Chapter Seventeen
“Thank you,” Darcy said after she’d had her fill of cheesecake. The treat had done nothing to distract her from what she’d begun to want more than satisfaction for her insatiable sweet tooth.
Giving into that desire was such a bad idea. The day’s events had stripped her heart’s defenses to ribbons, and despite Micah’s confession that he didn’t want anything more than sex, part of her wished he did. In little more than four days, he’d walk out of her life again.
Four days.
“For what?” His blond waves had come down as a shield between them, his voice cautious.
She wanted to reach out and peel it away, but she didn’t want to lead him on any more than she already had. “You know for what. I’m weak, and you’re being strong so we don’t do something really stupid.”
“Nothing between us would be stupid, but you’re welcome all the same.”
Frowning, she took the dish to the sink, confused by the doubt and guilt and heart-pain taking turns punching her in the soft spots.
He wiped his mouth and linked his fingers together in front of him. “I hate that you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid I’m entertaining myself because I see you as sexual object. I’m ashamed to say this week might have begun that way, but… You were right when you said I never wanted you to see the way I was today. I feel like I’m slowly waking up from a bad dream, and every time I open my eyes, you’re there like the dawn.”
Her stomach tied into a painful knot. “I don’t know what to say.” Why was he saying these things and confusing her even more?
“Then just listen. We’re alike more than I wanted to believe at first. I think we recognized another who’s suffered and survived. We’re both consenting adults who’ve been through a dry spell. Enjoying each other’s company for a few days isn’t wrong.” He came to her, laying a tender kiss on her forehead. “Ask me your questions when you’re ready, and I’ll show you the monster inside the man.”
The wheels in her brain hadn’t started turning again until his bedroom door had closed with a quiet click. He’d sounded sad, as if she’d just told him he was a worthless piece of shit. Had everyone he’d tried to get close to after the incident rejected him, as her lover had rejected her?
And what monster? How could he think that after all of the glimpses of the pure soul he’d shown her? He’d adored, loved, and lost his parents. He’d willingly taken pain to spare others from feeling it. He’d been a father to a boy who’d never known kindness. No direction her thoughts took made any sense or conjured a scenario that fit the man she was coming to know more intimately than anyone else.
Had Micah killed someone? If a madman had put her through the psychological and physical torture that man had put him through, what would she have been capable of? There was no way to know. She probably would have died in that camp, and he’d found the courage to survive and invest his heart and money into helping others caught in similar circumstances.
He wasn’t a monster. Nothing he could say would change how she felt about him. Which was…what? An epiphany had her sinking into the stool he’d vacated. She’d become the kind of person she never wanted to be. Instead of bailing on an existing relationship, though, she’d given up before even starting one.
Since Dickface had walked away and her parents split, she avoided anything that had the potential to hurt her. But those same things also brought her joy. Love, meaningful relationships, faith in the goodness of people. Everything that touched the best parts of her. She hadn’t lost anything after the accident but her courage, and Micah was helping her get it back.
Gran and Gramps had been a rarity. Her dreams of marriage and forever were unrealistic, because people grow and change. Life had no guarantees. Maybe true strength meant stepping onto the scariest, most exhilarating ride in the world, knowing at any time it might stop suddenly and throw her in the dirt, and having the courage to step on anyway.
Was she really happy to accept celibacy and only having meaningful conversations with her voice recorder for the rest of her life? Her expectations had been too high, her standards too narrow. She and Micah needed each other for a while. A physical relationship would be temporary, but maybe that would be okay just this once. Nobody had to know, and it wasn’t in exchange for a story, so she’d be able to look herself in the mirror afterward. Just because it wouldn’t last, it didn’t mean she couldn’t fill the time between with powerful memories. She was stronger now than she’d ever been.
She cared about him now that he’d let her in. It wasn’t wrong.
Friends with benefits could work. Or her decision could have been a pathetic copout excuse to have no-strings-attached sex with a god of all things erotic, who’d excited her more by touching her fingers than anyone else had done with her entire body. More, he’d excited her mind, made her laugh and feel safe enough to talk about the biggest thorns in her heart.
If he was willing to risk it all for her, then she’d find the courage to do the same. She’d step onto the wild ride he offered, if only for the rest of the week, and it wasn’t the physical that worried her anymore. It was that soul-deep emotion he kept shocking her with. Yes, that would be a problem, because her heart wouldn’t be part of this deal.
