Chapter Nineteen
She knocked, and after a moment she heard Hunter’s voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
There was a short pause. Then the door opened, and Hunter was standing there in sweatpants and no shirt, his bare chest as broad as a building and his shoulders like a professional athlete’s. His face looked freshly scrubbed, as though he’d taken a shower, but he hadn’t bothered to shave. The stubble that shadowed his jaw made her face tingle, as if she could already feel it scraping against her skin.
His expression was concerned. “Are you okay? What’s up?”
Her heart was beating faster than it had before the first parabola.
“I’m okay. I—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. She could barely breathe, much less speak. She crossed the threshold into his room, keeping her eyes on Hunter’s as she reached behind her and pushed the door shut. Then she untied her robe and let it fall to the floor.
His eyes widened, and with one glance he took her in from her toes to the top of her head.
“Airin—”
She couldn’t let him finish, because he might tell her to go back to her room. She closed the distance between them with two long strides, threw her arms around his neck, and pressed her mouth to his.
If he’d any ideas about sending her away, she knew the exact moment he gave them up.
He groaned. Then he moved her backward until she felt the door behind her, holding her up, as his hands slid into her hair and he angled her head to deepen the kiss.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
The last time they’d done this, her ribs had been injured. But now they were healed. Every part of her was healed. And every part of her surged into him as he held her against the door, his body pressing into hers so she felt his hard erection against her belly.
He tore himself away, his eyes wild as they looked into hers. “If you stay one more second, I’m not letting you go until the morning. If you don’t want that, leave now.”
She was shaking like an engine straining for more speed than it was made for. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just reached down to hook an arm behind her knees, and then he was carrying her to the bed, that boring hotel bed covered in its boring hotel bedspread that looked to her, right now, as glorious as a bower on Olympus.
He tossed her onto it and followed her down before she could catch her breath. His body covered hers, and as her mouth opened for him her legs fell apart, too, making a cradle for his lower body that he slid into as if it had been designed for him.
A low groan escaped him as he broke the seal of their mouths, kissing his way down her jaw to her neck.
Yes.
It was a cry of the body she’d only experienced three times before—the three kisses she’d shared with Hunter Bryce. But this was deeper and wilder, because this time she knew she wasn’t leaving until morning.
Her pulse was beating like a hummingbird’s wings. Hunter pressed his mouth to the place on her throat where it throbbed, and she arched her neck back to bring him closer.
If he revealed himself to be a vampire who wanted to drive his fangs into her jugular, she wouldn’t refuse him.
She wanted to be consumed.
Just a few hours ago, she’d wanted nothing more than free fall. Weightlessness had felt like the most perfect gift the universe could offer. But now all she wanted was the heaviness of Hunter’s body on hers. The weight of him pressing her into the mattress was the most exquisite force she’d ever experienced.
Except that she wanted more.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed, and he groaned again, that delicious sound that made her feel like a sex goddess.
And then he was moving against her, surging and retreating, his hard length pressing against her center and pulling away and pressing against her again until she was writhing beneath him.
“Oh, please,” she heard herself say, and then she was saying it over and over again.
Hunter dragged his mouth from her neck to her ear.
“Wait,” he whispered, and before she could tell him no, she didn’t want to wait, she needed more of everything NOW, he had shifted down the bed so his head was at the level of her breasts.
Okay. This might work until they got to the other stuff.
She expected him to take her bra off, and she was ready to arch her back to help him. But then he bit her left nipple with her bra still on, and it felt so good she cried out.
He started to pull back. “Did I hurt you?”
“Yes. Do it again,” she panted, putting her hands at the back of his head and tugging him down.
He didn’t need any urging. He licked and bit at her breasts through the thin satin of her bra until the material was soaked through, and the sensation was so carnal and decadent that she twisted beneath him, not caring that she was moving like an animal and making small desperate sounds.
But when he shifted again, kissing his way down her belly to the place between her legs, she went still and silent. The only motion in her body was the quivering deep inside her, a kind of trembling in her very bones.
Hunter looked up, and their eyes met. She’d never experienced this before with another human being, this feeling like she was standing at the edge of an abyss that somehow felt like home. Her panties were soaked through, and she should have been embarrassed, afraid of what was coming next, but she wasn’t.
At this moment, it felt like she’d never be afraid of anything ever again.
“Open your legs for me,” Hunter said, his voice as rough as the scrape of his stubble on her skin had been.
It was the sexiest sentence she’d ever heard. Complying was the sexiest thing she’d ever done.
