Still holding her with one steady arm, he lost the battle not to touch her hardened nipples. He flattened his hand over the shirt, right over her heart, and slowly, easily, gradually dragged his palm until he cupped her breast.
She gasped softly, straightening, her eyes wide. He braced himself for the word “no” or that look that said sex terrified her. But her expression was soft, her jaw slack, her eyes dark with arousal.
A loud shot of thunder made her startle and suck in a breath, coming closer.
“All those nights, Mandy,” he whispered into her dripping wet hair.
“All what nights?”
He thumbed her nipple, gratified by the hard, relentless point under his fingertip. “All those nights I’d sit in my room and solve equations and make graphs and torture my brain with mathematics...” He unbuttoned the top button, easily able to reach into the shirt and caress her breast.
For a minute, he couldn’t talk, his whole brain flatlined by the perfection of her skin and the slope of her woman’s body.
“But then I would think about you.” His cock underscored the sentiment, growing harder against her belly.
She smiled, either because of the words or what she felt. “What did you think about, Ezekiel?”
“These.” He squeezed her breast. “This.” Soft, sweet, tender woman filled every sense as he brushed her lips with his. “And...” He slid his hand down to the bottom of the shirt, sliding easily between her legs, finding sweet, soft, soaked silk, the sexiness of it jolting him. “Of course, this.”
She moaned as he stroked her panties and found a sweet spot.
“And what did you do?” she asked.
He wanted to laugh at the question, but he wasn’t capable of anything but feeling her buckle a little under his touch. “Not calculus.”
“Did you...” She wiped her hands down his chest, over his abs, lower to his already open pants, a question in her eyes.
He closed his eyes and hissed when her fingertip made contact with him, the slight touch injecting more blood to an already engorged hard-on. The rain was useless now, doing nothing but making this even sexier. “I did,” he admitted. He buried his face in her hair, nestling into her neck, fighting the urge to howl and slam himself into her fist.
She moaned, clearly turned on by the thought. Pulling her in, he kissed her, tasting rain and the remnants of lip gloss, tasting sex and desire. “I want you, Mandy,” he murmured as he broke the kiss. “Here, there, anywhere you’ll have me. I want to be inside you. I want to make love to you.”
The lightning answered for him, the shock of light catching unmitigated fear in her eyes.
There was no doubt about it. “Sex scares you,” he said flatly.
She didn’t answer, looking down, the distant rumble like an echo of her pain. “It does more than scare me,” she said softly. “I...can’t. I may never...again. I just can’t.”
Then he knew. All the comments about powerful men, her hesitation about sex, her assumption that everything between a man and a woman caused...pain.
She didn’t say a word, the rain rolling over her cheeks like tears he knew with certainty she’d shed a million times. “He hurt you.”
Her eyes shuttered. “I told you he did.”
“No, he physically hurt you.”
She didn’t answer, biting her lip, looking down in shame.
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“Please, Mandy. Did he...” God, he couldn’t say the word. It made him recoil, a testosterone-induced rage bubbling through him. “If he hurt you, wherever he is, whoever he is, I’ll kill him.”
He could see her eyes fill despite the rain. “No, you can’t. And that’s not...please, Zeke. I can’t talk about it.”
“You should talk about it,” he urged. “Let someone share your anger.”
She shook her head again. “I’m past anger and, honestly, I didn’t come out here to talk about that.” Her fingers brushed his abs again, but the fire was gone.
Until she got over this—until she talked and healed—he wasn’t going to have her. Not the way he wanted.
Far-off thunder rolled, and rain splattered around them, chilly now and not nearly as seductive as it had been a minute ago. No, until this pain was gone from her heart, every time they kissed and touched, some asshole came into the room with them.
He might want Mandy in every way a man could want a woman, but before they could share that, he had to at least try to help her forget the guy who’d wrecked her. Sighing, he put his arm around her. “Come in with me.”
“I can’t go to bed,” she said, and he understood what she meant.
“I have a better idea.”
Chapter Nine
Zeke brought Amanda towels and wrapped her in them, then sent her into the bathroom where she found a thick velour robe. She stayed in there a few minutes, corralling her composure, toweling off her hair, then staring in the mirror to see herself through Zeke’s eyes.
But all she saw was…Doug Lockhart’s wife. A shadow of the woman she could have been, and certainly not the woman Zeke thought she was.
She closed her eyes and released a pained sigh. She couldn’t go the rest of her life alone, could she? But anything else meant...
A shudder passed through her whole body. She wanted him. Really, truly felt the desire that she’d long ago thought Doug had killed. But there it was, alive and sparking in every nerve ending in her body.
Oh, it had been so long since she’d made love to a man who cared about her feelings. In the early days of their marriage, Doug had, but then…things had escalated.
If he hurt you, wherever he is, whoever he is, I’ll kill him.
Well, good luck finding him.
It would never get to that point. She couldn’t let it, even if she did give in to her body’s urges. In a week, Zeke would be gone. Pretend would end. She’d start her business, and he’d go back to his life in New York, and this would be nothing but a lovely interlude that made her feel beautiful again.
Holding that thought, she opened the door to find a fire raging in the fireplace and Zeke on one knee, adjusting the glass enclosure around the flames.
He was still bare-chested but must have found a pair of sleep pants. In the firelight, the muscles and cuts of his bare chest looked like an artist had painted them.
“Wow.” Amanda ventured closer. “I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. All I did was find the switch and turn on a gas fireplace.” He stood, his body on full display, the drawstring around his waist loose enough so the pants fell over narrow hips, revealing more of his masculine form. “And I found some basic necessities in the armoire there. I should have known our hosts would provide sleepwear.”