, and she could see him in the moonlight. Beautiful
male, beautiful man. Her vagina ached to be filled up by him again.

“I’m going to miss you, Cade.” Her whisper was tiny in the dark, and it almost sounded
scared.

He stroked the back of her head, quiet until the clock on the nightstand marked another
minute. “You don’t have to go.”

She raised her head to see his face, relaxed from his recent orgasm, but his eyes
were watchful on hers. God, she didn’t know what he wanted from her, but she knew
she wanted too much from him. More than what was fair to him. More than she could
handle.