“What I want is for you to stop calling me detective. It makes me feel like you have some creepy schoolteacher fetish, only for detectives.”
“For your information, Jewel,” he says. “My only apparent fetish involves you being a bitch to me and giving me hell all the damn time.”
I have no idea why him saying my name turns me on so damn much, but it does. My fingers curl around his shirt. “Are you going to kiss me, asshole, or what?” I demand.
He smiles a moment before his mouth closes down on mine, when he never smiles. And I have just a moment to think about how damn sexy it is that he did so now because I told him to kiss me, before he licks into my mouth. Before the first wicked taste of him explodes into my mouth, drugging me with raw masculinity and the hunger I taste on his lips. His hunger: mine. I moan softly, and he pulls back, his lips lingering just above mine.
“Just to be clear,” he says, his voice low and rough. “I’m breaking every rule I own with you. I don’t fuck women I’m protecting.”
“You could hand me over to someone else,” I suggest, “and it won’t matter.”
“Not a chance in hell,” he says, his hand sliding under my hair to cup my neck. “We’ll break the rules together.”
“I’m not sure I like how you do ‘together’.”
“I’ll make sure you do,” he promises, his lips slanting over mine, and this time he kisses me like he owns me, like he wants to control me, and like I really am his, like I belong to him, and in this very moment, I can honestly say I am. I want him, and I can’t get enough of him.
And how can it ever be enough when he’s this damn impossibly hot, and he’s such a damn good kisser. The way he makes me want his mouth on every part of me and the way he makes me want my mouth on every part of him. And so, there it is. I’m his, but I’m going to make damn sure he’s mine, too. I kiss him back as passionately as he’s kissing me. I meet him stroke for stroke, arching into him, telling him I am here and present, and I’m not even close to afraid of him or of this. He doesn’t get to control me. He isn’t making me do this. I control me, and I choose him and this.
Arching into him, his shoulder holster and mine are in the way, and I want them gone. I want him naked. Just to be certain that he knows that’s where I want this to go, my hand presses between us and I stroke the hard line of his shaft. He groans low in his throat, a sexy rough sound that tells me he gets the point. This isn’t his show. It’s ours. It’s us together, or there is no show, with or without our clothes on.
His reaction is to tear his mouth from mine, his lips lingering there though, as if he wants to kiss me again, and just when I would kiss him again, he leans away just enough to shrug out of his jacket. I take one step backward, and do the same with my blazer. I reach down and pull off my boots and he does the same. Next, we disconnect our shoulder holsters, and the truth is, it’s the first time I’ve ever been with a man who is probably more armed than me. That feels significant when it perhaps is not. He’s not a cop. He’s not that kind of career complication. He’s a Green-fucking-Beret, and one hell of a hot one, for that matter.
He sets his weapon on the couch and snags my hand, walking me toward him and taking my holster and weapon as he does. “Just making sure you don’t end up shooting me before this is over,” he says, setting it with his before shackling my hip.
“I told you I’ll wait until after the orgasms.”
“Careful,” he says, a hint of a smile on his lips again. “I might hold that orgasm and you captive.”
“You can try,” I say, but my head isn’t in the game in this moment, and somehow my hand is on his face, right by the almost smile, that seems to have complicated what should be sex, an escape, a way to pull back the emotions that umbrella stirred in me. That smile reminds me that Mr. Robot is his wall, his way to cope with death, with whatever makes him protect Jesse Marks.
He captures my hand. “What are you thinking?”
“That you have on too many clothes,” I say, before I let this go someplace emotional, somewhere that two people like us never want to go.
My hands press under his shirt, but he doesn’t immediately give me what I want. He studies me for several beats and then kisses me hard and fast. Too fast, but I get over it when he pulls his shirt off, tossing it aside, and given me a delicious view his perfect torso, and that shoulder tattoo that is gorgeously crafted: an eagle, a flag, the words Semper Fidelis, which is not just significant to the military, but to law enforcement as well. It means “always loyal” and only a man dedicated to his job and his country has that tattooed on his body.
I step to him, and caress a path down the tattoo. “You were a proud soldier when you got this.”
“I still am. Getting out doesn’t change that.”
