Jane might have changed her mind in the taxi if Cameron hadn’t rested his hand on her thigh as soon as he gave the driver her address. She was sober—she hadn’t been lying about that—but once they got outside, away from the weird fairy-tale-hopped-up-on-sex hormones that had been the bachelorette-meets-bachelor party, she started to wonder if someone had roofied her Diet Coke.
Because what in Xena’s name was she doing? She was not a reckless risk-taker. Never in her life had she picked up a guy at a bar. That alone would have been enough, but did she stop there? No, she did not. Forever an overachiever, she had picked up one guy, then left with another.
One who had, not twenty minutes previously, rejected her. If she had any pride, any self-respect to speak of, she would have left with Brian. Bryce? Dang, what was his name? Whatever. Heck, she would have left by herself.
If she had any sense at all, she’d put a stop to this now.
But that hand.
The way it had sought out her back at the bar, with a calm air of possession, like it belonged there.
The way it sat on her thigh now, heavy and solid, spreading heat up her leg and to her center. They were almost at her house, and they hadn’t spoken yet. But they didn’t need to. That hand communicated volumes.
He’d been right, before. She was horny. And it was his fault. He’d planted the idea of this “human touch” nonsense, and she hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind. Maybe he—and Gia, and everyone—was right. Maybe she and Felix simply hadn’t been compatible. Yeah, she’d felt his rejection as a major burn, but maybe she’d been letting it have too much power over her. She was older now. She knew what she wanted and what she didn’t. She was capable of compartmentalizing.
Well, maybe. Regardless, it’s what she wasn’t capable of that was ruling the evening. And she wasn’t capable of shaking that hand off her thigh. She needed that hand.
She needed it all over her.
The taxi pulled up to her house, and she heaved a shaky sigh, feeling like she was one big exposed nerve masquerading as a bridesmaid. Felix had always been frustrated with her because it took her so long to come, if she did at all, but tonight she felt like a box of gunpowder that might explode if Cameron looked at her the wrong way. Or the right way. Or at all.
“You can send me home,” Cameron said, low into her ear, crowding her from behind as she unlocked her front door.
She shook her head, too embarrassed to say anything out loud, to claim her desire for him.
“I can’t be your boyfriend.”
“Oh my God, no!” she answered, suddenly finding her words, then laughing at his mock-offended face as she flipped on the entryway light. “Sorry! It’s just that…I told you I don’t want one of those.” Baby steps—she had only just talked herself into the idea of casual sex.
She kicked off her shoes and—“Oh my God, what are you doing?” He had dropped to his knees.
“I’m looking at these toes that have been tormenting me all night.” He ran a hand from her ankle down over the top of her foot, and she shivered. “One photo of them, and I’ve been thinking about them nonstop. These are some powerful toes.”
“Hmmm. You might even say they have brought men to their knees,” she said, biting back a grin. Damn, she was bad at flirting. But she was rewarded anyway when he barked a laugh, and smoothed a line on the top of her foot where her shoe had dug into her flesh.
“This looks painful.”
“Nah,” she said, wondering if he was planning to stay there on the floor, at her feet. “That’s nothing. Have you ever tried high heels?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, don’t. They’re torture devices. I am morally opposed to them.”
He looked up at her, and she was startled to find that she’d placed her hand on his head, without even realizing it. His buzz cut was growing in a little, and the fuzz of his hair was surprisingly soft. They stared at each other, and for a moment, fear flared in her belly. The idea that anything could happen. That she’d brought him here planning to invite him into her body. What had she been thinking? It was…too much.
But then he moved his head a little so her hand slid down to his cheek. His breath hitched and his eyes closed as he leaned into her hand, as if he wanted to rest a weary head on her palm.
Was he afraid, too?
He opened his eyes, and she could see that the answer was no. But there was something there, some emotion beyond what she would have expected, that she couldn’t quite identify.
He must have seen the question in her eyes, because he whispered, “It’s been a long time.”
“Since you’ve been back, you still haven’t…”
“No. Well, that’s true, but beyond that, it’s been…since before I last deployed.”