It couldn’t be.
The sound of rattling windows jerked Darcy out of a hard-won sleep. She sat up, blinking in the inky pitch of the room. The city never reached that level of darkness, but the island was miles from such things as street lights and even other houses for that matter, and the near-blindness disoriented her.
What had woken her? As if in answer, a flash from outside lit up the edges of the room around the dark curtains. Thunder came right after, loud and terrible, shaking the windows. She jerked the covers up around her neck.
Not here.
Not now.
No, everything was fine. She just needed to close her eyes and go back to sleep.
The sound of rain arrived on the metal roof, like a thousand fingers drumming an angry tune. Tension crept into her muscles. Unable to stop it, that night rose up like a ghost from her mind. Phantom echoes of pain rippled through her body, centering at the base of her spine and down her right leg that had been broken. The blinding flash as the lightning struck the tree. The horse’s scream as it kicked. Every crash outside drove her deeper into the memory until the room disappeared, and there was only wind and the knowledge that she was going to die.
Breaths rattled up and down her throat with her imminent anxiety attack. Normally, she’d go into her bathroom at the apartment, where there were no windows, and wait it out. She scrambled out of bed and went into the hall, already wheezing.
Micah’s door remained closed. The bathroom had windows. As she dashed through the kitchen, squinting as the storm grew in intensity, she realized there was no basement, no room at all free of windows.
No escape.
Trapped again.
Trapped.
Half strangled with panic as she remembered the moment when she realized her legs wouldn’t move, she focused on the only sanctuary she could think of—Micah. Eventually, her joints unlocked and obeyed her commands to find him.
She hadn’t even made it back to the hallway when his silhouette appeared before her. His long hair appeared sleep-tousled around his face that showed concern in the flashes from outside. She shook her head, unable to speak with the invisible fist gripping her throat.
“I’m here. I’ve got you.” He looped an arm around her and tried to guide her back down the hallway, but her legs were trembling, and she stumbled. He picked her up and carried her to a room that smelled of him.
She clung to his neck with shaking arms, holding on to the most solid object in her world, breathing him in with every gasp. Pathetic sounds spilled out of her as he sat down, keeping her in his lap and wrapping a soft blanket around them both. Light spilled over them when he turned on a lamp beside them. They were on a sofa along the wall opposite the end of his bed.
“When I fantasized about you waking me up in the middle of the night, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said with over-the-top lightness, rubbing a warm hand up and down her back, finally leaving it on her nape. She shivered with pleasure. “If you wanted to sleep with me, all you had to do was ask.”
The calm tone of his voice and his strong arms worked like magic to push the memory back into the depths. Quiet, choking laughter took the place of her gasping, and slowly, the rock of her muscles returned to pliable tissue.
She left her lips and nose pressed to his throat, registering aches from being so insanely tense. Her hands left his sturdy shoulders to wander up into his hair. The lightning couldn’t reach her in his arms. Or the thunder. He was a new kind of storm she wanted all around her.
“Did you know I can speak five languages?” Micah sounded winded as he cuddled her body closer to his chest, her knees tucked up to his side under the blanket. “Godt natt og drøym søtt. That’s Norwegian. My father spoke it to me all the time when I was young. He and my mother had me fluent in three languages by the time I was seven.”
She stopped twirling his hair around her finger and leaned out enough to see him, the sweet tone of his voice buzzing through her. “What does it mean, what you said?”
He gave a knowing smile and shrugged. “Maybe something sweet, maybe something erotic.”
A crack of thunder shook the cottage, sending her back to her hidey-hole in the hollow of his throat. Curses tumbled out of her.
“I also speak French, Portuguese, and Spanish.” With his lips pressed to her ear, he spoke in foreign tongues that filled the silence with sexy whispers, driving back the darkness from her mind. What the words meant didn’t matter, only the rich emotion burning behind them. He was holding her together when she should have come apart.
“You need to stop doing that.” She rested her forehead against his and traced the lines of his jaw with her fingertip.
“Doing what?”
“Taking care of me. A girl could get used to that, especially this sappy, hopeless romantic.”
