I Dream of Danger

  Yes, definitely.

  He stood by the bed for a moment, looking down at her. “Lie back down, honey,” he said softly and she did, immediately, that “honey” ringing in her ears. When he looked at her like that, called her “honey,” she’d have obeyed him if he’d said, “Put your hand in the thresher, honey.”

  He sat on the side of the bed, making it dip, and just looked at her, perusing her carefully, from her face, over her breasts, belly, down her legs to her feet, then back up again.

  He sighed and she stiffened.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he said and smiled at her. “Now open your legs.”

  She smiled back and slid her legs apart.

  He applied the washcloth between her legs and she winced to see it turn red and then pink. His eyes followed his hands as he cleaned her. His movements were impersonal, prosaic, and she was immensely turned on.

  “I never even thought you might be a virgin,” he said and stopped for a moment, almost indignant. “I mean, look at you! You’re a beautiful young woman. What’s the matter with the guys in this town? Are they blind? How the f— How the hell was I supposed to guess that you hadn’t done this before?”

  Elle rolled her eyes. “First of all, Nick, you can say fuck. If we’re going to fuck, you can say fuck.”

  He stopped and his eyes widened in shock. His mouth fell open. She laughed. It took a lot to shock Nick. Or maybe not, if hearing her say “fuck” made his jaw drop.

  “Fuck.” He breathed, and she laughed again, then he shook his head. “Okay, my vocabulary aside, please tell me how someone who looks like you has never—” He stopped instinctively. “Has never—” He couldn’t complete the sentence.

  “Fucked,” she offered.

  “Okay.” He sighed. “So how can someone who looks like you never have fucked.”

  Never kissed either. She was really glad he hadn’t figured that one out.

  She gave him the easy version. “Daddy started getting really sick in my sophomore year. It had been sort of funny before. Losing the keys, forgetting where he put his glasses even though they were on top of his head. Then he said he took early retirement. I only found out later that he was forced into it. There was no way he could sit on a bench. But then it got worse, very fast. One night the police knocked on the door at three in the morning, holding Daddy between them. He’d wandered off. They found him in his bathrobe on State Street and brought him home. They were really nice. They were a little less nice the tenth time that happened. And downright angry the thirtieth. It—It’s a terrible disease, devastating. I had my hands full. I was young, but it was as if I had four small kids. There isn’t a boy on earth who’d put up with that, and no one did.”

  The hard version—she was never even remotely tempted by anyone but Nick. He filled her head and her heart and no one came even close. Certainly not the callow, shallow boys in high school. And then they all left for college and she didn’t even have a chance to turn dates down.

  “Assholes,” Nick said prosaically and startled a laugh out of her.

  “Yeah.” Yes, they were assholes. It was liberating to think of it that way.

  “So.” He’d finished cleaning her up and was simply looking at her, washcloth in hand. “Here we are.”

  His voice, his face were neutral.

  Well, she wasn’t neutral. Not a bit. “Yes, here we are. I’m naked and you’re naked and we’ve already done it—sort of—so what are you waiting for?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Pixie,” he said, his deep voice low, “what am I going to do with you?”

  “If I have to tell you, Nick Ross, then there’s no hope for you at all. I would think you’d know exactly what to do, since clearly I don’t. You do know what to do. Don’t you?”

  The smile deepened, and his famous dimple, the one she’d teased him so much about, appeared. “Yeah, I guess I do. Except—”

  Her eyes widened. “Except?” Oh God, what now?

  “Except I’ve never done it with a virgin before.”

  Oh no. Elle rolled her eyes. “Actually, I’m not a virgin anymore, so that isn’t a problem.”

  “No? You think it isn’t a problem?” He touched her, between her legs, eased his index finger inside her opening. She wasn’t expecting it. It hurt, just a little, and she winced.

  “See?” His eyes bored into hers.

  “It’s fine.” She shook her head without looking away from him.

