Authors: Christina Dodd
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal, #General
Storm of Shadows (23 page)
“
P
hilippe’s fast on his feet,” Aaron muttered, and turned to Rosamund.
P
hilippe’s fast on his feet,” Aaron muttered, and turned to Rosamund.
She looked on the verge of tears. “I told him you’d hate this. I told him I wasn’t pretty like this. I begged him to do something different, but he insisted that this was exactly me. But I don’t want it to be me. I wanted to be pretty. For once in my life, I wanted to be pretty.”
While she talked, Aaron leaned forward and pressed the button to close the window between the driver and the backseat. When they were sealed inside, surrounded by black leather and dim light, with the sound of the motor purring in the front and the rainy Paris streets passing outside, he turned to her. Grasping the champagne flute, he placed it beside his in the bar. Removing her glasses, he carefully slid them into the door pocket. He took her into his arms, and in a fury of frustration and desire, he said, “You are so much more than pretty.”
And he kissed her. Kissed her with all the pent-up anguish of a man who had seen and touched and traveled with the woman he wanted. Ruthlessly, he opened her lips, tasting mint toothpaste and all the while wondering what that soft, red mouth would feel like wrapped around his dick. He thrust his tongue inside, pretending he had entered her body with his. He handled her struggles impatiently, moving her hands off his chest and up around his shoulders.
He couldn’t bear for her to push him away. Not now. Not when she had just become everything he had never dared to imagine she could be—a sensual creature living in this moment and aware of her own self.
When he pulled his lips away—the girl needed to breathe, after all—she clutched her fingers in his hair and held him still. “Don’t kiss me because you feel sorry for me.”
He wanted to laugh, but it would have hurt his still-sore ribs. “Pull down my fly and tell me if that feels like pity to you.”
“Your fly? You mean, the zipper in your trousers?” Rosamund twisted in his arms.
Aaron knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to regain her equilibrium, be the rational, sensible, unyielding librarian.
It was way too late for that.
He held her off-balance, looked into her shocked eyes, and got right to the heart of his interest. “What are you wearing under that skirt?”
“What?”
She sounded so shocked.
She sounded so shocked.
Was Philippe right? Was she a virgin? If she was, her first time shouldn’t be in the backseat of a limo, not even when Philippe had assured him they were as good as alone.
On the other hand, lots of girls had their first time in the back of a car, and the world was well-populated, so Aaron assumed they weren’t scarred by the experience.
Now, if he came too soon, that might scar her—and as horny as he was, coming too soon was a real possibility.
“Tell me what kind of panties you’re wearing.” He couldn’t wait for the answer. Instead he at once slid his hand up her outer thigh, relished the silk of her stockings, finding the lace at the top and the clasp of a sleek garter. Then the smooth gloss of her skin, the bare globe of her ass, the fragment of lace between her cheeks . . .
A thong. She was wearing a garter belt and the smallest wisp of a thong ever created.
“I’m going to kill Philippe.” Somewhere, in the depths of his mind, Aaron knew his voice sounded tortured. He pushed her skirt up around her waist, and said, “Next time I see him, I’m going to kill him.”
Her fingers combed through the hair at the back of his neck, over and over, driving him mad with the pleasure of her touch. How had she so unerringly found one of his pleasure zones?
Why, when he inhaled, did he smell the scent of leather warmed from their bodies? The spicy perfume at her throat? Why did each bump of the road make him imagine how it would feel if he put her on his lap and let her ride him like a stallion?
The skin between her thighs felt like silk, yet his thumb found a small, raised area. “What’s this?” It felt like . . . like a pattern . . .
“It’s my tattoo.” As he stroked her, her voice grew sultry.
He had forgotten . . . no, he had tried to forget about her tattoo. “This is the one you got on a South Sea island?”
“Yes. It’s a ritual. All the girls who pass through puberty there are tattooed with a . . . with a . . . oh, Aaron . . .”
“Tell me what it is.” He nipped her earlobe to get her attention, then sucked it into his mouth and laved it with his tongue.
“An orchid.”
“Of course. What else would it be?” A honeyed orchid, smooth to the touch, and resembling a woman’s—“What color is it?”
“Pink.”
“Of course,” he said again. He never doubted it for a minute.
“Specifically, it’s a moth orchid, phalaenopsis, said to resemble a moth in flight and native to”—she struggled to speak—“Southeast Asia.”
She seemed to think he required more information, which he did, but not about the flower. “Rosamund.”
“Hm?”
“You research everything. Did you research sex?” He hoped to hell she had.
She grew warm in his arms.
God. She was blushing.
“Yes.” She sounded stoutly defiant. “I was curious, and I thought there was a chance that someday I might . . . get to . . . you know . . .”
Shit. She’d just admitted it.
Virgin. Virgin. Virgin.
Virgin. Virgin. Virgin.
“Darling, I promise. Today’s your lucky day.” What a stupid thing to say. He sounded like a guy flubbing his pickup lines in a bar.
She didn’t seem to care, especially not when he used his hand to spread her legs, and ran his fingers under the lacy elastic, up and down, touching everything that had never been touched before.
He was exploring untouched territory, and the mere thought made him harder.
Primitive and brutish? Undoubtedly. Uncivilized? Completely. Politically incorrect? You bet. A big fat disadvantage when it came to having the kind of sex he wanted to have? Oh, yeah. But none of that made any difference to the primitive, brutish, uncivilized, and politically incorrect virile beast that hid in his brain and heart.
Rosamund was a virgin. She was his, all his, only his. And he was going to keep it that way.
He placed the heel of his hand at the front over her mound, and pressed it once. She jumped, caught her breath, looked frightened and . . . excited.
Excited
. Thank God.
. Thank God.
