Can't Hold Back Read online

  “Nate.” Into his mouth. And then, turning her head to break away, “Nate, ease up, or I’m going to come—”

  He raised himself up and gave her a wicked look, then locked his gaze on hers again and thrust against her, and where all the tension had bundled itself together and was poised and waiting, something gave suddenly, a lost hold on control, the first breath after rising through layers of water, a vast lever under weight and strain, and her orgasm surged up and broke over her in wave after wave after wave.

  —

  Instinct drove him. He was frantic in a way he couldn’t remember ever having been with any other woman. The ache in his cock and balls, worse now that he’d partially whetted it by stroking himself over her, worse now that he’d watched that orgasm rise, color in her throat and face, lust like panic in her eyes.

  He felt it as a drumbeat, a drilled-in craving that called out for her. It was something about the way she’d given up control to him, even though—he knew—she didn’t want to. He’d taken it away from her and made her so out of her mind that she’d let him have the power. Hold the cards. Get her off.

  He’d seen it, then, a glimpse of what she’d be like if she let herself take everything she needed, if she stopped holding herself back. He wanted more of that. And he just wanted. Wanted, wanted, wanted.

  If he didn’t watch himself he’d rub himself off on her in two more strokes and it would be over. And he—he didn’t know if he’d get a second chance.

  He rolled away from her, hating the loss of contact, but bent on something better. What it would be like to watch her come again, feel her this time, to be buried as deep as he could get inside her.

  “Condoms. Alia. Where?”

  “Bathroom cabinet.”

  He crossed to the bathroom and found the condoms. “This box is waaaay too small,” he informed her.

  Her lips curved. Her lids were heavy, her face soft with pleasure. God, she turned him on. He couldn’t get his clothes off fast enough. He pulled roughly, his movements jerky. She was laughing at him. But she stopped laughing when he got his shirt over his head and kicked his jeans down. She wasn’t laughing at all. He loved the look in her eyes. Covetous. He could feel that look like a touch, smoothing warmth over his chest, drifting down his belly to the waistband of his boxer briefs. Wanting in, the way he wanted into her. He’d let her look all day if she wanted. He’d known—no, he’d hoped—she’d look like that. Like a woman who knew exactly what she was asking for.

  He held himself in one hand, freed himself with the other, pushing his briefs down, and he watched her eyes and her mouth. Eyes getting darker, bigger, sleepier, mouth softening a little, and then he saw the tip of her tongue and he thought of MenInUni242 saying, I want your cock in my mouth. As much as I can hold. And he almost asked her. Do you? But what if she didn’t? What if it wasn’t? That would bring this to a screeching halt as she realized that he’d been fantasizing about someone else. Someone they both knew wasn’t Becca but maybe wasn’t Alia, either.

  So he didn’t say it. But he thought it, and he got that much harder, dreaming that she did want his cock in her mouth, as much as she could hold, that she’d suck him to the back of her throat and—

  Nope, unless he was going to ruin this gig in the most unmanly of ways. Couldn’t think like that anymore.

  So instead he helped her with her clothes, which was as much of a laugh as tearing off his own had been—they kept getting caught and he made faint sounds of frustration and protest, and she giggled and helped, until she was wearing only a pale green pair of lace panties. He wouldn’t have figured her for pale-green lace. Something as down-to-earth as the rest of her outfit, more like.

  God. She was beautiful. Breasts right in that sweet spot between more-than-a-handful and what-the-fuck-do-I-do-with-these? Her nipples pale pink, and a little dip of a navel in the center of a belly that managed to show both ridges of muscle and gentle slope. Strong thighs that had gripped his thigh earlier, his hips, that had generously cushioned his increasingly ragged, out-of-control thrusts. She was like a cross between a Greek statue celebrating the human form and a fertility goddess.

  He could see it in her eyes. As much as he loved the way she’d looked at him, she was getting off now because he couldn’t stop staring at her. Lying back, she let him own her with his gaze, and then that tongue again, wetting her lips—

  Oh, fuck.

  She was breathing fast. She reached to push her panties down. Which was good because pretty or no, those panties were between him and what he wanted, which was to feel that softness and that unyieldingness, to get back into that rhythm she’d set for them earlier, because that was the thing that had really gotten to him, because, fuck, that had been her, back there, pretending it wasn’t happening, even as her body was making it happen. Because she wanted it even more than she thought it was a bad idea.

  He slid his thumb along the seam of her sex, parted her curls, and almost lost his shit completely when he felt how wet she was. And how swollen.

  He groaned and slid a finger in.

  She whimpered.

  “Oh, fuck. Alia, I—”

  “Condom.”

