Powerful. She felt powerful, and sexy, and totally unlike herself. Never in her life had Erin pranced around in a man’s jacket, wearing nothing but her bra and panties. While Jason was more than willing to spice up their sex life, the attempts had felt awkward, and a little silly. But this … this wasn’t just playing. This was coming from some place deep inside her, a place she hadn’t known existed until Jack asked her out in the stacks. It was like this was happening to another woman, to the woman who lived in Nora’s house and faced down a Ducati salesman. Her heart thudded against her chest as sensory images bombarded her: his shoulders, stretched by the waffle-weave shirt he wore; his legs in the jeans; his hand in her hair, moving her head the way he wanted it to move; his voice, rasping over nerve endings as surely as the sheepskin rubbed against her bare arms and legs and caressed her nipples.
Between her legs, her body grew slick, heated, aching for touch.
“Hmm?” he said.
She felt wild. Dangerous. Not in danger, but like she could do some damage herself if she wanted. She felt amped up, demanding. All the things she—in any of her roles, librarian, wife, steward of the college—didn’t think she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be helpful, giving, future-focused. A team player. A partner. Asking for very little, giving as much as she could. But right now she felt selfish, and entitled, and hedonistic.
It was amazing, and almost unbearably real. The heat in his gaze as he looked her over, like he’d never seen anything as sexy as a librarian in a leather coat, wasn’t self-conscious or cheesy, like her ex would have thought.
She laughed. That was the difference. Jason was a broker, a careful planner, and this kind of sex was as out of character for him as throwing caution to the winds and buying two round-trip tickets to Paris on a whim. Or a motorcycle.
“What?” Jack asked.
“I was thinking about my ex,” she said.
“For the record, this is the least sexy foreplay ever,” he said, but laughter rippled under his voice.
“No, no,” she protested. “I was thinking about how diff—”
“You shouldn’t be thinking at all,” he said, and tightened his grip on the jacket, dragging her forward until she straddled his thigh, her mound pressed to his hip bone. She was a little worried about the placement of her knee, dangerously close to the crux of his thighs, but then he let go of the jacket and flattened his palm against her tailbone, pulling her close so he could work his hips against her. The movement of his hips, strong and sure, set a glancing rhythm against her clit and threatened to tip her off-balance until she got with the program and wrapped her arms around his neck.
Sensation swamped her. Her lacy lingerie chafed against her most sensitive skin and the sheepskin slid teasingly against her, but what drove her crazy was the close proximity of his mouth. His full lips were parted, his breath coming in soft, short exhales as his gaze flicked from her eyes to her mouth. Unable to wait a second longer, she closed the distance between them and kissed him.
Plush, soft lips, hot and just a bit damp from their breath. Feeling daring, she opened her mouth a bit wider and touched her tongue to his lower lip. He made a soft little sound, part laugh, part growl, and slid his free hand into her hair, then tightened it into a fist and tugged her head back gently but firmly. Her eyes flew open.
He smiled at her. “Not yet.”
It was teasing torture, the slow rhythm of his hips, the way his lips glanced off hers, the promise of his tongue and deeper kisses always there but never given. Each time she dipped forward, his hand tightened in her hair, making her scalp sting. The final time she did it, she didn’t stop, kissed him through the pain until he groaned and cupped her head to hold her close and take her mouth, hot and deep, until she twisted away to lick and bite her way along his rough jaw.
“Okay?” he growled, massaging her sore scalp.
“Better than okay,” she said, and took his earlobe between her teeth. “Yes. Definitely yes.”
Trapped between his hard body and the heavy coat, she was sweating, skin growing damp, the scent of desire rising unmistakably to blend with the lanolin left on his neck, where she’d buried her nose and was nuzzling into the strong slope of his shoulder. He pushed the coat from her shoulder to bare her bra strap, then used his chin and mouth to slip that down, too. Hot, stinging kisses dropped from the curve of her shoulder, along her collarbone to the hollow between them. She tipped her head back and bared her throat to him, gasp-laughing when he tightened his grip in her hair again and held her there, exposed and vulnerable. He nipped his way up the tendons in her neck, stopping at the soft spot under the hinge of her jaw, worrying at it with teeth and tongue.
