by Shelby Reed
“Now let me in, Sydney.”
Heat slid through her, lighting every nerve. “How?”
“Tell me to come over.”
She straightened, her hand gone moist where it gripped the phone. “Colm . . . if I let you in, where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know, Syd. We’ll figure it out.”
Her lips touched the receiver. The fight was over. “Call when you get to the door and I’ll buzz you up.”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
Sydney had never moved faster in her life. She jumped in the shower, shaved her legs, blow-dried her hair, then slathered on a sultry musk-scented lotion and dressed in a pair of snug jeans and a maroon silk sweater that draped off one shoulder. He would strip off her clothing, and she couldn’t wait.
What are you doing? demanded the voice of reason as she applied a light touch of makeup with a still-trembling hand. Before she could snap back at that inner voice, the intercom buzzed. She glanced at the mantel clock. He was right on time.
She slid across the bamboo floor in stocking feet and hit the intercom. “Is it you?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“Come up.” She pushed the entry button and then raced back to her bedroom to pull on black, knee-high boots. A quick glance in the mirror and she was satisfied. Casual but not affected, something she could have thrown on without much thought when she got up that morning. She wanted to squirm free of every garment and get naked and feel his flesh against hers. Soon enough. Oh, God. She’d waited much too long for this.
When she answered his knock at the door, the blood was racing through her veins.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly.
“Hi.” As his light green gaze slipped down to the tips of her boots and back, his face wore a look she would never forget. No man had ever regarded her that way, with approval, appreciation, desire, and softness all at once. Sydney braced herself as she backed up to let him in, expecting him to slide his arms around her and whirl her against the nearest wall, where he would fuse their mouths with a kiss, one hand slamming the door and turning each of the four locks without him even bothering to look.
Colm closed the door and clicked the locks into place all right, but then, instead of kissing her, he placed a narrow box in her hands.
She studied the package with its huge silver bow. “This is the only present I’ve gotten that I haven’t bought myself this Christmas.”
“Open it.”
Still discombobulated, her entire body vibrating with want and expectation, she perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair. Her fingers moved over the professionally wrapped gift, but she hardly looked at what she was doing. Instead she watched him unzip his jacket and find a seat on her couch, the Christmas tree lights casting rainbow colors on the left side of his face. Every time he took her breath away she thought she might never inhale again, and yet here it came, and with it his scent, as piney as the tree, as warm as the flames in the fireplace.
She finally freed the ribbon, then opened the paper. Inside was a bottle of Shiraz. Instantly Sydney let out a laugh and hugged it to her. “Do you know I haven’t had any Shiraz since . . . well, since the last time I had it with you?”
Pleasure played around his mouth as he watched her examine it. “You still like it?”
“I love it.”
“How about at—” He glanced at his watch, his leather jacket sleeve creaking with the movement. “One in the morning?”
“Works for me.” Unable to sit there another moment without tackling him against the cushions, she stood and headed for the kitchen, where she rifled through a couple of drawers before she found a corkscrew.
And jumped when his warm hands closed over hers.
“Let me.” His body moved against her from behind, holding her subtly captive in the circle of his arms as he took the bottle and corkscrew. God, he was hard, perfectly made for her. His erection pressed against the top of her buttocks as he worked with the wine bottle. The cork released with a resolute pop, and then his lips nuzzled her ear. “Glasses?”
She blindly reached for a cabinet door.
His arm slipped around her waist and drew her tighter against him as she grabbed two glass goblets and set them on the granite counter.
“You pour,” she said weakly, her head tilting when his tongue flicked her earring and then slid along the sensitive side of her neck.
Instead, he brushed his mouth over her naked shoulder where the maroon top bared it and slid a hand beneath her breasts to hold her motionless. “Sydney.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
The universal question of Man to Woman hung in the air. They both knew why he was there, and still he was giving her a final chance to back out, to change her mind.
Her fingers dug into the granite edge of the counter, her pulse hammering. “God, yes,” she whispered.
Chapter Nineteen
He slid aside the bottle, the glasses, everything in the way, and turned her to face him. His mouth nudged hers once, twice, then opened over hers, and Sydney was lost. They’d waited so long to taste each other with nothing and no one between them.
When he lifted his head, she nearly cried out a protest. But the look of dark intent he wore shuddered through her, made her weak and glad for the strength of him and his resolution. He knew exactly what he was doing, what they both wanted, and no conversation or questions were necessary.
He grasped her waist, lifted and settled her on the counter top. His hooded gaze never strayed from her face as the sound of her boot zippers rent the silence. He never spoke as he drew the boots from her feet and tossed them aside so they thudded somewhere across the kitchen. Next came her socks, then his warm touch on her ankles. Cool air slid across her skin as he lifted one of her bare feet against his hard belly and caressed the top of it with both hands. She watched the drop of his dark head as he focused on what he was doing to her, the faint lifting and lowering of his lashes, before she realized that she could touch him, too, some irreverent part of him the way he was caressing her. Guilt existed no longer. No reticence. This wasn’t about her independence or her past. Only certainty that she had to have him, and now.
