Basic Training (17 page)

He caught her hands and pulled her toward him as he met her halfway. “Seduce me again.”

The bold challenge shocked her into silence.

He gentled his grip, folding her hands between his. “I saw you last night. I heard you. I tasted you. I guarantee you, I’ll never forget what you do to me.”

Tess was shivering again, likely the adrenaline working its way through her system. She squirmed in
her seat, watching the rain streak down the window beyond his shoulder. Finally, she found courage to look him in the eye. “Is that a dare?”

“Does it need to be?”

Her puff of laughter almost dissolved into a sob. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and smiled through it. “I’m talking about a gap in self-confidence here.”

“And I’m saying there’s no reason for it.”

He pulled his keys from his pocket, slid one off the ring and pressed it into the palm of her hand. A house key.

“Dad will be gone all night, and I’ll be in that big house by myself. Alone. Waiting. I’m stone cold sober, too, if that means anything to you.” He curled her fingers around the key and leaned over the console. His moist breath warmed her ear with a whispered caress. “Seduce me tonight. I guarantee it will be memorable. For both of us.”

“I can’t. What if I suck at it?”

He pulled away and opened the car door. His face creased with a classic Travis McCormick smile. “I know you won’t.”

She grabbed his arm to stop him from leaving. “How? How do I know you’re not just saying that to spare the feelings of an old friend?”

Rain blew into the car and splashed her face. His jacket and jeans were getting soaked. Travis moved closer to drier territory, stopping just short of touching her lips with his. “Because you’re good ol’ reliable Tess Bartlett. And you haven’t let me down yet.”

Then his mouth closed over hers. His kiss was a reward, an apology, a demand. But it was done and he
was gone before she could decide which message she should respond to.

T
RAVIS WAITED AT
his bedroom window, his sodden jeans dripping on the carpet, watching for the light to go on in Tess’s room.

Just to know she was okay, he rationalized.

Because he’d been an ass twelve years ago and hadn’t been able to connect “Tess” and “sex goddess” in his hungover brain, she couldn’t quite believe that his attraction to her now was the real thing. Hell.
He
couldn’t believe how badly he wanted her to take him up on his challenge.

She didn’t need lessons from him on how to get a man’s attention and drive him crazy. She didn’t need lessons from any man. Tess just needed a chance to strut her stuff. She needed a man to see her for the delectable treasure she was.

And he wasn’t about to let anybody else volunteer for that mission.

He’d seen her safely home. Half hoped she’d walk straight to his front door instead of up the steps to her mother’s house. But she’d unlocked the door and disappeared inside her dark, sleeping childhood home without even a wave goodbye. Travis had been left standing in the rain, with the wind pasting his wet clothes to his skin.

He thought of his dad—said a prayer that he was dry, his stomach was full, and that he’d remembered to take enough of his pills for the morning. He thought of Clarksie and his S.O. 6 unit—how they’d be wrapping up their assignment and prepping for the flight home in less than two weeks.

He thought of a twenty-one-year-old woman who’d rescued him from himself and nearly taken him to heaven—and her thirty-three-year-old counterpart, an unwitting siren who rescued him from his own driving needs and haunting fears, and had the power to take him well beyond heaven.

There.

The light went on in the second floor window, creating a beacon of creamy white curtains that called to him through the rain-shrouded night. The sense of relief that washed over him, knowing Tess was safe, was quickly replaced by a spark of anticipation that caught inside him, gradually speeding his pulse. He could see an indistinct silhouette moving on the other side of that curtain. Was Tess undressing? Bundling up in something warm? Pacing off the length of her room and calling him every well-earned name in the book?

Travis toed off his squishy deck shoes and kicked them into the bathroom where he’d shed his wet jacket. His socks joined the pile before he returned to the window to keep vigil until the light in Tess’s room went dark. It was a most fitting sort of punishment for a man who’d caused her doubt about her sexual talents, he supposed. To want a thing so much and be denied it was painful. He knew. Because he wanted the woman behind the curtain, but he was quickly learning that the real thing—the real woman—was far more addictive to his body, far more necessary to his sense of well-being than any fantasy.

