The Elliotts: Bedroom Secrets: Under Deepest Cover

He pulled her pants and thong down past her knees in one fluid movement. She gasped in surprise, but she was about to get an even bigger surprise. He leaned down, placed a shoulder against her waist, wrapped his arms around her thighs, and picked her up in a fireman’s carry.

She squealed in protest. “Bryan, what are you doing? Put me down.” She reached out and slapped at his rear, but it was hardly more than a tap.

He retaliated with a slightly smarter smack to her bare bottom. “Behave.”

“Ow!” She laughed. “What are you doing?”

He carried her only as far as the large counter where the chefs assembled the plates of food just before the wait staff whisked them out to their patrons. “You think you’re the only one who’s allowed to do something outrageous? You think you’re the only one who can seduce?”

“Oh, Bryan, I didn’t set out to seduce you. Not really.” She wrapped her hands around his head, pressing his face against her breasts, and he didn’t protest. He was in heaven.

“I was worried about you. You’d been gone so long. If you hadn’t had the whipped cream on your face, this never would have happened.”

“Well, it did, missy. You started it and I’m going to finish it.” He leaned against her, pushing her until she lay with her back on the counter. Then he stripped her pants and underwear all the way off her feet, pulling off her running shoes in the process. They dropped with a clunk to the floor, and he pulled her knees apart and stepped between her thighs.

She quivered with anticipation, and he had to admit it would have been easy just to drop his own pants and bury himself in her. He tested her readiness with one finger and felt that she was slick.

She gasped at his featherlight touch.

“Please,” she said. “Do it now.”

Not before he’d tasted her. With his own stomach knotted in anticipation, he leaned down and, using his fingers to open her, lightly grazed her with a flick of his tongue.

She wiggled and moaned again. “Oh, no, please, no more …”

“Maybe you’ll think twice before you do that trick with the chocolate sauce again,” he said with a low growl before tasting her once more. He held her hips firmly so she couldn’t wiggle right out of his reach, and he tasted her yet again, drinking more deeply this time, letting his tongue explore.

Lucy reached out and grabbed a handful of his hair. “Bryan!”

He did not take pity on her. He waited until he sensed she was verging on the peak of pleasure. Then he raised up, shed his own garments, slid her hips to the edge of the counter and plunged himself into her warmth.

“Oh!” Lucy cried out. “I can’t—Oh, my—”

Bryan thrust again, more deeply this time, and again until he was buried to the hilt. She was tight and warm and slick and he was going to lose control of himself. It was too much.

He felt Lucy’s spasms of ecstasy just before she cried out one last time. Three more hard thrusts, and it was over for him, too, but he’d known he wouldn’t last long inside Lucy. Not with the buildup he’d had over the past hours—hell, the past days.

Lucy sat up suddenly and, still joined to him, threw her arms around him and kissed him. She clung sweetly to him and rubbed her face against his hair.

“Please don’t leave me, don’t ever leave me,” she said. “I want to be together like this forever.”

He thought about telling her how awkward it would be for the chefs to work around them when they came to work tomorrow, but he held his tongue. This wasn’t a moment for humor.

Lucy might seem strong, but in many ways she was fragile, and he had to remember that. She might have been a bit brazen tonight, but he knew she didn’t take this sort of thing casually.

He tried not to take her plea about never leaving too seriously. People said all kinds of strange things during a sexual climax. Refined ladies cursed like sailors, and sailors wept like children.

He hoped she didn’t mean anything by it. Because he would leave her eventually. No matter how much he didn’t want to.

He gently separated himself from her, wrapped his arms around her and slid her off the counter and onto legs that wobbled slightly before she found her balance.

“You okay?” He smoothed her hair out of her face.

“I think I’ll live.”

“Ready to put your clothes on and go upstairs?”

“You aren’t seriously asking me to go upstairs without eating some of that cake, are you?”

Funny, he’d forgotten all about the cake. “Let’s take it with us. We can eat it in bed.”

She grinned, pushed him farther away from her and retrieved her discarded clothes. “Last one dressed has to spread whipped cream all over the other one and lick it off.”

That was one contest Bryan wouldn’t mind losing—though winning sounded pretty good, too.

Lucy had sobered by the time they got upstairs, fully dressed and carrying two plates of cake plus the rest of the dessert, which Bryan had sealed into a Tupperware cake plate.

Her face grew warm as she recalled how wanton she’d been—and then how she’d clung to Bryan, pleading with him not to leave.

She hadn’t meant to do that last part. She’d still been in the throes of the most intense orgasm of her life, and the words had just poured out of her right past her brain.

She knew she still had some issues about Cruz Tabor. The In Tight drummer had ended the relationship without warning, in the cruelest of fashions, and now she had a sort of phobia about being abandoned.

But such pleas would be useless where Bryan was concerned. Their relationship could not be anything but temporary. He’d given her fair warning—unlike that bastard Cruz, who’d led her to believe he was crazy in love with her and that he would marry her someday.

She would just make things worse if she clung to Bryan. She had to adopt the mindset that every day they had together was a gift, and that when they inevitably parted ways, she would have some incredible memories and, hopefully, no hard feelings.

Hell, she wasn’t even sure Bryan wanted to have a relationship, temporary or otherwise. She’d pushed him into sex, and men were pretty helpless to say no when sex was offered.

She chanced a glance at him as the elevator reached his loft. He was staring at her.

“What?” she said with a nervous giggle.

“You’re just so absolutely gorgeous I can’t stop looking at you.”

“Oh, yeah, right. In these really sexy clothes, no makeup, glasses, my hair’s a wreck—”

“Stop that. You are beautiful, with or without designer clothes and cosmetics. I don’t know who told you you weren’t, but he was an idiot.”

The door opened, and he ushered her ahead of him.

“It wasn’t a he. It was my mother. She thought I was going straight to hell when I died anyway, for being willful and lazy and disrespectful. But she said that at least she didn’t have to worry about me doing bad things with boys, because God hadn’t gifted me in a way that would make any boy take notice.”

Lucy had always made light of her mother’s criticism, but saying the words aloud after all these years still produced a tightness in her chest.

“That’s criminal,” Bryan said, his jaw pulsating. “No wonder you don’t miss your parents so much.”

“Oh, she meant well. She was always so afraid for me—afraid for my soul. She just knew I was headed down the path straight to hell. The sad thing was, I proved her right.”