Still looking like twenty-four carats of class, Juliet stared up at him. Why wasn’t she throwing him from the house or at least running, screaming, from it herself?
Noah dropped the veneer he struggled so hard to maintain when he was in her presence. “I want to touch every inch of your skin…I want to lick it with my tongue and roll across it with my cock, and when I’m done I want to use my mouth and teeth to mark every place I’ve been like a tagger marks a street corner.”
Now she stepped back.
Well, good. Good for her. Good for him, too. He took it as his invitation to leave. Gritting his teeth, Noah turned to the door. But then something caught at the back of his ancient army T-shirt.
Over his shoulder, he saw Juliet’s fist in the hem. He didn’t want to stay for what else she had to say. Eye on the door, he made to yank free of her hold.
Riiip.
His shirt gave way, and at the sound, so did his resolve. He spun, jerked her into his arms, and covered her mouth to take one last kiss before he left.
Eleven
To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
—GOTTFRIED WILHELM VON LEIBNIZ
Except, Noah realized right away, this wasn’t a good-bye kind of kiss. Juliet had her arms around him, holding him close with the same kind of desperation that was driving him, and then when he took the kiss deeper, she did that thing that fired his blood and thickened his already-hard cock.
She sucked on his tongue.
He groaned, and when she sucked harder, he had to wrench his mouth away from hers before he did something more drastic like wrenching all the clothes from her body. His chest heaved as he stared down into her blue and green eyes, desire burning like fire in his blood and his erection pressing like heated iron against his belly.
It should be a crime to want this much and have no chance at getting the prize.
Except—no chance? Because Juliet was still clutching his shoulders and her breathing was an erratic rhythm as she gazed up at him. She looked confused, maybe even bewildered. Dazed by surprise to find herself again in his arms or…dizzy with desire?
Is it too much to ask that I could have a man to hold me through one simple, single night?
She’d wanted that earlier, she’d wanted that man to be Noah, but he’d assumed the events that came after—Helen’s rejection at the restaurant and what Juliet had done at Zuma—had put that wish right out of her mind.
Is it too much to ask that I could find some way to prove that I didn’t die, too?
But now, now that the long night had passed, perhaps her need for proof had resurfaced.
Or maybe he was just kidding himself. Two-and-a-half years of fantasizing about the unattainable could fool a man.
She shivered, and hell, there was his answer. Time to go. So he moved back—but then she moved with him, her fingers digging into his muscles and her belly ghosting a kiss against his cock. Even that brief stroke sent lust punching through him like a syringe of adrenaline. Without thinking, he reacted to it by hauling her hips against his and taking her lips again.
She didn’t protest, no, not at all, because as he sank his tongue deep into her mouth, she sank against his body. Wasn’t nature amazing, he thought, his arms steeling to keep her upright. When he went pole-hard, she went pliant. When he needed in, she went open. And God, wasn’t that yin-yang opposition just so damn good.
As was that message her sweet pliancy, her sweet yielding delivered.
She trembled against him, but he knew what that signaled this time, and he petted a path up her back to tangle his fingers in her long hair. “It’s okay, baby,” he said, putting an inch of space between their lips. “I’ve got you. I’ll give you what you need.”
She buried her forehead against his chest and through his palm on her back he felt the hitch in her rapid breaths. “You know?” she asked, her voice a throaty whisper.
The husky note traveled down his chest to wrap like a hand around his dick. “Oh yeah, baby, I know. And I’m going to do you so good.”
At the bawdy words, she jerked against him, and he smiled over the top of her golden head. He’d laid it out for her before, he’d told her without a dab of sugary icing and in the crudest terms how and what he wanted, and he refused to back away from it now—because she hadn’t. Maybe part of what Juliet needed was a little slumming with Noah so it wouldn’t be anything like the sex she’d had with—
In the past.
He wasn’t going to think of her with another man.
He sure as hell was going to do his best to make sure she didn’t either. Noah had this one time to make her feel alive and he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone get between them.