Again and again, she touched him as if she couldn’t get enough, and his response was immediate.
He jumped off the bed, practically growled, “Be right back,” then stalked across the room to disappear through a doorway. Vaguely she heard a drawer open, then snap closed. Suddenly he was there again, before her body had time to cool at his absence.
Watching her, he stood by the side of the bed, stripping out of the rest of his clothes, then tearing open the condom he’d gone to the bathroom to get. He sheathed himself as she watched, her gaze locked on the hard length of him. He was as big there as he was everywhere else, and the anticipation inside her thrummed into overdrive.
“Been waiting days for this,” he muttered, coming down on top of her as she parted her legs to draw him in. “Feels like years.”
“It does,” she agreed breathlessly. Oh, the heavy, solid feel of him covering her body was so right. So tantalizing. And then he slid inside her in one glorious thrust.
Cass gasped and moved with him as he took her over completely. He filled her to the point where she thought she would never feel empty again, with or without him in her life. She knew his imprint would remain long after this night was over—that thought squeezed her heart painfully, so she dismissed it and focused on what he was doing to her now. There would be time enough later for regrets, for pain.
He moved in her, his body sliding in and out in a frenzied dance of need and passion. Her hands moved up and down his back, along his thighs, felt the power in his leanly muscled body and gloried in it. She lifted her legs to wrap them around his hips, pulling him in higher, deeper, and still it wasn’t enough. It might never be enough.
Tension coiled inside her, tightening with his every thrust until she was gasping, lungs heaving for air that couldn’t get past the knot lodged in her throat. And still she pushed him forward.
His whispered words, his kisses, all drove her toward the peak. She moved with him, around him, their flesh fused together by heat and passion. Cass groaned, called his name and reached for that dazzling light hanging in front of her. She had to have it. Had never known such bone-deep need, such desperation...
“Take it, Cassie. Take me,” he whispered. “Let it go and grab for it.”
“With you,” she insisted, shaking her head against the duvet that now felt like a silky pool of fire beneath her. Shadows twisted, firelight danced in his eyes as she stared into their depths and gasped, “We go together.”
He smiled, buried his face in the crook of her neck, and nibbled at her throat as he reached down between their bodies to flick his thumb across the hard swollen bud at her core. When she splintered in his arms, she heard him murmur, “You first.”
Power slammed into her, shuddering through her body as she clung to him, soaring higher than she’d ever been before as he continued to move inside her, pushing her ever higher. The last of her climax was still rippling through her when she heard him groan her name. As his body rocked with completion, she held on to him, wondering how she was ever going to let him go.
What she’d just experienced would never happen with a different man. She knew it. It was Jake who had gotten past every one of her hesitations, her worries, and made her forget her reluctance to get involved with the one man she shouldn’t.
And now she knew why she’d instinctively tried to hold herself back from him. It had nothing to do with worry over her boss or even the fact that she would be leaving and going back to Boston. No, this was more elemental than that. Somewhere, she had known that this man was the one who could reach her heart.
Jake Hunter was the one man in the world who could make her want to let go of old doubts and mistrusts.
To risk falling in love.
Jake rolled to one side and as he lay there beside her, Cass could practically feel him pulling away. She knew that right then, he was trying to find a way to let her down easy. To tell her that this didn’t mean anything. That it had been a mistake and wouldn’t be repeated.
But it would be repeated if she had anything to say about it. For the time she was in Montana, she wanted him with her, in her, over her. She wanted to wrap herself around him and luxuriate in the feeling of his skin along hers.
Because she knew, when she left, it would be over.
Oh, she hadn’t counted on this. Hadn’t expected to find...him. Now that she had, though, she also had to accept that she was going to lose him. Her heart pinged with an ache she realized would be with her for the rest of her life. But she hadn’t asked for forever and he hadn’t offered. Judging by the expression on his face and the shutters across his eyes, that offer wasn’t about to be made, either.