Can't Hold Back (11 page)

His hands were in her hair, and not only to brace her so he could pelt her mouth with kisses, but raking through her hair and pulling it and stroking it, like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to pet her or hurt her.

That was fine, because after all this time of holding herself back, of treating him and caring for him, she was done. She was done with gentle and thoughtful and nurturing. She was giving as good as she got, grabbing handfuls of whatever she could, learning his body in this new and different and totally satisfying way. The shift of muscle against her taut nipples, against the greedy heat between her legs, against the cling of her thighs as she tried to pin and contain and define him.
Mine.

Making up, somehow, for her failure to lay claim to him the first time she’d ever seen him, when she could have told Becca,
Yes,
I met him first.

He had this way of kissing. Short, greedy kisses, like he was desperate to get more of her but couldn’t make himself be patient enough to get what he needed. It drove her crazy. It made her kiss back with raw hunger, a craving that rose up from the core of her being, more primitive, even, than the roar of arousal between her legs.

The tempo shifted abruptly and his kisses became long and sweet and deep, his tongue sweeping in and claiming her. She’d thought that when he kissed her like that, like he meant it, like he was stopping to savor, she’d feel a sense of relief, but all she felt was a doubling and redoubling of the hunger. Her hands went off on a spree, yanking and squeezing and pinching, and he yelped because she’d bitten the heck out of his lower lip. “Do that again,” he ordered.

She was pure, naked id now. She clenched his thigh between hers so she could rub her achy sex up and down the hard muscle, whimpering his name, clutching his head so she could get more of his mouth. And she didn’t care how needy, how pathetic, how desperate she looked or sounded, because he was doing the same thing. He was saying her name over and over, a murmured mantra, bucking and thrusting against whatever he could get purchase on, and there was no rhyme nor reason to the way his hands roamed—not to give her pleasure, but out of control, territorial, possessive. Because
he
needed.

“You,” he groaned. “Oh, God. You. Are. A. Goddess.”

He crawled over her and trapped her between his arms and legs, and lowered himself onto her. Then slowly, so slowly it was a form of delicious torture, he lightly rubbed his cotton-clad erection against the seam of her pajama pants. One layer of fabric communicated friction to the other, and it resonated in her sex, just enough vibration to be felt but not enough to relieve the building tension.

Back and forth, a little harder now, and he braced up on both arms, muscles lengthening and bunching, powerful and male. It was almost too much, the sight of him over her, the sensation mounting between her legs, the look on his face, because he was feeling it, too, that same friction, and she could almost see it gathering behind his eyes as they locked on hers. So intense, that locked gaze, so intimate, like he knew how her body was tightening down around his touch, like he could see the exact shape and size of her hunger.

And then more pressure, a little of his weight now, and she moaned and licked her lips.

He made a noise that had no translatable name and dropped his head to kiss her. The long, deep, possessive kind. She wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or whether he’d half forgotten what he was doing, but he’d pressed his hips to hers fully now and was grinding against her.

“Nate.” Into his mouth. And then, turning her head to break away, “Nate, ease up, or I’m going to come—”

He raised himself up and gave her a wicked look, then locked his gaze on hers again and thrust against her, and where all the tension had bundled itself together and was poised and waiting, something gave suddenly, a lost hold on control, the first breath after rising through layers of water, a vast lever under weight and strain, and her orgasm surged up and broke over her in wave after wave after wave.

Instinct drove him. He was frantic in a way he couldn’t remember ever having been with any other woman. The ache in his cock and balls, worse now that he’d partially whetted it by stroking himself over her, worse now that he’d watched that orgasm rise, color in her throat and face, lust like panic in her eyes.

He felt it as a drumbeat, a drilled-in craving that called out for her. It was something about the way she’d given up control to him, even though—he knew—she didn’t want to. He’d taken it away from her and made her so out of her mind that she’d let him have the power. Hold the cards. Get her off.

He’d seen it, then, a glimpse of what she’d be like if she let herself take everything she needed, if she stopped holding herself back. He wanted more of that. And he just
wanted.
Wanted, wanted, wanted.

If he didn’t watch himself he’d rub himself off on her in two more strokes and it would be over. And he—he didn’t know if he’d get a second chance.

He rolled away from her, hating the loss of contact, but bent on something better. What it would be like to watch her come again,
feel
her this time, to be buried as deep as he could get inside her.

“Condoms. Alia. Where?”

“Bathroom cabinet.”

He crossed to the bathroom and found the condoms. “This box is
waaaay
too small,” he informed her.

