“It’s too much,” he said, opening his eyes to stare at her. His pupils were blown, another symptom of sexual arousal. Rosemary shivered, her heart knocking hard against her chest. “Too much,” he repeated. “Christ, your hand. I’m going to …”
He didn’t say what he was going to do, but Rosemary thought she understood. If she wanted to get all the way to the actual intercourse part of this, she had to keep things moving. Wes clearly was in no shape to do it—he’d frozen them in this strange little tableau, her hand on his erect penis, his hand covering hers, neither of them moving except for the great, panting breaths they heaved in.
Stretching up, she laid her mouth against his and pushed her tongue inside. He growled, the sound reverberating through both of their chests where they were pressed together. Rosemary felt the vibration against the sensitive tips of her breasts, still covered by her bra, which she suddenly wanted off her.
Unable to work the hook left-handed, Rosemary broke the kiss to say, “I need my hand back.”
“Are you sure?” Wes asked. There was an urgency in his voice that Rosemary normally associated with dire situations.
The idea that maybe from his perspective the removal of her hand would be considered dire made her heart speed up.
“Because I need both hands to unhook my bra,” she told him. “Then you can have it back. My hand, I mean.”
He gulped and stared at her glassily.
“Or …” She hesitated, then just said it. “Or we could do something else.”
“Swear to God, if you suggest an experiment or a pause for more research or something, I might die right here.”
“No!” He was going to make her say it. Fine. She had no silly inhibitions about what was essentially a mechanical function. “I meant something more along the lines of coitus.”
He blinked. “Oh, my God.” He gulped. “That shouldn’t be sexy. What is wrong with me?”
It must have been a rhetorical question, because he didn’t give her a chance to answer before he released her wrist in favor of folding both strong, lean arms around her back. Before she knew it, the release of her hand was a moot point anyway, because Wes worked some magic on her bra clasp and the offending garment loosened. In fact, at this moment it was only held in place by the pressure of his chest against hers.
Rosemary noticed all of this at a remove, through a haze of heat and rushing blood and firing synapses. His mouth was on hers again, claiming and searching as if the mysteries of the universe were locked behind her teeth. She wasn’t one hundred percent certain that they weren’t. This kiss was already showing her things she’d never expected. Like the fact that she was desirable. Extremely so, if Wes’s labored breathing and intense eyes were anything to go by. Not to mention the fact that she suddenly and irrevocably understood that her body wasn’t just a machine intended to shelter the powerhouse of her brain. No, her body had a life of its own, winding around Wes’s and rubbing in sharp, jerky, instinctive movements that made both of them gasp.
Wes got the rest of their clothes off, and by this time, Rosemary didn’t give a good goddamn where they ended up because she was entirely focused on Wes easing her back to lie against the scratchy material of their jackets, a thin cloth barrier between oversensitive skin and hard lab floor.
His hands swept down her rib cage and back up again, thumbs just grazing the undersides of her breasts. Without meaning to, Rosemary arched her back, pushing herself toward his touch.
“God, you’re gorgeous,” he said, his voice rough and deeper than she’d ever heard it. “I can’t believe how this is between us. Can you? I mean, shit. Why haven’t we been doing this for weeks?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t think. Don’t want to think.”
“That’s a first, I bet. Am I right?” His grin was conspiratorial, mischievous, as if the two of them were in cahoots, sneaking around behind her brain’s back.
Rosemary began to entertain serious fears that she was losing it.
“Stop talking and kiss me,” she demanded. “Also, quit tickling my ribs and touch me already. I ache.”
Fire flashed through Wes’s eyes and his fingers closed, with satisfying, electrifying alacrity, around her tingling, swollen breasts.
Rosemary’s lungs contracted suddenly, forcing her to suck in air with a noisy gasp. His hands were rough, callused in spots from holding a chef’s knife, and felt amazing on her naked skin.