Wow. Wow. She had kind of imagined him sleeping his way through Iraq, though that was probably stupid since she’d just found out he’d had a girlfriend during the deployment. And even though it had only been a day since their trip to Niagara, when he’d assured her he hadn’t reneged on their various bets, they hadn’t made another one to cover the time since then. There had been nothing stopping him from spending all day today working on his stupid “list.” Knowing that he hadn’t caused a surge of emotion. Guilt for having thought so poorly of him that she’d even entertained the notion. But also pride, as if he’d somehow been faithful to her, which was ridiculous.
Lust. There was also lust.
And it was stronger than the fear.
So she used her hand to gently tug upward on his chin, communicating her wish that he rise.
He did. She took his hand and led him toward her bedroom, but at the last minute he surprised her by stopping at the threshold of the office. “The good stuff’s in here,” he rasped, pulling her inside and then against him.
She buried her face in his chest, embarrassed in a way she hadn’t been when they were discussing her vibrators before. That had been a theoretical discussion, and this was…not theoretical. “We don’t need those,” she whispered, but she very much feared that she did.
She felt rather than saw his shrug, since she was still hiding her face. “Maybe we don’t need them; maybe we do.” His warm palms came to rest on her cheeks, and he gently tipped her head up to force her to look at him. “Regardless, we might want them. Either way, a man likes to be prepared.”
It was the perfect thing to say. The kindest, sexiest, most astonishing thing, and those few sentences somehow tipped a giant weight off her shoulders. Men were the ones who were supposed to have performance anxiety, but she’d been tied up in knots. The idea that he didn’t have a particular vision in his head of how their encounter would unfold, that there was no script, was strangely liberating. Insanely sexy.
She lifted herself up onto her tiptoes, intending to kiss him, but he didn’t seem to be getting the message. He still had his hands on the sides of her face, so she put hers on his in a mirror-image gesture and tried to tug his head down. But he resisted, stared at her with a small smile.
“Kiss me, you idiot,” she said.
He laughed. “I’m going to. I just need…a minute.”
“For what?” To change his mind? Like hell. She was standing there, panties wet and nipples almost painfully tight, a caricature of sexual desire. She hadn’t confronted her big emotional block about casual sex only to have the proceedings derailed now. She pulled harder on his head and bounced a little on her toes. Maybe this was one instance in which high heels would actually be worth the pain.
The smile disappeared, and for a moment she feared she’d offended him, that he was going to call the whole thing off. “To pause and take things in. To pause and take you in. Because once this starts, Jane…”
“What?” she whispered.
“We’re going to set this fucking house on fire.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond, just lowered his head—finally!—and oh, if she thought she’d been turned on before, she hadn’t realized. If she’d thought their kiss at the falls had been hot, she’d had no idea.
His tongue plunged into her mouth, but it might as well have been between her legs, because the shot of desire through her core was almost painful. She hissed against his mouth, and he started to pull away, but that wasn’t happening. So she slid her hands, which still rested on his cheeks, around his neck and hitched herself up on his body, wrapping her legs around his waist, and oh, her aim had been accidentally perfect. It was his turn to hiss as the very center of her slammed against his erection.
He didn’t miss a beat, though. His hands came around to cup her bottom, and he took two steps until her back was against the wall and pressed his hips against hers even as he returned to working her mouth with his. She arched her back, seeking more pressure, and he knew what she was after, because he ground into her, making tight circles with his hips, never letting up in the way a thrusting motion would have.
And then…“Oh God!” she bit out, because she had forgotten that he had hands and that she had breasts. She had forgotten, or maybe she’d never really known, how good hands could feel on breasts.
His hands slid up under her T-shirt, deftly undid the clasp at the back of her bra, then came around front and plucked her nipples, summoning a cry of pleasure from her. She wanted to arch away from and into his touch at the same time, so intense was the sensation. But it was gone as quickly as it began as he ripped his mouth from hers and spread his palms, pressing and kneading, cupping, as if he were trying to get as big a handful of her as possible.
Dear God, she was going to come right here with his hand up her shirt. That seemed, suddenly, not okay, so she lowered her feet to the ground and shoved him away. Or tried to—he grunted, resisting, renewing his assault on her until she managed to say, “I need to get my clothes off.”
