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He grinned instead. “You are so, so hot.”
That’s romantic, Corben. Way to set the mood.
This evening wasn’t going the way he’d planned. He’d meant to take her to their favorite sneak-away spot at the lake, open a bottle of chilled champagne, get down on one knee and ask her to be his wife for the rest of their lives. But he’d lost control of the situation and now they were up here on the roof of the ROTC building, everything on her terms.
She’s an heiress. She’s used to getting what she wants when she wants it.
Was that such a bad thing? According to his mother it was, but Daniel saw her daring self-confidence as a good thing. She was so alive, so free, so sure of herself. Being with her made him feel the same way about himself.
Taylor’s dark-eyed gaze misted with lust. She flicked out her tongue to lick her lips and Daniel forgot about everything except his driving need to sink deeply into her lush body.
She held out her arms. “Why are you standing way over there?”
Growling, he came toward her.
He had one knee on the bed when she reached up with the flat of her bare foot and pressed it against his chest, halting his progress. The sight of her toes, painted to match her bra and panties shot his desire into overload.
“I’m going to wear you out, lieutenant. The way you’ve never been worn out before. Are you prepared for that?” Her sultry laugh skipped across his eardrums. Helplessly his dick stiffened against the zipper of his uniform pants, anxious to escape confinement.
“Are you prepared for that?” He narrowed his eyes as she curled her toes into his muscles.
“Oh, yeah,” she murmured. “I’m making sure our last night is one to remember.”
“As if you could forget me,” he teased, his eyes locking on to hers, his hand going to his belt buckle as he toed off his shoes.
“What was your name again?” she teased right back.
Immediately he flashed to himself in Washington, D.C., and Taylor here on the UT campus. Surrounded by men. He gulped.
Ask her to marry you now.
She dropped her foot, curled up to a sitting position and reached for his zipper.
Daniel groaned.
“Yeah, baby,” she cooed as her fingers tugged down the zipper. “That’s my big man.”
His gaze slid straight through the cleavage of that pink lace bra. She had such gorgeous tits. Perfect size. Full and round and real, but not too big. Just right. Everything about her was just right. He couldn’t help reaching out to cup them at the same second as she jerked his pants down his legs.
Taylor was frantic. A wild thing. Going for his underwear next, ripping it off, and then pulling him down on top of her. He was equally hungry. His mouth seared hers as they dissolved into a tumble of arms and legs on the bed.
The atmosphere on the roof was turgid and ripe with the smell of their desire. He wanted Taylor and he wanted her now. Wanted her every way possible.
She reached around to unhook her bra and she tossed if off the bed before wrapping her long, sexy legs around his waist.
His cock throbbed. Blood galloped through his veins, engorging him hard and hot.
“Wait, wait,” she gasped. “Can’t forget protection.” Seemingly from out of nowhere, Taylor produced a condom and moved to roll it onto him. The entire time she was doing it all he could think was—gotta have her, gotta have her now.
When she’d finished, she fell spread-eagled onto the bed and he tumbled atop her, his big body pressing her into the mattress. He took command of her lips, but she was ready and waiting for him. She darted her sly sweet tongue into his mouth, rushing pell-mell past his teeth.
Each stroke drove the heat inside him higher and higher. Temperatures rising. Blood boiling. Brain blazing. And his cock—aw, hell, his cock was an inferno.
Taylor raked her fingers through his freshly clipped military haircut and arched her hips upward, driving him mad with the brush of her nipples beaded tight against his chest. And the sight of her flame-red hair curling down her creamy bare skin—have mercy.
He inhaled her womanly fragrance, feminine and enticing and the aroma jettisoned him to a whole new level of arousal. He had to taste her, inhale her, touch every inch of her.
Wetting his lips, he struggled to relish each second, mentally noting what was happening so that when he was in medical school cracking the textbooks, suturing wounds, doing scut work for the residents, he could trot out the memory of this night and replay it over and over. The night he graduated college. The same night that he asked the most exciting woman in the world to marry him.
But she was squeezing him so tightly his control just fried. Taylor’s lips parted, supple and impatient, mimicking his every move. She dug her fingertips into his spine, squashing his chest against her breasts.
They were nose to nose, Daniel anchoring her to the bed. He slipped one hand down her inner thigh, searching for her womanly heat, finding out how wet she was for him. Gently, he rubbed his index finger along her soft flesh.
Taylor gasped at his touch and her eyes rounded. “Oooh, Danny Boy,” she purred huskily.
He groaned in answer as he found his target and slipped a finger into her.
She shivered and her arousal caused a corresponding shudder inside him.
He inched in another finger. When he found her clit with the tip of his thumb, she moaned at the back of her throat, and pushed against his hand.
“Ah, yeah, that’s my Taylor,” he whispered. Her responsiveness drove him wild.
“I’m not doing this alone,” she managed to say as she nipped at his neck. “I want you to—” she quivered “—come along with me.”
“You know I can’t resist you,” he said, the air suddenly hot as blazes.
“Come,” she whispered.
He couldn’t hold out any longer. He pushed into her. The minute her hot, moist folds engulfed him he found total bliss.
Her fingers were in his hair and she was rocking against him, chanting his name like a mantra. “Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.”
She stopped breathing then. She always held her breath before she had an orgasm.
No, no, it was too fast. He wanted this to last. Daniel slowed down, pulled back. “Not yet, sweetheart.”
“Don’t be mean.” She pursed her bottom lip in a pout.
Grinning, he kissed her forehead, her eyelids, her nose, her cheeks, her chin as she wriggled impatiently beneath him. “You want it?”
