No strings attached (18 page)

Chloe wanted to gobble him up. She wanted to slowly feast. She no longer knew what she wanted
where Eric was concerned. He had her so confused…and so terribly, terribly frightened that she’d never be able to meet his expectations.

What would she do if she tried? And then failed?

And if he hadn’t changed his mind about sleeping with her, why had he swept her up and away after the fashion show even before she’d had time to change back into her own clothes?

What could he possibly want?

She stopped in the center of his room and turned to wait. “You mean there really is something in here you want me to see?”

He nodded, so she walked through his room, admiring the color scheme of navy and rust and deep pine green, admiring, too, the highboy dresser. His sleigh bed was queen-size, his comforter smoothed beneath a stack of pillows in cotton cases of navy and light blue plaid.

But she didn’t notice anything extraordinary. Nothing strange or obvious that he’d want her to see. The curtains covering the room’s one window were a marbled pattern of rust and blues. The door to the bathroom stood open. The color scheme continued into the smaller room.

A stack of folded T-shirts sat on top of an overturned laundry basket. A pair of inline skates and three pairs of athletic shoes had been tossed into the corner beside the closet door. The haphazard mess made Chloe feel better. She’d been deluding herself into thinking that Eric was perfect. Perfect as a man. Perfect for her.

She’d circled through the entire room and now returned to perch on the side of the bed, looking up at Eric, who still leaned against the door. She wasn’t sure
she’d ever seen him looking more relaxed. Or more sure of himself, sure of what he wanted, sure of his success.

A shiver ran the length of her spine and settled in to tickle the small of her back. Keeping her voice level required no small effort. “I guess you’re going to have to point it out to me, sugar. I’m obviously too dense to get it on my own.”

Eric pushed away from the door and straightened. Hands still in his pockets, he made his slow and lazy way toward the bed. Toward
her.
The room didn’t seem big enough for both of them, suddenly. One minute Chloe’s excitement simmered, the next it seethed. Even the tips of her fingers tingled, wrapped around the clasp of her purse.

He didn’t stop when they bumped shins. He continued forward, giving Chloe no choice but to scoot back into the center of the bed. He climbed on top, bracketed her thighs with his knees and bore her down to lie flat on her back, his hands holding his weight on either side of her head. And still she clutched her purse with anxious fingers.

“You’re lying to one of us, sugar. Because if this isn’t about sex, the only thing I can think that you might want me to see is your ceiling.” She couldn’t believe that was her voice sounding so breathless, her stomach launching a flight of butterflies.

“I don’t want to show you my ceiling. And I’m not lying to either of us.” He lowered his body, bracing his weight on his forearms and elbows, stretching out his legs along either side of hers.

She felt the bulge between his thighs against the cleft between her own, a bulge still soft and only beginning to stir with interest. But it was the look on his
face, the gentle intensity brightening his eyes, that stirred both Chloe’s interest and her uncertainty.

Eric dipped his head, rubbed his nose over and beneath her earlobe, nipping lightly, then kissing the spot he’d teethed, finally blowing warm breath against the skin between her jaw and her temple before he whispered, “I’m going to show you what it’s like to make love.”

She could barely swallow past the lump of emotion balled tight in her throat. She was shuddering from the inside out. Her bones, her muscles, her skin. No part of her failed to respond to his words.

“Then I was right,” she managed to answer finally in a strained voice. “You do want to sleep with me.”

“What I want is to love you.” He moved his lips to the corner of her eyelid and lightly kissed her brow and her lashes. “I’m going to use my mouth to show you what you won’t let me use my mouth to say.”

“Sure thing, sugar.” And maybe he hadn’t heard the crack in her voice. “Whatever floats your boat.”

“You just won’t give an inch, will you,” Eric said with a chuckle, his lips moving along her jaw to her chin. He raised up to look into her eyes. “Busting my chops from here to Tuesday every single time.”

What was she supposed to say? Admit the defense mechanism kept her from getting too close? Kept her heart safe? Kept him from controlling any part of her life? “C’mon, sugar. You know you wouldn’t have me any other way.”

