Bad Girl by Night, page 11
As he moved in behind her, though, he found himself wishing he’d gotten her out of that long pajama top completely—he yearned to have her naked body in front of him right now; he wanted to see the arch of her back, the curve of her ass, the muscles in her shoulders. So he found himself running his palms over her round bottom, up under the shirt, feeling the valley created by her waist, the smooth rise of her back following the slant of the stairs. He heard her sigh, just from those simple touches, and it sent a warm tingle down his spine.
But he wanted inside her again too much to linger, so he grabbed onto her backside with both hands, positioned his cock, and slid it in, smooth, deep. A guttural moan left her, and he felt it in his chest. And then he began to thrust again.
This had started as mindless, reckless fucking, but now he was able to think more, to feel. Every hot drive of his dick sent a burst of pleasure through his abdomen, up into his solar plexus. Low groans left him with each stroke as he drank in everything amazing about the moment: from her gorgeous body to her shockingly welcoming attitude, from the way the shadows fell across her form to the knowledge that they were doing it in a dark room without ever even having exchanged a word.
He gritted his teeth as he fucked her harder, harder, made her cry out with each intense thrust. He soon got lost in the pure, driving pleasure, lost in the hard, rhythmic plunges into her hot flesh. And then he was letting out low cries in time with hers, gripping her ass, hammering relentlessly, again, again, again—until . . . aw God, there it was, it was rising inside him, unstoppable, yeah, yeah . . . A ferocious growl sprung from his throat as the orgasm blasted through him, as rough and jagged as the sex itself, nearly rocking him off his foundations as he exploded in her sweet cunt. God, yesssss.
In front of him, she went still, and he slumped over on top of her.
Everything was quiet but for the ticking of a clock somewhere. Then a car passed by on the street. They weren’t the only two people alive, after all, even though it had strangely felt that way for a few minutes.
Damn. Jake had thought what they’d done with Colt was intense, but this . . . this was somehow more; this was the most intense fuck of his life.
Finally, he forced himself up off her—he turned to sit on one of the steps, leaning back to balance his elbows on a higher one as he returned to himself, got some strength and brains back.
When she rolled to her side on the steps to face him, he waited for her to say something. And when she didn’t, he asked, “Aren’t you gonna tell me to leave or go to hell or something?”
A small breath escaped her. Then possibly the softest voice he’d ever heard left her lips. “No.” Just that.
“Are you okay?” He didn’t mean it in a smart-ass way—he sincerely wondered if she was all right.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“Just so you know, I didn’t come here to fuck you.”
“What did you come here for?”
“To yell at you.”
She raised her gaze gently to his in the dark. “Fucking’s better than yelling.”
The surprising reply made him grin. “Damn straight.”
Finally, she sat up on the same step as him and began to pull her pajama top around her.
He touched her knee. “Don’t.” When she stopped, looked over at him, he explained, “Your body’s beautiful and you don’t need to hide it, not with me.” Then he sighed, feeling a little guilty as he added, “And I don’t think you have buttons anymore anyway. Sorry about that.”
“I’ll live.”
He didn’t quite know what was going on here, but he liked her new attitude.
“So . . . why do you suddenly seem like you don’t hate me anymore?”
She sighed. “Remember how you said the sex in Traverse City was the best of your life?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think this is the best sex of my life. And it happened when you didn’t think I was somebody else. So it’s hard to be very mad.”
Carly wasn’t sure what had just happened to her. Except for the bestsex-of-her-life part. It had been entirely contrary to what usually worked for her—she hadn’t had the least amount of control. She could conclude only that the strange, stark hunger had finally built up so much that it had overridden her need for that with him.
“What were you going to yell at me for?” she asked.
“Mainly for . . . imposing your guilt on me, I guess. I really never did anything wrong to you, you know.”
She nodded quietly. And couldn’t deny it anymore. “I know.” Then she took a chance, one that probably felt riskier than it was, since to be turned down now, after all this, would be pretty devastating. “These steps are hard. You want to go upstairs? To my bed?”
She caught his small grin in the shadows. “Yeah—that sounds nice.”
It felt at once awkward and comfortable to retrieve her pajama pants, go lock the door, and then lead him up the stairs to her place. Not the least of which was because no guy had ever been in her apartment. It was a studio—kitchen at the far side, bed against the back wall, living area set up at the nearest end beside the steps.
She’d been reading a book in bed when all the buzzing had begun, and it lay open, facedown, on rumpled covers. Funny, this was her home, but after what had just happened, it felt as if she’d been away from it for much longer than just fifteen minutes—something in her had changed since she’d gone down those steps.
Ah, the best sex of her life—that was it. Something inside her felt refreshed, renewed, even elated—despite how uncertain she remained about him, and about herself and all her strange sex issues.
And then—oh boy. She’d been aware for a while now—since standing up, actually—that something felt . . . unusual between her legs, moister, stickier, than usual. And now, as wetness rolled down her inner thigh, she finally realized: It was semen. God.
She turned to meet his gaze. “Um, at the risk of bringing up an unpleasant subject, we didn’t use a condom.”
