CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
SHAWN nodded, no longer able to speak. She was concentrating too hard on not losing control and coming on Rhett’s finger. It was too soon. She wanted to draw out the anticipation, but he was so good at setting her on fire, stroking her into hot ecstasy that here she was, struggling to hold on.
It wasn’t just his touch, though he had found her G-spot in about thirty seconds. It was having her hands behind her back. It made her breasts jut out in a way she wouldn’t naturally do. It made her exposed, unable to fold forward, to embrace, to touch. It made it all about her. That was the most shocking and sensual realization of all. She never would have thought that making herself vulnerable would make her powerful, yet it did.
Sensation was heightened, intensified.
Rhett had slowed his movements to a steady hypnotic glide, moving away from her sensitive spot, but intuitively understanding that if he just jerked away from her entirely, it would catapult her into an extremely unsatisfying orgasm. Breathing deeply in and out, she calmed herself down, regained control of her body, and managed to pick her forehead off his shoulder so she could see his face, gauge his expression.
His green eyes had darkened, and he was watching her with an expression she didn’t understand. It looked . . . tender. Unnerved, she tried to pull away but his hand was still in her pants, his finger still inside her, other hand cupping the back of her head. Holding her firm, he shook his head, just a slight shake of disapproval and she felt a flush of . . . what? Disappointment in herself for disappointing him?
Oh, hell, no.
Now she was really freaked out. She started to rear away from him, full-blown panic rushing over her. Given that her feet were entangled with his and her hands were tied and he was holding her, she ended up stumbling backward and would have fallen if he hadn’t prevented her from going down. Which made it worse. She realized that without her hands to brace her fall, she would have landed hard on her ass, or worse, on her face.
“Shawn.” He gripped her steadily, bent his head to make eye contact, but she couldn’t look at him. “Shawn, look at me.”
She stared at the wall, breathing hard, overwhelmed and confused. If she looked at him, he would see that she was suddenly terrified. Of how he could make her feel. Of how she could easily come to depend on him.
That wasn’t her. She didn’t depend on anyone. Because they would let you down. Leave. Like her father, and in ways so much more hurtful, her grandfather checking out and putting conditions on her inheritance.
Oh, God. Tears rose in her eyes, and one leaked, inching down her cheek, and she couldn’t even wipe it away. She was mortified.
“Baby, talk to me. What’s going on?” Rhett gently lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. When he saw the tear, he wiped it with the pad of his thumb and then sucked the droplet off his finger.
That disarmed her. “Why did you just lick my tear?” she asked, yanked out of her maelstrom of emotion. Sometimes Rhett was just freaking weird.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just wanted to taste it.”
She gave a desperate sort of laugh. “You’re really bizarre.”
“I know. I’ve never tried to hide who I am.”
No, he hadn’t.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her waist, but loosely, like he knew she would bolt if his grip was too tight.
Which she would.
“I don’t understand what you want from me.”
He studied her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Awkward to her anyway. His stare was intense, as it always was. It stripped her bare, made her long to look away again, to hide from him.
“I don’t want to take anything from you. You don’t need to give me anything. I just want to be with you. Does that make sense?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “It’s just . . . you looked at me and I didn’t get it. It was like you . . .”
Shawn stopped herself. She couldn’t say it out loud. She would feel like an idiot. A presumptuous idiot.
“Like I what?” he urged.
When she still didn’t answer, he frowned, the smooth skin between his eyes forming a deep trench that told her his expression was frequently one of concentration. Which she knew.
“I don’t know what I look like,” he told her. “But I know what I’m thinking. And what I’ve been thinking as I kiss you and touch you, is that you’re an amazing woman and I want to give you pleasure, make you happy. And you know what that means?”
She shook her head. Sometimes it was really hard to believe that Rhett was so much younger than her. He had an easy confidence in who he was, what he said, that she envied. Yet at the same time, he made her feel very feminine, very cherished, something she’d never experienced before.
“It means I care about you. It means that if you believe in fate, it guided us both to that bar that night because we’re supposed to be here, together, doing this. This is right, Shawn, me and you. And you can’t tell me otherwise, because I won’t believe you.”
Oh, God. She had never been particularly romantic, or gushy, or emotionally exposed. But she could have sworn that everything in her just heaved, like her soul sighed in pure bliss. She even heard the exhalation of air from her mouth, a soft rush that proved she did in fact believe him. She trusted him.