He toyed with the choker, his finger teasing beneath the fabric band. “I’ll have you any way I can get you.”

“Hmm. Is that a touch of desperation I hear?” Even
if it was, she couldn’t deny the small thrill she felt at his words.

He sat back on his heels, braced his hands on his thighs for a thoughtful moment before yanking his tie from his collar. He next went to work on the studs of his shirt.

Chloe couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She hated that she couldn’t. He had a smile on his face, but still his expression seemed pensive. Shouldn’t she be able by now to better tell what was on his mind?

“Let me tell you something, Chloe.” He shrugged out of the tuxedo coat and pitched it to the floor. And now that his shirt hung open, exposing the muscles of his abdomen, lightly dusted with golden hair, he moved to undo his cuffs.

Chloe swallowed hard at the pure masculine beauty above her. She felt tiny and feminine and on the verge of losing an internal battle. “What do you want to tell me, sugar?”

“Two things, really.” He held up two fingers, then went back to working his cuffs. “First of all, I gave up being desperate the year I turned thirteen. Up until then, I’d held on to the hope that my mother would show up from wherever it was she’d disappeared to ten years before.

“But hitting my teen years was like hitting a brick wall. I had a great foster family. And desperately wishing for the blood family I was never going to have was making me a miserable little dork.”

He tossed his shirt to the floor and loomed above her, his widespread legs straddling her hips, his hands moving to the fastenings of his pants. Chloe was torn between watching his economical movements, his agile fingers, his belly being bared, and wanting him to
stop and put what he’d just told her into an understandable context.

She had no grasp on this conversation.

“Secondly,” Eric continued, “you’ve called me sugar at least ten times in the last ten minutes. You do that a lot when you’re nervous. I don’t want you to be nervous. And I want you to call me Eric.”

He was going too fast. Chloe couldn’t catch up when he was moving this fast. She was still back on his blithely made comment about a foster home and desperation, and he was complaining about her habit of calling him sugar.

“Eric, wait.” She raised a hand, then scooted from between his legs and up toward the headboard. “Why are you telling me this now, here, in your bed? Why didn’t you tell me when I told you about Aidan’s visit? Or when we went to the movies and I popped off about showing your mother respect?”

He showed less interest in her confusion or in answering her questions than he showed in her feet, having moved both to his lap, where his fingers were now busy stripping away her shoes. “You accused me of being desperate. But what you call desperation, I call impatience. Desperation is an entirely different animal. That’s all.”

That’s all?
“And the foster home bit? Where did that come from?”

And where had he learned to do that to her feet? Rolling the knuckles of one fist into her arch like that, wrapping his other hand around her ankle, propping her opposite foot against the bulge behind his fly.

She couldn’t help it. She flexed her toes. And Eric smiled.

“It came from the same place as the issues you have
with your father. The past. But that’s not where either one of us lives. We’re living now.” He turned his attention to her other foot, massaging it in turn. “You’re wary of men. I understand why and don’t particularly blame you. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you lump me in with the masses.

“That’s not who I am, Chloe.” His hands slowed in their manipulation of her very tired feet. “The family who raised me for most of my life taught me better than that. They taught me acceptance, not judgment. I realize that I have to earn your trust. That’s part of who you are. And I love who you are.”

Hope and fear wrestled for dominance, constricting Chloe’s chest. “Who am I, Eric?” This was the one thing she had to ask. The one thing she most wanted to know. “Why would you want to love me?”

He placed the soles of her feet flat on his thighs and worked his hands beneath her skirt to her garters. “I guess I should leave out the obvious guy-type things, like that fact that you have the most incredible set of knoc—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Though at least
that
I can understand,” she said, as he rolled down her stockings and bared both of her legs. His hands were warm, his touch incredibly distracting. But this time, the ache in her heart was too powerful for the one between her legs to overcome.

“Ah, Chloe. Guys aren’t all about tits and ass.” He lifted a foot, kissed her instep. “There are a few of us who like a woman with a brain.”

He kissed her ankle, bit at her Achilles tendon. “We like it when she stands up for what she believes in, what she wants, and doesn’t cower when the bad guys try to mow her down. And personally? I especially like
it when she doesn’t mind working up a good sweat on the volleyball court.”

