The Space Between (18 page)

“Have you been thinking about that all this time?” I asked, dropping to my knees and unzipping her boots. My hands stroked up and down the backs of her slim legs while I vacillated between my love and hate for her tight jeans.

“Longer.” She glanced down at me with a smirk.

She thought I was in control. If she knew anything of my misery in the past weeks, she would know the inaccuracy of that sentiment, and gazing at her from my knees only cemented reality for me.

Her effect on me was profound, and it terrified me. I didn’t understand Andy. I couldn’t explain what she wanted. A small part of me knew she’d never truly reveal herself to me. It would always be breadcrumbs.

“How long?” Standing, I anchored my hands to her hips and narrowed my eyes at Andy. Her hands dropped to my belt and my pants hit the floor.

“Since the day I met you. When you interviewed me.” Her fingers scratched down my chest, and the predatory smile playing on her lips had me hard in a matter of seconds.

I nodded, and yanked her soft black sweater over her head while I attempted to recover from her revelation. Her breasts came into focus from their seats in her smooth graphite bra, and my need to free those beauties and bury my face between them eclipsed my attempts to figure Andy out.

After tossing the gray fabric over my shoulder, I cupped her breasts, my thumbs circling her small, mocha nipples until they hardened against my palm. She arched forward into my hands, her fingers clawing at my waist as her breath hitched. Another wave of her soul-stirring lavender scent hit me when my nose coasted over the rise of her breast.

I groaned against her nipple when her flavor seeped into my senses. She tasted like warmth, honey, sex, and tart cherries. Her fingers tugged at my hair while I sucked that hard little gem into my mouth and I was dizzy with want.

“Bite it,” she hissed. “I want your teeth.”

My tongue traced her nipple before my teeth skimmed over her skin, scraping the tender flesh repeatedly while my hand mimicked my actions on her other breast.

“I said
bite
.”

Whatever the opposite of docile was, Andy was it. If I believed for a second that she’d obediently take my directions, I was further along in my insanity than I initially thought. She was aggressive in her concise, pointed way, and she was content to make demands and argue about my technique while standing in the middle of my apartment, half-naked.

I fucking loved it.

Releasing her nipple with a sharp pull that elicited a throaty moan, I turned to meet Andy’s eyes. “You’re a dirty little kitten, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. Is that a problem?”

“It’s fucking fantastic.” I met her dark eyes. “I knew there was something very naughty about you the second I laid eyes on you.”

“Hm.”

Gripping her hips, I pulled her forward and my hand cracked against her ass. Her eyes flashed in surprise while a deep purr escaped her lips. “Oh, hell no. No. There is no ‘hm’ here. You have something to say, you say it.”

“I was just thinking…if that’s what you thought, you’ve been thinking about me, about this…for almost two months.”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “It’s been complete and total torture.”

“Good,” Andy breathed. She dragged her hands through my hair and brought my lips to hers for a hurried, impatient kiss. “So we’re on the same page.”

I rolled my eyes and pivoted Andy in my arms, propelling her into my darkened bedroom while I unbuttoned her jeans and shoved them down her legs. I was confident about a few things, and one of them was that Andy and I were not on anything resembling the same page.

With her jeans and black bikini panties balled on the floor, my eyes skimmed over her body. She reminded me of a Renaissance painting, all flawless skin and rosy lips. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, cloaking her small breasts.

That is, if women in Renaissance paintings wore red knee socks embroidered with miniature owls. Perfectly random. Perfectly Andy.

She noticed my head inclined toward her legs and my furrowed brow. “I’m all for naked,” she said with a laugh. “But it’s four below out there. I’m cold. I’m keeping them on. You can, too.”

Her fingers slipped under my boxer briefs and pushed them down, and in typical infuriating Andy fashion, she avoided my straining erection. My palm smacked against her skin, lower on her backside this time, closer to her legs. I knew she felt the jolt deep in her center when she moaned into my chest and sank her teeth into my skin.

And that was the end of my control.

In a blur of movement, she was sprawled on the bed, her knees bent to her elbows while my hand dug through the bedside table drawer for a condom. Kneeling between her legs, I rolled it down and slammed into her with one demanding motion. I couldn’t resist a smug smile when her eyes rolled back and her lips went slack.

