The funniest little strangled noise came from deep in his throat. Someone moved—he had no idea who. But suddenly her small, curvy, lithe body, slippery with silk, was pressed tight against his, and trying to maintain his self-control seemed unnecessary and stupid. He unleashed his restless hands and ran them over her bare back and arms—anywhere he could reach.
And she melted into him.
Chapter 20
G
reene’s hands on her body unlocked something hidden deep inside Simone, some secret, passion-filled room she hadn’t even known she possessed. Her lust, free now, ran wild. She ran her hands up his long, hard arms and tightened them around his neck, rubbing her fingers over the wiry silkiness of his hair.
“Alex.”
Aroused to the point of drunkenness, she tilted her face up for his kiss.
None was forthcoming. Whimpering a protest, she raised her heavy lids to find him staring as if he meant to swallow her whole at some point in the very near future. His hands cupped the sides of her face and his thumbs stroked over her cheeks, firing her blood to the boiling point and beyond.
“
What
did you say?”
Her throbbing, pulsing body couldn’t understand the delay, and didn’t want her to waste time talking. Rising on her tiptoes, she strained against him, trying to get to his mouth. “Kiss me. Now.”
“No. You said my name. You said
Alex.
”
Had she? She couldn’t remember, but judging from his incredulous tone, she had and he thought it was an event as miraculous as walking on water. Did such a little thing mean so much to him? Tightening her arms around his neck, she brushed a kiss across his mouth, aware of him watching as if he was afraid to close his eyes and miss something. Against her breasts, his chest heaved, inflating and deflating like a giant bellows.
“I’ll tell you what,
Alex,
” she murmured, stroking her tongue along his delicious bottom lip. “I’ll say your name again if you kiss me.”
“Oh, I’m going to do more than kiss you.”
Lowering his head, he fused his hot mouth to hers and incinerated any lingering coherence she may have had. All she could do was hold on for the ride and try to keep up.
She’d kissed dozens of men in her life, but none with his consummate ease and absolute mastery. One second his lips and tongue took hers roughly, rudely, as if he meant to insult her and show who was in charge, and she gloried in his possession. But just as quickly he backed off, until his light, teasing mouth drove her wild as he barely brushed her lips.
His hands took a leisurely tour of her body, unerringly finding all of her erogenous zones as if she’d drawn him a map. Threading his fingers through the hair at her nape, he massaged as he’d done that day in the car.
She groaned helplessly. “Alex…
Alex.
”
“How does that feel?” His lips moved against her throat as he talked and then she felt the sharp edge of his teeth graze her tender neck. Writhing, she cried out.
“How does that feel?”
He had to ask? Dazed and wobbly, she struggled to remember a few words of English. “G-good. It feels good,” she gasped.
“Good?”
Those heavy dark brows lowered over his glittering eyes as if she’d insulted him. “I’ll have to do better than that.”
Her belly did a crazy flip at the thought. The man already had her panting, moaning, throbbing and sweating, and he hadn’t even touched her bare flesh. If he did any better he’d kill her. Maybe they should stop.
“Alex,” she tried as he buried his lips in the side of her neck.
Unsmiling, he let her go and took a big step back. In the darkness, she saw the whites of his eyes as his gleaming gaze slid slowly down her body. “Do you have any idea how much I want you to take your dress off?”
“Oh,” she groaned, knowing she wanted to take her dress off, knowing she would do whatever he asked.
“Not tonight,” he said, “but soon.
Soon.
”
Yes,
soon,
she thought, nodding.
“Pull your skirt up for me so I can touch you.”
Though he said it in a cajoling, irresistible voice, it was a command, and she knew it. Disobeying never even crossed her mind. Reaching down, she gathered the bottom of the dress in her hands and slid it up her body, the faint slither of silk excruciatingly intimate in the night air. He watched as she revealed her legs. Nothing in her life had ever felt as thrilling as his hot gaze and the cool breeze sliding over her skin. Heat, insistent and wet, throbbed high up between her thighs.
“Come here,” he said in a thick, low voice.