She spread her legs, and he was there between them, stretched out with his hands on her hips and his head between her thighs. Driven by a sudden need to feel and not to see, she pressed her head back into the pillows and closed her eyes.
He kissed her through her panties, and her hands fisted in the blankets beneath her.
“You’re so wet,” he murmured. “Jesus, Airin.”
He grabbed her panties and pulled them off. Then it was just her body and his mouth, and oh God, it was the kind of good no amount of research could have prepared her for.
She was hanging on to the blankets like she’d held on to his hands in the zero-g flight—so she wouldn’t float away.
His tongue was everywhere. Against her folds, inside her, and most especially on the center of all the exquisite agony that was making her moan.
It was going to happen. That thing she’d been trying to do for so long, during years of reading erotica and sex manuals and watching straight-up porn on the Internet. Nothing had ever worked. And now, after a few minutes between her legs, Hunter was making it happen.
But he wasn’t in too damn much of a hurry. When he moved away from the heart of the action for the tenth time to tease at her slit and nibble on her thighs, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Go back,” she panted. “Please, Hunter, please. Go back where you were.”
She could swear she felt him smile against her skin.
“Here?” he murmured, and then suddenly his fingers were sliding inside her and his tongue was lashing at her over and over until . . .
The world seemed to split apart.
She hadn’t known she was at such a dizzying height, to have so far to fall. Miles and miles and miles of falling and rising and falling again, and Hunter’s hands on her body the whole time, steadying her, centering her, giving her a place to come home to.
Slowly she became aware that he was kissing his way back up her body, taking his time, until he lay beside her with his head on the pillow next to hers.
She turned on her side and looked at him.
Until now, she’d thought she knew his face so well that she could have sketched it on the back of a napkin with her eyes closed. But a man who could do what Hunter had just done had hidden depths, which meant there was still more to see.
He seemed equally captivated by her.
“I wish you could see your face right now,” he whispered, reaching out to brush the backs of his knuckles along her flushed cheek.
“Why? What do I look like?”
“You look . . . satisfied.”
“Satisfied,” she said, sounding it out. She wriggled forward and nestled close to him, tucking her head in the place between his neck and his shoulder. “That’s a really good word.”
“Yeah.”
Was that the feeling pulsing through her veins? Satisfaction? If so, she’d never been satisfied before. Because this feeling was entirely new.
And yet . . . she didn’t think she would call it satisfaction. Because that implied that they were done, that this experience was complete.
And she didn’t feel done.
A sudden rush of energy made her sit up.
“Whoa,” Hunter said. “You look like you’re back in the jet, ready to float up to the ceiling.”
It was the same kind of giddiness, if not the same kind of weightlessness.
“There’s so much I want to do,” she said breathlessly.
He folded his arms behind his head and grinned up at her. “Yeah? Give me an example.”
“I want to start by looking at you.”
His eyes glittered. “That’s okay by me. You should feel free to touch, too.”
He was still wearing his sweatpants. They were tented at the crotch, and the thought of what was beneath the material made her hands curl against her palms.
“Will you take those off?”
His gaze flicked down to her breasts, still covered by her bra.
“If you take that off,” he said, his voice husky.
They moved at the same time. She reached behind her back to unhook her bra, and he reached down to tug off his pants. As they tossed away their last vestiges of modesty, goose bumps swept across her skin.
“I’ve never seen a naked man before,” she whispered, unable to take her gaze from the long, thick, proud erection between Hunter’s legs. “Not in person.”
“Well, I’ve seen a lot of naked women before,” Hunter said. “Many of them in person.” He paused. “But I’ve never in my whole life seen a woman as beautiful as you are.”
She looked up at him, startled. “That’s not true. That can’t be true. Statistically speaking—”
His eyes burned into hers. “Fuck statistics. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Airin. And I want you so much I feel like I’m on fire.”
Heat swept through her. “I . . .” She didn’t know what to say. But she knew what she wanted to do, so maybe she could start there. “I want to touch you.”
“You can do anything you want, angel. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to stay really still while you do. If I let myself move, that’ll be the end of foreplay. If I let myself touch you, you’ll be on your back under me.”
Her breath left her body, and she couldn’t get it back. Her cheeks were so hot it felt like she had a fever. She reached out trembling hands and set them against his chest.
His skin was smooth, and the muscles beneath were like iron.
His breathing turned harsh.
“I want to touch your arms,” she said, and he unclasped his hands from behind his head and laid them down, curling his fingers into the blankets like she had a few minutes before.
