by Dani Collins
She shrugged, admitting reluctantly, “True. And I’m not sure why.” Her brows came together in dismay. “You’re not the sort of man whose attention I typically want or expect to earn.”
“What sort of man is that?”
“One who’s used to getting whatever he wants. One who’s not serious.” There was rebuke in her doe eyes.
“I assure you, I’m a very serious man.”
They were talking about different types of serious, but his remark didn’t intimidate her. It made a smile play around her mouth, as though she was amused. He should have been affronted but found that smile entrancing.
“I think you’re different from the women I normally spend time with. You’re playful. Impulsive. Definitely more sensual than anyone I’ve ever encountered.” He noted where her fingers were tracing the brocade upholstery on the back of a chair, learning its texture. “I find that quality in you very intriguing. I think that, after such a passionate kiss, I would like to know if you respond like that during lovemaking.”
* * *
So would I, Rozi found herself thinking with a semihysterical laugh bubbling in her chest.
“Um—” She felt buffeted by winds that swept all rational thought from her mind. “That’s not my usual MO.”
In fact, it was one reason she didn’t seem to keep boyfriends. In this day and age, they expected to go all the way after a few dates. She always drew a halt because she had never felt strongly enough about any of them, emotionally or physically, to abandon her pact with Gizi.
No one had ever made her feel like this, though.
As Viktor’s attention stayed on her mouth, Rozalia couldn’t think of anything but the strange, wild kiss they’d shared. Of tasting him again. Something urgent battled past her conscious reasoning. It was the insistent part of her that overtook her when she was in the heat of design work, expressing the very core of herself with precious metals and rare stones.
She didn’t have the tools and skills for lovemaking, though. She only had instinct and a deep longing to succumb to that brilliant force. It had never let her down, always saturating her with the deepest joy and leaving her with a sense of fulfillment.
So she put her trust in it. She stepped close and put out her hand so her palm rested on his chest where his heartbeat thumped strong and hard. She knew it was an invitation, a signal to begin. Her own pulse filled her ears with an echoing throb, pushing sensual heat through her limbs and into her erogenous zones.
He made a noise that was feline and satisfied, predatory but lazy. Almost a purr, yet a growl, too. Warning and welcoming as he drew her in with firm hands on her hips.
She gasped at the hardness of his frame, the confidence in his hands, the languorous way he nuzzled his nose against hers for one teasing second. It was a gentle urging to tilt her head so he could capture her mouth more surely. Thoroughly.
Sensation slammed through her as he picked up right where they’d left off, the rush so intense it hurt. Her nerve endings stung as though electrified. Her breasts grew full and tender, her lips became plump and sensitized. Her muscles ached with the effort to hold on to him when she felt weak, weak, weak. Her throat constricted with emotion and her lungs burned for oxygen. Deep between her legs, a pulsation of need started.
All from a kiss. From the sweet rough rake of his mouth across hers. A swipe of ownership, yes, but of enticement. Come with me. Let me show you.
He drew back, a question in his eyes as he took her hand.
She let him draw her from the office and up the stairs. Crazy, crazy, crazy. But she had come this far. Why not go all the way?
All the way down the gallery to a room with double doors, a sitting room with a desk, then through another pair of doors into a room with an enormous bed. Bigger than a king, she thought vaguely. Because he was more man than even that title could convey. More man than any sort of person she had ever encountered.
The drapes were already shut and a lamp lit. He closed the doors. Locked them with a click that gave her the slightest pause.
Then he came across and touched her again. He pulled her into a gentle collision that melted her on contact. So much seductive heat. Even his eyes glowed feverishly bright.
That was what really affected her—his desire. The hardness of his muscled shoulders and chest triggered primal responses of female to male, but her delicate feminine ego exalted in the specific hardness that pressed insistently against the softness of her belly. She reveled in the color that flagged his cheekbones. In the tension that pulled at his expression, indicating a struggle with his control.
She wound her arms around his neck and gave herself up to that force. To him.
He took her mouth. Took it as if this same energy inside her gripped him. As though this raw, aching hunger drove him to the same pitch. As if he needed her to match his need or they would both be lost.
It was overwhelming and wild and made her tremble, but she didn’t even try to slow him down. She didn’t care that she couldn’t breathe. This was the beauty of abandonment.
Still, a dim part of her worried she wasn’t as skillful a lover as he expected. Was she supposed to be more forward? Less? She wanted to feel more of him. Wanted to feel his skin. Did he grow impatient with her when she drew back to clumsily try to undo his buttons? Was that why he ran a firm hand down the center, dislodging buttons that stung as they sprang away and struck her arm and shoulder. He jerked his shirt open and yanked to free the tail.
She swallowed uncertainly, but her hands went to his hot, tawny chest, too hungry for the damp, satin feel of him to let doubt prevail.
He made that sexy growling noise and his own hands got under the edges of her T-shirt. They scorched her lower back and she jerked in reaction. He pressed her arms up as he peeled the shirt away in a trailing caress of his light hands, then drew hers behind his neck.
