Page 31 of Twister

He found his voice in the chaos of all that panic, “You,” he rasped out, the painful truth hurting as well as healing. “I need you.” He lifted his hand, touched her face, needing her all over him, until he couldn’t think.

He ran his thumb across her lips and felt his breath tighten in his chest. He lowered his mouth to hers, and she slid her tongue over his, and he closed his eyes at the way she eased that constriction in his chest. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t…”

“It’s all right. Lean on me. I’ve got you, Shane.” The water poured down on both of them, and the curls of steam immersed them in a sultry warmth. “Hold on and do what you need to do.”

Gratitude washed over him, gratitude and something else, something so real, it took his breath again. She was an angel. He cupped her face, feeling both so elated and so miserable at the same time. He opened his mouth wider, asking for more, and she gave it to him, moving deeper into his arms. An aching surge of pleasure galvanized him, the cleanest, most pure feeling he’d ever felt, and he let himself fall, just fall into her, into the deep amber pools of her eyes.

She was everything he needed, everything about her turned him on, and he wanted her hands on him. He pulled her against him, fighting off a little surge of panic. “Touch me, Sadie. I want it.”

She was warm and giving, and his mind focused on those things, and this woman beneath his hands. Another surge of panic sizzled into his veins, and he held her tighter, kissed her harder—too hard. She made a soft noise in her throat. Dammit, he cursed and broke off the kiss. He rested his head against hers, his heart pounding. He immediately loosened his hold, afraid of hurting her, bruising her.

He was so freaking whacked, with a raging hard-on, and a full-blown panic attack pushing him so hard mentally, it was like nothing he’d ever faced before. He was sliding off the deep end into nowhere, and he needed her to hold onto him.

Instead, she pushed him back, stretched up, and opened her mouth on his neck, pressing lingering kisses and licks against his skin. She ran her hands over his biceps, the curve of his pectorals, and around to his back. The water was starting to run cool, but he welcomed the relief against his burning skin. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if that would somehow block out the awful sense of panic buzzing at the back of his brain.Suck it up, he told himself—he had the most beautiful woman devouring him.

Then her mouth moved down his chest, slipped over his flat nipple and sucked him hard, then grazed the tip with the edge of her teeth. A groan rumbled up from his chest as she moved lower, spreading hot, wet kisses on his taut, flat belly, torturing every few kisses by brushing his dick with her full breasts. Each light caress tormented him with the promise of more.

She nuzzled his abs, and before he could inhale his next ragged breath, she had her fingers wrapped tight around his aching erection.

His entire body shuddered, no longer caught in the panic attack, and he clenched his hand into her hair while it started to dawn on him how much power this woman had over him. He felt so freaking foolish and so goddamned turned on…and so, so much better. Especially when she had him in that tight, mind-bending grip of hers.

He looked down the length of his body to where she had dropped to her knees, and he needed to see her face. Tightening his hold in her hair, he pulled her head back. She stared up at him, and for a heart-stopping moment, their eyes held. In that instant, Twister experienced the most astounding sensation that the empty, lonely parts of him fused with the empty, lonely parts of her. A sensation of wholeness dropped over him like a shot of adrenaline into his system, so intense. He felt fiercely close to her, a savage kind of harmony he’d never encountered with anybody else except his teammates. But his fellowship with them wasn’t as intimate as this beautiful, natural union with her, and the effect staggered him. She fed his soul, and in that instant, he realized all that he might have missed if he hadn’t met her.

He drew a ragged breath, and his gaze slid to her sweet lips. “Fuck me with that beautiful mouth of yours,” he whispered.Claim me, he urged silently. It was her right to the spoils. She was remaking him into a man he didn’t quite know just yet, but he was determined to work at finding a way to understand all of it. Right now, his mind was a sensual jumble, his body ruling anything his mind could conjure up. He was lost in a way that felt too damn good to let go of.

Her eyes flashed a darker, richer amber, her pupils dilating as her features softened into tenderness, anticipation, and then hardened into determination. He couldn’t get enough of it. He held her gaze as she ran her fisted hand over his shaft, his hips helplessly thrusting in rhythm to her sweet strokes. Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, she skimmed her thumb up overthe tip of his dick, slick from his aching arousal, lubricating the sensitive head.

