Transcendent (3 page)

She paused in the act of tugging his shirttails free from his jeans. “Thursday night was the closing show of our season. Tickets were sold out nine months ago. How did you get a seat?”

“I'm now a Platinum Circle Patron of the Selma Galenti Company,” he said.

She let out a short laugh as she glanced significantly around his Fifth Avenue apartment, then pulled his shirt free. “God only knows who the front office browbeat into giving up a seat to please a new major donor,” she said, then slid both hands up his chest to his shoulders and pushed the fabric down his arms.

The shirt caught on his still-buttoned cuffs. The error made a blush flare in her cheeks, but he liked the unscripted feel of this, and at an extremely base level, he really liked the way she looked kneeling naked in front of him.

She recovered quickly, murmuring, “What did you think?” as she unfastened one cuff, then the other, playing the subservient role to the hilt.

He couldn't put what he thought into words. When the curtain opened and he saw Marin rise off the stage, using what seemed like an acre of iridescent silk in her skirt as a prop in a whirling, leaping piece titled Transfixed, his heart seized tight and punched his ribs. Then his brain shut down entirely.

“I don't know anything about dance,” he admitted, “but you were spectacular to watch.”

At his faint, inarticulate praise, she glanced up. Electric shock times ten, because the wildness and power and intensity of the dance flashed in her eyes before she locked it down. He went still.

There it was. Transformation.
That
was what she locked down, except when she was performing.
That
was what he'd seen flashing under Miss Banks's serene surface, the surface no amount of erotic pain could crack.
That
was what he wanted to feel flowing through him, over him, what pleasure had almost broken free a few minutes earlier.

Life itself, channeled through Marin.

She pulled off his shirt and tossed it toward the foot of the bed. “You're not supposed to ‘know dance.' You
feel
dance. At its best, dance steals into your soul and transforms you.”

“Then what I saw was dance at its very best,” he said quietly.

She halted in the process of hooking her fingers in his belt and looked up at him, absorbing his words. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn't stop removing his clothes. With deft fingers she got his belt open and jeans unzipped, but he didn't lift up so she could push off his jeans.

“What do you have in mind, Cole?”

Her trademark serenity was a thin veneer over the passion he felt straining to break free. He'd come too far to flinch now.

“Kiss me.”

The wildness glinted bright and hot in her eyes then disappeared as she bent her head. He smoothed his palm along the side of her jaw, cupped it, stroked her cheek with his thumb. There was nothing more intimate than mouth-to-mouth contact, the shifting, sliding pressure of lips, the mingled breaths, the soft words and pleas tasted as much as heard.

She looked at him then, really looked at him. He had no idea what she saw. She was Marin Bryant and Miss Banks and a conduit for Terpsichore, the goddess of dance, but he was Colson Fleming IV and Fleming from prep school and Captain Fleming to his fellow Marines and then Fleming again when he joined Cooper Bensonhurst as a trader. He had no idea what she saw in his eyes, but he prayed it was something like
You can own me and I can own you if you just let down those goddamn walls.

“I don't like being vulnerable,” she said finally.

No fucking doubt.
“You're vulnerable every time we meet,” he said, encircling one wrist with his fingers.

“I'm not,” she whispered.

He lifted that wrist to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the inside. “Ten inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, remember?” he said, then grasped the other.

“You wouldn't hurt me,” she said, but he was kissing that wrist as she said it, then nibbling at the tendons under the skin.

Her eyes were closed, her voice low and distracted as the words tumbled into the air. As they dissipated into the room she opened her eyes and looked at him, the battle between wants and fears playing out in every line of her body.

With her he could be wholly himself. He wanted to offer her the same freedom.

“I won't hurt you in any way,” he said. “Trust me, Marin.”

He knew what he was asking her to do. For someone who experienced life deeply and had the talent to translate it into an intense, physical art, wild emotion felt dangerous. Threatening. Marin used the discipline of dance and their meetings to channel her strongest, wildest emotions—lust, anger, desire, love, need—into all-encompassing, explosive release. She'd never kissed him, never let him kiss her, and he wanted her mouth on his more than he'd ever wanted anything else in his entire life. Not for himself, so he could “claim her,” although no lie, he would do that.

