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“I am worried. I need you to touch me all over my body, and for that to happen I need to know you’re not in pain.”
“If you take me to bed, I promise you the only kind of pain I’ll be in is the good kind.”
She smiled at him and took his other hand, leading him into her en suite bathroom. It was a luxurious bathroom by anyone’s standards, with a huge jetted tub and a rainfall shower. There was a view of the ocean from the window.
“This bathroom is bigger than my bedroom,” he said to her in a low voice. “I would like to spend some time in here if we can.”
“We can.” She went to her medicine cabinet and opened it up in search for a bottle of pain reliever. Some of the contents came spilling out, including her birth control.
“I guess I don’t have to wonder about that,” he said and then unzipped her dress. She had on the ugliest underwear. A beige strapless bra. Her white cotton panties had been left on the floor somewhere near her front door. She had never thought she would be here in a million years. She didn’t even own sexy underwear, but Elias didn’t seem to mind at all. He unhooked her bra and with his uninjured hand cupped her breast, squeezing it ever so slightly as his thumb stroked over her nipple.
She swallowed hard, almost forgetting what she was supposed to be doing. But then she remembered she wanted him to have two pain-free hands so that she could experience even more of his pleasure. She picked up the bottle and closed the door to the medicine cabinet only to come face-to-face with herself in the mirror. Only she didn’t recognize herself. Her hair was windblown and wild, her mouth was slightly open, her lips pouty and kiss swollen. She was completely naked, and a large fully dressed man was looking at her with such open appreciation that it made her knees weak.
But the most marked change was the look in her eyes. There was arousal there, pure and naked lust. She hadn’t thought it was possible to look like that. It didn’t mesh with the image she had of herself in her mind.
“Do you see how sexy you are?” he asked as he pulled her nipple between his fingers. She bit her lip as the pleasure took over her. “I can’t wait to be inside you. To feel you wrapped around me. I can’t help but feel that you are what I need right now.”
She trembled. The power of his words alone made her tremble. She took a small step away from him and filled a glass with water and handed it to him.
“Pills now.”
“Open the bottle for me.”
She complied, but she did it as she walked back into her bedroom, feeling freer and more confident in her body than she had in all her twenty-nine years. “Sit down,” she ordered. He did so with a sexy grin that she was growing to love more by the minute. “Take these.” She handed him the pills and began to work at the small buttons on his shirt. She knew his body was in spectacular shape, because she felt every hard-muscled line when she was pressed against him. But now she could see him in all his glory. Beautiful brown skin covering tight abs and a powerfully built chest.
“I like bossy women,” he said and set his glass of water on the nightstand before he pulled her closer. “Have I mentioned how incredible your behind is?” He cupped it, his fingers digging into her flesh.
“No, but a lady always loves a compliment.” She pulled off his shirt and then pushed him back on the bed. She unzipped his pants and gave him a silent signal to lift his hips. She was growing wetter and wetter with each piece of skin she had revealed. It was something special to have a gorgeous naked man in her bed, one who she knew wanted her, one who was so aroused that she was afraid he wasn’t going to fit inside her.
He pulled her on top of him, their naked bodies colliding. He groaned as her breasts rubbed against him. “Beautiful girl...” His voice was husky and breathy. He ran his hand down the length of her back. “Everything you do turns me on. We need to slow this down before I embarrass myself.”
“I promise you,” she started but trailed off when his lips looked too kissable to pass up, “that you never have to be embarrassed with me.”
He rolled over so that he was on top, his body pressing hers into the mattress. “I want to touch you.” She felt his heavy erection between her legs. She had wanted to run her hands over it, her lips, feel the weight of him.
“I really want this to last.” He kissed her slowly and so deeply that she felt like she was falling. “Talk to me. Tell me something about yourself.”
“As a child I had a cat named Sophie. She was fat and orange and I loved her to pieces. Your turn.”
“My older brother played baseball his entire life, but I find the sport kind of boring and have only watched the games that he played in.” He kissed behind her ear and ran his hand over her hip. “That was a deep, dark secret that you can never tell another soul.”
“Juicy. Perfect for blackmailing.”
“Tell me something else,” he said as she felt him press against her opening, running his head down the length of her lips.
“Deep and dark?” she panted.
“The deeper the better.”
She suddenly got overwhelmingly nervous. This had felt like a dream up until now, but he was in her bed, nearly inside her, and she had never thought this would happen. She had all but given up on men. “I have something big to tell you.”
He must have heard the panic in her voice, because he stopped what he was doing and rolled them to their sides. “You’re married. You share this house with your husband, and he’s about to burst in here with a shotgun.”
“No! Of course not.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Strike two.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’re a man.” He touched her between her legs, slipping a finger inside her to stroke her. “I can tell.”
She cried out. “No. I’m a virgin.”
* * *
“Excuse me?” She was lying to him. She had to be lying to him. Cricket was definitely an enigma. She was odd and brainy and probably leaps and bounds smarter than he was. But she was so damn funny and sweet, and she had the body of a video vixen hidden beneath her cute sundress and prim cardigan.