  He tore the box, extracted his prize. Ripped the packet, rolled it on. Any smoothness, any pretense at competence, seemed like an unnecessary waste of effort when he knew exactly where he wanted to be and all he wanted was to be there as quickly as possible. And she was reaching her arms up, opening her mouth, drawing him down to kiss him, lifting her hips, rubbing her wetness on him, and he grabbed his cock to guide himself to her. She was clumsy, too, in her eagerness, pushing back as he was finding her, breaching her, savoring how tight she was, like his fist on a good night, only wet and twice as hot and better, because it was her, and he thrust once and then she gripped him tight around the hips and there it was, that rhythm she’d teased him with earlier, Alia moving against him like there was no way she could resist what her body was demanding—

  “I’m sorry, Alia. I will do better some other time,” he declared, before he abandoned good sense and all the rules of first-time sex and everything he knew about being a halfway decent lover, and gave up holding back—everything. Gratitude, mostly. Because she could make the pain go away. Because she was ready, willing, and eager. Because she was under him thrusting back as hard as he thrust into her, because for every time he called her name she called his. Because she was coming again, milking him, bending his will, and owning him.

  Everything in him, physical, mental, emotional, was clenching and unclenching, locked up tighter than a vault and broken wide open, far wider than his known universe. It was only her teeth in his shoulder and her fingernails in his back that kept him anchored to the bed.

  Chapter 15

  “Better?” she asked.

  He’d collapsed on top of her, his face in her neck, her hair tickling his nose. Barely holding his weight off her. Only a little bit of him still careful and aware. The part that acted now to extricate himself, condom safely stripped away and disposed of. So he could shift again to put his arms around her. So he could sigh into her hair and keep her warm like she’d warmed him earlier this evening.

  And then her single word fully penetrated his haze. She was asking if he felt better. As if she’d just administered a session of tapping.

  “Pain gone?” she asked, in case he’d somehow missed the significance of her question the first time.

  It was. His whole body was bathed in a warm glow, not at all unlike the drug glow he’d craved until a few days ago. All traces of pain had vanished. Although he could feel himself tensing up again already against her questions.

  And then he was pissed at himself for being such a girl. What was so bad about her asking him that? What had he expected her to ask him? Whether she’d rocked his world like he’d rocked hers? If it was the best he’d ever had? If he’d like a cigarette?

  So he answered her with the truth, or at least the truth he knew she most wanted to hear right then, which was “
I needed that.” He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at her.

  She looked genuinely pleased to hear it, which went a long way toward tamping down any stray disappointment he felt. So did how happy she looked herself, relaxed and pink-cheeked and red-lipped and just plain beautiful. He bent his head and kissed her, and she kissed him right back, and he realized, because of how strong his relief felt right then, that he’d been waiting for her to freak out. To say, We can’t have done that, we didn’t do that, we can’t do that again. And he was not ready to quit her. Not anywhere near yet.

  For one thing, that sex had, in fact, rocked his world. A-grade, top-of-the-line, write-home-about-it. You didn’t walk away from sex like that, even if things were a little complicated.

  And for another, there was still the MenInUni242 question.

  “That felt really good,” she said.

  “Sorry it was so short-lived. It has…been a while.” Then he shook his head, because there was too much half-truth already in that room. “Honestly? That’s not why. It has been a while, but the thing is—” He made a sheepish face. “I am into you. No. Correction. I am so into you.”

  “Oh.” Her face lit with surprise and pleasure, which, damn, felt good.

  “So I’m going to lay this out there, and you can feel free to say something that will shred my pride to teeny-tiny threads, but that? From beginning to end? That will go into the private mental porn library, forever and permanently.”

  “Oh,” she said, more distinctly.

  “Maybe that’s not the most romantic—”

  She cut him off. “No. Me, too. In the porn library.”

  “Really? You mean it?” He was actually a little hung up on the fact that she had a private mental porn library, and what its other contents were. Did it bear any resemblance to MenInUni242’s?

  Suddenly, he had to know. “Alia?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I want to ask you something. Back during the whole thing with Becca, there were these instant messages—”

  Her face darkened, and he realized what crappy timing he had. Bringing that whole history into things right now, when they were lying here in the afterglow, very much in the present. What if she thought he was thinking of Becca, at a time like this? He would hate for her to suspect that. When all he could think about was getting into her again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  It took him a minute. First to understand what she was apologizing for, and then to grasp the implications.

  Hope rose like a balloon. “You wrote them.”

  “Becca never told you?”

  “We never talked about them.”

  She blinked a few times, then shook her head. “God, Nate. I thought she—I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse. I know that. Just, I’m sorry.”

  His brain couldn’t work quite fast enough to keep up with all this. With how guilty she looked and how psyched he was that she’d typed those words, but also how it didn’t necessarily mean what he wanted it to mean. Just because it had been her fingers on the keyboard didn’t mean the fantasies had sprung from her imagination.

  “Did Becca tell you what to write?”

  She shook her head, and he felt the knowledge shift and settle at the base of his spine, in that dark impression where desire came from. Those words came from her mind. And still, he didn’t know enough. Whether she’d meant them. Whether they’d felt like her when she’d written them. Whether she’d claim them now. But now she was looking away from him, and the plea when it came was barely more than a whisper.

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  Abruptly, he realized it wasn’t only guilt she was feeling, but shame, too.

  So either she hadn’t meant them or she couldn’t own them.

  He could feel the mood shifting, and any moment she was going to fold under the weight of her old shame, remember why this escapade could cost her her job. Did it really matter so much what had happened a year and a half ago, when he had her here, in her bed, and she was willing and responsive and—

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said firmly. “It doesn’t matter. Okay?”

