“You’re letting the steam out,” Cady said. With every beat of her heart her extremities regained sensation as steam-warmed blood pumped through her body to her fingers and toes. “Come in and shut the door.”
Conn tossed her phone on the counter and walked into the room, kicking the door shut behind him.
“Who was it?” she said. “You didn’t just hang up on Chris, did you?”
“Your sister,” he said.
“That’s not much better,” she said like she wasn’t stark naked, like he wasn’t looking at her like … like she didn’t know what. No man had ever looked at her like that before. He stood just inside the door, feet spread and braced, hands jammed in his pockets, glorious shoulders gloriously squared up. She had the feeling that if he were wearing his gun belt, his thumbs would have been tucked in the leather. But this was an older reaction to the cop she’d seen at her homecoming concert. He looked a little lost, like the steam was dissolving his foundations so they coiled over their heads and away. He’d been there in body all day, but wary, hanging on the perimeter, and outsider to the end.
Until now.
“What did she want?” Cady asked, Emily’s recent issues still warring with her desire and her growing feelings for Conn for space in her brain.
“No idea,” he said. His eyes darkened as he looked her over. “I opened the door, you were naked, and my brain stopped working.”
She had to smile at that. Steam hissed from the jets lining the tiled rectangular shower stall. She opened a drawer for a hair elastic, then pulled her hair up into a messy knot on her head. It flopped to the side, but the mirror had fogged over so she couldn’t see how ridiculous she looked.
Based on the expression on Conn’s face, she didn’t look ridiculous at all. His gaze flicked over her once, topknot to tiptoe, then lingered on the way back up, pausing at the curve of her belly, her breasts, her face. Long accustomed to being objectified by men, by fans, by music industry executives, it took her a moment to understand how different she felt under Conn’s gaze. She felt seen. Admired. Wanted. Not as Queen Maud of the Maud Squad, but as crazy-haired, uncertain-about-her-future, likes-to-drive-fast-in-the-middle-of-the-night Cady.
She opened the door to the big glass enclosure, but thought before she spoke. They weren’t at the stage where they could take anything for granted. They’d made no promises, never gone past casual and into intimate. She’d heard what he said about cops being bad bets; he wasn’t just affirming her truth about touring musicians. He was telling her a truth of his own. Realistically, there was no chance this would last longer than her stay in Lancaster.
But until she left town, she’d take everything she could from her time with Conn McCormick. “You coming in?” she asked quietly.
The words dissipated into the steam now drifting through the master bathroom, obscuring Conn’s face like thin clouds obscured the sky. He answered with his body, reaching behind his neck to pull his Henley over his head, then set his hands on his belt.
She never, ever got tired of watching a man unfasten his belt. There was something so incredibly sexy about the movements. “Slow down,” she said.
Both of his eyebrows shot up, making his forehead wrinkle in a really interesting, adorable way. Even though she’d been wearing his hat for most of the Christmas tree shopping trip, his hair hung over his forehead, turning his face boyish despite the tough set of his jaw. Some distant, recording part of her mind noted the incongruities. It was the sheer size of him, bigger than anyone she regularly spent time with, but the man inside the muscles didn’t feel like he’d pumped the iron to boost his ego or meet the expectations of an image-conscious public. Based on the flashes of vulnerability she saw in his eyes, the way he looked at her askance, like he expected her to disappear, his muscles were a front, a defensive wall as unforgiving as the walls he liked backing her into. He wasn’t anything as simplistic as “hot.” Instead, he was compelling, made you look twice, then keep on looking in an effort to know more, trying to figure him out, catch his attention, keep his interest.
Cady was now of the opinion that “hot” was what you settled for when you couldn’t get “compelling.” When he was dressed, she forgot about the sheer size of him. He’d mastered the art of not being seen, somehow using his demeanor to hide his bulk, so that when he stripped, it was a shock to her system. He was a walking wall of muscle.
“Keep going,” she said, because Conn was clearly a we-better-both-be-on-the-same-page guy. “Just … slower.”
His face cleared, relaxed into something amused and sexy at the same time. Hands on his hips, he rolled his head on his shoulders as if he was knocking out tension, then focused on her again. “Want to watch a show rather than be a show?”
