by Suzie Quint
When his tongue slicked into her mouth, she felt it all the way to her toes.
“Mmm. You taste delicious,” he murmured between kisses.
As much as her nightgown allowed, she twined a leg with his. He left her mouth behind and nuzzled her ear. “Sweet,” he murmured again before he began working his way down her neck. Tingles radiated out from his touch.
He cupped her breast, then brushed his thumb over her nipple, electrifying her through the satin gown, taking her brain completely offline.
Alec smoothed the fabric over her breast, shaping it to her body. Her nipple stood erect on the soft, rounded mound. He took the satin-covered citadel into his hot, wet mouth.
When he flicked his tongue over her nipple, she felt it at the crux of her thighs as if the two locales were connected by a low-pitched guitar string he’d plucked. He murmured something against her breast she didn’t understand. Was she supposed to respond? When he moved his attention to her other breast, she decided it didn’t matter. While her breast occupied his mouth, his hands stroked the nightgown over her thighs. It glided up, revealing her calves, her thighs, her panties. He gathered the hem in his hands and bared her stomach as he scooted down.
Please. Let him be just half as good at this as I think he is.
He stopped to drop a kiss on her belly. Cleo swallowed a growl. Come on. Get to the good stuff.
Then again, this wasn’t bad. His touch, his lips, his tongue, felt like butterfly wings. Her skin quivered, his touch twisting her desire tighter, like a fuse in sight of the flame that would ignite it and send it sizzling toward an explosion.
He placed his mouth below her belly button and . . . blew.
She shrieked at the vibration that accompanied the raspberry.
When she looked down, his chin rested at the top of her pubic bone, a wide grin on his face, his eyes lit with laughter.
“That’s not funny.”
“Sure it is.” The smile faded to be replaced with a furrowed brow. “You’re not one of those women who doesn’t laugh in bed, are you?”
“I don’t usually go to bed with comedians.”
“Maybe you should.”
He made it sound almost reasonable.
“Are you ticklish?” His hands slid up her sides.
“N-no.” But she curled over, trying to protect herself. His fingers explored. When he found the spot he was looking for, right beside her hip bone, she shrieked a laugh.
He was relentless, and she fought to escape him until he caught her hands in his. She couldn’t help grinning back at him.
He held her hands against her ribcage as he blew another raspberry on her stomach.
His tickling had sensitized her skin, and she couldn’t hold back the laughter. She jerked one hand free and slapped at him, trying to drive him off.
He caught her hand again and heaved himself level with her as he rolled.
Unexpectedly, she found herself on top of him. He’d cuffed her wrists in his hands and held them behind her back, keeping her helpless, but since she lay on top of him, he wasn’t much better off. “You really don’t want to get laid, do you?” she said, even though evidence to the contrary prodded her thigh.
“Oh, I want to get laid,” he said, as though she was silly to doubt it. His mouth found hers and he kissed her deeply, somehow transmitting the intensity of his desire.
Her bones turned to water.
When his grip relaxed, she pulled her hands free to cup his face as she kissed him back.
He pushed the nightgown further up. They broke their kiss, and she rose up to straddle him, allowing him to pull it over her head.
She started to lean back down to recapture those wicked lips of his but stopped, frozen by the way he was looking at her breasts almost with awe. Instinctively, she brought her arms in front of her, her hands curling into loose fists under her chin. What was she doing? Except for a pair of bikini-cut panties, she was naked with a coworker.
“No, no, sweetheart. Don’t hide.” His hands closed around her wrists, trying to persuade her to relax. “You’re beautiful. Don’t you know that?”
Having inherited her mother’s body made any denial ridiculous, but was that all he saw? She wanted him to look beyond that, but she was afraid, too, that he would. If he were only the talented hack she’d at first thought him, this would still be a mistake, but not a fatal one. Instead, he was too smart, too unpredictable—too dangerous—to toy with.
Before she could figure out why dangerous came to mind, he lifted his torso and recaptured her mouth. Oh, God. His lips were lethal. She lost her train of thought and allowed him to coax her arms apart.
He wrapped his arms around her ribs. She reciprocated by wrapping hers around his shoulders and discovered a hunger to be skin-to-skin she hadn’t known she craved.
They sank back to the bed where he, still kissing the daylights out of her, rolled them over, so she was beneath him.
Satisfying her skin hunger almost distracted her from the poke of his erection against her panties, at least until he shifted and pushed it against her sweet spot. She moaned and pressed back.
He chuckled. “Okay, those have got to go.”
Before she knew what was happening, he was kneeling between her thighs, peeling her panties down. He backed away, drawing her last defense with him.
Feeling more exposed than ever but unwilling for him to guess, she tried to match his playful manner, but she felt stiff and awkward.
He stopped with her panties still above her knees. “Mm. Pretty.”
It was everything she could do not to fold her hands over her crotch.
“I like your taste in jewelry,” he said with a grin and a cocked eyebrow as he resumed sliding her panties off.
She should warn him. She wasn’t the woman he thought she was. The clit piercing represented a moment of bravado. Or idiocy. Or both.
