Finally, she grabbed two handfuls of shirt and pulled it free of his trousers and the last button gave. Then her hands were on his chest. Her hands and her mouth and the hot murmur of her breath as she said, “I’ve thought about touching you like this. All night.”
“I’ve been dreaming about it.” His hands combed through her hair, let the cool tresses play against his hot skin. “All week.”
“Really?”
Oh, yeah. And not just like this. He’d dreamed of those long, elegant fingers, that lush siren’s mouth, on him everywhere. “You have no idea.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Really?” he asked, echoing her question, her tone.
He felt her smile against his skin, felt it seep into his flesh and saturate his blood. “Did you only dream about me touching you?”
“Is that a hint?”
Her thumb grazed his nipple. “Was I too subtle?”
Alex laughed, low and lazy. He let his hands slide to her shoulders and down her back. Less than a minute ago he’d been too edgy to contemplate lazy or any laughter that wasn’t wound as tight as his impatience. But she’d surprised him again with her humor.
Surprised him with how easy she was to be with.
Dipping his thumbs under the hem of her shirt, he stroked the warm skin beneath. His fingers spanned her waist—beneath the silky drape of her shirt—and he started to walk her slowly backward, into the sitting room. “When I was waiting outside the restaurant, wondering if you’d show up—”
“I wouldn’t have sent you out there,” she cut him off, sharp and affronted, “and then stood you up!”
“Good to know.”
“I would have called.”
He stopped walking. Ducked down to look into her face. “You thought about doing that, didn’t you?”
“At least a dozen times,” she admitted. “Every time I tried to call Susannah. Every time I changed my clothes.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“So am I.”
The honesty in her words and her steady gaze settled rich and warm in his chest. He had to kiss her again, not with the unrestrained hunger of before but slow and deep and giving. He kissed her mouth and the strong line of her jaw and the little spot on her cheek. “I approve your final choice,” he said when he moved on to her ear. “In case you were wondering.”
“My final choice?”
Gathering the soft fabric of her shirt in his hands, he slowly pulled it up and off. “Of clothes. You said you changed a dozen times.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite that many, but close. I’m not used to thinking about what I’m wearing.”
“That’s okay.” Alex fingered the strap of her bra, let it slide down her arm then followed it with his mouth. His hands glided down her back and over her hips. “I’ll think about it for you.”
“You’re offering to act as my wardrobe consultant?” Her amused question ended on a breathy hitch when he gently bit the skin of her shoulder then laved it with his tongue.
“Sure.” Slowly, inexorably he bunched up the material of her skirt. “I’ll choose your clothes for you as long as I get to take them off.”
A smooth line, Alex thought, liking that he had his edginess, the wildness he loathed, back under control. Rewarding himself by drawing up her bunched skirt and letting his knuckles graze the backs of her thighs and the tight curve of her backside…the tight naked curve of her backside.
For a fleeting second his fingers fisted in the soft fabric of her skirt. He sucked in a quick breath through his teeth. Then he let that air—plus all the gathered folds of her skirt—go so he could cup those tight naked curves with his palms.
“A G-string,” he breathed.
“Is that the underwear you would have chosen, as my wardrobe consultant?”
In answer he drew her hard against his body. Stroked his hands over her warm, smooth skin and absorbed her shudder of response with a long, wet kiss. And when the lust dimmed to a dull roar and his brain cleared enough to distinguish his surroundings again, he resumed walking her toward the bedroom.
Before they made it to the bed, he managed to prize his hands from her body long enough to undo the waistband of her skirt. He took a half step back to watch it slither past her hips, to study those long, toned, runner’s legs, to imagine them locked around his hips, holding him deep inside her body. The pulse of sex started to beat through his blood, a hard hum of insistence that filled his senses, and then her hands were on his trousers, an exquisite torture of unbuttoning and unzipping, of touching but not touching nearly enough.