She went to him and he dragged his hands down her back, cupped her butt, bare except for the scrap of her black lace thong, and lifted her high. Without conscious thought, she wrapped her legs around his waist and enjoyed the scratch of his trousers against her inner thighs as he kneaded her hips and butt. There was something indescribably delicious and illicit about being half-naked when he wasn’t.
Pressing his face to her breasts, Alex nuzzled and inhaled as if he intended to suck her into his body. He swung her around and sat her on the gazebo’s outer rail, his hands running up and down her thighs, then higher. She tried to hold on as the world spun away into blackness.
Again and again, his hands ran over the front of her dress, applying an excruciating bit of extra pressure as his palms rubbed her nipples. And then somehow he’d pulled down the low bodice of her dress.
Bared to the breeze, her breasts puckered and tightened to the point of pain. “Please,
please,
” she mewled.
Alex obligingly lowered his mouth, licking, suckling and scraping like a starving man feasting on Thanksgiving dinner. Shameless and mindless, Simone clung and squirmed, pleaded and moaned and, finally, chanted like a porn star.
“Alex, Alex,
Alex.
”
“Mmmm?”
“W-we…we should stop,” she gasped.
Raising his head, panting, he focused his smoldering gaze on her face with obvious difficulty. “I don’t think so.” He peeled one of her hands away from his neck and pulled it to his hard, heavy groin.
Her mouth dried out and, light-headed with need, she swayed dangerously on her perch. Alex held her with one hand, and with the other he roughly pressed her palm to his erection.
Running it up and down his length, over and over, Alex proved, once and for all, that “Nikki H.” was a consummate liar. Dazed and outdone, Simone gave up any further feeble attempts to get this man to stop what he was doing. After a minute, he pulled her hand away—she whimpered a protest—and guided it back to his neck. His hands slid and kneaded their way back under her skirts, up her legs and around her mostly-bare butt.
Groaning, Alex jerked her forward, grinding her against the concrete length in his pants. They fit together perfectly. Alarming streaks of pleasure pulsed from her wet sex to her quivering belly. Oh,
oh,
he shouldn’t…she couldn’t…She cried out, her voice echoing around the pond.
His lips found her ear and whispered, the hot words passing deep into her head and her heart. “Soon, Simone,” he said as his hips made slow, rhythmic circles against her, unerringly rubbing the sweet spot between her legs. “Soon we’ll make love, and it’ll be better than this.”
“Yes. Yesss.”
He licked over the delicate curve and then nipped her lobe. “I’ll be deep inside you…So deep…
So deep.
”
His mouth ran over her cheek to her mouth, just as his hand slipped between them. He slid his fingers under her panties, trailing them in her dew, while he kissed her. This kiss, long and searching, exquisitely timed with a well-placed rub at her core, sent her over the edge. Her body exploded, shattering into a million shining pieces like stars across the night sky. She cried out, long and high, too far gone to care if anyone—or everyone—heard her. Finally, drained and spent, she went limp and would have fallen but for his arms holding her.
Alex cooed and murmured, his gentle hands stroking her back while she tried to recover, as if she ever could. At last she gathered enough energy to move again, and adjusted her bodice.
Presentable again, she decided she probably looked quite normal, if no one looked close enough to see the flushed face that surely marked her as a woman who’d just had the sexual experience of a lifetime.
And she was still a virgin.
All these years she’d doled out her sanctimonious advice about sex and claimed to be an expert. What a hypocrite she’d been. She hadn’t known squat about how sex made you lose your mind and all control, how desperate your body could become for relief, how you’d sell your soul to the devil himself for the right man’s touch.
No, she’d known nothing. Until tonight.
Stepping away a little, Alex lowered her skirts. When he looked up at her, his eyes were blacker than the night, his face and shoulders tight with his still unspent passion. Against all odds, Simone felt her sex tighten again. Her heart sank, and she realized she was lost. All he had to do was look at her and she lost all control over her weak, needy body.
“You’re mine now,” he said flatly, stating the obvious with no pleasure in the words. “Don’t you let Romero touch you.
Do you understand me?
”
What else could she do but nod? As if she’d ever want another man to touch her after what Alex had just done.
