UNINHIBITED

by Candace Schuller

  He found it disconcerting to realize that he cared now, to be forced to acknowledge some deep, dark, primitive, heretofore unknown corner of his male psyche. It mattered to him to know that the luscious Miss Zoe Moon was a virgin, and he found that unnerving. He also found it unbearably exciting.

  He would be her first.

  It changed everything, of course. Oh, not his intention to take her to bed—nothing could change that, especially not now! But the way he'd been planning to go about it had undergone a swift revision. A civilized man didn't ravage a virgin. Even when the virgin in question was so obviously willing to participate in the process.

  "We might as well go into the den," Reed said as he escorted her through the front door of his silent Back Bay town house. "I'm going to need a drink in my hand while we discuss this."

  Zoe hitched the strap of her tapestry bag higher onto her shoulder and followed him across the marble floor of the elegant foyer, through a short hallway to the back of the house. She hovered uncertainly in the middle of the cozy, masculine room he'd led her to, watching silently as he crossed the wide square of colorful Turkish carpet that covered the center of the room to the elegant cherry-wood sideboard. Without pausing, or turning around, he picked up one of the heavy crystal decanters that decorated its polished surface. It was a measure of how much she'd rattled him that he didn't think to inquire as to whether she might like a drink, too.

  "I don't see what we need to discuss," she said, as he unstoppered the decanter and poured two fingers of dark amber liquid into a matching crystal highball glass. "Unless you've changed your mind about wanting to have sex with me?"

  "No, I haven't changed my mind."

  "Well, then…?"

  Reed tossed back half his drink before he answered. "Zoe, you're a virgin," he said, as if that explained it all.

  "Yes, I know." She stood with her head up, her chin fitted, her back ramrod straight … but the fingers of her right hand were sliding up and down the strap of her shoulder bag in a quick, nervous gesture. "What I don't know is why it seems to have turned you off."

  "Turned me off?" He tossed back the rest of his drink with a quick, almost savage gesture, then carefully set the empty glass on the sideboard before turning around to face her. "Not hardly. I'm more turned on now than I've ever been in my entire life."

  She could see, quite clearly, that he was telling the truth. The knowledge settled her nerves. A little.

  "Well, then…?" She dropped her purse onto the seat of a burgundy club chair and took a step toward him.

  "No." He held his hand up, palm out. "Stay right there. Give me a minute to think this through."

  "To think what through?"

  "Do you have any idea—any idea at all?—how I've imagined taking you? What I've imagined doing to you? Hell, what I've imagined you doing to me?"

  "Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea. You told me in the car on the way over here, remember? And a couple of times before that, too, if you'll recall. You were very—" she shivered slightly, remembering "—explicit."

  "I apologize for offending you."

  "Oh, please." She all but rolled her eyes. "Do I look offended?"

  "Well, if you're not," he said, stung by the raillery in her voice, "you certainly should be. It was inexcusably crude of me to say those things to you."

  "Why? Because I'm a virgin?" Amused exasperation had replaced any fingering trace of embarrassment. Who would have thought the urbane, oh-so-sophisticated Mr. Reed Sullivan IV had such antiquated ideas about women? "Would it make you feel better if I blushed and stammered? Or how about if I fainted? Would that fit in better with your idea of how a virgin should act?"

  "You did blush," he reminded her. "And you were stammering so much you could barely say 'condom.'"

  "That didn't have anything to do with me being a virgin," she informed him. "Lots of experienced women have trouble getting that word out." At least, according to the women's magazines she'd read, they did. "Mostly because they know men don't want to hear it."

  "So you're saying you're not the least bit nervous? Not the least bit scared or unsure about facing something you have no experience with?"

  "Well, of course I'm nervous. But I'm not scared." She paused for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts so she could say what she wanted to in exactly the right way. "Being a virgin doesn't mean I'm some terrified, ignorant little girl. I know what sex is and how it's done. I've been to R-rated movies. I've even been to a few X-rated ones. I've heard all the words before, too, including the four-letter ones you're too much of a gentleman to use. I've read the Joy of Sex and the Kamasutra and I even—now brace yourself," she warned, "because this might come as a shock to you—I know what an orgasm feels like. I can give myself one whenever I want. What I don't know is how it feels to have one with a man inside me."