  Nick’s hand smoothed back down over her thigh, the skin of his fingers rough. She shivered and all of a sudden the cast of his face changed completely. His eyes sharpened, became hot, the skin tightened over his cheekbones. He looked slightly older, utterly male. Even if he weren’t sitting naked in front of her fully erect, she’d have known he was aroused.

  “Let’s take this slowly,” he whispered, his gaze never leaving hers, cupping one big hand around her thigh and separating her legs even further.

  “Let’s,” she whispered back. She was so completely open to him, everything she was, laid bare. Not just physically. She could actually feel her heart opening to him, like a flower unfolding instead of a chunk of muscle. To deal with her father, she’d had to close her heart up like a bank vault otherwise it would have been unbearable. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel anything at all for so long.

  And now she felt. Everything. Inside and out. She felt the lines of attraction between her and Nick, strong, almost visible. She was connected to him. What he wanted, she wanted. He could do with her whatever he wished.

  And her body was open too. In the few yoga classes she’d taken way back when, before Daddy got sick, the instructor had told them that there was an invisible line running through the center of the body. She was open on either side, fully available to him. Her shin was resting against him, against the hard muscles of his side. She rubbed her leg against him, just a little. It wasn’t just the female thrill of feeling a hard male, it was that Nick was so fully alive. Just touching him made her feel fully alive, too, vital and warm and strong.

  And she realized by comparison that she’d felt already dead and buried for so long.

  As long as Nick was with her, as long as she could touch him, she was alive too.

  His rough finger began circling around her, up and down, touching her lightly, and where he touched her, the skin sparked to life. Gently, lightly, his finger opened her, moved slightly inside.

  She sighed, and felt goose pimples along her arm.

  “You like that?” Nick murmured, and she felt his words resonate in her diaphragm, ripple along her skin.

  She was beyond words. She nodded jerkily.

  “And this?” His finger penetrated deeper, still circling, as if to widen her up.

  And he was. Oh God. He was opening her up so he could put his penis back inside her. The image, the very thought, made every single muscle clench in anticipation, including down there.

  Nick’s eyes narrowed even further. “Whatever you just thought, think it again. Because you just got wetter.”

  Yes, of course. Her body was preparing itself for him, becoming liquid. Not just her vagina. Elle felt like everything else was opening up, softening, becoming liquid. She felt like she could float away on some warm rocking sea.

  She was slick now, she could feel it and she could hear it. It could have been embarrassing hearing the sounds her vagina made as he moved his finger in her, but she wasn’t embarrassed. She was miles away from embarrassment, beyond even thinking of it. The pleasure swamped any trace of that from her head.

  His finger was moving in and out and not just around, swirling in her, opening her up. And then his thumb moved and caressed another part of her, and it was as if he’d plugged her into something.

  “Oh!” she stiffened. “What was that? Do it again!”

  “Clitoris,” he muttered, and did it again.

  For a second, the word didn’t penetrate her heated head, and then she understood. What romance novels called the pearl of desi
re. Nubbin of pleasure. It wasn’t a pearl or a nubbin it was a button. Press it and you switch a woman on.

  She’d washed herself a million times, right over that specific spot, and nothing like that had ever happened.

  Nick’s finger and thumb were working their magic, and he bent to her. She smiled, instinctively opening her mouth, but it wasn’t her mouth he wanted. He bent lower and grazed his teeth along her breast. Lightly. Then he bit her and she jumped.

  He lifted his head, smiling. “Yeah, that worked.”

  Elle ran her hands through his hair. “It all works, Nick. Everything you do to me. It all works.”

  “Yeah?” He bent to her again. “Let’s see.” He licked her nipple, long sensuous strokes, then started sucking and each pull of his mouth went right to her groin in a line so straight it could have come out of a geometry class. Exactly in tune with the tugs of his mouth. He suckled lazily for what felt like hours, certainly beyond any notion of time she had. The part of her head that marked time simply quit. Poof. Gone. Now she was on Nick time.