Staring hard, as if he’d satisfied himself she was serious, he nodded grimly. “Let’s go.”
Taking her hands, he helped her slide to her feet. Upright, she wobbled precariously, feeling as dazed and unfocused as when she’d had her wisdom teeth out and tried to stand after she woke from the anesthetic. He steadied her and handed her her shoes, in complete control as far as she could see. Only the faint sheen of sweat on his face betrayed any emotion.
“You go first,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”
Taking a few slow steps toward the stairs, she discovered, to her further dismay, that she didn’t like being that far away from him. She looked back over her shoulder. “Alex—”
His hard face softened. In two long strides he was behind her, pressing her against him, kissing the side of her neck and running his hands all over her breasts and belly. Trembling, she wrapped her arm around his neck and clung.
Abruptly he let her go and gave her a slight push toward the steps. “Go on, Simone.”
Bereft, she reached for the rail so she wouldn’t fall, gave silent thanks she’d taken off her stilettos and therefore didn’t have that additional complication to staying upright, and staggered down the steps like a drunk.
“Alex?
Alex?
”
Startled, Alex looked up from the sketchpad balanced on his lap. Laurel stood in the middle of his home office holding a LaRosa’s pizza box in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.
He blinked, feeling as if he’d just awoken from being hypnotized. A quick glance around the shadowed room told him he’d wasted his whole Saturday afternoon without ever hitting the trail with his mountain bike, as he’d planned.
Wonderful.
“Hey.” Stretching his arms high overhead, he leaned his head from side to side and tried to work some of the kinks out of his neck. “Did we have plans tonight?”
“Uh-uh. I got the final figures for the auction. A hundred and twenty-two thou. Pretty good, huh?”
“Wow,” he said, the enormous figure pulling him out of his stupor. “That’s really great.”
Laurel put the pizza and wine on the coffee table and crept closer, angling her head to see the completed sketches littering his desk. “Whatcha drawing?”
Alex quickly dropped the sliver of charcoal, swung his feet off the desk and gathered up the stiff sheets of drawing paper before she could take too close a look. When he was done with that, he flipped his drawing pad closed and shoved everything on top of the small credenza behind his chair, well out of Laurel’s reach.
“Nothing,” he told her.
Her eyes went wide and her brows crept toward her hairline. “O-kay,” she said, as if she’d just caught him trying to light a banana and smoke it. Turning, she sat in her usual place on the end of the sofa. “The sketches sort of looked like Simone.”
“Unh,” he grunted. The tips of his fingers, he noticed for the first time, were black with charcoal. Grabbing a tissue, he tried to wipe off some of the mess.
“So…that wasn’t Simone?”
Alex’s jaw ground down with annoyance, and he glared at his sister for asking such a stupid question. Of course it was Simone. Simone in her silky purple dress. Simone jogging. Simone laughing, Simone scowling. And his new personal favorite: Simone in ecstasy, with her head thrown back, lips parted and shoulders thrust forward in the moonlight.
He felt like Picasso in his Blue Period: fixated. His eyes saw only one thing, his brain only thought Simone thoughts, and the voice in his head played an unchanging and unending soundtrack. Simone, Simone, Simone.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh.” Laurel watched him thoughtfully. “Have you talked to her since the auction?”
“No.”
Not that he hadn’t tried—repeatedly and desperately—to talk to her. How many times had he called her office and apartment this week? Two hundred? Only his vow to take things slowly had kept him from barging into her office like he’d done before. If she needed a little time, he’d give her a little time.
Only…why did she need a little time?
Was she punishing him? Didn’t she have her pound of flesh by now? Had he offended her? Finally driven her away for good?
Scared her?
She couldn’t be more scared than he was.
Never in his life had he known fear before. Oh, sure, he’d had anxious moments, like when bullies had bothered him at school and when his parents divorced. But he’d never been
scared—
the kind of fear that trapped the breath in his throat and turned the pit of his belly to a block of lead encased in ice.
Now, though, having touched Simone and had her writhe and cry out in his arms, he knew terror. What if she really didn’t care for him? What if she never let him make love to her? What if she never opened up more than she had up till now? Worst of all, what if she preferred Romero to him?