“No marks,” she gasped.
“Where anyone could see them,” he countered.
“Yes,” she said. He knew what she wanted, marks on her body as temporary as this interlude in her life, bruises and red marks that would fade when he left, leaving only memories.
He bore her back to the bed, their legs still woven together. She arched and writhed, luxuriating in the drastically different and equally compelling sensations of hot, strong, hard man at her front and soft, warm, engulfing leather and sheepskin around her back and arms. He braced his weight on one arm and popped open the front clasp on her bra with the other, then laced his fingers through hers and pinned her hands above her head.
She froze, tremors running from her scalp to her toes. Intellectually she knew sex was about the differences in size and strength between male and female, but this was the first time she really felt it. All it took to immobilize her was the weight of his torso against her hips, and his hands, his callused, rough, scarred hands. She closed her eyes and absorbed the disquieting combination of tenderness and possession, their fingers clasped, her calf draped over his thigh.
He shifted down slightly and scraped his jaw and cheek over her breasts until the lace cups popped free, baring her to his mouth, then soothed the scrapes with the flat of his tongue, licking the soft flesh until her nipples peaked and she was writhing under him, desperate to get his mouth on her nipples.
“Please,” she whispered. “Oh, please.”
He brushed his bristly chin over her nipple, the contact slight enough to tease until he did it again, then again, then licked the sensitized skin, blew on the wet flesh, then closed his teeth over the tip. She arched and cried out, lifting her hips into his thigh, struggling to get her hands free.
His fingers tightened ever so slightly, mostly in warning because there was no way she was getting free unless he let go. He stopped at her breastbone to suck a hot spot into her skin, then blew on it, and moved to her other nipple. By the time he was finished, her body alternated between fierce tension and a lax submission. Her nipples were hot, tender, throbbing with her pulse in the warm, dappled lamplight.
Jack released her hands and sat back on his heels. Sweat dampened the front of his shirt, making it stick as he tried to tug it over his head. With a curse he yanked it free and tossed it to the floor. Dazed, she watched as he unbuckled his belt and opened his fly, giving a little grunt of relief as his cock surged into the newly opened space. Then he reached for her panties and tugged them off, then slid down on his belly, worked his arms under her thighs, and bent his head to her sex.
His tongue circled her clit at the same time his fingers found her nipples. She arched and cried out, suddenly, shockingly aware of how turned on she was, slick, her clit swollen. He licked her open, circled her clit until he found a rhythm and pressure that made her quiver, then pinched her nipples.
She came, back arched like the curve of a harp, shocked, sharp cries tearing from her throat. He licked her through it, then patted her belly gently and sat up. She opened her eyes to see him swipe his cupped hand over his mouth and jaw. His erection pressed against his boxer shorts, the fabric dark and wet in his opened fly. He paused, mid-swipe, and stared at her.
Dangerous. Powerful. Demanding. Orgasm usually left her satiated and loose, but her nerves still thrummed with desire.
“Get your clothes off,” she said, and scrambled backward, going for the condoms in the bedside table.
Denim rasped against hair-roughened legs; when she turned back to him, a condom packet in hand, he was kneeling on the bed, naked and hard. “Oh, God,” she said, and reached for him.
“Don’t even,” he said, and took the condom from her.
Ignoring him, she knee-walked forward until she could cup his balls and trace his hip bones while he rolled the condom down his shaft. She wriggled her shoulders, meaning to take the coat off, but he stopped her.
“Leave it,” he said, and wrapped his arm around her waist and twisted. They ended up with positions reversed, Jack on his back, Erin sprawled on top of him.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
He shifted over a little, lifting her as he did so she straddled him in the center of the bed. “Your turn to do the work,” he said, a little roughly. “Fuck. Look at you.”
