World Enough and Time (12 page)

“Connor, pull over. Pull the… pull over, I need you right—”

“We’re almost there.” His fingers circled a little faster. “We’re—”

“Connor, I’m—” I gasped. Shuddered. “Oh God…”

“
You’re
almost there, aren’t you?”

All I could do was moan. I reached back and gripped the headrest, closing my eyes while he kept teasing my clit, kept sending me higher, kept circling, kept pressing, kept—

“Oh… my… God…” My eyes rolled back, my back arched off the seat, and everything went white.

As my climax tapered, Connor pulled his hand away and I opened my eyes just as he turned the Jeep into my apartment parking lot. I bit my lip. We were finally home. Finally here. I could finally have him the way I needed him. He’d already made me come once, but it wasn’t enough. My orgasm was intense, but it offered no relief from this fire he’d ignited. Even the aftershocks, the pulses of energy radiating from my clit, seemed to whisper his name.

“We’re here.” He shifted into park and grinned when he put his hand on my leg. “You okay?”

“I will be shortly,” I said, wetting my lips.

“Then what are we waiting for?”

We managed to make it out of the Jeep, across the parking lot, and into the stairwell before we had to breathe each other again. Kissing and holding onto each other, we stumbled up the first two flights of stairs. On the second floor landing, he leaned me against the wall, pinning my wrists beside my head and kissing my neck.

“Fuck, I can’t wait another minute,” he growled.

“I know, let’s—” I whimpered when his stubble brushed the side of my neck. “Connor, let’s go.”

He kissed my mouth one last time before we started up the stairs again. Somehow we made it up the next two flights, but just before we got to the next, he spun me around and pushed me up against the wall again. We kissed frantically, desperately. My purse fell to the floor beside us, the contents spilling out, but it could wait.

I, however, could not. “Connor,” I said, panting between kisses. “Connor, my apartment, it’s, we’re almost there.” I gasped as his erection pressed against me. “The next floor, let’s—”

“Too far.” He released me with one hand, and my breath caught as soon as that hand went into the inside pocket of his jacket. I knew, I knew, but even still, a shudder rippled from my pussy right up my spine when he held up two fingers with a condom between them.

“You came prepared.”

“You’re damn right.” He tore the wrapper with his teeth. “After the first time, I never get anywhere near you without one.” We both fumbled with his belt and zipper, and while he put the condom on, I made a quick sweeping glance around the stairwell. Panic fluttered through my chest. Someone could come out at any moment. We could get caught. Someone could find us. We could be seen.

Then Connor pulled my leg up to his waist, and I didn’t care if every last tenant in the building stepped out into the stairwell.

With his hands supporting my hips, I brought my other leg up and hooked my ankles behind his back. Then I put my arms around his neck and held on.

With one deep thrust, he was inside me.

“Oh God…” He closed his eyes and let his head fall forward. “Oh God…” He withdrew slowly and slammed into me again. His range of motion was limited, but I was so aroused, he met no resistance at all. His body pressed against my clit and his cock slid back and forth across my G-spot.

“You feel so good,” I moaned.

“So do—” He gasped.

I couldn’t roll my hips or move with him. All I could do was passively let him fuck me, let him drive himself as deep inside me as he could, and it was fast, furious, and incredible. In my arms and before my eyes, the man who was always in control became desperation personified.

I tightened my pussy around him and he sucked in a breath. I did it again and a violent tremor ran through him.

“Fuck, I can’t— I’m gonna come,” he slurred. “I’m…I’m…” When he came, his back arched and he threw his head back, closing his eyes and releasing a throaty groan that echoed up and down the stairwell. I bit my lip to suppress a whimper; being caught didn’t matter. What mattered was watching the king of restraint abandon all good sense because he was just
that
far gone.

When his orgasm subsided, we just held onto each other, letting the aftershocks pass. We tried to kiss, but between shaking and panting, we couldn’t.