“Oh, fuck yes, Patrick,” Andy groaned, her nails clawing into my back.

I withdrew slowly as my eyes moved away from her closed lids, over her firm nipples, down her taut abdomen to where I lingered inside her. I noticed the stark contrast between her dark olive skin and my light, freckle-ridden skin. Captivated, I stared at my cock as it slid into her, and repeated the motion. A whirlwind of errant thoughts whipped through my mind, leaving behind ideas of possession and rightness and all-consuming desire.

Glancing away from our union, I found Andy leaning up on her elbows, watching as I pushed in and pulled out, her chest heaving with shallow pants. She gulped, and met my eyes. “Faster,” she commanded. “And harder.”

“Dirty and demanding?” I asked, adjusting my stance to hover over her.

“Complaining?” Her eyebrow arched and her lips edged upward into an inkling of a smile.

Gripping the backside of her bent legs, I hammered into Andy with the singular mission of bringing her a colossal orgasm that would drop every one of her defenses. I wanted to know Andy at her most uninhibited and vulnerable. “Not at all,” I grunted.

Wanting more, wanting deeper, I pressed Andy’s knees to her chest and thrust forward with her sock-covered ankles bouncing over my shoulders. A chorus of “oh” stuttered from her lips, and I felt tingles signaling my rising orgasm all over my body. Her heat was like a live wire, all fire and unbound energy that coursed into my veins and electrified me.

“You are so beautiful,” I stammered, my breath shuddering when her inner muscles clamped around me. And she was; from her wild hair spread over the blankets, and round, perky breasts, to her strong legs, she was magnificent and wholly addictive.

My hips crashed against hers, and when I drove my fingers into her legs, it called up memories of my fingers gripping her ass in Shannon’s bathroom. I was suddenly aware even a defenseless, post-orgasmic Andy could very well reject me.

“Patrick…yes, please,” Andy whimpered, her body jerking beneath me as her nails dug into my sides.

Bowing my head to her neglected nipples, I sucked one of the tips into my mouth, my thumb circling the other. The hard suction sent her arching off the bed. The exposed brick walls absorbed most of her shriek when I slammed into her again. I released her nipple with a loud pop that afforded her the pressure of a bite, and shifted her legs to wrap around my waist. A wave rippled through her muscles, and I felt her body tense in anticipation of her release.

“Patrick…oh, Patrick, I’m so close.”

“That’s cute. As if I need you to tell me.” I tilted my hips to hit her clit, and we groaned at the new depth. Breathless and teetering on the edge of my own long-overdue orgasm, I murmured against her ear, “Let go, Andy, just let go.”

I ducked my head to her chest and captured her nipple between my teeth, tugging and biting while Andy bucked beneath me. She was primed to explode. Her nails scratched up my sides, sinking into my shoulders until I recognized the faint sting of punctured skin. Andy’s answering thrusts were erratic and frenzied. Her inner walls contracted around me, sucking me in and demanding more. She was right there. She just needed to stop holding back.

My lips landed on the valley between her breasts, and I licked up and down her skin. I delivered quick bites to her nipple while her body dissolved into a quivering, moaning bundle of restrained sensation beneath me. Lasting this long was an epic accomplishment, and in another minute, I would be down for the count.

“Get it, Andy,” I growled against her skin. My teeth closed around the side of her breast, and I soothed the bite with soft kisses. “I want you coming all over my cock.
Now.
”

My hips rolled against her, and she rocked against me in response, her eyes locking on mine and begging me to go over the edge with her.

An airy moan heralded Andy’s orgasm, and I felt the spasms flowing through her, surrounding every millimeter of me and demanding reciprocity. I erupted with a stream of unintelligible babble about how good it was, that I wanted her all night, and how much I wanted her, and I kept my eyes trained on Andy while my hips slowed.

A warm, sated grin broke across her face. She looked open, calm, and unbelievably sexy. Mission accomplished.

I disentangled our limbs and rolled to the mattress, discarding the condom and dragging Andy to her side to face me.