“That’s very nice,” she breathed, once she reconnected the neural pathways that would allow her to form words. Wes smiled up at her, eyes hot and intent, and then proceeded to steal her cognitive processing function away again by thumbing her nipples in slow, measured circles. The pink buds flushed darker and tightened into knots of near-painful sensitivity, until every flick of his fingers made Rosemary squirm and press herself harder into his hands.
“Oh man,” Wes said. “I’m gonna make a meal out of you.”
Before she could ask what he meant, he’d dipped his head and put his mouth over her taut, distended nipple. She cried out, awash in sensation, waves of pleasure spiraling out from her breasts to warm her whole body and turn her brain to mush. Wes moved to the other nipple while Rosemary tossed her head, her hair whipping across her face, getting in her mouth and making it hard to breathe.
Or maybe that was Wes, again, because even when his hand reached up to brush the tendrils of hair from her face in a gentle, delicate gesture that felt at odds with the ravenous, insistent pull of his mouth against her breasts, even then—she still couldn’t breathe.
And it didn’t get any easier as his mobile lips and clever tongue left her chest and wandered down her torso, delving into the shallow bowl of her navel, nipping soft bites into the quivering roundness of her abdomen. When he nuzzled his face into the crease between her left thigh and her hip, Rosemary actually choked and scrabbled at the jackets beneath her, looking for something solid to hold on to in a world gone suddenly bright and sharp-edged with pleasure.
He scraped her soft inner thigh with his beard-roughened cheek, then licked a hot stripe up the gently abraded skin. Rosemary shuddered, her mind gloriously blank until it exploded with light and color the moment he lowered his mouth to her sex. Wes licked her open with slow, smooth passes of his agile tongue, and the sensation blurred and ran together until Rosemary couldn’t have parsed out what he was doing to which part of her if she’d been given a labeled diagram of female genitalia.
All she knew was that it felt amazing. She felt amazing. She was alive, so alive, shivers racing over her skin, her hands reaching out to grasp his strong shoulders where they propped her thighs apart to give him full access.
Tension pulled her belly tighter than high-tensile wire, and Wes kept pushing her higher and higher until, all at once, it broke over her like an epiphany, like a groundbreaking Nobel-worthy revelation, like the frakking Big Bang—and for the first time in her entire life, Rosemary understood exactly what the huge deal was about sex.
Which, when she took it to the logical conclusion, made her pretty curious about whether it could possibly be better once they got to actual intercourse.
So when Wes knelt up, his hands braced on her still-quivering, widespread thighs, and said, “Hold that thought, sweetness—I’ve got a condom in my wallet,” Rosemary thought less about the dangers of disease and odds of pregnancy even when using birth control, and more about yes, please.
Scrambling for his wallet and the key to the gates of paradise inside, Wes realized he’d lost any hope of playing it cool approximately ten minutes ago.
He glanced over his shoulder at her sprawled form. She looked elegant, somehow, if a little dirty in the best possible way. There was something filthy sexy yet heartbreakingly innocent about the way she relaxed against their white jackets, her fair skin glowing faintly peach and pink, flushed with the aftermath of pleasure.
Wes had to shut his eyes against the image before his hands started to shake and he fumbled the condom. But shit, she was some
thing else. The way she moved under his mouth, all abandoned and unselfconscious. He hadn’t expected that. He didn’t know what he’d expected, exactly—maybe more commentary, something more clinical and critical. Whatever it was, he hadn’t been prepared for the way going down on her felt. It was like licking into an oyster, all liquid brine and satiny smooth against his lips.
Addictive.
And the satisfaction he got out of those amazing sounds she made when he fucked her with his tongue? Unreal. If his cock weren’t a bar of solid lust between his legs right now, Wes might be tempted to categorize what they’d already done as the best sex of his life, and call it a night.
His dick thumped a heavy throb of disapproval, and he palmed it casually, the press of his own hand soothing the ache momentarily.
“Got it,” he said, turning back to Rosemary with the foil-wrapped pack held up between two fingers.
She blinked up at him and smiled. It was a smile he hadn’t seen before, warm and wanting, but it looked good on her. Wes took a moment to savor it, but another pang of desire coiled at the base of his spine and he abruptly needed to be touching, like right fucking now.
