Chapter 11
I close the door and lean against it with a heavy sigh after Nick returns to his car.
What does it say about me that I can spend two hours looking after my terminally ill friend yet come home feeling sorry for myself when Nick practically ditches me at my front door? I feel adrift in my own house, left alone with just my thoughts and my worry for the friend I already feel slipping away from me.
It’s too late at night to call Tasha or my mom, and when I phoned Lita from Kathryn’s to update her on the situation, she informed me that she’d caught a cab home from the auction and was headed to bed.
That’s where I should be heading too. That is, if I had any hope of going to bed and not lying there for the next several hours thinking about Nick.
Wanting him.
Needing the kind of contentment and comfort I’ve only ever felt in his arms.
I pick up my phone, my fingers itching with the urge to dial his number. I could ask him to come back. I know he would. I also know that if I’d invited him into my home tonight, into my bed, we’d be crossing a threshold with no turning back.
If we try to return to each other again and fail, it will be for the last time. For my own sake, for my sanity, it would have to be.
As much as I wish I had Nick’s strength to lean on, I’m not sure I’m ready to face that much finality in one night.
Instead I head upstairs to take a shower and try to relax. A few minutes under the hot water soothes my tired muscles. It washes away the tears I refused to let fall in front of Kathryn.
What it doesn’t soothe or wash away are my thoughts of Nick.
My longing to be with him.
Those feelings cling to me as I wrap myself in a short silk kimono and pad across my bedroom rug to draw the blinds. It’s still pouring outside, rain pelting wetly against the windows and sweeping in waves over the street below.
The street where Nick’s black BMW still sits parked at my curb.
“What the hell?”
He’s here? When did he come back? Or did he ever go at all?
It doesn’t matter. He’s here. I step back from the window in surprise, swamped by a selfish elation I can’t deny.
Then I’m racing down the stairs and out the front door, barefoot. Breathless.
Puddles on the pavement slosh against my feet as I round the front of the car to the driver’s side. I pound the flat of my hand against the window, a single knock that brings Nick’s head up sharply.
Our eyes meet through the water-streaked glass. He’s sitting in the darkened car, the engine turned off. He scowls, his lips parting on a silent curse as currents of rain sluice off my nose and chin.
The door pops open. I step aside as he climbs out of the car, an apology in his gaze. “I couldn’t leave. Damn it, I tried to, but—”
I don’t give him the chance to finish. With my hands holding his face, I drag him down to meet my kiss. His answering groan is animal, filled with the same yearning that’s coursing wildly through me.
We’re drenched in seconds. His white dress shirt plasters against his broad shoulders and chest. My thin kimono practically melts around me. Neither of us seems notice or care. Nothing can cool the urgency of our kiss.
Nick’s mouth moves hungrily over mine, our faces wet from the rain, our lips fused and fevered. His large hands hold me close to him, one palm splayed at my back, the other cradling my nape beneath the sodden tangle of my hair. His muscles flex, then in an instant he’s pivoted, turning me around so that I’m pinned between the closed door of the BMW and the firm heat of his body. He crowds in closer, still kissing me madly, our bodies crushed together everywhere they can, melding my soft curves to his hard planes.
I moan with the need for deeper contact. There’s no use trying to deny what he does to me. Just one kiss and I’m his for the taking already.
Again.
Always.
He says my name like a curse, muttering it harshly against my lips before he draws back to look at me. Desire blazes in his eyes and in the stark set of his jaw.
I see the question in his gaze. The warning.
I nod, the only response I’m capable of when my body is shivering under the deluge, my senses thrumming with the force of my need.
Nick kisses me again, hard and fast and heated. His fingers lace through mine and together we hurry back to the house. Dripping wet in the center of my little foyer, we barely make it to the steps leading upstairs before Nick wheels me around to face him, picking right up where we left off. He kisses me until I feel dizzy, until I am vibrating with arousal.
It’s always been like this between us from the very beginning. Spark meeting tinder. Passion perpetually smoldering and once reignited, swiftly consuming everything in its path.
But it’s not only lust that draws us together time and again.
It’s a connection that goes deeper than that. Nick and I share a mutual need that no one else can fill. I feel it every time I look into his haunted eyes and see a piece of myself there. As strong and unbreakable as he is, I know there’s a part of Nick that recognizes himself in me too.
I feel our connection now, when his gaze locks on mine and he begins to peel away my soaked kimono. He lowers his head and his mouth finds the curve of my bare neck and shoulder. My skin is cold, but it flares hot the instant his lips touch me. I shudder with unabashed need, curling my arms around him as his lips descend to my breasts. The wet scrap of my clothing falls away, taking the rest of the world and all of my other conscious thoughts with it.
God. How I need this. I need him.
