“Fresh clothes are in there.” Marcus pointed to our right, then he nodded behind me, somewhere past the gigantic bed. “And there, you can find the bathroom if you need anything.”
It was the first time I realized that the floor was in fact divided. Where Marcus had pointed, there were walls made of smoked glass that cleared as soon as he pressed a button in the small square control panel, fixed in the wall by the stairs.
To the right, there was a simple but large dressing room, while behind us, the smoked glass separated the bedroom from a breathtaking bathroom that looked cut out of a home & design magazine.
“Choose whatever you like.”
The problem was that I didn’t want to choose anything but him. I grabbed the lapels of his drenched jacket and didn’t let go. His eyes widened, then his pupils dilated, and blood rushed to his lips as they swelled in anticipation. His reaction was mirrored masterfully in every cell of my body.
“Maybe I don’t want clothes to change into.”
My throat felt dry, my heart trembled in my chest, and a shiver ran up and down my spine. Yet, the apprehension was not strong enough to stifle the desire.
“You are one infuriating woman,” Marcus growled softly, his lips pressed to my temple and his hands fisted by his sides. “I told you, I don’t know where I meet your expectations and where I start taking advantage of you.”
“And I told you that I want you too.” I took his hand and rubbed our linked hands against my chest, reflecting his earlier gesture. “The feeling that you stirred here is all-consuming. It burns, Marcus. It burns everywhere.”
I had pulled the trigger, and nothing could stop the explosion now. I was in Marcus’s arms, and his mouth was on me before I drew another breath. He was wild, relentless, and hotter than fire. His touch was equally gentle and rough—a man’s deft, knowing touch. His actions came now in a restless rush of kisses, bites, and ardent caresses.
Then, to my complete panic, he stopped and took three steps back. Without him enveloping me in his heat, I froze.
“No.” He was panting and hardly restraining himself, yet there he was away from me. “Not like this. I want to savor you, Charlotte. Every inch of skin, every little atom of your pleasure.”
“Oh.” Desire pulsed madly through my veins, and it left me breathless.
“I want to undress you, peel every garment off your body, and I want you to keep still. Can you do that for me?”
“No.”
In spite of the predaceous concentration that had suddenly taken over his features, Marcus managed a small smile that hinted at his boyish side. He shook his head disapprovingly but did not come closer.
“You have lured me, built a fire inside me that wants to erupt,” I said. “You cannot ask me to keep still.”
My voice was strained, and so was my body. It had been so long since the last time I allowed myself to let my guard down. I hadn’t felt an emptiness, a deficiency in my life, until Marcus started tempting me, driving me insane with emotions that terrified me.
When Carter and I split, my father supported me by keeping me engrossed in numerous projects that didn’t give me the time to entertain carnal appetites. Once Carter was gone from my life, I felt disappointment and an emotional void instead of frustration at not having my needs met. I had all but forgotten about my deepest, primal wants until Marcus made sure to awaken them one by one.
“I want to appease that fire, Charlotte, but first, I want to ignite it to a firestorm. Do you trust me?”
“To kill me slowly? Yes, I do.”
He smiled again, but this time he finally moved, taking one cruelly small step nearer. Dominating me with his eyes, he slowly removed his dark jacket and let it fall to the floor. Beneath the thin material of his shirt, his chest rose and fell in invitation.
“I will bring you back to life. I promise,” he whispered, each syllable a tease to my senses. His lips skimmed across mine, but he didn’t kiss me just yet.
“I trust you, Marcus.”
“Good.”
Blood pulsed feverishly through my veins. Straightened to his full height, Marcus inspected me through heavy-lidded eyes before his fingers started working deftly on the buttons of my blouse. He hooked his fingers under the collar and pushed the material back maddeningly slow, revealing one shoulder at a time.
My skin was wet from the rain, but my flesh grew hotter with each passing moment. Following the blouse down my back, his fingertips glided across my skin with tantalizing softness. He touched, discovered, and set on fire every inch of my body. I reached for him, but his hand locked around my wrist as soon as I moved.