She slid her hands up from his chest to his shoulders, and then down those arms she’d dreamed about a hundred times.
She could barely span his biceps.
Her gaze swept along his torso to his hip bones. They were angled like runway lights, telling her, Look down here, for God’s sake. This is where the action is.
After a moment Hunter growled, “If you think staring at me like that is going to make me any harder, the answer is no. It’s not physically possible. I could drill through concrete right now.”
She met his eyes again. “I want to touch you,” she said, and he knew what she meant.
“You should douse me in cold water first or give me a leather strap to bite on. But okay.”
She moved down the bed until she was kneeling by his hips. Then she reached out, slowly, and took him in her hand.
A long, low growl came from Hunter. When she looked up, his eyes were closed and his teeth were clenched tight, as if he really were biting on a leather strap.
He was hot and hard, which she’d known already. But what she hadn’t imagined was how soft his skin would feel. She bent down and rubbed her cheek against him, and it was like velvet.
“Fuck.”
She looked up at him again, and his eyes were hazel fire.
There were a lot of other things she wanted to try tonight. She wanted to spend hours touching him, finding out the things he liked. But right now, at this moment, there was really only one thing she wanted to do.
She moved back up the bed and put her hands on his chest again. She could feel his heart pounding against her palms.
“Hunter.”
“Yeah?”
His voice was gravelly, and it played across her nerve endings like a calloused fingertip.
“I want that thing you were talking about before.”
“What thing?”
“When you said—if you touched me—”
That was all it took. He reached up and seized her by the shoulders, and then he flipped them over so fast she squeaked.
Oh God.
He was supporting his weight with his arms, but he was so big and so powerful she felt pinned in place by the sheer force of him. She felt pinned by his gaze, too, which burned into her as though he could see into her soul.
Then he lowered his head and kissed her.
Her body surged into his as though she could levitate through sheer will. Their tongues thrust together as she looped her arms around his neck and pulled him down, down, until his chest crushed her breasts and his muscled thigh slid between her legs.
“Hunter,” she gasped. “Hunter, I need . . .”
“Wallet,” he said, rearing back and panting. “I think I have a condom in my wallet. Just . . . don’t move, for God’s sake. Stay right where you are.”
He was back faster than she would have believed possible, and then he was ripping open the foil packet and rolling the latex over his rigid length, and finally, thank God, he was over her again.
“Please,” she said, arching her back and wrapping her legs around his waist. “Please, please, please—”
“It’s your first time, angel. We’re going to take this slow.”
“I don’t want slow. I want—”
He leaned down and spoke right into her ear. “Trust me.”
His whispered words made her shiver all over. Then he nudged at her entrance, and she went absolutely still.
Inch by slow inch he pushed inside. There was tightness and resistance but no pain, only pleasure, and when he was all the way home it felt like the fullness and friction and pressure and heat were secrets that could unlock the universe.
“Hunter.”
He lifted himself up on his forearms and looked down at her, and the intensity in his eyes reverberated between them until it felt like they didn’t need words to communicate anymore—only this, forever, for the rest of their lives.
When he started to move it was almost too much, and with every thrust hitting she climbed higher. She knew she wasn’t going to come again, not this time, but the way she felt was a hint of things to come.
“Hunter.”
She sank her nails into his back as she said his name, and he growled in response as his thrusts became rougher and more urgent. A moment later she felt him pulse inside her, and then he dropped his head onto her shoulder as he shuddered out his release.
They lay like that for a long time. The whole world was beating hearts and ragged breath and a heavy, rich, musky scent she knew was the tang of sex.
She wanted to float in it forever.
Hunter rolled away and pulled off the condom, tossing it in the trash before rolling back and pulling her into his arms. Then he tucked her against his chest and murmured into her hair.
“How are you feeling?”
She sighed. “This is the best I’ve ever felt in my entire life.”
He chuckled. “Better than zero-g?”
“Yes.” She paused. “What about you?”
He pulled back a little, enough that he could look her in the eyes. “If I could, I’d stay here like this forever.”
His words made her feel hollowed out and shaky and joyful at the same time, the way she’d felt after their parabolic flight.
“I . . .” She swallowed. “I feel the same way.”
And then, suddenly, she yawned.
Hunter chuckled again. Then he reached underneath them to tug down the covers, and once they’d slid beneath he pulled them up again, over their shoulders this time. Now they were in a warm cocoon of naked skin and body heat and that incredible sex haze, and she could feel her eyelids growing heavy.
Hunter reached out and turned off the light.
“Good night, angel,” he whispered.
“Good night.”