Nerves threatened to overwhelm her. For a wild moment she wondered how she had managed to end up lying in his bed, his naked body hot and demanding against hers, her own body tingling, perspiring, aching to have the flimsy dress off her—because even the slightest bit of material felt like an iron barrier between them that had to be removed.
This wasn’t her. Yet, in a way, nothing had ever felt so natural. Her heart was beating like a sledgehammer as she curved onto her side so that they were facing one another, and she marvelled at the depth of his eyes, the shades of navy that flecked the black.
‘You were telling me how impressed you are with my body...’ he murmured, pushing her hair back and planting a trail of delicate kisses on her face. He wanted to hear her say it, which was a feeling he’d never experienced before.
‘Was I?’
‘I do work out, as a matter of fact.’
‘When? I thought you lived at the office?’
‘I work hard, but I play hard as well... I like to think that that’s what makes for a balanced life.’
Kate knew what he meant by playing hard. It wasn’t trips to the gym twice a week. It was sex. No-strings sex. With beautiful women who didn’t make demands because the second a demand was made their time was up.
The operative word was play.
It occurred to her that his sudden attack of desire for her had only surfaced when he had seen her out of her work uniform—when he had seen her dressed to kill and showing off her assets. As her mother had. He had gone for the body, and how many times had she told herself that she would never be—could never be—attracted to any man who wasn’t interested in her for who she was.
So much for being able to rely on her brain to tell her what to do...
She wanted this man. She couldn’t think past the heat sizzling through her veins, making her feel treacherously alive for the first time in her life.
‘Why me?’ she whispered.
Alessandro drew back to look at her. Up close, she was even more stunning. Her face was dewy, satiny smooth, her lips full, her eyes the purest green he had ever seen.
But he wasn’t lying in this bed, his body on fire, because of the way she looked. The world—especially his world—was full of stunning women. After a while they simply merged into one. No, he was here because she was...different.
And because she had witnessed him in a rare moment of confusion—when he had had all his preconceived notions about George Cape thrown over, when he had had to think on his feet and behave in a way that hadn’t been predicted by his assumptions.
Vulnerable.
He hated the word, but there it was. She had seen him strangely vulnerable.
Had that created some sort of weird bond between them? It was a thought he didn’t bother to follow through to a conclusion because it made no difference. The reality was that he was here, she was here and they were going to make love.
‘These things happen,’ he murmured. ‘Who knows what generates physical attraction? You have skin like a peach... Stop talking. There are better ways for us to expend energy.’
He ran his hand along her thigh, under the dress, along her waist. He was almost nervous, and that shook him a little.
Against her, Kate could feel the hardness of his erection, massive, stirring as he touched her. She reached down and held it and had another near-fainting moment.
‘I’m not...experienced...like those women you go out with. I just thought I should warn you...’
‘Okay. Warning duly noted. Now, I want you to get out of that dress. It’s a nice dress, but I’d rather see it on the floor...’
She hitched her hands under the hem, ready to wriggle it over her head, but he stopped her.
‘Not so fast...’
‘What do you mean?’
Alessandro propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with a little half smile that did all sorts of things to her already escalating levels of heat. Spontaneous combustion might very well be on the cards.
This was lust. This was what women went on about when they whined that they just couldn’t help themselves. Kate had never had any sympathy at all for women like that. As far as she was concerned there was never any not being able to help yourself when it came to men and sex. You could always help yourself. She was a prime example of that and it was called self-restraint. Easy.
Except right now, if someone had told her to walk away from the man staring at her with eyes that could start a forest fire, she wouldn’t have been able to move a limb.
‘Time for you to do a striptease...’ He lay back on the bed, hands folded behind his head, and looked at her. ‘Fair’s fair, after all.’
‘I’ve never done a striptease before in my life.’
Nor had she ever wanted to! In fact, on a scale of one to ten of activities she would have avoided at all costs, performing a striptease was off the scale completely.
Just thinking about it now brought her out in a cold sweat, and yet underneath there was a dark stirring of excitement when she imagined those dark, dark eyes focused on her, enjoying her...
Did that make her weak...like her mother? Helpless in the company of an attractive man? Unable to obey what her head was telling her? Ruled by responses over which she had no control?
No. Kate knew that with gut instinct. It didn’t. But she had the scariest feeling that she was letting go of the old Kate...although she had no idea where that notion came from. Or where the old Kate was going and whether she would be returning any time soon.
‘You don’t have to if it makes you feel uncomfortable,’ Alessandro said, in a tone of voice that made her realize he could see from the expression on her face exactly what she had been thinking.
‘Why would it make me feel uncomfortable?’
‘Tell me something,’ he said, watching as she hovered, half-sitting, poised between climbing out of her box and hanging on in there for dear life. ‘When you made love in the past, was it always in the dark?’
Kate blushed—which was an answer in itself.
He reached out and lazily stroked the side of her arm. ‘Have you never wanted to see what you were doing?’
