LITMIR.BIZ

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knew, but not quite yet. He couldn’t bear to pause just yet….

      “Cade.” She broke the kiss, flushed and panting. “We’ve got to stop.”

      Stop? He couldn’t have understood her. Or maybe she’d meant that it was time to get a condom.

      “Soon,” he murmured, loath to release her even for a moment. He kissed her again and led her back to those enticing undulations, spreading her thighs as far as the panties would allow. The satin garment had to go. And so did his briefs.

      “Now,” she whispered faintly against his mouth as he tugged at the waistband of his briefs. “We have to stop now.”

      He kissed her again into silence, not allowing himself to worry too much. This wasn’t like their make-out sessions in college. She wouldn’t leave him high and dry. They were adults, and she wanted him. She’d come to his bed, stripped off her gown and was kissing him even now with a feverish need, a very sexual need.

      A tortured groan escaped her, and she caught his hands in her own. “Cade, I…I have to think about this.”

      Think about this, she’d said. Not get a condom. Surprise made Cade pull back to read her face. “Think about what?”

      “This. Us.” Her expression was troubled as she squirmed from beneath him and sat up. “Having sex.”

      “Don’t think so much.” He levered himself up on one arm and hijacked her mouth in another kiss—a little more urgent than the ones they’d been sharing. A little more impatient.

      She matched his impatience with a roughness of her own, an exhilarating thrust and parry that roused him all the more.

      But then she broke away, panting as if she’d been wrestling rather than kissing. “I know you’re right. I do think too much. And you’re right about our kisses, too.” She paused to catch her breath, her eyes luminous, her color high, her hair tousled and sexy. “Just kissing you makes me hotter than…than…oh, never mind.”

      She initiated the kiss this time.

      Fire leaped within him, and his next kiss pressed her back against the pillows. She groaned, wrapped an arm around his neck and arched against him. He rubbed a greedy hand over her breast until the tender peak stood high and tight and scraped across his palm.

      She gasped, writhed and ran her silky knee up his thigh…up, up, up, to the tip of his erection, sending shards of heat through his groin.

      With a sharp hiss of breath, he plunged his hand in a downward path toward the dark curls glistening between her thighs.

      She caught his hand again, though, just shy of his destination, and held it. “This is wrong. I can’t let myself do this.” She pulled away from him and scooted to the side of the bed.

      Dazed and shaken, Cade watched in disbelief as she rose and pulled up her panties. “I’m sorry, Cade.”

      Sorry. Which meant she was doing it again! Just as she had in college—leaving him all hot and bothered and half-crazed. “Brynn,” he said, his voice inhumanly gruff, “what the hell are you doing?”

      “I’m going back to my room.” She found her rumpled nightgown on the floor, slipped the filmy fabric over her head and smoothed it down her maddening body.

      “Why?”

      “Because I can’t jump into bed with you without even thinking about it.”

      He sprang from the bed, crossed the room in two long strides and trapped her against the dresser, anchoring his arms on either side of her. “In case you don’t remember, you did jump into bed with me without even thinking about it. You also stripped off your clothes, kissed me into a goddamn fever—”

      “I know, I know!” She glanced at the erection straining beneath his briefs, and looked away with a guilty wince. “I’m sorry about that, but—”

      “What are you afraid of, Brynn?”

      “I’m not afraid.”

      “Then what is it?” A thought hit him, and he asked with a curious tightness in his jaw, “Are you in love with someone else?” The tightness spread to his chest. “The guy who makes you think you’re frigid?”

      “No!” She frowned at him, and relief rushed through his veins. “I’m not in love with anyone. And don’t talk about Antoine that way.”

      “Antoine? He’s French?”

      She nodded, and Cade scowled. There was something about Frenchmen that drove women a little crazy. “If you’re not in love with this Antoine, then what’s stopping you from having sex with me? If you think you don’t want to, you’re lying to yourself.”

      “Oh, I know I want to.” Her voice had gone all throaty and her gaze warmed. “There’s always been sexual chemistry between us. I’ve never denied that.”

      Cade pressed closer, longing for the taste of her mouth, the feel of her body moving beneath his.

      Her gaze grew apologetic, though, and he had to hold back a curse. “But…well…” She searched for words that clearly evaded her.

      “But what, damn it?”

      “You’re…Cade Hunter.”

      He stared at her, nonplussed. What the hell did she mean by that? Before he was able to decipher the statement in any rational way, she ducked under his arm and fled across the room, her sheer gown billowing out behind her.

      “That’s no answer,” he called, bewildered, riled and more sexually frustrated than he’d thought humanly possible.

      She didn’t reply, stopping only to scoop up the keys she’d dropped when she first entered the room.

      He fisted his hands to keep from grabbing her and carrying her back to bed. “If you walk out that door, Brynn,” he warned, his voice harsh and uncompromising, “don’t—”

      He stopped, precariously on the verge of saying, Don’t come back to my room unless you’re ready to make love.

      As if she heard what he’d left unsaid, she froze on the way to the door and turned a forbidding frown on him. “Don’t…what?”

      “Don’t…forget that you…said you were going to think about it—about…finishing what we started.” He forced the impromptu words through a throat severely constricted by pent-up pressure. “So, do that. Think about it.”

      She regarded him in clear surprise, then slowly nodded. “I will.” Bowing her head, she hurried out of his room.

      Cade released an explosive breath, feeling as if he’d stopped just short of driving blindly off a cliff. He’d come close to giving her the same ultimatum he’d been cursing himself over for nine long years.

      At least he’d learned from his mistake.

      And that just might have earned him what he now wanted more than anything—one more chance with her.

      4

      THE FIRST THING BRYNN DID the next morning was to order from a local health-food store a special combination of herbs she’d taken back in college to help stop her sleepwalking. She wasn’t sure if the herbs had worked, but she had eventually stopped the disturbing habit, so it seemed worth taking the concoction again.

      She also dug through the crate of papers, letters and mementos she’d kept from her college days until she found the meditation cassettes that might have helped, as well. Again, she wasn’t sure that they had, but they certainly hadn’t hurt.

      She then called the nearest security company and ordered a computerized lock for her bedroom door that required fairly complex steps to open. Steps she couldn’t possibly follow in her sleep. Hoping the new lock would keep her in her own bedroom at night, she paid an exorbitant fee to have it installed that day.

      At

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