That’s what was so scary.
He kissed the corner of her mouth, first right, then left. “Say something, baby.”
She shook her head. “No. Because if I do I might ruin this moment.” It didn’t have to be forever. It just had to be now.
So she kissed him. She reached out and poured her overflowing feelings into a kiss, which he accepted and deepened. As their tongues teased over each other, their moans eager and increasingly desperate, Rhett undid the bra locking her wrists together behind her back.
“I want you to touch me,” he murmured, his voice rough and gravelly.
She wasn’t going to argue with that. Greedily, she ran her hands over the hard plane of his abdomen, over his chest, his biceps. He was so hard, so solid. Like the man himself. There was nothing soft about Rhett, physically or otherwise. Indulging herself, she felt up his ass through his jeans. Equally solid.
When she shifted her touch to the front of his jeans, finding his erection with ease, she was feeling down the length of it, awed by its steely quality, when he broke off their kiss and covered her hand with his.
“Not yet, baby. Let me make you come first. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
With any other man she would have given a flippant response. A casually tossed “Duh” or the equivalent. But she wasn’t even tempted to be snarky with Rhett. It would be, well, disrespectful. So she said simply, “Yes.”
He kissed her neck and it caused goose bumps to rise all over her arms. She was lost to him, and she knew it. When he guided her back to the bed, she let him lay her out and she waited, in a sort of warm and squishy state of anticipation as he stripped her jeans off, followed by her panties. There was no rush on his part, no rough jerking of clothes, just a steady progress, the drive on his face clear. He was a man who focused on one thing at a time, she had learned. He didn’t start something and not finish it. He didn’t talk to her while scrolling through his cell phone checking e-mail and social networking sites. He didn’t watch TV and jump up at every commercial to do a chore the way she did.
One thing at a time, that was Rhett. He focused on a task until it was completed, and right now, his goal was to pleasure her.
He was achieving it. Shawn moaned in abandonment when he pulled her thighs apart with a firm grip and went at her with his tongue. She wasn’t sure what he was doing, but it was something about the steady rhythmic, yet erratic, movements that kept her guessing, unsure of where his flickering heat would land, that had her gripping the sheet, terrified that he would stop. She had always enjoyed oral sex, had never been particularly shy about receiving it, but with Rhett, it was more than simple enjoyment. It was clawing, agonizing and desperate. It was base, primal. Wet.
But then he pulled back and wiped his mouth, breathing almost as hard as she was as he paused to stare at her sex, a finger absently trailing over her inner moisture.
It was on her lips to ask what the hell he was doing, her thighs quivering from the tension she was putting on them, when she remembered the rules. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions. If she did, he wouldn’t finish this. He wouldn’t let her orgasm.
That, too, turned her on. The thought that he understood her body, her needs, better than she did. If it were up to her, she would come in the first five minutes, let him pump her for another three, then hit the showers, the edge taken off. But that really denied herself the intensity of pleasure that came from extended foreplay, that came from Rhett teasing and denying her.
It almost brought greater intimacy between them. She had engaged in sex by rote with Sam, a familiar choreography of clothes off, kisses, a few hot touches on each other’s erogenous zones, then in and out. Sleepwalking sex.
This was so much more, it wasn’t even on the same plane of existence.
She wanted to beg Rhett.
She wanted to grab his head and bury him in her.
She wanted to cry out that she was empty and she wanted him. She needed him.
But instead, she reached over and grabbed the pillow and buried her face in it so she wouldn’t be tempted to cry out.
He didn’t allow it. He tore the pillow from her and threw it against the wall. “Say what you need to say. It’s okay. I want to hear it.”
“Please,” she whimpered, and her voice sounded ragged and strange to her ears. “Don’t stop, please. Oh, please, don’t stop.”
“Put your ankles over my shoulders,” he told her.
She did, without question, assuming he was going to plow into her with his cock. She welcomed the thought, wanted something to ease the deep ache. But that wasn’t his plan. Instead, he slid his hands under her ass and lifted her clear off the bed, right up to his mouth.
“Oh, God!” she cried out when he made hot contact with his tongue on her clitoris.
