Dance of the Crystal (8 page)

The sight of those dusky-rose nipples made his cock even harder, if that was possible. He ducked his head down and captured one through the shimmery lace, tonguing it, sucking it deep into his mouth.

Crystal jerked and arched her back, as if giving tacit approval to his hungry movements. He fumbled his fingers around to the back of her bra, seeking the hook that would release the lacy cage holding her breasts. He moaned in frustration at the unbroken swath of fabric across her back.

As if understanding his goal, she leaned back a smidge. “The front,” she gasped between kisses, “it’s a clasp, not a hook.”

Soren’s lust-filled brain couldn’t quite comprehend the concept of front clasp. His scrabbling got more frantic until he finally pulled one breast from its cup and let the pointed tip of it poke straight out from its hammock. He zeroed in on it, the finally bare skin of her breast, her naked nipple inside his mouth, and he licked and sucked and pinched like a starving man.

“Soren, wait.” Crystal edged herself back a few inches on his thighs and grabbed the hem of her sweater with crossed arms. One yank and it was over her head and on the floor. “Here,” she said, breathing raggedly, her hands going between her breasts. “See? A clasp.” She flicked her wrists. The bra fell open.

She wiggled the straps down her shoulders and let the bra fall to the floor.

Soren’s throat closed up as he saw those soft, plump breasts jiggling mere inches away from him.

“Beautiful,” he whispered. He trailed his fingers around the areolas, inordinately pleased to see the little bumps on them swell. “So smooth. So creamy.” He would have liked to stroke them, admire them, for hours, but he was thinking with his little head now, not his big one. He took a breast in each hand, kneaded them, squeezed them together. “I’d like to put my cock right in between them,” he growled.

Then dipped his head again, trying to get both nipples in his mouth at once, greedy bastard that he was.

“Wait,” she said breathlessly, yanking at his polo shirt. “Your turn.”

It took a moment for her comment to sink in. Reluctantly he released his hold on her breasts and shucked off his shirt. He glanced at her, ready to return to suckling the most delicious pair of breasts he’d ever touched. The fascinated look on her face stilled him.

“Oh. My. God.” She trailed her splayed fingers down his hairy chest. “I’ve never seen a man with…”

She lay her palms against his chest and swept outward, matting the hair, then inward to muss it again.

Out, then in. Out, in. As if fascinated.

Soren couldn’t stand being still a minute longer. About to explode with lust, he pulled her to him roughly, rubbed her breasts against the hair that fascinated her. His skin felt on fire. The scrape of her taut nipples against him only added fuel to his impending meltdown.

He wanted everything at once—his face buried in her hair, inhaling its subtle fragrance. The feel of her teeth scraping his neck, nipping his ear. Their mouths, fumbling blindly until they found each other’s and fused them together with heat and suction and hunger. He needed skin to skin, all of it, from nose to toes.

With an urgency he couldn’t contain, Soren stood, lifted Crystal by the waist and set her on her bare feet. He dropped to his knees, ripped open the snap and zipper on her jeans and jerked the denim down to her ankles. In some small, sane corner of his mind he knew she was the kind of woman who’d want hearts and flowers, sweet words whispered in her ear, a Rhett Butler gesture of carrying her up the stairs to the bedroom. But damn, he was out of practice, and she was so hot, she was all over him like honey on pancakes, even now fumbling at the snap of his own jeans as he stood—

“Whoa, babe!” His brain cleared enough to realize that she couldn’t pull down the zipper around his swollen cock without his careful help. And if she so much as
touched
it, he’d come like a teenager with his first piece of ass.

With great care, he eased jeans and briefs around what felt like a torpedo about to launch. When the clothing got tangled at his ankles, he briefly wondered if Crystal had shucked her shoes in anticipation of avoiding the kind of circus he was now experiencing as he clumsily toed off his own shoes and lurched out of his clothes.

Then he looked at her. She stood with her hands half up and reaching toward him, as if wanting to touch him but afraid to, wearing nothing but her sparkling amulet and a tiny scrap of lace at her crotch.

Somewhere along the line she’d stepped out of the tangle of her jeans. Her eyes were glued to his hard-on, but whether she was impressed or afraid, he couldn’t tell.