She almost regretted her words, because that was all it took. He sprang away from her, and the loss of sensation made her breasts ache, and her vagina…it actually hurt. He whipped off his shirt, and oh God, those tattoos. The idea that she could openly look at them, that she could touch them. Put her mouth on them. He bent over to remove one leg from his pants but paused to look up at her.
“Naked,” he rasped. “I need you naked.”
She stared at him, stunned. His pupils were dilated so there was only a slim ring of blue around them. His breath was ragged, and she could see the thrumming of his pulse in his neck. He wanted her, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. She moaned, and he wasn’t even touching her.
“Please,” he added.
She was always going to obey; she had just been caught momentarily in him, helpless in the tractor beam that was his obvious desire. But the combination of the gruff command followed by the polite entreaty was like a fast-forward switch. She pulled her shirt and already-undone bra off together. She gave a passing thought that she should have started with her jeans because now he was going to see her muffin top, but it was forgotten when he closed his eyes, let his head fall back, and ground out, “Awww, fuuuck.”
The surge of triumph in her chest told her that it was a good “Awww, fuuuck.” So she unzipped her jeans. The sound in the otherwise silent room had him opening his eyes. They latched on to her hands as she pushed her jeans over her hips. His jaw hung open, and feeling drunk with power and as saturated with desire as he appeared to be, she decided to name what she wanted in a way she never had with Felix. “Yes. Fuck. That’s correct.” His eyes whipped up to hers, practically sparking. So, to be clear, she added, “That’s what I want. For you to fuck me.”
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” She wasn’t done taking her jeans off, but he grabbed her and walked her backward to the daybed until the backs of her legs hit it and she sat down. “What should I fuck you with first? My hands or my tongue?” He yanked on the bottoms of her jeans and then slid his hands back up her bare legs. He was coming for her panties, next, she could tell.
“No.” She shook her head, both to illustrate her “no,” but also at herself, because it wasn’t that she didn’t want those things, for him to fuck her with his fingers and tongue. She just didn’t want them as much as she wanted something else. “I want you to fuck me with your cock,” she breathed, and he stopped in the middle of sliding her panties down her legs.
“I don’t have a condom,” he rasped. He worked her panties the rest of the way off. “These are so wet,” he growled.
“What do you mean you don’t have a condom?”
He repeated his earlier move of sliding his hands up her legs, but this time there was nothing to stop him, no barrier or fabric, and when he got to the V of her thighs, he pressed one hand against each and said, “Open for me.” She did, unthinkingly.
“What do you mean you don’t have a condom?” she said again. It was like they were having two different conversations.
He stroked a hand gently across her outer folds. “Oh, shit, baby, you’re so wet.”
“Cameron!” she panted, to try to force him to listen to her but also because even that light, exploratory touch had her arching her hips up off the bed.
“Yes,” he said, taking his hand away now that he was finally listening to her. She wanted to curse herself for making him stop. She wanted to grab his hand and press it back against her body. He stuck out his tongue and licked a quick line straight up from her belly button, between her breasts, and through the notch of her collarbone. It was the single most erotic thing that had ever happened to her. So far. She had a feeling the record might be broken a few times if things continued on like they were. He ended his journey by covering her body with his own, bracing himself on his forearms so she wasn’t bearing all his weight. “It was a bachelor party,” he said when they were nose to nose. “I thought I was going to be hanging out with a bunch of guys all night.”
“But…” she trailed off, aware that she sounded like a whiny child. “I want to have sex.” She had tried to replace the “whiny” with “sultry,” but it wasn’t really working.
“We’re going to,” he said. “We are.”
Then he reversed directions and started heading back down her body, but he stopped at her chest this time and took an aching nipple into his mouth. She cried out from the relief of it, of having his mouth on her. That relief was short-lived, though, because having that part of her soothed only threw into stark relief how much she ached for him between her legs, how empty she felt.
He knew, though, somehow, because as soon as the thought arose, his fingers were there, pressing into her. That was the thing about Cameron. He was aggressive, but responsive. He was utterly in control of their encounter, but he played her so expertly that she wanted to surrender forever.
“How can you be this wet?” he demanded. She lifted her head, suddenly embarrassed. She was about to stammer an apology when he added, “Fuck, I could come just from touching your sweet pussy.”