He turned off the water that had gone almost cold, releasing his hold as she tugged her head forward, her focus sending his body into a taut anticipation, everything about him so hard, and everything about her so soft, sharing something between them that had more to do with life than all the death that had surrounded him. He ached for her without even knowing her, ached for her touch to bring him out of the shadows, out of the rubble, away from the panic, the shame, the remorse.

He groaned, his head falling back, his hips thrusting forward as she used her tongue in one of the most sensual explorations of his anatomy he had ever experienced. So sharply sweet and keenly arousing, riding him with her mouth with infinite finesse, infinite tenderness, in ways that surprised and tantalized the hell out of him, all but turning him inside out. She hummed her pleasure against his sensitive organ, playing him so thoroughly he thought he would lose his mind, fighting the overpowering, rippling, agonizing urge to come.

But now it was his turn to claim, and he wasn’t going to leave any of that shit to chance. He needed to get inside her, now, and the urgent, desperate desire drove him to reach down, clasp her under the arms, and drag her up his body in one move, then push her back against the tiled shower in the next. Her eyes widened, and before she could gasp her next breath, he lifted her leg, wrapping it around his thigh, found her sweet box, and shoved himself into her. She closed her eyes, her hips automatically conforming to his, moaning loud and low when his thumb rubbed against her clit.

He pulled out, then glided to the hilt again in the incredibly wet and aroused glove of her body. He pinned her between his hard, aroused body and the shower stall. Their eyes met and held, hers filled with thick desire and something he couldn’tdefine but which filled him full to bursting. He watched as she gasped over and over, arching into him when he continued to pound into her. Her sweet breasts were crushed against his chest, her knee riding his hip, and the urge to possess her in the most elemental way made him growl with an intensity that filled every pore, emotions flooding him, so many he couldn’t sort them all out. They mingled with his uncontrollable thrusts, taking her, claiming her for himself because he had never understood how much intensity there really was in life. All that he had shunned.

She wrapped her hands around his biceps, squeezing them with each hard penetration of his body as he surged into her over and over, tearing another moan from her throat as she convulsed around him in a powerful orgasm that made her body quiver. With each thrust, he grew harder, thicker, until that swell of need collided with her sweet response.

He sealed his mouth back over hers, sucking on her tongue and matching the rhythm of their bodies, feeling himself losing his way, allowing himself to be consumed by the heat and power surging through him, let her tenderness and sweetness burn through him—until there was only her, coming with a soft cry, holding him, her body tightening around him, and this time taking him with her.

The pleasure was intense, soul-shattering, almost more than he could bear. It stripped him down to his core, and in the aftermath, when it faded and left him naked and unprotected in her arms, something deep and terrible broke inside him. He felt it happen, like a wall so tall and thick cracking and tumbling down right through the middle of him.

He sucked in a breath against her lips, tried to stop it—but it was too late…too late.

Sadie felthim suddenly go still in her arms, so still she worried that she’d somehow hurt him. Then she tasted it, the warm, wet saltiness of his tears.

Oh, no, not this sweet, strong man. They were streaming down his face onto hers, running over her lips and breaking her heart. Not a move, not a sound escaped him.

Only the tears.

She held him, not moving herself, feeling so awful for him, worried that he might crumble if she so much as breathed. All she could do was hold him, give him the time and space to work out what had caused this. She wanted answers, but peppering him with questions now wasn’t the way to handle this kind of meltdown.

When he kissed her, lightly rubbing his lips over hers, she thought maybe he was coming around. Then, he was getting to a better place. She kissed him back, and he moved his mouth to her cheek, and in the split second before he spoke, she realized this was only the beginning of his personal storm.

“I almost died.” His voice was so soft, so raspy, his arms holding her so tightly.

Her gut clenched at those words, anguish forming in her heart and mind. Oh, God, no. He was meant to be here with her. She could feel it like her bones were a tuning fork to his voice.

“I didn’t know this was possible. I’ve been so closed, so rigid. I didn’t know how to be anyone else.” He eased in a hard breath. “Until you.”

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