Your Planet or Mine? (16 page)

T
HE ROOM DOOR SLAMMED
closed and Jana bolted it. Cavin set to work inspecting the closet, under the bed, the bathroom, every nook and cranny until he ended up at the window. He stayed there for some time, peering down at the parking lot with a device that resembled mini binoculars but that probably saw in the dark or even through clothing for all she knew.

Jana buried her hands in her bomber jacket pockets and watched him from under the rim of her ball cap. His shirt pulled tight across broad shoulders as he covered his wound with a free hand, a gesture she noticed he affected when tired. He resembled a tall, sexy Napoleon.

When he’d assured himself the coast was clear, he turned around and caught her watching him. He seemed pleased that she was. “Mrs. Snow,” he said in a deep and husky voice that made her coral-painted toes curl.

She did an about-face and ducked into the bathroom with her bag of toiletries. She grabbed polish remover, a bag of cotton balls, and propped a foot on the toilet seat. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” she muttered, rubbing furiously. Anything to help her resist his charms, because none of the reasons why she shouldn’t sleep with him made sense anymore. They were safe for the night, they had privacy, and they were in love.

At first there had been the need to avoid romantic entanglements in order to keep focused on her career and her family, but now there was far more distracting her than making it with a sexy alien. Like impending galactic warfare, rumors flying about her family, psycho cousins, shoot-outs and breaking the law—and that was just off the top of her head.

Then why not be intimate with Cavin now that she could?

Because you’re afraid once you make love you won’t be able to pretend this is just temporary, and you have no idea how you’re going to fit this man in your life.

How many other women secretly harbored the fantasy of a dream lover returning to sweep them off their feet? But what about the reality of it? Would a normal life ever be possible with Cavin? Sharing a bed each night as husband and wife. Making love before going to sleep, only to be woken by alarm clocks in the morning like any other couple. What then? She’d commute into the capitol and Cavin would drop their half-alien kids off at school before…before what? Going to work? Staying home?

You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Jana.

Cavin showed up in the doorway. A moment of silence told her he was confused. He wrinkled his nose. “What is that substance, Jana?”

“Polish remover.” She threw an acetone-soaked cotton ball in the toilet and took a fresh one from the bag. “See, I’m a frosted-pink kind of girl, every once in a while pale peach, but last week my nail lady told me I was too careful, too unadventurous. A bore, but she didn’t quite say that. ‘You need new color,’ she tells me. ‘You need sexy. I pick for you sexy color.’ The next thing I knew, my nails were ‘A Little Too Hot’ coral. Turns out it was way too hot.” Jana threw the last dirty cotton ball into the toilet and flushed. “There.” She wriggled her toes. “Nun’s feet. Now I can resist you.”

His grin was downright devilish. “Think so?”

She gently but firmly pushed him backward. His abs were hard with just the right amount of sexy give. “Be right with you,” she said and shut the door. On went her flannel pajamas, baby blue with crescent moons. She took off her hat, pulled out her ponytail, brushed her hair and shoved on her glasses. There, she thought. Miss Virgin Snow is ready for bed. The outfit alone was a surefire sex deterrent; not to mention the added glamour of her reading glasses and her hair hanging half over them. She flung open the door.

Cavin was back at the window, his hands clasped behind his back, but when he saw her reflection in the glass, he turned around. He looked her up and down with such hunger that she almost passed out on the spot. Jana clasped a fistful of flannel above her bust as if closing a plunging neckline. “I try to resist you, and I can’t. I try to get you to resist me, and I can’t do that, either. How are we going to make it through the night without…making it?”

Cavin sighed, mischief twinkling in his eyes. “Ah, such is the question all women ask of me. Any planet. Any star system. When I’m near, they cannot control themselves.”

“We should have gotten a suite!” Jana grabbed a pillow and hurled it at him. “Because your ego is too large for this room!”

He advanced on her. “My translator suggests an Earthling phrase in response—size matters.”

“That doesn’t refer to ego.” She grabbed another pillow, backing up.

“If not ego, then what?” The wicked curve to his lips assured her he already knew the answer.

Growling, Jana flung the pillow at him. He tried to catch her. Laughing, she ducked and pirouetted out of his reach. But he caught her hand and pulled her close. She muffled a shriek. They spun like a pair of dancers before falling up against the wall.