Then he was gone, and she cried out at the loss of sensation, but before she could get her bearings, he was back with one of her vibrators.
“We really don’t need that,” she whispered, but he ignored her, switching it on. He’d grabbed the Love Egg, and it looked so small, dwarfed by his big hands.
Ignoring her protest, he rolled her onto her side and pulled her flush against him, her back to his chest. He kept one arm around her torso, securing her to him, and pressed open-mouthed kisses on the side of her neck. Then he used his other hand to press the vibrating egg against her clit—but only for a second.
“Ahh!” she shouted. The moment her pelvis, of its own accord, bucked after the retreating egg, the arm that had been slung casually around her tightened like a vise, pulling her back against the solid muscle of his body. Then he pressed his hand—his whole palm—over her, almost as if he was soothing an ache, which in a way, he was. She was surrounded by him. His cock pressed into the crease of her bottom, and his arms a vise securing her to him, his hand covering the front of her sex.
“See? It doesn’t have to be either-or,” he said before tugging on her earlobe with his teeth. And before she could respond, the egg was back, but again, only for a heartbeat.
Again she struggled, though she wasn’t sure why. He was going to do what he was going to do. It didn’t matter what she wanted. Well, that wasn’t right. It was more that he knew what she wanted, before she did even. He knew about things she hadn’t imagined yet.
A few more rounds of teasing with the egg, and she was almost weeping. She was an exposed nerve. It was like he was dismantling her with his touch. She’d given up trying to chase the egg and had gone limp in his arms.
When he realized as much, the arm that had been bound over her chest slid down and he parted her folds. The next time he brought the egg to her clit, he plunged a finger inside her, then a second. His cock pulsed behind her.
“Oh my God!” she moaned. He left the egg on a little longer this time. It was too much. She didn’t want it to be over. “Stop!” she said.
He stopped everything, all at once, immediately. Not only did he stop touching her, he pulled his body, which had been plastered to her back, away.
“Gaahhh!” she nearly yelled, grabbing the egg-free hand and shoving it between her legs. When it was back where it belonged, she clarified, “Stop with the egg. I only want you.”
“You want to come all over my hand?” he practically growled.
She nodded frantically, writhing against him, hating that the end was so close but unable to stop bucking, to stop running to meet the wave that was barreling down on her.
And then she was coming.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jane,” Cameron ground out as she kept coming.
The aftershocks were still rumbling through her when he said, “Next time, I want to feel you come on my face.”
As the orgasm receded, it made way for self-consciousness. And for the awareness that she had basically sat there while he did such wicked, incredible things to her, heedless of his own pleasure. His penis was still tucked behind her bottom, and it was still hard as steel.
Next time, I want to feel you come on my face.
Next time.
Jane had always viewed fellatio as a necessary chore attached to couple-hood. When she was with Felix, she used to try to space it out. She even had a little internal schedule that he didn’t know about. She’d basically make an effort in that regard every four or five times. She didn’t hate it, but…well, to be honest, it was one more reason to prefer vibrators.
But holy crap, right now? She needed it. She needed to make him feel as good as she did. Heck, she needed to make him feel one-tenth as good as she did. And it wasn’t an “it’s polite to return the favor” kind of need. She wanted it, to come back to his use of the words want and need. What had happened between them had conflated the two concepts, blown apart the dividing lines between them. She didn’t even care that she probably wasn’t that good at it. Her mouth was watering. So she wiggled out of his embrace, turned over so she was facing him, and said, “I want to feel you come on my face this time.”
* * *
Holy, holy, holy fuck.
After Jane let loose that astonishingly dirty statement, she wasted no time. It wasn’t five more seconds before her mouth was on him. And there was no warm-up, no teasingly light kisses. She opened her mouth and took him in as deeply as she could.
“Oh Christ!” he shouted.
He was flat on his back on the daybed, and she was straddling his shins and bent over his dick, her hair a curtain of flame that was fucking gorgeous, but also blocking his view. “Wait. I want to see you if you’re going to do that. I need to see you.”
He sat up, intending to scoot back so he was sitting against the back of the daybed and would have a better prospect, but she slid off it entirely, kneeling on the floor and tugging his legs to get him to come sit on the edge.
