Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

He didn’t answer, she half turned to look back at him—he can’t have gone to sleep again that quickly. She caught the grin he tried to hide. “We could fool around.” She thought that might wake him sufficiently but she got nothing from him. “Mace?”

“If I kiss you, this fling will be over before I get breakfast out of you.”

She laughed. She liked the word fling. It was a perfect fit. “I think I still have the toothbrush I loaned you last time.” She lay a moment in his stillness. “We could talk?”

He rolled and pinned her beneath him. “Rather risk starvation.” He rubbed his scratchy cheek against hers, making her squirm to get away from him. She pushed against his shoulders and he rolled them again so she was lying over him, their legs tangled.

“Did your foot scar?”

“Yeah.” He pulled the covers back over them, but his hand was under her t-shirt, fingers splayed across her lumbar spine.

“How old are you?”

He squinted. “Twenty-nine.”

She sucked her cheeks in, he was younger. She’d expected to be Wentworth CEO at thirty-five or thirty six, thirty-eight if the board let Malcolm stay past sixty-five.

Mace gave her a shake. “I’m thirty-two. And if you give me that older woman crap I’ll hurt you.”

He laughed and made as if he was going to lift her away, but ended up wrapping her closer. “Relationships are a new language.” He brushed hair away from her face. “There’ve been women in my life, but nothing long-term. I had Buster to look out for. She had Parkinson’s for ten years.”

He’d spent his twenties taking care of someone. She’d spend hers selfishly pursuing her career. She propped her chin on his chest to look at him.

He laid his hand over her ear, rubbed the curled edge gently. “I was busy, sex was sport.”

He was a different kind of awesome from the tough guy she’d expected. “You had fantasies about me.”

He grinned and pinched her ear. “Not going there.”

She tickled her fingers up his rib cage. She really wanted him to go there. He responded with, “Give it your best,” but didn’t twitch.

She was hungry and she needed coffee and a shower but that was a challenge. She’d get the information out of him before she let him out of her bed. She flattened her hands on his sides and slid down his body, shifting her knees so they were inside his, trailing kisses down his sternum and onto his abdomen, and making space for herself. He caught on fast, grabbing for her hand, lifting his torso from the bed, those abs laddering, to watch her progress.

“Torturing the prisoner,” he said.

She bit his hipbone and this time he flinched. She liked the idea of him as her prisoner. She loved the idea of rendering him incapable of fending her off.

He caught her chin in his hand. “Too early for this.”

Who was he kidding? He was more than ready. She shook her head then licked a line across to his penis and thrilled at how his breath caught.

He stroked her hair and watched her. “I’m still not talking,” but his voice had thickened from edgy rasp to sexy husk. She scooted further down the bed and went to work on him, using her mouth in a way that loosened his tongue, but killed his vocabulary.

Her ears filled with the guttural sounds of his pleasure. But she was only going to get one thing she wanted, to make him lose that stoic cool of his from pure need instead of in anger.

He curled his torso up and gripped her shoulders and she felt him shake all over. His eyes were wide open now, fixed on her. She’d not touched him like this that first weekend; she’d not seen him so open to her, so come undone.

“Fuck, Cinta. That’s it.” He dropped back on the bed as she swallowed her first little taste of him, but then he pulled her away, dragged her up his body, his fist in her hair, too tight, making her the prisoner now.

He flipped them. “Coming inside you.” But then he sat back on his heels, with a groan, looking momentarily disoriented

.

“I’ve been with no one else and I’m on birth control.” She could’ve told him that last night, but everything had been so uncertain.

He lowered himself over her. “Feel like I’ve been with no one else ever.”

“Oh God.”