No Magic Moment Read online

  “Huge fucking scoundrel.” She grinned—then popped another button free.

  I clamped a hand to the back of her neck. Yanked her down, kissing her brutally. “The scoundrel who worships you.”

  She trailed her lips down, sinking teeth into my chin. “The vixen who needs you.”

  I clamped my teeth around the edge of her jaw.

  She whined, clawing my chest deeper.

  I gripped and yanked her hair.

  She bit and licked my neck.

  I twisted her breast.

  She squeezed my nipple.

  I swept the T-shirt over her head.

  She jerked at another button, bulleting it across the room, allowing my shirt to fall fully open.

  We swore and sighed, tasted and scratched, sucked and scraped, kissed and cussed, until I snarled low and flipped her over, one swoop that pinned her under me, wrists beneath my hands, thighs still cradling mine.

  Absence made the heart grow fonder?

  Screw fonder.

  I craved her. Was starved for her. Thirsted for her like I’d been stumbling through the desert for three weeks and she was the naked nymph in the oasis, cavorting in a lagoon as lush and green and perfect as her gorgeous eyes.

  An almost naked nymph.

  Another growl curled through me, a mixture of raw lust and tight aggravation, while shoving aside her panties to delve fingers into the core beneath—or, damn it, trying to. How much trouble could a few scraps of satin be? Answer—a hell of a lot, if they got twisted by the friction of two impassioned bodies. I could barely slide one finger past the barrier, let alone the two Margaux always loved.

  “Damn it.”

  “What?” she demanded. “What is it? Oh God, Michael. Please don’t stop!”

  “Not even if a train hit this place, sweetheart.”

  I whispered the promise into her neck, shoulder, breasts, then lower, kissing and nipping down her quivering body, lost to the expensive ice cream taste of her skin again. After licking through the curve of her waist, I finally hit the tight string of her lingerie—and bit to secure it between my teeth. With a grunt, I dragged down hard. Leaned back long enough to fully tear the panties away.

  “Much better.”

  With the garment gone, I pushed her thighs apart. Once more, spread my hands over the junctures between her hips and thighs—though this time, swept my thumbs across her damp curls.

  “Michael,” she begged. “Ohhhh…yessss.”

  “Damn.” I rubbed deeper despite the skirmish it started between my cock and fly. “Look at this. I’ve missed this pussy so much. Yeah…just look at all this wet, perfect sweetness.” I growled low as she whimpered high, throwing her arms back, wrapping them around the pillow. “Have you been this wet for three weeks, sugar?”

  “Michael!” She bucked. “For the love of fucking—”

  I chuckled as she choked into silence. “What? No designer deity to call on, sweetheart?”

  “None of them can help me. Nobody can…except you. Please!”

  “Hmmm.” I lifted a teasing smirk. “After you’ve answered my question.”

  “Wh-what question?”

  “You mean…you forgot?”

  “I—I can’t remember my own name right now.”

  Gently, I parted her labia. The fruity flesh beneath gleamed, soaked in her gorgeous juices. “We were discussing your beautiful cunt. Has it been this wet for three whole weeks?”

  She keened as I curled a finger in, teasing the hood of her clit. “Y-yes. Yes, god damn it, no thanks to you!”

  Victory fired my blood. It had to be wrong, coming at the price of her torment, but I couldn’t wrap my head around that. For the first time in nearly a month, everything felt right. Aligned. Complete. “Wait. You haven’t played with your pussy at all? No fantasies or vibrators or clamps for a little fun?” At my insistence, she’d kept a lot of her naughty single girl toys. Using them on her had been a hell of a lot of fun from time to time, but I’d never harbored illusions that a passionate creature like her would leave them alone in my absence.

  Until now.

  Until the moment she hiked back up onto her elbows, piercing me with a gaze full of such sharp green pain, I was locked completely in place.

  “Have you?”

  My mischief dissolved. I lunged, cupping the back of her head and smashing a kiss to her twisted lips.

  “No.”

  It was the truth if there ever was one. Every time I’d walked into the orchard to take care of business, I’d ended back up at our meadow. With the grass turned brown and the flowers slumbering for the season, I’d clung to the only thing that remained the same since that summer day we’d visited. My raging hard-ons.

