A symbolic barrier between Cullen and any woman he’d ever taken. A shield that somehow protected them from the dangerous mess of the half-cocked grenade that was him. His breath still, Cullen waited for the rush of panic, the internal alarm that warned him to get the hell away before he did something stupid. Before he hurt someone. Before he let someone rake nails down his own soul.
A wave of heat and need and trust, all heralded by Sky’s bright blue eyes, washed over him instead. He didn’t just love Skylar Reynolds, he trusted her. He trusted her to trust him.
Placing the aching head of his cock against Sky’s tight entrance, he thrust into her hard, holding still for a moment to let her adjust to the intrusion. Then, heedless of his shoulder’s protest, Cullen lifted Sky into his arms. Holding her against him, Cullen turned them both to lay his back down on the bed with Sky straddling him, her silky strawberry hair waving around her bare shoulders.
“Fuck me,” Cullen said, tightening every muscle in his body to keep the show from being over when it had just barely started. He wasn’t in the habit of letting a woman ride on top, but there was nothing typical about anything Sky did. “Now.” The words had left him as a curse rather than a command, but Sky smirked at him and gave a sarcastic salute.
“Yes, sir,” she drawled, almost purring her response. And damn it if that sir didn’t send his cock pulsing all the way to his head like a desperate schoolboy.
With her hands braced on his abdomen, Sky thrust herself along the length of him, her channel gripping Cullen’s cock, sliding tightly up and down his engorged shaft. As she looked down at him, Sky’s eyes were blue whorls of crystalline brilliance. Jesus fucking Christ. Filling her like this made Cullen’s head spin.
A ball of anticipation tightened at the base of his spine, his sac firming and drawing up toward his throbbing hardness. He’d never let a woman ride him before, and something about having Sky do it made it even more enticing. Or maybe that was Sky herself. He craved her, and not only for the sublime perfection of her body.
Still, having her straddling him like this was wreaking havoc on Cullen’s restraint.
“Hold on to the headboard with everything you’ve got,” Cullen demanded, his voice hoarse as his hips undulated beneath her. “I want to see the imprints of your fingernails left behind.”
Sky looped her hands around the maple edge above him, and Cullen bucked up into her at once. He felt himself penetrate deeper with each thrust, Sky’s small gasps confirming his cock’s report. Continuing to piston into her from below, he scooted his fingers along her silky skin and latched on to her right nipple with his mouth.
Suckling, he thrust faster and faster, the whole bed trembling from the punishing rhythm. Sky moaned with each bump and grind, the sound driving Cullen’s thrust harder still, feeding the escalating tension between them. The motion made her breasts bounce delectably right in his face, and he ceased suckling on her nipple just so he could watch.
Lacing his right hand into her strawberry tresses, he pulled her down and branded his mouth to hers. She offered him her tongue, and he took it, suckling it into his own mouth until she fell forward and had to brace herself with one hand on his pillow while the other connected with his good shoulder. He inhaled her passionflower fragrance as it blended with the fabric softener scent already prevalent in the room, and decided the combination was the best smell ever.
Lowering his hand to her clit, Cullen rubbed the swollen bud as he still held her mouth with his, his cock raking through her channel. Sky moaned against his mouth, her body jerking wildly at the triple assault. Fire roared through Cullen’s blood, his sac so tight that the lines between pressure and pain and ecstasy had long become blurred.
Giving her one more carefully aimed flick, he felt her walls clamp down on his pulsating cock, stronger and fiercer than ever. At the same time, cascading pleasure rippled through Cullen, the feeling of Sky’s legs and channel and mouth all holding on to him desperately magnifying each sensation.
Sky shrieked into his mouth, and he drank in her orgasm, twining it inseparably with his own release.
As their throbs and quakes blended and coalesced into pure shared bliss, he felt something calm inside him. He’d taken Sky prior to this, but today, in this motel room alongside the noisy interstate, it had been different. Intimate. And now, lying there under her, their limbs and bodies still tangled together, Cullen felt his heart change rhythm to beat alongside hers.
38
Sky
Having showered off, Cullen and I remake the room with the hurry of naughty school kids, finishing just in time to avoid me turning lobster red as Addie returns—bags of Chinese food takeout in tow. Giving me a knowing grin, the woman sets out boxes of lo mein and General Tso’s chicken on the motel’s tiny coffee table, rapping Cullen’s knuckles with a pair of chopsticks when he reaches for a wonton.
“You. Shirt off,” she orders.
Cullen gives her a dark look. “Thanks, Addie, but I’m a one-woman kind of guy.” His hand slides dangerously to the inside of my thigh in an illustration that has Addie glaring.
“Let me put it another way,” she says, her voice honey sweet. “You let me see your shoulder, or I call Dr. Yarborough right now and just tell him what I think is happening inside. And then I’m calling all the Tridents with the diagnosis and giving them this address. In my professional estimation, that will have you in surgery by…” She glances at the alarm clock, where 11:26 is just shifting to the next minute, “two p.m. is my best guess.”
Cullen growls like an enraged German shepherd, but obediently unbuttons the shirt we’d just put on him, his smooth tattooed skin on delicious display once more. Tightening my thighs, because Cullen’s hard body is the last thing I need to be thinking about just now, I impertinently take the very wonton Cullen was deprived of and drudge back to our actual reason for coming here.
“We think yesterday’s fight was a setup,” I tell Cullen, drawing his attention away from where Addie is peering professionally at his shoulder. “The video sent to Addie was taken by one of the Denton Uncovered photographers using a damn good telephoto zoom lens. For Frank’s guy to be there at just the right time to get blackmail material is entirely too convenient.”
Addie blows out a short sigh. “Except Cullen wasn’t there when the problem started. Just guessing that it would be Cullen who’d happen to intervene is rather inefficient.”
I swallow. “I don’t think Jaden ever expected me to resist his orders. He only got physical when I refused to follow along with him and he lost his temper. His instructions could have been to maneuver me toward Cullen. Except he got carried away.”
Cullen’s eyes flash in fury, and he makes a visible effort to rein himself in, his chest expanding in deep even breaths.
“And the photographer?” asks Addie.
Cullen taps his good hand on his knee, wincing slightly as Addie probes the joint. “I’ve had a feeling that someone has been watching me the entire week at WorldROCK. I’d dismissed it as a…” He hesitates, and I suddenly know what he was going to say. Why is he afraid to say it?
“A flare-up of PTSD?” I finish for him, touching his knee when he nods. “It’s been bad lately?”