Being this hard made him feel burly and unwieldy to his own hand, but all that really mattered was how he felt to her. Her body responded to the sensation of being filled. Part of that, he suspected, was mental. She got off on the challenge of it, and the primitive emotional comfort of feeling replete. But she also got off on the physical aspects of penetration. Bottom line? She liked having something inside her. His tongue, his fingers, his dick—they all worked for her as far as he could tell—and before they parted ways he’d make sure something portable worked for her, too, so she could…what? See to her needs, and not give some other lucky bastard the opportunity to please her?
That depressing notion ambushed him from a hiding place in the back of his mind. A no-win zone he’d warned himself to stay clear of, but now that he was in there, the unwanted thoughts piled on.
Because there will be some other lucky bastard. You know that. She’s moving on. Hell, she has a date this Saturday with Dr. Nicholas Bancroft.
You need to call Evelyn and cancel. You should have done it yesterday. Why are you waiting?
A little moan brought him back to the fact that he had her under him, holding her legs in the air like her life depended on it, relying on him to keep his head in the game and make sure they both scored. He shook off the unwanted thoughts. He was supposed to be showing her how to push stress aside and enjoy the moment, not wallowing in ill-timed and pointless self-examination.
Enjoy the moment. Enjoy the fucking moment and make sure she enjoys it, too.
He could do this. He specialized in enjoyable moments. Still holding the base of his shaft, he leaned over her and planted a hand by her hip. The move sent his balls swinging. He gritted his teeth and concentrated on the czarina’s stomach. It fluttered from the effort of keeping her legs suspended and then hollowed as she inhaled. Her hands settled on his thighs. His muscles bunched in reaction, giving her a solid place to hold on. He took a deep breath as well and then looked down their bodies and angled his cock toward her mouth. She raised her head a fraction and opened wider.
“Uh-uh. Just your lips. I want a minute with just your lips.” When she lowered her head and resumed her waiting position, he rewarded her patience by rolling the crown over her lips. Back and forth, lubricating them with her saliva and his precome, until his head glided easily. Her tongue sneaked out to join the party, which brutalized him as much as he’d imagined it would, but he didn’t scold her for what amounted to an instinctive response. Her somatosensory cortex was lighting up like crazy right now, processing the messages from the millions of sensory receptors in her lips and demanding more data. She pursed her lips, capturing his head and taking him in until she sealed her mouth around the flare.
He indulged in a couple shallow thrusts while lights exploded behind his eyes. “Christ, I could lose myself right here. Another day, another time, I’ll let you play those lips on me forever, but right now I have to go deeper. Are you ready?”
Her response was to lift her head while simultaneously dragging her hand down the back of his balls, nudging him on.
Jaw clenched, he guided himself in, sinking slowly into the warm, soft haven of her mouth. Muffled sounds—little gasps and moans—accompanied his intrusion. Manners dictated he wait for her to do whatever adjusting she needed to do to accommodate him, but her busy tongue explored at will, and she continued fondling his balls. Stroking, squeezing, driving him out of his mind. When he was in deep enough to feel the narrowing at the back of her throat, her tongue and hand stilled. “Good?”
Her hand fanned over his ass cheek, and she gave a small nod, which told him she could take more. He unwrapped his hand from his cock and let her cradle the weight of him in her mouth. “I told you, with me you’d take more, remember?” Full. He wanted her fuller than she’d ever been before. Fuller than she thought possible.
Both hands returned to his legs. Braced. Ready. Game for more. He could fall in love with this woman. He flexed his hips and pushed in a little deeper, until the tip of his cock nudged her soft palate. His vision blurred as her lips tightened and her throat worked. Fingers dug into his thighs. Seconds later a sigh of surrender came from somewhere in that crowded throat.
On all fours, his dick in her mouth, acutely aware of the short bursts of breath from her nose blowing over the back of his shaft. Life couldn’t get much better—for him. He lifted his head and focused on her legs, still crossed, still in the air. “You’re working so hard for it, aren’t you?” He leaned forward to kiss the closest knee, which pulled his cock out of her mouth a bit and gave her a measure of respite. He’d give her a measure more. “Okay, Czarina, lower your legs.”