After a moment, I unhooked my ankles and he guided me down, holding my hips until we were both sure my shaking legs would stay under me. Even after I was on my own two feet, I kept my arms around him and we both used the wall for support.

Resting his forehead against mine, he whispered, “That was fucking amazing.”

“Yeah. it was.” I kissed him gently. “Now let’s go find someplace more comfortable.”

He grinned. “I like the sound of that.” We straightened our clothes and he took care of the condom, putting it in the trash can on the landing while I knelt to pick up the spilled contents of my purse. When I rose, my knees wobbled, but he put a hand on my arm to steady me.

“Can you make it up the stairs?” he asked.

I nodded. “Can you?”

He put his arm around my waist and kissed my cheek. In a low growl, just like he’d done when he’d made flirty suggestions at the pub, he said, “But we’d better go now because I am dying to make you come again.”

Chapter Fifteen

It took another three orgasms on my part and one on his before we were both finally satisfied. He collapsed beside me and for the longest time, we just lay in silence, catching our breath.

Without thinking about it, I moved toward him, lying beside him and resting my head on his chest. He lifted his arm until I got comfortable, then draped it around my shoulders. His thumb moved back and forth on my arm, and at one point, he tenderly kissed the top of my head.

We touched now with a kind of gentleness that didn’t belong in the same room as the desperate, rough, sweaty sex we’d just had, but it was there nonetheless. Now that the firestorm of insatiable lust had passed, we touched with tenderness.

After a while, Connor chuckled softly and kissed the top of my head. “Now you see what happens when you tease me all evening.”

“You started it.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Liar,” I said. “I’m not the one who started saying filthy things in the pub.”

“No, but you did show up wearing that damned skirt.”

I turned onto my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows. “So will this happen every time I wear it?”

He smiled and played with my hair. “It just might. Especially when you start talking dirty like you were.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Just remember,” he said, “turnabout’s fair play.”

“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”

He laughed. “True, I guess it is.”

Conversation meandered from talk about our jobs to our families, just enjoying each other’s company. We switched effortlessly back and forth between insatiable lovers to something like friends. More than friends. Too intimate to be casual lovers, too passionate to be friends, and somewhere in that gray area was what we were and what we had no business being.

I pushed those thoughts out of my mind while our conversation wandered into his field of study.

He explained his master’s thesis in layman’s terms and told me a little more about the graduate program he was going into. Then he shrugged. “It’s not that exciting.”

“It sounds interesting. I mean, a lot of it’s Greek to me, but it must be fascinating to study.”

“It is. Like I said before, language is a powerful thing.” He paused, wetting his lips slowly. Then he looked at me. “You want to know what piqued my interest in it?”
“Poetry, wasn’t it?”

“Well, that caught my attention,” he said. “But what hooked me was a letter my sister wrote to me a few years ago.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “We had a falling out when we were teenagers. I mean, it was ugly. Drove a pretty big wedge into the middle of the whole family, even after I turned eighteen and moved out of the house.”

“It was that big of a feud? When you were kids?”

“It was pretty bad.” He turned onto his side, facing me and resting his hand on the small of my back. “Teenagers know everything and, well, we both knew everything there was to know about religion. Of course, we couldn’t both be right, and we were screaming at each other from polar opposite ends of the religious spectrum. She’s as stubborn as I am, so it just escalated until I moved out.” He sighed. “Anyway, we didn’t speak for a long time. During my second year of college, she wrote me this letter and more or less begged me for a ceasefire. Said we couldn’t both be right, but if there was one thing she couldn’t live with, it was knowing her brother hated her.”

“Did it work?”

He nodded. “We sent a few e-mails back and forth before we got the nerve to talk on the phone. When we saw each other face to face over the holidays, it wasn’t like nothing had ever happened, but it was better. A lot better.”

“How do you two get along now?” I asked.

“Just fine. We’re best friends now. And, well, it got me thinking. We’d torn ourselves apart with what? Words. Then we patched things up using the very same thing. That got me thinking even more, and I found out about the study of linguistics. When I got back to school after the holidays, I changed my major and that was that.”