“Something like that,” she said.
Their voices were barely audible over the running water. Conn tugged the end of his worn brown leather belt free from the loop, waited, then tugged it back to release the prong. Leather glided against leather, and then the belt hung loose.
Without touching herself she felt the little electric shocks of arousal intensify between her legs. Steamy heat gathered, droplets of moisture forming at her temples, slipped down her sternum, gathered in her sex.
“Too fast?”
“Just right,” she said, and waved her hand to indicate he should get on with it.
He took his time with his zipper, letting her see the strength of his erection straining at the gray boxers he wore before popping open the last of the buttons of his fly. The jeans came off first, kicked next to the vanity. He palmed himself through the soft cotton of his boxers, then stuck his thumbs in his waistband and lifted the fabric over his erection to fall to his ankles. Hands back on his hips, his cock bobbed straight out in front of him, lifting ever so slightly with his heartbeat. A flush darkened his skin from his cheeks down to his chest, the dark lines and swirls of the tattoos black on pink skin. Whether this was from the steam or arousal, she didn’t know, or care.
Condoms were in the second drawer. She tore one free from the strip and turned back to the open shower door. “Come here,” she said.
He crowded her through the door, hot skin and hard muscles chivvying her through the zero-entry doorway until he could close the door behind them. Steam enveloped them when the door closed. She turned to face him, lifting one hand to his sternum and holding her ground.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she said. It was hard to think with this muscled expanse at eye level, tattoos swirling under the sheen of steam gathering on his bare skin, and even harder to think when his fingers curled around her hip.
“What thing?”
“That thing were you use your body to herd me where you want me to be,” she said, making shooing gestures with her hands into what little space remained between their bodies. “It’s kind of hot.”
He chuckled, the sound blending into the water, and stopped moving. “Kind of hot and kind of wrong?”
“Maybe a little bit wrong,” she said, and smoothed her hands over his pectorals. In response his cock bobbed against her hip. “That doesn’t mean I want you to stop.”
He leaned forward just enough to get his mouth by her ear. “Good. I don’t want to stop.”
His teeth closed on her ear lobe, sending lightning streaking along her nerves. It was hard to breathe after that. How did he do this to her, short-circuit her brain with so little effort? They were naked, yes, but barely touching, and it was growing more difficult to even see him as steam obscured her vision, droplets condensing on her eyelashes. Conn looked down at her, his eyes darkened to slate blue, his hair clinging to his forehead as he backed her up a step, then another, across the floor to the tiled bench running the short length of the rectangle. She bumped into it, then sat down, no longer wondering how he did what he did, slipping into the flow as easily as water slid down the glass panels.
The new position put his cock, hard and straining upward, at face level. Automatically she reached for it, looking forward to going down on him, but to her surprise he kept moving and got down on his knees on the tile, edging forward until he could plant his hands on either side of her hips. Conveniently, the move parted her legs. A ripple of sensation eddied through her sex as she stared into his eyes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she replied.
He lowered his head. Expecting a kiss she parted her lips, but he surprised her again by stopping with his plush mouth just above hers, with each inhale giving her fleeting contact that disappeared with each exhale. The contact was brief, sweet, tantalizing. She pushed her head forward just enough to satisfy temptation, and felt his hand close in her hair, pulling her back.
“Not yet,” he said.
To her trained ear, his smile came through in his voice, but she could feel it against her lips as his hand flattened against the tile again. Desperate for more, she licked her mouth, scraped her upper teeth over her lower lip, trying to draw the taste of him into her mouth. He licked her lip, fleeting, hot. She whimpered, wriggled a little, feeling her nakedness and emptiness deep inside her body.
“You like to tease,” she said.
“I like to take my time. Enjoy it.” He kissed her then, quick and soft, no tongue, just the pressure of lips against lips. “I like to have.” Shaping the words moved his mouth against hers, a different form of contact. She inhaled his breath, the intimacy of the air drawing from his lungs into hers, an intimacy she’d not considered before.