“Hey,” he said, scooting closer and running his hands up her thighs and over her hips. Because he could. “Did you miss me?”
That got him a raised eyebrow. “You were gone approximately twelve point two seconds, Wes. I coped.”
He grinned. “You aren’t nearly fucked out enough, Doc, if you can still calculate time to the first decimal place.”
She licked her lips in an unconsciously sexy gesture that had Wes grabbing his dick again, this time with the intent of staving off imminent orgasm. “Maybe you should do something about that.”
In answer, Wes surged up her body and claimed her mouth. He thrust his tongue in, steady, strong strokes that mimicked what he wanted to be doing with his cock. Rosemary whimpered into the kiss, her body losing some of its lassitude and curling up against him, seeking more pressure, more touch, just more.
Without taking his mouth from hers, Wes fumbled the foil packet open and got the condom out and situated. He had to roll it down quickly to avoid overstimulating himself before he even got near her, but then it was on, and her legs were hooking around his hips and drawing him in, and before Wes knew it, he was gasping out a shocked breath and pressing the first inch of himself inside her.
Rosemary froze, her eyelids fluttering, and her hands clenched hard on his shoulders. Her thighs were rigid against his sides, and Wes gritted his teeth, forcing his body to a standstill. After a moment, though, the tight constriction around the sheathed head of his penis eased. Her thighs loosened and her eyes opened wide to stare up into Wes’s face. For once, he was the one who couldn’t read what she was thinking, but when her hands urged him closer and she bent her knees behind his ass to press his hips into hers, he at least knew what she wanted.
Careful now, Wes pushed his way in, doing his best to ignore the hot, clinging nirvana of her body in favor of watching the play of emotion across her face. He caught surprise, and heat, and impatience, and then more surprise mixed with pleasure when, about halfway in, he suddenly lost the battle with his body and surged the rest of the way in one swift stroke.
“Oh,” she cried, tilting her head back. “Oh, more of that.”
Wes agreed wholeheartedly, and his hips were way ahead of both of them, snapping forward and back in sharp thrusts that sent him deep. She gave so sweetly around him, her body in constant, welcoming motion as they surged together. The slick, sweaty slide of their hot, straining bodies pushed the jackets aside until his knees were on the cold laboratory floor. She arched away from the cold at her back and Wes hauled her up to straddle his lap, one hand under her pretty, round ass, working her against him. Dipping his head, he kissed her again, and that second point of intimate contact, the wet, hungry glide of her tongue against his as her internal muscles constricted mercilessly as she shattered for the second time in his arms—it all combined in a rush of pleasure and physical joy so great, Wes shouted as he came.
Chapter 10
Everything in Rosemary’s body felt wrung out and limp. She knew, intellectually, that she’d just experienced one of the most explosive internal upheavals the human body was designed to accommodate—but somehow she felt more drained than muscle contractions, increased blood flow, and postorgasmic levels of neurohormones in her brain could account for.
“You okay?” Wes asked, his voice shredded and raw. He was holding her gently now, his face pressed into the side of her neck, and Rosemary wrapped her arms around his head, feeling strangely protective.
“I’m wonderful,” she told him. “Everything about that experience surpassed my expectations.”
“Seriously? Wow, I was expecting an itemized critique of my performance, or something. A procedural checklist with items ticked off—stimulate clitoris, check. Provide oral pleasure, check. Last longer than a pathetic ten minutes—oh wait. Whoops! Not so much.”
“Are you saying it wasn’t good?” Rosemary demanded, amazed that there might be some objective measure of sexual intercourse that could give anyone the impression that what she and Wes had just done was less than amazing.
“No! That’s not what I’m saying at all.” Wes lifted his head to meet her stare. Positioned as they were, with Rosemary wrapped around him like a koala clinging to a tree, his move put their faces less than an inch apart. When he licked his lips, Rosemary could almost taste the echo of their last kiss.
Distracted, she said, “Then what did you mean?”