“Keep still,” he warned, his voice a rough commanding whisper of lust.
Marcus ignored my strangled groan and circled me, stopping right behind me. I wasn’t exactly a novice at making love although I was certainly out of practice. Holding my breath, I expected him to release the clasp of my bra and bare me. Instead, he approached me leisurely, aligning his whole length against my back, making me aware of every inch of him before he purposefully touched me again.
His breath blew warmly against my cheek, and his tongue lapped at my earlobe. When he caught the sensitive flesh between his lips, I jolted and he chuckled softly. His hands settled on my hips, caressing my curves with his knuckles, then his talented fingers moved to the front of my suit pants and released the button.
Somewhere in a foreign place, where my mind could still function, I knew what he was doing. Teasing and suspending that inevitable moment of complete intimacy, Marcus was building my desire to a fever pitch.
“You won’t be needing this.”
He knelt and pushed the pants down my legs, making sure that his hands were always in contact with my skin. Then his moist lips followed the trail his hands were leaving.
I couldn’t keep still.
He helped me step out of the drenched pants, then in a flash, he was back on his feet hovering over me from behind. Anticipation was both arousing and cruel.
His hand fisted in my hair and pulled my head back until it was inclined against his broad chest. Slowly, permitting me to observe every twist of his features and every thread of hair as it fell over his forehead, Marcus bent down and pressed his lips to the slope of my throat, trailing open-mouthed kisses all the way to my collarbone.
“Marcus, you’re driving me insane,” I complained but melted into his hard chest.
“So are you.” He chuckled and met my supplicating eyes with a stare ravaged by desire. “It’s curious that you are the one so rushed. I, on the other hand, enjoy the slowness.”
I don’t, I wanted to say, but that would have been a lie. The waiting was torturous, but it was equally scrumptious.
His mouth and hands moved on my body like a perfectly orchestrated dance. The clasp of my bra finally clicked open, and my breath hitched, both in anticipation and uneasiness. It was never comfortable to bare yourself, to make yourself vulnerable, but Marcus gave me the strength and confidence to try.
While his fingers peeled the straps off my shoulders, and the bra fell to my feet, he peppered kisses from my nape to the sensitive spot between my shoulder blades. My hypersensitive skin was wildly aware of his every touch, and so, I trembled.
His left hand caught my right, and for the briefest instant, he forgot all about slowness and whirled me in a pirouette. He steadied me with a hand splayed on my hip when I faced him. While I still tried to catch my breath, Marcus absorbed the sight of my bare chest, rising and falling frantically under his brazen inspection.
“You are a vision,” he murmured breathlessly.
Despite the raging hunger that plagued me, insecurities threatened to take over. Before quite thinking through my gesture, I lifted my hands to cover my unprotected breasts. Marcus’s fingers instantly wrapped around my wrists, and he pulled my hands back to my sides.
“Don’t hide from me.” His stare was scorching and invasive like he could see far beyond my naked flesh. “There’s not a single
part of you that you should be embarrassed to show me. You’re so heartbreakingly beautiful, Charlotte.”
My self-doubting mind disagreed, but the passion in his voice and the ravenousness in his stare were so authentic and so compelling that I could neither resist nor doubt him.
Marcus made me feel desirable. He made me uninhibited enough to gradually become comfortable with my nakedness.
“And you are distressingly clothed,” I complained.
My gaze ran up and down his tall, muscular, and excitingly virile body, caressing him in all the places where my hands couldn’t. Grinning widely, provocatively, he gathered me in his arms but placed me on the bed before I even managed to touch him properly. He rose, standing next to the bed, a dark, merciless torturer. My sweet torturer.
“We should rectify that then.”
A lazy smile spread on his whole face, lighting his eyes. The same skilled fingers that had been tantalizing my flesh gripped each button of his shirt and unfastened them, then he let the sodden cloth fall to the carpet.
A battle of wills quietly unfurled in his eyes. He was torn between making each moment last and just ripping the clothes off and indulging in a frenzied congress. His actions, lacking more and more the deliberateness he had been clinging to, betrayed his waning control.