  I sure as fuck regretted that choice now.

  Abstinence could be a hard taskmaster. Nothing like firsthand experience to enforce the lesson, especially as she tore at my fly. My eyes flared, though nothing changed about the determined light in Margaux’s. She might not have thought me a monster, but she was resolute about unleashing my inner beast, ramming my zipper down with a harsh rasp. Without skipping a beat, she continued her hand in, wrapping fingers around both my balls.

  “What if I don’t believe you?” She cupped me, pressing and kneading, yanking primal sounds from deep in my throat. “I know how you like to come, Michael. I know how you need to explode, how hard these balls shake when you do. What if I don’t believe you’ve been denying yourself for three weeks?”

  She pushed a couple of fingers into the base of my shaft and my knees threatened to give out. My thighs burned, battling to hold my body over hers. My ass flexed. Torture was damn near the correct word for this after all.

  “Sugar,” I groaned. “Shit! Feel me…do it tighter if you have to.” Tighter…please. “Feel me, swelling at you, pulsing for you…needing you.” Maybe the cause required assistance. I locked my elbows and braced my knees, pushing my crotch deeper into her grip. “Do you think this cock has had one goddamn orgasm in the last three weeks?”

  As my hardness filled her fingers, her mouth popped open. She clenched her teeth, torn between her pride and libido. I groaned, empathetic to the cause. For a guy who’d just declared he wasn’t a monster, every bone, muscle and blood cell in my body yearned to go completely King Kong on her sweet Fay Wray ass.

  “Prove it.”

  Her challenge, delivered with chin defiantly hiked, sent a new rush of blood between my thighs—and a fresh fire of challenge to my stare. “Gladly.” I pushed harder against her, relishing the tremble of her inner thighs against mine. “Name your criterion.”

  Her gaze glowed like the Northern Lights. I curled up the edges of my mouth.

  “Well, nothing beats hands-on analysis.” She demonstrated exactly that by lifting my briefs up, then down, freeing my naked flesh for her eager fingers.

  “No.” I treasured the sight of her hungry gaze as my tip surrendered a spurt of pre-cum. “Nothing really does.”

  As she spread the milky drop, tracing a vein in my dick, her gaze never left my face. “You’re hot and trembling as a virgin, Mr. Pearson.”

  I spread my knees, fitting our bodies tighter. “So are you, Miss Asher.”

  She licked her lips. “Maybe I need…just a little more proof.”

  “Maybe you need a lot more.”

  “Such as?”

  I could’ve bantered back. Played with her a little more. Used my cock in a dozen more forms of foreplay, driving us both to the brink of madness—but why? We were already there. Before Declan had brought his chaos to our front door, spending three hours from her was often its own special suffering. And three weeks? I’d often gotten through the days by sheer force of will alone.

  Fortitude I no longer had—or wanted to have.

  A monster I just couldn’t be anymore.

  Or maybe…a monster I could no longer ignore.

  Fuck.

  “Michael! Yes!”

  I tensed, struggling to heed the message scrollin
g across my conscience like a level red terror alert. This doesn’t fix anything. This doesn’t fix anything. This doesn’t—

  The screen went blank.

  The world was nothing but static, noise, light, heat.

  Intense. So goddamn intense that my head swam, my senses reeled, and my throat went dry—

  As my body fucked.

  Deep. Plunging into her tight tunnel of fulfillment. Hard. Punishing myself for succumbing to all of it. Brutal. Greedily grabbing every sensation I’d been numbing myself to, pulling them down like the walls of Jericho, letting them crash my psyche to the point that it bled. I siphoned it all back into the rod between my thighs, stabbing her so hard that she bit my chest to keep her screams from being heard into the next county. She grabbed my ass so hard, I was stunned it didn’t bleed.

  She climaxed around me.

  Then again.

  I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.

  Deeper. I needed to be deeper. A part of her, branded from the inside out, just as she’d claimed me from the very start. No matter how hard I lunged or how loud the smack of my balls against her ass, it still didn’t feel like enough.

