Blow Me Down (19 page)

“Sweetheart, my manly desire is more than rampant, as you can plainly see,” he answered, untying my ankles. I smiled at the rampant parts and quickly stood to shuck my underwear.

“Er . . . I don’t have a bad self-image or anything. I mean, men don’t barf upon seeing me naked. But I’m not in any way perfect, and I’m afraid that if all you have to go with regarding my appearance is my image of myself, then my flaws are bound to be exaggerated.”

Corbin spun the knife upward, impressively snatching it out of midair to point it at me. “Lose them, or I’ll cut them off and you’ll be spending the rest of your time here going commando.”

“Pushy is not sexy,” I pointed out.

He looked down at the rampant bits.

“Well, all right, some forms of pushy are, but you know what I mean. And yes, I’m taking them off. But you got to have a disclaimer before you took off your clothes, so I think it’s only fair that I get to, as well.”

I hurried off with the underwear, my bodice, and my blouse, then stood feeling extremely awkward while his gaze roamed over my (flawed) naked body. “I’m sorry. I told you my breasts were too small, and my grandmother always said I had hips that could bear a dozen children with ease, and I swear the cellulite fairy has been making nightly visits—”

Corbin tossed the knife onto the desk, then scooped me up again and deposited me on the bed with a laugh and a lascivious grin. “We’re quite a pair. Here’s me with my beer gut and you being silly about absolutely nothing. Your breasts are perfect, pert little morsels just waiting for more resuscitating, and I happen to like your hips. They arouse me like nothing else does.”

“You don’t have a beer gut,” I said, watching as he strapped my feet down again. “You have a tiny little tummy that I like. A lot. Can I lick your belly button?”

He paused in tying down my foot to give me a look that made my insides quiver. “You can lick anything you want. But only after I’m done licking what I want.”

“Oooh,” I said on a drawn-out breath, the quivering intensifying as he crawled up my body.

“First, I think I need to take care of that poor, abused breast that has been waiting so long for my attention.”

“Sounds like a good plan to meeeeee!” The word ended on a shriek as Corbin skipped all forms of breast foreplay and started gently nibbling and sucking on my nipple. My back arched as I grabbed his head, streaks of pleasure so intense it was almost painful zapping outward from where his tongue was now laving my breast. “Oh, dear God, Corbin. How did I survive without this attention?”

He chuckled again, this time against my breastbone as he kissed a hot, wet path over to where my other breast was demanding equal time. “I have no idea how either of us survived. You taste like heaven, sweetheart. Sweet and creamy and so delicious I just want to eat you up.” I squirmed against him as he paid his respects to breast number two; then he smiled. A
very
wicked smile. “In fact, I think I will.”

“Oh, Lord above,” I gasped, my thighs tensing as he suddenly slid down to my spread legs, his hands cupping my hips as he rubbed his cheeks against my inner thighs. “Yes, please. Not that I’m begging or anything, but it’s been a really, really long time since I’ve been with a man, and longer still one that’s been willing to indulge me, rather than vice versa. You can start anytime. Are you waiting for me to stop talking before you start? I’ll shut up now so you can get to it. Have I mentioned how much I like this? I’m primed and ready, too, in case you were wondering. Corbin? Why are you laughing into my girl parts? Oh, God, I’ve imagined something horrible about them, haven’t I, and now you think that’s what I really look like? Don’t believe what you see. I’m perfectly normal down there. If the scenery offends you, feel free to close your eyes. I won’t mind, really I won’t.”

Corbin laughed even harder into my privates, making me squirm with embarrassment. What on earth had my mind created to show him? His gray eyes were silver with humor and arousal as they gazed at me over my belly. “I’m not laughing at you, Amy. I’m laughing at the situation. I’ve wanted you for what seems like so long, I want to make every nanosecond last a year, and you’re trying to hurry me along. It makes it difficult to restrain myself from just jumping you and pounding away like a madman.”

“Pounding sounds good, too,” I said, twisting my hips in an attempt to put his attention where I wanted it. “But afterwards, please. My girl parts want you, Corbin. Badly. As in, right now.”

