Jake (16 page)

              “Just like this, Ivy, OK? Just for a minute.”

              His hands stroked from her shoulders, down her arms, to her bottom. He cupped her thighs, holding her to him. His cock nestled against her stomach.

              “Damn, you feel so good.”

              He felt good too. She relaxed into him, absorbed his strength and heat. She opened her hands and ran her palms over his shoulders, down the sinewy muscle of his biceps and curled her fingers around his wrists.

              “I’ve missed you,” she confessed. She’d missed the husky timber of his voice, the spicy scent of his skin, the confidence he exuded. She could tell right now that he was vulnerable, that he had an emotional need as well as physical, and both were intense. She’d seen a similar shadow in his eyes on the side of the road almost a week ago. He had covered it well then, not so much now. And maybe he wasn’t trying to. She lifted her hands and smoothed her fingertips over the five o’clock shadow on his jaw, the tension relaxed from his lips. Encouraged, her fingers drifted to his temples where she swirled them in a light massage. His eyelashes fluttered closed. She smoothed the line between his eyebrows with her thumbs and then delved into his hair. It had grown some and she pulled lightly on the strands, rubbed his scalp and then shaped it with her hands.

              His breath shuddered across her forehead, followed by his lips in a soft, barely-there caress.

              “You’re good for me, Ivy,” he whispered. His lips reached her ear and his tongue flicked out to stroke the sensitive curves there. Her nipples tightened. His cock stirred in response. “I’m going to make love to you,” he promised. “Slowly. I want to touch every inch of you.”

              Ivy felt the tension begin to build again, a smooth slide from her chest to womb. She shifted restlessly and Jake brought his leg up to pin hers gently to the mattress. The thin spattering of hair on his thighs rubbed against her silky skin, causing a delicious tremor to start in her limbs.

              “Not too slow, Jake,” she said. She sank her teeth into the tendon on his neck and then sucked the flesh into her mouth. Jake’s breath came thicker. She skimmed her fingertips over his shoulders, traced the scalloped edges of his spine and then filled her palms with the tight cheeks of his ass. She tried to pull him closer, to shift so that his burgeoning length was between her thighs, but he wouldn’t allow it.

              “Let me love you first,” he said.

              Ivy wasn’t deterred. Her hands grew bolder, following his cheeks to the sensitive skin of his thighs and then further still, until she had his balls cupped in the palm of her hand. She squeezed lightly, stroked deeply so that her fingers played along the ridge on his shaft, and lifted her lips so that she could graze that sweet spot below his ear. Jake’s cock grew to an impossible thickness. His breath hit the back of his teeth and his whole body clenched.

              “Ivy, no,” he grunted.

              Ivy felt the moistness gather between her thighs. She moved her body, trapping his erection against her belly, rocking against him so that the friction she created centered on his crown.

              “Condom,” he gasped.

              But those were in the bathroom. And if Jake wasn’t going to let her pleasure him with her

mouth, then she would do it like this. She increased pressure and pace, felt his hands fall away from her shoulders and gather fistfuls of sheet as he fought off what she was determined he would have, what she wanted to give—an orgasm as powerful as the many he’d given her.

              She moved then, sliding down his body until his shaft was between the cradle of her breasts.  It shattered the last of his resolve. He loved her breasts, lavished attention on them every chance he got, and she knew that this was probably somewhere on that bucket list. She tightened the channel she’d made for him and felt his hips jerk reflexively.

              He was flushed, engorged, and as they moved, his seed began to spill from the velvet tip and bath her in a heated pool.

              Jake was watching too, his jaw clenched, heat surfacing in his cheeks. The fire in his eyes turned liquid and seared hers when he found her gaze. When he was finished, when Ivy had milked him for all he had, Jake lifted a hand and smoothed his semen over her breasts.

              “That was not enough,” Jake mumbled. Ivy was spread over his chest, his hands tangled in her dark hair. As his testosterone calmed he began to fill with recriminations. “You didn’t come,” he said. He never made love to a woman without her coming first and coming often.

