The Texan's Royal M.D.

With every nerve in her body alive and clamoring, Zia conducted her own avid exploration. Her palms planed his broad shoulders. Her fingers found the lapels of his sport coat. She peeled it back, forcing him to break contact long enough to wrestle free of it. He reached for her again but felt compelled to offer a gruff caveat.

“Just so you know, I don’t make a habit of trying to finesse women I’ve just met into bed.”

“Nor,” she murmured, her acquired New York twang slipping away a little more with each word, “do I allow myself to be finessed.”

The blood of her Magyar ancestors thrummed hot in her veins. She felt as wild as the steppes they’d swept down from on their fast, tireless ponies. As fierce as winds that howled through the mountains and valleys they’d eventually settled in.

“But tonight I shall make an exception, yes?”

“Hell, yes!”

He scooped her up almost before the words were out of her mouth. Cradling her against his chest, he headed in what she assumed was the direction of the bedroom. She used the short trip to attack the buttons on his crisp blue shirt.

She got the top two open and was nipping at the cords in his neck when he elbowed a door open. She gained a vague impression of wide-plank floorboards, sparse furnishings and framed posters of ships filling one wall. Then he was lowering her to a king-size bed covered in thin, buttery-soft suede.

Mike shed his shirt, boots and jeans with minimal motion and maximum speed. A real trick, considering that every drop of blood had drained from his head and was now pooled below his waist. He couldn’t believe he’d managed to get the exotic, intriguing doc in his bed, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to give her time for second thoughts.

Yet he dredged up enough self-control to strip her slowly, item by tantalizing item. The silky camisole. The thigh-hugging jeans with the sparkly red heart that had drawn his eyes to her butt every time she’d walked in front of him. Her half bra and thong were mere scraps of lace and easily disposed of. Then he made the near fatal mistake of pausing to drink in the sight of her long, slender curves. She gleamed like alabaster against the pearl-gray bedcover. Her hair spilled across the suede, as silky and erotic as the dark triangle at the apex of her thighs. Mike almost lost it then. Probably would have, if he hadn’t gritted his teeth and held back the raging tide with the promise of exploring every slope and hollow of that luscious body.

Thank God he kept an emergency supply of condoms in the nightstand. The cache was a year old. Maybe more. With the demand for super-container ships skyrocketing and his fleet expanding almost faster than he could keep up with it, Mike hadn’t had all that many opportunities to dip into this private stash. He intended to make up for those missed opportunities now, though.

If he could find the damned things! Muttering a curse under his breath, he rifled through the drawer. Where the devil had all this junk come from? With another muffled curse, he finally resorted to dumping the contents on the bed. Two dog-eared paperbacks, a handful of loose change, a spare set of keys, several socks and a plastic fire truck tumbled out.

Zia pushed up on one elbow and eyed the hook and ladder. “I’ve seen all kinds of sex toys during my years in med school,” she said with a grin. “Some were put to rather remarkable use. But that’s a new one.”

“Dammit, I told Kevin and Davy to stay out... Ah! Thank God.” He gave a huff of relief and held up two foil packets. “I caught the boys making water balloons out of them four or five months back but was sure I’d salvaged a few.”

Four or five months back? Zia digested that little tidbit of information as he used his teeth to rip into one of the packets. Brennan must not bring many female friends to his beach house. The thought surprised her. And added another bubble to the cauldron that erupted into a furious boil at the sight of him sheathing himself.

He made quick work of it. A snap, a roll, and he tumbled her back onto the suede. He followed her down, bracing himself on his elbows to kiss her again. And again. And again. Her mouth. Her throat. Her aching breasts. Her quivering belly. When he eased a hand between her thighs, Zia went taut as a bow.

Yes! This was what she needed. What both her mind and her body craved. This wild pleasure. This dizzying spiral of excitement that contracted the muscles low in her belly. With each kiss and stroke of his busy fingers, the spasms got tighter, faster.

“Wait.”

