Thirty Nights Read online

  She stared at him. A huge lump of emotion clogged her throat. “That’s exactly what I intended,” she whispered, wondering how two such seemingly dissimilar people could share such identical emotions.

  “We’re going to be good together, Gillian,” he promised her. His words, spoken on a deep, lush voice that vibrated like a tuning fork inside her, revealed that they were on the same wavelength.

  Needing escape from her tumultuous emotions, she turned toward the piano. At first her fingers were stiff. From the Maine cold, she told herself, conveniently overlooking the fact that not only was the fire going full blaze, the house also boasted central heating.

  Deep down inside, Gillian knew it was nerves that had her fingers stumbling. Nerves were the reason she forgot to change keys at the first bridge, dropped the occasional sharp and neglected to lower a random flat.

  But eventually the mood of the song, the emotions she’d experienced when she first wrote it, overcame her unease and the music started pouring from her fingertips.

  In her mind, she heard the water—crystal streams tumbling over moss-covered rocks, the hushed sound of rain falling through the leaves of ancient oak trees, the whisper of an ebbing tide taking wet, glistening shells back to the sea, the crash of waves battering against limestone cliffs while the wind raged around her.

  Gillian was a visual composer. She always started with a mental picture—some real, some from her dreams, some from fantasies. Wherever the images sprung from, she’d discovered at a young age that when she put them to music, it was as if she’d suddenly sprouted wings and was able to fly away to some magical, distant place, crossing the human earthly boundaries of time and space to the gilded realm of imagination.

  Rhythms collided and melded into one another, tides of chords and arpeggios ebbing and flowing in rich, emotional soundscapes. Watching her, Hunter found her even more stunning in person than she’d been on that video. Her unwavering concentration—the sight of her bottom lip caught between her teeth—made him ache with hunger. It was obvious that she was no longer in the room. Or his house. Or even on Castle Mountain. She’d stolen away to some rich place in her mind that he was anticipating visiting more with each passing moment.

  Her percussive attack softened yet again to a more flowing rhythm, like the silent calm after a storm, before taking off again into a soaring legato run that told him the selkie had managed to find her way home, and that even as the seal-woman dove deeper and deeper beneath the Irish sea, her heart was soaring to the heavens.

  Drawn to Gillian, like an ancient mariner drawn by a mythical selkie into the drowning depths of the sea, Hunter pushed himself off the couch and crossed the room to stand behind her.

  She missed a note when he caressed her shoulder with his palm, but quickly recovered. Then glanced up at him over her shoulder.

  “Don’t stop,” he murmured, as he slipped his fingers into the neckline of her scarlet sweater. “Not yet.”

  The cashmere was soft. Her flesh, warmed by the fire and desire, was softer. She closed her eyes, whether to shut him out or concentrate on his touch, Hunter didn’t know. All he knew was that she was the most desirable woman he’d ever met and she fascinated him in ways too complex to attempt to decipher. His body felt like a rocket about to explode on the launchpad.

  He tugged the sweater free of the waistband of her skirt and felt her sharp intake of breath. “Keep playing.” He touched his mouth to the fragrant place behind her ear, the soft touch meant to both arouse and reassure.

  “I don’t know if I can.” She trembled as his right hand caressed her, his fingers tracing a line of slow fire across her rib cage, up her side, the hollow beneath her arm. “Oh!” She breathed a soft sound—part sigh, part moan—as he cupped her breast.

  “You can.” When he kissed his way down her neck, she tilted her head back, offering him access to her throat, where her pulse pounded like percussive bass chords. “You will.”

  When she felt the hook snare the button at the waist of her skirt, Gillian’s fingers faltered and her mind went as clear as glass.

  “I can’t remember what comes next.” Heaven help her, she’d be hard-pressed to recall her own name right now.

  “Don’t worry about it. Just play anything that comes to mind.” He was lowering the skirt’s zipper, tooth by treacherous tooth. “While we explore what kind of music we make together.”

