Drugged by the scent of her sex, he leaned in and took a long, lazy taste from front to back, until she whimpered and her knees bent. Then he did it again, dipping into the warm liquid that pooled at her center. So wet. All for him.
“Please,” she murmured.
Oh, how he loved it when she begged. If he could hear her repeat that one word every day for the rest of his life, he’d die happy. And he tried to hold out, to coax it from her again, but at the moment, he was just as greedy for her pleasure as she was.
He pressed his face closer and found the small bud with the tip of his tongue, flicking it from side to side several times to gauge her reaction. And when she cried out and tilted her ass up to give him better access, he gave in completely and gave her what she wanted: Steady licks with the flat of his tongue. Up and down, down and up, sucking and flicking. Circling this way, and then the other. As long as he gave her a steady rhythm, she gave him the most glorious noises in return.
And for a time, he almost thought he could go on like this, giving and not taking, but the insistent ache in his balls was too much to bear. Christ, she turned him into a ravenous animal, unable to control himself. No one else had ever had this unrelenting pull on him. Her scent, taste, shape. Her laugh. Her icy stare. Her posh accent. The way she squinted one eye when solving a problem. Every bit of it made him hard. Thank God he hadn’t met her when he was seventeen and barely able to make it through a few hours at school without a release—he might never have graduated.
Holding her open to him with one hand, he struggled to unbutton his fly, fingers shaking. His cock sprang into his palm, heavy and hard as steel. A shuddering relief passed through him as he stroked himself. Goddammit, he just couldn’t wait.
Ignoring her vocal protest, he stood, spread her wide, and, guiding himself with one hand, sank into her wet heat with a unsteady groan. She tensed, shouting as her body arched off the glass.
“Whoa,” he cautioned, and put a firm hand on her back to force her down as he began moving. Fast. Hard. No inhibition or restraint. Just a manic rush toward oblivion and an unyielding drive to push her further than he ever had. To conquer and claim her.
And if some quiet voice inside him was warning him to be careful and consider the ghosts from her past as he held her down, thrusting into her wildly, then a much louder voice extinguished his doubts.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she cried. “Thank you, God, yes, thank you . . .” Holding on to the edge of the case, she turned her head to the side, one cheek against the glass and an openmouthed look of rapture on her face.
Not fragile. Not broken. Not haunted.
Her cries echoed around the shadowed room, bouncing off the display cases and pillars. They truly might be caught after all. But damned if he was going to reel her in. He just shifted his grip, grabbing hold of her fleshy hips in both hands, and rode her until sweat trickled down his neck. Until they were nothing but two parts of a machine, each fueling the other’s pleasure. Until her punctuated moans and prayers grew desperate and she clenched around him.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come for me.”
He slipped his hand around her hip, to plunder her damp curls. His middle finger grazed the tight bud once, twice . . . She gasped for a breath. Jerked. Clutched around his cock until he groaned and thrust harder. And then . . .
Yes.
There it was: the bewildered, broken wail. He pushed her through the orgasm, hips pumping, finger rubbing her clitoris until her cries calmed and she pulsed around him. Thrust her hand over his to signal that she couldn’t take any more.
A possessive joy rang inside his chest as warmth gathered at the base of his spine. Christ, his balls were ready to explode. Picking up speed, he drove into her with hellbent purpose, ready to join her. And, oh, God—no.
No wonder it felt so good. He’d forgotten the goddamn condom.
How didn’t matter. He just had to pull out. Now.
Acting on some crazed, feral impulse, he groaned and jerked himself out of her wet heat—a fucking saint, he was—and grabbed her arm. He vaguely heard a surprised moan as he urged her onto her knees, one hand on the back of her head. Christ, she had every right to hate him for this, but he just couldn’t stop as he took himself in hand and prodded the tip of his cock against her mouth.
“Hadley,” he begged. He was a dog, and he knew it, but please just . . .
Her lips parted. Wide brown eyes locked with his as she closed her mouth around him and sucked.
His mind emptied. Head tipped back. Ecstasy rushed forward. He thrust into her mouth and came.
And came.
Gods above, it felt like he was spilling his very soul into her. He shuddered, nearly losing his footing as he swayed over her, hand fisted in her hair. Christ! He could barely breathe. But as heady gratification pulsed in his veins, the outer edges of his world bled back into view. And with that, a slow, heavy shame moved into his chest.
Any second she’d push him away and tell him to go to hell. Any second. He was sure of it. So when she extracted him from her lips, he didn’t expect the loose, tender strokes from her hand. Or the light kiss on the tip of his cock that sent frantic tremors through his legs, intense enough to make him rock forward on his toes.
And when she finally released him, and pushed herself to her feet, he definitely did not expect the playful smile. Gods above, that smile! Wicked and shy, all at once. It bowled him over. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her head, repeating her name like a sacrament as they swayed together on unsteady legs.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I forgot the condom,” he mumbled against the citrusy perfume of her hair. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
He lifted her face to his and said, in wonder, “You really aren’t.”
She shook her head.
He exhaled heavily, a stupid grin spreading across his face as he tucked himself into his pants and buttoned back up.
She tucked his shirt a little tighter. “And what’s more, it jostled a thought out of my brain.”
“Eh?” It jostled a lot of things in him, but thoughts weren’t one of them.
She explained. “When I was, well, bent over the glass, I kept thinking that there was something wrong with the third name.”
“And here I was, thinking I was transporting you to euphoric bliss.”
“Oh, you did. Believe me,” she said dreamily, a lusty satisfaction weighing down her eyelids. “But after, when you pulled me off the glass like some kind of violent marauder—”
He groaned.
“No need to be sorry. I rather enjoyed it. Quite a lot, actually,” she said with one brow cocked and a brief, sheepish smile. “But—”
“But?”
“I guess I had ‘clock’ on the brain, and your teasing me about my poor spelling skills, and I realized the problem with the name. Our interpretation of the pictograms wasn’t wrong. My mother misspelled the name.”
“She did?”
Hadley gripped the lapels of his jacket and spoke in an excited voice. “Lowe, I know exactly where the third canopic jar is, and it’s not anywhere near a grave.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“IT’S NOT L-E-V-I-N-E. IT’S L-E-V-I-N. Five letters, not six.”
“Levin?” He studied her face, still a little dazed and stupid from the massive orgasm. “I don’t remember a Levin on the list.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one. But I was just reading an article in the Chronicle yesterday about all the movie theaters being built around San Francisco. Quite a few of them have been financed by the Levin brothers. Including the one in the Richmond District. The Alexandria. Pet project for Sammy Levin.”