Like all the rest of the time, he was flung all over the place, and Julie gathered him up and handed him back to himself.
He didn’t know how to stop craving her.
“Tell me we’re not stopping.” He bit her earlobe because he knew she would shudder, and she did. His fingers found their way inside her sweater and unhooked the clasp on her bra, spilling her breasts into his hands. He tweaked a nipple, already bunched and sensitive. Carson wanted to see her. He wanted to feast on her for as long as she’d let him, until he didn’t need her so fucking much anymore.
It wouldn’t work, of course. He wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t use her up or shake her off or run away from her. He’d tried all that. He’d tried everything.
“I want you, Julia. Upstairs. All night.”
“It’s only two in the afternoon.”
“We have a lot of not doing this to make up for.”
“You think I’m easy, don’t you?”
He pushed up her sweater and drew her nipple into his mouth, and she moaned. She was easy. For him, she’d always been that way. Every time he turned to her in the middle of the night. Every time he came back to town and told himself no, then put his hands on her anyway, she said yes. She moaned it in his ear. She came on his cock, hard and fast, and unraveled him.
“Let me tell you a secret.” He pulled her shirt down, because he was going to get his way, and they both knew it. “Men like easy women.”
She grinned. The glint in her eye told him she had something clever to say before she opened her mouth, so he was already smiling when she cupped his dick in her hand and squeezed. “That’s funny. Women like hard men.”
“I’ll show you hard,” he promised.
“You’d better.”
Chapter Seven
Julie pounded up the attic stairs, breathless and happy and urgently excited.
There was no way to remember this kind of joy, to hold on to the elation that lived in the body and rose like sap in the springtime when he touched her.
People liked to pretend that emotions had something to do with the brain, but they were physical sensations, and Carson’s hands, Carson’s mouth, conjured up this excess in her. Even when they screwed each other angry, when sex became a form of combat, there was a pure green streak to it, alive and good.
She shucked her sweater and let her bra drop off her arms before he even made it into the room. This morning, she’d left the bed unmade and a pile of dirty clothes next to the closet. Probably she should care, but she didn’t. Let him see her private mess. She would admit him to her room, her body, her life.
She couldn’t control what he would do after that. Probably he would leave. It was who he was. It was what he did.
That didn’t have anything to do with this. When he was here, he belonged to her. Everybody in town knew it. Julie was sick of pretending she didn’t know it herself.
She
leaned down to peel off her socks, nearly toppling forward in her haste. Carson’s hands slapped down on her hips to steady her.
“Whoa there.”
“Don’t rescue me. Get your clothes off.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
She straightened and went up on tiptoe to nip at his lower lip, threading her hands in the hair at the back of his head and giving it a sharp tug as she kissed him. “Yes. We are in a god-awful hurry. Pants. Off.”
Her other sock came away, and she peeled out of her jeans and panties in one fast push and crawled onto the bed on all fours, giving Carson a show that she knew from experience he’d appreciate.
“Mercy,” he mumbled from behind her. She heard the jingle of his belt buckle as he yanked it open.
“No mercy,” she promised.
Not for her, and not for him. She’d cringed away from colliding with her attraction to Carson—her feelings for Carson—for most of her adult life. Enough, already. Let him hit her. Let him slam into her and knock her over with a tidal wave of sex and passion and deep recognition that she’d felt since the day he first spoke to her in class.