She was a sex goddess and he was lucky enough to be taken to her bed, and she was telling him that she had never been with a man before? He just didn’t believe it.
“You don’t kiss like a virgin.”
“I’m only one in the technical sense.”
“Explain.”
“I was with a man for over five years who was born with a defect and couldn’t...you know. It was fine, because sex wasn’t terribly important to me, and he did other...intimate things to make up for it. But we broke up three years ago and I haven’t made it this far with a man since.”
“Have you tried? All you have to do is look at a man and he’ll want you.”
“I want you.” She slid her hand up his cheek and kissed him softly.
He wanted her, too, and this revelation should have shaken him, but he was surprised to find that he wanted her even more. To be the first man inside her, to be the first man to have her body like this. “I’m glad you told me.”
“You aren’t going to walk away right now. It will kill me if you did.”
“I’m not walking away. I can’t, and I don’t want to.”
She let out a sigh of relief. He was surprised by her more and more each moment. She didn’t see herself the way he saw her. Thick and delicious. So incredibly sexy that it made his teeth hurt. Being with her wasn’t just a want, it was a need. For the first time since he had snapped his wrist, he wasn’t feeling so damn empty. He stroked between her legs as he kissed her. She moved against his hand, her hips moving in a way that made it hard for him to believe that she was a virgin. He felt bad for her. She was clearly a sexual person with needs that had gone unfulfilled for so long. He felt even worse for that poor slob of a boyfriend. It must be torture to be this close to perfection without being able to have it.
He was going to have her tonight. Things had heated up so quickly between them. He liked to take his time with women. To seduce them. But he was too far gone. He had never wanted another woman so much. He was more than hungry for her. He felt like if he didn’t have her, he would die.
Without giving it another thought, he slipped inside her. The noise that escaped him was primal. She was so wet and so hot and squeezing around him so tightly, putting him in extreme danger of coming before he even started.
He forced himself to hold back and not plunge inside her like he so desperately wanted. “Am I hurting you?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“Oh, God, no.” She wrapped her legs around him even tighter, taking him deeper inside. “I need more.”
He slid a little harder into her, which caused her to cry out his name. He kept his rhythm controlled and firm. He gave her deep kisses as he pumped away; he kneaded her flesh between his fingers, paid careful attention to her body, to what she liked. He kept his eyes open so that he could look down into her face. He wanted to remember this night, every single ounce of it, because he was sure he would never be able to have another night so damn perfect again.
“Elias...” She dug her nails into his back and squeezed around him so tightly that he lost all his control. She was trembling beneath him, her orgasm coming on hard and fast. He came with her, pushing into her one last time before he spilled himself inside her.
“Thank you for this, Elias,” she said a few minutes later. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for letting me be the man to do it.” He kissed the side of her neck before he lifted his head to look down at her. She was flushed and glowing with perspiration and smiling. He had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life, and he didn’t want to get out of bed to leave her. “Can I stay here with you tonight?”
“Yes. I would like that. There is nothing in the world that I would like more.”
Chapter 3 (#u4d85d225-6e5d-5229-8afc-0d2ad548d64b)
“You look chipper today,” Ava, Elias’s twin, said the next evening as they sat on the porch of the house she and her husband shared.
“Chipper?” He frowned at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used before.”
“Well, it’s how you look. You’ve been down since you haven’t been working. I would say that I feel bad for you, but I like seeing you more often. When you’re working I get the exhausted zombie version of you.”
“Fourteen-hour surgeries will do that to you.”
“Did you have fun last night? You met up with some friends?”
“Yeah,” he lied, not knowing why he did. He told Ava nearly everything, but he didn’t want to share his night.
He hadn’t just hooked up with some random girl. He took someone’s virginity and spent the morning making love to her all over again. He really liked Cricket, but he wasn’t sure if it was because he was in a weird headspace in that moment or if he just thought she was refreshing. If they had met in Miami, he probably wouldn’t have spared her a second look, but they hadn’t met in Miami, and this was no typical hookup.
He wanted to see her again, to be with her again. But this morning when he kissed her goodbye, he’d made no move to prolong their connection. He didn’t ask for her phone number; he didn’t suggest they meet up again. He had just walked away.
There hadn’t been hope in her eyes, no expectation. She’d just thanked him and kissed him softly and waved him off. He respected that about her. He might have been weirded out if she wanted to turn this one-night stand into a relationship.
But she didn’t seem to want to, and he wasn’t looking for a relationship, either, but he wasn’t sure he could just leave it at one night with her.
“I’m glad you went out. Are you planning to see them again?”
“I was just thinking about that myself. I might head over to Carlos’s and stay with him for a few days.”
“You getting sick of me already?”
“No...kind of. Yeah, actually. You and your husband kiss so much I wonder how your lips haven’t fallen off. Though Carlos and Virginia aren’t much better.”
“They aren’t.” Ava smiled. “When you fall in love, really fall in love, you’ll find yourself being the gross person you never thought you would be.”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“You can hope all you want, but when you’re with the right person, you can’t help it.” She looked over to the house next door. “Since Derek opened up a new studio space, we can actually use our house as a house. This place is bigger and we aren’t going to be using the one next door. We were planning to rent it out, but I would much rather have you there. You can come and go as you please, and you won’t be subjected to my husband and me making out all over the furniture.”