  9

  IT SEEMED SHE WAS UNABLE to deny this man anything. She wanted to please him, in part, Gillian thought, to yet again prove to him that she’d deserved a second look thirteen years ago. The problem was, of course, that in order to please Hunter, she’d have to surrender the autonomy she’d always prided herself on, choosing instead obedience. But, she reminded herself, it was, after all, her choice. And such surrender would only be temporary.

  Gillian began moving her fingers over the keys again, aimlessly, the music coming solely from her heart. Notes tumbled over one another; long treble runs tangling with thrumming bass chords that reverberated in that hot, damp place between her legs.

  As if in response to her silent plea, his right hand eased into the open placket of her skirt, stroking over the bone of her hip, moving lower still.

  “Spread your legs a bit for me, Gillian.” When she did as instructed, his fingers played their own symphony in the silken curls at the juncture of her thighs. “Now close your eyes. And try not to move.”

  She drew in a sharp breath as his fingers slipped into her with a silky wet ease. First one. Then another. A feverish tide rose in her, causing her to inadvertently move her hips toward that wicked, clever hand, seeking more.

  “Hunter—” her fingers trembled, discordant notes slurred “—please…”

  Unable to think about music while her body felt as taut as a piano wire, she gave up any attempt at playing and grabbed his hand, pressing it tighter against her in a mute attempt to satisfy this ruthless, pounding need.

  She was flowing over his hand, like sun-warmed honey. Her ragged plea caused Hunter’s own needs to flare higher even as a dark masculine power surged through him. He knew he could take her further, deeper, showing her the exhilaration found in the experience of pure sexual sensation.

  “You’re all I’ve been thinking about.” His words, rough and ragged, scorched his throat. A ruthless stroke of his thumb against the hooded tangle of nerves hidden in the slick wet lips made her cry out. Her eyes, darkened with a blend of surprise and pleasure, those same expressive eyes that had fueled so many lustful dreams, flew open.

  “I’ve thought about you like this.” Without giving her time to recover, he pulled her from the wooden bench, held her against him and stripped the sweater over her head as he had that first night, flinging it away.

  “Hot.” His tongue created a trail of fire around the dusky areola. “Hungry.” His teeth caught her taut nipple and tugged, drawing a ragged moan. Hunter could tell that her mind was shutting down, letting her body—and him—take over. “Mine.”

  He shoved her skirt down, his touch not nearly as steady as he would have liked, lifted her from the crimson puddle, laid her on top of the piano, then unzipped the gray suede boots, which left her only in a pair of opaque gray stockings that ended high on each thigh in a way that framed her fiery red curls.

  Taking his time to enjoy the sight and taste of her, he rolled the stockings with aching slowness down her legs, following the sensual path with his mouth. And then, finally, she was gloriously naked, her flesh gleaming in the glow of the candlelight like pearls.

  Desperate to take her hard and fast, he continued to ruthlessly rein in his lust long enough to drink in the sight of her. She looked soft and boneless, as if she’d drunk too much wine, but since she’d only had that single glass, Hunter experienced a sense of satisfaction knowing that he was responsible for that dazed look in her eyes.

  “You really are lovely.”

  He shook his head in mute amazement that such a warm, sensual woman could have sprung from George Cassidy’s icy loins. He ran the back of his good hand down her face in a slow sweep and felt her tremble. In fear? he wondered. Or anticipation? “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Gillian.”

  Her eyelids had fluttered closed at his touch. Now they slowly lifted, allowing him to see miniature twins of himself in her widened pupils, the flames behind him making him appear to be some creature risen from hell.

  Hunter wondered if that was how she saw him. And wondered even more why he should care.

  “I’m not.” Her smile was faint, a bit wary still, but it touched her eyes in a way that caused a distant stir of feeling he couldn’t identify. “I trust you completely, Hunter. I’m more afraid of myself.” A lovely flush of color flowed from her cheeks to her breasts at this admission. “Of how I feel when you look at me the way you’re looking at me now.”