He nibbled his way up her calf to the pit of her knee, his fingers slipping beneath her skirt and up her inner thigh. Then he lifted his head to stare into her eyes.

“Chloe, you sweet, beautiful idiot. I love the way you can make me laugh even when I want to strangle you. I love the way you’d go to the mat with anyone who threatened one of your friends. I love your ambition. I love your energy. I love the way you snore.”

He smiled at her widening eyes, then sobered. “I love that you don’t treat me like a dumb jock and, because you don’t, I’m forced to think and act like a smarter man. A
better
man. Don’t you see, sugar?”

What she saw in his beautiful blue eyes shattered the last of the shell surrounding her heart.

“I love everything that makes you who you are, Chloe Zuniga. Now.” He lowered her leg to the bed. His hands went to the tie holding her wrap skirt closed at the waist. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

He pulled the ends of the tie closures through their fabric slits, separating the skirt’s layers of gauzy material until she lay beneath him, bared to the waist but for her garter and thong. And then he stopped, his gaze sweeping over the treasures he’d uncovered.

Chloe felt the urge to suck in her belly, but she didn’t. If Eric loved her for who she was, then she had to give him her honesty. She couldn’t hide any part of herself, including the vulnerability seeping in as he scrutinized her barely clothed body.

“You’re making me nervous…Eric.”

“Aw, honey.” He blew out a choppy breath.
“That’s nothing compared to the way you’re making me shake.”

His near tremulous smile was almost her undoing, and she closed her eyes for sanity’s sake. What she saw was so real, so full of Cary Grant promises. She wanted to be bold, aggressive, to demand he show her body the way to heaven again, as only he, among all men, could do.

But none of those hard-hitting attitudes that had long served her well were within her emotional reach. At this moment she felt nothing but tenderness, gentleness and a softly loving response to Eric’s attention.

And when he shifted on the bed, when he leaned forward and sweetly kissed the skin of her belly above her navel, Chloe had to squeeze her eyes even tighter to hold back the tears.

Eric nuzzled his way up her breastbone, pushing her blouse up over her breasts and running his tongue along the lacy edge of her bra before taking one nipple into his mouth through the fabric.

Chloe arched upward, pressing her head back into the pillow and lifting her chin as Eric sucked hard, pulling with his lips and circling her areola with his tongue. She wanted to tug down the cups of her bra, to free her breasts and guide his head to her naked skin.

But she kept her hands where they were, on either side of her head, one still holding her purse. She couldn’t believe she still held her purse. She tossed it in the direction Eric had tossed her shoes, then slipped her hands beneath the pillows so she wouldn’t slip them behind his head.

He wanted to teach her about making love. Which meant she had to let him take control. She had to sur
render her mind as well as her body, and give him access to parts of herself she’d shared with no other man.

But now that Eric was urging her up and pulling her blouse over her head, she couldn’t think anymore, because she was nearly naked in his bed and he was so close and the look on his face was way beyond her comfort zone. She was seconds away from falling apart.

Eric tossed her blouse to the floor and, before he lowered her back to the bed, rid her, too, of her choker and her bra. The bra went the way of the rest of her clothes. The choker he held on to. And when he returned his affections again to her breast, he used the fabric flower to tease the other.

Her nipple, already peaked with arousal, tightened further as he drew the soft gathered edges over the tip. But he didn’t stop there. In fact, he replaced the gauzy flower with his mouth, rolling her nipple with the tip of his tongue and drawing the flesh of her breast between his lips to nip and suck and kiss at her skin.

The fabric petals he skimmed down the center of her body. Chloe shuddered as Eric tickled and teased her belly, exposed between garter and thong. He moved his mouth to her breastbone then kissed his way down the flower’s path. Coils of expectation burned feverishly in the wake of his lips.

By the time his mouth reached the elastic band of her panties, Eric had opened her legs with his hand. He teased the lips and mouth of her sex with the flower, brushing the choker over her plumped flesh covered with the thinnest layer of pink silk and mesh.