Dance of Desire (1001 Dark Nights)

  “’Cause you were afraid if we did anything other than fight all the time, that he’d throw you out on the street. Was that it?”

  “Something like that. Yeah.”

  “How long were you in those woods, Caleb?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice is hoarse. He makes no attempt to hide his tears. “But when I watched you marry Joel, a part of me felt like I’d never left ’em.”

  He’s got her in his arms before she’s closed the entire distance between them. He’s so much bigger, so much stronger and more confident than the fifteen-year-old she kissed years before. And his embrace alone is intoxicating. The feel of his powerful hands stroking her back warms her entire body. His breaths rustle her hair, sending gooseflesh down her spine.

  “Is it really going to be here?” she asks.

  “Is what going to be here?”

  “Our first real kiss is gonna be in this crappy motel room?”

  “Second,” he says.

  “Still.”

  “Well…” he says, and then he releases her suddenly, and for a second she’s terrified she’s infuriated him by being too casual and sarcastic about a moment that could change them forever.

  Caleb hurls the door open, but he only takes several strides before he turns to face her, arms thrown out, the heavy rain pelting his shirt and jeans, soaking his hair instantly.

  “There’s no full moon,” he cries over a roll of thunder. “But I’ve waited this long, I could kiss you anywhere.”

  She runs to him, leaving the door open behind her.

  There’s no resistance. No fumbling. Their mouths meet instantly, then their tongues follow suit, and suddenly she’s cradled in his powerful embrace, so powerful he’s lifting her up onto the balls of her sneakers.

  Several minutes go by before she even realizes she’s soaked from head to toe, and even then she doesn’t care. All her life she’s been afraid of lightning. But not now, not here. It could strike several feet from where they’re standing and still she wouldn’t be able to pull herself away from this kiss, this kiss she’s imagined countless times. And if lightning struck the two of them, then at least she’d die doing what she’d most wanted to do since she was a teenager.

  Her hands come to rest against his chest. She realizes she’s been pawing at the collar of his shirt, that the top few buttons have come undone, and there’s his hard muscle, glistening with rain. And it’s like a second glorious revelation. She doesn’t just get to act on her love for him now, she gets to act on her lust too.

  “See,” Caleb says, voice gravely, “we don’t always need a full moon.”

  “That thing you said…”

  “What thing?”

  “About kissing me anywhere. Was it a promise?”

  “Let’s go inside and see.”

  9

  “Take it,” she whispers as Caleb pushes her closer to the bed.

  He gives her another desperate kiss, then grips her chin in one powerful hand.

  “Take what?” he rasps.

  “All of it,” she says.

  He kisses her again, drags the hem of her shirt up over her chest with both hands, then his fingers trace the edge of her breasts. His thumbs find her nipples and apply two pinpoints of pressure through the fabric of her bra. He rubs smaller circles, then bigger circles, then smaller. Then bigger. Smaller. Bigger.

  “Take all of what, Amber?” He says this with the tone of a schoolteacher who knows the answer and is trying to get his pupil to say it.

  “All of me,” she says.

  He gives her a slight shove. She bounces on the mattress. When his weight comes bearing down on her, she realizes what she’s trying to do. She’s never spoken to anyone like this in the bedroom before. She wants to unleash him with her words, to set him loose upon her body.

  She doesn’t want to work for it. She doesn’t want to ride; she wants to be ridden. More importantly, she doesn’t want to think. Doesn’t want to hesitate or falter or do anything but let him taste every inch of her. She wants him to take her the way he’s always wanted her, the way she’s always hoped he wanted her, and when he does it, she wants him to blast all thoughts of other people’s expectations from her mind.

  If he were resisting, this approach would seem selfish on her part, childish even. But her commands have unleashed a torrent of growls and hungry kisses from the only man she’s every truly craved.

  His fingers claw at the button of her jeans.

  The door swings open behind him. Rain swirls in the room.