Just like the intimacy of having. She caught his jaw in her hand and leaned back just enough to get a good look in his eyes. He was so close she couldn’t look into both eyes at once, but had to flick back and forth between them. Her mind was racing at the same speed. “Having” mattered to Conn. It mattered to everyone, of course, but it went deep into Conn McCormick’s soul. “Because so much of what you do is fast,” she said. “Drag racing. Eating on the run in your car. Going from call to call.”
His hand stilled on her hip. She peered into his eyes,
Tell me more, Conn. You can tell me. I swear I’ll keep your heart safe.
For a moment he looked like he regretted speaking the words. “Guess so,” he said, minimizing the implications of what he’d said.
She brushed her thumb over his impossible mouth, felt his tongue briefly touch the pad. “You can have me,” she said.
Under normal circumstances the language was old-fashioned, a euphemism for sex, for casual, for fucking. But she meant it in a different way, offering herself to him the way she used to build rapport with an audience at a personal show, starting with something softer, slow tempo, drawing them in without the crutch of an upbeat, driving song, a top-ten hit, a recognizable number. Back when she put herself out there through her music rather than “performed.”
For a flash of time Conn’s eyes widened, just long enough for her to see the expression, then see it change, then wonder if she’d seen it at all. But her heart skittered in her chest. She’d seen it. Her body told her that, more truthfully than words.
She was still cupping his jaw, her body language holding him ever so slightly at bay. Suiting actions to words, she slid her hand down his throat, then drew her thumb over his collarbone to the hollow in his shoulder. It was her turn to nip his earlobe.
“You can have me, as slow as you want,” she whispered, and watched him shiver.
It felt so right to surrender to what she was making with him. For a long, charged moment she stared at him, wondering if he felt the same thing she did, that storm surge inside that usually meant songs were coming. Right now she wasn’t sure what it meant, but she trusted it, trusted her body. Trusted Conn.
Wondering if she’d broken the spell, she leaned back a little, resuming their original positions, making space for Conn to have what he wanted to have. Time paused while he hesitated. She darted forward and nipped his lower lip. He growled, low in his throat, and kissed her, hot, possessive, licking into her mouth, obviously determined to switch gears to fast and furious. Panting, she tore her mouth away and rested her forehead on his, then gently kissed the tender corner of his mouth, coaxing him to stay here, with her. The stubble scraped against her lips, now swollen and sensitive. Then she lifted her head, recreating the hair’s breadth of space between their mouths, and waited.
A shuddering exhale, then tension ebbed from his muscles and he picked up where he’d left off the first time, brushing his mouth back and forth over hers, stimulating delicate nerves to hyperawareness. She breathed out, soft and slow, and consciously relaxed. Without the driving desire her body softened, allowing her to feel the heat building in her core, her nipples, tight and hot despite the steam, the growing ache in her belly.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and shifted her bottom on the seat. Intense vulnerability shifted, strengthened, transformed into intense need as her body made known how desperately it wanted contact with his. All that hard, hot strength was within reach and yet so far away. He put one hand on her hip and pressed into her abdomen with his thumb, making her clit pulse and emphasizing the ache in her core. She circled her hips under his hand, the pressure frustratingly unsatisfying, but more than she had before.
“Give me something,” she demanded, so he gave her his mouth, his kiss blatantly, possessively mimicking sex, doing nothing to assuage the ache inside her. When she moaned, then nipped at his lower lip, he gave a soft rumble of a laugh, tightened his hands on her hips, and pulled her forward.
Caught off guard, her eyes flew open to find him gazing at her, heavy-lidded. He leaned forward and braced his arms at the elbow under her back, flattened palms supporting her upper body weight. Her skin was heat-reddened, the color similar to the flush standing high on Conn’s cheekbones. It wasn’t from the steam, but from the heat simmering between them. Still looking at her, he bent to her nipple and licked off the moisture collected on each hard tip. Cady’s eyes closed again.
“Too much?” he asked.
She trembled at the rough scrap of his stubble over her soft flesh, then said, “I don’t want to miss anything. Looking is distracting.”
She didn’t need to see him worshipping her body, the sounds and sensations told her everything she needed to know about his body position, and how turned on he was. The flat of his tongue against her nipple, then pointed to circle it, then the sharp edge of his teeth, gentle pressure tightening until she gasped from the sharp, hot flare of desire in her sex. The whispering pulse of steam from the jets, the prickling sensation of sweat blooming on her skin, her soft noises, his rougher ones, music in the sultry air.