It hadn’t made her daring or brave or adventurous in bed. Had she really hoped it would? What the diamond-studded barbell had done was make men think she was, and with that preconception, she’d been able fool one or two. For a while at least.
Could she convince Alec she was a wild child?
When he opened the drawer of the nightstand and pulled out a foil packet, part of her wanted to be offended that he’d been confident enough to have a condom there, but another part of her was grateful because she hadn’t given it a single thought.
She really sucked at sex.
Not that this was news. Starting with the first guy she’d slept with in college, she’d learned her fantasies were better than the reality. No one since then had changed that perception much. She should just wave the white flag and surrender. Except . . . Apparently, hope really did spring eternal. Somewhere out there, there had to be a man who could live up to all the hype, and against all her good sense, it seemed she wasn’t ready to give up quite yet.
She closed her eyes. Men liked enthusiasm. She could do that. Or she could fake it. She didn’t have time to dwell on that oxymoron. She needed a game plan.
He’d seemed to like the part about the romance heroine digging her nails into the hero’s back. She’d have to remember to do that when things built up. Oh, and they always wanted wet and tight. She couldn’t do anything about the wet part; that was either there or it wasn’t. Luckily, it was, but tight . . . She did a quick Kegel, flexing her vaginal muscles. Yeah, she could fake that, too.
“Cleo? You still with me, sweetheart?”
She opened her eyes and tried out what she hoped was a sexy smile.
He chuckled. “Whew. For a second there, I thought you’d drifted off.” He lowered himself onto the bed, threw one leg over her and nuzzled her neck. “I was afraid I’d lost my touch,” he murmured against her skin.
His fingers slid to the folds between her legs, proving that, if he’d ever lost it, it hadn’t gone missing for long.
The appreciative noises she made were real. She actually lost herself in what he was doing for a few min
utes, but then he asked, “What do you want, sweetheart?”
And she was back on script.
“I want you. Take me.” She bit down on the urge to add Big Boy.
He kissed her jaw, then nibbled on her ear as he moved into position.
She closed her eyes and tried to lose herself again in what he was doing. It was nice enough. This should be easy. This was sex. It was instinctual. Even teenagers could do this.
So what was wrong with her?
At moments like this, she wished she were more like her mother. Not a lot more. Just enough that she didn’t have performance anxiety. Why was it so damned hard to relax and enjoy this?
“What are you doing?” His tone was too conversational for a man in the middle of foreplay.
She opened her eyes. “Nothing. I mean, I’m . . . well, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” Oh, yeah. That sounded good. What did he want her to say?
Before she could figure out how to say something in the Oh, baby, you’re so incredible vein, he said, “No, you’re supposed to be feeling. Instead,”—he brushed his thumb over her forehead, smoothing crinkles she hadn’t realized were there—”you’re thinking. Stop it. Unless you’re fantasizing about something you’d like me to be doing, then you need to speak up.”
“I just . . .” She let her eyes fall to his chest. It was a nice chest. Smooth. Muscled. With a light dusting of hair. “I don’t want to disappoint you.” Ack. She sounded so unsure of herself.
“You won’t disappoint me. You couldn’t.” He tipped her chin up with one finger. “Unless you don’t enjoy this. Then I’d be disappointed. But not with you.”
Oh, God. The pressure. Well, this was where faking enthusiasm came in. She smiled, trying her best to make it sexy. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”
~***~
But Alec was worried. Or at least confused.
Cleo lifted her head to capture his mouth. He kissed her back, but now he was the one thinking when he shouldn’t be.
He would have sworn she liked what he’d been doing, but then she’d gone all stiff and her responses felt off. Like a movie where the sound was a half a second behind the action.
It was enough to put a guy off his paces.
So maybe he’d have to work a little harder to make sure she got caught up in the action and stayed there.
He moved from her mouth to her earlobe. She practically hummed with pleasure. A little exploration in that tender spot just below her ear, and she sucked in a breath and held it.
Now he was on track again.
He worked his way down her neck. A shiver cascaded down her body.
A smile threatened to break out across his face, but he fought it down. He pressed her breasts together between his palms.
She had great breasts. He loved everything about them. The way they felt in his hands, the pucker of her nipples, the little birthmark on the underside of her right breast. And the cleavage. There was something about cleavage that always got his motor running faster. When he mouthed a nipple, she drew a deep, shuddering breath and moaned. The sound came right on cue, exactly where it belonged.
With her breasts so close together, he had only to turn his head a little to lave the other nipple. Her hips shifted under him as though she’d felt that between her thighs. Oh, yeah. He had her attention now.
“So pretty,” he murmured against her skin.
She jolted as though someone had slammed on the brakes of a speeding car.
“What?” she asked in a breathy voice.
Not breathy enough in his opinion, however.
He lifted his head. “You’ve got beautiful breasts.”
“Oh. Uhm. Thank you.”
Thank you? Ah, crap. Had he done that? Knocked her out of the pleasure pocket? Maybe she didn’t like pillow talk. He should keep his mouth shut—well, not shut per se, but stop talking. See where that took him.
He returned his attention to her breasts until she relaxed and started responding with properly timed gasps.
