He was dressed in street clothes. Jeans and T-shirt, leather coat and boots. His broad shoulders looked a mile wide. His thighs powerful, his legs long and strong.
The moment her gaze traveled over him she could feel her pu**y creaming, her cl*t throbbing, her ni**les tightening and hardening, and her entire body sensitizing.
She knew arousal. She had been thirteen the first time she’d felt that breathlessness. At fourteen she’d become aware of her body when she saw him. Rafer, Logan, and Crowe had come home for a week because of yet another lawsuit the Corbins, Raffertys, and Robertses had lodged against their inheritances. When he had, he’d made sure to find a few moments to say hello.
The summer she turned fifteen, they were back again. That year, Rafe had danced with her at the Spring Fling Social. He had entered the festivities, walked straight to her in his black evening suit, and asked her to dance.
He’d asked her how she was doing, how school was. He’d asked her about her parents, about her aunt and uncle. He’d asked her if she needed anything and she’d wanted to cry because all she could think of was how much she had missed him and the fact that it felt so nice to be in his arms. She wanted to be there forever.
The next four years were variations of the same theme, except with each year, with each phase of her own sexual maturity, Cami had come to recognize the signs of arousal, of need, of awakening sensuality whenever she saw him. Over the years she’d seen him several times, and as she matured, those meetings had become even more heated, then explosive, until it had finally flamed out of control.
Until he had stood on the other side of the table at an airport that had nearly been deserted, for once, chance working in the favor of the travelers to provide the majority with accommodations in the nearby hotels. Unfortunately she hadn’t been part of the majority.
“Stranded, Cami?” he repeated the question, his gaze somber but lit with an inner glow of hunger. That glow had been there since the summer she had turned eighteen and slipped out to a street dance in Denver the night she and her aunt had stayed over.
It was there between them, like a live current, pulsing beneath their flesh. He kissed her that night and nothing had been the same since.
“Yes,” she whispered, breathless. She was always breathless around him. Always filled with anticipation and need.
He held out his hand.
A strong, broad palm, his fingers looking powerful, capable, and God help her all she could think about was how it would feel if they were stroking between her thighs, parting the lips of her pu**y, rimming the juice-saturated slit of her entrance.
The need for it was so strong, so striking, she was forced to press her thighs together, wishing there was some way to ease the sudden, unbidden throbbing of her clit.
But nothing could have kept her from taking his hand and letting him pull her from the hard plastic stool she had been sitting on.
Their gazes locked, hunger rushing through her body, the need to touch him clamoring through her senses. The feel of his palm, calloused and warm surrounding hers, sent a spike of sensation shooting straight to her womb.
A sensitivity she had never felt before, a need, rose inside her, dark and so sexual, so overriding she could barely keep from begging him to take her at that moment.
“Such hungry eyes,” he whispered. “Every year they’re darker, more mysterious, and always filled with that hunger. Tell me, Cami, how much darker and hungrier could they get?”
Like a switch flipping on, a breaker sending electricity surging through her body, Cami felt the arousal heightening uncontrollably.
She could barely breathe. Getting enough oxygen simply wasn’t going to happen. She had waited so long for the intensity of the hunger she saw in his eyes now. She had endured three years, three hard kisses that had grown in intensity. The awareness that his control was stronger than his need for her, and the knowledge that her body refused to accept any other man.
“Have you made me wait long enough?” she asked him then, realizing in that moment the delicate dance they had been weaving with each other since the summer she turned eighteen was now beginning to whirl out of control.
His gaze slid slowly to her lips as he took a single step to her. As he held her hand with one of his, the other slid into her hair, all the while his eyes holding hers captive, mesmerizing her, drawing her into a vortex of sensation that laid waste to any objections she could have thought of. Not that she had intentions of thinking of any.
His head lowered as he cupped her cheek, held her still, then brushed his lips over hers.
She was a virgin, but she wasn’t completely ignorant of her own body, her needs, or the arousal that just the thought of Rafe could inspire inside her.
There, in the middle of a nearly deserted coffee shop, his lips slowly pressed against hers, his tongue parting her lips licking against them. He must have dropped the duffel bag, because she felt his arm curve around her h*ps and pull her closer as the kiss began to deepen.
It was exploratory and knowing. It was rife with demand and acquisition. Rafer demanded and Cami had no choice but to submit. The effect he had on her wouldn’t have allowed her to turn away. The pleasure he gave her, the heat that rushed through her senses and swept over her body, was simply too addictive to deny.
It seemed more a dream than reality.
On the drive from the airport to Rafer’s hotel in the four-wheel drive he’d had waiting for him, the blizzard raged around them, at times so heavy it seemed to surround them in their own little world.
Once they reached his room—
Cami’s breath caught in sharp remembrance. Sensation tore through her, clenching in the depths of her newly awakened flesh, her cl*t throbbing.
Tearing herself away from him had been all but impossible. As she flagged down a cab and stepped inside, she still couldn’t believe she had actually managed to do it.
He had to have been exhausted.
No, that wasn’t it.
With a heavy heart she admitted the truth.
He’d pretended to sleep and he’d allowed her to slip away.
And she was too big a coward to even guess why.
* * *
Rafe watched Cami slide into the cab, saw her gaze lift to the window where he stood carefully behind the curtain and narrowed his eyes on her thoughtfully.
He’d let her leave. Everything inside his soul had demanded he hold on to her, that he tighten his arms around her and f**k her until she was too damned tired to try to slip from him while she thought he slept.