“I want it now!”
“You got it.” He dropped his feet to the ground, pulled her buttocks to the edge of the mattress. His throbbing cock hovered just outside her moist sex. She spread her thighs apart and he nudged against her entrance.
He looked down at her. At her naked body in the moonlight. Her lips were wet and shiny, her hair tousled, her breasts round and luscious. Damn, but she was the sexiest woman he’d ever known.
Taylor writhed against him. “Get inside me now, lieutenant and that’s a direct order.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He sank into her. Taylor grabbed his ass and pulled him in deeper. They groaned in unison. The heat, the night, the moonlight, the flickering candles. The smell of their combined sex. The headiness of the day. Neither one of them lasted long. A few powerful thrusts and they were both over the edge.
Daniel exploded inside her at the same moment Taylor cried out a deep, throaty pleasure.
Minutes later they lay on the bed in a tangle of arms and legs, sticky with sweat. He was completely sated, totally happy.
A drifty, dozy moment passed, and then Taylor murmured, “Daniel.”
“Uh-huh?” He breathed lazily.
“We need to talk.” She sounded serious.
Daniel rose up on one elbow. The expression on her face was sad, wistful, troubled. It touched him because he’d never seen his high-spirited, fun-loving Taylor look melancholy. His gut clenched. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t begin to tell you how great the last four months have been,” she said.
“Same here,” he replied, his voice gruff with the emotions pushing at the seams of his heart.
“It’s been the best four months of my life.”
“Yeah, for me, too.”
“And now it’s coming to an end.”
It was almost impossible, but he tried to stay calm. “It doesn’t have to end, Taylor. I don’t want it to end and I don’t think you do, either.”
She laughed, but it was a dry, humorless sound that sliced him wide open. “Don’t be silly. It has to end.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Be realistic. You’re going away. I’m staying here. Besides, you’ll be in medical school. Studying, working eighty hours a week.”
“We can make it work.”
“Long-distance relationships aren’t practical.”
Since when was Taylor practical? “We’re different,” Daniel assured her. “You and I. We’re not like everyone else.”
A strange expression that he couldn’t quite read came over her face. Part longing, part regret, part determination, part something else.
Relief?
Could she actually be relieved he was going away? The thought stung like a slap.
“Face it, Daniel. We’re fire and ice. It makes for great sex…” She shook her head. “But it’s lousy for relationships.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re too different. You know that and I know it. Most of all, your family knows it. This has been fun. Great fun, in fact, but…”
She was breaking up with him.
It hit him then, a sledgehammer between the eyes. He had an engagement ring in his pocket to slip on her finger and she was breaking up with him.
“We need to get out of this now before either one of us gets hurt,” she said.
Too late, too late.
Thunderstruck, he sat up and just stared at her. What then was this sudden stabbing in the center of his chest? Was that the kind of hurt she was talking about?
“Taylor…” He started to say more, to plead his case, but he stopped himself. Dammit, he wasn’t going to beg. If she didn’t want him, she didn’t want him. He was an airman. A doctor in training. He came from a long line of strong, capable men. He wasn’t going to let a broken heart fell him. Hell, no.
“This is our last hurrah,” she said gently and reached out to lay a hand over his, but her eyes were too shiny, her smile forced. “After tonight, it’s over, Daniel. It’s for the best and we both know it.”
No, no, he didn’t know that at all. Yes, they came from different worlds. Yes, his parents disapproved. Probably so did her father.
He hardened his jaw, tightened his hands into fists. “That’s really the way you want it?”
Taylor nodded. She was checking her emotions, pulling back, detaching herself. He could see it in the murkiness descending over her intense brown eyes.
“I’ve got to confess, Daniel, this was never anything more than a good time for me.”
She couldn’t have hurt him more if she’d taken out a knife and driven it straight through his heart. His limbs felt wooden as he searched for his underwear and pants and somehow managed to jam his legs into them and then lace up his shoes.
“You don’t have to leave now,” she murmured. “The night is still young.”
Was it his imagination or did she sound a little panicky? He searched her face for a clue, but she gave away nothing. “Hoo-effing-rah,” he said through clenched teeth as he tightened his belt. “Been nice knowing you, Taylor.”
He snatched up his shirt, grabbed his jacket, and snagged his hat from the bed post. Had he not been so mad, so hurt, he might have heard her whisper, “I love you, Danny Boy, with all my heart, but this is the way it’s gotta be.”
2
Present day
“DOCTOR CORBEN?”
Daniel got to his feet in the waiting area of the Department of Defense Manned Space Flight Support Office at Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral and smiled at the attractive young staff sergeant sitting behind the reception desk. “Yes?”
She returned his smile with a flirtatious slant of her eyelashes. Had word already gotten out that he and Sandy had broken up? “Colonel Grayson is ready for you.”
This is it, the conversation leading to the promotion I’ve been shooting for my entire career.
From the time he was a kid in short pants listening to his father and grandfather talk about the exciting opportunities for air force doctors, he’d dreamed of going into space as a NASA physician. Making colonel before he was forty was a crucial step in that direction.
Daniel squared his shoulders, perfected his best military-officer stance and stalked into Grayson’s office, hoping that he struck the perfect balance between cocky and obedient. Assertive, but eager to follow orders. “You asked to see me, sir?”
“I did.” Colonel Cooper Grayson was standing. He pointed at the plain straight-backed chair positioned in front of his sturdy metal desk. “Have a seat, Daniel.”
He sat, but the expression on Grayson’s face troubled Daniel. It wasn’t a congratulations-you’re-in-the-running-to-make-colonel look.