Her fingers reached for his hair and slid through it with experimental ease, measuring its thick, lush texture. His scalp was warm beneath its softness, the tendons in his neck tight as she dipped inside the collar of his jacket and traced them like a musician caresses her instrument. He closed his eyes and buried his face against her breasts as she massaged the tension from him, even as the heat flamed higher.
When he looked up at her, she cupped his face in her hands and let her eyes search his, finding desire and need shot through the spokes of green and gold. She felt more than saw herself reflected there—her own desire and need—in the way his expression softened and his lips parted, and knew she had never in her life allowed the passion for a man to cross her own face as it did now. She’d never felt safe enough. But with Colm . . . oh, with Colm . . .
She was more than safe. She was adulated.
Leaning forward, she took his mouth again, and the soft thrust of his tongue, and smiled at the spastic twitch of his fingers on her ankle, a subconscious response to the same jolt of sexual electricity that flowed through her.
Sydney’s pulse danced wildly, fire raging through her nerves, through sacred, female parts of her that she had shared on canvas but never as unabashedly as she would offer herself to Colm. Yes, she was softer than she’d painted herself; she was soft and wet and shivering as he pushed up her sweater and unfastened her jeans.
Then she realized he still wore his jacket. His clothes. His shoes. She wanted to laugh aloud. There was something so illicit and delicious about having a fully clothed man undress her.
But Colm didn’t strip her pants off her legs. He bent his head and found her bare stomach with wandering lips, the glide of a tongue circling her navel, fingers bracing her hips. And when he straightened and drew the hem of her s
weater up over her breasts, up, up the arms she’d raised over her head, she fought to breathe evenly and failed. How many times had she viewed his naked skin, delighted in the bare sight of him? Now she offered herself to him, and it was his turn—his right—to look her over, to examine what he would soon claim. What was he thinking as he let his gaze rake her from her tousled hair down to her breasts?
He studied her with such intense concentration, his hands hovering without quite touching, as though he didn’t know where to start. She reached out, grasped his fingers and cupped them over her breasts. “Touch me,” she whispered.
They were nose to nose, their breath rushing together as his hands moved, caressed her through her strapless bra until her nipples peaked and she squirmed in delight. Then he bent to draw the tips, one, the other, into his warm, wet mouth, and she was surprised to feel her bra sliding away. When had he unfastened it? No awkward groping. No delay. He was practiced; he was perfect. And tonight he was hers.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured, the tip of his tongue flicking the sensitive underside of her left breast. He bit her gently, moved to the next breast and suckled it, dragged his tongue over and over it until she squirmed with the hot sensation his caresses ignited between her legs. Then he straightened and brushed his mouth against her lips. “What do you want next?”
Her throat was too tight to answer. God, she loved this play. Her own partial nudity. The anticipation of his nakedness to come.
“Tell me, Sydney. Anything you want.”
She finally found her words. “Take off your coat and stay a while.”
He stepped back, shrugged out of his jacket and let it drop into a careless pile on the floor.
“Now shoes,” she ordered.
No one else in the world could make this awkward part of things so sexy. With a slight quirk of his mouth, he stepped out of his loafers and shucked off his socks. Even his feet were just right. She’d missed seeing these pieces of him, such benign areas and yet so intimate.
“Next?” he asked, bracing his hands on either side of her.
“Next you kiss me, then the sweater comes off.”
He followed her instructions; caught her mouth in a lush, hungering kiss, then backed up and drew his sweater up and off, followed by the T-shirt beneath it.
Sydney was enchanted. Colm had never been so desirable, standing before her and slowly, intently stripping with his gaze locked on hers. Her throat went dry as his hands skimmed his own chest in a light caress, then arrowed down to the buttons on his fly, which he flicked open with his thumb.
He was beautiful.
“Do you ever touch yourself?” she asked, brave and trembling at the same time. “You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. What do you think?” His hand lingered on the erection rising from his fly.
She smiled, her cheeks hot. Someone as sensual and uninhibited as he was . . . “I think maybe.”
“Maybe. When I’m thinking of you.”
She thought about her own forays into self-satisfaction and how intense they seemed since she’d met him. From now on, the sacred parts of her body didn’t belong under anyone’s hands but his.
“Be naked,” she said quietly.
He pushed down his jeans, taking his boxer briefs with them, and kicked the clothing free.
Restraint crashed and burned at her feet.
“Show me how you touch yourself,” she ordered.
He didn’t seem to mind. He wrapped his fingers around his shaft and stroked once, twice. So wanton. So ready to please her.
And too soon or not, she loved him.
* * *
Colm had been naked before, but never like this, never so naked inside. Goose bumps spread over his skin, partly from the cool air but mostly from the emotions tightening his throat as he stood before Sydney, caressing himself when he only wanted her hands on him. He would please her, do whatever she asked, even if he burst from the wanting.
He thought she might hop off the counter and come touch him at last, but she only tilted her head and watched him, her gaze skimming him head to toe. He knew what she was doing. She was painting him in her mind.