  No one fills the doorway. Caleb just failed to close the thing all the way during their lustful dance back into the room.

  He leaps to his feet and shuts the door so hard with both hands, the building shakes.

  “Fuck this door!” he shouts.

  “Or fuck me instead,” she says before she can think twice.

  “Dirty girl,” he growls, crawling onto her, hands braced on the mattress on either side of her, bending down to give her deep, lingering kisses. “Dirty, dirty girl,” he growls.

  “Not unless you make me…” She hesitates over her next words, wondering for a second if it’s too much, if it might blow the whole thing. But when he unbuttons her pants and a flush of deliciously chilly air bathes the crotch of her panties, lust devours fear. In a hissing whisper, she says, “Not unless you make your little sister a dirty girl.”

  His eyes widen. He grips her chin in one hand, stares into her eyes, as if this label were a kind of challenge. Did she just blow it? The passion uniting them is more than just some suppressed incest fantasy, and maybe her wording was too careless and heated and rushed. Why bring up the labels her father forced on them both? To destroy them, that’s why. To cast them into the fires of their newly released passion so they can be incinerated and replaced by something altogether different, altogether new. And maybe that’s what she really means when she tells him to make her a dirty girl––change me. Change us.

  He’s kissing her like she’s something altogether different, that’s for sure. Then he licks his way up the side of her neck with the flat of his tongue while he palms the crotch of her panties gently with the heel of one hand, drawing figure eights that brush her clit at the top. She’s clawing at the buttons of his shirt, pushing it back over his shoulders, chills racing through her at the feel of his bare, muscular skin beneath her fingers, beneath her palms, beneath her desperate, hungry grip.

  There’s so much of him. So much size, so much brawn. So much muscle and so much hunger. It feels like he’s everywhere on her at once, the sheer size of him distracting her from the fact that he’s just unfastened her bra and drawn it off her breasts with his teeth. Then he’s suckling her neck until he finds a special spot that makes her legs rear up off the bed and wrap around his waist—a spot no other man has found. Then he’s got one of her breasts in a powerful grip, squeezing it just enough that he gets the right angle on her nipple, which he tongues madly, then suckles, tongues madly, then suckles. And just when she feels consumed by this pleasure, just as he switches from one breast to the next, he peels the crotch of her panties back from her mound and fingers her folds, dazzling her clit for a few brief seconds before diving deeper into her wetness.

  Awestruck, quivering, she watches as he pulls his mouth from her slick nipple, brings his fingers slathered with her juices to his nose and takes a deep smell. “There’s my Amber,” he whispers. He slides her fingers between his lips and sucks on them briefly. Tasting her. Savoring her. “There’s my sweet Amber,” he growls. Then it seems as if he can’t decide between the lure of her pink, pebbling nipple or a deeper taste of the juices he just sampled as if they were divine nectar.

  Breathless with suspense, she watches him. He senses this and his eyes cut to her. He smiles devilishly. He’s got her right breast in one powerful grip and his other hand is rubbing lazy, cloying circles across her mound. “Let’s see,” he grumbles. “Decisions. So many tasty decisions.” He flickers her nipple with his tongue. r />
  But it’s just a distraction.

  In a flash, his still booted feet hit the floor. His hands grip her waist. He’s got her jeans off in no time flat, and then her panties, and then, as if that weren’t enough to make her skin catch fire, he grabs the back of her thighs, drawing her legs up and apart. And then he goes to work. And she screams. She literally screams.

  No one’s ever done it like this before. No one’s ever devoured her with this outright abandon, this determination not to miss an inch. In his every move, in every flicker of his tongue, there is as much a desire to dominate as there is a desire to please. He even dips just below her folds, coming to the edge of a place no man has ever been. Each brush of this place causes her to let out a small cry, and each time she does, he locks eyes with her. The message is the same. No part of you is dirty. No part of us, of the way we’ve always felt for each other, is dirty. Not here. Not anymore.

