to catch her when she came down from the high. It was in his nature to protect. Tess would be risking nothing to let this happen between them.
“Yes. Adam. Yes.”
“Jesus, Tess,” Adam ground out, leaning down to take her lips in a hard, wet kiss. “You make me want. I can’t get enough of you.”
“Good,” Tess panted out, reaching back now, her fingers digging into his hip. “I can’t get enough of you.”
“Good. Glad I’m not alone...in this.”
Tess couldn’t process the meaning of his words, not now when he was filling her body and scrambling her mind.
“I need to come,” she panted, her words slurred with lust and desire. “I need...”
“I know what you need,” Adam growled as he wedged his hand between them, stroking her clit with every thrust. “Come on, Tess. You know what I need.”
“What?”
“You,” he groaned against her lips. “You.”
His words flipped all her switches and she fell over the edge, her orgasm causing her entire body to shudder and buck beneath him. The pleasure was white-hot, searingly intense, and imprinted on every cell of her body.
Adam cried out above her, his body, all sleek muscle and rigid bone, going taut with his own pleasure. He collapsed against her and Tess wrapped her arms around him, ignoring the cooling of the sweat on their bodies and the knowledge that they really weren’t alone in this building. She just wanted to indulge in this moment, knowing that it would end soon enough.
That was the deal they had agreed to, after all.
But maybe some of the rules could be broken.
“So...” she ventured, trailing her nails lightly up and down his back.
“Yeah?”
“About that dinner out...”
Adam lifted his head, propped himself up on an elbow to gaze down and her, and raised an eyebrow in humor. “What? All it took was a mind-blowing orgasm to get a meal out of you?”
“A girl has got to have her standards.”
Ten
Tess was probably going to kill him.
Adam pulled up in front of the small bungalow tucked into the end of a small street in the solidly middle-class neighborhood. Nearby yards and driveways were littered with abandoned bikes and skateboards, anchored with basketball nets, and dotted with “Please slow down—children at play” signs. It wasn’t anything like the one he’d grown up in, with locked gates and housekeepers answering the door. This was a neighborhood where the streets filled with costumed kids on Halloween and wagon parades on the Fourth of July. Adam didn’t remember ever having that.
He shook off the dark cloud that always accompanied his dwelling on the ghosts of shitty childhoods past and cut the engine of his car, pausing to consider just how weird this was. Adam hadn’t heard from Tess in almost two days; no response to his texts and voicemails and she’d failed to show at Redhawk/Ling. None of that sounded at all like the Tess he knew. They’d spent every waking moment together or in constant contact in the past few weeks, either searching for the mole or finding chances to work off steam in a way that left him aching for more. So, he was down to two schools of thought about what he was currently doing: it was restraining order level of stalker activity or the action of a normal, noncreepy friend/fuckbuddy.
The jury was still out on which way the “Jury of Tess” would fall on the issue.
But he kept coming back to the fact that failing to show up for work or answer his inquiries was nothing like Tess Lynch. If she didn’t want to talk to you, she’d tell you to your face in unequivocal language and then freeze you out like a blizzard at the North Pole.
Screw it. If she murdered him, so be it.
Adam opened the door on his Audi R8 Spyder and glanced around the neighborhood as he shut the door. Three doors down a young woman was pretending to pull weeds as she watched him and her toddler out of the corner of her eye. She paused when she got the full look of him and her wide-eyed reaction was either because he was a stranger in her neighborhood, he was a brown stranger in her neighborhood or she was ogling his car. He nodded, giving her his best “I’m a billionaire business owner so please don’t call the cops” smile and walked up the short concrete walk lined with pretty flowers to the teal-painted front door and raised his hand to push the doorbell. He hesitated a