He shut his eyes, gritted his teeth. “Jesus. I was . . . overcome. Which is no excuse, but . . . that’s all I got. Sorry.”
“Are you . . . overcome often?”
He gave his head a firm shake. “The last time I didn’t use protection was . . . probably about five years ago, the last time I had a serious girlfriend.” He paused, sighed, then said, “You?”
This shouldn’t be embarrassing, but for some reason it was. “This is the, uh, first time I’ve ever not used one.” It made her feel inexperienced or something.
“Wow. That’s impressive,” he said as she walked to her bedside table for a tissue and tried to subtly take care of the messiness with her back to him. Then he murmured, “No wonder it felt so damn good.”
And it made her wonder . . . Was that why it was her best sex ever? Because there was no thin barrier of rubber between their bodies?
But no—that wasn’t it. It was more than that. Way more.
“Something to eat? Drink?” she asked, tidied up now and ready to change the subject.
She turned to him in time to see him shake his head. “I’m good. I just gorged on chocolate cream pie before I came over.”
She bit her lip, studying him. She was mostly naked, but he remained fully dressed—even having zipped up his jeans. So even despite his comment about wanting to look at her body, now that they were in the light, she went to her dresser, slipped on a pair of pastel striped undies, and shed the debuttoned shirt, exchanging it for a tank top.
When she turned back around, he’d made himself comfortable on her bed, laying propped up against the pillows, hands behind his head. “Did you build this bed?” he asked.
She nodded.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“So, you make furniture for a living. That’s unusual.”
She nodded once more. “The craft was passed down to me from my dad.”
“Do you do it because you love it or because it’s one of those family things you got pushed into?” He was so blunt, no beating around the bush.
“Both,” she replied, joining him on the bed, lying on her side. Chilly beneath the ceiling fan, she reached for the quilt she kept draped across the end of the mattress and pulled it over her legs.
“Any regrets about it?”
“I find a lot of satisfaction in the work. So if I have any regrets, I guess it would be not taking a break and going to college before committing to the business. I haven’t . . . seen much of the world outside Turnbridge.”
Their eyes met, and he said nothing, but she could easily read his thoughts: That’s part of your problem, isn’t it?
And of course it was.
But she knew plenty of people who’d lived their whole lives in Turnbridge who were still capable of having normal relationships, normal sex. So it hardly explained anything.
Just then, Oliver came trotting up the stairs. Unlike Carly, the cat wasn’t shocked by the sight of a man in the bed—he was too used to seeing people come and go in the shop. “Big cat,” Jake observed.
“Jake Lockhart,” she said, “meet Oliver J. Cattenstein.”
“Big cat with a big name,” he said, the corners of his mouth turning upward slightly.
She smiled softly herself, at a memory. “When he first came to live here at the shop, my friends teased me, said he was my business associate, and we decided he needed a professional yet catlike name.”
When Oliver jumped up onto the bed to nose around Jake, Jake absently reached out to pet him.
“So you don’t hate cats or anything?” she asked.
He flicked a glance to her. “No. Should I?”
She shook her head, pleased. “But some guys do.”
“Well, I’m not some guys,” he said, and the words resonated. Indeed, she was starting to think there was nothing very average about Officer Jake Lockhart at all. From his sexiness to his determination.
“So,” he said, his tone more cautious, “are we . . . friends now?”
She raised her eyebrows, a little surprised by the word, all things considered. “Friends?”
“What I mean is . . . if I ask you something personal, are you going to get mad and throw me out?”
Carly took a deep breath. Part of her wondered why he had to spoil this, this one moment since Traverse City when things felt almost comfortable between them. But then . . . the way they’d met, the encounters since then—she supposed it was inevitable that he wasn’t just going to stop being curious and let this go. He was a cop, and she’d known enough town cops to know they were naturally inquisitive, always trying to get to the bottom of things. “I won’t get mad. I can’t promise I’ll answer or be happy, but I won’t get mad.”
Next to her, he took a deep breath, and he looked a little sad before he said, “I know there’s more.”
She just blinked. “More?”
“Look, honey, you don’t become somebody else to have sex unless . . . you think there’s something wrong with the person you are.”
The words nearly knocked the wind out of her, and she was glad she was lying down. She barely knew how to respond. Talk about blunt. Maybe that was a cop thing, too. To her surprise, it didn’t make her angry at him—but it made her feel a little pathetic. And not very sexy. “That was a statement, not a question,” she replied.
He met her gaze. “All right. Why do you have to become someone else in order to fuck?”
She sat up, leaned against the headboard, staring absently at the quilt now pulled to her waist, and nibbled on her lip.
She knew the answer. Maybe. Sort of. But she didn’t ever think about that—she simply didn’t let herself. She’d never wanted to fully examine how she’d gotten from point A to point B. So she said, “I don’t know. It’s just always been this way.”
“Define always.”
She swallowed. “Since high school. Since my earliest sexual experiences. I . . . just couldn’t do it.”
Now he rolled onto his side, facing her. “What do you mean?”
