The Real Deal (26 page)

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Authors: Lucy Monroe

BOOK: The Real Deal
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“I never knew how powerful love could be. It's pretty much unstoppable.” She could hear the lingering disbelief in her own voice. “Even though I know I'm going to end up hurting, I can't hold back from whatever Simon is willing to give me.”
“His body.”
“It's a great body, Jillian.”
Her friend snorted laughter. “Amanda!”
“He cares about me, too. Maybe it's not love, but it's more than I ever got from Lance. Simon wants me to be happy while I'm with him.” He did all sorts of little things to show her, like setting up this office area for her and gaining Jacob's agreement to let her watch Jillian's show every day on his television. “And he never criticizes me. He's sort of blind and tells me all the time how beautiful I am.”
“Aw, honey.”
“Jill, it's so amazing, but when I'm with him, I feel like I'm not just Amanda Zachary, junior executive and failure in the marriage stakes.”
“You're not the failure,” Jillian said fiercely.
“That's what Simon says too. He can't understand how Lance didn't want me. He said my ex must have been the most inept lover alive not to be able to please a responsive woman like me.
Can you imagine?
”
“I tried to tell you that not all men were like that jerk you married.”
“Maybe not, but I don't think I would respond to other men the way I do to Simon. I want him, Jill, and I've never
wanted
another man, not like that.”
Jillian, who had had an active love life since she was sixteen, would probably have a hard time understanding that. She wouldn't make fun of Amanda, though. She never had, no matter how far apart their perception of something was.
“So, tell me more about this guy. I've got that he's hell on wheels in bed, but I want more info on what he's like out of it.”
Jillian grilled Amanda about Simon for another twenty minutes, before letting her change the subject. Not that Amanda minded talking about the man she'd fallen in love with. She didn't, but the more she talked about him the more unlikely it seemed that a man like that would fall in love with her. However, when she flipped her cell phone closed forty minutes later, she was smiling.
Jill's initial reaction had surprised her, but the other woman had ended the call by saying, “Go for it.”
 
 
The next morning, Amanda woke up to the feel of Simon's hand gently caressing her stomach. Her eyes fluttered open to his steel-gray gaze.
She smiled. “Hi.”
He kissed her, tenderly, sweetly and oh so slowly. “Hi.”
“You know what today is?” she asked.
His brows drew together then his expression cleared. “The five day anniversary since the first time we made love. What do you want to do to celebrate?”
She felt her heart constrict. He could be so romantic, even if he did tend to forget everyone else in the room when his mind started chewing on one of his projects.
“That too, but I was thinking that it's Saturday. I don't have to work today. How about you?”
She didn't think he kept regular hours, but maybe he could take a break today.
His forefinger drew a circle around her right nipple, causing the flesh to swell and stiffen immediately. “The only thing I want to work on today is us.”
The breath stilled in her chest for a full five seconds and then it came whooshing out on a rush of air. Had he really said that? That he wanted to work on them . . . that there was a real
them
to work on, not just two people who were extremely compatible in bed?
Her thoughts short-circuited as he went about once again proving that compatibility.
 