He sighed, tightening his arms around her. “As it turns out, I like taking care of you.”
“I don’t want to need you—this. I’m a grown woman. A storm shouldn’t make me hyperventilate and dive for the nearest shelter.”
“And the sight of blood shouldn’t reduce me to a whimpering mess, but it does, and there’s nothing either one of us can do about it.”
A warm glow grew in her mind as she pulled him down for a kiss, one of the slow, smoldering ones that softened her center. When he withdrew, she pursued him, pushing up to her knees and throwing one over his lap to straddle him.
Unasked questions clouded his eyes. His hands slipped up her legs, stopping abruptly at her hips. “You’re not wearing anything under this.”
She caught her lower lip between her teeth, letting it slide out while she built her nerve. “I can’t wear underwear to bed.”
He pushed at her, shifting them to the edge of the sofa. Only his thin cotton underwear kept her from his massive erection. “I’m trying to be good, but I’m no saint. Unless you want me to break my word, you need to go now.”
Nuzzling his ear as her hands tangled into his hair, she shook her head. “No, not this time.”
A heated pause, then, “Have you been into the cheesecake again?”
She laughed, lining their faces up as she brushed his lips with hers, delighting in his quick intake of breath. “No, I’m hungry for something better. You accepted our attraction before I did, and I’m done starving myself. I’m handing you the keys to my private kingdom, Micah. How many wonders you explore while there is entirely up to you.”
He settled back into the sofa, his hands once again sliding tentatively along her outer thighs. The confusion that had been pulling his face tight relaxed into a crooked, uncertain smile. “Are you sure you’re awake? You seem vulnerable right now. I don’t want to mistake a snap decision for true desire and have you hating me in the morning.”
“This isn’t a snap decision. Before I went to bed, I decided the next time opportunity arose, I was going to surrender to this. I want you, Micah, even at the risk of compromising my professional integrity. No promises. No expectations. Just two on a week-long fantasy ride. I want to finish our lovers’ dance.”
Micah’s mouth covered hers as if he’d suffocate without it. Growling low in his throat, he slipped one hand up her spine to her nape, leaving a rash of tingles in his wake. The other curled over her bare ass as he thrust his hips upward. The friction through the cotton, and the impressive state of his arousal, overwhelmed her pleasure and fear centers, which were mingling into a delicious aphrodisiac in her abdomen.
She’d never felt so trapped by a pair of arms, and so free to enjoy it without hesitation, without inhibitions. He was safe and hot and real, and he wanted her, damage and all. Once his initial surprise seemed to ebb, he cupped her face, staring deep into her. She shivered and squirmed with the intensity of having him slip by the inner walls to find the bare truth of her.
“How do you like to be loved, lucerito?” He lifted the hem of her nightshirt.
Still caught in a full-body tremble, she raised her arms, shivering harder as the cool night air accentuated the sudden exposure of her nude body to the hot man beneath her. Not only to his eyes, but that virile male energy that sparked against her skin.
The heaving of her chest made it hard to speak. “I don’t…I’ve never been…it’s never been like this, and this is good. Just…I need your eyes on me, no matter what happens.”
“You’re all I see.” He claimed her mouth again, not waiting for her lips to open before he thrust his tongue between them. God, she wanted him to so badly. She lowered her hands to his shorts.
“Patience.” He trapped her wrist in his hand. “I intend to have you slowly, until every inch of you knows my touch.”
Her buzzing mind skipped over his phrasing and concentrated on what it meant. She was at his mercy, and on fire with the burn of his words, and very soon, the demands of his body.
His hand slid over her ass, but at the first graze of his fingertips on her scar, she grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”
Taking her chin in his free hand, he forced her to meet his gaze, intense in ways it had never been. “I never understood your grandmother’s wisdom until now, why she’d kiss a scar, something I can barely stand to look at on myself. The scars aren’t the problem, but what our mind ties to them. So, I’m going to write a new memory for you more vivid than lightning, more powerful than thunder.”
“How?” She relaxed her hand on his arm.
“When I touch you here”—his finger traced the left edge of her scar—“you’re going to think of this.” He nudged her head aside with his, grazing the side of her throat with his lips, nipping his way down to her shoulder. “And when I touch you here”—his fingers moved toward her spine—“you’ll remember this.” His other hand moved up her ribcage, making her tremble, then circled her nipple with his thumb, coaxing it out to meet him. His warmth sank deeper into her as he folded one large hand around her breast, the other bringing the sensitive skin along her spine back to life.
