Slowly she pushed down her pants, easing them over her hips, revealing black lace and satin.
“Turn around,” he said, and for a moment the game wavered. She didn’t give up control easily, he realized. She liked to choose what and how she revealed herself.
But then she turned, bending over as she pulled down her pants the rest of the way. Beautiful, sexy. She grinned at him over her shoulder and that was it. All he could stand.
He stepped up behind her. She wanted dark. Dirty. She wanted wicked.
He could give her all of that.
Slipping his hand around her waist he pulled her up tight against him. In lock step, he crossed the room to the desk and spread her hands out there.
She chuckled low and deep in her throat, pushing back against his erection. “I thought you wanted a bed.”
“We got all night.”
He shoved down his jeans with one hand while his other hand slid over the smooth skin of her stomach into the lace edge of her underwear. She gasped, groaned, arched against him.
“Too fast?” he asked, and she shook her head, her black hair drifting across her shoulders.
“Hurry.”
He didn’t need another invitation and pulled the condoms he’d brought out of his back pocket. While she pushed her underwear down to her ankles, he used his teeth to rip open the condom. He fumbled slightly, panting, dying.
And then…yes…oh yes…he was inside her. All the way.
Inside, her muscles clutched and she whimpered, and he pushed as high and as hard as he could into her. She pushed back and he couldn’t have said who was inside whom.
And then…she laughed. Dark and dirty. The laugh crept over his skin like fingers.
The moment was suddenly transcendent; he was inside his skin and at the same time watching himself. Loving all of it. This moment, the two of them, made sense in a way he’d never expected. In a way he’d never had.
Sex was sex for Jeremiah, even with women he really liked, but somehow, with Lucy, sex was different. Sex was an extension of who they were, of what brought them together. The sadness and heartache and desire, it all snowballed inside of him.
No, he thought, his panic buttons screaming. Too much. Ease off. Make a joke.
He desperately wanted to find the shallow pools he was used to, but Lucy wouldn’t let him.
She groaned and cried, pushing herself on her tiptoes, so that impossibly he sank even deeper into her, found a friction that lit up the night. All of him, that’s what she wanted, what she expected.
Can I do that? I’ve…I’ve never done that.
“Jeremiah,” she sighed. “Please. Stay…stay with me?”
Enough of his own head games. Enough of his own fear. He wasn’t going to waste a second of his time with Lucy, because without a doubt, she would be gone soon. And he’d be right back where he started.
Alone and lonely. Probably lonelier for having had her, but that was a problem for a different day.
He slipped a hand up under hair to her neck and tipped her over further across the desk.
“Jeremiah,” she gasped, slapping her hands against the wood.
He grinned in the half dark and set about being as wicked and dirty as he could.
“I’m with you. Right here with you.”
Lucy dozed slightly, her head buried in Jeremiah’s armpit. Their skin was stuck together with sweat, and when she could move again, and decided to, it would hurt peeling herself away from him.
In more ways than one, she thought in a rare moment of total honesty with herself. All of her excuses and pretences, her rationales and justifications, they’d abandoned her in the last few hours. Run out of her life by Jeremiah and his endless, bottomless, control.
“You won that round,” she muttered, her body stretched and pulled and boneless. He’d been…amazing. She was no slouch in the sex department, but he…she was going to make him a love god tee-shirt.
His laughter shook her head. “I’d say it was a tie.” His fingers, as they lazily walked up and down her spine, coerced goose bumps all over her skin, but she didn’t tell him to stop. Just like she didn’t move.
I don’t want this to end, she thought, sighing deeper into her doze.
Suddenly, from the utter blankness of her thoughts, sprang the idea for a ring. Wide, wider than most, masculine almost. Hammered gold. And another one, a thin braid. Silver? No, she recast it in gold. White gold. And wider, Celtic in flavor. Or Viking…oh…cool.
“Wedding bands,” she murmured.
“What?” howled Jeremiah, jerking away from her.
Their skin split apart and both of them winced. “Did you say…?” He stared at her, horrified, and honestly, she couldn’t blame him. But she also couldn’t explain it, not until she sketched the ideas before she lost them entirely.
Naked, she bounced out of bed toward the desk. The pen was on the floor, the little notepad shoved up under the phone.