He smiled at the girl parts. “And I want them, too. I look forward to introducing them to my boy parts. But right now, since you are so demanding, my lusty vixen, I will indulge in a light snack just to set the scene for the main course, if you don’t mind my mixing metaphors.”

My body, strung tighter than a bowstring, positively hummed when his mouth closed on the center of my desire. He nibbled, he licked, he did amazing tongue swirly things, and just when I thought I was going to explode into a thousand incredibly satisfied bits of Amy, he slid first one finger, then a second into me and sent me into orbit.

“You were right,” he said into my mouth a few eons later, when I had come back down to earth. His body was hot and hard on mine, and I realized in some dim, distant part of my mind that he had left my feet bound. He kissed me long and hard, and I reveled in our mingled tastes, my body putty in his hands as he positioned himself at the center of my own personal paradise.

“I almost always am,” I answered, sucking his lower lip, my hands sliding up his ribs to his shoulders. “About what?”

“You were primed and ready for me. I’ve never made love to anyone so responsive as you.” He nudged himself an inch or so into me, causing me to squirm again in a futile attempt to take all of him.

“I’m very orally inclined, both giving and receiving,” I said, half moaning as he slid a little farther into me, my body parting reluctantly for him. He wasn’t a massively endowed man, but he seemed positively huge to my previously man-deprived girl parts. “I’d have been happy to show you my own particular talents, but you seem to have caught my impatience.”

“Mmm,” he murmured into my neck as he nibbled a sweet spot behind my ear.

I dragged my fingernails down his back, causing him to rise up and give me a wild look just before he plunged fully into me.

“Corbin!” I shouted, my hips bucking upward.

“Oh, God, don’t move, love. If you move, I’m not going to be able to last. Just lie there and don’t move, and I may be able to go longer than another second or two. Don’t breathe, either. Breathing is moving, and that’s going to be it for me. Just lie there and don’t breathe or move or think any sorts of the thoughts I can see in your eyes.”

I twisted against him, my fingers digging into the muscles of his butt, trying to pull him in deeper. “I’m still tied down! I want to move against you. I want to wrap my legs around you.”

He groaned into my mouth, his hips flexing as he started a stroking rhythm that had me seeing stars. “You moved. You breathed. You spoke. I can’t untie you, love. If I do, you’ll kill me. I may just survive this if you stay perfectly still and don’t do that twisting thing with your hips—”

I twisted my hips again in desperation to have him back where I wanted him, filling me, completing me, taking me to a place I had no idea existed. “Corbin! I want to move my legs!”

He rose up on both hands, giving me the wickedest smile known to man. “I know you do, my sweet Amy, but you aren’t going to. I’m going to ride you hard and fast and you can’t do anything about it. Dear God, I love this game!”

He lunged forward again, causing my eyes to roll back in my head with the sheer, utter pleasure of it all. My thighs ached with the strain of my attempts to wrap my legs around his hips, but all thoughts beyond the joy he was bringing me were lost as I gave myself up to another wave of ecstasy that was building with each stroke.

“Oh, God, I can’t hold out any longer. Are you ready? Please, tell me you’re—”

I shouted his name as my body burst into another glorious orgasm, hundreds of little muscles tightening around him, his cry of completion ringing in my ears as he pounded into my body.

My hands slid down the faintly sweat-slicked planes of his back, my body still quivering with a dozen delicious aftershocks of pleasure as I kissed his shoulder, enjoying the slightly salty taste of his skin. Corbin smelled like leather and lemon and man, and he tasted just the same. He lay gasping for breath on me, his body a heavy weight, but not an unpleasant one. Somehow, I had managed to work one foot free. I pulled my knee up around his hip and kissed a path over to his jaw. “That was wonderful, Corbin. I think I can say without any exaggeration that you are the best lover I’ve ever had, not that I’ve had many, but still, there have been a couple, and you, hands down, have given me more pleasure than anyone else ever has.”

He groaned something into my shoulder and propped himself up enough so he could look down on me. “Why is it I’m thinking I’m about to have a coronary, and you’re chatting up a storm? Why aren’t you as near death as I am?”

