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  Thank God.

  I studied his expression as if I was looking for cracks. As if he’d broken down in front of me and I was trying to soothe him out of a crying jag. His dark brows rose in disbelief.

  “Do you think you can handle that, Damon? One night, no strings. Just sex.”

  This time, the laugh he let out ignited something deep inside of me. This time, it rolled over every inch of my skin and left me too hot and too weak to do anything but sink into it. I didn’t mind the sensation at all.

  “I think I can handle it,” he assured me.

  And then he bent, put his shoulder to my belly, and hoisted me up into the air so that I dangled over him.

  My own breath deserted me in a rush, half laughter and half shriek. Damon ignored it. He simply wheeled around and strode back inside with one hand holding me tight to his shoulder, somehow managing to walk in through the door without bashing my head into the wall. His beautiful condo was a swirl of luxury around us as he moved through the main space, carrying me across the whole floor until he pushed through a door on the far side.

  Then he tossed me through the air, and I laughed as I landed in a heap in the center of a very large bed on a raised platform. I looked up and there was only Damon, a wall of windows behind him, and the bright, magical city all around him.

  He didn’t turn on any lamps. He let San Francisco light up the room from the other side of all that glass, gleaming gold and gorgeous in the September night.

  And then he started taking off his clothes.

  “What are you doing?” There was nothing airy or convincing about my tone any longer. I sounded as if I hadn’t taken a deep breath in months. I felt as if I might never breathe again.

  His dress shirt was already on the floor. He toed off his shoes and put his hands on his belt.

  “Plumbing, Scottie,” he said, low and dangerous enough to make every hair on my body stand on end. And maybe dance a little bit, too, in delicious anticipation. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Of course it is.” I made myself say it as brightly as humanly possible, as if I’d believed everything I’d said to him out on the balcony when I already knew this was going to scar me. But that was okay. Some scars were worth it. “Let’s get this done!”

  I matched my feigned and hearty enthusiasm with action, despite the fact I felt nothing but fizzy and fluttery from the inside out. I kicked off my shoes and heard them thunk against the floor. I shrugged out of my jacket and then stripped my camisole up and over my head before I could think better of it. I reached around and unzipped my skirt, then started to shimmy it down over my hips.

  But that was when I realized he was watching me. Intently.

  Wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs that made me feel remarkably religious, all of a sudden. Glory hallelujah, etcetera.

  Clothed, Damon Patrick was a work of art. A fantasy made flesh.

  The actual flesh, though? That was a whole other thing. He was carved to mouthwatering perfection. Lean and cut and something far better than simply stunning. He exuded sex and power from every pore and I thought I might die if I didn’t get my hands on him.

  It took me a moment to realize he was looking at me the same way.

  His gaze met mine and I might have thought he was angry had I not felt that same fury of need inside me, tearing me up. He made a hurry up motion with one hand, and I wasn’t simply conditioned to obey him. I wanted to.

  God, how I wanted to.

  I slid the skirt down my legs, then knelt up to tug it that last little way off my ankles and toss it aside.

  I didn’t care where it landed. I only cared about the man before me and the way he looked at me. I only cared that he moved closer and took his time about it, until I couldn’t tell which one of us was breathing so loudly in the quiet room. Me. Him. Both of us together—and then none of that mattered, because his mouth was on mine.

  Again.

  At last.

  And it was even better than before, because I could press myself against his naked chest. I still wore my bra and my panties, but they seemed like little more than minor irritants because there was so much of him to explore. Every flat plane and intriguing ridge. The diagonal furrows that pointed toward his groin. The symphony of perfection that was his shoulders, his arms, as he wrapped himself around me and claimed my mouth with his.

  He kissed me hard. Deep.

  He made a noise I couldn’t interpret and then he was lifting me, positioning me on my back on the bed and then climbing over me.

  We both groaned when he came down on top of me, pressing his whole body against mine. I let my legs fall open to cradle him against me, that hard cock of his separated from my aching pussy by two scant layers of thin fabric. For a moment we only stared at each other, making a lie of my commentary on plumbers and possessiveness as we lay there stripped bare in the dark.

  I thought we both knew it.

  But Damon took my mouth again, with a certain ruthlessness that made my toes curl with delight.

  And then he ate me alive.

  He started at my neck. He tasted and teased his way down the length of it, sliding his hands beneath me to prop me up into a better position so he could learn every inch of my collarbone. He tugged my bra straps down my arms as he tasted the curve of my shoulders, the upper swell of my breasts.

  I felt his clever fingers underneath me, and then he unhooked my bra and bared my breasts entirely.

  For a moment we were suspended there in the cocoon of the dark room. He looked up from where he crouched there over my body, his mouth so close to one hard nipple that I actually shook with need. I tried to roll my hips into his for some relief but that only made him smile.

  “Good thing I’m so comfortable with tragedy,” he murmured. “I have no trouble inflicting it. You’re going to have to wait.”

  I tried to rock into him but he twisted “I don’t want to wait.”

  “Too bad.”