“I think…I think I’d like to do this again. I don’t want just one night with you,” she said, her fingers gliding through my hair. “If that’s all you wanted…tell me now.”

I eyed her, wondering where the woman who repeatedly shut down my advances went. How did she go from ‘we shouldn’t do this’ to ‘I want to do this again’? What changed for her?

“As if one night would have been enough.” I pulled her closer, weaving our legs together and stroking my hand up her thigh, over her spine, through her hair, and back down again while I let her words sink in. It wasn’t enough to look at Andy anymore; touching was a necessity on par with breathing.

“But I don’t want anything to change between us at work. You have to promise me, Patrick. Just sex. Nothing else.”

The word ‘just’ knocked against every competing urge in my body until I was bruised. Her fingers threaded through my chest hair while my hand continued mapping her every rise and curve, and I would have happily given Andy the frontal lobe of my brain if she asked for it in that moment. For a second, it felt like I did.

Andy looked up, her hand paused on my chest. Her espresso eyes, the darkest brown I’d ever seen, gazed into mine. Her teeth scoured her bottom lip, and she blinked, her unapproachable veneer stripped away and abandoned alongside her panties. She was vulnerable and open in my arms, and without that spine of steel, she suddenly looked young and delicate.

“Patrick?”

I wanted her as mine. Nothing about that belonged in the ‘just sex’ category, but I knew what it was like to let her go, and I wasn’t about to walk that road again. Not unless it led to a padded cell stocked with enough whiskey for me to float away.

Regardless of how impossible her request was, I wanted Andy and I was taking whatever she offered. “I promise, kitten, anything you want.”

Her lazy smile returned, and she planted light kisses on my lips before staring at me as if she was trying to communicate something words couldn’t say.

Those eyes…they fucking owned me.

ANDY

I
needed to
rewrite my submission for the Orgasm of the Universe contest. I wanted to do that quickly—while the memories were fresh and muscles sore—but my thoughts scattered like marbles down a staircase.

Patrick touched me with a skill I couldn’t comprehend, and my body was still reveling in the aftershocks, but the quiet was most fascinating. It was a strange feeling, really, to have everything fade away. It wasn’t entirely welcome, and I didn’t know how to handle the newly placid lake that was my mind.

The tips of Patrick’s fingers brushed over my back, and I shivered. With a deft movement, Patrick engulfed us in thick blankets and tucked my back against his chest.

“Better?” he murmured, his lips pressed beneath my ear.

I nodded, my eyes falling shut when his fingers resumed their trail along my body. The light pressure compounded the looseness of my muscles while I debated the appropriate course of action. It was the middle of the night, and Patrick wasn’t sending out any hints for me to hit the road, but having sex with my boss muddied the etiquette waters.

Patrick’s fingers traced the back of my knee, and I wiggled away from him with a squeal. I sat up, dragging the sheet over my chest, and shook my head at him. “Tickling is unnecessary after the age of five.”

He levered up on an elbow, his eyes trained on my side. His fingers passed over my ribs, and he asked, “Is that Arabic?”

I glanced down at the narrow strip of black ink running vertically down my side. “It’s Farsi.”

Patrick laughed, and brought me back to the center of the bed with an eager sweep of his arm around my waist. “Of course it is.”

My defenses flared to attention, and I narrowed my eyes at him. “What does that mean?”

He shrugged, his hand stroking back and forth over the ink. “It means that you, the most complex, mysterious creature I’ve ever met, would tattoo both rational geometry and Farsi onto your gorgeous skin.” He bent to kiss the marking, and I bit my tongue to restrain a moan. My ribs weren’t particularly sensitive but something about his lips on my skin was illogically erotic. “Is speaking Farsi one of your secret talents?”

“No,” I sighed, leaning back against the pillows while Patrick continued studying the characters. “Barely at all.”

“But some?” He peered up at me from where his head rested on my stomach. I nodded, wondering if he’d inquire further. I didn’t divulge information freely, and I knew he wanted more, but he was patient. That’s how Patrick was different—he never acted as though he was entitled to my life story. He respected boundaries. Most of the time. “What does it say? Where does it start?”

I pointed to the spot adjacent to my breast. “It starts here, going right to left. It says, ‘If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.’”