Craved Mate: Cybermates, Ayers, Candace [the rosie project .txt] 📗

little puffs of nervous breath against my neck that were nearly my undoing. I would’ve died right then and there just for a taste of her—to run my tongue over her smooth skin, trail it down between her thighs, over her silken folds…

Breathe in. Breathe out. Try not to think about tearing her clothes off and making love to her with your tongue as she writhes in ecstasy to the pinnacle of her sweet, delicious climax.

She scanned my face, stopping when she met my eyes. The scent of her arousal spiked. Ah, so I was affecting her as well.

One of her hands latched onto the front of my shirt. Her fingernails bit into my skin. Those wide, hazel eyes stared straight into mine.

They seemed to be searching…for something.

I swallowed down my hyped libido. I had to get my head together and get her down out of Walter before she fell and broke a bone or sprained a ligament or, god forbid, cracked her skull open.

She was fragile.

As a shifter, I could fall. I could fall all day long. I could crack my skull all over the place. Not a big deal. I’d heal.

But my mate was fragile, as were all humans—easily broken and susceptible to a myriad of diseases. I’d spent enough time as a first responder to know that.

That sobering thought cleared my head. “I want you to step down onto the ladder with me, okay?”

She inhaled sharply and shook her head. “I-I can’t. It’s not safe.”

“I’m right here. I promise you, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She shook her head again. “If I start to fall… No, I’m too heavy. I’ll take us both down.”

“Hey, look at my arm.” I flexed my bicep. Then, grinning and speaking as soothingly as possible, I raised an eyebrow in my best macho, he-man pose. “These guns aren’t just for show, you know.”

My lame attempt at humor seemed to work. She visibly relaxed some.

“I could toss you over my shoulder and carry you down, but I thought you’d be more comfortable using the ladder on your own.”

“No! You can’t carry me.”

When I made a move to prove her wrong, she squeaked and practically leaped onto the ladder with me.

It was self-sabotage on my part. I should have carried her.

Keeping my promise that I wouldn’t allow her to fall, I stood behind her which only served to press her ass against my pelvis and her back against my chest. My arms remained around her with my hands braced on the rungs of the ladder just above hers.

“Good job.”

She looked over her shoulder at me with a shaky smile. From so close, her scent was even more tantalizing, like a heady drug—potent, stirring, torturous.

“Okay, I’ll climb down a rung and then you climb down a rung. Got it?”

She nodded. “You must think I’m ridiculous, but I hate heights. I have an irrational fear of them that I’d like to conquer someday, just not right this moment.” She trembled against me but descended step by step, as I’d instructed.

“Why did you climb a tree, then?”

With a sexy little frown, she huffed. “There was a…well, what appeared to be a cute, helpless kitten. I now know all that cuteness was a ruse, a cunning ploy meant to lure me to the most embarrassing moment of my life. What I thought was an adorable little ball of fluff was really an evil demon-spawn armed with a skillset of Machiavellian maneuvers. As soon as it coaxed me up here with its lies and trickery, the fiendish furball ditched me.”

“And then you were stuck.” I took another step down.

“And then I was stuck.” She groaned. “But, of course, not before I flashed all of Main Street.”

I winced as she followed me because with every step she took, her ass rubbed against my boner.

I wondered if I should apologize for that, but it wasn’t as though I could control it. Not with her ass stroking it every few seconds. Sometimes the damn thing had a mind of its own.

5

Mel

If there was one consolation prize in this nightmarish ordeal, it was being helped down the ladder by Hulk the hunky firefighter.

The man was delicious, and calling him Hulk was no exaggeration. My rescuer was so big, he made me feel petite. It wasn’t often that I was around a man who made me feel petite and, based on the part of his anatomy pressed against my left butt cheek, there was nothing small about him.

Hulk was packing.

Tall, firmly muscled, with cropped hair and dark-blue eyes that matched his navy blue uniform. He had a patch over the left pec that bore a picture of a ladder and a crisscrossed ax surrounded by the words firefighter on one side, rescue on the other, and EMT at the bottom.

As big, sexy men in uniform went, this one was the biggest and sexiest I’d ever seen. My vajayjay sure did think so. That old girl perked right up and responded instantly to him.

Even while focusing on my descent, with my arms trembling and my legs quivering, I achieved a total-body blush each time I managed down a rung and his hard bulge brushed my backside.

It was like foreplay—agonizingly torturous foreplay.

By the time we reached the ground, I was breathless. My rescuer’s body heat vanished from behind me, but his hand remained on my back as he guided me off the ladder. Even his hand was an aphrodisiac.

I groaned.

A small crowd had gathered. Great. An audience to witness my mortification.

“Next time you see a cute but deceptively demonic kitten, just give us a call. We’ll handle it.”

My smile was feeble. “Got it, and thank you.”

I was so hot that I was sweating buckets. I happened to glance at the edge of the crowd where the firemen were elbowing each other, snickering, and whispering while watching us.

Could I have made a bigger fool of myself? I think not.

A drop of boob sweat trickled down my cleavage. My head felt airy