Burning For Nero (SEALs Going Hot) (5 page)

Slowly, she pushed away and headed for the shower. Ready to put distance between them just to gain some perspective about how she had succumbed to him so easily.

“Hey, lady.” Her lover rose, caught her wrist and pulled her toward him, then rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip. “You’re frowning. Wasn’t I any good?”

His humor and his easy humility warmed her. She grinned at him. Great Nero. Badass emperor of all he surveyed. She’d known—heard, rather—that he was superb in the sack. The tale was nothing to the reality of loving him. “That was so good my mind is mush. And I need a cool shower.”

He threw his head back to chuckle lightly. “Think I’m gonna let you go so easily?”

She tugged him along the few steps to the small glass enclosure and pulled shut the door. “You don’t have to. In here,” she said as she pressed her breasts and hips along his wonderful hard expanse, “we can even breathe for each other.”

In the dim light, his eyes twinkled as he reached up to turn the spigots. As the water rained down and went from chilly to warm, he leaned in to kiss her mouth as gently as a breeze across her lips. “I got lost in you.”

His admission breached the barrier in her heart that she’d erected to protect her from another military man. The break frightened her. She had covered her attraction to him for so many months, forced herself to tear her eyes from admiring him too publically, too often. Now, she panicked and looked away.

“What’s the matter, honey?” He sounded so hurt. “I plan to be up front with you. I saw how you give to me. I was here. Now’s the time to talk.”

“Yes.” Her voice rose along with her courage and her pride. “You’re right. What we just did was…heartrendingly lovely.”

He grabbed the bar of soap from the ledge and began to rub it all over her, his lips trailing with tender ardor from her throat to her breasts as he washed her and stroked her between her legs.

“Oh, Cass,” he said, his voice choking with emotion as she washed him, “those are eloquent words for the best hour of my life.”

She blushed, tingling with the caress of his hands and marveling at his own sweet rhetoric. She hadn’t expected that from him and now that she had it, she felt like a flower blossoming in the sun, powerful, mighty, incomparably loved. “For me, too.”

He went quite still. “Want to tell me why?”

“Sure.” She could share…some of her reasoning. Certainly Tony wouldn’t ask details about his best friend’s marriage or how he performed in the sack. “Let’s get out of here first.”

He lifted her chin, a frown marring his brow. “Are we too close?”

She knew his question meant more than their physical proximity. Licking her lips, she shook her head. She wanted to be so much closer to him that it shook her to her toes. Whatever fears she had about hooking up with him, still he deserved to hear just how much she regarded him and why. “No. Come on.”

She stepped out and after he turned off the shower, he followed. Grabbing a towel from the rack, he dried her off with sultry strokes of the nubby towel, then did a quick whisk of his own body. When he wrapped her to him by winding the towel around them both, she sighed against him. “I love how you take care of me.”

He kissed the crown of her head—and waited for more.

She’d give it. “And how you took care of Jon.”

“I screwed that up and—”

She pulled back to meet his dark gaze. “You and I had that fight. It’s over. I understand your reasoning.”

“I’ll make it up to him. If you want me to.”

“I do.”
I shouldn’t. If this is a one-night stand, if I sell the house, if I move to another city, then Jon gets to feel the loss again. But Jon needs to feel that a man can relate to him, wants to be with him. And Tony did. Does.
“I want him to learn you didn’t desert him.”

“I’ll start tomorrow. Take him out on Dad’s boat. He loves the water.”

She ran her finger over the swell of his lower lip. “You are a sweet man.”

He snorted. “Don’t tell anyone that. I’ll be demoted.”

Time to play ball, Cass.
“Ray and I were having trouble long before he died. I tried to get him to work on our relationship, change some things, but he wasn’t interested. He—he—”
Wasn’t a man I could love any longer.

Tony moved not one muscle.

She had never discussed the demise of her love for her husband with anyone. Certainly, she had never thought she’d ever explain it to Tony. So she stepped carefully across the minefield of her marriage. “He took up Scotch as a regular playmate.”
I suspect he had others of the living breathing female variety.
“He’d drink, change. Get surly. I asked him to check it. He wouldn’t. Said he didn’t have to and he was entitled to his release. The work was so tough.”

