He drew back from my mouth enough to show me that his blue eye had drowned to lion amber. A growl that should never have come out of a human throat trickled from between his lips, as he held me.
I growled softly back.
Nicky roared, a great, coughing blast of sound that I'd never heard from any werelion. The sound was stunning this close. I was so startled that he had set me on my feet before I reacted.
I said, "What..."
He grabbed the front of my jeans and ripped them open, tearing through the zipper and most of the cloth around it. The strength was startling. He turned me around, roughly, making me stumble a little. He bent me over the bench so that my hands had to catch me on it, or I'd have hit my knees on it. He ripped my jeans open, tearing them down to my thighs. He put one hand around the back of my thong and ripped it off of me in one pull. Did it hurt, or did it feel good? That moment where rough and pain turn to sex and pleasure had switched in my head. I loved the sensation of him ripping my clothes away; the force of it, the eagerness of it, tightened things low in my body.
Nicky slipped his hands around my hips, and growled, "God, I love your ass."
There were other men in my life who whispered sweet nothings during sex, even quoted poetry. I loved them for it, but I loved Nicky for other things.
He kept one hand on my hip, but ran his hand over my ass, stroking, tracing, petting, and finally slid a finger inside me. I was tight enough that even that drew a small sound from me.
"You're wet," he said, in that hoarse whisper-growl of a voice.
"I know," I said, and my voice was hoarse, too.
He slid two fingers inside me, and began to push them in and out like a preview of what he planned to do later. He moved faster and faster, and it felt good, it felt very good, but it wasn't going to hit the mark.
"The angle's wrong," he said, in a voice a little less growling.
"Yes," I said.
"Lie on your back on the bench."
I glanced over my shoulder at him. "It's too narrow to have sex on."
"Just do it," he said, and it was at moments like this that I both enjoyed Nicky being less flowery than most of the other men, and wondered just how blunt he would have been if I hadn't mind-fucked him from the beginning.
I gave him a look the idea deserved, and stood up. "Not with my jeans around my thighs."
"Fine," he said. He knelt, and I had a second to realize what he meant to do before his hands balled into my jeans and jerked downward. I had nothing to hold on to, so it staggered me. He caught me with one hand, while the other one ripped the last of my jeans off. I was left in my shirt with the bra under it, and the ankle-high boots I'd worn in the field. They weren't club boots; they were police/military boots, not exactly sexy.
"I would have said you couldn't get jeans off over these boots," I said, and was half laughing.
He licked one of my cheeks, a long, slow taste of tongue, and I stopped laughing. Then he set teeth into my cheek, and I said, "Ow, too much teeth, too soon."
He licked over where he'd bitten. "You'll like it later," he said.
"Probably, but not yet."
"Lie down, on your back, on the bench."
"It's a really narrow bench," I said, and turned enough so I could look down at him. He looked up at me, his blond hair falling over his face, that one blue eye staring up at me. His face already held that darkness, that surety that most men's eyes get at some point when the clothes are coming off and the sex is happening. It's not exactly possessive, but yet it is, but it is predatory, and it wasn't just because Nicky was a werelion. It wasn't a shapeshifter look, or a vampire look, it was a male look. Maybe women had their own version, but I rarely saw my own face in a mirror during sex, and I had only one other woman to compare to, and she didn't have a look like this one.
I stared down into Nicky's face, and he stared up at me and let me see in his face what he wanted to do to me. "Get on the bench, Anita."
I didn't argue again.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THE BENCH WAS narrow, but Nicky pointed out, "You do ab work on the incline bench, just hold on." I put my hands behind me next to my head and held on. Our clothes had ended up in a pile on the floor. He did me by hand, using his fingers to find that sweet spot that was possible from the undignified angle of me on the bench, legs up and half bent, him holding one leg so that he could put one knee on the bench and get the angle his fingers needed to stroke over and over, fast and faster, that sweet spot inside me. He brought me screaming, fighting my body to hold on to the bench and not forget that if I let go, I'd fall.
He moved his fingers out of me, and between my legs to find that other sweet spot that was outside. My words came out breathy, as I said, "Fuck me."
"Not yet," he said, and his voice was growling deep again.
"Why not?" I breathed.
He stroked over and around me, staring at my face as he did it. "Because I've seen what the other men in your bed do to you, Anita. I want you to want me, and that means I have to bring my A-game, because anything less and you don't have to f**k me. If I don't put effort in, you'll go to someone who does."
It was hard to think with his fingers playing with me, but I tried. "I enjoy you. You're... great."
"You've got at least two lovers who are better at o**l s*x than I am. You've got two who are bigger than I am."
I started to try to comfort him, but he said, "I'm okay, I don't have to be the biggest boy in your bed." He started moving his fingers faster, a little harder. The pleasure began to build between my legs, and my face must have shown it, because he grinned. "Yeah, that's it. I love that look on your face."
One moment the weight was building, and the next, that wave of pleasure burst over me, poured through me, danced over my skin, my body, as if every muscle, every piece of me had become nothing but the joy, the sensation of it. I shrieked, head back, back trying to arch against the bench. Nicky called out, "Anita!" His hand was suddenly pressing against my sternum, pressing, holding me to the bench, while I rode the orgasm, and his fingers kept it going, until I lay boneless, eyes fluttering, and blind with the pleasure of it.
He was laughing, that deep, masculine chuckle that men have inside them when they are particularly pleased with themselves, usually about sex.
I tried to see me, tried to force my eyes to work, and the world not to be soft-edged and blurry, but another aftershock made me writhe on the bench, and Nicky's hands were wrapping around me, lifting me.
I had time to try to make my arms work enough to hold on to his arms. He moved both his hands down to my thighs and lifted me slightly, and then he sat me down on top of him, and slid the tip of him inside me. It stole the breath from my throat, too soon after the last orgasm, so that the sensation of him sliding inside me, his hands controlling how slow he entered me, was almost overwhelming. It felt so good, so... my eyes fluttered shut again, my hands convulsing on his arms, trying to hold me where he wanted me, while he guided our bodies together.
When he was as deep inside me as he could go, he said, "God, that feels so amazing."
I managed to gasp, "Yes, oh, yes."
Then he bent forward, pressing me back onto the bench with his body still buried as deep inside me as he could go.
"We'll fall," I said. The thought was helping clear my head a little.
"Hold on to my arms, I've got this."
I did what he asked, and the happy after-fog was drifting away on my very real fear we would fall off the narrow bench.
He raised my h*ps a little, angling my legs up and to either side. He steadied me while I found the angle I wanted with him on top, and then he put his hands on either side of me, wrapping them around the edges of the bench, in a reverse grip of what I'd done earlier. He stayed sitting up, his legs on either side of the bench, my legs on either side of his h*ps and waist, and he began to move himself in and out of me.
"On the bench," I said, eyes a little wide and not just from afterglow.
"On the bench," he said, and he raised his h*ps a little, lengthening out his upper body above me like a roof of muscle and flesh. His arms were moving with the rhythm of his body inside mine, and I transferred my grip back to the bench, one careful hand at a time. Once I wasn't holding on to him, he changed his angle and started finding a serious, quick, deep rhythm. I watched his body work above mine, only his h*ps and that long, hard piece of him touching me at all. Technically with the man above me it was supposed to be missionary position, but this was as far from that as you could get and still have the man on top.