As she moved between his thighs she had expected him to dominate the act, to move her head as he wanted it, to hold her to him as he took over the pace. Instead, his ragged voice had encouraged her as he arched to her. His hands had gripped the headboard, his body tight, tortured with need.
And now she arched to him. As his lips moved from hers, to her neck, then her breasts, his hands pushed at the pajama bottoms she wore.
Heat built around them until Maggie felt perspiration coat her flesh. Reaching for him, a whimper left her lips as he caught her hands and stretched her arms above her head.
“Hold on,” he growled. “It’s my turn now.”
Her fingers latched onto the slats behind her as she watched him with dazed fascination. The expression on his face was one she had never seen, not at any time before. Savagery tightened it as hunger lent a dark cast that sent a shiver racing down her spine. He wanted her, wanted her with a depth and a strength she had never seen in him before.
His head lowered over a breast again, his lips poised just above the hard point rising eagerly toward him. His gaze lifted, meeting hers in the dim light of the room as his tongue extended to lick over the stiff peak, demanding that she watch. That she see the naked lust and pleasure tearing through him, as it tore through her. Sensation whipped through her, jerking her body violently upward as a cry left her lips.
“Joe. Don’t tease me. It’s been too long.”
Years too long. An aching, sorrow-filled lifetime since she had known his touch.
“I know how long it’s been.” His voice was raspy, deep. “Every day, every hour, I counted with my need for you, Maggie. I’m a very hungry man now. Let me relish what little time my control will allow me here.”
He turned his head, rubbing his rough cheek against the sensitive flesh of her swollen breast. Maggie bit her lip as she panted for air and shuddered beneath the caress.
“I love your breasts.” His hands framed the hardened mounds, his thumbs raking over her nipples as the hard bursts of pleasure had her whimpering in rising anticipation. “Such pretty, flushed nipples.” He lowered his head, his lips covering the hard tips, his tongue flickering over them with rapid, hot strokes. “So sensitive and easy to please. I love pleasing your nipples, Maggie.”
Maggie’s hands tightened on the headboard, as her gaze dimmed and pleasure rocked through her. It was so good, the slow worshipping of her breasts. She remembered that well, how he loved making her nipples hard, then driving her crazy as he made them more sensitive by the second.
Which was pretty much what he was doing now. Laving each with his tongue, raking them with his teeth, only to come back to suck at them firmly, one by one, until she swore she was going to climax from the intense pleasure of that alone.
“Beautiful.” He breathed the word from one nipple to the other before giving each a parting kiss and moving lower.
As he touched her, Maggie could feel her heart melting, her soul reaching out to him. There was a difference in his touch, it was gentler, almost reverent. As though the time spent apart had hurt him as much as it had hurt her. Was she being fanciful? Probably. But God, she loved him. She always had. And for just this one night she would let her heart have its way and convince her that he loved her as well. Just a little bit. Just enough to sustain the dreams she had kept hidden, even from herself.
“Joe…” The pleasure grew, wrapping around her until she knew she wasn’t going to be able to bear much more. The agonizing arousal tearing through her clenched her womb, throbbed in her vagina. She was desperate for release, for his possession.
“I have to taste you again, Maggie,” he whispered, his voice whisky-rough as his hands moved to push the pajama bottoms further down her thighs and over her knees.
With an impatient kick, Maggie discarded the bottoms. Arching her back, she lifted closer to the tormenting lips moving along her torso, then her abdomen. With hot licks and slow kisses, Joe had her stretched on a rack of lust nearly too intense to bear. The pleasure was burning through her nervous system, creating a vortex of need, hunger, and intense blinding arousal so deep it became the very center of her existence.
She needed more.
As he lifted himself between her thighs, his hands parting her legs and lifting them until her knees bent, Maggie could only watch in rising anticipation. Breathing was nearly impossible as she waited for that first touch, that first blinding, intimate kiss.
“I dreamed of this, Maggie.” He moved his hand until the backs of his fingers were feathering over the short curls that shielded her sex. “Touching you, tasting you again. Did you dream of me, baby?”
His thumb rasped over her clit and she jerked in pleasured response.
“You know I did.” The dreams had kept her going, had kept her hoping through two years of a marriage that had turned into hell.
She wasn’t in the mood for games now, though. She needed to orgasm, needed that sharp brutal edge of lust to dissipate as it only did after Joe brought her to climax.
“Hmm, were your dreams this good?”
His head bent, his tongue swiping quickly through the drenched slit of her sex, as her hips arched violently and a cry tore from her lips. Electrical impulses of lava-hot sensation tore through her body, leaving her hovering on the edge of climax as Joe retreated.
“Don’t stop.” Her head thrashed on the pillow. “Joe, don’t stop.”
“I don’t want to rush it.” His voice was strained, his breath hot against the damp flesh between her thighs as he blew against the sodden curls.
His tongue licked over her, teasing the swollen bud of her clit before going lower. With wicked, knowing licks, he outlined the sensitive entrance to her vagina, his tongue flickering over it as she lifted to him, only to retreat teasingly.