Tony stroked her shoulder, silent.

Inhaling, she pursed her lips. “I told him he was becoming an alcoholic. He laughed at me. ‘Everyone drinks like fish. We
are
fish,’ he’d tell me. But his bouts only got longer, his drunks deeper. And his personality? That got uglier.”

She cleared her throat. “He took less interest in Jon. Had no time for him, to be honest. A little boy who idolizes his daddy but doesn’t enjoy him is a lost little kid. Anyway. Upshot was that just before Ray shipped out for his last mission, I went to see a lawyer.”

Tony watched her, his expression placid, non-judgmental.

“I was going to talk it over with Ray when he came home. But—” She bit her lip. “That never happened.”

“You still loved him when he passed. I saw it.”

“I grieved, I did. But truth is that I had mourned his loss months before he died.” She rolled a shoulder. “My love for him had changed over the years. My affection for him wasn’t a twenty-year-old’s crush on a glamorous midshipman. It wasn’t a young bride’s passion for her very sexy groom. It wasn’t a military wife’s patient understanding or even her tolerance of her husband’s dangerous profession. It was a mature woman’s knowledge of the man she married. His foibles. His weaknesses. It was her wish that he might not destroy himself with drink. It was her hope that he might take a vital interest in his own son and help the boy to grow into an honorable man.”

“I’m so sorry, Cass.”

“Me, too.” She gave him a watery smile, relieved—glad—to have told him.

He stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. “I witnessed his new love for Scotch. But I had no idea about the other.”

“Tom and Peg never let on if they knew.”

“And you never told them,” Tony said flatly.

She nodded, gratified he understood that she’d be discreet about such a thing. “No. If Ray wanted them to know, he would have told them. But I think he avoided the story because he hated to disappoint them.”

“Ray never confided anything to me. The one difference in our relationship over the last year of his life was that he didn’t talk to me any longer. Not about anything. I wondered why. I asked. He shut me down. What could I do?”

That was a surprise. She had always assumed that Ray told Tony everything. She’d even thought Tony had refrained from bringing up the subject of alcohol out of respect for Ray’s privacy. “After he died, what made you decide to still come around? To visit?”

“I wanted to help you. Wanted to make things easier for you, if I could. Run errands. Get the oil changed in the car. Fix the dripping faucet. Most of all, I wanted to be with Jon.” He led her to the bed and they sat, side by side. “And you.”

“Not as your friend?” she asked, hoping to hell she wasn’t pleading against his answer.

Groaning, he pushed her to the mattress, his open palm sliding along her throat, over her breasts and tummy to dip between her thighs. She shifted, opening herself to him. He lifted her leg so that he slid his cock deep inside her. “Does that feel like friendship to you?”

She plunged her fingers into his hair and captured his mouth. He thrust inside her, filling her, taking her up, riding her high and hard and cramming every inch of his shaft into her core. She cried out as she crested a new high and lost herself to the tremors of another orgasm.

Breathless, hanging on to her sanity by a decadently thin thread, she settled back to earth in his arms. But he pulled out and when he caressed her and fingered her, she knew he wasn’t done with her. A look of stark need on his face, he rolled her budding flesh while she keened like a cat. Rubbing his evening beard on her sensitive nipples, he excited her to near madness. Her pleas grew wordless. Her pants became gasps. She quivered and came, once and then again, boneless with his lusty devotion.

“Love how you love this. Gonna make you sweat for me all night,” he promised on a grin.

“I’m already a wobbly mass of Jell-O.”

“Delish, babe. Cherries and cream. And I haven’t had nearly enough of you.” He rolled her clit between his thumb and forefinger while he sucked on her nipple.

She bucked, clutching his shoulder, her core pulsing in a new climax all over again. “You are a bad man.”

“And I want you bad, bad as you want to be. Only with me though. Only with me.” He nuzzled her, rubbing his face all over her stomach.

The urge to climax rumbled through her again, and she marveled that she didn’t stroke out at the electric excitement of this grand affair. She ran her hands through her own hair. She was a slave to his charm, a harem girl to his pasha. He was the inventive lover she’d wanted, never had. The man who talked in bed, gave and took pleasure, joked and praised and teased.

