“So I’m the first prince to come your way?” he asked with a laugh.
She slanted him a Behave-yourself glare and went on, “Now that you know, I suppose you don’t want me anymore.” She glanced at him shyly and looked away.
He took her chin in his hand and turned her face back to him. Kissing her lips lightly, he murmured, “I still want you.”
A slow, wicked smile spread across her lips. “Stand up, then,” she ordered.
Huh? With his brow furrowing in confusion, he got up cautiously, bracing himself on one crutch. At the same time, the stereo suddenly came on with Elvis wailing, “It’s Now or Never.”
He jerked back at the unexpected noise and Annie laughed.
“The stereo does that sometimes. There’s a short in its circuit, I guess.”
He thought about telling her that was a safety hazard, but decided he had more important things on his mind right now. Like why she’d wanted him to stand, and why she was staring at him, arms folded across her chest, with that odd expression on her face. She was probably afraid, being a virgin and all. It was sweet of her, actually.
“Don’t be afraid, Annie. I won’t do anything to hurt you.”
She laughed, a joyous, rippling sound mingling with Elvis’s husky now-or-never warning.
That was probably nervous laughter, Clay concluded. Still, he tilted his head to the side, questioning. “Annie?”
“Take off your shirt, Clay. Please.”
Her softly spoken words ambushed him. With a quick intake of breath, he almost swallowed his tongue.
“Reeeaal slow.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Annie could see that she’d shocked Clay, but she didn’t care. This was her big chance.
Just because she was a virgin didn’t mean she was a dried-up old spinster with no needs. As she’d told him before, there weren’t many princes who ambled on down the farm lane. And when one not-so-perfect specimen accidentally rode in, well, heck, she’d be a fool not to drag him down off his destrier and have her way with him.
“I have needs,” she told him matter-of-factly.
“Needs?” he choked out. Geez, the man looked as if he were choking on his own tongue. Where was the suave, cool-as-a-hybrid-cucumber man who could cut a person off at the knees with a single icy stare?
Okay, sometimes Annie forgot that city people didn’t understand the plain speaking of farm folks who lived with the facts of life on a daily basis. Those who worked with the land and animals tended to be more earthy, more accepting of the forces of nature. Sex was just another of the physical urges God gave all animals, nothing to be embarrassed about. At least, that was what she told herself. If she didn’t justify her behavior in that way, she’d have to admit she was a lust-driven hussy with a compulsion to jump this poor prince’s royal bones.
“Yep. Needs,” she answered with more bravado than she really felt. If he rejected her, she was going to crawl in a hole and never come out. “So shuck that shirt, honey. I’ve been having indecent thoughts ever since I saw you in the emergency room in those cute little boxer shorts.”
Stains of scarlet bloomed on his face at her mention of his boxers. Or was it her needs turning up his internal thermometer?
“This is a joke, right?” Clay said, backing up a bit.
Oh, swell! I’m scaring him. Slow down, Annie. Play it cool. Pretend he’s just hairy old Frankie Wilks.
Ha!
“No joke, Clay. You have a chest that would cause a cloistered nun to melt, and I already have a fever to begin with. So take off the darn shirt, for crying out loud.” Her voice had turned shrill at the end.
“All right, all right,” he said, raising a palm in surrender. “Let’s backtrack to step one. You want me to take off my shirt because you like my chest?”
“Yes.”
He smiled then, one of those glorious affairs that bared his even white teeth and caused those irresistible dimples to play peekaboo with her heart. “What if someone walks in…like your aunt?”
She pooh-poohed that idea. “Do you think Aunt Liza hasn’t seen a man’s chest before? In a house with five males?”
“But Annie,” Clay explained with exaggerated patience. “If you want me to take off my shirt, I’m pretty sure I’ll be wanting you to take off your shirt.” He flashed her a So-there grin.
“Oh.” Delicious images swam in Annie’s head at that suggestion. “Well, I guess I forgot to mention that Aunt Liza is dead to the world once her head hits the pillow. Her alarm clock, set religiously for four A.M., is the only thing that will awaken her now.”
“Yes, you did forget to mention that fact.” His grin didn’t waver at all. “And your brothers?”
“The same. Besides, there’s an unwritten rule in the Fallon house. Nobody walks in unannounced on a courting couple…not that you and I are courting, mind you. Don’t get your feathers all ruffled in that regard. I’m not out to trap you.”
“My feathers aren’t ruffled,” he protested indignantly. Then, understanding that they wouldn’t be interrupted, he immediately pulled off the flannel shirt and raised the T-shirt over his head. Superman couldn’t have done it faster. After that, standing still, he waited for her to make the next move.
He wasn’t smiling now.
He was so beautiful. Wide shoulders. Narrow waist and hips. A thin frame, but not too thin. Muscles delineating his upper arms and forearms and the planes of his chest and abdomen—not a muscle-builder’s puffed-up flesh, just healthy, fit male muscle. Dark, silky hairs peppered his chest, leading down in a vee to the low-riding jeans.
