“I get it.”
“I’d never want to hurt you.”
“I appreciate that. Same goes.”
“So.”
“So.”
“Want to go upstairs?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do you have condoms?”
“In the house.”
“Why don’t you go get them?”
Cooper couldn’t believe this was actually going to happen. He was going to have sex with Gigi Gibson. In the time they’d spent together, he’d discovered there was so much more to her than the hysterically funny, sexy woman she portrayed on the show. She carried a well of hurt a mile deep, and all he seemed to want out of life since he met her was to make her happy and soothe the pain she carried deep inside.
He disentangled from her, got out of the pool and grabbed his towel to dry off before he went inside to grab the condoms he had in his shaving bag. Would bringing three seem overly optimistic? Cooper laughed at that thought and took a second to get himself together before he joined her.
This thing with her, which had started out as lighthearted fun, was quickly becoming much more than that for him. He’d heard what she said about not falling for her, and he took that to heart, but he was falling, nonetheless, and having sex with her was only going to make it “worse.” In this case, worse had never been so good.
Yes, he was young, and yes, women had been a source of fun for him for most of his life, but never had he met anyone he could see himself being with for the long haul until he met Gigi. She’d be an endless source of excitement, mystery, confusion, laughter and desire. If someone had asked him before he met her what his perfect woman might be like, he couldn’t have said. Now he knew that Gigi in all her maddening variations was his idea of the perfect woman.
Convincing her to give him a chance was going to be a daunting task, but he was more than up for it.
* * *
Gigi hoped she wasn’t making a huge mistake by inviting Cooper into her bed. He was a great guy, but his intensity concerned her. He looked at her as if he could see all the way through her to the junk she kept buried deep inside and off-limits to everyone. She didn’t want him or anyone seeing that crap, which meant she needed to be extra careful around him.
His footsteps on the stairs announced his arrival. He came in wearing only swim trunks, with his muscular chest on full display. Deep, dark bruises marred the perfection that included light blond chest hair that went darker around the waistband of his trunks. The man was sexy, sweet and sincere, three things that were hard to find. So hard to find that she appreciated those qualities in him, but she absolutely refused to become attached to a man who’d soon be living three thousand miles from her.
She’d meant what she told him before. This could never be more than a late-summer fling. Now if only she could convince herself of that before it was too late.
He came right over to her, put his arms around her and picked up where they’d left off in the pool with hot, sexy kisses that made her head spin.
“I wish I could do something cool like sweep you off your feet and carry you to bed, but I’m afraid if I did that, I might not be able to do anything else.”
“Save your strength, Tarzan. You’re gonna need it.”
“Am I panting? Drooling?”
Smiling, she took his hand and walked backward toward the bedroom. When they were standing by her bed, she gently ran her fingertips over the bruises on his side. “If it hurts too much, will you tell me?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you. But I’m fine. Never been better, in fact.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
Something in the way he looked at her put Gigi on alert that she might’ve made a huge mistake agreeing to sleep with him. An odd tingling sensation traveled down her spine as he touched her with reverence. She wanted to stop him, to remind him of what this was and what it wasn’t, but she couldn’t get words past the huge lump in her throat.
Sex wasn’t about emotion. That bullshit was for other people. Sex was a physical release, and that was it. She needed to take control of this situation before it spiraled out of her control.
“Let me,” she said, her hands on his chest.
“No.” He dipped his head and kissed her neck, laying a path to her chest, where he quickly removed her bikini top and began to worship her breasts.
There was no other word to describe the way he tended to each one, making her squirm and ache from the sensuous torture. Cooper might be younger than her, but he clearly knew his way around the female body. He was tender, sweet and demanding—all at the same time. She no sooner processed one thing than he was on to the next.
As he lowered her to the bed and gazed down at her, Gigi couldn’t keep up, and holding on to any semblance of control seemed foolish considering how he played her body like a maestro. She’d had no idea that her belly button could be so sensitive or that hip bones could be erogenous zones.
He raised her legs to his shoulders and left hot kisses on her inner thigh.
“Cooper.”
“Hmm?”
“I, uh…” Her brain went completely blank when his tongue connected with her clit. Holy. Shit. Gigi couldn’t recall the last time she’d allowed a guy to do that to her. It was too intimate. She wanted to tell Cooper to stop, to move along to the main event, to get it over with so she could put her protective walls back in place to keep him from getting too close. But when a man had his face buried in your unmentionables, that was hardly the time to remind him that this was supposed to be just sex, not whatever this was.
Gigi was always, always in control. She never drank too much or did any kind of drugs that would leave her unprotected. The habit of self-protection was so deeply ingrained in her that she’d rarely had an orgasm with a man, preferring to fake them rather than let herself go there with someone else. Besides, she’d yet to meet a man who could give her a better orgasm than she could give herself.
Cooper seemed determined to be the exception.
He was in no particular rush as he used every tool in his arsenal to devastate her defenses. Fingers, tongue, lips worked together in a combination that had her making noises she’d never heard herself make before as he brought her to the very edge of release before backing off and starting over. He did it so effortlessly that she began to wonder just how much practice he’d had in how to make a woman lose her mind.
And as soon as she had that thought, she hated every woman he’d ever done this to before her with a wild, unreasonable fury.
Gigi Gibson didn’t do jealousy, which was another unprecedented emotion on top of all the others that overwhelmed her one right after the other. She was about to insist he stop when the orgasm he’d been building broke so suddenly, it took her breath away. When she came back down from the incredible high and opened her eyes, he was perched above her, too sexy for his own good—and hers. His small, smug smile did wonders for his already sinfully handsome face, and as he pressed into her, Gigi winced from the tight fit.
Holy. Hell. The man was packing, and it should’ve come as no surprise to her that he knew just how to use his God-given gifts. Christ have mercy, he was going to be the death of her. And then he began to talk.
“You’re so, so pretty, Gigi,” he whispered as his lips skimmed over her tingling nipple. “Prettiest girl I ever met.”