She did so, slowly. Her breath came in rough pants, expulsions of air that emptied her lungs and ended in tiny whimpers. He pressed his forehead to her knees and tried to block out the incidental pleasure of her lips sliding along his shaft as he moved, and the delicate forays of her tongue. “Open them up, princess. Open wide. Show me where it hurts.”
A cry of relief, or agony, or a mixture of both, accompanied the careful uncrossing of her legs. Then she slowly splayed her thighs. Exposing herself to the heavy air provoked another broken cry. He kissed one trembling thigh. Then the other. Then he lowered himself onto his forearms and brought his mouth down until he hovered mere inches from her. “Are you ready?”
In answer, she slapped his ass. Not a restrained slap, either, like the kind he’d given her. More of a “Fuck me now, motherfucker, or I’m going to hurt you” slap. Imperious to the end. Fun and games were over. Arden St. Sebastian was ready to come. He couldn’t help but smile.
“Careful, Czarina. Don’t dish out anything you can’t take.” Then he lowered his head, closed his lips around her clit, and sucked it into his mouth as hard and deep as possible. No introductory flicks of his tongue. No gentle kisses. He was too desperate, and he could taste her orgasm rising higher with every pull of his lips, and…oh shit…she did the same. It dragged him dangerously close to the edge. He’d counted on her forgetting about him, or anything else for that matter, the moment he went to work on her needy clit. The fact that she hadn’t created a very real possibility of him coming first.
That couldn’t happen. He wanted to be certain she came, which meant she came first. He pushed her thigh to the ground and held it there while he gave her clit the same treatment he’d given everything else in the vicinity. Her body tensed. She reared up, and the thigh trapped under his hand fluttered. Just as that first long spasm shattered, he lost his own battle. The next thing he knew he was thrusting with abandon, coming without restraint while her eager mouth drained him, and one thought repeated like an echo in his head.
Not enough. It’s not enough. Two more days with her isn’t nearly enough.
Chapter Ten
He was stealing time. There was no other excuse for this detour to the janky little roadside marketplace. Today’s sexual adventures had been delivered—with spectacular results, if he did say so himself—effectively fulfilling his purpose in her life for the next twenty-four hours. She didn’t need him to play tour guide. He knew it. She knew it. But she was going along. More than going along, actually. When they’d passed a sign for the marketplace, and he’d followed the rogue impulse to suggest a pit stop for shaved ice, she’d nodded immediately, and he hadn’t missed the happy gleam in her eye. She’d glowed like a little girl offered a favorite treat.
She was still glowing, he noted, as they walked along the souvenir stalls full of T-shirts, jewelry, and local art. Heads turned when they strolled by, and attention—particularly male attention—lingered on the leggy brunette in the red bikini top, little low-riding cutoffs, and flip-flops. Maui boasted plenty of beautiful bodies in barely-there attire, but the czarina dazzled for other reasons. Reasons like her undisguised enthusiasm for rainbow-drizzled shaved ice, hand-carved sea turtles, aloha-wear, and whatever treasure might be found in the next stall…or the next. He couldn’t blame them for looking, but he slung a proprietary arm around he
r shoulder to send the back-off message to any comers.
She switched her shopping bags to her other hand and snuggled into him for a moment. Then stole a bite of his pineapple ice. She repaid him with a wink before something in the next trinket shack caught her eye.
“My brother’s fiancé would look amazing in that sarong,” she said as she slid out from under his arm and headed over. At the stall, she turned to run her hand along the panels of fabric hung at eye level. He watched her for a moment, frowning when he noticed a red patch of skin high up on the inside of her thigh. A staggeringly strong surge of lust immediately followed, threatening to drop him to his knees. More whisker burn. A souvenir of his undisguised enthusiasm earlier today when he’d been down there doing his level best to flay a climax from her before she annihilated him. What would she think if she knew how badly his tongue itched to lick the raw spot…all her raw spots…for no other purpose than the pleasure of tasting her, enjoying her without a particular strategy or endgame in mind? As if he had all the time in the world to spend on her body, instead of only two more days?
