First to Burn (20 page)

“You’re doing more than that.” Each time he shifted, the bulges and ripples of his muscles worked seamlessly to do his bidding. The arm he raised had the contours and definition her imagination had supplied and more. Part of her wanted to pull against his grip so she could watch his body tense and uncoil, but a shred of common sense held her still.

“Order me to stop.” His palm hovered over the spot where fabric stretched across her nipple.

She was the one who moved first, who pushed the pressure receptors in her nipple against the thousands of touch receptors in his palm, and they both knew it. Shock zinged from her breasts through her spine to her trembling knees while her body begged for more friction.

He brushed across her other nipple, the fabric of her shirt too flimsy to contain her breasts’ pilomotor reflex, and she knew she wouldn’t stop him.

“Tell me.” His palm circled harder, drawing her tighter. “It’s your decision.”

“My questions...” She arched from the door deeper into his hand.

“Ask.” His fingers changed the play and rolled her nipple tighter still. “Anything.”

“Are you...” She wanted to touch him, but he kept her hands pinned. She twisted her head on the wood, trying to recall her questions. “Undead?”

“Exactly the opposite.” His breath tickled her neck when he spoke. “I am very alive.”

“Then what?” She wanted him to reach under her shirt as much as she wanted his answer. “What are you?”

“I am a barbarian.” Saying it seemed to release his last restraint. The lust that burned in his eyes and hardened his face was a look her few, carefully chosen lovers had never showed. Something in him broke free, and she sensed it coming for her, stalking her.

She desperately wanted it to catch her.

“A scourge of peace-loving folk.” He inserted his free hand in the neckline of her shirt and kept his gaze enmeshed with hers.

If he hadn’t held her wrists, she might have slid to the floor. Past seductions had always followed the usual couch-and-grope routine, never words and walls and waiting, fully clothed and wobbling, for a touch larger than her imagination.

“A conqueror.” He pulled until her neckline chafed her sensitized skin, then let go of her wrists to use two hands on her shirt fabric.

Leaving her arms extended over her head, she waited. The tearing sound blended with the moan she couldn’t hold back.

“I am a berserker.”

She envisioned him in battle, swift and brutal, as he’d been in the street. Would he drive into her here against the door? The thought called up an Amazon who wanted to fight free and conquer with him, conquer
him.
Maybe she’d take him here on the floor and damn everything. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Nooo.” Her hunger was too much.

Heat disappeared from her skin as even the rasp of his breath disappeared into silence.

She opened her eyes. His head was thrown back and he dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets as if struggling. He’d misinterpreted her attempt to stop
herself.
Not him.

“Kiss me,” she managed to whisper.

Shuddering, he dropped his hands and closed the gap between them until they shared one breath. “Don’t ask me to stop unless you mean it.”

His gaze called to cravings so intense that she shivered, echoing him. “I won’t.”

“Then I will pillage your mouth.” With one finger, he touched her lips, then traced a line from her jaw to her throat. “I will claim your neck and your body.”

She lowered her chin to watch his finger slip between the cups of her bra. Her torn shirt hung like draping on a statue of Venus while he trailed fire across her bare skin.

“I will plunder until my sword is exhausted.” He wove a spell of words she never wanted to escape. “You will be my prize. But you must agree.”

Closing her eyes, she moaned.

“Say it.” His mouth returned to the pulse in her throat. “Say yes.” His fingers covered her breastbone.

She wanted to abandon herself to his touch more than she wanted answers, more than she wanted to be a doctor, more than she wanted her next breath.
Yes.

“Let me hear it.” While his thumb drew a line along her collarbone, his voice pushed her to the end of her resistance.

“Yes.” Dizzy, she swayed into his hand and spoke louder. “Yes.”

Before she could help, he’d stripped the ruined boots and clothes from her body and carried her into the pool. Her skin prickled with the water’s heat, but once he slid next to her on the submerged stone bench and ran his wet hands over every inch of her body, the hot steam cooled in comparison to the fire under her skin. He’d threatened to plunder, but instead he touched her as if she was as fragile as glass. Even his kisses had the tenderness of a first encounter, not the fierce need burning in her after days spent building to this point.