Her lack of self-consciousness washed him with a wild mixture of lust and admiration, her utter concentration on him unyielding as she finally slid, bare-breasted, pants open, off the counter and approached. He abandoned his own flesh to slide his hands around her hips and inside her jeans, but she gently pushed him backward until he stood on the soft kitchen area rug.
“Like this,” she instructed. “Don’t move.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed, his fingers balling into fists to keep from touching her as she circled him, one hand gliding along his naked ass as she went. When she appeared before him again, she pushed down her jeans, stepped out of them, and stood there in a pair of pink lace bikinis and nothing else. He lifted his gaze back to hers and waited, and thought he would die from wanting her.
“Don’t you dare move.” The repeat order came huskier this time in the thick silence. Her fingers slid over his chest, his abdomen, then down to encircle his hard-on, and he jolted from the firm, deliberate surprise of it. For three years he’d done the pleasing, the handling. Now he stood helpless, tortured, and he loved it.
Before he could recover, she knelt on the rug before him, one hand curled around his cock and the other around his hip. She rubbed her soft cheek against his erection, her warm breath skimming its throbbing length, and Colm squeezed his eyes closed, waiting for that searing, wet heat.
It came slow, slippery sweet. She took him in deep and then pushed him out again, her long lashes lifting to meet his eyes. Everything in him fought to keep from thrusting between her lips. Her tongue slid beneath the head of his cock and down to its base, flicked, explored, then back, and when she closed her lips around him and sucked, he came to life, unable to help himself, and buried his hands in her thick, silky hair. His stomach muscles jumped as she withdrew in a slow pull, then took him deep, stroking a rhythm with one hand and gripping his hip with the other to guide his helpless thrusts.
Don’t come, he thought, the pathetic adolescent mantra he hadn’t used in years. Don’t come, don’t come.
“Come,” she whispered.
Not like this. Not before her pleasure. He would give her everything before taking more, for he had taken so much from her already. Granting ecstasy was what he knew. She would find out what he was eventually, but for tonight he could master his skills and give her all of his knowledge, and beyond that, every part of himself.
Gritting his teeth, he withdrew from her mouth, dropped to his knees before her, and took her face in his hands. He let his gaze search her flushed features, committing them to memory, because he would lose this reality eventually, the picture she made kneeling on her kitchen floor, lips parted and waiting for his kiss.
Seized by need and a stomach-twisting grief, he bent his head and plundered her open mouth, slid his tongue along the inside of her bottom lip, and when her head dropped back in surrender, he caught her waist and lifted her just enough so that she straddled his thighs.
“Sorry about these,” he growled, and before she could speak, shredded her pretty lace panties right off her and tossed them over his shoulder. She was trembling, but he was, too, and for the moment there was nothing expert about his reactions despite his intentions to keep things a smooth glide. His mouth fastened on her nipple, sucked and stroked until she cried out. His hand fumbled between them to grasp himself and rub against her wetness, and oh, she was hot and slick against his tip, drawing him forward . . . almost in . . .
Condom. What the hell was wrong with him? “Wait,” he said, and lightly bit her breast, holding tight to her with one hand on her backside. With the other, he grasped for his jeans and found his wallet, his fingers shaking while she waited, poised above him and breathing fast.
“Let me,” she said when he straightened, and took the packet from him. When she tore it open with her teeth, he s
huddered. He’d only seen these uninhibited parts of her when she was painting. He’d known she would be like this, hot and flushed and gorgeous in her passion.
She was no novice. She rolled the condom down his shaft with one quick movement, and before he could draw a breath, she rose up on him, poised herself, and then slid down again, taking him in . . . deep . . . deeper, to the very heart of her.
“Oh . . .” she breathed.
“Yes,” he groaned.
They locked gazes, her eyes wide with the shock of pleasure, his sleepy with the weight of desire. With his hands on her hips to steady and guide her, she lifted and lowered and found rhythm, graceful and so, so slow. And when the need became too great, her legs untangled from his waist and she anchored her knees on either side of his thighs to gain leverage.
Colm thrust into her each time she rose up so that there was no surcease of pleasure, only a building momentum that scooted the rug beneath them and eventually sent his back colliding with the nearest cabinet. They laughed into each other’s mouths and rearranged themselves, and he kissed her breasts, her neck, while she stroked his hair and ears and then clung to him as the ride grew wilder.
He looked down between them, to the place where they meshed so perfectly. He’d never known such sweet, hot bliss from being buried inside a woman. It wasn’t deep enough. He released her and braced his palms on the floor behind him and pushed his hips hard to meet her, watching the ecstasy on her beautiful features as it flushed her cheeks, her throat, the tops of her breasts.
Sydney clung to his shoulders and cantered upon him a few more short strokes. Then a cry quivered on her lips and she dropped down, grinding, dancing. Colm caught her as she arched backward and bent to her, his mouth on her left breast to taste the untethered thrum of her heart and hold her tight through the quaking.
No warning. There was no warning as his own simmering orgasm shot free. He pushed into her once, twice, lifting her high on him, and shuddered helplessly before she’d even stopped coming. He wanted it to go on forever, the greatest climax he’d ever known.