  Reed groaned audibly and took a half step toward her. "Zoe—"

  "No." She held up the restraining hand this time. "Let me finish. I want to make sure we're perfectly clear on this before it goes any further."

  He halted in midstep and waited, his eyes riveted to her face, like a wolf who'd scented prey. Or a mate.

  She hesitated a moment, startled by the sheer, sensual force of his unwavering gaze. She'd never been the focus of so much sexual heat before, so much concentrated masculine energy, so much honest, unabashed, blatantly carnal hunger. It was a bit intimidating … and unbearably arousing … and strangely empowering.

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and lowered her chin, returning his stare from under a provocative, protective veil of auburn lashes. "That very first day we met in Moira's parlor I felt this incredible spark of instant attraction that was stronger than anything I'd ever felt before. I told myself it was just basic biology and that I should ignore it. I could tell you didn't approve of me and I was pretty sure I didn't approve of you, either. Which didn't really matter one way or the other, since it didn't look like we were going to do business together. And then we did do business and I told myself it was even more important to resist the feeling I had for you, no matter how strong it was, at least until we got things settled, one way or another. Well, things are settled, and I don't have to resist it anymore." She lifted her lashes and met his gaze head-on. "I don't want to resist it anymore."

  She began to move toward him, gait slow and measured, chin up, eyes steady and unflinching, her usual sassy bravado replaced by something both more honest and more artful. She was a woman dead set on seduction. His. And her own.

  "I've finally come to a place in my life where I want the entire sexual experience. I want to know what it feels like to be touched by a man. Everywhere. I want to know what it feels like to have a man on top of me. Inside me." She was standing right in front of him now, her head tilted back to keep her gaze locked on his, her breasts almost, but not quite, brushing his chest. The look in her eyes was soft and sweet and as hot as the flames of a gypsy campfire. "I want the man who shows me what it feels like to be you."

  He stood stock-still for a long breathless moment, his fists clenched at his sides, the muscle in his jaw twitching, his heart hammering frantically against the wall of his chest. The wolf inside snapped and lunged against the tight leash of Reed's rapidly waning control. She was every man's fantasy as she stood there gazing up at him: a wanton innocent, a passionate virgin, an eager, inexperienced voluptuary. And she wanted him.

  She'd just said so in perfectly clear words that had him as hard as the wrought-iron poker by the fireplace. He'd never felt so ready before. So turned on. So incredibly needy. He wanted to reach out and ravage … devour … possess. And he wanted to do it over and over again with innumerable inventive variations, fueled by two weeks of lurid fantasies

  Which was all the more reason for him to take it slow, to proceed with the care and caution she didn't seem to realize she needed. By her own admission, what she was feeling now was something she'd never felt before. One of them had to treat her innocence with the re
spect and reverence it deserved.

  Even if it killed him.

  "Would you like to go out for something to eat?" he asked, desperate to find a way to slow things down before his grip on gentility slipped any further and he committed an unforgivable, ungentlemanly outrage on her untried body. "There's a charming little French bistro less than three blocks from here. We could walk it, if you'd like." A walk would cool him off. Maybe. "You barely ate anything at Gran's."

  "No, thank you." Zoe smiled, enthralled by the look in his eyes. No one had ever looked at her in quite that way before. All heat and longing, mixed with a sort of befuddled consternation and a fierce, dogged determination that was somehow very sexy. "I'm not hungry—"

  "Would you like a glass of champagne? You only sipped at the one—"

  "Let's save it for later," she said, and lifted a hand to touch her fingertips to the hard curve of his jaw. "After."

  Reed bit back a ragged groan and shoved his balled fists into the pockets of his trousers to keep from dragging her down onto the patterned Turkish carpet beneath their feet. The knuckles of his right hand brushed the smooth round globe of the Indian lutz he kept in his pocket. Inspiration struck.