‘I’ve slept with a guy precisely four times,’ she confessed in a harried rush. ‘We never... I never... I suppose if things had worked out...’
No. Even if she and Sam had not ended up crashing and burning, she still wouldn’t have become the wanton hussy she was now capable of being. Given the right guy. Or rather the wrong guy—the utterly, utterly wrong and inappropriate guy. She would have still insisted on having the lights out when she got undressed, because he had not induced these crazy feelings of uncontrollable yearning in her.
She slithered off the bed and stood just where Alessandro had previously stood. His discarded clothes were right there on the floor by her feet. Very slowly, and with a lack of self-consciousness that amazed her, considering she should be ravaged by it, she drew the slip of a dress over her head and tossed it on the ground, where it joined his clothes.
Then she reached behind her and unclasped her bra.
Alessandro touched himself. His breathing faltered. She was slender, but not skinny, and her breasts were generous, barely contained within the flimsy bra. Her nipples were large, pink, begging to be sucked. Just thinking about it made the breath hitch in his throat even more.
She stepped out of her underwear and then drew herself up proudly, all woman, curves in all the right places, the downy patch between her thighs proclaiming her as one of the few who didn’t think it necessary to depilate every square inch of her body.
Alessandro had never been so turned on in his entire life.
As if suddenly remembering that she should be quivering with embarrassment she lowered her eyes and blushed madly, before making a dive for the safety of the bed. But he stopped her in her tracks by placing one big hand on her stomach.
‘Your feet still look tender,’ he murmured, gazing at her plastered heels and arches.
Blistered
feet should do something to get his raging libido a little under control—but actually, as he stared down, all he could see were her extremely shapely ankles, and all he could smell was the heady, musky perfume from between her legs.
He groaned and curved both hands to cup her bottom, tugging her gently towards him.
Kate had forgotten about the sore feet that were the reason she was in this bedroom in the first place. They were consigned to oblivion now, as she took those tentative steps into...the unknown...
‘I...I can’t...’ She managed to articulate those strangulated words while, of their own accord, her fingers curled into his hair.
She gasped when he parted those soft folds, and gasped again as his tongue flicked against the wet, sensitized flesh, and then she stopped gasping and drew in her breath, holding it as that exploring tongue began to explore some more.
It was exquisite. She was transported to another dimension. And she parted her legs, accommodating that questing tongue as it located the throbbing nub of her swollen clitoris. She arched back. Her whole body was covered in slick perspiration. If a bomb had dropped on the hotel right now she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have noticed—because the only thing she was capable of noticing was the sweep of sensations racing through her body at breakneck speed.
When he withdrew she practically sobbed with the sense of loss.
‘Now you can come to bed,’ Alessandro commanded softly.
He patted the space next to him and she slid like a rag doll into the allotted spot, her body turning and curving against his, loving the feel of the heat he was emanating.
He pushed his thigh between her legs and moved it with just the right level of pressure to ensure that she picked up where she had left off when he had removed his tongue from her.
Kate grasped his shoulders, feeling solid muscle under her fingers, and looked at him drowsily, drugged, completely in his power.
And he liked that.
He kissed her—a hungry, very thorough kiss, that made all her bones feel just a little more jelly-like—and then he carried on kissing her. The slender column of her neck, her shoulder blades, working his way down until he was circling her nipple with his tongue and then taking it into his mouth and suckling on it, lazily, in no rush to go anywhere.
She had died and gone to heaven. There wasn’t a single part of her entire body that wasn’t buzzing with all sorts of new, wonderful, pleasurable sensations, and they only increased when his hand wandered down to her thighs, slipped between them, his fingers idly playing with her in a way that was screamingly intimate and utterly erotic.
She squirmed and felt him smile against her breast. He was enjoying himself—but he couldn’t be enjoying himself half as much as she was enjoying herself. He did this all the time. He had a reputation that preceded him wherever he went. He was a guy who had wined, dined and bedded some of the most beautiful women in the world. This was probably routine for him.
Not that she liked the thought of that. But she hadn’t been born yesterday, and even while she was losing herself in the pleasure he was bringing her she was still realistic enough to know that he was an expert at this sort of thing. An expert when it came to giving sexual pleasure.
Whereas she was in a whole new territory—one she had never visited before—and she was loving it.
Loving what he was doing to her.
Loving the way her body felt—as though it was waking up for the very first time.
She closed her eyes and sighed as he moved from one tingling nipple to the other.
She had always thought her breasts to be overtly sexual —had always secretly longed for little ones that didn’t require the heavy-duty support of a bra—but, watching his dark head exploring them, she was enormously proud of them, of their fullness, the prominence of her dusky nipples, which he couldn’t seem to get enough of.
She moved against his fingers and he thrust them a little deeper into her, arousing her yet further.
‘Please...’ she pleaded, and he stopped sucking her nipple to look at her.