“It might be nice to go forty-five minutes without having to be subjected to that, but I don’t want you to lose any rental income for me.”
“Lose money? Ha! I was planning to charge you double market value.”
“I might head back to Miami soon. I was thinking about taking a trip somewhere. Maybe I’ll visit Mom.”
“You’ll last three days there. There are five women in that house. They’ll smother you to death.”
“They will,” he said grimly. His mother and aunts were likely to kiss the skin off his face. But he had to go somewhere, because if he didn’t, he would find himself going back to see the woman whom he hadn’t been able to get off his mind all day.
* * *
Cricket sat at the desk in her office and stared at her blank computer screen. She was supposed to be writing. She had left her job to concentrate on writing her next book. She had doctorates in anthropology and biology, and she had just spent the last ten months in India and sub-Saharan Africa studying small pockets of isolated populations and the illnesses that affected them. She had notebooks full of notes, but today she couldn’t make her fingers work with her brain. And it was probably because her head was still filled with Elias. Two days later and it all still felt like a dream to her, so incredibly magical that it had to be unreal.
She had been with Phillip for a long time. He had been incredibly sweet and gentle. He would hold her for hours and kiss her softly. But there was no hope of sex for them. She had been to doctors with him. They had seen the best in the world—no one could help them. She had assured him that it was fine. That the intimacy they shared was enough. And sometimes it was. He would touch her between her legs, using his fingers and his mouth to bring her pleasure. It had been satisfying for her, even though she felt something was missing. After a while they stopped being intimate altogether. He was more like a brother or a good friend, and still she’d been willing to marry him. He’d been the one to break it off. He’d said that she deserved passion and babies and a life he could never give her. She was deeply hurt by it, because she had never wanted kids and passion faded. She had never asked for a different kind of life.
But then she had been with Elias, who was gentle and sweet with her, too, but he was also strong and powerful, and she needed that. He had made love to her that night and once again in the morning. She had stayed in bed that entire day, in her used sheets, not wanting to get up and change them because she didn’t want to lose the scent of him.
She kept thinking of how he felt inside her, that slow, hard slide that made her incoherent. Just thinking about him now was making her aroused. There was a persistent throb between her legs that wouldn’t go away.
She knew he wasn’t looking for a fling or a relationship, but she wanted to see him again, just to spend a few more hours in his strong presence. She simply liked him. She couldn’t say that about any other man she had been in contact with for a long time.
Her cell phone rang, and she looked at the caller ID to see that her mother was calling.
Her mother, the brilliant Dr. Frances Lundy. Born into abject poverty in the projects of New York City, she’d gone on to earn a perfect score on her SATs and been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. Frances had paid her way through medical school to become one of the top cardiothoracic surgeons in the world and the chief of surgery at one of the best hospitals in the country. And to top it all off, she had snagged herself a billionaire. Her mother was the most brilliant person she knew, and Cricket was still slightly afraid of her.
“Hello, Mom.”
“How are you, honey? Your father is here. Say hello, Jerome”
“Hello, precious! I miss you. Come write your book here. We’ll have so much fun.”
They would. Her father was a giant goofball and the most creative person she knew. He’d invented a smartphone that could hold a charge for three days. It was the bestselling phone in history, and that was only in the last ten years. He had over 150 successful inventions to his name. Cricket often wondered how her parents got together when her mother was so by the book and her father was so off the rails. “I purposely didn’t come home because I knew it would be too much fun with you. I wouldn’t get any work done.”
“And here I thought,” her mother stated, “that you were avoiding the long interrogation I was going to give you about spending nearly a year in the most poverty-stricken, disease-ridden parts of the world. I worked incredibly hard to make sure you would never have to witness those conditions, and at every opportunity you go back into them.”
“My research could help millions of people, Mom.”
“I know,” she said softly. “If you weren’t so brilliant and kind, you would be a sore disappointment to me.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“We do want to see you. I’ll be away at a conference for the next two weeks and then your father will be away, so we are calling to block off a date now.”
This was common with her parents, having to schedule dinner a month in advance so they could all spend time together.
It would be a full six weeks before all their schedules aligned, and so they made a date to meet in Miami at her mother’s favorite Creole restaurant. She was looking forward to seeing her parents in person. It had been a long time. She had video chatted with them three times a week while she was away, but it had been months since she had seen them last.
She heard the doorbell ring. She glanced at the clock. It wasn’t yet 11:00 a.m., and she hadn’t been expecting anyone. No one came to visit her on the island. Most of her friends were in academia and lived all around the world.
She opened the door, and her heart jumped. Flipped. Went right from her chest and into her throat. Elias was there, looking absolutely gorgeous and a little unsure of himself.
“Hi.” She was breathless. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t hide it from him. She’d never thought she would see him again, but he was at her doorstep.
“Hi. I know it’s early, but I was hoping I could take you out for lunch today.”