“Wow,” I said. “The only thing I ever got out of sibling rivalry was a black eye.”

“A black eye? Are you serious?”

I laughed. “My sister and I fought like cats and dogs while we were growing up. When I was about fifteen, things finally just got out of control, and we got into a big fight. And I don’t mean a girly slap match. I mean a fistfight.” I shrugged. “When it was over, we each had a black eye and she had a split lip. Didn’t do much for her prom pictures the next weekend, but we stopped fighting after that.”

Connor chuckled. “How do you get along now?”

“Oh, same as you and your sister,” I said. “We’re best friends now. We talk on the phone constantly and she’s been begging me to come back to Wyoming. You’d never know we ever didn’t get along.”

“A little Wyoming diplomacy apparently goes a long way,” he laughed.

“Tomboy diplomacy is more like it.”

“You? A tomboy?” He chuckled. “Hardly.”

“Says the man who’s never seen me slinging hay bales or driving a tractor.”

His eyes lit up. “You know, I think you just got a hell of a lot sexier.”

I rolled my eyes. “You dirty bastard.”

“Damn right.” He leaned in to kiss me. “The perfect match for a dirty girl like you.”

“The perfect match, indeed.” I grinned into his kiss. Even as his kiss made me lightheaded, a thought wandered into my mind:
I could get used to this
.

When I broke the kiss, I met his eyes. Neither of us spoke, but I’d never been so blissfully relaxed and comfortable around someone as I was just then.
I could get attached to this
.

My blood turned to ice.
I can’t get attached to this
.

His fingertips trailed down the side of my neck and I shivered.
I’m getting attached to this
.

“You okay?” he asked.

“What?”

He played with my hair. “Looked like you were spacing out a bit. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, just thinking.”

“About?”

I could tell him. I could be honest and let him know the thoughts wandering through my head. But I hesitated. It would scare him off for sure. He’d think I wanted to get clingy.

Or worse, he’d feel the same, and the reality was that we couldn’t go there.

Instead, I grinned, pulled him closer, and said, “Just thinking about all the things I still want to do before we go to sleep.”

Chapter Sixteen

No matter how much we planned and organized things, horse shows always involved a certain level of chaos. If a schedule of all the classes and tests was carefully put together and posted, then tack and equipment would go missing. If all the tack and equipment was accounted for, at least one essential document would be missing for either a horse or rider. If all the paperwork was squared away, the schedule would fall to pieces and we’d all be scrambling to make our test times.

The three-day show on Whidbey Island was no exception, and as a bonus, Gavin was in rare form. More than once, Susan and I were sure the only solution was homicide, but somehow, all three of us survived the weekend.

We were finally on our way home. On the ferry, she and Leslie stayed down on the car deck to keep an eye on the horses in the trailer while I dragged my aching carcass to the main deck. I leaned on the railing outside.

The sun was going down and the wind blowing across Puget Sound was chilly, but it was nothing a zipped-up jacket and Connor’s arms around me couldn’t deflect.

He’d come up this morning to watch my last couple of tests, and just having him there had shaken some of the show-induced tension out of my shoulders. He had a calming effect on me like no one else, and while every inch of my body ached now, his touch was soothing and relaxing. I wondered how I’d have made it through this particular show without the spectacular back rub he’d given me between tests a few hours ago.

“Still sore?” He brushed some windswept hair out of my face.

“Probably will be for a day or two.” I shrugged. “Par for the course.”

“I’m sure.”

“So the show didn’t bore you to tears?”

He smiled. “Not in the least. I mean, I’m not going to pretend I had a clue what was going on half the time, but I got to watch you ride in those white breeches, so—”

I smacked him playfully and laughed.

“What can I say?” He grinned, running his hands over my hips. “They make your ass and legs look incredible.”

My face burned. “Connor, my God,” I said, pretending to disapprove. “A soon-to-be master of linguistics, and you still resort to such crassness.”