What would she think if she knew he wanted to break the boundaries away and see where things went?
Shit. He tipped his head and tapped the dregs of his flavored ice into his mouth, swallowing quickly to ease his dry throat. It didn’t help much. Oblivious to his efforts to get a lock on his reckless thoughts, the czarina placed her shopping bags on the ground by her feet so she had both hands free to unfold the sarong, and then draped it around her while she chatted with the vendor. Speaking of reckless. He tossed the soggy paper cone in the trash before wandering over to pick up the bags. No petty thieves in Siberia, apparently.
She tossed him a smile of thanks before handing the sarong and a couple twenties to the sturdy, middle-aged woman behind the counter. The woman bagged the sarong and handed it, plus the change, to the czarina with a nod and a mahalo.
“You’re good at this,” he said, and added the bag to the collection he held.
Her laugh carried on the breeze. “Have I made you sorry we stopped yet?”
“No.” Never. He took her hand. “Shop as long as you want. I’ve got all day.” And all night.
Her smile turned slightly self-conscious, but she steered them to another stall. “It’s a little hobby of mine. Most of the men in my life refuse to go near a retail establishment with me. Oh wow”—she stopped short at a kiosk full of tie-dyed clothes, incense burners, and a wide assortment of pipes and bongs, and ran a finger over something on the counter—“I used to have one of these.”
“Another little hobby I didn’t know about?” He teased her, even though he could see she was touching one of the many charm-studded chains spread out on a black scarf.
The comment earned him a playful elbow to the stomach. “I bought this exact thing the last time I was in Maui, and then I lost it. That was…geez…a long time ago.”
He leaned closer to examine the silver chain crowded with small charms. A hula girl dangled from one link, a pineapple, a seashell, a heart, an assortment of colorful enameled fish, and a whole lot of leaves. Pot leaves. He couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You bought a Maui wowie bracelet last time you were here?”
She laughed, too. “Worse. It’s not a bracelet. I bought a Maui wowie anklet the last time I was here. In my defense, I was such a dumbass I didn’t even know what I was proposing to decorate myself with. I was, like, twelve, and my little twelve-year-old brain thought an anklet was hip and racy. I wore it nonstop the rest of the time I was here.” She laughed again. “I actually got teary-eyed when I returned home and realized it was gone.”
He looked at the diamonds in her ears. Arden St. Sebastian owned far more precious sparkles than a twenty-dollar bauble available from any number of souvenir vendors worldwide, but the idea of a young Arden brokenhearted at the loss of the special piece that had captured her fancy hit him like a blow to the underbelly. “How’d you lose it?”
She blinked at him, and he lost himself in the clear turquoise depths of her eyes. “I have no idea. My mom probably trashed the stupid thing as soon as she saw it, and I can’t really blame her, but”—she sighed and ran her finger over the chain again—“I was totally charmed.”
“Ha.”
“I’ll be here all week.”
Yeah, but “all week” for them ended in two days. She returned his stare for a long, drawn-out moment, possibly thinking the same thing. Or waiting for him to say something? “Czarina, I—”
“Oh. My. God.” Her gaze flickered away before he could get out the words.
Attention locked on something over his shoulder, she moved past him. He turned to find her closing in on a waist-high chunk of koa carved into a tiki figure.
He followed. “Goddess, I think.”
“Goddess Pele,” the young guy manning the stall supplied helpfully. “Carved here on the island by a master artisan from solid Acacia koa harvested before the turn of the century.”
“I have Kamapuaa on my hearth at home, just sitting there all lonely and ugly.” She ran a reverent hand over the large spiky crown arching over the figure’s head. “I found him at a gallery in Paris, of all places. I’ve been looking for his perfect mate ever since.”
