She sat down and settled herself back on the pillows. He didn’t speak, and didn’t move, so she slipped her thumbs under the waistband of her shorts and slid them slowly off her hips. When she lifted herself off the bed slightly to get them over her ass, she saw his sharp intake of breath and felt triumph flicker beneath her sternum.
“Carly …” he started, but she shook her head.
“I don’t want to tell you,” she said, sliding the shorts down her thighs, then over her calves, and kicking them off. “I want to show you.”
Chapter 14
Nick had only ever passed out once in his life, when he was eighteen years old and had shown up to a dress rehearsal with a raging flu. It had been his first year in the company, and he’d been too scared to call out sick. He’d danced the first run through of Balanchine’s “Rubies” without incident, but as the orchestra began to play at the top of the second run-through, his vision had swayed and all the blood seemed to drain out of his body. His legs swam and he stumbled, and a second later he was falling, and remembered nothing more until he woke up in the theater’s tiny medical room with an icepack on his forehead.
He wondered if he was about to pass out again now, as he stared at Carly’s discarded shorts on the floor. She hadn’t spoken loudly, but he heard her words echo around the bedroom as if she’d screamed them into a megaphone.
I want to show you.
He pressed his hands a little harder against the doorjamb to ensure that if his legs did give out, if all the blood did in fact drain out of him, he wouldn’t collapse again. On the bed, Carly was playing with the strap of her tank top, rubbing it between her fingers and sliding it over her collarbone. Holding his gaze, she grasped the bottom of it and, arching her back, peeled it off and over her head. He didn’t see where it landed after she dropped it off the bed, and he’d never cared about anything less. She lay back on the pillows in a pair of black boyshort panties and a flimsy-looking pale blue lace bra, and all he could think in that moment was how furious he would be if he did, in fact, pass out. If he missed this, or whatever happened next.
What happened next was that she ran her hands up her thighs, her fingers tracing up her body and snagging gently on the legs of her panties before continuing over her muscled stomach. She broke their shared gaze and closed her eyes, and for a moment he regretted it, until he saw the way she flinched and arched into her own touch as her fingers fluttered over her bare ribcage. She gasped and let out a tiny sigh, and the sound made every cell in his body flare with heat and scream for him to get closer to her. As close as it was possible to be.
He stepped into the room, and by the time he was standing at the end of the bed, Carly’s hands had reached her bra and she was gently squeezing her small breasts, sighing louder now and pressing her head back into the pillow. He stared, trying to take in every mouth-watering detail of this picture, trying to catalogue every shift and pull of her stomach muscles under her pale, freckled skin. But when the fingers of one hand slipped under the lace and he saw the fingers of the other hand pinch at her small, hard nipple through the thin fabric, he knew it was pointless to try to remember. He’d never be able to forget. He would go to his grave with the sound of Carly’s breathy moans, and the stretch of her skin over her ribs as she writhed, etched into his memory.
His erection was pressing against the fly of his shorts, hot and heavy and impossible to ignore. It took all his self-control not to pull down the zipper and touch himself, but he had asked for this. He had asked her to tell him what she wanted, what her body could take, and even though she’d agreed, she had done what she always did: unleashed utter chaos. He heard the sound of his own rapid breath mixing with Carly’s moans, heard the jaw-clenched, strangled sound that escaped him as she extricated her fingers from her bra and slid her thumbs under the waistband of her panties. Carly Montgomery was going to kill him, and he was going to enjoy every second of it.
In a matter of seconds, she’d shed her panties, and he watched, almost shaking with need, as she returned one hand to her breast and ran the middle finger of the other up the inside of her thigh and between her wet, glistening folds. Her groan of relief nearly undid him, and all he wanted was to wrap his hand around his cock, or better yet, wrap her hand around it, but he would not interrupt her. He willed himself to watch, to memorize the way her fingertip circled and dipped in wide sweeps and then in tight, rapid rings. He wanted to learn every step in this dance the first time. And if he couldn’t learn it all by watching, he fully intended to learn the rest by doing.
