His intense look of concentration blanked for a second into a hollow gaze before he shuttered his expression. “Indeed, why not me when any man would do? Why now is the real question, isn’t it?”
An urge to correct him caught in her throat, but she didn’t want to reveal how much she had wanted it to be him. At the same time a stunning insight struck her. Nic had no idea he was special to her or anyone else. She had been told all her life that she was special—so special she had to live up to unrealistic expectations—but he hadn’t had that problem. His father had ignored him. What about his mother?
Rowan ached to ask, but prying was out of place. He wouldn’t appreciate it, given what a proud, aloof man he was. She let her hair fall forward to hide her frown of empathetic pain.
“I was tired of fighting with you. Fighting that feeling,” she confessed, hoping he wouldn’t make her tell him exactly how long that feeling had been twisting like a flame inside her. Tossing her hair back, she made a false attempt at flippancy. “And you’re the one who thinks I need to grow up, so it’s rather fitting for you to be the one to make me a woman, don’t you think?”
A disturbing sense of privilege poured into Nic. Plainly this act held a lot less importance to her than it did for him, so he did his best to laugh it off the way she had. “Is that what this was? A coming-of-age ceremony?”
For a second he thought Rowan flinched. A familiar bleak valley threatened to swallow up his brief sense of pride. He tensed, but then Rowan produced a wide smile that was like light breaking over the dark edges that surrounded him, bathing him in reprieve. She cupped the side of his face, leaning close enough to touch a light kiss to his mouth.
“Yes, Nic. You might not be given to sentimentality about these things, but I shall forever look back on you fondly as My First. That’s almost as good as whatever you get for being Newsman of the Year, isn’t it?”
Always so glib, but her words had a profound effect on him. That forever look back ought to be reassuring. He had barely let himself acknowledge the fear that her taking him as her first lover and dropping words like long-term meant she expected a relationship. He most certainly was not the man to give her anything like that.
But that fondly squeezed feeling out of his incompetent heart. Two days ago he wouldn’t have given any thought to parting with animosity between them, but quite suddenly he hoped for something better than that.
She started to pull away and he brought his hand to the back of her head, silky curls crushed under his gentle insistence she stay close.
“I won’t forget this either,” he admitted.
Which scared him as much as the vulnerable way Rowan caught her lip between her teeth. He closed his eyes against a look that searched for reassurance and drew her forward so he could kiss her, making her release her bottom lip to his own gentle bite and lingering attention to soothe any tenderness he inflicted.
The kiss quickly got out of hand and he groaned, never having come up against anything like this: the desire to make love again so soon after the most intense orgasm of his life, or with a woman so new to it she couldn’t.
When she breathed his name against his lips and set a hand on his collarbone he had to let her put space between them.
“Are you saying you won’t forget in a good way or a bad way?”
Was she kidding? He glanced down at the raging muscle straining from between his thighs like a compass needle seeking North.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Her flush was pure mortification. “I thought it was good for both of us, but—”
“Maybe if you’re willing to practice we can do something about it?” he chided facetiously.
Rowan paled and he realized with horror that she’d taken it the wrong way. She tried to bolt from the bed and again he had to grab her, holding tight to her wiry strength while she struggled and slapped at him.
“That was a joke,” he insisted, trying to speak over her angry demands to quit manhandling her. He wouldn’t let her go, though—not when his heart was bottoming out at how badly he’d misread her sensitivity. “Rowan, listen. Ouch.” He swore as he took a scratch down his rib cage before he immobilized her.
“That wasn’t funny, Nic!” She was breathing hard, muscles a taut bundle of resistance against his hold, eyes spitting venom. “I know more about practice than anyone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back to trying and not getting it right. For you. I’m living for me now—understand? I don’t care if it was good for you. It was good for me, so you can go to hell with your practice.”
His chest knotted up so tight he could barely breathe.
“It was good for me,” he insisted, pressing the words into her temple as she turned a stubborn cheek against him. He could see her brow pleated in hurt.
He didn’t know how to apologize with the kind of sincerity needed here, and inadequacy threatened to push him out of the room rather than try, but he had learned enough about her in the last two days to realize how deeply it would injure her to think her performance had failed to please him.
“I only meant I want to make love again and I realize you won’t want to.” He hurried to say it, shifting because he was aroused by their tussle and unable to hide it. He didn’t expect anything but a cold shower, though. “You have this insane effect on me, Ro. You always have. I can’t help it.”
She turned her head to look at him and he began to wobble on a tightrope a thousand stories in the air. He backed onto solid ground.
“I don’t know what it is with our chemistry. I had hoped once would be enough.” The lie bunched his muscles into aching knots. He had never believed once would be enough. “If you let me, I’d be on you night and day to work this out of my system.”
Her lashes came down to hide her eyes and he scowled, uncomfortable with how much he’d revealed. He was generally self-sufficient, but now he looked into a bleak future where his frustrating hunger for her might actually be worse, not easier to bear.
“If we were coming together as equals,” she said carefully, before she lifted wary lashes, “I’d let you. But not if I don’t have the sort of experience to keep you interested.”
“You—” she couldn’t see the fine tremble in the hand he used to smooth her hair “—are a natural. I’m at the disadvantage. I know how special this is.”
“Tell all the girls that, do you?”
“I’ve never said it to anyone,” he contradicted tightly.
“Really?” She rolled into him with a forgiving slither of silken skin and inviting softness, bending his mind away from the alarm bells against making comparisons or revealing how truly exceptional their experience was.
Her pleased smile provoked another zing of warning against feeding her ego and that sense of entitlement to adoration of hers. He didn’t want to be a slave to her good graces. But her light hands skimmed over him in deliciously arousing paths, rewarding rather than rejecting, and he quit caring that he was turning into one more ardent fan.
“Me, too. Best ever.” She strained to touch her lips under his chin.
With a shaken chuckle and deep reluctance he stopped her. This mood of hers was surprisingly endearing. Gathering her slender fingers in his own, he kissed the scrape on her palm before saying, “You need time to recover. Don’t you?”
“No. I like the way you make me feel, Nic. I want to do it again.”
The tiny throb of longing in her voice was a golden rope that looped around the root of him and tugged.
He shuddered and gave in, tucking her under him with possessive intent.
* * *
One thing about Rosedale, Nic acknowledged later that evening, if you wanted to avoid someone you could.
He’d left her as the sky was starting to darken. Rowan had been on her stomach, nothing but a midnight waterfall of hair and an ivory shoulder. His body had sprung to attention despite the way he’d worked it into exhaustion over hours of lovemaking. He’d forced himself to leave her, partly because he was sure she was tender and partly because he hated how addicted he was becoming.
Becoming? a voice taunted deep in his head. He’d always been obsessed. Now he’d had her it was worse. And he’d admitted it to her. That left him deeply uneasy, so he had showered, dressed, come into his office and shut the door.
The memory of Rowan’s uninhibited response wasn’t as easy to leave behind. At one point she’d kissed her way down his body and murmured, “May I? I’ve always wondered...” He’d disbelieved she was that inexperienced, but the amateur way she’d learned to please him had told him this too was her first time and had nearly undone him.
He glanced at his knuckles, going white where he gripped the arm of his chair. He ought to be working, not reliving Rowan’s teasing him beyond bearing before lifting to ride his hips until she was sobbing with rapture.
His laptop hummed with yet another string of emails hitting his inbox, but he wasn’t having much luck being productive and he needed to be. The conglomerate of multi-media interests that Olief had amassed during his lifetime was a demanding operation. If Nic hadn’t had this to consume him for the last year, the fruitless search for Olief’s plane and its survivors might have driven him to madness.