“For reasons you’ll never understand,” he snapped and whirled from her.
“Why,” she demanded. “Because I was able to get away and you weren’t? Because I’ll never know what it was like to have been trapped back there with no way out?”
He whirled on her, rigid with torment. “Yes! Yes, damn it.”
“And you’ve already decided that I’m not worth sharing that with? Make me understand, Jake. Help me see this from your point of view.”
He tried to turn away again.
“Jake,” she protested, reaching out to him. “I love you.”
He stopped. His head came up and his chest heaved convulsively. “No.”
She tried her very best to smile. “You keep disagreeing with me. I find that so irritating.”
He didn’t move. So she did. She walked right up to him and rested a hand on his arm. It was rock solid with tension.
“Jake, last night—”
He jerked upright, glaring at her. “Last night I took advantage of you.”
She looked up at him. “No,” she said gently, “you didn’t. Last night I walked in with you. And Jake—I want to walk in with you again.”
“Amanda, don’t—”
“Damn it, don’t you understand yet?” she demanded, tears burning her throat. “I’m past arguments and rationalizations. No matter what you say or do, I’m going to love you. I’m not just lonely or infatuated or-”
Suddenly she was in his arms. “Oh, Amanda,” he groaned, surrounding her, stopping her open mouth with his own. “Shut up. Just—” And then before Amanda could protest or even think, he’d swept her up in his arms. “Shut up.”
She’d stolen his control. She’d sabotaged his strength. Before Jake knew what was happening, he had her in his arms and was stalking toward his room.
“You talk too much,” he growled against her mouth, that whisper-soft mouth that infected his thoughts, that hungry, hot mouth that tormented him and mesmerized him. He took that mouth, wrapped his fingers into her hair so that she couldn’t escape, even if she’d wanted, and plundered the soft, secret recesses, mating his tongue with hers, sipping the tang of coffee and capturing that full, petal-soft lower lip between his teeth to tease it. To tease her into groaning, deep in her throat, so that he could bend farther and taste it against his tongue. She let her head fall back in his arms, her hair cascading over his hands, his forearms, her moonlight-pale throat offered to his lips.
“You drive me crazy,” he muttered against the flutter of her pulse. “Never give a man a chance to think...” The bed. He reached it and eased into its nest with her still in his arms, her skin hot and flushed already, the cotton not enough barrier to his anxious hands. “Never give him a chance to say no...”
She smiled. Stretched out beneath him on the bed, her hair a dark aura against the soft cream-and-green comforter, her eyes deep emeralds in the night, she smiled, and Jake felt himself stumbling right into her winsome challenge. “Do you want to say no?” she demanded, her voice husky, her hands hesitating at the brink of his shirt.
Jake buried his hands in her hair, in her silky, sweet hair that smelled like sunshine, and caught her like a butterfly. “It’s too late,” he managed just shy of a growl, and then eased his burning, aching body down to hers. “It’s way too late to say no.”
He wanted to frighten her, to intimidate her with his desperation. She needed to know that he was past patience, he was past sanity and reason. The hot fire in her eyes was singeing him. The sweet flush of her skin was drowning him. The secret pleasures of her body were tormenting him.
But she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t hesitant. Jake had almost wanted to see caution in those dark, deep eyes. He’d wanted to see retreat. Instead, he saw delight. Instead of dying, the fires flared, the flush deepened and pulled him right under. Amanda yanked open buttons and pulled at his shirt with trembling hands. Jake helped her, they helped each other, until she could reach his skin as he could reach hers.
He felt her delicate fingers skim his chest like whispers and groaned with his body’s harsh answer. The need he’d shoved down too long. The hunger he’d buried beneath work and discipline and denial. Amanda was setting it loose like a wild animal, and it sprang. It took her, hands and mouth and tongue, devouring, quenching, sating itself on her.
Jake shook with the fury of passion. He gasped with the wild music of her response. She arched beneath his touch. She whimpered with his kiss. She urged in murmurs and praised in throaty moans, her hands even more bold than his.
Jake filled his mouth with her. He filled his hands with her. He sank into the languorous forest of her eyes and captured her body like a fall of sunlight between his hands. Between his desperate hands, his hungry hands. His hands that swept throat and cheek and ear, that plundered belly and hip and thigh. He explored her breasts through cotton, the skimpy shirt doing no more than complementing the soft fullness of her, the sigh of material caught between his thumbs and her taut, attentive nipples tormenting him.
He gathered those breasts in his hands, the shirt bunching up in his palm, the barrier just enough to tease them both. He dipped his head to taste that cotton with his mouth, with his tongue, with his teeth, and then he nudged at the top of the shirt with his mouth until he could slip his kisses in beneath. He slipped his hand along the edge of her panties the same way, torturing them both with the cool, plain material that kept him away from the hot silk beneath.
He skimmed her with his fingers and felt her leap beneath him. He raked her thighs with callused fingertips and felt her ease open in invitation. He pushed that cotton shirt up with both hands and feasted on her breasts. Amanda sang to him, her hands in his hair, scoring his back, snaking beneath the waist of his jeans.
“Off,” she gasped, yanking, “I want them off—”
Together again, they worked them off, and his boots. They made sure the condom was on. And then, together. they turned back to sweep the final barriers away.
Cotton whispered in the night. Amanda’s skin gleamed like moonlight beneath Jake’s hands. Her eyes glowed. Her fingers tempted and teased. Jake wanted to just look. He wanted to fill his eyes just as he had his hands. But it was too late for that. It was way too late.