He wanted this for her. He wanted to give her the complete freedom to experience and show everything, no fear, no boundaries, no restraints, no roles. Just him and Marin.

She had to want to do this. He could strategize and maneuver, make her come a dozen different ways and times, but he couldn't make a kiss meaningful unless she offered it to him.

When she lifted her eyes to his, it was his turn to freeze. Everything lashed deep down in her soul was glinting in her green eyes, turning them a stormy sea green. He braced himself, waiting for her to come to him. Then she rose just enough to bring her face level with his, tilted forward, and brushed her lips across his.

He'd asked for one kiss, and one kiss only, but she didn't pull away. Instead her breath eased from her in a shuddering little sigh that soothed the sparks popping under the skin of his mouth. Delicate and sure, she stroked her tongue along his lower lip, then paused, as if evaluating the taste of him.

Barely daring to breathe, he stayed silent and still. A moment later she gave him another kiss, this one with more pressure, her mouth open against his, then her tongue dipped into his mouth. The faintest trace of coppery blood dissipated with the kiss. The instant when her tongue stroked over his, when the floodgates opened and she let everything she felt flow through her, into him, the brilliant, nuclear heat of the sun shot through his veins.

He cupped the back of her head with one hand and wrapped his other arm around her waist, pulling her naked body to his. He'd never felt so alive, not under machine-gun fire, not under the daily stress on the trading floor, not in Lady Matilda's shadowy boudoir with Miss Banks. There was adrenaline, and there was Marin, mouth open under his, tongue to tongue, trading gasps.

More.

She might have said it, he might have imagined it, but they both felt it. Breathing hard, he backed off the bed and shoved his jeans down, then grabbed a condom from his nightstand. He sheathed himself by touch because he couldn't take his eyes off her, sitting back on her heels in the middle of his bed all pale skin and white blond hair, transformed into a white-hot column of flame.

He crawled back to the middle of the bed, pushed her on her back, and moved between her legs. Braced just above her, her nipples brushing his chest with each inhale, his cock nestled just inside her wet, swollen folds, he looked down into her stormy green eyes and said, “Kiss me. Don't stop until I'm inside you.”

She gave a high-pitched groan, then gripped his nape with one hand and brought his mouth to hers. He felt his pulse pound as she kissed him like she couldn't get enough, licking and nipping at his lips and tongue. Sweat broke out on his back as he slid in, inch by excruciatingly hot, tight inch, until he was as deep inside her as he could get, hip to hip, chest to chest, and finally, his mouth on hers. Limitless energy unleashed, she writhed under him, but he withdrew as slowly as he'd slid in, paused for a deep, thorough kiss, then eased forward again.

Again. Again. Again and again and he was going to go out of his mind, because she was surely going out of hers. Trapped between his body and the mattress, she writhed under him, strong enough to make him work to hold her down as everything she felt animated her body. He held her down and fucked her slow and steady until that wild, restless energy coalesced into pure need. On his next deep, gliding stroke she lifted her hips to meet his, her sheath clamped around his cock, her mouth open under his. A high-pitched, shuddering noise he'd never heard her make slipped from her mouth. She shoved at his chest but he didn't move for her.

“God, Cole,” she gasped against his mouth. “You're cruel!”

Given their history, the irony of that particular statement made him laugh. “You love it,” he growled, political correctness and everything he'd learned about being a gentleman long gone.

He braced his elbows above her shoulders to keep her in position and put the full power of his hips into the next thrust. Her eyes slammed shut as she arched hard and cried out.
Christ,
it felt so good, hot and slick and so right to be inside Marin, naked and sweating and striving together.

“Look at me,” he said, and paused until she did.

