Page 12 of I Dream of Danger
He’d headed south, to Fort Bragg.
Why did you leave us? Elle asked. He’d left because he was unworthy to stay in that house one more minute, but Nick didn’t know how to say that.
He also didn’t know how to watch Elle cry. It unmanned him, made his stomach swoop with distress. Worse than that first jump out of a plane.
“Why?” Elle asked again, and reached out for his hand.
There was no resisting her. He wouldn’t have done anything five years ago. She’d been a young girl. His body had betrayed him. Luckily he’d known better than to give his body what it wanted.
But now? She wasn’t a young girl, she was a woman, and blindingly beautiful. She was no longer the pretty girl of privilege…she was a beautiful woman who had suffered. Overly thin, unsmiling, stunning.
Absolutely irresistible.
When her small hand closed around his, he felt an electric shock go up his arm and his body betrayed him all over again. A nuclear reaction he was totally unable to control.
He stood up so fast his chair fell over, and pulled her into his arms so hard he could feel the breath leaving her body, but it didn’t make any difference because she could breathe through his mouth, through him.
And oh, how she tasted. Like honey. All those years of fucking other women and he hadn’t allowed himself once to wonder how Elle tasted. Not once, not while he was awake. His dreams…ah, that was something else. In his dreams he wondered, in his dreams he sometimes felt her presence, but this was nothing like his dreams—it was a million times better.
She was struggling against him, but he was so blasted with lust it took some time for him to catch on. She was fighting him, trying to get away…
Oh God.
It was his worst nightmare, worse than when the Judge caught him staring at her and getting an erection. Because then it was just between him and the Judge. Now he was getting the message from her, from Elle, and he was a hair’s breadth from coming, while being intensely ashamed.
This was Elle.
He lifted his mouth, opened his arms, stepped back, feeling like shit.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he began, when she threw herself back into his arms, mouth awkwardly searching for his.
Oh. He’d been holding her arms down, and she wanted to hold on to him.
She been standing on tiptoe to kiss him, and dropped back down onto her heels. Nick looked down at her, nearly blinded by the fact that she was so beautiful and…she was Elle.
Her hair had escaped the French braid and formed a soft, pale-blonde halo around her head, just as it had all those years ago.
She lifted a hand from his shoulder to cup his jaw, then her fingers traced his face. From forehead to cheekbone, down over his jaw and neck. “Nick,” she whispered.
He braced himself for more questions but she didn’t say anything, just lifted herself back up to his mouth. He took the kiss over from there.
She tasted so fucking good. So good he was starting to get aroused. There was no way Elle could miss it either—she was plastered up against him. She rolled her hips against him, and he groaned as he came to a full erection, a woodie so hard it fucking hurt.
Which was crazy because he’d been getting laid on a regular basis at the training camp in Fort Benning. Everyone told him to get as much tail as humanly possible during training, since there were no opportunities on ops, and even if there were, he’d be too strung-out and exhausted to take advantage. So he’d been on a tear.
Right now, it felt like he’d never had sex before in his life.
Elle was like a cat in his arms, open to him in every way, rubbing sinuously against him. He put a hand under her ass, lifted her a little and groaned when he felt her heat against his dick. He was holding her so tightly he could feel her mound through the thin layer of her pants and panties. She was a furnace there, emanating heat like a sun. He shifted her a bit and felt the lips of her sex open over him. She swung her hips forward and rode him, driving him crazy. If they didn’t have clothes on, he’d be inside her.
Maybe he should dial this down a notch? It was crazy—they were practically fucking in the kitchen he’d eaten so many meals in, in this cold house on a cold November afternoon. And they’d reached this point in about a minute flat. Lips eating at each other, hips grinding together, one hand under her ass, the other cupping her small breast.
Their breathing filled the room, the sounds of their mouths catching, lifting, coming together again echoing, and he was grinding against her, his mouth and his hips…
Down boy! he told himself. Jesus, act like the gentleman you’re not. He was about ready to loosen his arms, put her back on the floor, step back, give them time to think this through, when she said, “Take me to bed, Nick.”
And he was lost.
It was exactly like in her dreams. The phantasmagorical ones, the ones other people had. Exactly. Except of course for the circumstances. They were never in her kitchen and it was never so cold, but everything else—oh yes, everything else was the same.