  "Are you still willing to play for the peppermint swirl?"

  Zoe blinked. "Am I what?"

  "The peppermint swirl with the six pink bands." He pulled his lucky marble out of his pocket and held it up between them. "I'll play you for it."

  "Play me for it…?" She blinked again, forcing her eyes to focus on the shiny black-and-gold sphere he held an inch in front of her nose. "That's a marble."

  "Yes." He nodded. "An Indian lutz."

  "Are you telling me you want to play marbles? Now?" Her eyes widened in confusion. And doubt. Had he changed his mind? Had something about her—her virginity? her unconventionality? her boldness?—made him decide he didn't want her, after all? She dropped her hand and took a hesitant half step back, shifting her gaze from his, looking down and away. If he didn't want her, then he didn't want her, and she had to get out of there. Now. Fast. She had to—

  There, before her eyes, bulging against the front of his tailored charcoal gray trousers, was unmistakable proof that he did, indeed, want her.

  Startled, uncertain, confused, she lifted her gaze to his face again.

  Reed Sullivan IV blushed like a schoolboy.

  And she was suddenly, absolutely certain that whatever his reasons for backing off, it wasn't because he didn't want her.

  "All right," she said. "If you want to play marbles, we'll play marbles."

  She turned away from him and moved across the room to the purse she'd dropped in the leather club chair. "I've been carrying this around with me since that day in my apartment when your secretary went into labor." She drew out a tiny blue velvet drawstring bag and opened it, dumping the glittering peppermint swirl out into her palm. "I meant to give it to you as a gift as soon as we finished the business with New Moon, whether we struck a deal or not. But I guess we can still play for it, if that's what you'd rather do." She gestured at the tilted, glass-topped cases displayed in one section of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases on either side of the fireplace. "Do you have any marbles besides those? Ones we can actually play with without worrying about a chip reducing their value?"

  Suppressing a rueful sigh at the success of his strategy, he turned and lifted a colorful tin box off one of the shelves, flipped open the lid and presented it to her. "I played with these when I was a boy. Take your pick. We can use the edge of the rug as a lag line."

  Zoe shook her head. "If we're going to play, let's play."

  He arched an eyebrow at her. "Ringer," she said, the glint of challenge in her eyes.

  Ringer was a tournament game, the tournament game, played every year at the National Marbles Tournament in Wildwood, New Jersey. It was a cutthroat, winner-take-all game that demanded a great deal of skill and concentration. As good as batting averages for taking a man's mind off of … other things. Especially when it had been fifteen or twenty years since he'd played the game.

  "Same terms as last time," he said. "If you win, I take the peppermint swirl as a gift. If I win, I buy it from you for four hundred dollars. Agreed?"

  Zoe nodded. "Agreed."

  Hitching up the pant legs of his elegant charcoal-gray suit, Reed dropped to one knee and rolled back the Turkish carpet. He carefully laid out target marbles in the regulation cross pattern and surrounded them with a six-foot circle made of string. Officially, the rules called for the circle to be ten feet in diameter, but a smaller one was allowed if space was limited.

  Zoe waited until he'd won the lag and was down on both knees, the knuckles of his shooting hand to the floor, preparing to take his first shot, before she elaborated on the rules of their particular game.

  "Strip Ringer," she said, just as he sent his shooter into the circle.

  It slammed into the target marbles, sending them rolling and bouncing across the hardwood floor. When everything stopped moving, he lifted his head and eyed her across the playing circle. "Strip Ringer?"

  "Don't worry. It's easy. There are only two additional rules," she informed him, making them up as she went along. "Every time you lose a turn, you have to take off an item of clothing."

  The position of his shooter—outside the ring—had cost him a turn.

  Reed made no move to take off any of his clothing. "And the second rule?"

  "For every target marble you manage to get outside the ring, your opponent takes off an item of clothing."