He had her halfway naked inside his head when the phone rang.

An instant alertness snuffed out the lust coursing
through him. It could be news of his father. Maybe he’d found a clearer means to make contact. Travis read the number displayed and smiled. The burst of adrenaline quickly receded and a familiar heat licked through his veins, reigniting his desire.

Tess.

He punched the talk button. “Hey.”

“I forgot to say goodnight.” Her quiet voice sounded as if she were in the darkened room with him.

“Goodnight, T-bone.”

She cleared her throat. The silhouette behind the curtain moved. “Could you call me Tess tonight? Or honey or darlin’ or whatever?”

“Okay, Whatever,” he teased.

“Travis.”

I want you. He heard the seductive subtext in that one-word reprimand, and his breath caught in his chest.

He forced himself to exhale, then breathe in again, evenly, slowly. To control the rapid thumping of his heart.

She was doing it.

She was seducing him.

The Action Man tried to play it cool, but Travis Harold McCormick of the USMC had never wanted a thing as badly as he wanted this. Not even S.O. 6. But he had to put his own needs on simmer and let this night be about Tess and what she needed. He swallowed past the lump of desire in his throat.

“Tess.” He gave her name as dark and sensuous a spin as he could. I want you. He encouraged her to continue. “You’ve got the ball.”

“Three different men flirted with me tonight.”

Ouch. Strike one to the old ego. Other men should
not enter the conversation when he was this primed for a woman. “Really? Am I supposed to be okay with that?”

“You should be proud of your star pupil.”

He looked through the rain and the night and saw her silhouette framed behind the curtain at her window. “I am. But you’re
my
pupil.”

“One of them said he was looking for you. He’s a friend of yours from the Corps. I forgot to tell you that earlier.”

“What’s his name?”

“I got busy and didn’t get a chance to find out.”

“I’m not interested in him right now, anyway.” From his lookout point, he could make out that her position mirrored his own. The fence and houses and rain-soaked night shrouded her window to the world while offering him a private view of her room. Open the curtains, he silently urged. “Is that all you wanted to tell me?”

“Thank you for listening to me tonight. I’ve always been embarrassed that I wasn’t special enough to notice.”

“Don’t believe it.” Her silhouette moved. His hungry gaze darted to the glimpse of her fingers slipping between the curtains, like a batter spotting the pitch and taking aim.

“You know we’ve never been able to resist each other’s dares.”

“Open the curtains, Tess.”

He held his breath, licked his parched lips, then damn near got a hard-on the instant the curtains opened and he saw her standing there. She’d moved a lamp close to the window, spotlighting her and leaving her room in darkness behind her. The ball cap was gone. Her damp hair hung loose about her shoulders, kinking into curls
and clinging to her cheeks. The jersey she wore was soaked, too, and fit her trim curves like a second skin. Her lips moved against her phone.

“Travis.”

“Tess.”

He pulled his bed stand closer to the window and turned on the lamp so she could see him just as clearly. Just like when they were kids. Only there was nothing innocent about the signals they traded tonight.

“It’s hot,” she murmured, her voice a seductive pitch that stroked against his groin.

Too damn hot despite the chill of wet clothes sticking to his skin. Travis reached for the hem of his T-shirt. He peeled it off over his head and tossed it aside. Cool air hit damp skin, but his temperature seemed to keep rising.

He put the phone back to his ear. “It’s hot here, too.”

He thought he detected a slight nod. Then she set her phone on the corner of her bed and came back to the window to slowly, deliberately, unhook the buttons of her jersey, one by one. Travis watched in rapt fascination. When she reached the last button, well below her waist, his dick jerked as if she’d touched him there.

His own chest heaved in a stuttered breath as she slid the jersey off her shoulders. Her breasts thrust toward him, nearly touching the glass. He reached out and splayed his fingers against the cool, hard pane of his own window.

At first he thought it was a sudden chill, or maybe second thoughts, when she hugged her arms around her waist, hiding that smooth expanse of skin. “Tess, don’t stop.”