  And then he sucked one taut nipple deep into his mouth, and I lost track of the conversation. And the world.

  He took his time. He used his hands and his mouth and a hint of his teeth. He tortured me and he worshipped me, moving from one breast to the other and then back, until I was mindless beneath him. I thrashed and I moaned and he only laughed and kept going.

  When I was reduced to nothing but a keening noise and writhing, he moved lower. He licked fire down the curve of my belly before moving even lower, hooking his fingers in my panties and then tugging them down as he went.

  “Damon,” I said, or moaned, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to say. Only that I couldn’t seem to keep myself from saying it, singing out his name as if it really was a prayer. But the last thing I wanted was deliverance.

  He pulled my panties down the length of my legs, and then settled himself between them. I felt him smile against my inner thigh, and the width of his shoulders holding my legs apart was a kind of exquisite torture that I wanted to last forever and ever.

  And I couldn’t pull in a full breath and I couldn’t seem to get that arch out of my back, and that was when he moved even closer, slid his hands around to anchor my hips, and licked his way straight into my pussy.

  I think I screamed. I might have died. But if I did, I came back again fast and he was still there. He teased my desperate clit with that wicked mouth of his, then licked into me hard and sweet.

  I came apart on another scream, wild and long. I arched up off the bed and rocked my pussy into his mouth, bursting into so many lights I should have blinded the whole city. And when I was done, when I thudded back down to earth feeling like a completely different person, Damon was reaching into the drawer beside the bed.

  I tried to do something, say something, but he’d wrecked me. I couldn’t seem to do a thing but lie there in the middle of his bed, panting, with moisture in the corners of my eyes and my arms thrown up over my head.

  He glanced at me as he rolled a condom down over his cock
, and smiled faintly at whatever expression I had on my face.

  “It’s only a little bit of plumbing. You’ll be fine.”

  “You must be kidding.” But I didn’t move from my languorous, flushed sprawl. “I’m replete and totally satisfied.”

  “Yet still, alas, a virgin.”

  I grinned without meaning to do it, as if my mouth had an agenda all its own. “Oh, right. That.”

  His dark blue eyes were so bright it was almost hard to look at him straight, but I managed it. He crawled back up over my body and gathered me beneath him, and I thought, this is it. This is finally it.

  I braced myself.

  Damon… did nothing.

  He simply held himself there, propped up on his elbows and his groin against me but his cock not in me, his hands coming up to shape my face.

  “What’s the matter?” I whispered. I pretended I didn’t notice the way my voice cracked on that last word. “Why aren’t you…?”

  I rolled my hips again, and I could feel him pressed against me, hard and huge and as exciting as he was overwhelming. I was still trembling from what he’d done to me and I was so slippery and so wet I might have been embarrassed by it if I hadn’t felt so deliciously wrung out.

  “I told you I’d give you what you want,” he said quietly, and there was too much in his gaze then. Far too much for the rules we’d set. But I didn’t have it in me to point that out, or to push us back into solid ground. I’d tried that once already.

  “You could have done that hours ago. Just shove it in and be done with it. Problem solved.”

  He didn’t smile then. His hands cupped my cheeks.

  “That’s not what you want, Scottie. If you did, you would have performed that particular surgical strike a long time ago. I think you know that.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him what he thought it was I wanted, then closed it again. Because I suspected he’d tell me.

  And because I already knew what he’d say, and I didn’t think I could handle it. Not here in this bed where something I’d been treating as a funny all evening was suddenly not funny at all. It felt a whole lot more like sacred.

  That notion terrified me. I told myself terrified was the only possible explanation for the wild, deep, intensely beautiful feeling that welled up inside me and threatened to sweep me away.

  He moved his hips then, the slightest swivel, and then the head of his cock was right there, at my entrance. I flushed hot. Then cold. I tried to breathe.

  I wanted nothing more than to look somewhere else. To hide my face. I did neither. I reached up to do something, maybe push him away, but only ended hooking my hands around his wrists.

  “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop,” he told me, and the calm tone he used almost disguised the tension beneath it. “You don’t have to go through with this. You don’t have to do anything unless it feels good. Tell me you know that.”

  “Damon.” I could only whisper his name. “I know that. Now please shut up. And do it, already.”

  He laughed. It was almost soundless but I felt it in his chest, and it rolled through me, too. And then he moved.

  He sank into me. I braced myself at that first, thick invasion, stretching me far more than I’d expected. Damon stopped. He waited until I relaxed, then pushed in a little more.

  This happened again and again. A thick and full advance until I stiffened or pulled in a breath. He’d stop and wait, then move again when I relaxed.

  His jaw got tighter and I could see sweat bead on his brow, but he never sped up. He never pushed.

  And then finally—finally—he was seated deep within me.

  He shifted then. He moved his hands from my face to flatten them on the mattress and hold himself over me, sparing me the weight of all his sleek, solid muscles. I found that my own palms were braced against his chest, though I had no memory of putting them there.

  I felt drunk. I felt strung out and glorious at once.