Tonight there is the added fuel of our separation, all the nights and weeks and months that I’ve longed to feel Nick’s hands on me again, his mouth on me . . . his hard, powerful body crushed against me, buried inside me.
In spite of everything we’ve been through, there is still this. There will always be this. I know it as surely as I see that same truth reflected in his stormy blue eyes. We will be drawn together like this always, even if it hurts.
Even if it destroys us.
Right now I don’t care about any of that.
Right now, all I need is him.
Nick understands. There’s no need for me to say the words. He doesn’t have to tell me how deeply he craves this either.
My fingers struggle to unbutton his wet shirt. The custom-tailored white fabric is glued to his muscled arms and torso, slowing my quest to get at his naked skin. He seems just as impatient to have my hands on him. Yanking the tails loose from his pants, he rips open the front of the shirt with a sharp flex of his wrists. Mother-of-pearl buttons clatter to the hardwood like tiny pebbles.
His sigh is ragged when I touch him. On a low sigh, he drops his head back as I run my fingers over his bare chest and abdomen. When I drift lower, palming the steely ridge of his arousal, a rough moan rumbles at the back of his throat.
Gripping my hips, he drags me against him, the rain-dampened bespoke slacks pressing coolly to my nakedness. His pelvis grinds into mine. The pressure and the friction of his hard erection rotating against me makes my core clench greedily. His mouth captures the impatient sound I make, even as his hands clamp on to my backside and haul me deeper into his embrace.
He slides his palms down the outsides of my thighs.
The next thing I know, his hand is between them, teasing the wet seam of my body. My spine arcs when his fingers delve into the cleft of my sex. It’s been so long. To think I’d nearly had myself convinced that any sexual impulse I had was snuffed out the day I left Paris.
It was only waiting for this. For Nick.
“Oh, God.” I gasp, shuddering against him as his touch slides through my wetness, his thumb rolling deliciously, torturously, over my clit. Each stroke winds me tighter, driving me toward a pleasure I can neither slow down nor contain. I want to burrow my face into his chest, but Nick moves back, watching me. Studying every nuance of my response.
As always, I’m stripped bare under his gaze.
Because even after a year apart I am his.
My climax breaks over me without warning. I cry out with the intensity of it, with the staggering force of everything I still feel for Dominic Baine.
I open my eyes a moment later and find he’s still watching, still searching my face. And between my quivering thighs, his fingers are still moving reverently inside me.
“Christ, Avery. You’re so fucking beautiful when you come.” His voice is ragged, tight with desire. With his free hand, he gently caresses my cheek and brow. “I want to be inside you.”
I press against him, smiling up into his sober face. “I want it too, Nick.”
“No. You don’t understand.” He withdraws his fingers from inside me, then lowers his forehead to rest against mine. “I want more than that. I want to be the only man you take inside you.”
“You are.” I hold his serious gaze, unable to pretend with him now. I can’t lie by letting him think it’s been easy for me without him. Not after everything he’s told me.
All the lies and pretending we’ve done with each other are part of our past now. If we’re going to move forward, there’s no room for anything but the truth.
“There’s been no one else since you, Nick.”
He grunts. “So, Professor Nice Guy. He really isn’t in the picture?”
I shake my head. “He never was, just like you said. I broke it off with Brandon the day you and I talked at the gallery.”
“And Jared Rush?”
I frown at both the question and his jealous tone, although it shouldn’t surprise me. When we were together, Nick all but forbade me to get close to the charming artist even though the two men were on friendly terms in the past.
“Jared and I are friends, that’s all. That’s all we’ll ever be,” I assure him. “There’s been no other men since you, Nick. No one. Not once. Not in all this time.”
I see the jolt of astonishment flash across his face. I see the relief.
“Damn you for letting me think they could have been.” He exhales, then mutters a quiet curse. “Do you know how badly I wanted to forget you? How many times I went to a bar or a party for the sole purpose of finding some nameless, faceless female that I could fuck instead of tormenting myself every waking moment with the thought of wanting you?”
I’m holding my breath as he talks, yanked unwillingly back to reality. I’m terrified of what he’s going to tell me. I had no claim on him this past year, but if he confesses to screwing half the women in this city, I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t bar him from my heart that easily, but if he felt so little for me that he could do what he’s describing, I don’t know how I’ll be able to look at him and not feel like I’m in love with a stranger.
He lifts my chin, forcing me to give him my full attention. “I wanted to be able to fuck you out of my head, Avery. Out of my heart. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want anyone else. I still don’t.”
Hope catches in my chest. “Then you didn’t—”
“No one,” he says, brushing his lips over mine. “Not once.” A tender kiss to the side of my neck that makes my pulse race and my heart leap. “Not in all this time.”
