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He froze.Shit.“Did I hurt you?” He braced himself.
She swallowed, bit her lip. “Little bit. You bumped something. But I’m OK.”
“Sorry,” he said helplessly.
Becca wiggled and adjusted herself around the hard, unyielding shaft of his cock. “That won’t work,” she said. “I don’t want just sex. That’s not what I meant at all. Not. At. All.”
He shut her up the only way he could think of. He kissed her.
A double invasion, with his cock embedded in her slick, squirming warmth of her pussy, his mouth moving hungrily over her soft lips. The taste of the paint on them was unfamiliar, contrasting oddly with the sweet taste of her inner depths, her little tongue.
Again. He had no idea why he made this same goddamn mistake, over and over. This double contact did something to his chest, stretching him out between those two focus points of intense awareness and need. The aching, hollow place in his chest took over his whole body. He clutched her like she was life itself. He was kissing her like he’d die if he stopped. Fucking her with hard, frenzied lunges. Desperate to get inside her, as deep as he could go. She struggled just as hard, straining towards what she needed. Her body clutching, demanding, as her orgasm called forth his own.
He obeyed, rode the crest of that wave for as long as he could, feeling for her, waiting for her before he topped the rise and let himself be battered under the tons of pounding foam.
She was already asleep when he finally had the strength to lift his eyelids. He was grateful for that. Somehow summoned the strength to reach out, flip off the bedside light.
The light that leaked out of the bathroom loved up the graceful curves and lines and hollows of her body.
He tried not to think about it. Tried again. Christ. He fidgeted.
Hey, he would have stopped himself, too. No one knew better than he what Becca had to deal with in Nick Ward. He was a rude, irritable, oversexed pain in the ass. Since he’d met her, their encounters all had more or less the same arc. First he scolded and bullied her, then he subsequently tossed her on her back and fucked her brains out.
Not much of a base there for “I love you.”
He’d never had the nerve in his life to say those words to anybody.
At least not in English. The thought came to him suddenly. He’d said them to his mother, in Ukrainian. And there he went, right off the cliff. Bad move. Thinking about his mother was all he needed right now.
No “I love you’s.” It was against his rules. It was like painting a big bull’s-eye on your chest and saying,go on shoot me. Shoot me, please.
He was a fucking chump idiot to get his tender feelings hurt.
He dragged her closer, his arm jealously tight around her smooth body, and tried like hell to grow up, and get some goddamn sleep.
CHAPTER22
“Ican’t do it, Richie,” Diana said brokenly. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I’m so sorry.”
Dismayed, Richard Mathes stared at the woman swaying on his front porch. Diana looked awful. Eyes bloodshot, lids swollen and fiery red, ringed with tear-streaked makeup. Her mouth was marred with a bubbling mosaic of fever blisters; her hair was a rat’s nest, squashed into a bizarre one-sided crest. Her clothes look like she’d slept in them. She stank of old sweat—and of alcohol.
His shock lasted only a moment before his practical nature snapped into action, checking rapidly to see if any nosy neighbors were out pruning their flowers to witness this tableau.
“Richard? Who’s at the door?” Helen’s voice floated out the open door, growing nearer.
“Wait here,” he hissed at her. “No one,” he called, whipping the door shut just as Helen appeared at the top of the stairs, fastening an earring.
“Don’t get absorbed in anything, please,” she said, in a crisp, admonishing voice. “The Zimmer girl’s birthday party starts in twenty minutes, and I can’t take Chloe because I’m taking Libby to get her hair done at GianPiero’s, so you have to give her a ride. Remember?”
Mathes gave her a placating smile, though his teeth clenched hard enough to send bursts of pain up into his skull. “Of course.”
He waited until his wife disappeared back into the master bedroom before he permitted the smile to fade. He had no idea what the real expression beneath it might be, but it was better that the nagging, irritating bitch not see it. He had enough problems.
He slipped out the door, spun Diana around and frog-marched her over the vast expanse of the Mathes lawn and into the shade of the big maple that overhung the drive, and from there into the garage. “Where is your car?” he demanded.
“It’s around the corner,” she said faintly. “On the Avenue.”
He abruptly ruled out the possibility of sending her packing back to her own vehicle. She was drunk, for one thing. Worse still, in this neighborhood, she would be remembered in this deplorable condition. Bad enough that she’d staggered this far.