Their eyes met and shared a wordless message of heat and urgency and need. With swift hands and quick catches of breath, they shed the rest of their clothes and sank together to the turned-back bed, rolling in a heated slide of skin against skin, of passion-warmed bodies against the cool expanse of sheets. Again their eyes met and of an accord they slowed, steadied, stilled…until Alex turned them one more rotation and settled on his back.
For the moment he had Zara exactly where he wanted her. Stretched on top of him, her breasts grazed his chest with every breath, her legs tangled with his. She was all sleek curves and finely toned muscles, long and strong and perfect. Slowly he slid his hands over her back, adjusting the weight of her hips until she cradled his arousal between her thighs.
But what froze him in that instant wasn’t the fit of their bodies or the teasing lure of her moist heat. It was the intensity of her expression as she looked down at him.
The rush of empowerment, the sense that he’d waited forever to look into this woman’s eyes while she took him into her body, stalled the breath in Alex’s lungs and squeezed viselike in his chest.
For a second it was too much, a blinding flash of fear that he might give more than he wanted, and then she leaned down and kissed him and drove the beast away with the honeyed taste of her passion. He twisted his hands in her hair and held her there, bound to his mouth and slowly melting over his body, yielding to the thick, insistent heat between his legs.
Longing coiled strong and low in his gut. The desire to spread her wider and push inside. To claim her in the most primitive way, naked and unprotected. His hand traced the length of her spine, and she arched and stretched against the pressure, humming with pleasure into their kiss, against his lips, into his mouth.
Alex’s need flexed, stretched, pulsed. He palmed her hips and held her there, hot and wet against him, the worst and the best of tortures. Then with a low growl he rolled her onto her back. “You have no idea how much I want this.” All the primitive fire of his need blazed in his eyes and grazed the edges of his voice as he rocked slowly against her. “To forget myself. To forget to ask about protection.”
His words seemed to take a second to sink in, but then her eyes widened with understanding, alarm, dismay. Alex felt a jolt of remorse. He shouldn’t have admitted to that primitive temptation. Not after last weekend and all they’d talked about. Quickly he rolled away, over to the bedside table and the condoms he’d bought after leaving the gym. Just a meal he’d said, while he prepared for much more.
“I can’t believe I would forget.”
Frowning at the appalled note in her voice, Alex looked back over his shoulder. Her stricken expression caught hard in his chest. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. My mother taught me better. I always carry protection. Always.”
He came back to her, pressed a kiss to her mouth, another to the pucker of worry between her brows. “I didn’t forget. I’m sorry I sowed that doubt. It was unforgivable. I’ll always protect you, sweetheart.”
Something flickered in her eyes. Doubt? Skepticism? Whatever, he didn’t like it.
“Don’t you trust me? If that’s—”
“It’s not you,” she said quickly. Her gaze rested, dark and serious, on his. “Or maybe it is you. You make me forget my common sense.” She touched a hand to his mouth and her voice grew husky. “You make me forget…everything.”
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Her fingers skimmed his lips with silken heat, the sincerity of her words stirred much deeper, richer, hotter. Alex closed his eyes for a second, two, and then he trapped her fingers against his mouth. Opened both eyes and lips as he murmured, “Fade to black.”
“You’re dangerous,” she breathed as he licked across her fingertips. As her quiver of reaction echoed through his body.
“You must have me mixed up with someone else.” Eyes never leaving hers, he took her hand from his mouth. “I’m safe.” Drew it down his body to touch the part of him he’d made safe. “Steady. Dependable. Reliable.”
“Is that how you see yourself?”
“Yes.”
For a second she gazed at him speculatively, then her fingers slid down his shaft and her look turned hot, wicked, erotic. “I’ll give you safe.” Those teasing fingers wrapped around him and he jerked in response. “But not so steady.”
With her hand still on him, Alex’s snort of laughter sounded tight and broken. Not steady at all.
