This stuff with her sister, well, it was cast into a different light when she considered the whole of it. Helena needed to do the job on her own and to also realize how important the connection she had with Lark was. And Lark needed to be in Seattle to realize a whole lot of things on her own too.
This male who held her tight but with the greatest of tenderness was a big, big part of that.
“What are you thinking? I told you. You tell me. It’s only fair.”
“So much. I just had a fight with my sister on the phone.”
He cocked his head. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “That’s not all I was thinking and it’s an old problem anyway. I was also realizing that you were meant to be here, in Seattle and the only one able to pick me up from the airport. My mom is quite the believer in fate and personal magick you have with the people you’re supposed to be with. She and my father got married two weeks after they met. They’re intense together even though they’re so very different on the outside. I’m not saying we should get married tomorrow or anything.” She had enough to deal with just then. “I appreciate your honesty and I’ll return it. You scare me. You’re really good at this. So totally sure. I… I’m not there yet. But I can raise my glass to beginnings. Yes. I can.”
“Revelatory thinking. That’s what my father calls such moments when you realize the entirety of things is far, far bigger than you’d ever imagined. You are a revelation to me.”
His words sent little shivers of electricity through her system. He gave great compliments. Not just that she was pretty or had a great body, though that was nice to hear. But he got her, and it got to her in turn, to not only have him know her so well, but to appreciate those parts that so many seemed to be repelled by. She was proud of her skills and that he was too? It humbled her even as it excited her. And as she’d told him, it scared the hell out of her too.
“I don’t know how to reply to some of the stuff you say. I’m not smooth and elegant. I don’t know how to be like that.”
“I don’t want you to be like that. I want you to be like Lark.” He snorted. “I’m not after pretty words said with a coy lash flutter. All I want from you is honesty in all things.”
“So nothing hard or anything.”
“If it’s not hard, what’s it worth then? If you don’t have to work for something, why is it worth having? I already told you, this isn’t dating. I’m not just around you to get into your pants.”
“How old are you exactly?”
He laughed. “I’m six hundred. Time is a little different between Lycia and here. In terms of how I’d age here? I’m roughly thirty-four. I want truth from you. It’s not easy. And it won’t be easy for me either. But I’m promising you I’m giving it my best shot.”
“Why me then? Don’t you need a princess? Another Lycian? How will your family react when you start dating a non-Lycian? Also is it about my pants at all?”
“I am all about your pants, or at least divesting you of them. But you’re more than that. I’m more than that. Why you? Probably because you’d ask that question.” He grinned a moment and then got close enough to nip her bottom lip. “It just happened. I liked you. You liked me. I saw your body in a swimsuit. I saw you fight. You’re good at what you do. You don’t get intimidated by anything. Which will come in handy as I’m told it’s not easy to be with a Lycian male.”
“You intimidate me.”
He looked at her closely. “No, I don’t.”
“Yes. You’re very good at being a grown-up. You have a business. A successful business. And this house and land. I don’t even have an apartment. I was living in a friend’s house while she travels. I fight with my sister over clothes and who gets to do what in my job. I feel like a baby bird next to you.” It left her breathless and anxious all at once. There was an imbalance between them in terms of life experience in some big, important ways.
He breathed in deep. “And yet you stun me with your honesty. The last thing I’d think of when I see you is a baby bird. You’re confident. And strong.”
“It’s an act. I’m freaked the fuck out. This is big stuff. This… thing with the M-word. I’m out of my league but there’s no actual league anyway. So I’m the best they’ve got and what if I’m not good enough?”
“Well see, here’s another interesting thing. I’m a warrior too. And you and I are going to work together on this. Not because you can’t handle it. You can. But because together we can handle it even better. We’ll go, talk to my father and to our Elders. We’ll get more data and keep planning. We’ll keep planning until we win.”
She let herself relax, just a tiny bit. He did have some good information to offer. And she’d seen him fight; he could come in handy in a pinch. “I appreciate the help with your people. As for the rest—I have a team. You have a job too. I have no intention of being someone you have to take care of.”
He laughed then. A big belly laugh as he hugged her tight. “We have to go back to my earlier statement about Lycian males. We like taking care of our women. Not that we like weak women, which you’re not. Not by a thousand miles and not having an apartment or fights with your sister have nothing to do with how accomplished you are.”
And then he was kissing her. Kissing her so senseless she simply tossed herself into his storm and held on, trusting him to keep her from drowning.
Everything fell away as she turned to get closer, to straddle his lap and run her fingers through his hair. And though she was on top, kissing his mouth, it was he who controlled it. He who drove that sensual assault into her system at a hundred miles an hour and left her a wreck.
His tongue didn’t tease this time. No, this time he claimed her with it. Stole her taste, tantalized with the sure stroke of his tongue against hers.
He nipped her lip and drew back only to rush back in and kiss her more. Kiss and kiss until her head spun with his taste, with the scent of his skin all over hers. He held her upper arms and though she wasn’t sure why, it thrilled her to her toes.