  “You’d have every right to still be mad. It was a shitty thing I did.”

  Ironic. In her mind, having written those dirty words made her more the bad guy. In his—

  Well, it made her the kind of bad girl he still hoped to find when he’d peeled away her inhibitions.

  “I know you did it to help Becca.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay.”

  “It’s in the past,” he said. Because she was right. It didn’t make it okay. But maybe he couldn’t be angry at someone who’d made him feel as good as Alia had. Maybe there was a statute of limitations on how long he could care about what he’d lost, when he had her, warm and beautiful, limber and willing, stretched out beside him.

  He would probably never know how much of MenInUni242 was Becca, how much Alia, and how much some combination of Becca and Alia, some fantasy girl. But the thing was, he didn’t need that fantasy girl, because Alia, the real Alia, was here with him, and even if she wasn’t going to tell him she wanted his cock down her throat or his tongue all over her, there were still a million things he wanted to do to her, right here, right now, and so it would probably be a good idea to get started.

  Chapter 16

  He was kissing her again. And he was hard already, and as if she hadn’t just come, ridiculously intensely, twice, she was turning toward him and trying to press herself against him. And it was getting more and more difficult to convince herself that this was something that had happened accidentally, something that wouldn’t happen again, something she could call it quits on anytime, before more harm was done.

  Because she wanted to do it again. As many times as he wanted her to, she would be ready to give him what he needed. It was a little bit of a problem, actually.

  A little bit of a Nate addiction.

  And Jake had been worried about his bad judgment.

  Oh, man.

  It was probably not even possible to catalog the number of ways having sex with him had been a bad idea.

  Add to all the others, the fact that the past refused to stay put. That he was still thinking about her original betrayal, still trying to sort out how much she’d interfered with his relationship with Becca. And the messages had been a low moment. Not the lowest, maybe, but damn low.

  She’d had a terrible evening that night. For once, her date—an online match—was the same age he claimed, the same weight he’d appeared in his photo, and possessing the same degree of employment he’d mentioned in his profile. He was even attractive, attractive enough that she’d felt a flare of optimism when he’d met her in the lobby of the restaurant. But it turned out he was angry and bitter, raging against politicians and various ethnic groups and working moms—pretty much no one was immune. Finally, she’d extricated herself, begged off dessert—which told you something about the degree of her desperation—and fought off his unwanted good-night advance.

  By then she’d been quite drunk. She almost never drank much, but it had been her only defense against his awfulness. She had let herself into the apartment that she and Becca were sharing—it was before Becca had moved out and found her own place—and, in the dark and quiet, began to cry.

  Not just about the awful date. Also about how in just a few days, when his flight finally came through, Nate was going to come home and Becca was going to tell him the truth and it was going to be over. For good.

  About missed chances and bad choices, good intentions sliding down the ravine to hell, and the loneliness of knowing that you’d fallen in love with someone who didn’t know who you were.

  Across the room, the desktop computer, which they shared, pinged. Alia crossed the room and wiggled the mouse.

  There was an instant message window up on the screen.

  NateRiordan199: Still waiting. They say probably tomorrow. I’m dying of boredom. Please tell me you’re awake.

/>   She could feel his disquiet. The long hours, the adrenaline he could never quite burn off. How itchy it must make him. How bored, and how lonely.

  I still know you. Even if you don’t know me.

  It was, oddly enough, a small comfort. The fact that she could feel him, across all this distance. Across her own mistakes and regrets.

  She knew she was woozy. She knew her judgment was impaired by both drink and fatigue—it had been a hell of a week at work.

  What she didn’t count on was her own boredom and loneliness. Matching his.

  MenInUni242: What are you doing to kill time?

  There wasn’t really any harm to chatting, right? All the damage had been done.

  NateRiordan199: Playing cards. Reading magazines. Playing with my RainGlobe. Wishing I had more Cow Chip cookies. Reading the same books again. I’ve read Gone Girl three times.

  MenInUni242: Ouch.

  NateRiordan199: And, you know, jerking off. Number one boredom killer.

  “Oh!” said Alia, aloud. She’d felt it in the pit of her stomach. No. Truth. Her whole body had flared warm, a sweet, melting burn.

  He was not just bored, but desperate, then. A guy alone in a dry and mountainous country, surrounded by men who were buddies but not friends, bored out of his mind, needing contact. Needing—escape. Release.

  She tried, unsuccessfully, not to think of his hand on his cock, of the skin taut—

  It was sad. And oddly sweet. And hot. And Alia felt all of that, and more, moving underneath her skin, in her chest and belly, lower.

  Now would be a good time to walk away. But Alia’s head was full of the words. The words Nate needed. Soft words, slippery words, sticky words. Achy words. Broken, reaching, yearning, sweet, raw words.

  Her head hurt. Her chest hurt.

  MenInUni242: Need any help with that?

  NateRiordan199: I wouldn’t refuse that offer.

  MenInUni242: How can I be of assistance?

  NateRiordan199: Pretend I’m there. Tell me what you want.