  Hunter was wondering if she knew the power of the gift she’d just given him, when she took hold of his hand and pressed it against her rosy breast. Beneath his palm, her heart fluttered like a wild bird. “Of how I feel when you touch me.”

  She shivered when his thumb brushed against her nipple. Sighed when he replaced his hand with his mouth.

  “I like looking at you.” He lifted his head and drank in the sight of her again, looking flushed and wanton atop the piano, her damp flesh glistening in the firelight, her feet unable to reach the floor, her legs open, moisture glistening like early morning dew on her silken curls.

  “I like touching you.” He skimmed a fingertip down a milky thigh. “And I especially like tasting you.”

  He touched his tongue to a pale blue vein revealed by her milky, Irish-pale skin and was vaguely surprised when there was no hiss of steam. When his teeth nipped at that fragrant flesh, she cried out, a sharp
sound of pleasure mixed with pain.

  “Please, Hunter.”

  Gillian had never begged for any man in her life. But as need coiled tightly inside her, she realized that was because she’d never met a man she wanted in the way she wanted Hunter St. John. Never met a man who could make her willing to toss away a lifetime of sexual restraint in order to learn the secrets her body had been hungering for since her first night on Castle Mountain.

  Hunter knew those secrets. She’d witnessed it in his hot, hungry eyes as they’d looked at her, seeing beyond her clothing, even, she’d thought, past her tingling skin, to some hidden feminine place deep inside her.

  She’d felt it in his hand, which revealed a familiarity with the female body that caused needs to well up inside her at the same time she hated all the other women he’d touched in such an intimate fashion.

  The hook that had replaced his left hand glinted dangerously in the firelight as he captured an erect nipple between the prongs, delicately, but in a way that would have prevented her from moving, if she’d wanted to. Which, heaven help her, she didn’t.

  As he watched her in the steady, unblinking way a diving falcon might watch a small gray mouse, Gillian understood that this was a test, that he was searching out disgust on her face. He wouldn’t find it.

  “Please,” she repeated on a soft, thready tone. “I want you, Hunter.”

  I need you. The words went unspoken, but there was no need to articulate them.

  The prongs opened. Closed. “Soon.” Opened again. “You’re a woman of virtues, Gillian. Surely you’ve acquired the virtue of patience.”

  Only this morning Gillian could have assured him that patience had always been one of her strongest traits. Now it seemed to have scattered like dry leaves attacked by hurricane-force winds.

  The touch of that cold point of steel against her burning flesh proved unbelievingly erotic, and although she’d always considered herself a self-controlled woman, Gillian discovered what she suspected only a few women could ever know, that sexual surrender to the right man—a man you could trust absolutely—could be glorious.

  The fact that Hunter was still fully dressed while she was naked was strangely, undeniably exciting. When he spread her legs wider, so far apart she felt a faintly painful tug in her hip joints, she felt no embarrassment. No shame. Only pride and an age-old feminine power that she could be the cause of the hunger that was written in bold script across his normally inscrutable face.

  “Lovely,” he murmured again. The tip of the hook tugged on the blazing nest of hair. Gillian didn’t flinch. But she did moan as he knelt down between her legs and with deft fingers parted the deep rose flesh of her outer lips, revealing the paler petal-pink opening.

  When his tongue flicked over those tingling lips, it caused such a spark of exquisite pain that Gillian gasped and began to tremble like a woman in the grips of a fever.

  “Stay still,” he ordered huskily, as if she could control the demands of her mutinous body.

  His touch was ecstasy. Agony. Alternating strict commands with lush compliments and warm endearments, he seemed ruthless in his need to pleasure her—fondling, licking, sucking, biting, ravishing her with mouth and hand, bring her to a seemingly never-ending series of orgasms that racked her body.

  The more Gillian gave into Hunter, the more control she surrendered, the more she came. Over and over. Until she was slick and wet from her own juices and aroused anew by the musky scent of sex rising from between her splayed legs.