  There were four target marbles outside the ring. Reed eyed them longingly, practically licking his lips as he imagined exactly which items of clothing she might remove in forfeit, trying very hard to remember why it was so important that they take things slow. He recalled, vaguely, that he meant to be a gentleman about this. Meant to pay the proper homage to her innocence. Meant to—

  One of her boots landed on the floor by his knee.

  His stupefied gaze shifted from the marbles, to the discarded boot, to her face.

  She flashed him a glance from under her lashes, half cheeky-street-urchin, half hot-eyed-gypsy, all seductive-feminine-challenge. "One."

  "Ah … Zoe, wait a minute now. I really don't think—"

  She togged off the second boot and tossed it across the circle to collide with the first. "Two."

  "This isn't…" He cleared this throat and tried again. "This isn't a good idea, Zoe."

  She hitched up one side of her long paisley skirt and rolled her lace-topped, thigh-high stocking down her leg. Black gossamer drifted slowly to the floor. "Three."

  "I'm trying to be a gentleman here," he pleaded desperately, his veneer of civilization starting to crack.

  He knew he should stop her from going any further. There were really good reasons why he should stop her. And he would. In a minute. Just as soon as she took off that other stocking so he could see if she was wearing her gold toe ring.

  But instead of rolling down the other stocking, she reached up and behind her, pulled the velvet scrunchie out of her hair and shook her mass of curls free. They cascaded over her shoulders and down across the front of her gold sweater, as bright as fire, as soft as a cloud. "Four."

  Reed sighed like a lovesick schoolboy, half in crushing disappointment that she still wore the one stocking, half in heartfelt relief that she hadn't tested his wavering resolve by taking it off. Yet.

  Zoe sent him a slow, bewitching smile. "Your turn," she murmured, putting everything she had into it, hoping it would be enough. If it wasn't, if he still put her off, she would die of acute and total embarrassment.

  There followed five long seconds of tortured, tense, expectant silence while both of them wondered what was going to happen next.

  And then Reed groaned and yanked his tie off so fast he nearly choked himself.

  On her first shot, he lost his shoes and one sock.

  She gave up her second stocking, revealing both the toe ring and a delicate gold ankle bracele
t adorned with a trio of dangling crescent moons.

  He discarded his remaining sock, his suit jacket and his trim-fitting vest.

  She shimmied out of a silky, black, lace-edged half-slip, sliding it off from under her skirt without revealing more than a teasing flash of slender, well-toned thigh.

  He whipped his belt out of the loops of his slacks and tossed it over his shoulder as if it were a live snake.

  She surrendered both of the golden hoops in her ears, and the trio of glittery rings on her right hand.

  He added a pair of discreet gold-and-ebony cuff links to the pot.

  She removed her bra, reaching up under the cover of her loose chenille sweater to unclasp it, wriggling a bit as she maneuvered the straps off her shoulders, smiling a secret, female smile as she slid it, magicianlike, through the length of her sleeve and dropped it on the floor.

  Reed stared, transfixed, at the scrap of purple satin and black lace lying on the hardwood floor among the scattered marbles and other bits of clothing, fantasizing about the twin mounds of magnificent female flesh still hidden, but gloriously unrestrained now, beneath the nubby fabric of her sweater. He wondered if her underpants matched her bra … imagined her wearing them and nothing else … imagined her not wearing them … and missed his next shot by a mile. He gave up his custom-made, white cotton dress shirt as forfeit.

  Like Clark Gable in the movie that sent T-shirt sales plummeting back in the mid-thirties, he wore nothing beneath it but skin. And muscles. Smooth, rounded deltoids, swelling, apple-hard biceps, well-developed pectorals covered with dark crinkling hair; a washboard abdomen.

  Zoe caught her breath and lost her grip on her shooter. It clinked noisily as it hit the hardwood floor and then rolled backward, toward her knees and away from the circle. It didn't even occur to her to call a do-over. Instead, she sank down on her bottom, leaned back on her hands and extended her right leg—the one still adorned with both the toe ring and the ankle bracelet—across the shooting circle. "Take whatever you want," she invited huskily.