The thing had to weigh a hundred pounds. “Czarina, a four-foot tiki won’t fit in your luggage.”
“We ship,” the clerk interjected, clearly prepared.
“Do you take Visa?” she asked, also clearly prepared.
“All major credit cards. Follow me, please.” He gestured to the counter. “I’ll ring you up and take your shipping information.”
She looked back at him. “Do you mind? If you need to get back, I can—”
“Take your time. I’m going to grab a gift. I’ll find you when I’m done.”
Once she turned away to follow the clerk, he backtracked to the stand with the anklet. He hadn’t bought jewelry for a woman in a long time, but when he saw the Engraving While You Wait sign above the kiosk, that sealed it for him.
The kid lounging on a stool behind the counter looked like he’d made good use of some of the merchandise, but he stood and smiled broadly when Nick approached. “Help you, brah?”
“Yeah.” He picked up the anklet and flipped the biggest of the charms. Still pretty small, but the back of the heart offered a broad, flat surface. “Is the engraver here?”
Another broad smile. “You’re looking at him.” He pointed to a small caddy containing notepaper and a few stubby pencils. “Write it down and I’ll price it out for you.”
Nick took a slip of paper, a pencil, and wrote out the letters as carefully as he’d write a chart instruction. Legibility counted. When he finished, he turned the slip of paper toward the clerk. “Can you engrave this right here?” He tapped the heart.
“No problem.”
In under ten minutes the clerk showed him the results. “This okay?”
Nick checked it and reached for his wallet. “You’re an artist, man.”
The guy accepted cash from Nick, then placed the anklet in a Baggie and handed it over with a laid-back shrug. “Hope she likes it, brah.”
…
Spend the night. That’s all she had to say. Just look over at him and say, “Want to spend the night?”
Bad idea.
Why? She wanted him to spend the night. No shame in admitting it. She wanted more of his tireless and oh-so-talented body.
You want to spend more time with him.
Bingo. The end of their arrangement loomed in just two days. Two short days to get her fill, and she was very worried she wouldn’t be able to do it.
This thing doesn’t include sleepovers. The hotel is right there, but he always takes you out. Don’t you think there’s a reason for that? A boundary.
Scenery zipped by her passenger window, mocking her indecision on such a simple question. They were almost back to the resort, and she was still second-guessing herself. Ask? Don’t ask? Maybe tomorrow night would be better?
&n
bsp; Needing a break from mentally chasing her own tail, she pulled her phone out of her bag and powered it up. And immediately regretted it. Amid texts from a supplier, a designer, and a photo of a bridesmaid’s dress from Chelsea with a caption containing a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down, and a question mark, were a voicemail from her mother and four messages from her father.
She swiped the first text from Luc. The screen opened to a series of text bubbles.
Your brother tells me you need breathing room. I’m arriving tomorrow. We can discuss.
Her stress level spiked. And then spiked again as she read the next bubble.
Also, we’re having dinner with the Templetons at 9 p.m. Possible co-venture in the Bahamas. More common ground with the nephew.
Luc-speak for, “Here’s your chance to do something strategic in your personal life.”
After dinner, I want to review your vision for my hotel. I have some ideas.
The next message had come in two hours later.
Tell your mother she needs to sign off on the tax forms I sent her before the end of the month.
And then, forty minutes ago,
Where are you? Call me.
Her palms started to sweat. Four little texts announced one hard fact in no uncertain terms. Her escape from real life was definitely coming to an end. Soon. Her father’s imminent arrival already encroached. Vacation over.
Not yet. Not quite yet. The question was, did she want to squeeze as much fun as possible into the time she had left, or not?
If fun was all she wanted, inviting the man to spend the night might not be such a bad idea. But that’s not all there was to it. She wanted to curl up with him in the dark and talk, drift off to sleep with her cheek on his chest and the sound of his heartbeat as her lullaby. She wanted to wake up in his arms.
Compromised in Paradise Page 12