Cavin caught both her hands in one of his, pulling them over her head and pressing them to the wall behind her. With her shoulders against the wall, her hips thrust forward making her B-cup breasts jut out and brush his chest. His muscular thighs corralled her legs.

They grinned at each other, laughing, breathless. It was playful and erotic and wild and fun. “You didn’t lose that girl, Jana, the girl you were,” he said. “She’s right here, here with me.” Before she’d finished giggling, he’d muffled her laughter with a kiss. And then another, each one hotter than the last. When he finally lifted his head, his expression was so open, so unguarded, it grabbed at her heart. “
You’re
here with me.” He kissed her again, lightly, tenderly, playfully, on her lips, her nose, her brows, until he’d made her sigh.

In that moment, it was hard to imagine they’d ever been apart. “I wonder what it would have been like if we hadn’t separated as children,” she said dreamily.

“We would not have been behaving like this, not in the beginning. But as teenagers…” He kissed his way to her shoulder and gave her a little bite that made her yelp. “All I can say is that we would have married young.”

“Very young.” She slipped her hands from his and framed his hard jaw, tracing his features with her thumbs, absorbing how the boy’s face she remembered had been altered by tiny scars and creases left from years of living, sometimes quite brutally it sounded like. “But then you wouldn’t have been able to be a soldier.”

“Not necessarily. As a young couple, we would have needed an income. One-third of the Coalition population is either in the military or employed serving the military. But I wouldn’t have chosen a combat job, not at the risk of leaving you a widow.” He folded her hands and lifted her knuckles to his lips. “I would have searched out a backwater posting, a low-risk location. We would have had a quiet life. A life together…”

As he spoke, she let his descriptions sweep her away. Cavin had a gift. He could paint pictures in her mind with words, from erotic images of jungle sex to sweet and blurry-edged visions of an idyllic existence on a distant world: a cozy home, their children running barefoot in the grass. Her, wearing a pretty cotton sundress. Cavin catching her around the waist and spinning her close for a kiss. Then the realist in her filled in the details. “I’d have missed my family. And I’d have lost the chance to go into politics. All I’ve ever wanted to do is hold elected office. To make a difference in this world. To give something back.”

“Then we’d have stayed on Earth,” he said simply. “I’d have sent my father off without me.”

Jana imagined herself as a nine-year-old bringing Cavin home.
“Look what I found, Grandpa!”

“Whatever our decision would have been as children, to stay or to go, we’d have made it together,” Cavin said. “And whatever our future decisions are to be, we’ll make those together, too.”

She slid her arms around his waist. “Your planet, or mine?”

He bent his head to kiss her. The embrace was longer and hotter this time. His warm hand slid over her stomach, just inside the flannel, questioning, not wanting to breach any invisible boundaries.

But she wanted him to touch her. Wanted his lips and hands all over her body. The scent of his skin was an aphrodisiac, and his taste, salty sweet. He made her dizzy. He made her ache for more. He made her so many things that she couldn’t begin to catalog them all. With his hands and lips on her, she found it nearly impossible to think. Or to remember why she wasn’t supposed to make love with him. She’d had her reasons. Whatever they were.

“Phish Food,” she whispered. It was her last line of defense. It’d never failed her before. She ducked out of Cavin’s embrace and made a beeline for the minibar fridge where she’d stored the container. The ice cream was more than half melted by now, but she didn’t care. She peeled off the lid. The aroma of chocolate and caramel drifted out. She was almost shaking with anticipation as she buried a spoon in the melted ice cream and lifted it to her mouth. “That’s it, yes.” She closed her eyes and savored the taste. “Yes, yes, yes.”

She walked back to Cavin and offered him a spoonful. “Here, you have to try—”

He bent his head and kissed her, exploring her mouth, tasting her, until all traces of chocolate had been erased.

“…a taste,” she murmured dazedly when their lips finally parted.

“It’s very good, this fish food.” His green eyes glinted with mischief. “Oh, look. It’s run down your arm.” He lifted her arm by the wrist. Chocolate had dribbled all the way to her elbow. “You weren’t paying attention, Jana. Was something distracting you?”

