She heard his quick intake of breath, and her eyes narrowed again.
Maybe this new Tara McBride wasn’t so unexciting, after all.
She kissed his chin. His throat. His chest. And then she slid downward and pressed a damp kiss right next to his navel. His stomach contracted sharply. She felt him grow and swell against her abdomen, proving that her tentative efforts to arouse him were as successful as she’d hoped. She planted another kiss on the tender skin an inch below his navel.
“Um...Tara...” He caught her chin with his right hand, just as she worked up the nerve to ease lower. “It’s sort of been a while for me.”
She smiled in delight and pulled his hand around to her mouth, pressing a kiss into his palm. “For me, too,” she admitted, though she stopped short of telling him that no one had ever made her ache the way she ached now.
And then, just to prove she could, she ducked away from him to brush her lips across his swollen flesh.
Blake made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh, and then he hauled her upward. “You do like living dangerously, don’t you?” he accused her as his arms closed around her.
She could have told him that she didn’t like it at all, but that would have been the old Tara speaking. Blake’s mouth covered hers before she could say anything.
The world shrank to this one bed, this one man. Tara didn’t think about the past or the future, didn’t worry about their differences or their circumstances, no longer feared that she wasn’t exciting enough or daring enough. She didn’t think at all, but allowed herself to act on sheer instinct. Blake seemed to approve wholeheartedly.
He made love to her until she quivered and cried out each time he touched her, her skin so exquisitely sensitized that she felt that she would leap right out of it if they didn’t end this soon. She was vaguely aware when he paused long enough to grope for the pants he’d left lying by the side of the bed. She waited impatiently while he ripped a foil packet open with his teeth. And then she helped him don the contents, her hands more eager than skillful.
Blake stripped away Tara’s lacy bikini panties. And then he clutched her thighs, just above the tops of the silk stockings, and entered her with one deep, forceful thrust. Tara nearly came off the bed, arching beneath him with a cry of pleasure, her heels digging into the sheets, her hands going to his hips to hold him even tighter.
The sensations that shot through her were more intense, more powerful than anything she’d ever felt before. Her total lack of control over her emotions, her reactions—even over her own movements—should have caused her concern. She’d always been so very careful to remain in control. But with Blake, it simply didn’t matter. Oddly enough—considering everything that had happened lately—she felt safe with him.
And then he moved again, and she willingly surrendered what little sanity she’d retained.
10
IT WAS BLAKE’S TATTOO that reminded Tara of how foolish she’d been to think that anything had changed between them just because she’d given in to the temptation of his beautiful blue eyes and flashing smile.
The tattoo was on the back of his right wrist. Tara spotted it when he reached up to brush a damp strand of hair away from her face. She didn’t immediately see what it was, but just knowing it was there was enough to bring her back to reality.
What was she doing? Who was this red-haired woman who lay sprawled in such abandon in another woman’s bed, wearing nothing but a pair of black silk stockings? And who was this naked man beside her, who’d shared so little of himself with her, who had turned her life upside down by tapping out “shave and a haircut” on her apartment door? Who had somehow made her fall in love with him, even when she knew from the start that doing so was a mistake?
Pushing that thought to the back of her mind, she took his hand and turned it so that she could study the mark on his wrist. Blake didn’t resist.
Her eyebrows lifted. “What is this? A wolf?”
“A fox,” he corrected her, his expression a bit sheepish.
She could see it now, a tiny silhouette etched in blue, a sleek, stylized creature captured in full run. Crazy like a fox, she thought. As wily as a fox.
“I was just a kid when I got that. Nineteen, maybe. And more than a little drunk,” Blake admitted.
“Why a fox?”
He lifted one bare shoulder in a hint of a shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Oh.”
He smiled in response to her expression. “You pointed out, yourself, that I’m a bit...weird.”
“‘Weird’ was your word,” she reminded him. “I think mine was ‘odd.’”
She reached out and tugged at the hem of the sheet, covering herself with what she hoped was a casual gesture.
Blake slipped out of the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the bathroom. Tara immediately stripped out of the thigh-high stockings and reached for the ice-blue satin bathrobe Stephanie had given her to wear earlier, during their hairstyling and makeup session. She felt somewhat more selfpossessed now that she was covered. She tied the sash tightly around her waist.