“This deal. It involves us only,” he told her as he threw the glass in the garbage and kept his back to her. “No one else.”
When she didn’t speak, he turned and stared back at her.
What the hell had been wrong with him the night he had taken her? He had known that Crista wasn’t the sharing kind. She was a one-man woman, just like Kelly.
“Why can’t you just let me go? You owe me that, Dawg.”
Yeah, he owed her. If his dreams were anything close to what had actually happened, then he owed her a hell of a lot more than he could ever repay.
“You owe me as well,” he told her coolly. “All I have are fragmented dreams that drive me f**king crazy. Whatever we started eight years ago, we’ll finish this summer. One way or the other.”
Nothing on earth could convince him to let her out of his sight now. Possessiveness, desire, and emotions he hadn’t felt in so many years he barely remembered them rose to the surface of his consciousness. Emotions he felt in those dreams. Something softer, more tender, and yet a thousand times hotter than lust alone. He wouldn’t call it love; he had assured himself years ago that love didn’t exist. Besides, this went deeper than anything he had heard love described as.
“Just like that.” Bitterness curled at her lips. “As though the fact that I don’t want to finish anything doesn’t matter.”
“It wouldn’t be blackmail if it did.” He shrugged, fighting back the guilt he could feel building in his gut. “If you wanted to pay the price, then it wouldn’t be such a dirty word, would it?”
She stared at him with big dark eyes filled with hurt and made him wish he were someone other than who he was.
“Tell me something,” he asked her then. “That night we had, did you at least enjoy it?”
Her gaze flickered away as sharp heat filled her face.
“That’s not the point.”
“If my dreams are anything to go by, you were just as hot for it as I was. Tell me I’m wrong, Crista. Tell me you hated it.”
He moved toward her then, watching as her head snapped back and her eyes tracked his progress across the room.
She didn’t retreat; she couldn’t be frightened of him. She stared back at him defiantly, her hands clenched at her sides, her expression mutinous.
She wanted to say she hated it, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been able to lie worth a damn when she was younger, and she couldn’t do it now.
“It was hot, wasn’t it, Crista?” He stopped within inches of her, his hand cupping her arm, smoothing down it to her wrist before he lifted her hand to his shoulder and gripped her waist. “So hot we burned down the night. That’s what I dream. That you’re wet and wild, screwing me with the same crazy lust I’m screwing you with.”
Her face flamed brighter.
“And you slipped out on me that morning, didn’t you? Just ran away, like the scared little girl you were.”
Her eyes flashed with anger.
“I’m not a plaything for the Nauti Boys. Not then and not now.”
“And you were too scared to stick around and fight for the singular position, too, weren’t you, Crista. What happened, baby? Did it get too hot?”
“Fight for Dawg?” She widened her eyes as though mocking him. She tried to mock him, but he saw the pleasure she was fighting to hide as he drew her closer, nudging his c**k against her lower belly and feeling the muscles clench. “Why fight over something every other woman in the county had already had?”
Dawg smiled. “You were scared.”
“I was disinterested.” She couldn’t lie. He heard the tremor in her voice, saw her grimace as she acknowledged it.
He shook his head at her as he allowed the fingers of his free hand to twine into those long, silky strands of hair. Soft, fragrant hair. In his dreams it had twined around him, snaring him, binding him to her. And it had never let him go.
“Are you more interested now?” The hand at her waist bunched the material of the shirt in it.
He was going to have her. He was going to touch her, taste her, feel her come apart in his arms.
“Dawg please…” Her voice trembled then.
Dark eyes stared back at him almost pleadingly as the shirt cleared her thighs and rose higher.
“Please what, Crista Ann?” He lowered his head until he could inhale the scent of her. Sweet vanilla and wild roses. She always smelled of vanilla and wild roses to him.
That elusive little scent wasn’t enough though. He had to taste her. His lips touched the silken flesh of her neck, his tongue tasting her flesh, and he swore he saw stars as the taste of her exploded against his tongue.
His arm came around her back, lifting her to him as primal hunger replaced the careful seduction he had intended.
He pulled her head back, covered her lips with his own, and found the fiery heat he had been searching for, for eight damn years.
And son of a bitch if it wasn’t worth waiting for. She exploded in his arms. A shudder rushed through her, then her hands were twining in his hair, pulling at the thick strands, and pulling his lips harder against hers.
God, she made him feel. Made him feel things he couldn’t remember ever feeling, except in his dreams. Dreams of her. Dreams of heat and primal pleasure and sensations he couldn’t have imagined really existed.
But they existed here with her in his arms, her body straining toward him, her whimper of pleasure and distress filling his ears as his tongue parted her lips and delved inside.
Fiery sweetness. Spicy ice. She was every contradiction in the world, and his blood raced at the defiance, the challenge, and the sheer response he felt radiating from her.
Crista tried to tell herself she could fight the attraction, the pleasure. Before he touched her, she tried to convince herself she could hold herself aloof from him.
Until his eyes had dilated with pleasure and he had pulled her to him. Until his lips touched her neck; then that hungry moan had left his lips a second before his kiss rocked her mind.
This was a very bad thing. Starbursts of pleasure were exploding inside her bloodstream as she fought herself, fought her response to him, and failed.
Oh how she failed. She was trying to climb into his body instead, to burn in the center of a sensation so hot, so dark and heated she was lost beneath it.
“Off!” His lips lifted from hers only long enough to whisk the shirt from her arms and over her head before she could react. Before she could stop him. Then he was bending to her, his lips moving unerringly for the tight, too-sensitive ni**les lifting to his lips as though they had craved this caress for eight years.