She clenched her jaw, tried to clamp down on the soaring sensations.

“Mike. Wait.” She scrunched deeper into the velvety suede and reached for him. “Let me... Oh!”

Before she could do more than wrap her fingers around his rock-hard length the sensations spun into a white-hot core. Groaning, Zia gave up trying to stop the climax that shot up from her belly. She couldn’t have held back if she’d wanted to. It came at her like an out-of-control freight train.

Neck arched, spine bowed, she rode it to the last shuddering sigh. When she collapsed onto the covers and opened her eyes, she saw Brennan watching her.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “It’s, ah, been a while.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” He was still hard and rampant against her hip. His shoulders were still taut, his tendons tight. Yet his grin contained nothing but smug male satisfaction. “You wouldn’t be sorry if you had any idea how glorious you just looked.”

Zia had studied human sexuality and the reproductive process, of course. She could put a name to each stage of her body’s response. Desire. Arousal. Lubrication. Orgasm. Satisfaction. She also knew the female of the species could generally repeat the cycle faster than the male. Still, she was surprised at how fast. All it took was for Mike to lean down and feather his lips over hers. The kiss was so tender—and such a contrast to the tension still locking his muscles—that Zia kicked into high gear again.

He filled her. Stroked her. Pushed her to another peak. She hung on this time and refused go over the edge without him.

* * *

Gasping and limp with pleasure, Zia knew she should get up, get dressed and go home. Should drifted into later when Mike defied conventional science by proving he could repeat the cycle after only a minimal break.

If the first round was fast and urgent, the second round was exquisitely slow. So slow, Zia had more than enough time to explore his hard, muscled body. The corded tendons, the washboard ribs, the flat belly, the five-inch scar on his left shoulder. She’d set enough stitches during her ER rotation to know a knife wound when she felt one.

“How did you get this?”

“Hmm?”

He shifted, obviously more interested her body than his own

“This scar?” she persisted. “How’d you get it?”

“It was just a slight misunderstanding.”

“Between?”

“Me and a one-eyed, foul-breathed Portuguese. He was a pumper on the tanker I shipped out on the summer before my senior year in high school.”

“And?”

“Let’s just say Joachim didn’t appreciate smart-assed kids pointing out he hadn’t grounded himself before opening the feed nozzle. Now...”

His hands cupped her butt and scooted her up a few inches.

“Let’s get back to more important matters.”

* * *

Zia hadn’t planned to zone out. Grabbing twenty or thirty minutes to recharge in the residents’ lounge had pretty much become a way of life. All she’d intended was a brief catnap between the sheets with her head nestled in the warm angle between Brennan’s neck and shoulder. So when she blinked awake to a blaze of sunlight spilling through the wide windows she gave a small yelp.

“Oh, no!”

She jerked upright and pushed her hair out of her eyes. A quick glance around confirmed her hazy impressions from last night. The flooring was wide oak planking polished to a rich sheen. One wall did sport a collection of framed, poster-size photographs of oceangoing vessels. And she huddled amid a welter of silky cotton sheets topped by a cloud-soft suede cover. Naked. With what felt like a good-size patch of beard burn on her left cheek.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! She was an adult. Responsible and unattached. She had no reason to feel guilty or uncomfortable about explaining a whisker scrape to her family. Or the fact that she’d spent the night with an interesting, attractive man.

A man who evidently knew his way around a kitchen. She discovered that after she’d made a trip to the bathroom, scrambled into her clothes and followed the scent of frying bacon. Mike had a small feast laid out on a glass-topped breakfast table with a breath-knocking view of the Gulf. Her surprised glance slid over the juice, sliced melon and basket of croissants to lock on a tall carafe.

With a melodramatic groan, she made her presence known. “Please tell me that’s coffee,” she begged, nodding to the carafe.

Mike angled around, spatula in hand, and grinned. “It is. Help yourself.”

She did, but one sip had her gasping. “Good Lord!”

“Too strong?”