She paused in the act of scooting back, blindly seeking his cock, and looked down at herself. Her skin was blotchy and red from her orgasm, with the marks from his stubble and teeth standing out against the fading sex flush. The curls at the top of her sex were damp from her juices and his mouth, and her hands extended from the too-big sleeves of the leather coat to brace against his shoulders. She looked like a train wreck, in all the best ways.
“So … fucking … hot,” he said distractedly as he shifted and lifted his hips in one movement.
She gasped when the blunt tip of his erection pushed against her, seeking entrance. He slid in, slick and easy, the stretch no less shocking than it was the first time they did this. She bit her lower lip and let her head fall back, inhaling a shuddering, pained breath.
“Breathe,” he said. “Fuck, sorry, fuck, exhale. Erin. Exhale.”
More helpfully he let his hips drop back to the bed, pulling out part way, leaving only the tip nestled in the sensitive flesh at her entrance. Air left her lungs the same way it came in, trembling like her arms. Tension seeped from her body, relaxing muscles; she eased down, taking him inside.
They both groaned as she enveloped him, inch by slow inch, his hard cock stretching her soft, slick inner walls, until her hips rested against his. His fingers twitched, tightening against her hips, then relaxing.
“Okay?” he asked after a long, humming moment passed. His voice was tight, and the single word sounded like it was forced out between clenched teeth.
She let her head fall forward, then opened her eyes. Her hair was stuck to her cheeks and lips, partially obscuring her vision, but she could see the dark red flush on his cheekbones, spreading across his chest. “Don’t move,” she whispered.
“No problem,” he said, his gaze roaming from her mouth to her body, shadowed by the enveloping coat. “If I move, it’ll be all over.”
She made an amused sound, the corners of her mouth lifting, but registered these signs of amusement with some distant part of her brain. Right now the rest of her focus was on the way his hip bones jutted against her inner thighs, the brush of coarse hair against her thighs and bottom, the sharp, electric pulses in her sex as her body adjusted to his. Her hands looked like they belonged to someone else, long slender fingers spread over a wall of chest muscle. Experimentally she flexed her fingers, watched white divots appear in his skin.
“Fuck. You keep looking at me like that and I’m done.”
“Close your eyes,” she said.
“No fucking way.”
“What about this?” she whispered, and sat back to shrug the coat from her shoulders to pool at her elbows.
At that his eyes slammed shut, and his hands tightened on her hips to the point of pain. She closed her own eyes and just felt the way his cock pulsed inside her as he fought for control, the murmured curses and what sounded like counting in another language. Eventually some of the tension seeped from his body.
“You’re a tease.”
She opened her eyes and smiled down at him. “Hardly.”
Using his viselike grip on her hips, he urged her into motion. “Slow,” he said. “Take it … fuck … take it easy.”
At first she did, because it pleased her to absorb each shift and glide, feel her body adjust to his cock, her palms slipping on his shoulders as sweat slicked his skin. Then she lifted up a little higher and dropped back down, forcing a groan from his throat. Her breasts bounced with the movement. She sat up straighter, shifting her hands to the bottom of his ribs and did it again. Sensation pulsed to the edges of her skin and beyond, and then she couldn’t stop. She rode him for all she was worth, her entire awareness narrowed to the tight grip of his hands, his hip bones bruising her inner thighs, and his cock blunt and hot inside her.
“Fuck. Erin, I can’t … going to … I’m almost there.”
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, yes, yes!”
She was dimly aware of his heels pushing against the sheets as he shoved up, burying himself deep inside her, then aware only of the contractions of her sex around his. Her entire body tingled as her muscles gave way. Heart pounding, air heaving into and out of her lungs, she slumped against him.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Seconded,” he said with equal feeling.