Under her sweeping appraisal, he never once lowered his eyes. Women faltered under such close scrutiny, but not men…not this man.
“Can I touch you?” she whispered.
She saw the hard ridges of his stomach muscles lurch.
Heat curled in her stomach.
At first, he closed his eyes and a low, strangled sound emerged from his lips. He appeared to be out of breath, panting. When he lifted his eyelids, Annie almost staggered backward under the onslaught of blue fire. “If you don’t touch me, I think I’ll go up in smoke,” he whispered back.
Well, that sounds encouraging. She stepped closer and put her hands on his shoulders. He tried to take her in his arms, but Annie swatted his hands away. She wanted to do this herself, with no distractions. “Let me…I want…” she murmured, her brain reeling with feverish urgency. “I want to do things to you. So many things.” Things? What things? Where are these outlandish thoughts coming from? And how am I getting up the nerve to say them aloud?
“Annie…” he started to say, then paused, lost for words. “You take my breath away.”
“Don’t move,” she ordered, and ran her fingertips down both sides of his tension-corded neck, over his shoulders, skimming over the light fur on his arms to his hands, where she twined their fingers for one brief moment, raising the knuckles of one hand, then the other for a brief kiss. She released his hands then, setting them back at his side.
Smoothing the palms of her hands across his chest, she felt his heartbeat thud. She watched in fascination as the flat male nipples hardened and elongated.
Clay gritted out one crude word between clenched teeth.
Annie decided to take the expletive as a compliment.
She couldn’t resist then. Lowering her head, she licked one nipple, sucked it into her mouth, rolled it between her lips.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod!” Clay exclaimed, snaking out a hand to grasp her nape, then lifting her into an embrace where her hips cradled his erection. Alternately kissing her with a devouring hunger and growling into the curve of her neck, he ended up cupping her buttocks and rocking her against him. All the time he was overcome with a violent shiver.
Incredibly, Annie felt herself approaching climax. It was way too soon for that, and not the way she wanted it to happen.
It was Clay who slowed the action. Setting her away from him, he said in a gravelly rasp, “Do you kno
w what I want, Annie, love?”
She cocked her head to the side. “I think so.”
“Not that, silly girl. I mean, yes, I want that, but not now. What I really want is to feel your skin against mine.”
It took several moments for his words to sink in. When they did, Annie felt a thrill of excitement ripple through her already oversensitized body. She jerked off her flannel shirt, then drew the T-shirt up and over her head, leaving only a plain, white nylon bra. Through its thin fabric, her small nipples stood out with stiff, pale rose peaks, aching for his touch.
His eyes studied her with apparent appreciation. He licked his lips as he waited for her final unveiling. When the wispy bra fell to the floor, his eyes seemed to water up. “Oh, Annie, you are so beautiful.”
She wasn’t beautiful; Annie knew that. But it was nice that he found her appealing. She wanted to be beautiful for him.
“It’s your turn now, sweetheart. Don’t move,” he said then, giving equal attention to her body, murmuring compliments to each part examined by his tantalizing fingers and feathery kisses. When he came to her breasts, Annie’s heart stood still. First he raised them up in the palms of his hands, then skimmed both nipples with the pads of his thumbs. By the time he angled his head down to wet one, then the other with his lips and tongue, and finally suckled rhythmically, Annie was mewling in an increasing frenzy.
Recognizing her spiraling passion, Clay eased backward toward the couch, taking Annie with him. But he lost his balance and fell onto his back, half reclining, with one leg extended out to the floor. Annie tripped, too, and ended up plopped on top of him. When she raised herself up, she found herself, amazingly, straddling him, jean-clad groin to jean-clad groin.
Clay groaned, a long, husky sound of pain emitted through clenched teeth.
Immediately, Annie remembered Clay’s injuries. It was a sign of her fevered brain that she’d forgotten to begin with. “Oh, my God! Did I hurt you? Is it your head? Or your ankle?”
Clay tried to laugh, but it came out strangled. “That’s not where I’m hurting, Annie.” He rolled his hips from side to side against Annie’s widespread thighs, and Annie felt the clear delineation of the ridge pressing against her with an urgency that matched her own.
“Oh,” she said.
Clay chuckled. “‘Oh’ about says it, darling.” Then he chucked her under the chin.
“I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?” she asked, belatedly shy.
Shocked would be the understatement of the year, Clay decided. Who knew when I woke up this morning, a cold, dreary day in Princeton, that my evening would end with such unexpected manna from heaven? But wait a minute. He didn’t like the look creeping onto Annie’s face. “Don’t go shy on me now, Annie.”
“I’ve never behaved this way before…so forward and uninhibited,” she confessed, hiding her face in her hands.