She would never survive his teasing. She knew how he teased, knew how long he could hold off as he made her hotter by the second. She was more desperate now than she had ever been for his touch. The teasing wasn’t going to happen, because she would never survive it.
“Rush it. You can go slow later.”
She released the slats of the headboard, and before he could catch her hands, her fingers were tangling in his hair and pulling him to her desperate flesh.
She heard a growl a second before his lips covered the aching, burning nub between the sensitive folds of her pussy. Sucking it into his mouth, his tongue licked with a driving rhythm, as a thick male finger worked deep inside the pulsing depths of her vagina.
Oh yeah, that was what she needed.
Pleasure exploded inside her, brilliant shards of white-hot lightning sizzled over her nerve endings, burned through her flesh. Her clitoris swelled beneath the assault, her body tightened, and seconds later the orgasm that tore through her flung her into ecstasy.
She was unaware of the tight grip she had on his hair, or his grip as he forced her fingers free. All she knew was the rapture flying through her, and the feel of him kneeling between her thighs seconds later.
Opening her eyes, she arched her hips to him as he rolled a condom quickly over the straining cock rising between his thighs.
He was powerful, all sleek flesh and rippling muscles. His chest was heaving with the effort to breathe as he secured the protection, then moved into position between her thighs.
“How do you want it?” His voice was strained. “Fast and hard, or hard and fast?”
The limited choice would have amused her, if she wasn’t so damned desperate for the coming penetration.
“How about hard and fast?” she moaned. “God, I don’t care, just do it, Joe. Now…”
She screamed at the penetration. It was hard. Fast. In three strokes he had buried himself to the depths of her needy pussy. Coming over her, his arms tucked beneath her shoulders, his elbows holding the majority of his weight from her as he began to move.
“Hell yes. Take me, baby. Take all of me.” The harsh demand, voiced in a tone desperate with pleasure, had her breath lodging in her ch
est.
All of him. She needed all of him. His body, his heart.
“Joe. Oh God. Joe.” Her fingers clenched on his shoulders as her legs lifted, wrapping around his pounding hips and locking in the small of his back as he drove her to insanity with the pleasure burning through her.
“There, baby,” he crooned, as his head lowered to her neck. “So sweet and tight.” His voice was guttural, throbbing with lust. “I could fuck you forever, Maggie. Never stop. I never want to stop.”
The fierce rhythm was too much to contain. Nerve endings untouched in more than two years rioted with the intensity of the sensations stroking over them. Explosions of nearing orgasm began to ripple through the tender tissue, as Joe groaned roughly at the further tightening around his plunging erection.
He liked that, she remembered. The way she tightened around him before climax, the feel of her racing toward completion.
“Come for me, Maggie.” He nipped her ear erotically. “Come for me, baby, let me feel you milk me. Now, baby. Now.”
He moved faster, impossibly deeper. Maggie felt the sensations splinter inside her as a stronger, harder orgasm gripped her. She couldn’t scream, there was no breath to scream, no strength to fight the rolling explosions tearing through her as Joe’s male cry filtered through her mind.
He tensed above her, driving deep in one last plunging thrust, before she felt the convulsive throb of his cock inside her, felt him spilling himself into the condom he wore.
“Maggie. God, Maggie. I missed you…”
Her heart clenched at the words, at the emotion she fooled herself into believing she heard. She loved him. She had always loved him. In that moment, Maggie knew that nothing and no one would ever replace Joe in her heart.
chapter 7
“did you really love him?”
Joe’s question wasn’t unexpected. Hours after the lust and hunger had burned itself down to a dull glow, sleep had stolen their strength. Now, awake, he held her, her back against his chest as she watched the day lighten beyond the bedroom window.
He wasn’t confrontational this time, not as he had been when he questioned her about Grant before. He was quiet, reflective. Unfortunately, it was also when he was at his most dangerous. And she was very aware of the fact that right now he had no intentions of allowing her to brush the subject away. And maybe it was time to face it, to face the truth of the mistakes she had made.
“I thought I did,” she finally answered. “I wanted to, until a few weeks after the wedding. Had he been the man I thought I married…” She paused. She didn’t want to break the fragile peace between them.
“You would have,” he answered for her.
He sounded accepting. There was no anger in his tone, he wasn’t tense. She hadn’t expected that. In the past two and a half years she had seen Joe only once, at her wedding, where he had been best man. It had been hell. The moment she whispered her vows to Grant something had shattered inside her soul.
She should have walked out then; she admitted that to herself long ago. When the vows had stuck in her throat, and the tears had flowed, not from happiness, but from sadness, sorrow, she should have turned and walked out.
But she hadn’t wanted to hurt Grant. She had cared for him deeply.
“I could have,” she amended. “If I had let myself.”
“Would you have let yourself?”
That question no longer haunted her. At first it had, in those first weeks when she had questioned herself so deeply, before Grant had shown himself for the bastard he was.
“If he had been the man I thought he was.” Admitting it to herself was the hardest part. “Then I would have loved him.” She would have lived her life loving two men, rather than just one.
“You wouldn’t have.” His answer had her jerking in his arms, turning until she could face him.
“I married him,” she pointed out, ignoring the dark look he flashed her. “I cared for him then, Joe. Deeply.”
