Of course it wouldn’t be. Joe was highly sexed, a creature of lust when it came to his pleasure. That didn’t mean it was love. Did it? Or could it?
“I think I’m very much afraid you’re playing one hell of a game with me,” she admitted the possibility to herself. “You terrify me, Joe, simply because you hold the power to destroy me in the palms of your hands. And if you’ve already judged me guilty, you wouldn’t hesitate to use whatever weapons you could come by. Even lying.”
His eyes narrowed on her; the distance of the bed between them suddenly seemed much farther and much more difficult to cross than it had been even days before.
“You’re right,” he finally answered. “If I thought you were lying, if I thought you were involved, nothing would save you, Maggie. But I haven’t lied to you. I don’t believe you were involved.”
“You’ve just suddenly found all this love for me that wasn’t there two and a half years ago?” She jerked her long shirt from the floor and pulled it on with shaking hands.
“It was always there, Maggie.” He didn’t bother to pull his sweatpants on, he just stood facing her, aroused and proud and so damned confident she wanted to throw something at him.
Her smile was mocking as she shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you, Joe.”
A frown jerked between his brows. “Oh, really?”
The dangerous undertone of his voice wasn’t exactly a comfortable sound.
“Really.” Maggie ignored the nerves building in the pit of her stomach as she faced him.
She had never truly challenged Joe, not in anything he said or the parameters of their relationship. Confrontations weren’t her first choice in solving anything, but as she stared back at him she realized that this particular confrontation had been coming since he had taken her from the police station.
“You don’t want to do this right now, Maggie,” he warned her quietly. The velvet softness of his voice was a sure sign that his temper was rousing.
“I don’t want to push you, period, Joe.” She turned from him, bending to pick up her pajama bottoms before putting them on. “It’s not worth the heartache you can deliver. But I stopped believing in fairy tales two and a half years ago.” She turned back to him, fighting the need to believe him even as she doubted him. “Especially yours.”
She didn’t expect his sudden response. Joe always handled himself calmly. Coolly. He never lost control. Until that moment.
The change came over his expression so suddenly that Maggie had no chance to react. From one second to the next the easygoing facade was stripped. His dark eyes narrowed, the flesh along his cheekbones tightened, and he had vaulted onto the bed, crossing it in one step before he was in front of her.
Turning to run wasn’t really an option, but she tried anyway. With a squeak of alarm she turned and tried to jump for the safety of the bathroom, only to feel the manacle of his heavily muscled arm wrap around her waist as he pushed her against the wall.
“You stopped believing in my fucking fairy tales?” His voice was a hoarse snarl at her ear as she felt her heart rate increase, the blood suddenly thundering erratically through her veins. Not from fear. There was no fear as his hands literally ripped the T-shirt from her body and flung the scraps aside, all the while holding her in place as she struggled against him.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled out, more from shock than any other emotion. Where the hell had this Joe come from? She could feel the anger, the lust, and more. Some added edge to his touch that had her heart leaping in hope.
His hands were gentle despite their commanding strength, his body controlling her, even as it stroked against her. This was no act. She could feel it in his hands, in the sudden, dominant hunger blazing in the air around them.
“Believe in this fairy tale then, damn you,” he snarled at her ear as the straining length of his cock pressed into the crevice of her buttocks. “You want reality, by God? This is reality, Maggie. I can’t bear another woman’s touch, and knowing you slept in that bastard’s bed ate into my guts like fucking acid. My best goddamned friend, and all I wanted to do was slip into his bed and fuck his wife until she screamed my name and begged me for more. Is that enough reality for you?”
She was panting for him, in the space of seconds just as aroused, just as hungry for him as he obviously was for her. She could feel the pulsing, driving lust in the engorged length of his throbbing erection as he moved back, then spread her thighs further apart.
“You make me fucking crazy.”
One hard, desperate thrust filled her with his flesh, took her to her tiptoes and had her crying out his name.
“Joe, please …”
“Yes,” he snapped, his voice thick with lust. “Joe. It’s Joe, Maggie. It’s Joe fucking you and it’s Joe that’s going to make you come. Come for me, baby. Oh God … Maggie.”
He stilled as she felt him inside her, bare, the latex barrier he normally wore no longer there.
“Shit. Oh hell, Maggie, you feel so fucking good.”
He was lost. Joe knew he was lost and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. The bitterness and pain in her voice and her expression as she doubted the emotions that had tortured him for so long, had broken his control. Control he had built for his own sanity, control he had sworn he would never lose with Maggie.
But there he was, his dick buried full length inside her, as bare as hell, throbbing with the need to spurt his semen inside her. No condom. Some primal instinct inside him screamed out the denial as he clenched his teeth and fought to pull back, only to return in a thrust that ripped the breath from his body.
“Oh fuck, it’s so good,” he whispered at her ear as he held her hands to the wall, shifted his hips, and stroked the brutally tight tissue clasping him. “Maggie, baby. You’re so sweet and soft. So hot …”
He didn’t know how to let her go. He knew he should, he needed to. This was a risk he shouldn’t be taking, a risk he should have never allowed. But he couldn’t release her. God, he couldn’t let her go.
“Joe …” There was a sense of wonderment in her voice. The cynicism was stripped away, the doubt gone. Innocence filled her tone, the same innocence he heard the night he took her virginity.
Hell, he had been just as shocked then as he was now by the sound of it. A woman nearly twenty-six years old should not be a virgin in this day and age. But Maggie had been. She had laughingly told him she was just waiting on a man who could do more than make her tingle. One who could make her desperate. And he made her desperate.