“Jane, ” he started, but he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. Maybe that she didn’t have to kneel, but Jesus, to see her like that. She was a perfect hourglass, her waist nipping in between gorgeous full hips and those criminally addictive breasts. And now that her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders, he could see her face. She smiled a little and ran her hands up the tops of his thighs. He feared perhaps this repositioning might mean a loss of momentum, that now she would backtrack and start with the teasing foreplay. Not that there was anything wrong with that. He would take Jane’s mouth on his cock in any configuration she liked. He just—“Oh my God!”
She took him all the way in, as she had before, and began moving her mouth up and down his shaft, but from this vantage point he could see everything. Her cheeks hollowing as she sucked. Her perfect breasts bouncing as she established a rhythm. Her big green-brown eyes looking up at him. It made him realize with a jolt that Christie had always closed her eyes when she was blowing him. But this. This was so much hotter. This was—oh, shit. The pressure had been building all over, in his back, his balls, everywhere. But he’d thought he could hold back, prolong the pleasure. He’d always been pretty good at controlling himself, in the bedroom if not elsewhere. But she was undoing him, tearing him apart.
“Jane, Jane,” he gasped, trying to gently push her away. She pulled up but didn’t move back, kept hold of his thighs with her hands.
And he came for the first time in five months with another person.
“Holy fuck.”
* * *
They fell asleep with the light on, a tangle of sweaty limbs on the too-small daybed. When Jane woke up and glanced at the clock she kept on her desk, it was three a.m. She ached all over, her breath was atrocious, and she was pretty sure she had come in her hair.
But she didn’t care. She shifted a little because one of her legs, which had been draped over Cameron, had fallen asleep. She felt like she weighed a thousand pounds, but for once, in a good way. She was heavy with satiation. Well-used.
She almost had her leg free when an arm came out of nowhere and clamped down on it. “Where do you think you’re going?” Her head was tucked under his chin, and she was curled up against his chest, so she felt the words rumbling inside him as he spoke them.
“My leg is asleep,” she said, her voice muffled by his body.
“Mmm.” He stretched in place, then sat up and scooted to the end of the bed and began massaging her leg.
“Oh, you don’t have to…oh!” It felt so good, the pins and needles being worked out by deep, long strokes of his strong hands. So she swallowed her protest and shifted into a sitting position at the other end of the bed, facing him. She had the vague notion that maybe she should cover herself. Or at least suck in her stomach.
She and Felix had never really lounged around naked. She didn’t have a lot of experience with non-sex nudity. But she was still suffused with that languid heaviness. It was too delicious to let go of, and it kept her pinned in place.
“These toes,” he said, having worked his way down to her ankle. “I thought about them all night.” He lifted her foot and, to her utter astonishment, bent over and bit her big toe.
“Oww!” she squealed, though it hadn’t really hurt, had just been a little nip.
He kissed the same spot and began rubbing her foot.
“Do you have a foot fetish?” she teased.
“Not previously.” He wagged his eyebrows.
It did something to her. She was suffused with a sense of gratitude and appreciation. He had been so much like what she expected, and yet not. There had been the confidence, the mastery, his utter control of her body’s response, but also the tenderness. The foot rub, for heaven’s sake. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“What?” He looked up, genuinely confused. Then he grinned and shrugged. “Hey, post-orgasm foot rubs—standard operating procedure.”
“No,” she said, wanting to reward his tenderness with honesty. “I’ve never…had sex like that before.”
“Ha!” he said, giving the arch of her foot an extra-hard squeeze that nearly made her eyes roll back into her head. “So you admit that I was right.”
“About all this doing-it-with-an-actual-human business? Well…” She pretended to think about it. “I didn’t hate it.”
He made a mock-outraged face and nipped another toe.
“It’s funny,” she said, thinking back on the sexual component of her relationship with Felix. “The vibrators became such an issue with my last boyfriend. I tried to introduce them because things were…not really working for me. But he hated them so much that I backed off. Used them privately. I guess I built up this either-or thing in my head. But…” Her face heated thinking back to the way Cameron had tormented her with the vibrator, bringing her closer to the edge, then backing off. And also because here she was again, casually chatting about sex. She didn’t do that. But she also didn’t want to stop. It felt like she was getting a real perspective on things—on her past, on what she wanted out of life.