I rubbed my freed knee along his hip, and gave his butt a friendly little squeeze. “Women are capable of having sex and talking at the same time. We’re masters of multitasking that way.”

He frowned down at me.

“What?” I asked, trying to smooth out his frown with my fingers. “We’re not masters of multitasking?”

“You said we were having sex. Is that all this is to you? Just sex? Is all that we are together? Just a way to scratch an itch?”

His eyes were dark with anger. He tried to pull out of me, but I grabbed his hips and held him in place. “I’m sorry, that was unfeeling and rude of me. I don’t just have sex, Corbin. I told you that before—I have to have some emotional commitment before I take this step. I like you, Corbin. I like you a lot. I like to talk with you, and be with you, and you make me laugh, which I’ve always thought is important in a relationship. But if you’re asking me if I’m madly in love with you . . . I don’t do madly in love. I’ve never been the fall-in-love-at-first-sight kind of girl.”

“I’m in love with you,” he said, his eyes watchful.

I kissed the tip of his nose. “I’m not sure that’s very wise of you, but I’m flattered nonetheless.”

“
Flattered
?” His eyes went blank.

“I’m very fond of you, Corbin,” I said, willing him to see the truth in my face. “I wouldn’t be here now if I wasn’t. But I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been in love exactly once in my life, and that lasted a whole year before I realized my husband was more in love with himself than he was with me. It’s been so long since I felt that emotion for a man, I’m not sure I know how to do it.”

He said nothing but rolled off me, untying my still-bound ankle before turning onto his back, pulling me tight up against his side. I spread my fingers on his chest, looking at the whiteness of them against his tanned skin and the dark curls, torn between the need to ease the pain he obviously felt by me admitting the truth, and a reluctance to delude him.

“I will teach you,” he said softly into my hair as I drifted off to sleep, lulled by both the warmth of his body and the rhythmic creaks of the ship as she sailed through the night.

—Ibid, Act II

“There you are. We have to talk.”

“I have better uses for my tongue than mere words,” Corbin said, illustrating his point by skirting the portable tub I’d recently been using, and kissing me.

“Yes, you do, but we really have to talk,” I said as soon as I regathered my scattered wits. Corbin’s kisses had the tendency to leave me utterly bemused, a fact that I simultaneously resented—I hated being out of control—and loved. Who could complain about a man who kissed so well it drove all other thoughts from your mind? I peeled myself off him and grabbed my brown leather bodice. “I have a lot of things to say before Bas and I have to leave.”

“Why leave?” Corbin asked. “Everything that is mine is now yours, as well. I have sixteen ships here. If you don’t like the
Samurai Squirrel,
we can move to another ship, although none are so comfortable.”

“I don’t have a problem at all with living on a ship,” I answered, glancing around the cabin. Despite the odd name, the
Squirrel
was a very elegant ship, outfitted with gleaming brass, rosewood, and mother-of-pearl accents. The captain’s quarters were particularly luxurious, even running to the large copper tub in which I’d taken a bath.

Corbin looked around the cabin with pride. “Aye, she’s a sweet ship.” His eyebrows rose as he saw what I’d secured with a rope clip on the lip of the porthole. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s my underwear. I didn’t have time to rinse them out last night, what with all the mad, passionate lovemaking going on.”

Corbin was on me in a heartbeat, his hands skimming beneath my skirt, up my thighs. “Oooh. You’re going commando.”

“I have no choice in the matter. I washed them in the bath with me. Thank you for that, by the way. I appreciate all the men hauling that water in here. Corbin!”

His leer turned up a notch as his hands slid around the curve of my behind, heading for my fun zone. “My pleasure. And I mean that literally, although I would have preferred the ship not having docked right at the moment you were bathing. I wanted to help wash your back. And front. And legs, and breasts, and right here—”

I yipped, melting against him as his fingers found still sensitive flesh. “Corbin, talk! Talk, we must talk! About many things, such as stepping up our investigations regarding Paul.”

With a sigh of regret he removed his hands and smoothed down my skirt. “All right, but I think we could make better use of the time. Come on. I want to show you Mongoose Isle, and I need to find out if there’s been any progress yet in locating Paul.”