He stepped forward, forcing her to step backward. They repeated the cooperative little dance until her legs bumped against the edge of a sofa. A tiny cry of protest escaped her when their bodies separated, and he lowered her onto lush, down cushions.
From her prone position, she watched the clothes fly off him in a quick succession of efficient movements, his delicious body a feast for her eyes. The hardened muscles flexing across every lean inch of him were nothing short of splendid. Wild with pleasure, desire, and greed, she opened her legs and bared herself to him, a feeling of delicious sinfulness overtaking her. Never in her life had she felt so much assurance within her femininity as when he froze at the sight of her.
“Mariana . . .” he trailed off, apparently unable to complete a sentence. Craving, dark and sinuous, stole through her, causing her sex to quiver in anticipation ofhim. The corners of his lips tipped up ever so slightly.
Again, he was a jungle cat, and she wanted nothing more than to be his capture.
When he dropped to his knees between her legs, she rose onto her elbows. She would watch as he entered her.
He wrapped long fingers around his shaft and pressed his hips forward, slowly, deliberately, until his manhood pushed against her sex. Her body tensed with anticipation, and the breath suspended in her lungs. She sensed a hesitation within him. He wanted her. That she knew. But he didn’t want to want her. That she also knew.
“Aren’t you going tofuckme?” she whispered, the question a demand and a plea.
His manhood poised at her opening, he pressed forward, inch by excruciating inch, his eyes drifting shut. He looked utterly lost in the moment. At the sight and feel of him, she teetered on the edge of orgasm, another recently acquired word.
Deeper and deeper he sank into her, rills of sensation streaming through nerves focused on a single purpose: pleasure. Encased to the hilt, his eyes opened, and she, too, was lost. Unable to restrain herself, she wrapped her arms around his neck as her legs encircled his waist. She would feel all of him.
A muffled groan escaped her when he drew away; a sharp gasp filled her when he pushed forward. With each deliberate thrust of his hips, his fingers biting into her skin, steadying her, spurring her on, she no longer knew or cared where he ended and she began.
Yet something wasn’t right. They hadn’t kissed. With a craving, sudden and desperate, she needed the touch of his lips on hers, the whisper of his ragged breath across her skin, mingling with hers.
She reached up, pulled his head down, and claimed his mouth. Her tongue found his and toyed with it as her hips responded to his increasingly frenzied rhythm. The moment transformed from one of mindless indulgence to one complicated by an unexpected rush of intimacy, a closeness familiar and new.
His hips thrust harder, faster, deeper, ravishing her, destroying her, breaking her into a million pieces of light and air and exquisite nothingness.
Incapable of holding the kiss, her head arched back as his shaft drove relentlessly into her, and an elusive feeling of wildness began to overtake her, driven by a fever nearing its breaking point.
She needed more,more, her sex winding tighter, her fingernails digging into his back as the tension refused to release. “Oh, Nick,” she gasped.
An image of an iron lock, stubbornly clamped shut, came to her. It had been so long . . . Perhaps too long . . . A groan of frustration escaped her.
“Come”—He pulled out of her—“for”—He drove into her—“me.”
On a cry, her body slipped free of its locks and release overcame her on wave after pulsing wave. Her essence separated from her body and soared above, high on the wing of wantonness, as he pressed toward his own climax, meeting her there in the realm of abandon and oblivion.
Shaky arms unable to support her, she collapsed back into lush cushions, where she lay, eyes closed, thoroughly, deliciously fucked. Nick’s enervated body followed hers down, and they lay skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath, in unison, the known world fallen away.
It could have been the errant flicker of a candle or a night bird’s song in the trees, but the world began to reassert itself, to remind her of its existence. Her eyes flew open, and panic, blind and self-preserving, rose.
She pushed his hard, muscular chest. “What have we done?”
Chapter 17
Sixes and sevens: Left at sixes and sevens; i.e. in confusion: commonly said of a room where the furniture, &c. is scattered about; or of a business left unsettled.
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Francis Grose
Nothing we shouldn’t have kept doing all these yearswas Nick’s first thought. But it wouldn’t do to speak that thought aloud. Or think it again, for that matter.
On a groan both sated and irritated, he slid off Mariana, ignoring the scream of protest inside him. His body had no desire to separate from hers, but he couldn’t think in a straight line otherwise. Her gaze held his in a moment both tense and tender, and he felt an insuperable chasm open up and yawn between them, the sense of intimacy growing more elusory with each second that ticked by.
He sat back on his heels, suddenly as naked as Adam after he ate the forbidden fruit.
Mariana rolled onto her side and curled into herself, denying him the unobstructed view of her body he craved. “Have you seen Yvette and Lisette since . . .” she trailed, “. . . since that night?”
At once and unaccountably hurt, he responded with a defensive, “Of course not.”