“Well, as discussed, your ex sounds like a real winner.”
“It was like he was mad that I didn’t just fake it,” Jane said. “I never thought about it in those terms, but I think that would have made things easier between us.”
“Easier, maybe,” Cameron scoffed. “But I personally would rather cut off my dick than know someone I was sleeping with was faking it on the regular.”
“Right?” She laughed. His directness was so refreshing. It had rubbed her the wrong way when they first met, but she was coming around to seeing things his way. There was something liberating about saying what you wanted with no obfuscation. About “opening your eyes and jumping,” to quote him from the CN Tower.
“I’m glad you came to your senses and dumped him. Vibrators are clearly better than he was.”
“I didn’t dump him, actually.” She had no idea why she was saying this. The rational thing to do would be to just let him assume that she’d been smarter and more confident than had actually been the case. But she had literally bared herself to him just now, and she couldn’t seem to stop doing it.
Cameron screwed up his face, trying to make sense of the situation. “So he was a lousy lay, you suggested an avenue for improvement, and then he dumped you? What the hell?”
Jane giggled—his indignation was gratifying. “No. He dumped me a couple years later when I suggested we move in together. Well, that’s not exactly right.” She deserved some credit here. “I did kind of dump him at that point, I guess, but it was only because his reaction to the idea of cohabitation suggested that I was basically nothing more to him than a convenient habit.”
“What?”
Oh, boy. Cameron wasn’t just indignant, he was pissed. His nostrils were flaring and everything. Was it wrong that she liked that? It was one thing for her friends to express outrage about what had gone down with Felix, but for some reason, Cameron’s anger was different.
“Yeah,” she said, warming to her tale of humiliation. “We’d been together six years at that point. We were both twenty-six. Neither of us had a ton of money—I was determined to make a go of it with the writing, but things hadn’t really taken off yet—so it just seemed like the natural next step as well as a financially practical one. It was his birthday, so I took him out to dinner and did this little proposal-type thing. I got us these stupid little matching heart key chains. You know, like we could use them for the keys to our new place?” She scoffed. To think that she’d ever been so naive.
“And he said no.” Cameron was clearly working to control his voice.
“To be fair, he tried not to be mean about it, but yeah. He said he was happy having a girlfriend and didn’t really see that changing. And it wasn’t like I was pushing for marriage or kids,” she added. “I just thought…well, I don’t know what I thought.” It seemed like another lifetime ago.
“But then you dumped him.”
“Not right that moment. I was too…mortified. Trying not to cry and all that.”
Was she mistaken, or had Cameron just growled?
She looked at him, giving him a moment to speak if he wanted to, but when he didn’t say anything, she continued. “I talked to Wendy that night, and she said, ‘You’re not happy with him, and you haven’t been for a long time. So why are you still doing this?’ And it dawned on me that she was right. I hadn’t even told her about the vibrator stuff—it was too humiliating. But I started thinking ‘I never get off with this guy and he doesn’t really want to be with me in any meaningful way. What am I doing?’ It took my heart a little longer to get the message. We met when we were twenty, so in some ways, we grew up together. It was hard to let go. But, yeah, I listened to my brain and not my heart and broke things off the next day.”
“And where is this motherfucker now?” Cameron spoke quietly but there was barely controlled rage in his tone.
Jane shivered but tried to cover it up with humor. “Why? So you can go beat him up?”
“Seriously. What’s he doing now? You said he was a surgeon?”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore.” She appreciated his outrage more than he knew, but now that she’d told him her sob story, she felt light. Happy. She wanted to stay that way, to prolong this extraordinary night. “I think we’ve given Felix enough airtime, don’t you?” Her stomach rumbled audibly, and she laughed. “I’m starving. Should we make sandwiches? Are you hungry?”
He kept her pinned with his intense, borderline-angry gaze for a long moment, but just when it had started to become awkward, he dropped her foot and licked his lips. “I am hungry.”
She started to get up, but his hands clamped down on her thighs, one on each, at the widest part of them. Then, very slowly, he lowered his head until his mouth was inches from her mound.
“Open your legs,” he said.
And she did.