Riptide by Cherry Adair Page B

“Stop?” His eyes, his amazing azure eyes, narrowed fractionally on her face. His fingers flexed on her ass.
    “I’m sorry.” She was shockingly aroused, her taut nipples rasping against his chest even as she could barely drag in a breath. She was this close to a climax and shook, trying to resist the urgent pull of it. “I can’t do this.” Thank God her brain was in charge, because her body was begging for more, more, more. Anyone else, and she would’ve fluttered her eyelashes, smiled, and lightened the situation so she could walk away without a backward glance. Or apologized for leading him on and defused the situation. All the while leaving the guy’s ego intact.
    Nick Cutter wasn’t that guy.
    “You started this,” he pointed out, his voice was cool, unaffected.
    She’d realized the moment their lips touched that she’d made made a tactical error in her attempt to see if he was cold all the way through. But that hadn’t stopped her from kissing him back. That hadn’t stopped her from touching him. Or rubbing against him.
    Bria’s heart was knocking uncomfortably. Her body buzzed and throbbed and a strange euphoria racing through her bloodstream made her dizzy. She was wet in places that usually took concerted foreplay to make damp. “I know.” Very slowly, she uncramped her fingers from the back of his head before he got any more confused. Or angry.
    She couldn’t make her body move any more than that. Not for a minute. Or ten. “Sorry.” Oh, God, she sounded like some dim-witted Victorian virgin. “But I only met you a few hours ago! I—”
    “You don’t go to bed with men you don’t know?”
    “N—” She bit her tongue, the tongue he’d been nibbling on with devastating effect a heartbeat before. She didn’t owe him any explanations about her somewhat limited love life. Not only wasn’t it any of his business, it wasn’t the point. She could have told him a version of the truth: For a moment I lost my mind, thinking I might’ve died, and was looking for a little human connection, a little confirmation of life.
    And, be honest, it was a foolish experiment.
    Except this wasn’t the time for that kind of brutal honesty. The man was a stranger.
    The orgasm started to ebb unfulfilled. It was a night for that. Her brain screamed get away from the man for God’s sake! But her body, her traitorous sex-starved body couldn’t comply, because moving right then would set off a domino effect.
    “I don’t usually have people trying to strangle and kill me. I don’t— Never mind. I just don’t.”
    There was no excuse. She couldn’t even lie to herself. She’d needed warmth to hold the flutters of fear at bay. She’d wanted to see if she could elicit a spark of … something. A little heat, anything to staunch the cold feeling inside. And what she’d done was set a match to a forest of dry kindling.
    When Nick Cutter warmed up, it was overwhelming. She needed a moment to regroup.
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    Nick rolled onto his back, lifting his hands in surrender. As if. She already knew him better than that. He did nothing to hide the erection straining at his zipper as he cupped the back of his head and watched her with hooded eyes and a stern mouth.
    Tingling, throbbing, pulsing, Bria swung her legs off the mattress, then sat there, back to him while she tried to calm her manic heartbeat and slow her breathing. She fought the urge to bury her face in her hands.
    His voice cracked the silence. “Are you a virgin?”
    She couldn’t help laughing. If her lips weren’t swollen, and her heart racing, she would’ve sworn from his tone that he hadn’t kissed her senseless three seconds before. “A woman asks you to stop, and you presume she’s frigid?”
    “A woman crawls all over me, and I presume she wants to be fucked. Did you take the edge off before I got here, Princess?”
    She thought she had. She hadn’t. She glanced over her shoulder to stare narrowed-eyed at him. “Wow.