  Each time he pulled at her breast, her vagina pulled at his finger, in sync, like a little ballet her body was doing. His thumb was stroking her clitoris, but that was off the beat, out of tune, a quite dissonant heat.

  Nick took her nipple between his teeth, very gently, and pulled. It was just a tiny bite of pain, nothing really, but it was that tiny sting that pushed her into complete overload. Time stopped, suspended, then rushed back in as her body convulsed, long hard pulls of her vagina muscles and belly and thigh muscles, her entire body pulling toward the center of her, where Nick had his hand.

  Her back arched, her toes curled, everything spiraled inward then . . . exploded.

  She gave a great cry as her body convulsed, pulsing in time with her heartbeat, and in one of those pulses Nick slid on top of her again and into her again and just as the pulses were dying down, they started again, only more intense this time, on the razor’s edge of pain.

  He was moving in and out of her slowly, in time with the beats of her body. She was wrapped around him, arms, legs, and heart.

  When her body subsided, finally, her hands fell to her sides, palms up. Her legs loosened their hold on his hips and her knees fell apart. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, completely and utterly sated, thinking of absolutely nothing and feeling alive in every single cell of her body.

  Nick placed his mouth close to her ear and whispered, “Uh-uh.”

  She blinked. Uh-uh? No?

  He bit her lobe and something sparkled again, right under her skin, like a dying engine fizzing to life for one last second, sparks flying.

  “It doesn’t work like that.” His lips were caressing her jaw and she could feel him smile against her skin.

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Nope.” He settled on her more heavily, big hands smoothing down the backs of her thighs. Then, surprisingly, he lifted them so her knees nearly touched her chest. “You don’t get to stop, not yet.” With her legs so high, she was completely open to him. He tightened his buttocks and slipped deeper inside her, and, oh God, the tingling and the heat. . .

  Nick had been rocking inside her, short, gentle thrusts, but soon he was moving strongly, long, deep thrusts with the full power of his muscles behind them, so strong she was surprised he wasn’t hurting her, but he wasn’t. Not in any way. His body took over hers; there was no other way to describe it. She moved to his rhythm, to his beat, completely insensible to anything outside the bounds of her skin and his. He’d laid his head next to hers, his mouth close to her ear, and she could hear his breath soughing in and out, gasping, as if running a four-minute mile. He was slamming into her now, making her bed creak, then making the headboard beat against the wall in a fast and faster rhythm, moving so hard and fast inside her it was a miracle she wasn’t catching fire down there from the friction and then, oh my God, she did catch fire, everything in her simply went up in flames.

  It wasn’t like the previous orgasm, which had been pleasant. Fun, even. This was earth shattering, some outside force taking over her body, as unstoppable as a freight train as she convulsed, over and over again, fingers digging deeply into his heavy shoulder muscles because it felt as if clinging to him was the only way not to shatter into a thousand pieces.

  With a shout, muffled by the pillow, Nick’s movements became frenetic, no longer those heavy measured thrusts, but out of control writhing inside her, as if he were hammering his way to her heart with his penis.

  She felt him swell, and with another shout he started coming. She’d never felt this before, had barely read about it before, but it was unmistakable. He was jetting semen into her until she was wet, they were both wet, to the groin.

  Finally, with a groan, Nick collapsed onto her and she realized that he hadn’t been putting all his weight on her. Now he was, and he was heavy as a horse. She could feel her ribs bending slightly with the weight of him and wheezed.

  Nick was still breathing heavily but at the sound of her wheezing, he planted two large hands by the side of her head and prepared to lift himself off her.

  No!

  Elle grasped him tightly around his back and twined her legs around him, the body movements as clear as words. Don’t go.

  With a groan, Nick subsided and she made sure she wheezed quietly.

  Because she loved this. Everything about it.

  Nick’s immensely heavy weight grounding her after she’d felt as if she’d fly apart into a million pieces. They were plastered together all along their fronts because he’d sweated heavily and she supposed she had too. It was hard to tell.

