Author: Bella Andre

She was almost there, could almost feel his heat coming into her so perfectly, when she heard, “Megan.”

Very reluctantly, she opened her eyes and looked down at him.

His blue eyes were intense, full of arousal, and something else she couldn’t quite figure out. Or maybe it was that she didn’t want to figure it out.

Not when she was still trying to pretend.

“Are you protected?”

Her brain couldn’t quite process his question at first, it had been so long since she’d thought about things like protection against sexually transmitted diseases.

Or pregnancy.

When the words finally pierced the haze of lust fogging up her brain, she would have shot up off his lap, but his hands were firm around her waist, keeping her right where she was.

“No.” The one word sounded overly loud in the hotel room.

What was she doing?

But before she could answer that question, Gabe was reaching over to the side table and picking up a condom she hadn’t seen him put there the night before.

She knew, now, that she should stop him from putting it on. That last night was an aberration they definitely shouldn’t repeat.

Of course, she also knew that if he opened up that condom wrapper and slid it over his erection, she wouldn’t have a prayer of stopping herself from continuing what they’d started. What she’d started.

Because she’d been unable to help herself.

And yet, the tearing of the wrapper never came. Because Gabe was holding it out for her. As if he wanted her to make the choice about making love again.

Her words from the night before came back at her, then.

Please love me.

Megan closed her eyes at her weakness, at the way she’d begged Gabe for something so much bigger than just physical pleasure. That was how dangerous being with him was. It was long past time to steel herself to do what she’d told herself she would do come morning, and get out of the bed. But her heart, her guts, felt like they were being torn in two as she tried to climb off his lap.

The hotel was almost perfectly silent in the early morning, but she swore she could hear the clinking of the prison bars, one after the other, settling into place around her heart, first, and then her body.

Boom!

Megan knew she was being crazy, that she had to be overtired from too much exercise—and sex!—and not enough sleep.

Boom!

Her heart was already trapped, but as another thick bar came down—Boom!—instead of letting them continue to fall around her, she took crazy to a whole other place...and lunged back at Gabe.

She grabbed the condom from his hand and ripped it open so fast the latex circle fell into the bed as she held the two pieces of wrapper in each of her hands.

Boom!

She dived for the condom and scrambled back up over him, her hands shaking as she lifted the condom over his shaft. But just when she thought nothing could break her panic, his hands covered hers.

Warm. He was so warm.

She lifted her eyes to his and realized she was panting.

“Megan?”

She suddenly saw herself through his eyes, the way one night of incredible sex had turned her completely inside out. He should have been running away from her as fast as he could.

But, for some reason she couldn’t understand, he wasn’t doing that.

And somehow, when she was looking into his eyes and she could feel him warm and solid beneath her, those bars stopped slamming down around her. As if he could read her mind and knew exactly what she wanted, but was unable to ask for, he slid his hands all the way up her arms, past her shoulders, to cup her face in his palms.

“Come here, sweetheart.”

She leaned down over him, then, and as their mouths met so gently she felt something shatter inside her chest. Those bars around her heart were all knocking into each other as she gave in one last time to something so sweet she couldn’t stop herself from going back for more, couldn’t keep her hips from sliding up, then up some more until she was levered over him, her hips directly over his.

Megan took Gabe inside her on a gasp of pure joy. And there was no denying that making love with him again felt incredible, no way to stop her arms from going around his neck to pull him closer, or her legs from wrapping around his hips as they rolled back over so that his wonderfully heavy weight was pushing her back into the bed.

But even as her body hurtled toward an inevitable climax, even as she lifted her hips up to be closer to his, even as his mouth came down over the tip of one breast and she arched into the heat of his tongue—and especially as she tried to keep what was happening in a “just hot sex” box—there was no way on earth that Megan could deny that being with him this morning was different.

Bigger.

And so much scarier.

Too scary to go there alone.

“Please,” she gasped out.

Gabe lifted his eyes to hers, sweat dripping from his forehead to hers as he stilled. “Anything,” he told her, his voice as raw as hers.

But he couldn’t give her anything. He couldn’t become a man who went to a safe office every day and promised to come home in one intact piece every night.

And she could never ask him for that.

All she could ask for was this moment, this pleasure.

“Gabe.” She lifted one hand to his cheek, cradled him there as her whole world came down to this man, this one moment, this desire that demanded to be sated. They wouldn’t get any more moments like this. All they had was now, these final moments of sweet perfection. “I need you here with me.”

“I need to be there, too.”

His words were as good as a caress, enough to push her to the precipice of a pleasure so intense she couldn’t even imagine what was on the other side.

For the first—and last—time, Megan opened herself up completely to Gabe, pushed down every wall, shoved apart every prison bar, and let him in, so deep that as he slowly slid into her, as he filled all of the empty places she hadn’t even realized were there, she could have sworn he touched her soul.

