Instead, she focused on how good Evan looked, how perfectly masculine, how amazingly sexy. She needed the escape, the indulgence, to calm the panic building inside her over that vision from the alley, the eyes. He was bigger than she remembered, broader, his faded jeans and black tee hugging an obvious abundance of lean, well defined muscle. And his hair – that long raven hair touched his shoulders, no longer tied back at his neck. God, she loved his hair. The very idea that she’d had that body all over her body, and didn’t remember it, was just too impossible to believe. It couldn’t be possible. It just couldn’t be. Yet, the warmth spreading over her skin, the heaviness of her breasts, the tightness of her nipples, said differently.
“I…” she started. “No, you…I mean. What did we…no, not what--" She pressed a hand to her face at her miserable rambling and groaned. “Oh please, just tell me.” Her hand fell from her face. “Did we--?”
The last part of her question faded as she realized that Evan had soundlessly moved again. Not only had he closed the distance between them, he towered over her, his gaze shifting from her face to do a heated inspection of the vivid view of her bare backside. Marissa quickly lowered herself to a sitting position and covered herself, feeling more than a little embarrassed – and aroused – by his inspection. Her legs clenched together, the tingling awareness there so intense, she almost gasped. Her skin tingled too, and her nipple ached. Even her own hair brushing her shoulders sent a shudder down her spine. Despite Evan’s hotness, something wasn’t normal about what she was feeling. Surely, this couldn’t be from the alcohol.
Evan sat down beside her, his eyes twinkling with mischief, one dark brow arching. “Were you trying to ask if we were intimate, Marissa?”
Intimate. She swallowed hard against the sudden dryness in her throat, and the erotic, out of character, highly detailed images that came to mind. Wildly erotic images of the two of them together flashed in her mind. A memory or was it just fantasy?
She nodded, surprised to find her voice. “I’m wearing a sheet, nothing but a sheet.”
“You had blood on your clothes, and you insisted on taking them off.” His lips twitched. “I turned my back.”
“You didn’t turn your back when my sheet fell a few minutes ago.” She paused in stunned realization of exactly what he’d said. “And I just stripped my clothes off? That doesn’t fit my personality.”
“You were intoxicated,” he reminded her, “which is also why I turned my back then, but not this morning.”
She studied his handsome face. His cheekbones were high and defined. His jaw was strong and square. He held her stare, met her scrutiny without a blink. She cringed at the truth in his eyes. “So the moral of this story is clearly that I’m not a good drinker. Wait.” She blinked at him. “What blood?” Red eyes flashed in her mind. “Blood…I…,” Her stomach knotted, her mind fighting to show her an image she didn’t want to see. She dropped her head into a hand, the other still clinging to the sheet.
Suddenly, Evan was there, his hand framing her face, his touch confusing her senses. She wanted him. God, how she wanted him, like she’d never wanted in her life. “Kiss me,” she ordered, when she would never be so bold. “I need you to kiss me.”
“And I need you to remember Marissa.”
She shook her head. “No. No I--”
He leaned forward, framed her hips with his hands. Warm waves of awareness rushed over her with his nearness. The scent of him -- stronger now, richer, more male -- invaded her senses, arousing something unfamiliar inside her. Something that made nerves and fears and inhibitions be damned. That need, that burn, to kiss him rose inside her again. She wanted to shove the sheet away, to tear off his clothes and feel his skin against hers.
“You must remember,” he told her, the command in his voice like a silky stroke between her thighs.
She let go of the sheet, wrapped her arms around his neck. Her nipples puckered, the stiff peaks brushing his chest. She moaned. “Kiss me.” He still hadn’t touched her, still pressed his hands into the mattress. “And damn it, kiss me.”
“Not until you tell me about last night.”
“I already told you I don’t remember.” She pressed her lips to his, wild and wanton, in a way she’d never felt before, but she didn’t care. She felt it now, and she wanted to feel him – all over – next to her, inside her, on top of her, behind her. Her tongue pressed past his lips.
He moaned and then gave into her, his mouth closing down over hers, one hand spearing through her hair, the other molding her close. His tongue stroking hers, wickedly hot, and then gone. He pressed her down onto the mattress, his legs framing her hips, his hands holding hers over her head. “Not yet.” His hot stare brushed her nipples, lingering on her breasts, before lifting to her mouth, then finally her eyes. “Tell me about last night.”
“Why do you want to talk when you could be inside me?”
His gaze raked over her breasts, a teasing caress that had her squirming, his eyes dark with hunger when they met hers. “You want me inside you because of what happened last night, which is why you need to remember it.”
“That’s not true. I wanted you the instant I saw you. I wanted you before…” Her chest tightened and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out what he wanted her to remember.
“Before what, Marissa?”
Fire washed through her. She was hot all over, her mind racing with images she tried to reject, her thighs aching from the emptiness he could fill. If only he were inside her, she could escape…escape something…she wasn’t sure what. She was wild though, wild with need, desperate to feel him buried inside her, taking her, filling her. She reached for his mouth. He pulled back.
“Damn you,” she all but yelled at him.
“I was damned a long time ago,” he said, his fingers curling around her jaw. “But you aren’t. Not yet. Not if I have anything to say about it. Tell me what happened last night.”
“Fuck me or let me up.” She barely knew such a bold order as her own, but her body did. Her body knew she needed him inside her, as if he were her lifeline, her drug, she couldn’t live without.
His dark eyes were flickering with something dangerously primal that only made her want him more. “I’ll fuck you when you tell me what I want to know,” he stubbornly replied. “When I know that you know what is happening to you.”
“You were there,” she said. “You know what happened to me.”
“I need to know you know. Tell me.”