He did it again and again, a slow, warm pump of pressure. “Feel that?” he whispered. “That’s what it’ll feel like when I’m between your legs. It’s good, isn’t it?”
She nodded, wide-eyed.
“Then there’s this.” He slid his fingers under the thong, separated her nether lips, found her clit, and stroked it between his thumb and fingers. “I can do this while we’re screwing, and you’ll orgasm. Over and over. You’ll be clawing with need and then limp with relief, and then clawing with need again.”
She trembled in his arms, digging her fingers into his shoulders, moving her hips in tiny, uncertain circles.
“I’m not sure, but I think you’ll scream while you come. Do you know? What kind of sounds you make?”
“No, I . . . Sounds? Like moaning and . . . I can’t imagine I’ll make any sounds.”
“Really?” If he could have, he would have laughed. “Do you use a vibrator?”
She tensed. She wet her lips, trying to concentrate on answering the question while below, he stroked her, over and over. “I do. The vibrator. They say . . . um, religions say . . . that you’ll go crazy if you use one, but I think I’ll go crazy if I . . .”
“Don’t?”
“Right. If I don’t. The vibrator. It’s good.” Her lips parted as she tried to catch her breath. “That’s good, too. What you’re doing. Really good.”
As the needs of her body overcame the cautions of her mind, her hip movements were becoming more insistent.
He was seeing, bringing about, the blossoming of a warm, sensual, demanding creature.
That blossoming made him feel like a god.
As he touched Rosamund, she grew damp, and that was all the permission he needed. With one smooth motion, he thrust his finger inside her.
His own audacity was almost his undoing.
She was tight and hot, and his dick suddenly developed an imagination, one that claimed
it
, not his finger, was inside her. Aaron trembled on the verge of coming in his shorts, something he had not done since his early teens. He strained to hold himself back.
it
, not his finger, was inside her. Aaron trembled on the verge of coming in his shorts, something he had not done since his early teens. He strained to hold himself back.
Then he realized . . . she’d stopped moving and was barely breathing. . . .
“What’s wrong?” He kissed her ear, her throat. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. No, but this is too . . .”
She hesitated for so long, he found himself doing what he had sworn he would never do—trying to comprehend a woman’s mind. “It’s too . . . deep? Public? Distasteful?”
She shook her head after each guess.
“Intimate?”
“Yes.” She hid her face in his shirt. “Yes.”
“Do you want me to stop?” Merely asking the question almost killed him.
She shook her head.
No, stupid. She wants you to slow down. To seduce her. Because she is a virgin, and this is the price you have to pay.
Be careful what you ask for, Aaron Eagle.
Carefully, slowly, he slid his finger out of her.
She whimpered in distress.
Apparently, the intimacy was too soon and too intense, but at the same time, she liked having him fill her.
He took the tiniest bit of comfort from that. Soon he would fill her with himself, breach her virginity, and she would gasp and hold him in her arms, and he would bring them both to climax.
Soon. Damn it.
Soon
.
Soon
.
He wedged himself in the corner between the door and the leather back, then pulled her into his lap, discarding her panties on the way. He cradled her shoulders with one arm, her bare bottom against his closed fly, a taunt to his control, and let her legs sprawl across the seat.
He leaned around to reach for the champagne flute.
She chose that moment to squirm in his lap, trying to adjust her skirt over her thighs to some instinctive female predetermined decent level halfway down her thighs.
Her butt wiggled against the hardest erection he’d ever experienced, an erection so big King Kong could have climbed it holding Fay Wray in his palm. Aaron could almost see an atomic blue glow coming from his balls, and it was a miracle the damned crystal flute didn’t crack in his grip.
When she finally subsided, he ungritted his teeth long enough to ask, “Satisfied?” Because he sure as hell wasn’t.
Something of his agony must have sounded in his voice, for she cast him a look of cautious horror. “Am I too heavy?” She tried to spring free.
“No.” He caught her around the waist. “You are not too heavy. I simply want you to enjoy a sip of champagne. I know Philippe, and I’m sure this is no less than Dom Perignon.” He held the glass to her lips, and watched her profile as she took her first sip.
She closed her eyes as if the taste was ecstasy, and that worshipful expression made him want to pull her under him and show her another way to ecstasy.
In a dreamy voice, she said, “Do you know Dom Perignon is famous for tasting champagne and saying, ‘I am drinking the stars’?”
“I’ve heard that.” Of course, she knew more about it than he did. The woman was a plethora of both useless and useful information.
“Actually, while the good monk was responsible for increasing the quality of the Benedictine wines, he didn’t make bubbly champagne, and the quote came from late nineteenth-century advertising.” She cupped his hand with hers to bring the glass to her mouth again. “But it really
is
like drinking stars.”
is
like drinking stars.”
“Yes.” He leaned his mouth close to her ear, and suggested, “If you would like, I can show you other ways to taste the stars.”
Rosamund audibly swallowed her wine. “Really?” Her voice squeaked.
The clean scent of her hair filled his head, intoxicating him as surely as the champagne intoxicated her. “Finish your glass,” he said, and immersed his fingers into his own champagne flute.
The champagne bubbled against his skin, and he almost laughed at her expression—amazed and rapt as he slipped his hand under her skirt, shocked by the cool touch of his champagne-dipped fingers in the warmth between her legs. “Darling, open for me. A little more . . .”
She did. Gradually, with reluctant fascination.
He dipped his fingers again, and this time when he slid his fingers along her clit, she whimpered. “Do you like that?” he whispered in her ear. “Can you feel the bubbles?”
“It feels like it tastes. Cool and sort of—”
He repeated his actions—the dip into the glass, the caress between her legs, over her clit, around the entrance to her body, and back to the glass. “Sort of what?” he asked.
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