She laughed and rolled to the side, then shimmied out of his coat, letting it fall across his chest as she stretched and wriggled in the sheets. He chuckled and shoved his coat to the floor. “What are you doing, wild woman?”
“What feels good,” she said, and pointed her feet until her toes cracked. “I’m doing what feels good.”
“Go on with your bad self,” he said, and heaved himself out of bed. He came back with a wet washcloth for her, then thoughtfully disappeared while she used it, returning with two glasses of water in one big hand and half a chocolate pie in the other. “I had a look in the fridge,” he said. “I hope that’s okay.”
“If you’d reappeared with two apples or my fat-free cottage cheese, it would definitely be a problem,” she said, taking the pie plate from him. Two dessert forks sat in the graham cracker crust and whipped cream. Picking one up, she licked it clean then traded it to him for a glass of water. She drank half the water, then dug into the pie.
“So, Jack Powell, why did you leave the Navy?” she asked, because after fabulous, bone-melting sex resulting in two orgasms, she could say anything.
In answer, he held out his right hand. She watched it tremble and twitch until he made a fist, then opened his hand again. Still trembling.
“Is that from exertion?”
He laughed, but the sound wasn’t actually amused. “That was great sex. Really great sex. Unfortunately I’ve been dealing with the tremors for a while.”
She held out her hand in response. Her fingers quivered a little. “It was enough to make me shake,” she said.
“I’m trained to handle the worst. I’m failing.”
Calm and collected, she sectioned off another chunk of the pie. “Want to talk about it?”
Normally, no. With her, he did. “A friend died. Bled out in front of me,” he said, then stopped to get himself under control. “It’s happened before. We’ve all lost friends, teammates, men we call brothers. I’d come back from dozens of good outcomes and bad outcomes completely fine. I came back from the last one with a classic case of combat nerves.”
“Hence the paper on PTSD treatments?”
He nodded. “I thought if I quit the Navy, took a break, I’d get better,” he said. “So far I’m not. Depends on the day, how tired I am. I don’t sleep much. Or well.”
The conversation had taken a sharp turn from playful to serious. She broke off a piece of crust and popped it in her mouth. “That’s why you fall asleep in the library.”
“It’s quiet there. Warm. I just shut down,” he said.
She looked at him. “You don’t seem all that upset about it.”
“I am,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Thanks to several months of therapy, I can tell you that I’m both angry and scared. The one thing I’ve always been able to trust is my body. It’s never, ever let me down. All the crazy-ass shit I used to do when I was a kid, BUD/S, eight years on the teams, my body did whatever I asked of it. As strong as I was physically, my mind was stronger. Now it’s not, and I have no fucking clue who I am without that control.” He tossed the fork onto the plate, then held up his hand again. “I was supposed to go into security work when I left the Navy. I had a job lined up, even rented an apartment in Istanbul. But with this, I’m a liability, not an asset.”
One hand halfway between the pie plate and her open mouth, she stared at him. “Jack. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “You’re not the only one who wants to explore limits. Apparently I have new ones, and I need to find them.”
The smile he flashed her was a shadow of the one he usually wore. She looked at the man sprawled in her borrowed bed, really looked at him. He was a Navy SEAL, a trained warrior, and just a man, too.
“I should go,” he said, sliding off the edge of the bed in a delicious shift of muscles and bone.
“You can stay,” she said with a glance at the clock.
“Thanks, but I meant it when I said I don’t sleep so good. I don’t want to keep you awake.”
“I sleep really well here,” she said, looking around. “I didn’t, for most of my marriage. I always slept best when Jason was on a business trip. I thought it was just the hassle of sharing a bed, but now, I wonder…”
“Wonder what?”
She wondered if she slept well in Nora’s house because she was meant to be living Nora’s life. “What would this be like, to have lived this life?” she said, not quite answering the question. Every inch of the house held some meaningful object, a memory, a connection to a life lived fully, vibrantly, completely.
