It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (33 page)

He closed his eyes, and his head fell back, and a great sigh of relief moved his shoulders up and down. He opened them again, and the expression she saw there nearly buckled her knees.

“Tommy . . .” His voice was a hush. “Tell me then . . . why the hell else are we alive if not for this?” Something—fatigue, emotion—cracked his voice.

It was like the moment she’d walked the railing outside of this building. Don’t look at the ground, Tommy. Don’t look at your feet. Don’t wonder how it is that you’re balancing so precariously. Just do it.

He’d offered her nothing but himself. Not a future, not forever.

She had never chosen the easy way. Safety wasn’t her nature. And if love was so dangerous neither of them dared say the word, that was fine, too.

She moved closer to him, and let her head fall back to look up at the giddy height, the beautiful view that was his face.

His hands glided up over her throat, and cradled her head. “For this. This is what we’re meant for,” he whispered.

Before his mouth touched hers.

Their lips melted together. And little by little, his kiss unraveled her. At first slow, then deep, so deep, then nearly desperate. She felt it in every layer of her being, until she was sure she’d been created by it.

She pulled away, ducked her head into his chest, shook it to and fro. “Jonathan . . .” Her voice trembled. Still a murmur. Still a warning.

But his hands were on the laces of her dress, and she didn’t stop him.

His voice was low in her ear, like a spell, so close it might as well have been the voice of her own heart, and she was helpless not to follow its dictates. “Tell me you haven’t thought about me every single night. The taste of me. The feel of me. The smell of me. Tell me you haven’t been haunted the way I have.”

“Haunted? Not for a single moment,” she murmured, as she unbuttoned the first of his buttons. “Not by your smile. Not by your laugh. Not by how your thighs look in those trousers.”

This won her a little smile. “I always knew you were a liar,” he murmured back. He’d finished with her laces and had nudged her bodice down over her shoulders, and his mouth trailed to the slope of them, leaving gooseflesh in their wake.

She unbuttoned the second button. And then slipped her hands into his shirt, and oh, the wondrous relief to be touching him. Her hands slid over the smooth hard muscle of him and the crisp curling hair and the glorious heat. She lay her cheek against his chest and listened to his heart beat. She dragged her fingers down the seam between muscles that led to the buttons of his trousers. She had the intense pleasure of feeling his belly leap when his breath snagged, of feeling his hands tighten around her, drag softly up her spine, over the nape of her neck, leaving a trail of heat. She licked his nipple.

She suspected she
did
have a gift for pleasuring. But only for a man she wanted to pleasure.

“I am going to take you every imaginable way,” he promised on a whisper, tugging her bodice lower.

“Excellent,” she murmured. She tugged his shirt from his trousers.

“Right side up, upside down, sideways, sitting, standing. You on top. Then me on top.”

“A brilliant plan.” His shirt fell from his shoulders. Oh, his shoulders. The vast glorious curve of them. She couldn’t wait to lick one.

“Backward, forward. On the bed, on the table, on the settee.”

He paused, and lifted her dress off over her head with all the ceremony of an unveiling. It fell to the floor.

“And then?” she whispered.

“And then we’ll do it all over again.”

It was the never-ending story!

And yet when they were at last completely nude, he seemed a bit wonderstruck. A bit like a man who hardly knew where to begin, since the options were endless and he’d been presented with a feast.

So she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her body against him, and felt the jump of his belly from his sharp intake of breath, at the blissful shock of at last being skin to skin. She placed a soft hot kiss into the center of his chest, and then another, a little lower, and she followed the kisses with the slide of her hands down over his belly, then over his thighs, teasing, and then she cupped his swelling cock, and stroked it, gently at first, then enclosed it in her fist.

His breath snagged again; his head tipped back on a soft groan, and his hands played over her spine.

“Don’t stop,” he whispered.

So she did it again,. His hands cupped her arse and pressed her closer to him as he took her mouth again, and oh, the pleasure of it.

“I left out one way,” he murmured against her lips.

“What’s that?”

“Quickly.”

His best idea yet.

He lifted her up, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, then looped her arms around his neck, and he carried her to the bed and lowered her down. She landed with a soft thump.

He gazed down for a second or so longer, baldly admiring her, his eyes dark and wondering. Long enough to make her blush. As if he didn’t want to forget this moment.

She reached up for his hand and pulled him down.

Oh, the unthinkable magic of touching him and being touched by him. The astonishing privilege of feeling his body against the length of her body. She finally understood the true purpose of skin, of fingertips, of lips. She wanted to taste every inch of him, every hollow, every slope, but there was time for that later. For now they lay folded together, limbs entangled, his lovely enormous erect cock pressed against her belly, and kissed, and allowed their hands to greedily wander, to discover, purposeless, yet every stroke, every touch, every kiss, every breath, inflamed and aroused. His hands filled with her breasts, and he stroked her nipples until she was gasping, arching,
begging
for it. He slipped down the length of her and took one into his mouth and bit gently.

She threw a leg over his hip, and he teased her, sliding his cock where she was wet, and hot, and swollen with need for him.

“Oh, God, Jonathan.
Now, now, now
.”

He hovered over her, and she wrapped her legs around him. She didn’t want to savor the moment of joining. She didn’t want finesse. She wanted what he wanted, and that was to be inexorably, thoroughly claimed. She arched beneath him as he plunged into her, pulling him closer with her legs, urging him deeper and deeper. She reveled in how black his gaze went, how fierce, and how he closed his eyes against the nearly intolerable pleasure.

“
Jonathan . . . please . . . fast . . .”