When his mouth trailed down her abdomen, she broke rhythm by whimpering bereftly, then felt his chuckle against her skin when she lifted her legs and braced them on his thighs to give him better access. His mouth paused at the top of her sex, then one hand slipped under her bottom. A moment of breathless anticipation, during which she quivered like a guitar string, then his tongue circled her clit at the same time two fingers circled her soft opening.
It was hot, sweet torture, waiting while he opened her by infinitesimal increments, teasing, pushing, retreating to circle again, then dipping deeper. Her hands clutched at his shoulder and nape. Unable to get a grip on sweaty skin stretched taut over hard muscles, she slid her fingers into his hair and pulled tight.
Her reward for this pushy move was his fingers, deep enough to graze the aching bundle of nerves inside her sheath. Sweet heat zinged through her body and she moaned again, not stopping while he ruthlessly, implacably used the pressure of his fingertips and tongue to draw her climax from her. The steam hardly muffled her short, sharp cries.
“I’ve never done that in here before,” she said when she regained her words.
“Come on,” he said, his eyes flashing blue-gray through his damp lashes. “Really?”
“Never with another person,” she amended.
He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You’ve owned the house how long?”
“Fair point,” she conceded. She leaned forward so their foreheads touched. “Don’t stop now.”
He opened the condom package, now softened by the steamy heat, and rolled the latex down his shaft, their heads bent together so she could stroke his nape.
“Now you like watching?”
“Love your hands,” she murmured, stroking his nape while she watched the complex play of tendons, ligaments, muscle, and bone as his fingers performed the delicate task. “Also, there’s nothing better going on.”
He lifted her off the bench and onto his lap seemingly without effort. His cock jutted away from his pelvis, making it easy to center her over the tip and let her weight do the work. “How about now? Something better going on now?”
Her eyes fluttered closed again. “Definitely,” she hitched out. Seeking entrance, the tip stretched sensitive, vulnerable flesh, then parted the swollen folds and slid inside. He controlled her descent with his hands, pausing when she flinched. She waited until the single pang passed, then licked his throat. He tasted of water, sweat, and his skin.
“All the way,” she said, and stopped breathing until he was seated inside her.
He gave her short, slow, shallow thrusts, working the tip of his cock over the most sensitive tissue at her entrance, reminding her body that more pleasure awaited. His mouth was open against hers, soft, panting grunts increasing in intensity as he moved. He was holding back, she realized, so she kissed him, flickering her tongue over his lips, into his mouth, tempting him into kissing back as she circled her hips in his hands.
“Stop helping,” he groaned.
“I’m not helping,” she replied. “I want you deep.”
A tremor ran through him. He lifted himself a little higher on his knees, bracing her lower back against the tiled bench. Cady flattened her feet on the floor but even then she wasn’t ready for a thrust driven by his powerful hips. The only thing keeping her in place was his equally powerful arms, one around her waist, the other curving over her shoulder to hold her in place. His tempo increased, a solid, slapping sound became the counterpoint to her hiccupping cries.
“Again?” he asked.
“Again,” she said through her tight throat, tipping over the edge into that pulsing certainty before she came. “Oh yes, again.”
The deep shudders wracking his body and his arms tight around her told her he’d followed her into the void. Tension eased from his body in stages, his fingers trembling against her shoulder and hip, then relaxing. When she thought her arms would take her weight, she braced her palms on the bench behind her and lifted herself up and off him, his hand supporting her the whole way.
“That was intense,” she said.
“Probably crazy to do in that kind of heat,” he agreed, flashing her a softer, sweeter smile.
Probably crazy to do at all, she thought as she got to her feet and tottered over to the controls. With the twist of a handle she shut off the steam and turned on the shower jets, adjusting the temperate to a more reasonable warmth. The dual rain heads turned on, and she stepped under the spray.
He joined her a moment later, taking the shampoo bottle from her hand and setting it back in the niche, then taking her jaw in his hands and holding her for a series of sweet kisses. “I should have done more of that,” he said.