“I do believe you’re dependable and trustworthy.” Her eyes glazed with more than heat, she leaned into him and traced the grooves in his cheeks. With her fingers and then her tongue. “You’re hard. And dangerous. And beautiful.”
Completely undone by her words, by the sensual whisper of her mouth, Alex struggled to breathe. “That would be you,” he managed to say finally. “Beautiful.”
“Oh, I’m not beautiful. My sister’s beautiful.”
“You have a sister?”
“Half.” And there was a new tension in her eyes, a dark flash of self-castigation. “Can we not talk about my family?” She cradled him fully in her palm, squeezed gently, insistently. “Can we not talk, at all?”
At the moment Alex couldn’t imagine saying anything that wasn’t a groan or a plea for mercy. Later, he thought, as he kissed her and palmed her breasts and struggled to contain the swamping wave of desire. Later he would ask questions and inveigle the answers from her sweet mouth. Everything he wanted to know, everything that went on inside her mind, everything that made her strong and vulnerable and completely captivating.
Everything that made her so damn beautiful he ached.
For now he contented himself with learning her body. Everything that made her arch her back and stretch her legs in restless need. Everything that made her hum low in her throat and clutch his head between urgent fingers, holding him to her, enticing him to use tongue and lips more boldly until he lapped up the strong shuddering wave of her first climax.
And when he rose above her, hard and aching with the need to be inside, she met his eyes and slowly drew him into her wet velvet heat. As if she’d divined his need for slow, his craving for self-control, his fervent desire to keep a grasp on the sweat-slippery reins of restraint.
He curbed the incessant need to close his eyes and give himself up to the wild primal instincts of his blood. He needed to be that steady, solid, reliable man he’d created.
“Beautiful,” he breathed as she took him to the hilt, and then she squeezed some internal muscles and drove the air hissing from his lungs. Dizzy with lust, with need, with her, he struggled to hold himself still, to withdraw inch by inch, to not drive himself all the way in, again and again.
Slowly he pulled back, and she wrapped those amazing legs around him and held him there while she stroked his face and then licked at his mouth. Her taste was on his tongue, in his blood, wrapping him in a thick, sweet cloak. He kissed her throat, nuzzled his face in her shoulder and bit her earlobe as he moved with a slow rocking cadence while the pressure built in the back of his brain and in the tightly bound tension of his muscles.
Her hands slipped through his hair, caressed the long muscles of his back and then gripped his biceps as she arched up to meet a stronger thrust, changing the angle, driving him even deeper and crying out with her pleasure. That was it, that guttural cry of pleasure, that sound of complete abandon, the buck of her hips and the drag of her flesh against his.
“Let yourself go,” she murmured, her voice as thick and tight and hot as his body. “Now, Alex, please.”
Heat engulfed him. A blazing sensual storm he could no longer fight. He drove faster, harder, deeper until his breath exploded, fast and furious, as his climax came in a blinding explosion of pleasure that swallowed him whole. For a long while he remembered nothing, nothing but the frantic beat of hearts and the cooling sweat of bodies, and running beneath the harsh physical reality like a vein of pure gold lay the innate knowledge that he knew this woman.
That every broken relationship, every woman who hadn’t worked out was because he hadn’t met this one.
He knew he had to rouse himself, to dispose of the condom. Even through his languor he felt a fierce need to protect her as promised, to protect her during the dangerous afterward. But before he forced his utterly spent muscles into action, he buried his nose in her throat for a second and it came to him, clear and unbidden.
The unnamed element in her scent.
“Almonds.”
Zara recalled that one perplexing word muttered against her throat as she stood blinking at herself in his bathroom mirror the next morning. “Almonds,” she mouthed silently, shaking her head in bewilderment. What was that all about?
It was an easy something to focus on. One distinct, unthreatening word she’d picked from a thousand that fluttered through her early-morning brain. Not that she was trying to forget or to discount the hours spent in Alex Carlisle’s bed. As if she could do either. As if she would ever forget the way he’d loved her, so many times, so many ways.