He paused in the act of untangling his underwear and jeans. “What do you mean?”
“I could have rented an apartment,” she said. “I came out of the divorce with not much in the way of material possessions, but I make a decent income. I could be in my own apartment, or in a little renovated Craftsman on the East Side. But when Nora offered me the house, I jumped at the chance. Jason thinks it’s because I could save money, but I wanted … I thought maybe her things would rub off on me in some way.”
It sounded incredibly stupid when she said it out loud, like she was a little girl trying on her mother’s clothes or makeup. What thirty-four-year-old woman didn’t know who she was?
“‘You’re breaking your word,’” she said. “That’s what he’d say to me, over and over. Until death do us part. Over and over and over. He wanted me to keep my word even more than he wanted me to be true to myself. But now all I hear in my head is his voice. You said … you said … you said. That’s why I want the motorcycle. The motorcycle somehow became this sore spot in our relationship. Like a bruise that just wouldn’t heal.”
Jack dropped his jeans and boxer briefs and put his hands on his hips. “I normally make like Switzerland when it comes to divorces, but you do realize that your ex-husband was a stifling asshole.”
She gave him a rueful little smile. “And you do realize that when you subject your body and mind to extreme situations, you’ll change.”
A bitter laugh huffed out. “The training to become a SEAL is supposed to knock that out of you.”
“And love is supposed to conquer all,” she said lightly.
“Looks like we’re both trying to learn to trust again,” he said. “I am not this person, someone who quits out of weakness.”
“It’s not the same as what you’ve been through, but … I trusted my love. I thought it would last forever. Something just changed inside me, deep inside. After a while I could look at certain things he did or said, attitudes, and say That’s why I want a divorce, but the truth is that it happened in my body before my brain caught up with it. Like my body knew before I did that something was wrong.… I was a person who kept her word, until I didn’t. Couldn’t.” She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I’m going to be that person again.”
“Your ex-husband sounds like a real piece of work,” he said. “Look, there’s nothing…”
His voice faded in Erin’s hearing. For a long moment she stopped thinking and just stared at his frankly incredible body. He wasn’t muscle-bound, but his body conveyed a deadly competence she found beyond sexy.
“Erin.”
“What?” she said distractedly.
“My eyes are up here,” he said, amusement roughening his voice.
“Oh my God,” she said, mortified, and dragged her gaze up the length of his torso to his face. “Sorry.”
For the second time he plucked his jeans and boxers from the floor, shook them out, and this time stepped into them, a prudent decision given her inability to focus when he was naked. “I said, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want your life to be different, you find someone who can show you the way. Someone like me,” he finished, flashing her a cocky smile as he buttoned his fly.
She backpedaled. “You really don’t have to do that. It’s not … I’m … I got used to wanting things. I want to have them. They’re not big things. I don’t want to win an Academy Award or be on a reality TV show. I want—”
“You don’t have to justify what you want. Not to me. Not to anyone.”
The last words came through the waffle weave of his shirt. In the second before his head emerged, she realized that the thing about short-term flings was that she had to take what was on offer right now, before he worked out whatever rattled him and went back to his work. Which he would. The thought of Jack Powell staying in Lancaster was laughable. And the temporary nature of what they had made her daring. “So,” she said, clearing her throat and sitting up. “The weather’s going to clear up tonight. We’ve got a nice stretch of sunny days coming up. Perfect bike-buying weather.”
“And skydiving weather,” he added. “I’ve got some experience jumping out of planes. I could do your tandem jump.”
“Some experience?”
“Some,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
“You’d do that with me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No big deal. I’ll call my friend, set up a date for a jump.”
“Great,” she said. “That’d be great.”
He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss that turned deep, hot, when she gripped his nape.
“You’ve got a mouth made for sin,” she murmured when they broke apart. She trailed the backs of her fingers along his jaw, then let her hand drop when he straightened.
“So do you,” he said. “See you later.”