Unforgiven by Anne Calhoun Page A

exploration were endless, intriguing. Silently she pushed the door open in invitation. He tilted his head.
Ladies first.
She walked into her tiny kitchen and flicked on the wall sconce over her little kitchen table. Dim light pushed at the shadows in the room.
    “Would you normally do this after a first date?” he asked, his head bent as if he was studying the floor.
    “That was hardly our first date,” she said lightly. When he lifted an eyebrow, she relented. “Depends,” she said.
    “On what?”
    That was harder to answer. “On lots of things. The guy. The date. How long it’s been.”
    “How long has it been?” he asked, still not looking at her.
    “Three days,” she said. “You were there. Shots of whiskey, pantry. Remember?”
    Then he lifted his head and nailed her to the wall with his heated hazel gaze. “Before that.”
    Months. Months and months and months alone, because she was busy in the summer, and worn down, and in the winter the weather kept her off the roads. The longing for touch, for a man’s hands on her body, against her body, swept through her. Maybe it was a betrayal of honor and self-respect. The night in the pantry probably was. But she’d long since given up denying what her soft, animal body wanted. Needed. “A while,” she said.
    “I know how that feels,” he said.
    “I expect you do,” she said. Longing surged in the room like a rising tide, engulfing them by degrees, rhythmic, predictable.
    “It’s an ache,” he went on. “Low and tight. Heavy.”
    Her mouth went dry. “Yes,” she said.
    He crossed the tiny kitchen in a single step, backing her against the wall by the door to her bedroom. One elbow braced by her head, he laid his big palm flat against her lower belly, not quite cupping her sex. “Here. It’s steady. Relentless. After a while it doesn’t matter if you get yourself off or not. It never goes away.”
    Air slowly left her lungs, drawn to the heat simmering between them. She inhaled shakily and looked up at him, then cupped the thickening bulge in his jeans. “Is it the same for you?”
    He shifted, rubbing against the heel of her hand, while his fingers gathered the loose fall of her hair. “Lower,” he said. “Right at the base, and in my balls.” When she turned her wrist and applied a little more pressure, he groaned and ground against her. “It’s a need,” he said, low and rough. The hand slowly twining in her hair tightened for a split second, then released. “But the Marine Corps taught me how to deal with needs.”
    Two steps, her retreating, him advancing into the dark, warm air of her bedroom, and they were up against her double bed. She stopped but Adam didn’t. He slipped an arm around her waist and lifted her, bearing her back onto the unmade bed, breaking their descent with his other hand. He was braced on one arm, stretched out beside her, his hazel eyes dark with restrained desire. Her heart thudded hard against her breastbone. This was a moment she loved, when the promise of sex began to permeate the air. But they were both fully dressed, and something unknown glimmered under the building heat.
    His long fingers curled under the hem of her sweater, caught under its bottom, and began to tug it up. Adam, a bed, darkness, and privacy—her teenage dream. Cold air kissed her belly, then her ribs, puckering her nipples inside her lace bra. A little shifting and he tugged her top over her head and dropped it on the floor.
    “In boot camp you never refer to yourself in the first person. No ‘I’ or ‘me.’ It’s ‘this recruit,’ with the objective being to graduate from recruit to Marine. Before Receiving, I had needs,” he said, then bent to the exposed skin. She expected a kiss and got the scrape of his teeth over her collarbone, then the kiss, a softer touch that zinged straight to her nipples, then to her clit. The shudder that ran through her had nothing to do with air temperature. “‘This Marine’ closed his mind