  They smelled, mainly of Nick. It was an intense, pungent earthy scent she’d never experienced before—human sex—but recognized instantly. Another example of her body knowing things, instinctively, that she didn’t. Her entire groin area was wet with what was causing that smell—his semen, her juices. Mixing together in a unique mix.

  He was still hard inside her, which flummoxed her a little. He’d had an orgasm, hadn’t he? Surely he had. And men—what was the word the Merck Manual used? Detumesced, that was it. Surely after an orgasm a man detumesced, but there Nick was, still hot and hard and huge inside her.

  Another of those life mysteries she wasn’t going to penetrate right at the moment. Certainly not while Nick was still penetrating her.

  She snickered.

  Nick stirred. “Finding this funny, are we?” She turned her head and saw him lazily smiling at her, sated, and so sexy her heart turned over in her chest.

  “Very. Or maybe not funny so much as . . .” She felt her eyes drift up and to the right in contemplation.

  “As? This better be good.”

  Her smile widened. “Interesting.”

  Nick’s black eyebrows rose. “Interesting? That’s all you have to say?”

  He was looking mock-ferocious and . . . and hot. When she used to have girlfriends, she’d hear them say that about a boy and didn’t really understand it, but now she did. Oh man, did she understand it.

  Nick was the epitome of hot. And the epitome of cool. Both, at the same time, with hot prevailing right now. Hot like a flame, a source of immense attraction and life. His skin was hot under her palms, against her front, against the skin of her thighs. And he was hot in that other sense too. So attractive you wanted to jump him. Tough, fully male, exuding pheromones by the ton.

  No wonder women fell for him so hard.

  A little bit of her joy dissipated as she remembered the many Dreams she’d had about him with other women. How many women she’d seen him with. Fucking. That was the operative word, of course. It had been clear that it was a physical release because in her Dreams, he never lingered. He got up from the bed immediately after climaxing and she’d seen dozens of women, startled, legs still splayed from the sex, looking at the ceiling and wondering what had happened while in another room Nick was already showering.

  Of course she had no idea if her Dreams, those special ones that we
re so intense they felt like life experiences, were real or if she was crazy. How could she know? Her life became so isolated there was no one to ask. No confidante, only her dementing father.

  Nick was frowning now, running a rough thumb between her eyebrows. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop it right this minute.”

  Her face cleared. She’d forgotten how well Nick knew her. It had been so wonderful, being known by him. Understood and, well, loved.

  No one had known her like that since he’d left. No one. It had been like being encased in a clear bubble. She was in the bubble and the entire world was outside it.

  Maybe later she could tell Nick about her Dreams. But then of course she’d have to say that she’d seen him countless times with other women, and that was creepy.

  She plastered a smile on her face. “Sorry, just thinking.”

  “Well, stop that. You think too much. You always thought too much.”

  She took in his face. When he smiled, the boy in him, the boy she’d known, came through. But when he was frowning, he was all man. Wildly attractive.

  Down below, her vagina contracted around him and his eyes widened.

  “Distract me,” she whispered.

  “Oh yeah.” The voice was a low mutter and he bent to her. Just as his mouth touched hers, the downstairs bell sounded. Loud. Three ascending notes like the peal of church bells.

  Startled, Elle looked to the side, to her alarm clock. Seven. Something was supposed to happen at seven, wasn’t it? Her head was sluggish, no connections possible. It was seven and at seven . . .

  “The food.” Nick groaned and rolled out of bed. “I’ll get it.”

  In an amazingly short time, he was dressed, had combed his hair with his hand, and looked entirely normal, except for a slight flush. And, well, the scent of sex that still clung to him. But then Elle had an extraordinarily strong sense of smell. Not everyone would pick up the smell that seemed so strong to her.

  “Okay,” she said, but he was already walking out the door.

  He had to do this. There was no way she could get dressed and walk down the stairs in less than half an hour. Her legs felt like mush. She was uncoordinated, slightly punch-drunk.