Her head fell back as he moved from her lips across her jaw and down to the hollow of her throat. She tugged his hair, holding him to her and he laughed against her skin, the heat of his breath sending shivers over her. “Greedy. Why am I not surprised?” And then he picked her up and placed her butt on the side of the hot tub. The shock of the cold against her exposed butt cheek made her squeal rather unsexily as she shot up and cracked him in the jaw with the top of her head.
That super hot and totally romantic kiss had just headed straight into blood?
She reached out for him. “I’m sorry! Goddess, I’m sorry. Are you all right?” She tried to ignore the sharp throb in the top of her head. Was he made of granite as well as looking like he was? “You have a very hard chin. Like Superman.”
He paused and stared at her for the longest time as the top of her shivered while standing in his hot tub and too stunned to sit or move. Too… holy crap, he totally made her feel like prey. And she liked it.
And then he laughed, picking her up as if she weighed nothing, which she supposed when you were made of granite a guy could heft around a gal like she was no real effort. So why not enjoy it? She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders. He stepped from the hot tub easily and she snuggled in tight, luxuriating in the heat of his body until they got back into the house.
“It was icy cold. I was just surprised. It happened sort of automatically.”
“What?”
“The ledge. When you put me down it was on my bare butt where the suit bottom had ridden up. So it was bare ass against icy cold.”
He kissed her and then grinned. “God, you make me laugh. I love that. I apologize for placing that juicy peach of an ass on the icy cold deck. I just wanted to get in between your thighs. It seemed most expedient that way.”
He left her speechless.
No one left her speechless.
“I’m going to take your Superman comment as a compliment and I know
you didn’t deliberately whack me with your head. So. Now we’re in my house and you’re wrapped around me. I rather like this part, though all the blood in my body is stuck in one place. I’m having trouble remembering my name.”
“You’re really good at this.” And he was. He carried her across the breezeway and toward his bedroom at the end of the hall and up the stairs. A whole quarter of the second story was his bedroom and normally the views would have had her stunned. But what could the trees and sky have to compete with Simon Leviathan? There was nothing else she wanted to look at but the shape of his ears, the way his pulse beat fast and hard as she licked over and then stared at his throat. The burr of his groan against her lips as she kissed him there echoed low in her body.
He took her into the bathroom her entire apartment could have fit in and put her down before he began to move around confidently, turning the water on, gathering towels. “You should rinse off. Question is, shall I wash your back?”
She heard the taut control in his voice. Knew he was giving her an out, which made her laugh at the very idea that she’d want this to stop. As if. She wasn’t ready to run off to Vegas and get married, but she was on board for hot sex.
So she reached up and untied her suit top and then shimmied out of her bottoms. It helped to just look at him and know she’d be seeing him naked momentarily.
HE held on by the barest of threads when she’d wrapped herself around him the way she had. Her breasts against his chest, the scent of her mixing with his own. It filled his senses marking him the way he’d been marking her.
But then when she’d looked him square in the eyes and gotten naked?
“You have no way of knowing this,” he said slowly as he circled her, “but what you’ve just done is akin to waving a red flag at a bull. A female who bares herself to her male and holds his gaze is making a challenge.”
Her skin pebbled but not from cold. Or fear. He pulled his trunks off and then drew her back into the shower with him.
“I’m going to soap you up. Not so much because you need it, but because it gives me a reason to get my hands all over you while I look at every inch of your naked skin.”
“Before you get all up in my business and stuff, stay back so I can look at you.” She held out a warding hand and backed away. “You can stay there with the water rushing all over your muscles. That’s nice. It’s a crime for anyone to look this good naked. You’re going to give me a complex.”
She circled him now, much like he had her just moments before. He stood taller and let her look her fill. Pretended to be calm but each time she touched him it chipped away at his already tattered control.
“Your ass is way nicer than mine. I just thought I should tell you that.” She squeezed as if to underline that point. “These tattoos of yours are so sexy.” More caresses until he turned and caught her up, pulling her to him and kissing her some more.
Her eyes slowly opened as he growled but she only smiled. “You’re growling.”
“Yes. My beast likes you.”
“It’s hard to believe a giant behemoth of a wolf lives just under that human skin.”
It did though and it wanted her.
And then she was there, stretching and writhing under his soapy palms as he rubbed all over her naked body. “This was really the thing.” He tested the weight of her breasts in his hands. “When I saw them the first time in a bathing suit top I knew I was in trouble.”
“Are you a breast man then?”
“I’m an everything man. Which works because under your clothes, you’ve got everything worth dreaming over.”
“I think I’m clean.” She laughed and he paused to watch the way her features lit. “Well, not my thoughts. Those are irretrievably dirty. But my outside is all scrubbed and squeaky clean.”
“Impatient?”
“I can take my own showers. I want something else from you.”
He picked her up and then deposited her on the rug before wrapping a towel around her and rubbing her dry. She closed her eyes and let him minister to her.
