RR&R 01 Real (18 page)

When we need to stop, sometimes we hear music, turn on the TV, or eat, but most of all, we kiss. I sometimes hear nothing but the slick sounds of him kissing me, and our fast breaths, tearing one after the other. The night before the last, I was so primed by the time he came to fetch me from my room, I almost jumped into his arms. By the time we sank into his bed, my hands were already in his hair, my tongue desperately pushing into his warm, delicious mouth, and when he responded with an animal growl and a powerful kiss that sucked my tongue feverishly, I felt each of his pulls on my tongue ping little bolts of pleasure to my sensitized little clit. It swells and throbs when we kiss, and I get delirious remembering. Now just the tiniest look from him swells me up. When he glances at my lips. When he tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I know we’re just sending our adrenals to hell, doing this. Keeping the output of this lust is just not healthy, but I can’t stop him. In fact I want more. I want him to stop because we’re suffering and I want him to go on until I lie dead in his arms, burnt to ashes from my want of him.

I want him. Every hour, minute, and second.

I wanted him that first night, when I tried to brainwash myself and pretend I didn’t. And now I want him like I want to breathe, to eat, to live a happy life, to see my sister again, to be satisfied in my job. I want him like I want to live my present without any fear whatsoever of what may, or may not, happen tomorrow.

But fear has never been a friend of mine.

“
You. And your money,” I tell him.

I smile, and when his gaze drops to my smile, an awareness of my mouth seizes me.

“
Do you want to run today? To get ready for tomorrow?” I ask him, and it’s taking all my effort to focus on anything but the fire raging inside me.

I nod in understanding, because I feel a little of that too. I don’t want to get up. Especially with this enormous muscled man in the same bed, where I just want to torture myself all over again with my wanting him.

I lean back, feel his shoulder against mine resting on the backrest, and I want to curl up like I did last night when we just couldn’t keep up the kissing and caught a couple of hours of sleep. I think he senses I’m tired too, and he shifts slightly so I can rest my head on him.

He passes me a song.

I’m too lazy to pass him any of mine, so I just listen. Norah Jones’s smoky, beautiful “Come Away With Me” begins playing, sensually proposing that I do exactly as the title suggests.

The tone is so sexy and reminds me so badly of our nights together, our stolen moments kissing, that it gives me a fever. Suddenly he leans over to try to listen through my earphones, and when I get a closer whiff of his clean male scent near me, my muscles throb painfully tight. I instantly grab my music, and select a modern song that’s been playing in the radio lately about a boxer who’s strong and fights incredibly hard. I wanted to play “Iris” for him. I wanted to play something to beg him to make love to me. But his team is worried, and I know that whatever we’re doing at night isn’t conducive to good athletic performance. No matter how much I crave those moments and crave what they’re leading to, I can’t sabotage him like this. He’s too important.

I watch his profile as he listens. His expression is unreadable at first. When he finally raises his head, his gaze is dark and troubled. “You play me a song about a fighter?”

I nod.

He tosses my iPod aside with a scowl. Then, he reaches around and grabs my hips. He drags me onto his lap, and my breath goes when I feel how much, how unmistakably, he wants me. “Give me another one,” he demands.

The primal look in his eyes makes me shudder.

I shake my head. “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing, Remy. You need your sleep,” I whisper.

“
To what?”

I shudder and pull back. “Remy … I’ve never had an affair before. I just won’t share you. You can’t be with anyone else while you’re with me.”

He strokes a thumb across my damp lower lip, his gaze intense. “We won’t be having an affair.”

I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest.

His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. “When I take you, you’ll be mine,” he says, a soft promise in my ear. He slides his thumb along my jaw, then gently kisses my earlobe. “You need to be certain.” His eyes are so hot that I’m on fire with the lust in them, and the word “mine” makes the empty place between my legs swell with longing. “I want you to know me first, and then, I want you to let me know if you still want me to take you.”

The word “take” is also having an effect. I’m just a big mass of quaking need. “But I already know I want you,” I protest.

He looks at my lips with fierce intensity, then into my eyes, his stare so pained and tormented I’m stunned with the darkness I see. He strokes a hand down my bare arm, waking up all the little hairs there. “Brooke, I need you to know who I am. What I am.”

He won’t take me yet.

Even when it’s all I think about. All I want.

Today, it’s daylight, and I’m still living in the last bed I was in, with him, with his mouth devouring mine.

I expect this threat to have more of a reaction. He’s a man. This is an open invitation to uncomplicated sex, just what men want. I’m making it easy for him, basically accepting him “as is,” no more questions asked. He will either work it out in bed with me and be able to train tomorrow, or he’ll have a restful night of sleep without me. And I hate that he doesn’t seem budged to the make-love option which was honestly the one I was praying he’d go for. Instead he studies my face with eyes that I notice are definitely, definitely, not blue today.

Wow.

That evening we arrived, I remember his body in my hands, his sweaty bare skin under my fingers, and it was all I could do to keep my pulse under control as I rolled and rubbed the firm, lean nape of his neck. I edged closer to whisper in the back of his ear, “Mind telling me why Diane and I are in a suite, Remy?”

He let me turn his neck one side, then the other, my fingers lightly resting on his scratchy jaw with a sexy day’s of whiskers, and he never answered. “You can’t do this, Remington,” I added.

But he turned his head slowly, and he touched my lips so that every part of my body remembered having his lips on them. “Stop me. I dare you,” he said, then grabbed his towel and walked away.

I just don’t understand him.

I miss Melanie to talk to.