Where was her barbarian? While her hands stroked his shoulders and down his back to the tight rise of his ass, she poured her scorching feelings into their kiss. Her breasts dragged across his chest, seeking rougher stimulation than wet skin on wet skin provided, but no matter how hard she pressed, he didn’t release his warrior.

“Wulf.” She coaxed and ordered and begged all in one word as he lifted her hips from the bench, but his hands didn’t speed or roughen on her body.

“Relax into the water.” One hand glided along the length of her back, arching her body until her breasts jutted from the bath, while his other hand stretched her legs until her soles reached the far side of the tub. Heated water lapped at her calves, her ribs, her shoulders, all sensitized by his gaze and pleading to be touched, but his hands stayed fixed under her back and thighs. For interminable moments only his eyes moved from her lips and breasts to her uptilted hips and spread legs. “Grab the wall.”

She obeyed. The stone was textured—not rough, but not as smooth or heated as his skin. She craved more. She craved touch. His.

He leaned down for a caress so brief she might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching. His lower lip caught a droplet of water descending the curve of her breast, but he didn’t press harder against her skin. His tongue never touched her. Instead it licked only his own lips, and took only that single drop before he straightened.

Torture, that’s what making her wait amounted to. Her grip tightened on the wall behind her, giving her leverage to thrust upward and bring her aching breasts closer to him and his mouth, closer to the attention they needed, even as she floated.

At last his lips closed around her nipple, and she couldn’t stay quiet as more need clamored in her body. Her moans mingled with the sound of his sucks. The louder she became, the harder he pulled, and she wanted it harder still. When her voice rose, he added his tongue. She felt her chest expand, heard air rasp from her throat, as he worked her.

Fire built where his teeth scraped, spread across her skin and burned despite the water. She squeezed her fists on the edge of the pool, squeezed her pelvic muscles, squeezed the pleasure from every touch, but she wasn’t filled. She wanted to be, but his mouth only tightened her, it didn’t finish the damn job.

Finally, his finger breached her triangle of need and she reached for his shoulders while she thrust her hips against his hand. Her unmoored body floundered, and his hand fell away.

“I told you not to let go.” His voice sounded like an animal’s growl. He rolled her nipple hard enough to make her shiver. Anticipation and need fought as she wondered whether obeying him or letting go would be the faster route to what she wanted.

This time she stayed where he put her, feet and hands anchored to opposite sides of the stone bath, her body floating in the hot water. For long moments he didn’t touch her, as if testing her obedience, and then his reward sent a fresh surge of desire through her as he traced a line around the juncture of her thighs. Up and down, but not inside.

“More. Please. More.” She’d tell him with words he seemed to like hearing. “Fuck me.”

He gave her more, but it wasn’t close enough to everything she wanted, even when he slid a finger past her entrance and sucked her nipple at the same time.

Her world compressed to her breasts and her core, and the sensations that sizzled from them to the tensed and vibrating muscles in her body. His mouth released her nipple, but he moved faster in her, with more fingers, and then his thumb touched a spot that ignited the water on her skin. She needed to shake, to writhe, to heave from the escalating tension.

“Hold still.” His voice, gritty and barely audible, made her open her eyes.

The man who loomed over her, head flung back so far she couldn’t see his eyes, wasn’t in control. His lips curled back from his teeth, and his neck tendons stood out like wires. Even though he touched her so carefully, his chest heaved like he was racing for his life.

From her instep to her spine, she squeezed and sought leverage to thrust while his fingers drove into her faster and faster, sending her spiraling in a whirlpool of sensation until vibrations swept her body and matched the water that surged around them. She must have screamed then, because an echo hung in the air and her mouth was open.

He supported her as the ceiling came into focus. “Well?” Above her his eyes glittered like sapphires reflecting light. “How was that?”

“Terrible.” Her feet drifted to the stones at the bottom of the deep tub as she sat. He deserved a little torture. “I can’t think.”