The muscles in his stomach tightened as he picked her up and carried her to the bed with her legs clamped around his hips. He tossed her gently, playfully into the soft puff of the duvet and remained standing at the end of the bed. His gaze held no smugness at the imminent score of yet another conquest, but a potent blend of fear and hope and desire that transcended the physical.
Darcy didn’t understand it, but she let it consume her every thought, feeling no shame as his hungry gaze roved over her body. It began at her toes, licking up her legs and stomach, and finally lingering on her face. He’d already seen the damage on her back and hadn’t turned away. He still wanted her.
“So warm,” he said, finally placing one knee on the bed beside her feet and leaning over to place a kiss on her stomach that twitched and flexed with his tickling. “Like a stolen ray of sun.”
She squirmed as he feathered kisses while ascending her body. On her ribcage, pausing to nibble until she laughed and thrust her hips up to get free, but his hands at her waist held her until he’d had his fill and went to work on the opposite side.
Finished with her midsection, Micah nuzzled the underside of her left breast, sending tendrils of warmth through her chest and to her lower parts, rushing her further along the path to the golden glow rising within her.
When he took her nipple between his teeth, nipping and sucking, her back came off the bed. “Micah, please!”
“Patience is a virtue, so I hear.” His hot breath rushed out with his dark laughter, tightening her delicate and sensitive flesh even more. Holding one hand under her lower back, he slid his opposite hand up between her breasts and back down, once again surrounding her with touch.
“Are you trying to make me combust?”
“Well, yes, actually.” Finally, he moved up her body, lying beside her as his fingers took over his agonizing torture of her body in places she never expected to be so sensitive. He traced slow circles around her breasts and stomach, smiling as her belly contracted and her legs shifted, and then lavished the same attention on her collar bones and shoulders, the insides of her elbows. If he didn’t hurry up and give her what she needed, her skin wouldn’t be enough to keep her molecules from flying apart in every direction.
When his warmth left her for a moment, she realized her eyes had rolled up into her head at some point. She opened them at the sound of foil crinkling.
Micah sheathed himself with a condom and moved to kneel at the end of the bed again, offering a wolfish smile when she sat up and spread her legs out, reaching for him without hesitation. He was stunning, silhouetted by the lamp light behind him. A golden god of hunger, a shelter from the storm raging beyond the windows. Long, lean lines and tight muscles. His tousled hair begged to be wrapped around her fingers.
He allowed Darcy to have her fill of visual pleasures before coming for her slowly, as he had the night of their first kiss. It took agonizing seconds for him to lean down and cover her mouth with his, kissing as if she was more potent than pure oxygen, while he lowered her back to the bed. That glorious blond hair trickled down around her face, blotting out all but him.
She needed this. Needed him, all of him, and somehow, from the first moment he’d hit her radar, some part of her had known it.
A small movement of his hips sent the hard length of him along her need, not breaching, but the threat was there. Giving her time to say no, to run from the fire. She wouldn’t. Somewhere in the depths of her addled mind, she knew there would be no denying this leviathan of need they’d summoned from the deep.
No putting it back wherever it had come from.
No escaping it.
No wanting to.
Darcy raised her knees in invitation. Staring at her with half-lidded eyes, he moved his hands up her sides, along her arms, pressing them into the pillow above her head. His tongue slipped between her lips at the same moment he stopped threatening and drove deep, swallowing her startled cry with one of his own. He seemed to go on forever, filling her until it was almost too much before retreating again.
As he moved with the grace and power of an erotic dancer, Micah’s gaze never left hers. Her pleasure centers had long since left her control, and she let go of all but the sensation of his skin against hers. His heat. His breath. The soul-deep affection radiating from his dark stare. The steady drum beat of his heart. The sweet sounds of his mounting pleasure.
Sensual pressure built into something large and hungry in her abdomen. “God, I’m so close, but I can’t. I’ve never…not like this.”
He picked her up, keeping them joined, her straddling his lap and him on his knees. “Tell me what you need,” he said breathlessly. “I’ll do anything for you.”
She believed him.