The assault continued until she was twisting her head back and forth, fingers numb from her frantic grip on the sheet, skin crawling with goose bumps. “Rhett,” she whispered, all the blood rushing to her head, her leg and butt muscles tensed from the position, her agonized ecstasy rendering her incoherent. She had something to say, only she didn’t know what it was.
He lifted his mouth and looked down at her, his head framed by her thighs. “Say my name again,” he told her urgently. “Scream it.”
“Rhett,” she said, struggling to keep her eyes open. “Oh!” she said involuntarily, when he plunged his tongue into her again.
His movements stopped and she whimpered.
“Louder.”
“Rhett!” she called out, the name half plea, half question. It sounded electric to her, ringing in the quiet room, an embarrassing burst of her succumbing to him, to the needs of her body.
But it clearly wasn’t that loud, because he lifted his mouth again and used one finger to pinch her ass cheek. “Say it like you mean it. Don’t be ashamed, Shawn. Scream for me.”
So she did. She let go of everything inside her and screamed over and over while he worked her. She came with his name on her lips, echoing in the room around them, her throat going hoarse, her pleasure transcending her body, dragging everything out of her.
And when he levered her legs down onto the bed, still tasting her, as the last strains of tight fulfillment were wrung from her, Shawn blinked, her eyes, her mouth, her heart all open to him, frozen in the profound moment of pure abandonment.
Rhett undid his jeans, watching her with a predatory expression as he voiced his approval. “That was perfect. You’re perfect.”
She was stunned, tremors still rippling through her.
• • •
STANDING up so he could shove his jeans and briefs off, Rhett stared down at Shawn, her breasts heaving, her cheeks pink, skin dewy from exertion. Her fingers were fluttering upward, reaching for him, but on the bed, like she wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. She looked like she was in shock.
He felt a little that way himself. Something had happened to him when he had listened to Shawn scream his name, with the tangy taste of her on his tongue, legs wrapped around him. Something had shifted, and he didn’t know what it was. He only knew that he had never wanted a woman as much as he wanted her, that he had never known the kind of satisfaction he had felt when she had opened her throat and cried out her need, her pleasure.
His tongue was thick, his cock hard to the point of painful, his control hanging on by the merest of threads.
If she touched him, if he felt the feathery, soft touch of her fingers on his back, if her milky thighs wrapped around him, he wasn’t going to be able to contain himself. He was going to lose it in her, and he needed a second.
So as he divested himself of the remains of his clothes, he told her, “Hands above your head. Legs spread. No touching.”
Her eyelashes fluttered in confusion, but after a second, she did as she was told. The eroticism of her obedience humbled him, stoked his arousal to a fever pitch, and he moved between her thighs. Her body was displayed to pure perfection, arms above her head, neck long and graceful, breasts rising up, her legs spread wide for him, her blond curls dark and damp. When he sank into her, she cried out, then looked up to him for approval. For instruction.
He paused, the agony of the thick, pulsing desire, the primal pleasure from her surrender, almost unbearable. He shook his head, indicating no speaking, because he couldn’t speak himself. He wanted to experience his invasion of her body in silence, her screams of his name still echoing in his ears. She understood without any words from him, and her teeth sank into her bottom lip to hold back the moans as he began to move inside her.
Never had he felt this kind of connection, this deep of an intimacy with a woman, and he bent over to kiss her, wanting her to taste the lingering scent of her own body on his tongue. “Say it again,” he murmured softly against her mouth, his gaze locked with hers.
She knew what he meant. “Rhett,” she whispered, and the sweetness of his name on her lips broke his control.
He thrust deep and just said, “Shawn,” hoping she would understand that this was something different, something important happening between them. “Touch me.”
As he pushed in and out of her warmth, he expected her to lock her ankles behind his ass, to dig her nails into his back.
But she didn’t. Her legs stayed spread wide for him.
While her fingers reached up and stroked his cheeks.
It disarmed him entirely, that soft caress, her smooth hands cupping his face, while she mouthed his name in silence, the sentiment hitting him harder than when it had been torn from her on a shout.
Turning his head, he kissed her fingers, dragging one into his mouth, biting the tip before pulling it down onto the bed and intertwining her fingers with his. When the rush came, when he exploded inside her, their eyes never left each other, and Rhett knew that they had just crossed a line that couldn’t be taken back.
He didn’t want to take it back.
He wanted to stay there forever, bodies meshed together, emotions real and honest.