Her lips curved. Her lids were heavy, her face soft with pleasure. God, she turned him on. He couldn’t get his clothes off fast enough. He pulled roughly, his movements jerky. She was laughing at him. But she stopped laughing when he got his shirt over his head and kicked his jeans down. She wasn’t laughing at all. He loved the look in her eyes. Covetous. He could feel that look like a touch, smoothing warmth over his chest, drifting down his belly to the waistband of his boxer briefs. Wanting
in,
the way he wanted into her. He’d let her look all day if she wanted. He’d known—no, he’d
hoped
—she’d look like that. Like a woman who knew exactly what she was asking for.

He held himself in one hand, freed himself with the other, pushing his briefs down, and he watched her eyes and her mouth. Eyes getting darker, bigger, sleepier, mouth softening a little, and then he saw the tip of her tongue and he thought of
MenInUni242
saying,
I want your cock in my mouth. As much as I can hold.
And he almost asked her.
Do you?
But what if she didn’t? What if it wasn’t? That would bring this to a screeching halt as she realized that he’d been fantasizing about someone else. Someone they both knew wasn’t Becca but maybe wasn’t Alia, either.

So he didn’t say it. But he thought it, and he got that much harder, dreaming that she did want his cock in her mouth, as much as she could hold, that she’d suck him to the back of her throat and—

Nope,
unless he was going to ruin this gig in the most unmanly of ways. Couldn’t think like that anymore.

So instead he helped her with her clothes, which was as much of a laugh as tearing off his own had been—they kept getting caught and he made faint sounds of frustration and protest, and she giggled and helped, until she was wearing only a pale green pair of lace panties. He wouldn’t have figured her for pale-green lace. Something as down-to-earth as the rest of her outfit, more like.

God.
She was beautiful. Breasts right in that sweet spot between more-than-a-handful and what-the-fuck-do-I-do-with-these? Her nipples pale pink, and a little dip of a navel in the center of a belly that managed to show both ridges of muscle and gentle slope. Strong thighs that had gripped his thigh earlier, his hips, that had generously cushioned his increasingly ragged, out-of-control thrusts. She was like a cross between a Greek statue celebrating the human form and a fertility goddess.

He could see it in her eyes. As much as he loved the way she’d looked at him, she was getting off now because he couldn’t stop staring at her. Lying back, she let him own her with his gaze, and then that
tongue
again, wetting her lips—

Oh, fuck.

She was breathing fast. She reached to push her panties down. Which was good because pretty or no, those panties were between him and what he wanted, which was to feel that softness and that unyieldingness, to get back into that rhythm she’d set for them earlier, because that was the thing that had really gotten to him, because,
fuck,
that had been her, back there, pretending it wasn’t happening, even as her body was making it happen. Because she wanted it even more than she thought it was a bad idea.

He slid his thumb along the seam of her sex, parted her curls, and almost lost his shit completely when he felt how wet she was. And how swollen.

He groaned and slid a finger in.

She whimpered.

“Oh, fuck. Alia, I—”

“Condom.”

He tore the box, extracted his prize. Ripped the packet, rolled it on. Any smoothness, any pretense at competence, seemed like an unnecessary waste of effort when he knew exactly where he wanted to be and all he wanted was to be there as quickly as possible. And she was reaching her arms up, opening her mouth, drawing him down to kiss him, lifting her hips, rubbing her wetness on him, and he grabbed his cock to guide himself to her. She was clumsy, too, in her eagerness, pushing back as he was finding her, breaching her, savoring how tight she was, like his fist on a good night, only wet and twice as hot and better, because it was
her,
and he thrust once and then she gripped him tight around the hips and there it was, that rhythm she’d teased him with earlier, Alia moving against him like there was no way she could resist what her body was demanding—

“I’m sorry, Alia. I will do better some other time,” he declared, before he abandoned good sense and all the rules of first-time sex and everything he knew about being a halfway decent lover, and gave up holding back—everything. Gratitude, mostly. Because she could make the pain go away. Because she was ready, willing, and eager. Because she was under him thrusting back as hard as he thrust into her, because for every time he called her name she called his. Because she was coming again, milking him, bending his will, and owning him.

Everything in him, physical, mental, emotional, was clenching and unclenching, locked up tighter than a vault and broken wide open, far wider than his known universe. It was only her teeth in his shoulder and her fingernails in his back that kept him anchored to the bed.

“Better?” she asked.

He’d collapsed on top of her, his face in her neck, her hair tickling his nose. Barely holding his weight off her. Only a little bit of him still careful and aware. The part that acted now to extricate himself, condom safely stripped away and disposed of. So he could shift again to put his arms around her. So he could sigh into her hair and keep her warm like she’d warmed him earlier this evening.

And then her single word fully penetrated his haze. She was asking if he felt better. As if she’d just administered a session of tapping.

“Pain gone?” she asked, in case he’d somehow missed the significance of her question the first time.