She didn’t have to beg. His white hips drummed swiftly, driving them toward a shattering release. And it was Jonathan who shook in her arms, and her name that was a hoarse cry against her throat as he shuddered.

L
ATER THEY LAY
silent and limp and spent. He’d pulled all the pins from her hair and combed it out until it fanned over the pillow.

“Russet,” he murmured to himself.

“No,” she murmured again.

He drowsily tangled his fingers in the length of her hair.

“No one has ever kissed me the way you do,” she said.

“Have there been many?” His voice was languid. As far as he was concerned, it wouldn’t matter. She understood this.

“No,” she admitted.

“It’s the only way I know how to kiss you. It was like I had no choice.”

“What do you mean?”

He tipped back his head in thought. “What did Shakespeare say . . . something about a woman and infinite variety, or some such?”

She laughed. “Oh, fine grasp of Shakespeare, Oxford boy. You’re asking the wrong girl.”

“But that’s you. Kissing you is . . . kissing you is its own world.”

She knew what he meant. The fact that he could speak it moved her immeasurably and she could say nothing at all. “Have
you
kissed many . . .”

“Not one of them counted until you.”

She was thunderstruck. She stared at him. Then she drew a strand of her hair over her face, moved and overwhelmed.

He peeled it away gently. He looked down at her thoughtfully for a long moment.

She gazed back at him. His brow furrowed, as though he meant to say something profound. She held her breath.

“Backward now?” he suggested.

“Are you going to call out our lovemaking like a billiards game?”

He laughed. God, how she loved his laugh.

Thud, thud, thud.
Upstairs Rutherford walked across the room.

Tommy thought, how about that? I’ve added my own thumping to the building at last.

Chapter 26

A
FTER TWO HOURS OF
luxuriously lying with each other, Tommy had discovered more things. For instance, how his thighs were so marvelously, shockingly hard. A delicious benefit of all that riding horseback.

As her hand wandered down and between them, he optimistically opened them a bit wider, encouraging her to attend to the swelling between them.

“You’ve marvelous muscles in your thighs,” she murmured, as she slipped a hand between them.

“It’s true. Best be careful. If I close them too quickly, I might accidentally snap your wrist like a twig.”

She laughed. She bent to place a kiss on that pale smooth place deep inside them where horseback riding had worn away his hair. She saw his cock twitch and leap a little.

“The thighs are all well and good, but I think you intend to go higher.” He sounded distracted. It was an erotic sound. It was the beginning of him losing his mind with pleasure. “Perhaps you need a map.”

“Patience,” she ordered, but she bent and indulged him and drew the head of his cock slowly into her mouth. Then traced it with her tongue, and slid her lips down over it harder, and followed it with her fists.

He groaned. “Oh, God. Christ, I’m a lucky man.”

His hands twined through her hair as she slid her lips over him, slowly then quickly, and he arched, his breathing hoarse now.

“You wouldn’t consider riding me, would you?” he asked politely.

“You’ve lovely manners,” she purred. “But of course.”

She climbed aboard, and eased down over his cock, and . . . Oh God . . . she half sighed, half moaned with the pleasure of it. She felt him everywhere, her fingertips to the soles of her feet. Her head went back, eyes shut. So. Good.

His big hands spanned her back, and they moved together slowly at first, eyes locked. Each daring the other, teasing with a pause, a slow slide. He allowed her to dictate the rhythm. Slow, and then stop. A rise, a pause, then a fall. Sensual torment. The cords of his neck grew taut, and his head thrashed back as his chest heaved against hers. He moaned as she rose again. The sweat sheened his throat, and his eyes were black now. She licked him where the sweat traveled to his collarbone.

“Please, Tommy. Have mercy. I need . . .
please . . .
GOD . . .”

He bucked upward, and she had mercy. She met him hard, and they rocked together, a frenzy of joining now, her nipples chafing his chest a lightning burst of sensation, her fingers clawing his shoulders, as she swore and urged him on harder, and harder, and deeper, and deeper, until he made a roar of her name.

“
Tommy!
” His head dropped back and he shuddered.

And she buried her long soundless cry in his throat as she shattered.

F
OUR HOURS LATER
he discovered things about
her
.

For instance:

“You’ve an arse like a peach,” he said as he gently nipped one cheek. He’d kissed his way down her spine while she lay on her stomach, sated, her head resting on her arm. He licked the sweet little indentation at the base of her spine, and she stirred and sighed. He slipped his fingers between her thighs, delicately, lightly, tracing the downy hair there, until she sighed again, and her thighs shifted open wider.

He obliged her, sliding his fingers between her legs, to where she was slick and satiny smooth, and he slid them in and out again.

She groaned softly and bridged her hips up.

“Do you like it?” His voice was tense.

“Please don’t stop.” A prayer if she’d ever prayed one.

“On your hands and knees,” he ordered softly.

She arched her body up to obey him. And he shifted to his back, and slipped his head between her legs, and reached his hands up to cup her arse, and then brought her down to his mouth.

And he thrust his tongue hard along her wetness.

Mother of God. The
shock
. The exquisite
shock
. She hissed the pleasure of it as it lightninged through her bud. The hiss evolved into a helpless carnal groan. “Oh, God. Oh, please . . . Jonathan.”

“Again?” he murmured.

She nearly whimpered.

He did it again, circling this time, then sucking lightly. It rushed to her head, the bliss of it; she nearly fell. He held her fast.

He feasted, his tongue silken, deft, insistent, a revelation, driving her to the brink of madness with a pleasure she’d never dreamed attainable. She heard her own breath like the ocean in her ears, and the animal sounds of pleasure and encouragement she’d never imagined she was capable of making. And then he sucked hard, and sensation rushed over her, like flames.