  His powerful hands slide under her butt, gripping her cheeks, lifting her off the bed so he can bend forward and get a better, more focused angle on her clit. She hears strange thuds before she realizes she’s balled her hands into fists and she’s striking the comforter on either side of her to keep from screaming.

  Devoured. Consumed. Taken. Never before has she connected these words to the act of sex. Hell, she would have laughed at anyone who did. But they all describe exactly how she feels now. Caleb gives her clit a rest now and then so it doesn’t go numb. He takes time to search her folds with his tongue and puckering lips, looking for new sensitive spots. The whole time he keeps his eyes locked with hers, searching for any evidence of new, unexpected pleasure in her expression.

  It’s not a certain spot that does her in. It’s those eyes. Those eyes she spent so many years refusing to meet for fear of being drawn into dangerous temptation. Those eyes that stare into her own now. Those eyes that belong to Caleb, the man she was forced to call brother before she could claim him as her lover. Those eyes and his name, which escapes from her lips unbidden. Which she says again and again and again until the dam breaks and the hands she’s balled into fists turn to claws and Caleb rears up, sucking harder.

  He uses the arm he’s braced under the small of her back to lift her further up off the bed. And as she cries out, he grunts sharply against her slick folds. She has some sense of what’s happening, but part of her thinks it can’t be true, and she can’t exactly pause to investigate while in the grip of her own orgasm. But just the thought of it quickens the waves of pleasure coursing her limbs.

  He’s coming too, she thinks. Is he really coming in his own Levi’s?

  He pulls his mouth from her sex as if it were a struggle, stands erect suddenly. She’s spent, boneless. For a few minutes the idea of moving seems an abstraction. Then she lifts her head and stares down at the foot of the bed. Caleb is just standing there, hair tousled and still rain slicked. The baffled expression on his face makes him look innocent, despite his God-like muscles. The bulge in his jeans is considerable. So is the wet spot.

  “Son of a gun,” he says. “Can’t believe it.”

  “Seriously?” Amber asks.

  She slides off the bed and hits her knees in front of him. He backs away, one hand going up to stop her as she reaches for the button on his jeans.

  “No, no, no,” he says, but he’s laughing. “No. This is embarrassing.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Show me your cock.”

  “This is the first time this has ever happened to me,” he says. But he’s moved his hands out of the way. “I swear.”

  She unbuttons his jeans. The idea that just the taste of her made him lose control like this is almost as gratifying as the orgasm that just pulsed through every cell of her body.

  “Well, tonight’s a first for a lot of things, isn’t it?” she says.

  Not once did she ever try to sneak a peek of him in the shower when they were growing up. The sight before her now is her thick, beautiful reward. The way his cock, still slick with his seed, peels away from his stomach once she pulls down his briefs makes it seem as if the thing is literally presenting itself to her. The only thing missing is a bow and a silver tray.

  He laughs softly, still embarrassed. This display of vulnerability as he towers over her awakens as much desire in her as the ministrations of his skillful tongue. She closes one hand around the shaft. A small sigh escapes him. He’s not laughing now. He’s dead serious as he gazes down at her, fingers twining in her hair, biting his lower lip gently. He must feel exactly the way she did when he was deciding between suckling her breast or devouring her sex. She can feel the tension in his body, the desire to force her mouth onto him fighting with the desire to take in the sight of her, submissive and on her knees.

  “You’re a big boy, Caleb,” Amber whispers.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, you’re a—”

  Before whatever porn star line he was about to deliver can come out of his mouth, she takes his cock into her own. The sound that comes from his half groan, half cry, there’s a tremble to it, the tremble of a strong, powerful man being shaken to his core. She’s sure it’s not just the physical sensations of his still sensitive cock sliding between her lips, but his surprise at having her suck his fresh seed from his shaft.