It was. His whole body was bathed in a warm glow, not at all unlike the drug glow he’d craved until a few days ago. All traces of pain had vanished. Although he could feel himself tensing up again already against her questions.

And then he was pissed at himself for being such a girl. What was so bad about her asking him that? What had he expected her to ask him? Whether she’d rocked his world like he’d rocked hers? If it was the best he’d ever had? If he’d like a cigarette?

So he answered her with the truth, or at least the truth he knew she most wanted to hear right then, which was “I needed that.” He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at her.

She looked genuinely pleased to hear it, which went a long way toward tamping down any stray disappointment he felt. So did how happy she looked herself, relaxed and pink-cheeked and red-lipped and just plain beautiful. He bent his head and kissed her, and she kissed him right back, and he realized, because of how strong his relief felt right then, that he’d been waiting for her to freak out. To say,
We can’t have done that, we didn’t do that, we can’t do that again.
And he was not ready to quit her. Not anywhere near yet.

For one thing, that sex had, in fact, rocked his world. A-grade, top-of-the-line, write-home-about-it. You didn’t walk away from sex like that, even if things were a little complicated.

And for another, there was still the
MenInUni242
question.

“That felt really good,” she said.

“Sorry it was so short-lived. It has…been a while.” Then he shook his head, because there was too much half-truth already in that room. “Honestly? That’s not why. It has been a while, but the thing is—” He made a sheepish face. “I am into you. No. Correction. I am
so
into you.”

“Oh.” Her face lit with surprise and pleasure, which, damn, felt good.

“So I’m going to lay this out there, and you can feel free to say something that will shred my pride to teeny-tiny threads, but that? From beginning to end? That will go into the private mental porn library, forever and permanently.”

“Oh,” she said, more distinctly.

“Maybe that’s not the most romantic—”

She cut him off. “No. Me, too. In the porn library.”

“Really? You mean it?” He was actually a little hung up on the fact that she
had
a private mental porn library, and what its other contents were. Did it bear any resemblance to
MenInUni242
’s?

Suddenly, he had to know. “Alia?”

“Uh-huh?”

“I want to ask you something. Back during the whole thing with Becca, there were these instant messages—”

Her face darkened, and he realized what crappy timing he had. Bringing that whole history into things right now, when they were lying here in the afterglow, very much in the present. What if she thought he was thinking of Becca, at a time like this? He would hate for her to suspect that. When all he could think about was getting into her again.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

It took him a minute. First to understand what she was apologizing for, and then to grasp the implications.

Hope rose like a balloon. “You wrote them.”

“Becca never told you?”

“We never talked about them.”

She blinked a few times, then shook her head. “God, Nate. I thought she—I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse. I know that. Just, I’m sorry.”

His brain couldn’t work quite fast enough to keep up with all this. With how guilty she looked and how psyched he was that she’d typed those words, but also how it didn’t necessarily mean what he wanted it to mean. Just because it had been her fingers on the keyboard didn’t mean the fantasies had sprung from her imagination.

“Did Becca tell you what to write?”

She shook her head, and he felt the knowledge shift and settle at the base of his spine, in that dark impression where desire came from.
Those words came from her mind.
And
still,
he didn’t know enough. Whether she’d meant them. Whether they’d felt like her when she’d written them. Whether she’d
claim
them now. But now she was looking away from him, and the plea when it came was barely more than a whisper.

“Do we have to talk about this?”

Abruptly, he realized it wasn’t only guilt she was feeling, but shame, too.

So either she hadn’t meant them or she couldn’t own them.

He could feel the mood shifting, and any moment she was going to fold under the weight of her old shame, remember why this escapade could cost her her job. Did it really matter so much what had happened a year and a half ago, when he had her here, in her bed, and she was willing and responsive and—

“It doesn’t matter,” he said firmly. “It doesn’t matter. Okay?”

“You’d have every right to still be mad. It was a shitty thing I did.”

Ironic. In her mind, having written those dirty words made her more the bad guy. In his—

Well, it made her the kind of bad girl he still hoped to find when he’d peeled away her inhibitions.

“I know you did it to help Becca.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“It’s in the past,” he said. Because she was right. It didn’t make it okay. But maybe he couldn’t be angry at someone who’d made him feel as good as Alia had. Maybe there was a statute of limitations on how long he could care about what he’d lost, when he had her, warm and beautiful, limber and willing, stretched out beside him.

He would probably never know how much of
MenInUni242
was Becca, how much Alia, and how much some combination of Becca and Alia, some fantasy girl. But the thing was, he didn’t
need
that fantasy girl, because Alia, the real Alia, was here with him, and even if she wasn’t going to tell him she wanted his cock down her throat or his tongue all over her, there were still a million things he wanted to do to her, right here, right now, and so it would probably be a good idea to get started.