 
Simon carried Amanda into the shower. She was right. When he was around her he had some major caveman tendencies, but she liked it. She might haughtily protest his habit of picking her up and carrying her around, but she always curled into him with a trusting sensuality that he found addictive.
Hell, everything about Amanda was addictive. From the way her breath hitched when he first probed the entrance to her body to the way she teased Jacob about having a crush on one of the female leads in Jillian's show. The warm sunshine that seemed such a natural part of her personality dispelled every lingering shadow in his soul but one. He could not dispel the knowledge that one day soon, she would be gone.
It made him determined to enjoy her to the fullest while he had her. His libido complied with an enthusiasm he hadn't known since his teens. Their recent lovemaking had been quick and fierce, the perfect beginning to a day spent entirely in her company.
He let her slide down his body, before reaching in to turn on the taps. She liked her shower hotter than he did, so he set the temperature on the two showerheads on the left higher than the overhead nozzle of the two on the right.
He felt a featherlight touch on his back and turned around to face her. She had an odd expression on her face.
“What is it?”
“I was just touching you to see if you're real.” Her eyes reflected an inexplicable wonder.
His knees about buckled and his recently satisfied male member surged with renewed arousal. “I'm real.” Not only did he act like a caveman, he sounded like one, practically growling his response to her.
“Yes.” Satisfaction laced her voice. Then she smiled and reached past him to test the water. “It's hot.”
He nodded, still a little stunned by the awe he'd seen on her face for that brief moment.
They stepped into the oversize shower stall.
He'd had it built this way because he liked space around him. The five showerheads had been a luxury he'd decided to indulge in, which had turned out to be doubly decadent when he and Amanda washed beneath them. He had discovered some very interesting uses for the directed jets of water when making love with her, uses that made her blush and come apart with pleasure at the same time.
But today he wanted more than to make love with this beautiful woman full of stimulating contradictions. He wanted her to make love to him. It had taken him a while, but he'd finally realized that she almost never initiated their touching and that she was reticent about touching his body. He'd caught on right away that it wasn't because she didn't want to. She looked at him with a hunger that stirred his baser instincts, but she never acted on that hunger.
At first, he'd been glad. He'd been careful not to overwhelm her with his size, but she didn't show the slightest indication that she found his overt masculinity overwhelming. In fact, she went crazy when he touched her so deeply inside with his aroused flesh that he couldn't go any farther. She was tiny compared to him, but her passion made them the perfect fit.
Except, she didn't touch him and he was going hungry for the feel of her sweet little hands on his sex.
He handed the soap to her. “Wash me?”
Her head jerked up and she stared at him with those drown-in-me brown eyes. “All over?” she asked as if she needed his permission.
Oh, yeah. “Please.”
Her eyes lit with anticipation. “I've been wanting to, but I wasn't sure . . .” her voice trailed off and she caressed him tentatively with the soap across his chest. “You'll tell me if I do it wrong, won't you?”
Damn that bastard she'd been married to.
Simon reached out and framed her face with his hands, making her look at him. “Any way you touch me is the right way. I'm dying for the feel of your hands on my skin. Amanda, don't you know you're the best lover I've ever had? Please, baby, don't let that bastard stop you from giving me what he was too stupid to want.”
Her smile was misty, but brilliant. “Okay.” She put the soap aside. “I want to feel you with my hands, both of them, alright?”
He supposed it would take time for those little hesitations to be completely dispelled. “It's more than all right. It's perfect.”
He couldn't talk after that because her hands were doing things to him he'd dreamed of since the moment he met her. She started with his head, massaging his scalp, playing with the shoulder-length strands of his hair before moving on to touch his face with butterfly caresses. His eyelids slid shut as she brushed his cheekbones.
She outlined his lips with a fingertip. “I love your mouth, Simon.”
He nipped at her finger. “My mouth loves your body, baby.”
She laughed softly, sensually.
Then her hands were on his neck, lightly tracing his pulse. “Your heartbeat is a little fast, darling. Maybe you should have your blood pressure checked.”
“It wouldn't do any good. It's always high when you're around.”
A feathery kiss pressed against his pulse point. Her fingers trailed down his chest, zeroing in on the small brown disks of his male nipples. “They're just like mine. They like being touched too.”
He couldn't make his mouth form a response. All he could do was groan with the teasing pleasure she was subjecting him to.
“Do they like other things, I wonder?”
She knew damn well they did. She'd sucked on him last night until he'd taken her in such frenzy that he'd been terrified he had hurt her until she screamed her release in his ear.
She suckled him, first one and then the other. She didn't linger and he didn't beg her to because he didn't want anything to delay her reaching the ultimate goal. A delicate bite on each nipple ended her torment of those erogenous zones.
Her mouth and hands moved downward, caressing a stomach that had gone rock hard with excitement. She outlined each one of his defined abdominal muscles. “You've got an amazing body.” Her voice was husky and so sexy it was like a caress on his sensitized skin.
Then she went lower.
He stopped breathing, in a wealth of torment waiting for her to touch his most intimate male flesh, but in a move calculated to drive him insane, she bypassed his sex and went to the tensed muscles of his thighs. She caressed them with all ten fingertips, making him shudder and wonder if he was going to be able to stay standing.
His legs came close to collapsing when she caressed the back of his knees. “You're sensitive here.”
“Yes,” he managed to get out in a guttural voice.
“And here? Are you sensitive here too?” She brushed the inside of his thighs, letting the backs of her fingers make brief contact with his sacs.
He muttered a short, Anglo-Saxon term that he was usually careful not to use in a woman's presence.
She laughed. “Not yet, darling, but soon.”
He liked it when she called him darling. It was intimate, as intimate as her touch.
“Amanda.” His hips strained toward her, his erect flesh brushing against her face. “Please, baby, touch me there.”
His hands were flattened against the warmed and wet tile of the shower stall, and every muscle in his body was tense with anticipation.
When she didn't say or do anything for several long seconds, he opened his eyes and looked down at her. She was staring at his sex with a sort of rapture. He felt a small amount of pre-ejaculate come out in testimony of how much that look turned him on.
She saw it and licked her lips, making him groan. She reached out with one delicate little fingertip and touched the bead of moisture at the tip of his penis. Then she brought it to her lips and tasted it.
He groaned. She was going to kill him with her innocently sensual curiosity.
She looked up at him, her eyes darkened almost to black with desire. “I like it.”
“Oh, baby. . . .” How could he want to pound into her with every inch of his throbbing arousal, while at the same time wanting to hold her and kiss her with a tenderness he'd never felt for another woman?
Her fingers wrapped around him and he choked on his own breath. The tips did not quite touch.
“You're big, aren't you? I mean bigger than average.” Her tone was that of a scientist gathering information and it made him smile despite the acuity of his need.
“I don't measure myself against other men,” he said truthfully, if evasively.
“Well, you're a lot bigger than Lance was.”
Something about the wording of that statement pricked at him until he had an insight that he could not quite believe. “Are you saying you don't have any other standard of comparison?”
She didn't look up at him, her attention was wholly engaged with his hardened rod. “I've never been intimate with any other man except you and Lance.”
He wouldn't define what she'd had with her ex-husband as intimacy. “You're practically a virgin!”

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