By the time he unzipped his jeans and quickly removed them, I was panting. Marcus was not only beautiful, but utterly fascinating.
Smooth, sun-kissed skin encased hard muscles. My eyes traveled over his broad chest, down his sculptured abdomen, and followed the happy trail that ended beneath the black material of his boxer briefs. Then I let myself gaze lower, over his well-built thighs and hair-sprinkled sinewy calves. His appeal was a combination of vintage elegance and mouthwatering roughness.
“If you keep staring at me like that, I will lose the last remnants of control I possess, Charlotte,” Marcus growled and descended upon me with fiery determination.
“I want you to.” My hands locked around his neck as he settled between my thighs, and his chest pressed against my swelling breasts. I couldn’t keep still anymore.
“I want to be gentle. This once, I want to go slowly. Not miss a bit.”
“I don’t know how to do this slowly, Marcus. Once I’m in, I’m in.”
It was a warning, and in his intent look I found empathy. I did not refer to the pace of our lovemaking but to the pace of my heart. I wasn’t the type of woman to go to bed with a man only for pleasure’s sake. My pleasure derived from deep-rooted feelings that once kindled did not go away easily.
Where matters of the heart were concerned, logic failed me entirely. It didn’t matter how smart I was. In the end, my heart always had a way of fooling me. And this heart of mine already had a fondness for Marcus.
“Good. Because where you are concerned, Charlotte, I can’t go slow either. For you, I am willing to slow down, but I’m damn happy I don’t have to.”
He did not refer to the pace of our lovemaking either. He was happy I had found the strength and trust to meet him halfway, and so was I.
His hands stroked down my sides and fisted in my panties, then they were off and so were his boxers. The closeness of bare skin meeting in a suffocating embrace made me throw my head back, gasp, and writhe under him. I had never been this lustful, this unrestrained, but Marcus was unleashing a side of me that seemed to have been waiting to be brought to light for far too long.
“Let go, Charlotte,” he whispered against the skin of my throat. “Leave restraint aside. It’s just you and me in this bed.”
“And the firestorm,” I breathed.
“And the firestorm,” he agreed, finally taking my mouth.
His tongue stroked past my lips and intoxicated me with his taste. Under his weight, I felt soft, warm, and aching in all the right places. He pressed into me enough to render me aware of his arousal lying against my hip but not too much to smother me.
I trembled in mixed expectancy and pleasure. I wanted him with a fierceness that wrecked my body. He had reduced me to a mass of simmering emotions.
I was the firestorm.
With our lips engaged in a sweet, torturous battle, his hands expertly grasping my hips, and my arms wrapped around his shoulders, Marcus thrust inside me agonizingly slow, allowing me to feel every exquisite inch of him as I struggled to accommodate his invasion.
Then he started moving, a lazy, carnal rhythm that slipped gradually into a frenzied bodily dance. I clung to his shoulders tightly as if I would fall if I let go. Under my tentative fingers, his back felt wiry, straining, and damp with perspiration. He was an excellent male specimen of unhindered passion.
“Oh, Charlotte, you undo me.”
I kissed his jaw and licked the enticing shape of his lips before he granted me access inside for another breathtaking kiss. I gasped and thrashed against the cool duvet. Very deep in my stomach, a spiraling tension constricted my insides and gave way to a growing, aching pleasure.
Marcus buried his head in my throat. He inhaled my scent and groaned, a raw rumble that came from the depths of his chest, adding fuel to the fire consuming me. His hands caressed my hair, slithered along my sides, and cupped my bottom with a dominating flexion of his fingers, which brought him deeper inside me. The anticipation stole my breath away.
“Marcus—” I murmured weakly. So many things raced through my mind, but I was unable to voice a single coherent thought. Within me, the tension reached an unbearable peak. It was sensory overload.
Hardly managing to keep my eyes open, I was faced with the striking sight of his carved chest. I craned my neck and pressed an open-mouthed kiss to his right pectoral, smiling when the muscle jerked under my touch.