“Is this part of the service you normally provide?”
He paused and didn’t resist kissing her quickly before speaking. “I’m sure I’ll be sorry for this somehow, but what do you mean?”
“It’s nice to be taken care of like this. Especially by a smoking-hot naked man. Is this part of your sexin’ routine? If so, I can see why the women at the club are all over you.”
He wondered if any men before had done this for her. Brushed her hair or dried her off after a shower? And then he didn’t want to know. It made him grumpy just thinking about it. So he finished drying her off and turned her in his arms to look at her again.
She was an ace at her job, but in that moment she held nothing back. Her features were open. He smiled. “Suffice it to say, you’re not the usual woman. At all.”
“Nicely done.”
He grinned and then picked her up and tossed her over a shoulder as she laughed. “I can see your ass better this way. So I won’t complain.”
He dropped her on his bed and had to stand there awhile to truly take her in. Take in the sight of this blue-haired pixie naked on his bed. Her tattoos and… “You have a nipple ring.”
“I do?” She sat up to look down at herself and he laughed, crawling on the bed after her.
“Smart-ass.”
“I must confess, this is a major flaw.”
“Hm.” He bent to kiss the nipple bearing the hoop. “I can’t see it as a flaw. But the presence of a nipple so very close to my lips is always a nice ice breaker.”
She rolled him over with a deft moment and scrambled atop his body.
“I know you let me do that.” She mock frowned.
“Baby, there are many things I’ll let you do to me. Especially if we do them naked.”
“You’re far more relaxed when you’re about to have sex than you are otherwise.”
“Consider that a lesson well learned.” He winked and she actually giggled. She melted away his reserve, charmed him until he forgot he was jaded.
“All right. What else can you teach me then?” One eyebrow went up in challenge and he flipped so she was on the bottom, his body covering hers.
Her laugh died on a soft gasp when he licked over her collarbone. He kissed his way across her chest and then down to her nipples where he paused awhile. He hadn’t expected a nipple ring though he wasn’t sure why. He certainly enjoyed the way she arched and made soft, needy sounds when he flicked his tongue over it.
“Each part of you I taste is better than the last.” He moved to the other nipple and licked and kissed for a while until he needed to move down her belly and then down some more.
“Oh!”
He pushed her thighs open and held her there while he looked his fill. Her skin heated in a full-body flush. “You’re beautiful here.” He bent for a kiss. “Don’t try to hide yourself.”
And then he licked and her fingers slid into his hair and gripped tight, making him smile against her flesh. She knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to take it. That was sexy too. And she tasted… well, like everything he wanted. Sweet and spicy. The sounds she made charmed him and ramped up his own need. A need he tried not to think of as he brought her pleasure with his mouth.
And when she broke apart with a soft cry, he couldn’t hold back another moment. He needed to be in her with such craven greed he should have been embarrassed by it.
Bleary-eyed and soft from pleasure, she looked up at him as he slowly pushed his way into her body. Her inner walls still fluttered from her climax, which drew him closer and closer to the edge. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. Wanted to take his time with her though his cock thought otherwise.
“Finally.” A self-satisfied smile marked her mouth. That mouth. He dipped to kiss her and she sighed into him, adjusting her legs and suddenly he slipped in those last two inches and was still, his gaze locked with hers.
“You should move or I will die.”
br /> “That’s an exaggeration.”
“Duh. I’ll feel like I want to die from how good it is to have you inside me.” She dug her nails into his shoulders and his beast approved of the slight sting of pain. His woman had claws.
“My beast approves of your bloodthirsty side.” He began to move before she responded. Instead of speaking she writhed and rolled her hips to meet his thrust.
He was so large above her he blotted out the light. Immense. Masculine. Hard as a rock. In all parts apparently. She smiled and he kissed her again. Masterful, he angled himself up and adjusted her body just exactly how he wanted it. Her breasts bounced with each thrust he made into her body and the way he looked at her made her all tingly inside. He was big and strong and totally in charge and that was hotter than hot. Even better, he knew what to do with all the stuff he had.
He fucked her hard and fast, but like she was something special. That juxtaposition, the way he took her way into filthy, hot sex town and still looked at her as if she were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen was really her undoing. She could hold herself back with a lot of things. But Simon wouldn’t allow her to, not with this, not with him. And that was a challenge of an entirely new kind.
“Damn you’re good at this stuff.” She shuddered as he dragged the head of his cock over some sweet spot deep inside.
“You’re going to kill me with your body.” He grunted as she managed to squeeze herself all around him.
“I need you for the sex. No killing.”
He smiled and shook his head but then to get her back, he dug his fingers in at her hips and pulled her up and closer, held her tight against him as he went to his knees. She got her ankles together at the small of his back and managed to hang on as he continued to devastate her.
“Can’t get enough.” He raked his gaze all over her body. Inside she went a little gooey at that. This alpha male thing wasn’t underrated. He was raw, feral and made her feel like the sexiest woman to ever live.