              She lifted her head and gazed into his eyes. Hers were soft, sincere. “Sometimes, Jake, you have to let a woman give. It’s what we do. What we
need
to do.”

              He detected a slight irritation in her tone and remembered how she had coiled away from him in that moment, when he had pulled himself from her mouth and made a play to regain control of their progress. Damn, that had been a screaming success. He’d wanted to return the focus to her, but she’d been so determined. And he’d ended up coming anyway. Neither of them had gotten what they wanted. Because he had tried to control the outcome.

              “I didn’t let you have that,” he said.

              “You did, for a moment,” she conceded, and a smile curved her lovely lips. “I want to know that I move you as deeply as you do me.”

              “Sweetheart, there’s no doubt—“

              But she interrupted him. “I need to give equally. To be a partner,” she impressed upon him. “You want me to trust you, Jake, but that’s a mutual necessity.”

              And he knew she was right. But she was asking the impossible, because it wasn’t her he didn’t trust, but himself. And so he always held himself a bit aloof in the clinch. That, too, was becoming impossible. He’d never been so challenged before. He’d never wanted to give in so badly. It would have been a glorious freedom, to tumble head first into Ivy and thoroughly enjoy himself, but what would that have done to her? If he’d lost all restraint, bucked against her as that wild rush built, he would have hurt her.

              It was unacceptable. The thought had shaken him and he had removed himself from her mouth, from temptation.

              He felt her fingers at his hairline, stroking his temple, and opened his eyes.

              “A man’s passion should never be fully unleashed,” he told her.

              “Bullshit.”

              “What?” It wasn’t her language that surprised him, but her simple and confident reply.

              “How old were you when you crashed that car?”

              “Seventeen.”

              “Don’t you think thirteen years is enough time spent behind bars? I mean, no one was hurt, Jake. You said so yourself.”

              “It wasn’t just the car.” Though that had been his wake-up call. “I was on a self-destructive path. I had a history of bad decisions. Out of control behavior.”

              “How much history can a seventeen year old have?”

              She sat up, facing him, and pulled the sheet over herself demurely. And that really bothered him. He didn’t like her covering herself from him. He didn’t like that she felt she had to.

              “Plenty, if you start young.”

              “Don’t you think you’ve matured some over the years?” she challenged and her tone was becoming not a little antagonistic.

              “What’s the problem, exactly, Ivy? Am I not pleasing you?”

              “No, you’re not.”

              And that sank into his jugular. He actually felt the blood drain from his head.

              “Not today,” he agreed. “But I intend to fix that.”

              “I’m not talking sexually, Jake.”

              “The hell we aren’t.”

              “Well, we are, but I’m going a little deeper here. You want to explore the possibility of a relationship between us,” she reminded him. “You’ve pointed out how well we communicate, and I agree, we’re really good at it. So why throw up road blocks here? Why don’t you just tell me what you’re afraid of? Is it the physical aspect of getting that close to me? Or is it the intimacy itself?”

              His body stilled. He felt caught but refused to examine it too closely. For him, it was always about safety—but what if she was right, and it was about keeping his distance? He turned the tables on her, remembering her hesitancy, her insistence on regarding them as an affair and nothing more. “Since we’re talking about intimacy,” he began, “why don’t you tell me what you’re afraid of, Ivy? Why insist we’re sex only? ”

              She froze, her eyes shifted from his face and she shrugged uneasily.

              “Now who’s not trusting?”

              “I was afraid you’d hit me,” she admitted, and lifted her gaze. Her eyes blazed with the effort of meeting his challenge. “I know you won’t, because I know you better now. But that’s the fear that goes through my head whenever a guy catches my interest.”

              He ignored the guy part, because that was definitely past tense as far as he was concerned, but he latched onto the violence and he felt sick.

              “Did your ex-husband hit you, Ivy?”