She wrapped her arms more securely around his neck, shuddering as his chest hair abraded the upper swells of her aching breasts. She couldn’t get enough of the feel of him and licked up his throat in sheer wantonness.
Her bra released and he slid his tickling touch along her arms, forcing her to draw back so he could peel it off and throw it away.
He caught her before she could throw herself into his arms again. Caught her by the upper arms and held her before him as he looked.
She swallowed, told herself not to have body issues because—
“Oh!” His sure hands cupped her breasts, plumping them. Making them ache even as he soothed with gentle massage and light flicks of his thumbs across her nipples.
She shifted her feet, trying to keep her balance under the onslaught of sensations.
He lifted his gaze to hers, watching to ensure she liked it. She could barely hold that penetrating gaze. Not while waves of heady, dizzying desire rolled through her. Her lashes fluttered and a dangerous wild heat flared between her thighs. Flared and burned and condensed into a coal of glowing abject need. Into pressure and tension and such acute pleasure she had to cover his hands and make a pleading noise for him to stop.
“Let it happen,” he commanded.
She shook her head. Couldn’t. She needed to be in the safety of his arms and looped her arms around his neck again.
He caught her up with hard hands behind her thighs, so she instinctively twined her legs around his waist and her mouth was on a level with his.
She kissed him. Greedily. She did every lurid, raunchy thing she had been longing to do to that mouth. She swept her tongue against his, explored the wet heat and different textures of him. She scraped her teeth across his erotic bottom lip, then sucked on it with carnal recklessness.
On and on it went until the world upended. Suddenly she was on her back on the mattress, his weight pressing briefly before leaving her as he rose to his knees between hers. He yanked at the fly of her jeans, then stepped off the b
ed to pull them away.
She cycled her feet to help, even peeled off her sock and lifted her hips to throw away her ridiculously comfortable but unsexy short-short girl boxers.
He dispatched his own clothing as unceremoniously. As urgently. Then he came down alongside her and set a hard knee between hers while his hand stroked from the outside of her thigh, up her hip, to capture her breast again.
If she had thought the brush of his chest a stimulating experience, the whole body sensation of hips and thighs and stomach brushing against her own made her groan. He was so beautiful, too, not that he let her admire him. He bent to suck the nipple he had teased to staunch attention, making her cry out at the initial hot, wet sensation. He lifted away, blew softly, then did it again.
Teased and tortured, she rolled into him, unable to get close enough, hands skimming his back and sides, learning the shape of roped muscles and the silky texture of his chest hair and how sensitive his nipples were to the graze of her fingertips.
She didn’t even know what she was doing, but he jerked and looked up at her with a dangerous smile of approval and threat. Then he sucked her nipple again. Hard.
It was the most delicious payback. Her toes curled and golden threads of desire shot into her loins. She found herself crooking a knee to enjoy the abrasion of his thigh against the inside of her own, rubbing like kindling, stoking the fire between them.
He drew her half under him, his forearm beneath her neck, and took his time petting and caressing her breasts and waist and hip, her stomach and finally, finally, he cupped her mound.
She bit her lip. Closed her eyes tight as the exquisite pressure of his palm released a rush of dampness.
He made that noise again, the one that was so primal she knew this to be utterly natural. The way man and woman were meant to be. He rocked his hand where she yearned for... So much. A deeper touch. Something mysterious and necessary.
She bucked, instinct taking her over. She arched in response to the way he teased her. She offered her breasts. Her lips. Everything. All that she was.
He kissed her lightly and kept up that slow shifting pressure of his hand. As if he knew the build he was inciting would grow by increments yet keep her this side of the abyss. With light fingers, he parted and explored, keeping her on the precipice, toying with her and driving her insane.
The only thing she could think to do was return the favor. She slid her hand to the thick, implacable heat against her thigh. She took hold of pure magic and discovered a new world. Silk over steel. Velvet and a new, deeply ragged sound that rattled from his throat.
“Yes.” His voice was whiskey-soaked and made her scalp tighten.
She knew logically what she was begging for, but she didn’t know. The way his weight came over her was overwhelming. She didn’t have second thoughts, per se, but she had a moment of stunned realization at what she was doing. As if she had leaped from an airplane without fully grasping she was a mile above the earth.
He guided the broad dome of his sex over the sensitive knot of nerves, throwing her back into that chasm of craving where she only needed more. More of him. Of whatever he could give her. And he gave it to her. The crest of his tip pressed into the slick heart of her. Pressed and stretched, thrusting deep with confidence—
She gasped at the catch and burn.
He lifted his head. Some of the haze left his eyes while a moment of comprehension struck his expression.
This was it. The mating act.
It was the mile-high view of existence. Soaring and dangerous, but such a moment of awe.
Perhaps he saw the same thing because his expression, having gone shocked and tense with sudden clarity, eased into tenderness. He cupped her cheek and kissed her with a taste of adoration on his lips.
Maybe it was her romantic soul turning something earthy and base into something exalted and beautiful, but they were in free fall. She wanted this to go on forever. This soft kiss and this intensely intimate, sharp penetration.