“I . . . had the urges”—God, had she ever had the urges, as intense as any teenager’s—“but whenever I tried to fool around with a guy, even a guy I really cared for . . .”
“What happened?”
She thought back to those awful, almost paralyzing moments. “I . . . froze up, felt dirty, felt sick. I . . . couldn’t let the good kind of dirty out of me, couldn’t let anyone see it or even know it was there. It was like there was some invisible wall between the me everyone knows—the town sweetheart and all that—and the sexual part of me. For some reason, I just couldn’t let anyone who knew me see that side. No matter how I tried. It was awful. Painful.” She sighed, remembering all of it. “I hurt someone I loved.”
God—Chuck. She hadn’t thought about him—in that way—in a very long time. And she hated remembering it now.
“Chuck was my first—well, my only—love. And everything I just told you is what he had to put up with. I wanted to be with him, but like I said, I just froze up, time after time.”
“So . . . you had sex with him, or it didn’t get that far?”
“Sometimes sex. But it was . . . unpleasant.” She stopped, shuddered, remembering—it had felt . . . like rape. Though she’d never been raped, so she shouldn’t know such a feeling. And it hadn’t been his fault. “It was like there was some heavy weight clamping down on me, making me go completely still, and stiff, when the actual touching and sex happened. It was the worst feeling I ever had. And . . . for the record, that’s kind of how I felt yesterday, up by the tracks when I slapped you,” she added on a thick, nervous swallow. “It . . . it wasn’t logical. It just . . . was.”
He only looked at her, and she couldn’t read his expression, so she decided it was easier to simply keep talking. “But . . . back to Chuck—the guy was a saint, frankly, but I was too caught up in my own issues to realize it at the time. Finally, I broke up with him because I figured if I couldn’t have sex with him the right way, it must mean I didn’t really love him. Only I know now that I did—that the problem really was just the sex. Because whenever I started dating other guys after him, the same exact thing happened.”
“Are you still in love with him?” Jake asked.
She shook her head. “But it took a while to get over it. It broke my heart. Especially since it was my stupid fault.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like you couldn’t help it much.”
“Anyway, he’s married now, with a daughter, and he runs the canoe livery outside town. When I see him, it’s fine—we wave, or say hi, and occasionally even chat for a few minutes. The whole love thing is long in the past. I just wish it had ended for a different, better reason.”
“What happened after that? I mean, when did you . . . start the Desiree thing?”
She was still embarrassed that he knew her most personal and shocking secret—and yet, the answer to his question made the base of her scalp tingle, just remembering it. Because, like everything related to Desiree, it felt a little shameful—yet exciting. “My best friend, Dana, went away to the University of Michigan, and one weekend when I was twenty-one, I went down to Ann Arbor to stay with her. We went to a party, I got drunk for the first time in my life, and I had sex with a guy I met there. And I was able to. I mean, I enjoyed it, for the first time ever. I was able to let go, finally let that part of me out. It was . . . liberating.
“And afterward, I realized it must have been because the guy didn’t know me, and so he wouldn’t judge me, at least not as harshly as someone from Turnbridge would. He had no preconceived notions of who I was.”
“You’re really hung up on people judging you,” Jake pointed out. “Mind if I ask why?”
She kept her gaze on the quilt, studying the point where four triangles met. “I don’t know.”
“So . . . any idea why you were able to have really hot sex with me a little while ago? We’re in Turnbridge, after all. And I know you’re the town sweetheart.”
She finally looked at him again—and it reminded her how handsome he was, the sensation fluttering all through her. “Maybe it’s because you met that side of me first. The Desiree side.”
“Then maybe it’s good it happened that way,” he pointed out.
“Maybe.” She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Jake Lockhart had turned her world upside down.
When he sat up, announcing he had an early shift and should probably take off, she felt equal parts disappointment and relief. She didn’t really want him to go just yet, but it would be easier, safer, once she was alone again, back in her own private little world where no one was trying to make her think too hard about her problems or get to the bottom of them.
“Can I come back and see you tomorrow night?” he asked before standing up.
She almost lost her breath, not having expected that. In fact, she’d thought maybe the intensity of the sex they’d just had might have . . . gotten her out of his system or something. And that their talk just now might have answered all his questions, given him whatever sense of closure or explanation he’d been seeking from her.
So she bit her lip, feeling unaccountably nervous. “I’m not sure.”
God, she hated how docile she felt with him tonight. The aftermath, she supposed, of letting him fuck her brains out, of letting him see how much she’d liked it. And even admitting it, too. It had left her . . . vulnerable.
“I want to make us both feel good again, honey,” he said, his voice deep, seductive, seeming to reach down inside her and wrap around her beatingtoo-fast heart. “Can I take you out to dinner somewhere? Or . . . we could do anything you want.”
She sensed he was walking on eggshells now, trying to figure out how to please her. Which was . . . nice. Undeniably so. For a guy who hadn’t seemed very nice since that night in the bar, it was a welcome change that softened everything inside her even further.
“No,” she said anyway, though, explaining, “I’d rather not have people talking about us any more than they already are after the pie auction.”