“You cared for him, you didn’t love him.” His broad hand cupped her face, his thumb caressing over her swollen lips gently. “You would never have loved him, Maggie. Because you loved me.”
She breathed in roughly as she stared back at him, remembering the nights she had ached for him, dreamed of him. The nights she had cried for him.
“I cared for him,” she repeated. “He wasn’t the man I thought he was, so I wasn’t given the chance to love him.”
She felt him behind her, hard, erect. There was no demand in him though, at least not yet. He smoothed her hair back from her face as he watched her patiently, his gaze velvet-soft, flickering with emotion.
“Wouldn’t have mattered.” The arrogance that suddenly stamped his features moments later had anger simmering inside her. “You loved me, Maggie. You still love me. You married Grant loving another man and you know it.”
She gritted her teeth. She was not going to argue with him. Arguing with him got her nowhere.
“Stop it, Joe.”
His smile was patronizing. “You knew when you married him that you didn’t love him. You loved me. Admit it.”
“Why? So you can gloat? So you know you’ve won?”
“Oh baby, I already know I’ve won,” he growled. “I just want to make certain you know it.”
“I know you have got to be the most infuriating man I have ever met in my life,” she snapped, jerking out of his embrace as she moved from the bed. “You just can’t help yourself, can you, Joe? Being an asshole is so deeply ingrained inside you…”
“I loved you, Maggie.”
His calm, quiet announcement shut her up. She stared back at him in surprise, her eyes wide, the elation she would have once felt overshadowed by more than two years of pain.
“You loved me?”
Maggie watched as Joe flicked the blankets back and moved to the opposite side of the bed. The muscles in his back and lean buttocks flexed as he rose to his feet before turning back to her.
He was aroused. The hard length of his erection jutted forward demandingly. Muscular, hard, and proud, the sheer power in his body had always commanded her attention.
“You seem surprised,” he grunted. “I haven’t had a woman since you left my bed. Do you think it was from choice?”
Of course it wouldn’t be. Joe was highly sexed, a creature of lust when it came to his pleasure. That didn’t mean it was love. Did it? Or could it?
“I think I’m very much afraid you’re playing one hell of a game with me,” she admitted the possibility to herself. “You terrify me, Joe, simply because you hold the power to destroy me in the palms of your hands. And if you’ve already judged me guilty, you wouldn’t hesitate to use whatever weapons you could come by. Even lying.”
His eyes narrowed on her; the distance of the bed between them suddenly seemed much farther and much more difficult to cross than it had been even days before.
“You’re right,” he finally answered. “If I thought you were lying, if I thought you were involved, nothing would save you, Maggie. But I haven’t lied to you. I don’t believe you were involved.”
“You’ve just suddenly found all this love for me that wasn’t there two and a half years ago?” She jerked her long shirt from the floor and pulled it on with shaking hands.
“It was always there, Maggie.” He didn’t bother to pull his sweatpants on, he just stood facing her, aroused and proud and so damned confident she wanted to throw something at him.
Her smile was mocking as she shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you, Joe.”
A frown jerked between his brows. “Oh, really?”
The dangerous undertone of his voice wasn’t exactly a comfortable sound.
“Really.” Maggie ignored the nerves building in the pit of her stomach as she faced him.
She had never truly challenged Joe, not in anything he said or the parameters of their relationship. Confrontations weren’t her first choice in solving anything, but as she stared back at him she realized that t
his particular confrontation had been coming since he had taken her from the police station.
“You don’t want to do this right now, Maggie,” he warned her quietly. The velvet softness of his voice was a sure sign that his temper was rousing.
“I don’t want to push you, period, Joe.” She turned from him, bending to pick up her pajama bottoms before putting them on. “It’s not worth the heartache you can deliver. But I stopped believing in fairy tales two and a half years ago.” She turned back to him, fighting the need to believe him even as she doubted him. “Especially yours.”
She didn’t expect his sudden response. Joe always handled himself calmly. Coolly. He never lost control. Until that moment.
The change came over his expression so suddenly that Maggie had no chance to react. From one second to the next the easygoing facade was stripped. His dark eyes narrowed, the flesh along his cheekbones tightened, and he had vaulted onto the bed, crossing it in one step before he was in front of her.
Turning to run wasn’t really an option, but she tried anyway. With a squeak of alarm she turned and tried to jump for the safety of the bathroom, only to feel the manacle of his heavily muscled arm wrap around her waist as he pushed her against the wall.
“You stopped believing in my fucking fairy tales?” His voice was a hoarse snarl at her ear as she felt her heart rate increase, the blood suddenly thundering erratically through her veins. Not from fear. There was no fear as his hands literally ripped the T-shirt from her body and flung the scraps aside, all the while holding her in place as she struggled against him.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled out, more from shock than any other emotion. Where the hell had this Joe come from? She could feel the anger, the lust, and more. Some added edge to his touch that had her heart leaping in hope.
His hands were gentle despite their commanding strength, his body controlling her, even as it stroked against her. This was no act. She could feel it in his hands, in the sudden, dominant hunger blazing in the air around them.