“But you—”
He cups my face and kisses me, his hand sliding up my shirt, his touch fire that has me helping him pull my shirt over my head. Letting him drag me to him where he now sits on the couch. I straddle him, my bra somehow gone by the time I’m there. But my hands press to his shoulders, and I hold him at bay. “I will still arrest you if I need to,” I promise. “This doesn’t change that.”
“You aren’t going to arrest me any more than you hate me.” He glances down at my breasts, his gaze a hot caress as it rakes over my breasts, my nipples, before his eyes meet mine. “Because you know I’m protecting you.”
I ignore the ache between my thighs. Or I try. “From what? The slayer or the Jesse Marks damage patrol?”
His hand slides between my shoulder blades and he molds my chest to his. “Do you really want to talk about Jesse Marks right now? Because if you ask me questions, I’m going to ask you questions when I’d much rather be inside you, giving you as many reasons as I can not to arrest me. But you pick. Conversation or fucking.”
“Both,” I say, because it’s the truth. I want answers and I want the conversation my emotions are having in my head to shut up. “Fucking first.” I push away from him and stand up, unbuttoning my pants, sliding them down my hips, and he watches me with that unreadable, robot expression that is admittedly sexy as hell. I press my lips to his and that’s all it takes.
We are crazy, hot, kissing, his hands on my breasts, my nipples, my neck. I can’t touch him enough. I can’t feel him enough, can’t get close enough, and that’s new to me. I don’t need anyone the way I feel I need this man. I don’t want to need anyone this much, but it’s too late. At least, right here, right now, I do. He rolls us to our sides, facing one another, the wide cushion of the couch more than holding us and the next kiss isn’t fast and frenzied. It’s long, drugging, and somewhere in the midst of his tongue stroking my tongue, I end up on my back with the heavy weight of him on top of me, his hands on either side of my head. Those gray eyes of his bore into me. “I have one condom. We have to make it count.”
“I get the birth control shot, but I have a question before I give up that condom. When you weren’t fucking women you were protecting, how many women were you fucking?”
“I don’t fuck around. I don’t have time, but if that occasion presented itself, I used a condom. And a woman gets a shot for one man or a lot of men. You won’t let a lot of men get close to you.”
“I had a fuck buddy. He’s gone.”
“Who?” he demands.
“Just—a fireman. He’s gone.”
“How long and when did it end?”
“He was a fuck buddy, Jacob. There was nothing to end.”
“When did it end?” he asks.
“Six months ago.”
“Why did it end?”
My brows furrow. “Why does it matter?”
“Holy fuck, I don’t know, but it does.”
“What does that mean?”
“Why did it—”
“He was too nice, and he wanted more and I just didn’t.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“I told you. He was nice.”
“Nice is bad?”
“Okay, he was too nice. I don’t do nice. Nothing in my world is nice. And you’re not nice. In fact, you’re so far from nice that I might have to arrest you and I hate that I want you, but I do.”
“You aren’t going to have to arrest me. I’m a lot of things, many you might not like, but I’m not that guy. I’m the guy who will die to protect you if I have to.”
My hand goes to the tattoo on his shoulder. “You’d die to protect anyone,” I say, which only backs up his words. He’s not the guy I have to arrest. I don’t want him to be the guy I have to arrest.
“You’re not just anyone or I wouldn’t be here, like this, with you right now.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” he says, and he doesn’t give me time to process that statement or reply. He kisses me again, and I decide, “good kisser” is once again the proper description for this man. No, I decide, as his mouth travels down my neck to my nipple, where he licks and suckles—good with his mouth. Good, so very good, and everywhere. My sworn testimony to that fact is his mouth on my belly, and his tongue dipping low beneath my waistband.
He catches the string of my silk panties at my hips, and caresses them down my hips, but he stops mid-thigh, lingering there just long enough to give my clit a lick. I gasp, and arch my back, and he suckles my nub, sending darts of pleasure straight to my nipples. His tongue follows again, swirling and teasing, until his mouth is gone, and moments later, so are my pants. The instant my ankles are free, he’s standing, reaching for his pants. I sit up, not because I feel out of control—oddly—I’ve forgotten that battle that felt so very real when this started. I’ve forgotten what I was angry about, what I was afraid of. I sit up because I want to watch him, and by the time my feet settle on the ground with my knees pressed together with the ache in my sex, his pants and underwear are gone. And it’s not the jut of his cock—which like the rest of him is impressively big—that has my attention, but rather the much larger, deep scar that runs the length of his thigh and calf.