Or someone. She grew light-headed as he licked and kissed the ice cream from her skin, scooting her sleeve higher to reach her elbow. Desire flowed through her like warm syrup, thick and sweet.
Boom, boom, boom
. The drumbeat between her thighs was pounding harder and hotter. He kissed his way up her arm to her ear, where he breathed, “The next time you utter ‘yes, yes, yes’ it will be as I make love to you.”

Jana uttered a sound that fell somewhere between a moan, a sigh and a cuss.
Grandpa, I want you to know I didn’t go down without a fight. I held out until the bitter end, or at least until the end of my apparently short evolutionary rope. But with Cavin it’s different; it always has been. Once my hormones reached critical mass, there wasn’t anything I could do.

Jana found his delicious lips, sipping, teasing, enticing, until she’d drawn him into a full kiss. Blindly, she reached between their bodies to unbutton his pants. Her knuckles brushed over his stomach; his muscles contracted from her touch. The bulge a little farther down told her how aroused he was. One flick of her fingers over the button on his waistband and he’d be hers…

…moving inside her. Flying, the two of them.

She popped the button on his fly and pulled on the zipper, freeing him. He groaned and pinned her to his body. “Jana…” He gasped her name, harshly, desperately, like a drowning man trying to stay afloat. It was a warning: if they continued, he was going under and taking her with him.

“I want to make love. I do,” she whispered. “I tried staying away. It doesn’t work.”

He scooped her into his arms as if she weighed nothing and carried her to the bed. In one smooth motion, he’d lowered her to the mattress.

“Your wound,” she cautioned. “Be careful.”

“Right now, pain is the last thing on my mind. Trust me on that. The only inconvenience for you due to my injury is that tonight you may have to be on top.”

May the rest of my life be filled with such inconveniences
. “Top, bottom, left, right, upside down, inside out, up against trees, walls, on tables, I don’t care.”

The heat in his stare made her shiver. “We’ll try all of those, in time.”

At that point, self-combustion was a real possibility.

His hands slid under the flannel. She didn’t stop him when he caressed her bare breast. She tightened under his hand and between her legs, a double explosion of sensation. He kissed her under her ear which made her giggle, but his hands were busy the whole while. By the time she’d realized what he’d done, her pajama top was unbuttoned.

He parted the fabric, baring her to him for the first time. The air was cool, his hands hot, his tongue even hotter. When he took a nipple into his mouth, they both sighed.

“This only reinforces my opinion that you have the most amazing mouth,” she half whispered.

“And this—” he kissed and nibbled and licked his way from her breasts to her throat to her collarbone and back down to her belly button without missing anything in between “—only reinforces that you have the most amazing body.”

He knew his way around a woman’s body, too. His fingers slid under the elastic waistband of her pajama pants, lowering them. He cupped her bare bottom as he brought his mouth to her ear. “You’re so soft, Jana. So sweet. All mine,” he breathed and slipped his fingers between her legs.

If Cavin’s mouth was amazing, his hands were even more so. Her desire for him went from syrupy thick and sweet to as swift and molten-hot as lava. The drumbeat pounded, harder, louder. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, yes.” Deftly, he explored her. She arched into his hand, greedy for more. Her thighs opened for him. No inhibitions, nothing to hide. His fingers caressed, tortured, dipped inside her. He took her to the edge, holding her there. The sensation was exquisite. Quickly it became almost too much. She gripped his hand and moaned. “Please…”

“Come for me, Jana,” he whispered, sliding lower on her body. He touched his mouth to her, to her very center, and her world exploded. She closed one hand in his hair; the other twisted in the bedsheet until her last moans of pleasure whimpered into silence.

When she at last floated down from orbit, Cavin smiled down at her. “Better than fish food?”

“What’s Phish Food?” she asked dazedly.

He grinned. “Good answer.” He rolled onto his back, pulling her astride him. “I want you, Jana. Gods, how I want you.” Before he could pull her close, an ear-shattering explosion boomed from outside.

Cavin rolled again, flipping her beneath him to protect her. A fireball flashed in the gap between the curtains. Thunder rocked the room, and the window shook. A dozen car alarms whooped and beeped as chunks of debris clanged back to earth.