“Then don’t.” He laughed, his throat muscles sharp and enthralling. “You’ll argue.”

“Ha.” She trailed her hand down his chest to where the evidence of his self-control stood hard and thick while he threw his arms along the pool wall and offered himself. His posture proclaimed,
It’s your turn to explore.

She loved how the male body contrasted with hers. Where her body was padded and curved, his had angles and separately identifiable muscles, like the crease between his torso and his hip. The dim light didn’t penetrate the water, so she couldn’t see the shape of his thighs, but they felt like logs, too hard for her fingers to probe or massage.

When she wrapped her hand around the part of him she wanted to possess completely, he shuddered. His shaft stood like a mortar set to launch, so she whispered, “Shot out,” and slid her hand up and down his length. Her thumb barely touched her second finger. His thickness would fill her, fill every need she had and more.

Straddling his thighs, she guided his tip to her opening. They locked eyes and achieved the deeper union she’d yearned for each time their hands or bodies had brushed. This was the connection he’d started a month ago with his scrap of embroidered silk, the bond he’d built with his kisses, the link yesterday and today had forged.

His hands dug into her hips, yanked her down onto him again and again until waves collided and she braced on his shoulders and threw back her head while he thrust. Her body coiled tighter with each shove of his cock inside her, each impact of his pelvic bone on her inner thighs, each scrape of his teeth at her nipples. She came down faster and harder, striving for a second explosion, reaching for it with him, together.

With his neck tendons like ridges bisecting his shoulders, he looked like a man about to break, and then he bucked deeper yet and lifted her from the water with a last thrust. He yelled, a sound only, not the coherence of a word, and collapsed backward.

However long she straddled him, arms looped over his shoulders and face pressed to his neck while their breathing slowed, it wasn’t long enough.

“Splash over, Doc.” His hands framed her face. “Think that qualified as a hit?”

She groaned. She had no words, no thoughts, no plans. He could take charge.

He slipped to the other side of the pool. Water puddled everywhere, the aftermath a wet mess. Like her. Too sated to move, too awed at what they’d shared, she couldn’t do more than watch as he opened a teak box and extracted shampoo.

The plastic bottle with its orange flip-top, so mundane, made her freeze. They’d forgotten one particular boring, dull, crucial, vital thing.
Shit.
“You’ve thought of...almost everything.” The sarcasm didn’t carry a sting, but she wanted to bawl,
Shampoo but not condoms?

“So.” She’d start normally before she opened
that
chat. “This is an amazing place. How often are you here?”
Okay
,
this is awkward
. She might as well have asked about the weather.

He glanced over his shoulder, almost as if he were equally uncertain about what to say or do. “Once or twice a year,” he said, and then he returned to gathering soap and towels.

“All this—” she gestured around the room, “—for once a year?” Inside her head, she heard her mother say,
Enough questions
,
sweetie
,
or you’ll end up single like Aunt Mary.
She shut up.

The shampoo cap snapped decisively. “It’s been a lot of years.”

“How many?” She watched his hands rub together until they were covered in bubbles, as ephemeral as this bond between them. If she pushed, would he shut her out even now? With the scent of oranges surrounding her, he massaged circles into her scalp, creating sensations so good she almost let her question drop. Almost. “I’ve noticed a pattern. You make a mysterious pronouncement, then when I ask you to explain, you distract me.”

“I like distracting you.” After he sluiced water on her hair without letting it drip into her eyes, his fingers followed the bubbles over her shoulder and across the swell of her breast.

Her body wanted to go all mushy a third time, but her brain issued a squelch command. She tugged his hand off her breast and frowned. “Not going to work.”

He looked set to jump at the challenge she’d unintentionally issued, until he read her expression. Wise man.

“Rinse.” He retreated to the other end of the stone ledge. “Then we’ll talk.”

She did as he said and pushed wet hair away from her face. “So, you never said how many years you’ve been coming here.” This answer had become important out of all proportion.

Pulling his eyes off her chest, he looked at the ceiling, perhaps counting.