Incapable (Love Triumphs 3)

She felt absolutely unanchored, swaying between need and want, and run and hide, and all points in the continuum of confused desire. “You’re really okay just sleeping?”

He scrunched his face. “Yep.”

No waiver in his voice, a quick commitment to the one short word, but he had to know she’d seen the please don’t make me look. She mashed her lips together hard to stop unexpected laughter, but he must’ve heard it in her breathing, his dimple made a showing, a brow lifting lazily.

She leaned closer and breathed his heat. “I don’t feel sleepy.”

His eyes opened. The hand at her back came up to play with her hair. “What do you feel?”

Terrified: of disappointing him, of ruining this for herself. “Comfortable.”

It was opposite of a safe word. It was a green light, a waved flag, the crack of a starter’s gun.

His fist closed and he pulled on her hair, but let go immediately, his palm cupping her skull. “Then let me give you something to go with that.”

“What?”

“Everything.”

He pulled her across his body and his tension vibrated in her. He brought her face close to his and his kiss was firm—stamping his intentions. He was going to take comfort and make a mess of it, bend it all out of style, set it on edge and annoy it into screaming awareness.

The readiness in his body shaped the urgency in hers. The press of his arms, the path of his lips loosened her last grip on reluctance and put a new willingness in her hands.

She touched him with wonder and necessity. His face, his shoulders, the heat of his chest. Her fingers found ripples in his muscles, curves and ridges to seek with her hands and learn with her lips.

He captured her shoulders, stopped her moving. “I want the luxury of all of your skin on all of mine.”

She wanted it too, the obscene wealth of it. He released her and she sat, straddling his thighs. He followed her upright, tugging at the bottom of her shirt. They lifted it off together and then his hands were on her, safe and dangerous, insistent and gentle.

“Ah Georgia, you’re beautiful. I need your skin under my hands. I want to breathe it, lick it, fill my senses with you.” He nuzzled her neck, his palms sliding over her shoulders, down her back, under the elastic of her underpants and over the rump of her backside. “These have to go.”

“Yours too.” Amazing that came out at a normal volume; it sounded like trumpet in her head.

He groaned. “Oh God, yes.” His voice had fallen into thick glue, heavy in his throat, sticking on his tongue. He released her. A few seconds apart and then no more barriers.

She stood, ditched her underwear. She watched him do the same, breathing open-mouthed, loud in her own ears, eyes so bugged out it was a wonder she could blink over them.

Logic told her the two of them would fit together; one to encase and absorb; one to seek and define, but watching him pull the cover off the bed, it was impossible to believe that could hold true, impossible not to need, with a kind of unhinged sanity, being claimed by the weight and length of him.

He stood by the bed. “I want you something fierce, but you need to choose.” He extended an arm, reaching for her, his expression intense. “Where do you want to be?”

Above, below, beside, right side up, upside down. She was already all points of the compass, spinning wildly. “Everywhere.”

He beckoned and she came into his arms, the shock of skin on skin knocking a rasping grunt out of her, turning her hands to claws on his shoulders, and she knew where she wanted to be first—beneath.

Beneath him she’d feel his power, give hers over for a time. Beneath him, watching him, in the rhythm of him, her body could not for a panicked moment mistake him for Hamish and not for an eternity measured by his kisses want things any other way.

Time became the urge of his knee between hers, the stroke of his fingers on and around and inside. She lost her breath in the seconds his lips touched neck, nipple, unknown nerve ends that shot sensation from scalp to toe tip. Ages passed in the flicker of his tongue, down, down, from mouth to mouth, where he licked up into her making her buck and squirm and fight to ride this wrecking he was bringing.

He made her insensible to the bed, to the room, the flat, the street, the world. He made her see nothing and exalt in it, because she felt everything: every bone shake, every flinch of pleasure, every laboured gasp and moan wrenched from her gut in a fit of feeling that emptied her head of thought and filled it with reaction.

Her mouth on his skin. Her lips sucking his pulse points. Her hands stripping him of the coordination to ease inside her slowly, play the ebb and flow of them easily, creating instead a racetrack: speed and precision, thrust and fine concentration, a finish too far, too close, too achingly triumphant.

Over that line they were nothing but carcasses for the time it took for the world to come back into focus, for Georgia’s eyes to see again, for Damon to withdraw and crash beside her, haul her ruined body across his and hold their hearts together in the crisis of coming down.

She stirred when she heard his voice, so greased with wonder and fatigue it was a new melody for post-coital bliss. “I swear that made me see colour. Bright stripes of it, whole rainbow arcs of it.” He kissed her slow and deep, his hands heavy on her hips. “I’m never going to have enough of that. I want it to have been the same for you.”

He wanted her to talk and her brain was half starved for rational thought, ricocheting between various wavelengths of emotion, what came out of her mouth was, “That was—um—wet.” Hamish had often not been able to ejaculate.