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“Ow! That hurt.” She put her hand to her ear, rubbing the sting he’d caused. He was back on the other side of the lounge before she’d scrambled to a sitting position. “What did you do?” He hadn’t squeezed that hard, but her ear still smarted.
“I’m listening to your body.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Plan A, Plan B, Malcolm, they make you tense, Princess.”
“And you can tell that from pinching my ear.”
He gave her his moustache-twirling grin. It made her forget about her ear and her tense toes. Made her wonder what miracles his fingers might wrought unleashed on the rest of her tension. He was right, she was always tense. It was one of the sacrifices. Like working weekends, like not having someone like Mace in her life. She really should go to her desk and make sure Plan B was going to be as effective in fixing her mess as she hoped.
“What do you want, Mace?”
He held out his hand. “Temporary residency.”
She granted it.
8: Arrogance
With his lips and tongue and teeth, with the press of his fingers and the slide of his palm, Mace took the tension in Jacinta’s frame, the tightness in her muscles, and the ever-present fatigue she dragged around like a bank vault, and re-routed them through her body. Everything coalesced in a new form of pressure, an unbearable, shuddering, aching need.
She lost the use of speech around the time he found she loved his too tight grip on her hips, and he gripped her harder, marking her possessively. All that was left of her vocabulary was garbled in her throat, escaping in tattered breaths and strained gasps. She lost the use of her brain around the time she looked into his eyes and realised he was as into her as she was him. He didn’t simply make her feel good, he drove his own pleasure through her limbs and into her heart. He lost his reticence to speak around the time she discovered what tilting her pelvis did to him.
The breath punched out of him and he eased deeper. “Glorious, you’re fucking glorious. Hot, so wet. Jesus, Cinta, never want to pull out.”
She was happy with that, it was entirely reasonable.
“Not leaving this bed till neither of us can walk.”
Again, a no-brainer.
“Too beautiful like this. Too damn much. You make me high.”
And she was high with him; on the threat of him, the reality of him, the way he punctuated her body with stops and starts and long strokes and quick dashes, the way he reared up over her then curled around her with firm hands and wandering lips.
“All that tension is for me now.”
“Oh, God. All for you, Mace.”
He took her bones and liquefied them. He took her senses and blew them wide open till she was screaming with the delight of it; soaring, soaring, outside her body, outside her mind, but grounded in his arms wrapped tight around her, in the choppy rhythm of his breathing and the feeling of being held secure.
When his breathing eased, he relaxed his hold on her. “You okay?”
He was curled around her back. She murmured her assent. She didn’t want to do anything to tempt him to roll away, though they were both slick with sweat and sleep was the ideal celebration of a joining that rocked her to her core.
“Cinta, answer me.” There was urgency in his voice, and his arms tightened around her waist.
“I’m fine.”
He resettled her so he could see her face. “Don’t say that if it’s not true.”
She put her hand to his face, his cheeks bristly now. She had the rasp of his scruff all over her body and she still tingled with it.
“I can get a little intense,” he said.
“I liked your intense. It made me come harder than I can ever remember coming.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He dropped down on the pillow beside her and looked up at the sky. But their bubble was broken. She was learning the secrets of his body, now she needed to know what was in his head.