“Honestly?” He huffed out a laugh. “It was too good. I mean, I felt like a kid, out of control, everything taking me by surprise—I don’t know what it was about you, Doc, but you turned me into a fumbling virgin!”
Rosemary felt tension begin to seep back into her limbs. “I wasn’t aware that virginity was a contagious condition,” she said. “My apologies.”
Wes jerked back, eyes wide. “Wait. What? That was your first time?”
She nodded.
He stared. “As in, ever?”
Rosemary dropped her arms from his shoulders, uncomfortable and embarrassed. For the first time tonight, she wished she had a robe or something to cover up her naked body. “It’s not actually a disease,” she pointed out. “I was being sarcastic. For effect.”
“No, I know that,” Wes said, clutching at her arms as she attempted to extricate herself. “Hold on, let me—”
Holding on to the bottom of the condom, he pulled out of her carefully, the motion causing an unwelcome aftershock of pleasure. The tender, swollen nerve endings around her entrance burned a bit, but it was nothing compared to the sting of humiliation in her cheeks.
Wes’s hands were as gentle as if he were handling volatile chemicals when he laid her back against their ersatz blanket of tangled, discarded jackets before getting up to dispose of the condom in the trash can by the door. Rosemary took the opportunity to shrug on her lab coat as he turned back to her. She held it closed over her breasts and lifted her chin to meet his gaze calmly.
“Fuck,” he breathed, his mouth turning down into an unhappy curve. “This is coming out all wrong.”
“I think you’re being very clear,” Rosemary said, the chill from the floor leaching up into her bare thighs and making her shiver.
“I’m not, I promise you,” Wes said. He grabbed his jeans from the pile of clothing and pulled them up his lean hips, not bothering to faster them up properly. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m just so surprised. Why didn’t you tell me beforehand, Doc?”
She shrugged, wanting to get up and put her clothes back on but still embarrassingly uncertain if her legs would hold her. “It didn’t seem pertinent.”
He shook his head. “Not pertinent? Oh man. It was way pertinent. I would’ve done things completely differently.”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” Rosemary said, compelled to honesty.
“Your first time shouldn’t have been here, on the floo
r in a lab,” Wes said, gesticulating in a wide circle that encompassed her beloved refuge from the world outside. “It should’ve been in a bed, with the lights low and some kind of fruity music with violins, or something. There should’ve been champagne and chocolate truffles and …”
He broke off, glancing away, flags of color flying high on his cheekbones.
“And what?” Rosemary asked, her curiosity as insatiable as ever.
“And … it should’ve been with somebody wonderful, a great guy who’d take things slow and make it all safe and good.”
He looked down, his brown hair falling over his forehead in sweaty, disordered spikes and tufts that made her fingers itch to push it back, and something in the slump of his shoulders gave Rosemary a sudden insight into what might be going on.
She inched closer to him. “I had chocolate-dipped strawberries,” she reminded him. “And the security floodlights outside the window gave everything a very nice, muted glow. There was no music, but I’m not a big fan of classical stringed instruments, anyway. I prefer David Bowie.”
Ducking her head a bit, she peeked past his hair to catch the glimmer of a half smile quirking up one side of his mouth. “Yeah? Bowie, huh?”
“Yes,” she confirmed, scooting nearer until she could put her hand on his cheek and raise his head. Locking her gaze with his, she screwed up her courage to the sticking point and said, “I also prefer my lab to just about any bedroom I’ve ever occupied. And as for the last part—you described it perfectly.”
“What do you mean?” His eyes clouded, the hazel eyes troubled.
“Somebody wonderful,” she whispered. “A great guy who’d take things slow and make it all safe and good. That’s exactly what I had, Wes. I wouldn’t change a single variable. I’d be too terrified that might alter the outcome, and I like where I am right this very second too much to risk it.”
Something flashed across his face and Rosemary would’ve given a year’s worth of research to know what he was thinking.
“Me, too,” was all he said, and he followed it up with a kiss and an enfolding embrace that banished the chill from Rosemary’s bones.
Just One Taste Page 9