The hand she lifted to touch a mark on her throat, another on her breast, trembled.
While her pragmatic self came awake knowing what she must do—get dressed, leave while he slept, acknowledge this as a one-night stand—an inner voice murmured that walking away would not be that easy.
Alex Carlisle made love as he did everything—slow, thorough, intense, with an underlying thread of ruthlessness. As if he couldn’t stop until he had bound her to him, body and soul. Her hand dropped from her breast and a shiver of reaction rippled through her over-sensitized skin.
Dangerous. Oh, yes. He was one very dangerous man, making her feel this sated, this different, this beautiful.
Shaking her head at that piece of silliness, she turned away from the mirror. For heaven’s sake, Zara, your nose is still big, your shoulders too wide, your face too long. The mole on your cheek is still a mole no matter how many times he calls it a beauty spot. A masterful mouth and a clever tongue and half a dozen orgasms do not change facts!
A wry smile curved her lips as she sorted through the items of clothing she’d scooped up from the floor in the near-darkness. Her favorite shirt, her best skirt, her only bra that wasn’t a racing-back sports model. And a pair of men’s boxer briefs with a designer monogram on the elastic waistband.
Damn.
Quickly she pulled on the rest of the clothing. If she found her underwear on her way out, well and good, but she couldn’t spend time searching. She didn’t want to wake him. She didn’t want to explain. She wanted to get home where she could indulge herself with a long shower, and then she would get dressed in her usual practical, comfortable clothes—with underwear—to face a big day of study.
Right. She inhaled a deep breath, opened the bathroom door, and let out a startled squeak. He stood just outside the door, waiting.
The dark shadow of morning beard, the bed-tousled hair, the broad naked chest made him look not quite civilized. Made her heart thump hard in her chest. So did the look in his eyes as they slowly trailed over her, head to foot. And the raspy edge to his morning voice as he said, “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“Sort of.”
He studied her for another second, something dark and primal in his eyes, then he closed the space between them, held her still with a hand cupping her neck and kissed her. Not briefly, not as long as last night’s marathon, but very thoroughly. By the time he finis
hed, her heart was racing and the bottom had dropped out of her stomach.
“You’re dressed.” He rubbed her nape and she curled into that caress like a cat.
Her response resembled a purr.
“Why?”
Frowning, Zara forced herself to straighten and pay attention. “Why…what?”
He curled a finger into the neckline of her shirt and tugged gently. “Why are you dressed?”
“I have to get to work.”
“Damn.”
And suddenly it was all right, this morning-after intimacy thing. The overwhelming urge to forget work and climb back into his bed was all right, too, since it was an urge he obviously shared. Since it was an urge she couldn’t give in to.
She sighed heavily. “Yeah.”
“Will you come back?” he asked. “After you finish work?”
How easy it would be to say yes. His hand dipped lower inside her neckline, tracing the slope of her breast, enticing her to accept that easy answer. Her nipples tightened, her heart skittered, but she lifted her eyes and met his gaze steadily. “I have a lot of studying to do. I intend spending the day at the library.”
“And after that?”
She moistened her lips. “Alex, I don’t think—”
“This wasn’t a one-night stand, Zara.”
“It was supposed to be just a meal,” she countered, not stepping down from the steely resolve in his eyes.
“Let’s just see what happens,” he said evenly. “I know study is your priority. I know you have your job and not much time.”
“No time for a relationship.”
Something flickered in his eyes, but before she had a chance to acknowledge the danger, he’d moved closer, cupping her face in his hands, easing her back into the bathroom until she’d backed up against the vanity.
“I’m not going to rush you. I’m not going to impinge on your time.” Very, very slowly, he trailed his mouth over her cheek, nuzzling her ear, turning her knees to jelly. He was not playing fair. “Let’s just see where this goes? No promises. No commitment. No tomorrow. Just now.”
Princes of the Outback Bundle Page 45