Then he moved. He withdrew and thrust gently as he watched her with a smoky gaze from beneath heavy eyelids.
The friction hurt, but his easy pace sent frissons of pleasure through her, too. Ones that incited a glow that redoubled and expanded. She curled her arms around him, her legs. Drew him in and moved with him. Urged him with ancient, primitive signals to move faster. Harder.
He used his hands. His teeth. Kissed and touched and nibbled and said things she should have understood, but she was far beyond the world of words. There was only this mindless place where writhing pleasure soaked her. Where she clung to his powerful body and only his fierce possession of her mattered. Where one tiny twist of her hips had him striking into her like lightning, making her lose her breath and turn molten even as his arms caged her.
He splintered with her, fusing them with alchemy and sorcery and elemental power for the rest of eternity.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WASN’T UNTIL he reached to keep the condom on as he withdrew that he realized he hadn’t worn one.
It sent a frozen splash through him, snapping him out of his postclimactic lethargy. How? He always wore one.
It was one more shock on top of the sheer power of his release. He fell onto his back, absorbing what had been a cataclysm. And had she been a virgin?
She had been everything he could ever want in a lover. Abandoned and responsive, irresistible as creamed honey. Before he’d even had her naked, the animal in him had known once wouldn’t be enough. He had been both urgent and determined to savor. Then she had clasped him in her delicate fingers and all he could think was that he needed to be inside her.
Her gasp as he’d thrust had been one of surprise. Pain, maybe. His world had been so perfect in those dark, wet heartbeats, he had been stunned at having misjudged how ready she was. He had thought it would kill him to pull out.
But emotions he couldn’t name had dawned across her lovely face. To call it “knowledge” was too biblical, but that was what he had felt, gazing on her. In that second, he had known her at the deepest level because he had been in the same state of wonder and magnificence.
In those sublime moments, urgency had left him. He had exalted in every caress from then on. Every catch of her lobe in his teeth and every glorious whimper he wrung from her throat had become a part of him. He would have stayed within her for a thousand years, but her climax had triggered his. There hadn’t been a cell of sense in his head at that point. Not a single glimmer of willpower or control.
Now, however, cogs were turning and mental connections were being made.
“You were a virgin,” he said. “Does that mean you’re not using birth control?”
“Hmm?” She turned her head.
They were sprawled sideways across the wrinkled covers, her body still rosy in the golden light. Her hair was loose and mussed, her cheeks pink, her lips dry until she ran her tongue around them, leaving them shiny. Her sooty lashes blinked and her fine brows quirked together.
“I’ll have to take a morning-after pill.”
“You will,” he assured her, prickles of disenchantment and suspicion firmly dousing his afterglow. How had he been such a fool? He would have sworn he had conquered this weakness for a soft touch and a pretty smile.
“We wouldn’t want to repeat history,” she said with a flick of her gaze into his, inviting him to laugh with her.
“No. I wouldn’t,” he agreed without a single iota of humor. He refused to repeat his own history with a woman who had seemed enamored with him but had betrayed him in a most coldhearted way.
Thinking far more clearly now, he realized what she must have been vying for.
“Was this your attempt to trade for the earring? If so, I’m still not interested.”
* * *
I’m still not interested.
“What? No!” A single, jagged choke hit her t
hroat, too coarse to be a laugh. Mostly a noise of disbelief. She was reeling from what she’d just done and he was asking—accusing her of—She sat up. “Are you serious right now?”
I’m a very serious man.
She had thought him so funny when he said that. He had taken her meaning as a sense of humor, which had tickled her because she’d thought he was saying it as a type of self-deprecating joke. But she had been saying she recognized him as the kind of man who charmed a woman into bed without offering any sort of future.
“You’re twenty-three? Four?” he asked.
“Twenty-four.” She knew better than to fall for a player. Sure he had some good moves, but that was because he practiced. Ugh. She wanted to bury her head in her arms, she was so appalled with herself.
“Most people lose their virginity a lot younger these days.”
“So what? Are you suggesting there was something wrong with the way I behaved?” She blushed. It started as embarrassment but intensified as she wondered if he was judging her moves. She had let instinct guide her, but maybe she’d been clumsy and laughable. Her lungs grew so tight she could hardly draw air.
“I’m suggesting you obviously don’t experiment so there must be some ulterior motive for you to give your virginity to me, a perfect stranger. You must want something.”
A shared and remarkable experience, perhaps?
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not perfect.” Physically, maybe, but, “Why are you being so insulting?” She climbed off the bed and searched out her clothes.
He came up on an elbow, his form as lovingly carved as an ancient statue, each muscle delineated across his chest and into his abs. His thighs were powerful, his—She averted her eyes, but felt his gaze linger on the sway of her breasts as she bent to snatch up her bra. He had all the languorous arrogance of a sheikh with his harem girl.
Well, this one had fulfilled her purpose and was dismissing herself. She didn’t even bother trying to find her missing sock.
“Answer my question,” he demanded. “Why me? What did you hope to gain?”