The horror of how he must have gotten that shakes me, and reminds me that he is a Green Beret, he is a hero. He walks toward me and the minute he’s in reach, one of my hands comes down on that scar, and the other around his cock. I trace the scar with my fingers, and it is deep, so very deep. I look up at him and he is watching me, his expression hooded, jaw hard. Cock even harder, and I lean in and give him a lick.
“Fuck,” he breathes out, and I like it. I like him sounding rough and out of control. I want him rough and out of control. But when I go to take him in my mouth, he moves, and in a blink, we’re back on the couch, on our sides facing each other.
“My cock in your mouth right now, means I come, and you’ll think I’m more of an asshole than you already do. And I’m not that damn selfish.” He kisses me and then presses his cheek to mine, his lips near my ear. “I’m going to fuck you now, hard and fast, because we both need hard and fast right now, but later,” he nips my lobe, “later, I’m going to taste you again. Lick you again.” His breath is a warm trickle on my neck. “Everywhere. But right now—” He strokes his cock along the wet seam of my body. “There is this.” He presses inside me, and I grab his shoulder with the sensation of him entering me, stretching me, until he’s in the deepest depths of me.
Our foreheads come together, and his hands settle between my shoulder blades, molding me closer. We don’t move though, we just linger there, and I swear I feel something happening between us. Or maybe it’s me that it’s happening to. Maybe I’m more affected by the slayer than I realize, more vulnerable to Jacob’s appeal than I intended to become. Maybe alone isn’t as good right now as together.
“What are you doing to me, woman?” he asks, as if he’s thinking what I’m thinking. Like he feels this too, but I don’t even try to reply. I don’t know what this is, and I can’t think now. Not when the thick ridge of his erection is caressing a path backward until I think he is going to pull out to move away. I arch forward, desperate to bring him back, and he slides my leg up, over his hip, and answers me with a hard thrust. I pant, trying to catch my breath, moaning as his hand slides to my backside, pulling me closer, driving deeper. I want him to drive in again, but he leans in and kisses me, a slow, drink-me-in kind of kiss, his hips doing this kind of slide and grind against mine.
Our lips part and for a moment we breathe together before he thrusts again, and the explosion of sensation I feel has me panting out his name, and digging fingers into his arms. He thrusts again, and with that, a frenzied need erupts between us. He starts to pump into me over and over and I feel him shaking, or maybe it’s me who is shaking. His gaze rakes over my breasts, and he kisses me in between another pump and grind. And another. And another. I don’t want this to end, and yet I need him to keep hitting that crazy sweet spot that promises bliss. I need it to the point that I move into him, pull him closer, lean into every move he makes.
And then it happens. I am there and without warning. I am never there without warning. I’m honestly rarely there at all. I usually just hope to get there. But I am now. Suddenly, intensely there, my sex clamping down on Jacob inside me, spasming with the most intense orgasm of my life. He growls low in his throat and drives into me before I feel the wet, hot heat of his release. We tremble into release, clinging to each other. Our naked bodies meld together intimately, our foreheads connected.
And for the first time in my adult life, I don’t know what I want to come next. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what he’s making me feel. I need to think, which isn’t going to happen with this man naked and all over me. I try to roll away, but he captures me. “What just happened?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The couch. I need tissue.”
He reaches behind us and grabs tissue, pulls out of me and stuffs it between my legs. “Problem solved. Now. What just happened?”
“We had sex,” I say, trying to get my head back on straight. “Just sex. That’s what happened.”
He cups my face and kisses me, this drugging, seductive kiss that is somehow all about sex, and yet, not about sex at all. “That didn’t feel like just sex to me,” he says. “But maybe it is. Maybe you needed to forget the slayer and maybe I just wanted you to forget Jesse Marks, which I do, I don’t deny that. But I can tell you that I plan to fuck you again. I plan to lick you every place I can possibly lick you. And I plan to make sure you can’t even remember that firefighter’s name.” He rolls me to my back and hovers over me. “So is it just sex?” he asks. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s something else and since I’ve done something else, I think I’ll try it on for size and take you with me.” And with that, he stands up and walks to get his pants, giving me a perfect view of his perfect ass.
He’s such a damn asshole.
An asshole that is definitely making me feel something else.