As fun as her breasts were, there were other places on his itinerary that needed his attention. He worked his way down the flat plane of her stomach, glancing up as he brushed his fingers through the small landing strip of hair on her pubis. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed. Her body practically vibrated with tension, but it was good tension. The tension of anticipation, of yearning.
Returning his gaze to very lovely, very hot lady parts, he slid his fingers down to the glint of silver with the diamond chip and flicked it. Her hips jerked.
“Oh, yeah,” he breathed. Her body jerked again, but he knew, even before he looked up, that this time, it wasn’t the response he wanted. Her eyes were still closed but her eyebrows had pulled together as though she was fighting against returning to reality.
Keep your thoughts to yourself. Being silent didn’t come natural to him. He liked talking in bed. It made him feel connected to the woman he was with. If he couldn’t talk to them, it started feeling like mutual masturbation, which was only slightly more fun than solitary masturbation. But if silence was what she needed, he could do it. He hoped.
Maybe if he gave his mouth something more interesting to do. He centered himself between her thighs and gave her a long, slow lick, ending with a flick of the barbell. She gasped so hard he thought she might choke. When he was sure the danger was past, he allowed himself to grin for two whole seconds before he got back to work.
Her responses were all he could hope for. The little breathy noises drove him on, arousing him just as his ministrations clearly aroused her. He thought about taking her to climax, but he wasn’t quite selfless enough. Or convinced she wouldn’t lose her enthusiasm once she got hers. He sure as hell didn’t want to have to choose between his pride and his own satisfaction the way he’d done that morning. Maybe it was selfish, but he didn’t want her coming apart until he was inside her.
He gave her one last swipe with his tongue then reached over the side of the bed. His fingers found one of the pillows. He tossed it onto the bed then found another.
Cleo made a distressed noise he found reassuring. She didn’t like that he’d stopped, which meant she’d been enjoying herself. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. The party’s nowhere near over.”
She blinked at him, the glazed look fading with every flutter of her eyelashes. Mierda. He’d forgotten he wasn’t supposed to talk.
Since he’d already broken the mood, he said, “Lift your hips.”
“What for?”
“We’re going to slide these under you.”
“Why?”
There was the Cleo he knew. She couldn’t just do what he asked without a reason. Except he didn’t want the Cleo who thought about things in bed with him. He wanted the Cleo who made small breathy noises because she was swept away by what he was doing to her. “It’ll make what we’re about to do more pleasurable.”
Her brow furrowed again, but she complied. He slid the pillows under her. “See? That’s not so bad, is it?”
“No.”
He stretched out on top of her and kissed her. “Did you like what I was doing?”
“It was nice.”
He nuzzled her neck. “Do I need to up my game?”
“Are we playing a game?”
“Don’t you like games? They’re fun.” He lifted his head to look into her eyes. “This is supposed to be fun.”
She frowned as though the idea of having fun in bed had never occurred to her.
Madre de Dios. What was wrong with the men she’d slept with?
~***~
Alec thought sex was supposed to be fun? What was wrong with him?
Sex was occasionally satisfying, usually a lot of work, and always, always stressful. Cleo tried to remember a time when it had been fun. She’d slept with a grand total of five men before Alec. Some of them had been fun out of bed, but she couldn’t remember them being fun in bed. Martin, for example, had been fun out of bed.
Hadn’t he?
&nb
sp; She stopped to consider that. Had he really been fun? Or had they just done fun things? Would jetting off to the Bahamas or Acapulco or Waikiki have been as much fun without him? Had she ever really laughed just because she was with him?
Or any of them, for that matter?
She couldn’t remember ever being glad to be with any of them just because they were fun.
“Cleo? Sweetheart?”
She shook off her thoughts and focused on Alec. His face hovered a few inches above hers. He looked worried. She reached up and smoothed his forehead the way he’d done to hers earlier. “Now who’s thinking too hard?”
“Am I?” he asked.
“Of course. I am having fun.” If she could fake enthusiasm, she could surely fake fun as well. “I’m just . . . not used to being with someone so chatty.”
He blew out a puff of air. “I knew it. I was distracting you, wasn’t I?”
“A little bit.”
“I hate to tell you this, but I’ve been holding back.”
Was he kidding?
“I’ve been told I should have been a sports announcer because I sometimes sound like I’m doing a play-by-play broadcast.”
She clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing in his face. Oh, God. What had she gotten herself into?
He pried at her fingers. “Don’t do that. It’s okay to laugh. This is supposed to be fun, remember?” His eyes glittered with amusement. “Don’t make me tickle you again.”
No. Not that. She’d lost control of the situation, laughing and . . . having fun? In bed? The two things didn’t go together. At least, they never had before.
But Alec apparently wasn’t going to give her time to contemplate this second oxymoron because he nibbled her earlobe. She surprised herself with a giggle.
He lifted his head to look down at her. “Now that’s a sweet sound.” His lips descended onto hers, but the kiss was gentle and tender. And amazingly, took her from a gentle simmer back to a rolling boil in seconds.
“Enough,” she said against his lips.
He lifted his head. “What?”
“Enough fun and games. Would you please―?” What? Do me? Make love to me? There had to be something in between. “Could we please have sex now?”