‘Please what...?’
‘You know...’
‘Okay, so maybe I do, but I still want to hear you say it...’
‘You want me to tell you that...that I want you? Right now? That I can’t hold on for much longer? That—’
‘That you’d like to come into my hand but you’d much rather feel me moving inside you...thrusting hard and deep... Repeat all that after me...’
‘I can’t!’ she gasped breathlessly, and Alessandro grinned. Because the chasm between her wet, hot body and her prurience, to which she couldn’t help but carry on clinging, even if it was just a little, fascinated him.
‘You can...’
She did. And just saying those things out loud was a huge turn-on.
She was aware of him leaving her for a few seconds, felt the mattress depress when he returned, and knew that he was donning protection.
She was open and ready for him when he entered her. Although it had been a while and he was big—very big. Her tight muscles relaxed, closed round his hardened sheath, took every glorious inch of him in. And when he began moving inside her it was like nothing she had ever experienced in her life before.
Her short nails dug into his back. Both their bodies were slick, sliding against one another. He reared up just as the groundswell of sensation inside her cascaded and splintered, sending her into orbit and making her cry out.
Utterly spent. That was what Kate felt as she descended from the peak to which she had been catapulted at supersonic speed. Utterly spent and very much aware that, like it or not, she had been as vulnerable to this man’s sexual charisma as all those supermodels he had dated and dispatched with monotonous regularity.
Alessandro rolled off her, took a few seconds to gather himself—because the experience had left him on a different planet. He felt amazing—as though he had discovered the ability to walk on water...
Where had that feeling come from?
He lay on his side and looked at her body. He cupped one breast with his hand and felt its weight.
Kate edged away and scrabbled for the duvet, which was solidly planted underneath them. Horses, stable doors and bolting sprang to mind. What was the point in succumbing to a sudden attack of shyness when she had been uttering things that made her blush only minutes previously?
That said, what on earth had she gone and done? Shouldn’t she be in the grip of remorse? Regret? Mortification?
‘My feet feel much better...’ That was the prosaic statement that came out of her mouth—because she was too busy looking at the man she had just had sex with to think of anything wittier or more profound to say.
‘Sex has a way of sorting out most of life’s little problems.’ He toyed with a few tendrils of her hair, tucked them behind her ear. ‘Including sore feet.’
‘Really? I never knew...’
‘That’s because you’ve spent all of your adult life avoiding it.’
And you’ve spent all of your adult life avoiding commitment.
It was something she wanted to say. She found that she wanted him to talk to her—talk to her the way she had inadvertently been persuaded into talking to him—but that was a line that could not be breached. She knew that with every gut instinct inside her. Step over that line and she would be dismissed as casually as a stranger he had happened to bump into.
She didn’t want to be dismissed. Not yet. Not when she had discovered this crazy, sensual side to her that made her feel so great—as though she could walk on water. She wanted to hang on to it for just a little bit longer.
What was wrong with that? It was human nature, wasn’t it? The desire to cling on to something that made you feel good?
Not that she had any intention of being clingy. She might have taken an unexpected detour with him, but in the process she hadn’t steamrollered over all her principles. She was as strong as she always had been.
She swatted away the uneasy realisation she had had
earlier that she had fallen for his charm, succumbed to his animal magnetism, trodden the same mesmerized, idiotic path that those women he dated had trodden before her.
Now that the haze of unbridled passion had dissipated she decided that she was the same person she always had been but with added dimensions. And how could that not be a good thing? How could that not stand her in good stead for the future that was out there waiting for her?
Mr Right was out there—and not only would he be waiting for her with a glass of chilled wine when she had had a long day...after the chilled wine he would sweep her off her feet and carry her into the bedroom and make her feel just the way the very inappropriate Alessandro Preda was capable of making her feel.
Because now the sensual side of her had been unleashed. Her ex-boyfriend might not have been the full package, but now she knew the full package was practically round the corner.
And the relief of knowing that knocked her for six.
Only now did she realize how much she had begun to accept an inevitable future in which she found no one, remained a lonely career woman, heading up the ladder with no one at her side.
She snuggled against Alessandro and laughed when she realized that their recent bout of mind-blowing sex had done nothing to depress his very active libido.
‘The reason I asked you how your feet were,’ Alessandro murmured in between kisses to the side of her mouth, ‘is that it’s occurred to me that walking is going to be fairly difficult for you tomorrow. Possibly for the next couple of days.’
Kate stilled. In a horizontal position, with this gorgeous hunk next to her and her body already eagerly anticipating round two in the sexual stakes, her feet had been the last thing on her mind. They felt right as rain, in fact.
Now she pictured shoving them into her little black pumps, feeling the tight leather pressing against the plasters, and knew that he had a point. But she was here to work. And he was first and foremost a man who put work ahead of everything else—and that would include a romp in the hay with one of his employees.
At Her Boss's Pleasure Page 13