Again and again he rocked over her, around her, inside her, his arms strong, his heartbeat steady, his kisses sweet and demanding all at the same time as they climaxed together.

No one has ever loved me like this was her last thought before the prison bars started falling back into place, crashing down in a circle all around her heart.

Chapter Fourteen

Plain and simple, Megan blew Gabe’s mind. To the point where, even though he knew he must be crushing her, he couldn’t manage to move a muscle from where he lay, sprawled over her, breathing heavily into the damp crook of her neck.

She was breathing just as hard, and he wasn’t surprised, given that their lovemaking had been at least as physical as anything he’d done even as a firefighter.

Gabe thrived on putting out fires. His job was his calling and every day he went to work, he went with a deep level of satisfaction over the life he’d chosen. But no triumph over fire had ever left him feeling this elated.

Which was why, no matter how many times he’d tried to hold onto the idea of one night—and only one night—with Megan, his brain hadn’t been able to pull it off.

He hadn’t forgotten what they’d agreed on in her apartment, but that didn’t mean he could discount what had just happened here between them, either.

Slowly lifting himself up off her sweet, soft curves, he looked down into her eyes, still fuzzy from the aftereffects of her climax. He smiled at her, the beautiful woman he couldn’t get enough of, and said, “Good morning.”

Two short words were all the time it took for Megan to go from pliable and loose and warm to rigid and tense and cold.

The caveman inside of him wanted to keep her pinned there beneath him on the bed. Instead, he forced himself to let her scoot away from him.

She reached for the first piece of clothing she could find. He wasn’t sure she realized that she’d grabbed his shirt, that she was wrapping herself up in him. The only thing he was sure of was the fact that Megan was desperate to get away from him.

In the decade that Gabe had been taking women to bed, they had only ever tried to get closer to him. They’d tried to find ways to spend more time with him. They’d worked to seduce him. A couple had even hoped for a ring.

But none had ever tried to get away from him.

Until now.

When Megan had made it to the far corner of the room, her back up against the wall, clutching his shirt tightly closed around her, she finally stopped and stared at him with big, alarmed eyes.

“That can never happen again.” She shook her head, that hair he’d had his fingers buried in just seconds ago falling over her shoulders like crumpled silk. “Never.”

Gabe got off the bed and pulled on his boxers to give himself time to think before replying. Back in her apartment their discussion about staying away from each other made sense. Perfect sense.

But now...well, there sure as hell wasn’t anything perfect about keeping their distance.

After his jeans were back on, he turned to the beautiful woman watching him so warily and said, “Never’s an awfully long time. Especially after—” He gestured to the bed. “Seems to me instead of saying never we should be discussing things.”

The shock on her face was better than that wary fear. “What’s there to discuss?”

He wasn’t at all pleased to note that his name on her lips was no longer the almost-prayer it had been when she was coming beneath him. “Seems like there’s plenty, Megan.”

She all but flinched at the way he said her name, still a caress, as if they were still in bed together, rather than standing at opposite ends of the room throwing the word never around.

“No,” she said, her hands clutching even tighter at his shirt, “just because we—” This time she was the one looking at the bed. “Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed.” He didn’t want to have to push her like this, but he sure as hell didn’t like the way she was pushing him.

“Yes. Okay. Fine.” Each of the words was clipped as they fell from her kiss-swollen lips. “We had sex. And it was great, but—”

“More than great.”

“You win,” she replied in a hard voice, as if they were on opposite sides of a war, rather than in this together trying to figure out where to go from here. “It was more than great, but it doesn’t change anything. You’re still you and I’m still me. Which means that it can never, ever happen again.”

All she wanted was for him to agree. He could see that. And he’d promised her anything, just minutes ago when they were making love.

But how the hell could he agree to never?

“Tell me about her,” she suddenly asked. “About the victim you saved. The one you dated that it didn’t work out with. What was her name? What did she do for a living? What color was her hair?”

His surprise at her questions was tempered by the fact that he knew what she was doing: She was forcibly trying to remind him of his reasons to walk away from her. Probably before she reminded him of hers—of the husband who’d died in his dangerous job and left her and her daughter all alone.

“Kate. Teacher. Dark.”

Gabe watched her carefully as he answered her questions. For all that she was saying she wanted him out of her life, there was no doubt in his mind that she hated putting together a mental picture of his ex. Just as much as he hated to think of her in Summer’s father’s arms, more stupidly jealous of a dead man than ever now that he knew just how much warmth, how much passion, how much sweetness Megan had to give.

“What happened? How did you save her?”

“It was an apartment fire.”

“Like mine?”

He shook his head. “No. Not nearly as bad as yours.” But Kate had been crying, shaking, so scared that he’d pulled her into his arms and hadn’t let go of her until the ambulance arrived.