  I felt him, so deep inside me.

  He was big and hot and so hard, and I could feel that slick intrusion radiating everywhere, as if he’d plugged himself into an electrical outlet and the current was setting me alight.

  My toes. My ears. My sensitive breasts. Everywhere.

  “Congratulations, Scottie,” he murmured. “You’re no longer a virgin.”

  I blinked up at him. Then I rolled my hips against his, sucking in a breath when that electricity went white hot. And burned deep. His mouth curved and I didn’t want to notice the tenderness in it. I really didn’t.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  Damon moved against me slightly. Gently. He pulled out a little and surged back in, then laughed when I flushed hot and red beneath him. The sensation might kill me. I kind of wanted it to.

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No!”

  I realized what that sounded like, and made myself move my hands from his chest. I only made it to his arms again, and dug my fingers into his rock hard biceps.

  “No,” I said again, somewhat less wildly. “Don’t stop.”

  “Then, Scottie,” Damon said, dropping down to put his face close to mine, “this is what happens. We have some fun.”

  And then he began to move.

  Chapter Eight

  ‡

  It was slick, hard, perfect. It was unbelievable.

  I thought maybe I said his name. Maybe he said mine too, but I lost it somewhere in the slide and the push, the friction and the dark, deep joy of this.

  At last. This.

  “I thought it was supposed to hurt,” I whispered.

  Damon’s dark blue eyes gleamed. “Not if you do it right.”

  I lifted myself to meet his thrusts, one harder and deeper than the next. I couldn’t control the fire that swept over me, the thrill that wound deep inside of me, the sheer joy that seared out from every place we touched, inside and out.

  “Have you done this a lot?” Even I could hear the wonder in my voice, and his dark blue eyes crinkled in the corners as he gazed down at me.

  “Sex, yes,” he said, dropping his face down to put his mouth against my neck again. “Virgins, no.”

  “Have you—”

  “Scottie.” A drag of his teeth against my sensitized skin. “Quiet.”

  Once again, I obeyed him.

  And everything fell away. The world shrunk down and expanded at the same time, until there was nothing but this bed. Until the bed was everything.

  The only thing that mattered was the searing, impossible fusion of our bodies coming together like this, and all the wild sensation that swept over me at the slide and the impact and the bliss of it.

  I would never be the same again. I didn’t want to be the same.

  With every deep thrust, with every roll of his hips or lift of mine, I made myself new. Or he did.

  Damon set an intense pace, a perfect rhythm, and I met him. It felt almost easy. It felt as if this wasn’t new, as if I’d done it so many times it was as much a memory as a revelation.

  I felt as if I’d been made for this. Him. Tonight.

  As if everything in my entire life had been carefully crafted to lead me straight here.

  And all the while, his mouth was in the crook of my neck. He urged me on, made me gasp and pant and cry out. He taught me how to fly with him and he let me stretch my wings, and all the while he kept up that wild, addicting pace.

  Until everything inside me went jagged and slick, and I thought I might die from the intensity—

  “You won’t die,” Damon told me, his voice nothing but a growl.

  I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud. I didn’t care that I had.

  He reached down between us and found my clit, then massaged it, never pausing as he did it.

  And I felt myself spin tight, then tighter still, then so dangerously tight I thought it was the end of me—but instead, I tipped over into a wild, bucking sort of shattering that swept me away.

  I shook and I shook, and Damon�
��s thrusts fell out of that sleek rhythm. He groaned something I didn’t understand, he pounded himself into me, and then he called out my name as he followed me over that edge.

  *

  I came back to myself with a jerk when I felt Damon move beside me. I didn’t remember him rolling off of me, but he had, and it felt like an unbearable loss when he pulled his arm from where it had tangled with mine. And then worse still when he kept going and left the bed entirely.

  He moved to the doorway I hadn’t paid any attention to earlier and flicked on the lights as he walked through it, showing me a glimpse of his bathroom before he closed the door behind him.

  I lay there with the lights of the city playing lazy games across my bare skin, stretched out across Damon’s bed like some kind of sacrificial offering. But no longer a virgin one. I had to muffle my laugh at that. All those years and all that waiting, and it was finally done.

  I wasn’t a virgin any longer. I’d finally had sex.

  And I didn’t need to go out and run any comparison tests to know that the kind of sex I’d had tonight was nothing short of extraordinary. Most of my friends had reported the loss of their virginities—years and years ago—as an activity that rated somewhere between awkward and uncomfortable, and very occasionally, nice.

  Not life-altering. Not stunning.

  But then, this was Damon Patrick. He was both of those things when he was fully clothed and on his phone—

  Which was when my stomach twisted. What was I doing? Lolling around in the man’s bed as if we were dating? That was crazy. This had never been anything but a transaction and I needed to treat it as such.

  I crawled to the edge of the bed and got to my feet. It was only then, when I could feel how shaky I was, that all the rest of the great tumult of emotions I’d been holding at bay swept over me.

  “Oh no,” I muttered to myself as fiercely as possible. “Not here.”