How could she show him she was his equal as a lover? As kind, as selfless, as artless? “You do this so, so well. I bet women the world over beg you for this.”

He stopped so abruptly, she froze. “Look at me.”

She gazed up to see his dark gaze peering at her, adoring her.

“That answer is yes. But usually one taste and I’m gone.”

“Why’s that?” she asked, her heart miserably broken that he implied he would leave her, too, after this.

“Because none of them was you.”

Oh.
That socked the breath from her. So she really hadn’t imagined his other intimations of how deeply he cared for her.

“How long…”
How long have you felt that way?

“How long have I wanted you? Since the day I met you.” He seared her with his truth. “How long have I ignored it? Since the day you got married. How long am I gonna make love to you?” He grinned, a sensuous devil in her bed. “Until you tell me to stop.”

“Don’t,” she whispered.

“Can’t.”

And to make certain of that, she rose to her elbows, sent him a triumphant smile, then reversed her position on the bed. Settling down along his torso, she took his shaft and licked him head to base. He was hard, hot, soft, musky and all hers. Laving up his pre-cum, she cupped his balls, weighing them in her hand and rejoicing in the sound of his short pants of breath. She paid particular attention to his helm, big and broad. No wonder he fucked her so well, claiming every bit of her.

He slid his fingers between her heavy lips, parting her and zeroing in on her clit with his talented tongue. He was so devoted to her pleasure she fought the urge to weep.

“Prettiest pussy. Sweet and tart.” He toyed among her folds, driving her to madness as he dipped and darted inside her cunt with fingers or tongue. “Going to put chains on this cunt. Hold open these plump lips so I can touch this clit, feel it and reach between your hot thighs and play with you any time.”

Mewling, she put voice to her approval. Then sucked his cock avidly into her mouth, stroking his flesh and priming him to fuck her.

“
Enough!”
He bolted upright, reversed, batted her legs open and sank between them, his cock driving inside her the finest declaration of how much he cared about her. Wincing, he shot straight, and she was certain he had hurt his arm, but a fraction of a second later, he fucked her, fast and hard. At the end when together they shouted out their orgasm, she held on to one certainty. This was not a one-night stand.

“Sleep,” he curled her against him, tugging at the covers to wrap them together in a cocoon.

“We need to wake up before anyone else and—”

He put two fingers over her lips. “No worries. No one will know.”

She kissed his clavicle, nuzzled him there, inhaling the sexy musk their two bawdy bodies had so joyously concocted. “Oh, don’t kid yourself, buddy. We left. The adults will know. I feel my ears burning right now. I just don’t want Jon to get any ideas.”

“We’ll be careful.” Tony locked his gaze on hers. “But there’s more you and I need to talk about.”

My need to move. My search for a job. Us. The improbability of you and me.
One big subject after another piled up like impenetrable walls. One though she could scale. “No more about Ray.”

“You’re right. That’s not necessary. But this,” he undulated his hips toward hers, “this isn’t a best friend fuck.”

She froze, but he stroked her cheek and throat so tenderly that she sighed. “It isn’t.”

“We have more to say.”

She kissed the point of his jaw. “More to learn.”

“There’s so much more I need to know about you.” He threaded his fingers through hers and brought their hands to rest against his heart. “Like what do you think of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

She stuck her tongue out.

“And the Redskins?”

She grimaced.

“Getting suitably fucked in the shower?”

“In this shower? You have got to be kidding.”

“Nope.”

She brightened, licking the corner of her mouth with the tip of her tongue.

“I see. So how about getting off from across a crowded room?”

“Oh, brother!” She was aghast with the very idea of such ribald pleasure. “I’m sure you could do it to me.”

“Tomorrow. Promise. Go to sleep now.”

“Oh!” She reached around, grabbed a pillow and threw it at him.

Chuckling, he wrestled it away from her and then kissed her till her lips hurt. “Tomorrow, baby. Promise, I’ll love you even better.”

Bring it on.
She snuggled in his arms with a smile on her face. It was the first one she’d worn to bed in so many years that she was able to ignore the shadows that edged the brilliant joy of her night with him. She closed her eyes, content to surrender to this new peace.