Her breaths were coming in jagged gasps now, her heels making deep, round imprints in the mattress as she rolled her hips against her hand. His pulse was booming in his ears as he watched her, every inch of his skin hot and tight and desperate to be touched.
“Oh God,” she gasped to the ceiling, and ohGod, he didn’t have enough eyes to watch all of her at once. Her hand flickering over the lace, teasing her nipple with the pad of her thumb. Her torso arching, her thighs tensing. Her middle finger rubbing and receding, dancing on her clit. Her beautiful face, twisted and perfect and surrounded by her riot of red curls.
“Fuck, Carly,” he moaned, aching for her release and his own. “I want to see you come.”
She opened her eyes and pulled her head up off the pillow, meeting his eyes with a look of sheer desire. Next time, he decided, through the hot, dense fog of want, he would be the one to put that look on her face.
“Oh God,” she gasped again, and then her mouth opened in a moan of ecstasy, and she shuddered and bucked, writhing and rolling against her hand until the moan became a whimper, and then a sigh.
A ringing silence filled the room, broken only by Carly’s panting and the thunderous sound of Nick’s pulse, which he wouldn’t be surprised if she could hear. He was so hard it hurt, but he didn’t take his eyes off Carly’s. She gave him a sly, flushed smile and removed her hand from between her legs.
“Does that answer your question?” She sat up and pressed her back against the pillows.
All Nick could do was nod. She’d won this round, and he’d never been so happy to lose.
Nick’s nod was restrained and dignified. Well, as dignified as a man could be with his shorts tented by what appeared to be a massive hard-on. Carly gave him another sly smile and raised her eyebrows in invitation.
She’d never touched herself in front of a man before. She wasn’t shy—and if anyone knew that by now, it was the man standing, looking slightly dazed, at the end of her bed—but she’d never imagined doing what she’d just done. Then again, no man had ever asked her how she liked to be touched before touching her. No man had ever understood the truth about her body.
But Nick knew. Nick had Googled it, for Chrissake. And then when Google hadn’t given him all the answers he needed, he’d asked her. And she’d been willing to provide them. For a moment, as she’d been peeling off her shorts and preparing to call his bluff, it had occurred to her that with another man she might have been embarrassed. But Nick Jacobs had already seen the worst of her, so what was there to be embarrassed about?
“Nick? Did that answer your question?”
He nodded vaguely again, and she grinned. “You’re going to have to say it, Nick. With words.”
“You’re impossible,” he breathed, and she let out an evil giggle. Then she scooted to the end of the bed and rose to her knees in front of him.
He pulled her into his arms in an instant, placing one large hand at the back of her neck and the other on her ass, pulling her body against his. She became aware of how almost naked she was, as the fabric of his shorts slid against the damp skin of her bare thighs, and she decided to even things out a little. She seized the bottom of his shirt and tugged it upward, and he leaned back to pull it over his head with one hand, keeping the other hand on her ass and their hips pinned deliciously together.
One he’d tossed the shirt on the floor, he returned his hand to her neck, pulling gently at the roots of her hair. Her clit throbbed in response, but before she could even moan her encouragement, his mouth took hers. His tongue was hot and decisive as it swept between her lips, and it tangled with hers in an urgent dance that only intensified when she ran one hand over his chest and let the other trail up his thigh and over the hot, hard bulge in his shorts.
His body was just as she remembered it from that first day at the beach, all shadows and lines where the muscle shifted under his smooth skin. She let her fingers linger over his stomach, and the lean bunches of muscles over his ribs, and the firm, neatly cut lines of his pecs. All the places ballet had molded and made him, pleasantly softened by retirement. He groaned into her mouth when she ran her fingertips across the deep, muscular channels that disappeared into his shorts, a whisper-light touch that made him grind against her other hand. Taking the crystal-clear hint, she nipped at his lower lip and then set to work undoing his shorts, but a second later, his hand covered hers, stopping her.
“Don’t you want … ?” she asked, punctuating the question with a squeeze of his cock and a quick series of kisses to the place where his neck met his jaw.