  Both of his strong hands grip her head now. But he doesn’t try to drive her; he’s steadying himself, taking care not to pull her hair. There’s a loud thud from above and she knows just what made the sound—his head slamming into the wall behind him.

  Once she’s cleaned him off, she pulls away. In response, he cups her face in both hands, even though his eyes are shut. He’s drawing her gently to her feet. She’s never done anything like this before. Never tasted the essence of another man in this way. Never wanted to before him. And the idea that she might have just destroyed his desire to kiss her pains her suddenly.

  Too much, she thinks. Too far. I went too fa—

  He kisses her tenderly, gently, at first. The way he holds her face as he does slays her thoughts and conquers her self-judgment and makes the motel room fall away.

  “So long,” he whispers. “I have waited so long for this, so long for you.”

  “I’m sorry if I—”

  “No,” he says, placing a finger to her lips. “No. There’s no sorry here, not right now. That, what we just did, was nothing to be sorry for.”

  As to prove his point, he reaches down and before she realizes what’s happening, he picks her up like a bride and carries her toward the bed. He lays her down gently, then settles down onto the mattress behind her, spooning against her, a reverse of the position into which they’d settled the night his parents died.

  He rolls away from her. She hears his belt buckle clacking against the button of his jeans. When he spoons into her again, he’s naked against her bare behind. The intimacy between them feels somehow sealed by this simple act. He’s already spent. He doesn’t seem to be demanding another go-around, and yet, he’s disrobed just so she wouldn’t feel more exposed than she currently does.

  “The kid in the office said I had to be out by sunup.”

  “I paid him already,” Caleb whispers.

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s how I got him to tell me which room you were in.”

  “Good thing you’re not an axe murderer.”

  “Good thing a night in the sack with me didn’t rid you of your smart mouth.”

  “You got that right,” she says.

  “Good. I love your smart mouth.”

  “Do you?”

  He reaches up, grips her chin gently and tilts her head back so he can look into her eyes.

  “Do you know what I’m about to say?” he asks.

  “That if we get anything from this bedspread you’re gonna kill me?”

  “No,” he says with only a slight smile at her joke.

  Whatever he’s about to say, it’s serious.

  “You don’t need to wait for me to say it, do you? I mean, you’ve waited long enough, haven’t you?”
he says.

  “Caleb—”

  “I love you, Amber Watson. I’ve always loved you. Even when I believed we could never be together, even when it hurt so bad to love you I couldn’t see straight, I never stopped. I couldn’t even try to make myself stop. It was true then, and it’s true now. I’d rather spend the rest of my life feeling the pain of not having you, than spend one moment of it not loving you.”

  “You won’t have to,” she whispers. “You won’t have to know what it’s like to not have me ever again.”

  It feels as if someone else has spoken through her, but maybe that’s what it feels like when you finally speak your truth. And when he kisses her, she feels like she’s floating somewhere just above her body, but maybe that’s what it feels like when you kiss the man you truly love.

  “I love you, Caleb…”

  And she stops.

  She was about to echo his words. She was about to use his full name, just as he used her own, but now?

  “Eckhart,” he says. “My full name, my birth name, is Caleb Eckhart, and when I was fifteen years old, a good man named Abel Watson allowed me to live with him and his wonderful family and so when he adopted me, I changed my name to Watson. But that time has passed now. There’s something new on the horizon. New and better. So as soon as we’re back in Dallas, I’ll get myself to a lawyer and find out how to change my name back to Caleb Eckhart, and you and I will be able to slow dance in the middle of Watson’s and won’t a soul be able to say a damn word about it. If that’s what you want, of course.”

  She smiles.

  “Do you want me to, Miss Watson?”

  “Yes,” she answers. “Yes. Because I love you, Caleb Eckhart.”

  People really can kiss like this, she thinks. Long. Slow. Forever.

  “Caleb,” she says a few minutes later.

  “Yes, Amber.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. This has been one of the best nights of my life. But I’m really slee—”

  10

  A phone rings close to her head.