  I pulled out. Flipped her over with a ruthless toss.

  Sweat shone on every inch of her skin, pooling in the hollow of her back. She writhed like an animal in heat, sexy-as-fuck sounds emanating from her throat, her ass rising, readying for my invasion.

  “No.” I yanked on her ankles, flattening her again. Slicked my hands up to her thighs and spread them apart. “Like this.”

  I entered her again, impaling her fully, welcomed again by her soaked, gripping channel. With one hand, I pinned her wrists over her head. With the other, I fisted her hair away from her face. Licked along her cheek and neck, sucking up the salt of tears and the musk of sweat. The air smelled of nothing but our joined arousal, primitive and pure. I soaked in the sound of her, the feel of her, the taste of her, the tightness of her.

  “Vixen…mine,” I growled against her ear.

  “Yes,” she breathed back.

  “Animal…mine.”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “Cunt…mine.”

  “Yes!”

  “Climax…mine. Now!”

  Her body tensed. She grabbed the bedsheet, coiling both hands into it. As the cotton ripped beneath her grip, she screamed into the mattress—

  As her sex demanded the explosion of mine.

  I poured myself into her, so intent on the mission that my groan was soundless. Wave after orgasmic wave pounded me, squeezing my ass, gripping my thighs, stripping my sanity. When I didn’t think I had anymore to give, her body claimed me all over again. Drained every drop. Exacted every tremor. Confiscated every thought.

  Dominated my soul.

  I kept it that way until long after we fell apart, still breathing hard, bodies pretzeled. Somewhere in that process she turned again, so we shared a pillow with foreheads together and breaths mingled.

  There, tangled in her softness and breathing in her essence, I added one more whopper to my long list of mistakes since walking in here.

  I gave in to the deepest, hardest sleep I’d had in weeks.

  * * * *

  Sometimes, waking up with every brain cell firing on full was not a good thing.

  Especially when every one of them confirmed that Margaux hadn’t left for town yet.

  Though her bag no longer rested on the dresser and the room only carried traces of her amber perfume, my senses resonated with her nearness. My nerve endings crackled like the old days, when I knew she’d entered the building long before she strutted into the office behind Andrea.

  I swung out of bed, trying to gauge the hour by the light through the window. Even from the edge of the bed, I observed the shroud of low clouds over the orchard, meaning it was still early or we were going to have shit weather today. In short, no help there.

  I reached for my watch on the nightstand. Six a.m.—not the coolest time to be awake on a Saturday—but I curled a huge smile, anyway. I didn’t remember taking the watch off, meaning Margaux had. She’d done the same so many times back at home, it had become a routine. Poor thing had been bonked a few too many times with the big Tissot, built for beach workouts and days on the farm, not spooning and cuddling. The sight of it there, perfectly positioned where she knew I’d find it, made me ache for our days in the condo again.

  The condo?

  I didn’t give a fuck about the condo.

  I just wanted to return home—any home—with her by my side.

  What would our own place be like? Something closer to the water, probably. A little place in Carlsbad or La Jolla, so she could be closer to Claire…

  And what the hell kind of crack are you smoking?

  Nothing had changed between yesterday and this moment. Not a goddamn thing. Though Doug’s team had possibly sighted Declan at the airport last week, my scum-sucking uncle was still missing off the grid at large. That little tidbit wouldn’t matter to the Principals, who’d demand payback on their loans in some way, shape or form. Hell, Menger and his boy toys might be prowling through Julian this minute, stomping the wooden boardwalks between the pie shops and antique stores, thinking they were inconspicuous just because of their scowls.

  No. Nothing was different at all. Dialogue echoed in my head courtesy of the party Mom and I had attended at Town Hall over the weekend, celebrating the Triangle Club’s annual melodrama run. ‘There’s still danger aplenty lurking in the forest.’

  Not even an hour of I-missed-you sex was going to fix that.

  Crazy, catastrophic, mind-blown-off-its-hinges sex.

  Memories that had to be forced aside now—and were—as I slinked back into my room and threw on a sweater and jeans.

  Memories that returned in a relentless rush as soon as I saw Margaux again.