Suddenly he felt awkward. He was hot as Hades, hard as a granite boulder, breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows, and he knew she wanted it as much as he did. Jesus, he wished he was as experienced as Rolf. Rolf would say something glib and sexy and the woman would melt right into him.

But he, Soren, didn’t know—

Holy shit. Crystal knelt down before him, her mouth right at the level of his cock that pointed straight at her, her face a study in awe and wonder.

“It’s so…big,” she whispered.

He groaned.
No shit, Sherlock
. Then ground his back teeth. She had reached out one finger and stroked the hard length of it, from the ridge down to the base and back again. Involuntarily his hips pivoted forward.

“Tickles,” she said, running her knuckles lightly over the darker blond pubic hair surrounding his cock then following the rough trail of hair down one thigh.

Soren didn’t know which tease was worse, her touching his cock or touching everything
but
his cock.

“Crystal.” He reached down and jerked her up, slammed her into the furnace of his body so her feet dangled a foot from the floor. Skin against skin, chest to breasts, hips to hips. He kissed her, hard, his tongue thrusting deep into the hot cavern of her mouth, showing her what he wanted to do to her pussy.

She met each thrust with a sucking motion of her mouth, driving him nearly mad. Her arms and legs came around him, her lace-clad pussy wide open to the pressure of his naked cock.

Without breaking the kiss, he strode to the nearest kitchen counter and slid her sweet ass onto it, her legs still tightly wrapped around his hips. Mindless with need, he wrenched aside the sliver of lace covering her crotch and with the other hand guided his cock between her hot, swollen pussy lips.

She whimpered, a soft needy sound in the back of her throat. She tilted her hips, wiggling them so as to encourage his entrance.

On a prayerful curse, he plunged into her with all the pent-up force of years of reserve and denial and need and want. In a far corner of his mind he noted her slight resistance, her passionate cry at his first thrust, and accepted it as a sign of their mutual desire to finish what they started, this thunderous dance as old as time and as new as their touch. Over and over again he drove into her, her little gasps urging him on, until he felt on the edge of the precipice, ready to plunge into oblivion, and he remembered. With a last wisp of sanity, of knowing he couldn’t take the chance of impregnating her no matter how much he wanted to shoot deep inside her, he pulled out his cock and felt himself gush his cum all over her belly.

And only after his pounding heart had slowed, after his breathing normalized, after he felt her rigidity, did he realize what his subconscious had processed in the heat of the moment.

He had taken a virgin.

“Jesus, Crystal, I feel like a heel.”

Relaxing his death grip on her hips, he took a small step back, to examine her turned-aside face, her downcast eyes. “Are you all right? I didn’t know you were…” His throat closed. How could he have not known she was a virgin? All those artless kisses, the fumbling touches, the awe in her face at the sight of his rampant cock—the signs were there. He simply chose to misinterpret them.

He didn’t know exactly when she’d removed her arms from around his shoulders, but her hands were now planted on the kitchen counter, holding her upright, it seemed, by sheer force of her will. Her legs dangled down the sides of the counter in limp parentheses to his thighs.

“Jesus,” he said again. “How can I make it up to you?”

She wouldn’t meet his gaze. He couldn’t tell if she was hiding tears of disgust at him or shame at herself.

Or physical pain. He glanced down and winced. Not only at the globs of his cum slithering down her belly but, more to the point, traces of red—fresh blood, virgin’s blood—on his wilting cock.

“Dammit,” he said in a raw voice, “you should have been coddled, pampered, fussed over. Not taken like a tavern slut. I’m nothing but a piece of shit you should have scraped off your shoe.” He took a deep, stabilizing breath and slid one arm under her knees. “I wouldn’t blame you if you never spoke to me again, but I
am
going to do this one thing for you.” He placed his other arm around her unresisting shoulders and lifted her into his arms. “Where’s your bathtub?”

She felt like a limp child, her head now slumped onto his chest, the weight of her surprisingly light for how voluptuous she was to the eye. When she didn’t answer, he walked down the hallway where they’d entered from the garage, and saw a stairway leading up at the far end. Flicking a light switch with his elbow, he climbed up with his precious burden, careful to keep her bare feet from hitting the walls.