The open vulnerability in her eyes had his heart battering his breastbone and his throat locked too tight to breathe. He could see how hard it was for her to be vulnerable like this, like the conduit of human emotion she became on stage, exposed for everyone to see, for him to see. But she did it, let the emotion he sparked in her flare through her eyes as she clung to him, fingers digging into his shoulders. Each plunging thrust forced a gasp from her. The pink flush of sex was high in her cheekbones, in her exposed throat.

“Don't stop.”

The words were almost inaudible, a soft pleading unlike anything he'd heard from her before. He didn't stop. He kept up his relentlessly steady pace, felt her fly apart under him. Slick contractions gripped his cock as he thrust through the spasms and absorbed her helpless cries with his skin. Balanced on the razor's edge of pleasure and pain, he hung there, chest heaving, sweat dripping to plunk on her collarbone as she eased back into the mattress. She opened her eyes, and the yearning in the green depths gripped his throat.

“Please come,” she said again in that soft, female voice. “I want to feel that.”

He slid in, back out, in again to the depths of her body, felt her legs curl around his calves as she trembled in response. She looked down between their bodies, watching him plunge into her. He fought to keep his eyes open as sensation pulled him into the rip current.

One hand gripped his hip; the other pressed at the small of his back. “Yes,” she whispered. “Cole, yes. Let go.”

That was all it took. Orgasm hit him like running full tilt into a brick wall. He buried his face in her hair, spasm after spasm wracking him, and felt the world go black around him.

Hearing returned first, Marin's quick breaths into his neck. Vision. His forearm, the white sheets, her sweat-dampened hair, her ear. He'd slumped over her. He lifted some of his weight back to his arms and tried to remember how to breathe. Once he had that mastered again he got up and went into the bathroom to remove the condom.

When he came back into the bedroom Marin was gone.

Her jeans and sweater still lay in a heap on the floor, but his shirt was missing. He pulled on his shorts and strode barefoot down the hall, past the dining room, the library, the home theater, the three other bedrooms, the eat-in kitchen, into the living room overlooking Fifth Avenue.

She hadn't bothered to turn on the lights, instead standing in a semi-darkness that made her white-blond hair glow like moonlight. Dressed in his shirt, she was looking out the floor-to-ceiling living room windows at the Central Park West skyline, rising in the distance over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The angle of the ambient light shadowed her profile. He stopped just behind her and laid both palms flat on the glass on either side of her head, almost but not quite touching her, restating his opening position but not taking liberties.

The whoosh and rush of a bus's air brakes reverberated below them. “I heard Wall Street bonuses were down,” she said.

There was always money to be made if you worked your ass off, so he could have bought the apartment in any of the last several years, but he told her the truth. “I inherited it. My great-grandfather built the building. I grew up one floor down.”

Revealing that little detail to a woman was usually like throwing chum in the water, but she tilted her head in curiosity, nothing more. She studied his reflection in the glass, then her oblique gaze shifted back to the small figures in the glass-enclosed Sackler Wing. “You gave this up for the Marine Corps barracks?”

The last time they met was the first time they'd talked in anything other than a formal, scripted way. She'd guessed he was NYPD or FBI, which surprised him until he learned she was a dancer. Marin studied movement like he studied markets and commodities. She'd probably read his history in his body while he was still enamored with Miss Banks.

He waited until she looked at him again, then nodded. “Six years. Two tours in Afghanistan.”

“You are one surprise after another,” she said, her focus shifting back to the skyline.

“And you were expecting a scene like all the others,” he said.

Again, he waited for their eyes to meet. When they did, she nodded.

He thought about her silk and pearl-clad alter ego Miss Banks, about Marin Bryant, Principal Dancer, about the passionate, sexual, adventurous woman no less under his skin than when they'd begun. She wouldn't be easy, but he liked difficult things. “I got the feeling boring you would be the cardinal sin.”

“You are many things, Cole, but you're not boring,” she said.

At that something in him eased. The glass reflected her swollen mouth, flushed cheeks, the banked fire in her eyes. “I'm glad you're here,” he said, a statement, like so many facets of their relationship, that could be taken many different ways.