But she didn’t have her phone, and she wasn’t.

“Damn, woman.”

She pulled her arms up beneath her breasts, lifting them, squeezing them together. Her plain white bra gleamed against her skin, highlighting each swell and curve, and if he used his imagination, each straining nipple.

Leaning forward, she pressed her breasts against the glass and Travis’s fingertips dug into the window with frustrated need. She dragged them in circles, finger-painting with each tit. His pelvis tilted in response.

When he’d dared her to seduce him, he’d thought it would be in person. But this was as innovative and compelling a turn-on as anything he’d experienced before. And his body was heating and tingling and rising to attention as if she were doing those things to him and not the glass.

“Tess.” He whispered into the phone, knowing she couldn’t hear. “Tess.”

But she sensed his message, or felt the same electric current linking them across the night that he did. She retrieved her phone, and when she came back to the window, the bra was gone.

“How am I doing?” The soft question sparked an answer deep inside him.

“You’re beautiful.” She pressed her dusky nipples against the window. When she gasped into the phone, he felt the shock of hot skin meeting cold glass right along with her. “Touch yourself.”

This was better than any fantasy his feverish dreams could conjure.

She slipped her free hand between herself and the glass, sliding the nipple into the crook of two fingers, squeezing, rolling, lifting, plucking. “Like this?”

Travis licked his lips, imagining his tongue there. Imagining the silky texture of her skin against his lips, the citrusy smell of her essence filling his nose. “Yeah.” He heard the hoarse rasp that was his own need, begging for fulfillment.

She’d seen his tongue. She lifted her fingers to her own mouth and licked them, sucked them, moistened them with the same thoroughness as she had used when she’d sucked his cock last night.

“Yeah.” He could barely make a sound. His knees were trembling, his hips were clenching, and he was rubbing himself against the window sill. He breathed in a moment of sanity and stepped back from the window. “You’re killing me over here.”

The witch smiled against the phone. “That’s good, right?”

He couldn’t answer. She twirled her wet fingers around her nipple. He heard her gasp again, saw her stomach jerk as she gave herself pleasure. She was panting hard—in rhythm with his own shallow breaths—by the time she’d unzipped her shorts and dropped them to the floor.

Tess was an erotic goddess, touching here, wetting her fingers and touching there. Travis unsnapped his jeans and was gently loosening himself from behind his zipper when she reached inside her panties and touched herself. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, her throat hummed an incoherent song of rapture.

He wrapped his hand around himself and squeezed, battling the urge to come before she’d completed herself.

“I’m hanging up now.” She could barely get the words out.

“No!” But a click had disconnected them before he could get out his protest.

His shout rattled the glass. She disappeared into the darkness of her room. She would not do this to him. She would not leave him hanging. If this was some sort of tease, some sort of payback…

He tossed the phone onto his bed and sat down to peel off his wet jeans, his eyes still glued disbelievingly to the glass. He was as naked as she was when she came back into view.

Not a tease at all.

Travis braced his hands against the window, leaned his forehead against the cooling glass and gasped at the vision he saw.

How could he not have known? How could he never have imagined how perfectly sexy Tess was? How perfect she was for him?

How could he have had these feelings bottled up inside him for so long and not have known that he loved her? He wanted her? And he was the luckiest man on earth that she wanted him.

Tess had some sort of toy in her hand, a vibrator by his guess. She held the pad in her palm and pressed it between her legs. She spread them farther apart and moved her hand against her clit.

Travis’s whole body lurched in response. Her mouth opened, her head tipped back, her breasts bobbed with each panting breath. She cried out.

“Tess,” he whispered.

She clamped her lips shut, her hand still moving between her legs.

“Tess,” he cried out with her.

Her breaths were coming faster and faster.

She froze for an instant. In ecstasy.

“Tess!”

Travis snatched the phone from his bed, the condoms from his jeans, and speed-dialed her number as he headed for the stairs.

Her breathless voice answered on the third ring. “Travis?”

“Get over here. Now.”