The stairway ended at a small hallway with three opened doors. The one on the right showed the edge of a filing cabinet. An office, he surmised. The one in front of him was carpeted, probably her bedroom.

Assuming that the third door would be the bath, he turned to the left and stepped into a spacious, up-to-date bathroom done up in soothing shades of green and blue.

Still holding Crystal in his arms, he bent down to run hot water into an oversized Jacuzzi, then sat on the closed toilet seat and settled her on his lap while the tub filled. He dropped light, remorseful kisses on her temple, murmuring soft apologies into her hair. With a pang of self-loathing he noticed she still wore the scrap of panties that he’d ruthlessly yanked out of the way of his deaf, dumb and blind cock.

God. How could he make it right for her?

When the tub was more than half full, he got up and walked to it, sat on the ledge and, balancing her on his lap, dipped one hand to test the water temperature. Perfect.

Turning off the tap, he stood and began to lower her into the water. Her arms came around his neck and gripped him in a vicious hold, her face buried in the crook of his shoulder. “No.”

“Let me do this for you, honey. Let me wash away your pain and the evidence of my perversity. Then you can tell me to go to hell. Or worse.”

“No.” She clung to him in an unexpectedly strong embrace.

She lifted her face to him. He was not surprised to see tears shimmering in those soft brown eyes, tears of pain and humiliation that were certainly all his doing.

“What, then? What can I do to take away your tears?”

With a little shudder, she clung to him, tucked her face against his throat. “Us. You first. Together.”

A long moment passed before he processed her meaning. “You mean, in the tub?”

Still hiding her face, she nodded.

He swallowed hard, felt the soft skin of her cheek pressing into his Adam’s apple. “Sure. You got it.”

And stepped into the warmed porcelain, the water hot enough to relax but not to burn. Carefully balancing her, he knelt down then sat back on his haunches, lowering her into the water until her weight rested sideways on his thighs, her feet dangling over the side of the tub. Only then was he able to juggle her enough to stretch out his legs and settle her as well, her butt on his thighs, legs between his. He did not attempt to pull her back to lean against his chest for fear of her reaction.

He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He didn’t know what to do or say next. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing here in the first place, sitting with his victim as if they were in a Pocono Mountains honeymoon suite drinking champagne. So he opted for something neutral. “How does one turn on the bubbles?”

With what might have been a tiny giggle, she reached over and turned the knob.

The water frothed around them. As she sat there quiescent on top of his legs, Soren became uncomfortably aware that his randy cock had begun to swell again from the nearness of her, both of them damn-near naked and sandwiched together, the jets of water caressing his skin like a woman’s touch.

God, did they make chastity belts for men? What did it say about him that he still thought with his dick even after he’d deflowered a virgin?

Her head was bent forward. The riot of dark curls had separated to flow down the front of her shoulders, leaving a swath of vulnerable nape that invited him to kiss it. An invitation he resisted by the skin of his toenails.

She leaned down into the water. He imagined her lovely breasts dangling, bobbing in the froth then mentally slapped himself. She was probably hoping the bubbling water would scrape off his pecker tracks from her belly.

“Soren?” Her voice came out muffled, absorbed by the water.

He couldn’t help it. He rested his hands on her upper arms, testing. “I’m here.”

It might have been wishful thinking, but he imagined she leaned into his touch just the slightest bit. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

She pulled herself into a smaller silhouette. “I’m sorry I wasn’t very good.”

Soren blinked. “What are you talking about?”

Crystal looked over her shoulder at him. “I-I didn’t know what to do. I felt so awkward and stupid. I wanted you to kiss me, to touch me, the way you did. I liked it. More than liked it, even. But then, when you…did
it
, I didn’t know how to respond, because it hurt and I was surprised and I didn’t want you to think I didn’t want you—”

“Oh, baby, I was the stupid one.” He rotated her shoulders, forcing her to shift her body crossways so they could look at each other. “I should have known you were innocent. The first time I met you, I thought you were a flowers and candlelight type of woman and you deserved someone better than me.