Only the sound of our flesh meeting and Marcus’s sharp intake of breath could be heard. And our hearts—our raging, pounding hearts.
Linked together, we soared higher and higher, and it was then that I truly valued Marcus’s desire to savor every moment, to make each instant last. This first time of complete and unrestricted intimacy, this first time of discovering each other in the barest and most vulnerable of manners, was never going to happen again. We only had a first and Marcus had made sure to make the best of it.
He sucked and licked the spot behind my ear where my pulse beat fast and strong, and suddenly, there was too much emotion stretched tight in my body. I couldn’t contain it any longer.
I arched off the bed, my fingernails digging into his shoulders as I caught him in an unyielding grip. Marcus clasped my hip hard, power and passion oozing from his touch, and with his other arm, he supported my convulsing back.
For an indefinite moment, the firestorm encapsulated our whole world, then I came undone. A heartbeat later, Marcus joined me, his head falling on my chest.
Outside, it poured down with a vengeance, but here in the little cocoon we had created, only our ragged breathing and rampant heartbeats reverberated like a symphony of desire. Minutes passed by, but neither one of us let go of the other. Underneath Marcus’s weight, it was blistering hot, headily dangerous, and yet, soothingly safe. Against his skin, I smiled.
“You are incandescent, Charlotte.”
He watched me, mystified, as if he could hardly comprehend what had just happened, then he wrenched the duvet from underneath and rolled us so he was lying on his back, and I rested on his chest.
“You make me incandescent. You make me another woman.”
Absentmindedly, I stroked his chest, the length of his throat, his stubble-covered cheek, and once in a while, my fingertips rested on his lips as he pressed soft kisses to my knuckles.
I wasn’t the only one glowing in the room. He was too—brightly like fire. Marcus was fire. He could warm you, but he could always scorch you beyond repair.
“No, sugar. You are the same woman you have always been. I only try to bring forth the Charlotte you have locked inside yourself.”
“You want to bare me beyond clothes.” It wasn’t a question, but a certainty.
&nbs
p; “I do,” he hummed and kissed the top of my head. I was terrified as well as intensely excited to let him discover me. Entirely.
In his arms, my eyes closed lazily, and my limbs suddenly felt so heavy that they almost melted into the mattress. I protested with a grunt and unsuccessfully tried to catch Marcus’s arm when he slid from beneath me and climbed out of bed. He returned, wearing a gray pair of pajama pants and holding a white shirt and a hairdryer.
“I wasn’t aware you owned anything that wasn’t black,” I giggled, feeling peculiarly giddy.
Marcus pushed me to a sitting position with unexpected care and gentleness. He smirked, but instead of arrogance, his face was filled with something akin to fascination. I lifted my head to kiss him, but after a chaste brush of our lips, he stilled me and helped me slip into his oversized shirt.
He sat on the edge of the bed, with his back to me. I kissed his shoulder enjoying his ensuing soft chuckle before he bent to plug in the dryer. By the time he straightened and turned to face me, I was already sprawled on the bed, legs pressed together to alleviate the lingering, pleasurable ache between my thighs, arms stretched askew, and a stupid grin on my face.
“You look beautiful. Especially since you are in my bed.” I was too tired to open my eyes, but I could imagine the brooding quality of his smile.
“Hm...”
He switched on the dryer, and his fingers started massaging my scalp and playing with my damp hair. The tender stroking and warm air blowing over my skin combined with the raptness Marcus had breathed in my blood were a narcotic I couldn’t resist. Before he finished drying my hair, I drifted off.
Through the noise of the dryer and the muddle of my dozing thoughts, I thought I heard a phone ringing.
Chapter 19
Marcus
I rejected the call and ran a hand over my face. Then the phone rang again. Liv was inexorable, and though her tenacity used to please me, tonight it was stifling. Frustrated and with an unsettling feeling of guilt, I switched the phone off and let it drop in the drawer of my nightstand.
Darkside Love Affair Page 21