              She maintained eye contact and nodded. “He beat me.”

              More than once then. Jake felt everything inside him tighten, like his whole body was clenching into a fist. His sweet, lovely Ivy.

              “Not me,” he said. “I will never harm you.”

              “I know. I
trust
you,” she emphasized.

              “This is different. I’m a big man, Ivy. If I let all that loose on you, I couldn’t promise you I wouldn’t hurt you. And it would kill me if I did. I won’t risk it.”

              “Have you ever surrendered control to a woman, Jake?”

              He shook his head. “And just a few minutes ago was the closet I’ve ever come.” It was like fading out. Like falling into that final dip on a roller coaster. Everything except climaxing had become unimportant to him. Almost. “It’s selfish and irresponsible.”

              She stroked a finger down his chest, turning a dog tag.
Jacob L. Emerson.
    He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips.

              “I think you’re afraid of intimacy,” she asserted. “I think that’s what’s holding you back.”

              “Control isn’t always about a fear of intimacy.” But her words resonated inside him.

              “I know that. But this time--" She lifted her shoulders again, in a gesture that was more sadness than agitation “—that’s what it feels like.”

              “We have to be clear on this, Ivy,” he pressed, pinning her gaze. “Are you going to be okay with that? If I never completely give you control?”

              “I don’t know.”

              And he heard the doubt in her voice and watched it shadow her eyes.

Chapter Fifteen

              Jake didn’t give her long to think about it. Sometimes you had to show a woman how much she meant to you, and Jake could do that. He sat up and smoothed her hair back from her face. A small frown drew her brows together and Jake saw to that next, opening his mouth over the puckered skin and laving a kiss there.

              “You’re trying to change the subject,” she accused, but her hands curled around his hips and she leaned into him.

              “I’m showing you what I can give to you,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see it’s enough.”

              “That’s not the issue,” she returned. “It’s what you’ll let me do for you.”

              It was a matter of confidence, maybe, which Jake was beginning to understand in new terms, following her revelation about her relationship with her ex-husband. Or maybe it was a mix of both—it almost always was—and he had some adjusting to do even if he had no idea how he’d get to that place of surrender where Ivy waited for him.  Just the thought made him break out in a cold sweat.

              “Then really look at me, Ivy,” he instructed. “When you’re touching me. When I’m buried deep inside you. When you’re coming and breaking apart and I’m the reason for it.” Damn, how he loved to watch her orgasm, listen to the gasps he drew from her. The flush on her body, the way she bowed into his touch, desperate for him and that send off. His dick rose for the occasion and Jake picked up Ivy’s hand and placed it on his shaft. “And that’s just thinking about you.”

              Ivy’s fingers swirled around his tip. “You’re a Marine first,” she said. “Discipline and honor.”

              “Yes,” he agreed. Discipline had given him a good life, one with purpose. Honor became a personal code, one closely woven into his self-respect.

              “How are you on adventure?” She smiled at him and there was a wicked gleam in her eyes.

              “Definitely a top-ten item.”

              “Do you have a bedroom bucket list?”

              “Don’t we all?”

              Her tongue stroked her bottom lip and the pressure in her fingers increased. “Tell me one of yours, Jake.”

              “I will,” he promised. “But only after I’ve found a few of yours.”

              “We already hit on one of mine the other night.”

              That was a surprise to him. She had come, four times at his count, and they had tried a

variety of positions, but none of them had pushed the edge.

              “What was it, Ivy?” He shifted her hand to his chest and tugged at the sheet that was covering her generous curves. Her breasts were gorgeous, full globes with dusty peaks and he remembered how she had positioned them earlier and brought him to a shuddering climax.

              “You have to go first sometimes, Jake.”

              “I just did,” he reminded her. He nibbled a path across her collar bone and up her neck and had to take the weight of her breasts in his hands. Her skin was so pale against his, soft against his calloused palms. “But you’re hurting, babe. And that’s our focus now.”