“Well,” she murmured against his mouth. “There’s always round two.”
* * *
Round two didn’t happen. They soaped and rinsed and dried off, but when Conn wrapped a towel around his hips and headed for his bedroom, she caught his hand and pulled him into bed with her. When she woke up the next morning, pushed her hair out of her face and rolled over to see who was asleep beside her, the first word out of her mouth was “Ow.”
Conn didn’t move. Buried in her enormous, fluffy comforter, he was snoring faintly, and dead to the world. Cady smiled fondly. His hair was as much of a wreck as hers, sticking straight up off the side of his head where he’d fallen asleep on his side. Hers, no doubt, was a Bride of Frankenstein mess. She eased herself out of the bed, wincing at the soreness in her low back. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror showed a line of bruises forming at the base of her spine.
She shook some anti-inflammatories into her palm, then continued into the kitchen to down them with a glass of water, then do her morning steam treatment while the coffee brewed in the French press. When she turned around, Conn was standing by the island, resting his weight on one palm. She snorted.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, rubbing his hand over his crazy hair. He slept naked but was dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. “What have you got there?” he asked with a nod at her little pharmacopeia.
“Painkillers and vitamins,” she said.
“What are the painkillers for?”
Wordlessly, she lifted up her fleece pajama top, tugged down the bottoms, and showed him the line of bruises along her back. Equally silent, he pulled up the cuff of his sweatpants and showed her a purplish-black bruise on his knee.
“There’s a matching bruise on the other knee. I’ll take a couple of the painkillers,” he said.
She laughed as she dumped pills into his outstretched hand, then handed him what was left of her glass of water. “Pro tip. You don’t want to spend a lot of time on your knees on tile. Or hardwood. Or concrete.”
“Or carpet,” he said, pleasantly willing to laugh at himself. “Rug burn is for amateurs. So variety isn’t the spice of life?”
She twitched her wrist to adjust her bracelet, an automatic move she’d done thousands of times. But this time there was no bracelet. The smile disappeared off her face so fast the muscles in her jaw twinged in protest. “My life is already a little too spicy at the moment. I want safe, comfortable spices. Gingerbread lattes. Spice cookies. Peppermint candy canes. Holiday spices that smell like home and family and love.”
“I get that,” he said.
She was beginning to put together the pieces, his conversation with her mother, his relationship with Shane. Conn knew how it felt to never feel safe, to never know if home was the place where people took you in, or threw you out.
“I got another text from Bryan. There was another attack. I’m starting to see frustration from fans—emails, tweets, that kind of thing.”
“What did he say?”
She showed him her phone. Anyone in Lancaster hate you? IP addresses there definitely involved.
“I thought I was safe here,” she said. To her shock, tears were welling up in her eyes. She turned away, busied herself with pushing down the French press, then pouring coffee into two cups.
Conn’s voice, sandy and resonant, came from behind her. “We will find this guy, and make this stop.”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said, pleased to hear her own voice was steady. “But a dozen more are waiting to take his place. A hundred. This is my life. I can’t believe in fairy tales anymore.”
“Okay,” he said. “Plans for the day?”
“I’ve got some ideas running in my head,” she said, hearing the notes for the phrasing patter through in her mind. It was insistent, not catchy, but demanding her attention. “Studio time. You?”
“We need to have a meeting,” Conn said.
That brought her up short. “With who?”
“Hawthorn. Dorchester. Whoever else they think is a good idea to bring in. We need to do it here. I’d rather keep you at home than risk you going out.”
“Fine by me,” she said, reaching for her phone. “Chris is going to want in on that conference.”
He had some thoughts about Chris. “Understood.”
After a few minutes of texting with their respective tribes, they’d set a time to conference at Cady’s house later in the afternoon. “I’m going into my studio,” she said, and gathered her notebook and her guitar in one hand, and the handles of her tea and coffee mugs in the other.
Conn stopped her with a not-so-subtle lean of his body, then dropped a quick kiss on her mouth. “Keep your cell with you at all times,” he said, his slate eyes serious.
She waggled it at him, shifting her guitar in its case in the process. “You know where to find me,” she said, and walked downstairs, into the studio.