Joy surges inside me, along with renewed desire. I can’t contain either one. Throwing my arms around his neck, I leap at Nick, my bare legs encircling his waist. Our mouths meet with abandon, with ferocious hunger.
He holds me aloft, his palms and forearms supporting my weight. And then suddenly we’re in motion, ascending the staircase that leads to my bedroom on the second floor.
Nick’s never been in my house before. Never been in the queen-sized bed that seems very small as he sets me down on the edge of it and stands before me to finish undressing.
He strips with elegant efficiency while I watch with eager eyes and a watering mouth. He’s so heart-stoppingly handsome I nearly forget to breathe. I know every muscled ridge and plane of his body, yet he’s never looked more virile than he does now.
He pushes me down on the mattress, his body covering me. His weight on me is a comfort as much as it arouses me. I cling to him, arching beneath him and yearning to have him buried deep inside me.
He knows what he does to me, even now. A year of distance between us, yet he still knows just how to touch me, how to kiss me. His tongue delves deep into my mouth, thrusting and withdrawing, stoking the fire that’s barely banked from the orgasm he gave me downstairs.
I want to kiss him all night, but Nick has other plans.
Moving down the length of my body with his wicked hands and mouth, he leaves a trail of fire along my neck and across my breasts, then down to the shallow dip of my belly. I moan with the bliss of it, my spine arching off the mattress as his trek continues downward. He pauses at my hip bone, tracing the delicate edge of it with his tongue.
“I’ve been dreaming of tasting you again for too long,” he murmurs harshly, his breath rolling hot and heavy over my sensitive skin. “Open for me, baby.”
I comply with a shivery exhalation, every nerve ending riveted on Nick and the pounding need that’s pulsing between us. As soon as my thighs part, he sinks down between them.
“Oh, God.”
The first fleeting lick of his tongue against my sex spirals through me like liquid fire. Then another kiss, one that lingers much longer, his tongue cleaving into my center, driving me to the brink of glorious madness. He finds my clit and the tender, unrelenting assault he wages on that tight bundle of nerves is almost my undoing.
But he knows just how much to give me and just when to retreat. This dance is a familiar one for us. Give and take. Submission and demand.
Nick is a master at everything when it comes to my pleasure. He knows precisely how to prolong my torment and when to set me free.
What I need right now is him inside me.
On a deep, approving growl he kisses my pussy once more, stroking and nipping, then drawing the tender bud of my clit against the hot, wet heat of his tongue.
His hooded gaze lifts to mine in wicked promise as he licks his lips, which now glisten with my juices. “As sweet and hot as I remember,” he murmurs darkly.
He moves back up now, every inch of him hard and hungry and so very beautiful. I clutch the solid bulk of his shoulders as he covers me, propped on his fists on either side of me, his thighs wedged between mine. His cock has always been impressive, but tonight it looks immense.
“I’ll try to take it slow, but—” His words cut off on a hissed curse. “I just have to be inside you, Avery.”
“Yes. Now, Nick.”
I reach up to him, tunneling my fingers into his silken black hair as he penetrates me. The invasion stretches me nearly to the point of pain, even though I can feel how rigidly he’s holding on to his control.
“Ah, fuck,” he grinds out through clenched teeth, shuddering with the first deep thrusts. “You feel so damn good.”
“So do you.” I arch to take him fully, to meet every soul-shattering drive of his body into mine. “Nick, don’t stop.”
“Never.”
His eyes are rooted on mine, refusing to let me go. I surrender completely to the tempo he sets for us, taking comfort in his control. I feel safe when we’re together like this. I feel protected.
Even after everything we’ve been through, I feel cherished.
I open to his kiss, meeting his tongue with mine as he claims my mouth in a hotter, hungrier joining that leaves me feeling drunk with pleasure and need.
His name is a tremulous whisper on my lips as he increases his rhythm. Each long push goes deeper than the last, adding to the fire that’s roaring back to life inside me. His mouth covers mine as the first jagged cry of my orgasm erupts from the back of my throat.
There is no mercy in him now, only need.
He rocks into me feverishly, violently. His body goes tense, shuddering with each rapid pound of his hips against mine.
“Ah, Christ, baby. I’m close. I need to come inside you.”
I nod, beyond words now.
His release rips loose from him in a coarse shout and a violent buck of his body.
“Avery.” His arms hold me tight beneath him as he empties within me in wave after spasming wave. When he says my name again, he utters it like a mantra. Maybe a curse.
There is a part of me that recognizes what I’ve done here. The threshold I wasn’t sure I was ready to cross has now been obliterated.
I don’t know if Nick will hurt me again.
I only know that I need him. I needed this.
Tonight I needed us.
The look in his eyes tells me he does too.
And for now, that’s enough.