Baddest Bad Boys(52)

She met Mac’s gaze directly and pulled her sweater over her head. With nothing between them now except heavy rain, wind, and a slice of sheer black silk, she stood, hands on hips, and let him look his fill.

He wasn’t going to touch, he said.

She’d see about that.

Mac managed not to swallow his damn tongue, but nothing short of the grim reaper could stop him from getting hard. He memorized every curve as Tommi unveiled it, the line of her hip, the rounds of her firm breasts, the triangle of black covering the territory he most wanted uncovered.

Even her goddamned knees were perfect.

As he’d imagined her. As he’d dreamed her.

She stood over him, rain a silver slick over her straight shoulders. Her nipples pebbled, two strong juts into the wind and rain. She looked like some kind of nature goddess.

Except for that black silk triangle.

And he’d promised not to touch. He was a madman. An egotist who’d taken bull-headed pride to new heights. As penance, he’d probably have this hard-on for life. And he knew damn well she was teasing him. Either that or she was enjoying freezing her butt off.

“If you don’t get in,” he said, sounding like he felt, frustrated and angry, “you’ll get pneumonia. And I’ll embarrass myself.”

She stepped down into the pool and sat on the stone shelf opposite him. When the water covered her to the shoulders, she closed her eyes. “Oh…this is heaven, absolute heaven.” She lifted partway out of the water, forked her fingers through her rain-soaked hair. In his sex-fogged brain, her breasts, wet with steam and water and only an arm’s length away, seemed luminescent; her eyelashes, when she raised them to meet his gaze, were diamond-tipped and sleek.

“Glad you took the dare?” If he didn’t say something, he’d drown in his own juices. God, he hurt.

“Yes.” She made a swimming pose with her hands, playfully pushed the water aside, then looked at him from under lowered lids. “Except—”

He waited. “Except what?”

She skimmed her palms over her nipples, cupped her breasts and lifted them. Offered them. “It’s making me…hot.” She grinned at him, a grin full of mischief and sexual mayhem, and stood. The water now only to her waist, she waded toward him. “Very hot.” Standing over him, she purred, “What about you? Is your temperature rising?” She rested a hand palm-flat on her stomach, ran a finger under the trim of her panties.

Thunder rolled and roared somewhere in the distance. The weather was closing in, as was Tommi. Torturing him with his own promise.

The steam rose from the pool to curl around her like smoke, making her unreal, dreamlike. A sexual feast, just out of reach.

He dropped his gaze. Below the surface of the water he saw the black triangle, the slight rise of her sex. A handful. A perfect handful. And under that—

He cut his thoughts. A promise was a promise. He’d have her, all right, but when he chose the time and place. When he was in control and could make her so hot she’d combust under him. In a primal way he wanted to brand himself on her. So she’d never forget…probably never forgive him.

He stretched out his legs on either side of hers, his erection aching—and blatant, and leaned back against the rock. “You’re playing me, Smith. It won’t work. You can save the ‘come f*ck me’ routine for another time. Right now, all I want is nature’s hot tub.”

He gave her credit—she didn’t flinch, she laughed. “Looking at that”—she eyed the hard length of him visible beneath the clear water and smiled—“I’d say what you want is me.”

“Figured that out, did you?”

“Uh-huh. Actually, I passed the Introduction to Male Arousal course sometime in the sixth grade. There were pictures and everything.” She looked at him again, more studiously this time. “You’d have made a good model. Long. Straight. Very impressive.”

“Thanks for the kind words. Now…sit.” Her eyes might as well have been her hands on him, stroking—but coming apart in the hot springs wasn’t his plan. Tommi knew the sex game, played it well, which both pleased and irritated him.

“I could go on.” She looked at him as if she knew he was suffering and she had the cure.

“You planning a second career doing phone sex?” he asked through a locked jaw.

She laughed then, stepped over his leg, and sat beside him. Her arm touched the side of his chest, under his outstretched arm. He turned his head a second, closed his eyes and took in some oxygen, his promise now looking like a marathon of self-control—or a fatal attack of male masochism.

Tommi didn’t let up. “I could straddle you right now, take off your briefs, and take you in…deep.” She ran her tongue over her lower lip. “Or I could just taste you? Which would you like?” She lifted her brows, gave him an innocent look totally at odds with her provocative words. “Of course, that would involve us touching.”

His mind stuck on auto-sex. Tommi…tasting him.

Every testosterone-loaded cell in Mac’s body detonated, the din of it deafening him, blotting out reason. He turned his head to look at her, see what was in her eyes. “I’d like both. And you damn well know it. But—” He stopped, the devil on one shoulder telling him to shut up and begin the feast—make her chew on her own taunts—the irritating wingless angel on the other telling him to be honest. If he were honest, his guess was Tommi would be out of the water with the speed of light. Shit!