  She couldn’t possibly take any more, she thought as he lifted her hips off the piano and pressed her mound against his mouth. When his tongue thrust deeply into the moist cleft, Gillian gasped for breath and felt her blood pounding in her heart, her ears, that burning place between her thighs.

  It was too much.

  At the same time, it was not enough. Because even as yet another series of convulsions shuddered through her, Gillian still wanted Hunter. All of him.

  Across the room a log shifted, but with her mind clouded by smoke and haze and her body battered by an increasing crescendo of sexual sensations she could feel all the way to the marrow of her bones, Gillian was only distantly aware of the resultant flare of sparks.

  Fond schoolgirl memories of that ancient crush she’d had on an older man spun away, while her future seemed aeons in the distance. There was only now. Only this glorious, shimmering presence with Hunter.

  At this suspended moment in time, there was nothing he could have asked for that she would not have willingly given. The idea that she, a woman who’d always insisted on absolute control in all parts of her life, should feel this way both intrigued and excited Gillian. She knew she’d have to give the mystery more serious thought. Later, when she could think again.

  Hunter realized that he’d won the victory he’d been seeking. Gillian’s mind, her heart, her lush, fragrant body, all were his for the taking. Even as he was pleased by her open-hearted gift of absolute submission—it had, after all, been his intention to tame her, to break down all her barriers of independence until she was unconditionally his—he was discovering he’d not remained unaffected by her uncensored response.

  As his body had hardened, his own heart had strangely softened. She’d touched him. In a way that could prove a threat, a way he’d have to examine. When he could think again.

  But for now, driven by sexual needs stronger than the forces of nature that had formed the towering cliffs on which his house was perched, he released her just long enough to strip off his clothes and sheathe himself.

  Then, with a single hard thrust he surged into her, deep and hard, driven by her breathless cries, the feel of her inner muscles, contracting, drawing him in.

  “Put your legs around me, Gillian.”

  His voice, rough and guttural and nearly incoherent, was unfamiliar to his own ears. But somehow Gillian managed to understand him and she did as instructed, her hands fretting up and down his back, her unlacquered nails digging into his flesh in a way that fed his lust even further.

  He hammered into her, again and again, hot flesh slapping against hot flesh, her soft cries muffled by his ravenous mouth as it ate into hers, his tongue thrusting between her parted lips in rhythm with his bucking hips.

  A red haze shimmered in front of Hunter’s eyes. His movements quickened. Deepened. And then he was coming, in a hot, torrential release that had him shouting out. The single word that was wrenched out of his chest to reverberate around the red cedar walls of the room was her name: Gillian.

  An instant later, she followed him over the edge.

  Hunter had no idea how long they lay there, her half on, half off the piano, him collapsed on top of her, his heart pounding, his body too drained to move. It could have been minutes. Hours. It felt like an eternity.

  The ravenous hunger that had escalated with each passing day had finally, at least for now, been temporarily sated. He could stay like this forever. Buried inside her, feeling her soft feminine curves yielding to his harsher angles, her pearly skin, which had been fever-hot, now cooling, like a moist summer mist against his. He nuzzled at her neck and breathed in a flowery fragrance that mingled with the redolent, evocative musk of sex.

  Hunter couldn’t recall a time when he’d felt more satisfied. More fulfilled. Which was exactly why he had to move away.

  She murmured a faint complaint as he eased out of her. Her legs hung limply over the edge of the Steinway, her arms at her sides, her eyes closed, dark-looking like strands of gold and copper silk against her still flushed cheeks.

  There were marks on her pale flesh, faint purple bruises that were mute evidence of the passion they’d shared. Hunter knew that he should feel guilty for having put them there, but couldn’t, since they were, in their own way, like a brand. As if he’d burned his name into her silken flesh.

  His satisfaction at that idea was quickly dampened when he viewed the dark smears marring the smooth white flesh of her inner thighs.

  “Gillian.” He touched a still glistening smear with a fingertip.

  Her only response was a sleepy murmur that was more purr than proper answer.

  “Gillian,” he repeated, cupping her cheek in his palm. “Open your eyes.”