  I’d expected to find her in the kitchen or living room, gazing out of the window in her typical way of easing into the day. So many of those moments, when she stilled her inner dervish long enough to soak in the world instead of contemplating a conquest of it, were my favorites.

  I’d get no such moment today.

  She was out on the porch swing, coffee cup perched on her curled-up knees, beneath a heavy wool blanket. She wore a pink angora sweater in that funny backward way, so odd it looked cool, but that wasn’t what arrested me at first glance. That came in the form of her sleek, French-twisted hair and her to-the-eyelash makeup job, including the perfectly applied berry stain on her lips. Even with the turned-around sweater, she emanated class and polish and perfection.

  And detachment.

  Decision.

  Resignation.

  As if she’d woken and performed the exact same mental game I had. Purging all the memories, forcing down all the reality.

  Of course she had. Because I hadn’t fallen in love with a stupid woman. She was the exact opposite.

  She was your equal in about a thousand ways.

  And your superior in about a thousand more.

  I should have been relieved. After all, she’d done all the hard shit already.

  I wanted to lean over the rail and puke into the bushes.

  Instead, I shuffled to the empty end of the swing and eased onto it. When she didn’t kick me off, I scooted back a little farther. Wrapped one hand around her bundled feet and rubbed gently. “Hey.”

  She didn’t echo the greeting, or acknowledge the massage. After half a minute of silence, she finally murmured, “Your mom and Carlo took off a while ago. Grabbed an early breakfast in town.”

  I almost laughed. “Sure.” Early breakfast, my ass. Mom rarely even thought of food before ten—unless she didn’t want to be lurking during the most uncomfortable morning after in history.

  Margaux sipped her coffee. “I made a full pot. There’s plenty left, if you want some.”

  “No, thanks. Not yet.” I plunged again into the stillness as thick as the mist. “You look beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  �
�Big plans for the day?”

  “Not really.” She sipped again. Gazed out toward the barn. “Looking put-together helps me deal better with wanting to fall apart.”

  I exhaled through my teeth. “Fuck.”

  “Hmmm. Yeah. That about sums it up.” Then after she sipped again, “Dumb shit.”

  I grimaced. “Guess I had that coming, too.”

  She flung a side-eye like a wet towel embedded with razors. “What were you expecting? That I’d suddenly become ‘that’ girl, rewriting today because of what happened last night?” She let out an all-too-quiet sigh, set down her cup then folded her arms. “Your cock and your heart are two different things. While I enjoy the commitment of one, nothing between us is going to be right without the commitment of both.”

  I turned to swipe my hand around her nape. “Every fucking inch of my heart belongs to you.”

  Her lips tilted up, though she might as well have sobbed. The expression clutched my gut just as violently. Sadness, so deep it transcended tears, poured off her stronger than a nuclear haze. “No. Not every inch—and we both know it.”

  I snarled. Jerked back to my feet. Shuddered as Mom’s words from last night echoed within, adding to the agonizing cloud. ‘You’re reacting, not thinking. It’ll only be a matter of time before that fear manifests into something worse…’

  Fine, god damn it. Let the manifesting begin.

  “Margaux. Fuck.” I slammed both hands to the rail. “I don’t know how to do this any other way.” Twisted my hands around the damn thing until I trembled, my only defense against a full plummet to my knees. How else could I translate the mess in my mind to her? To communicate that I’d learned no other path than this? Did she think I hadn’t explored those other roads? Used compassion, understanding and the whole teamwork thing with dear ol’ Uncle Dec—even against him? Good beats evil, was that it?

  But that wasn’t it.

  Captain America beat the bad guys by understanding them.

  Then pretending to the rest of the world that he didn’t.

  Nobody ever told him it was going to be easy, either—especially in a moment like this, when the love of his life rose to her feet with such singular grace she knocked the air out of him as if they’d met for the first time. Yeah, even more than the night she’d shown up half-drunk at his place and dropped her dress, offering herself to him in the sexiest red lingerie he’d ever seen. Even more than the first time she’d confessed her love for him, in the middle of the airport, begging him not to get on a plane and leave her.