“Your eagerness excites me. Tremendously. Don’t you dare stop now,” he said in a suffocated whisper, prying her fingers away. “I have plans for you that require a major dose of forwardness and uninhibitedness.”
“You do?”
Was that hope in her voice? “Absolutely. Are you afraid?”
“No. Are you?”
He laughed outright. God, how he loved her openness.
“Listen, Annie—stop, you witch…I can’t think when you do that.” She was leaning forward, her hair a thick swatch curtaining his face, as she still straddled him. Back and forth, she was brushing her breasts across his chest hairs.
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Not to think?”
He leaned up and gave her a quick kiss. “You don’t act like any virgin I’ve ever known.” Not that I’ve known very many…or any, for that matter, that I can recall.
“Just because I didn’t do that, doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything,” she said, meanwhile kissing a little line from one end of his jaw to the other.
Clay fought against the roil of jealousy that ripped through him at the thought of any other man touching his Annie in any way. Had it been the milkman, or someone else? How many someone elses? “Annie, you’re driving me mad. Be still for one moment. Please.”
Surprisingly, she did as he asked. Of course, when she stilled, she also sat upright, square on his already over eager, overengorged erection. He closed his eyes for one second, to keep them from bulging clear out of his head. Finally, when he managed to speak above a squeak, he said, “We’re not going to make love to night, Annie.”
She stiffened at once, and her face went beet red. “You don’t want me?”
“Of course I want you, but I refuse to make love with you on an uncomfortable sofa, out in the open, with a houseful of people…no matter what you say about sleeping patterns or rules for…uh, courting.”
She pondered his words, then seemed to accept their logic. “So, we’re not going to make love tonight? Will we ever?”
“Oh, for sure, darling. For sure.”
She smiled widely at that.
“And there’s another thing, Annie, love. We have to talk about this thing that’s happening with us.”
“It is…strange.”
“Strange, overpowering, confusing. I have an idea, Annie. Let’s go out tomorrow night. Slow down this runaway train. See where this relationship is going.”
“I like the sound of that.”
He took a breast in each hand then and admired the contrast of the firm, white mounds against his darker skin. “I love your breasts. I love the way they aren’t big, but appear to be so because of your thin frame.” He stretched his head forward to savor one of them with his mouth.
She made a keening sound low in her throat, halfway between a purr and a cry for mercy. “I thought we weren’t going to make love,” she gasped out.
“True. We’re not going to make love. But we can make out. A little.”
“Oh, goody,” she cooed. Before he knew what she was about, Annie slid a hand between them and caressed his tumescence. “Does this count as making love or making out?”
He about shot off the couch. And all he could think was, Who the hell cares?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Annie.” Very carefully, he dislodged her grasp and placed both her hands at her sides and held them there. “You’ve been running the show for much too long in your family. It’s time for you to sit back and let someone else take over.”
Her chin went up.
“All right?”
After a long pause of hesitation, she nodded.
He proceeded then to unbutton her jeans.
Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, but she didn’t protest.
“Lift up a little, honey, and lean forward,” he advised. When she did, he slid a hand inside the waistband of her pan ties, down between her legs. The warm wetness he met there caused him to sigh with pleasure. “Oh, Annie, love, you feel so good.”
“Clay,” she cried out, unsure whether she wanted him to touch her there.
Before she had a chance to think further, he inserted a long middle finger inside her tightness and rested a pulsing thumb against the swollen bud. “Now, Annie,” he encouraged her with a guttural hoarseness, “you ride…you set the pace.”
“I…I don’t think I can,” she whimpered.
“Yes, you can, darling.”
And she did.
With each forward thrust, she brushed the ridge of his erection. They were separated by denim material, but the sensation was still intense. With each withdrawal, that part of his body yearned for her next stroke. It didn’t last long. Probably only minutes. But when Annie began to spasm around his finger and melt onto him, he held her fast by the hips, leaned forward to kiss her with a devouring hunger, and bucked upward…once, twice, three times.
“Annie, love,” he whispered into her hair a short time later. She was nestled at his side, both of them stretched out full-length on the sofa.
“Hmmm?” She was half-asleep and sated.
Clay couldn’t have been prouder if he’d pulled off a mil
lion-dollar investment deal. You’d think he was personally responsible for having made the world move. Well, he had, actually. For both of them.
“Clay?” she prodded.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he disclosed. He hadn’t intended to tell her…not yet. But his senses were on overload, brimming with so much joy. He couldn’t contain it all.
“I already know I’m in love with you. I think I fell the minute I saw you storming across that vacant lot looking like Scrooge himself.”
He poked her playfully in the ribs at that insult, but inside he felt such a triumphant sense of elation. Annie loves me. Annie loves me. Annie loves me. It was all so new and strange and confusing. Not what he’d come to Memphis to find. It would pose all kinds of problems in his life. But what a wonderful, wonderful thing. Annie loves me.
Annie worried her bottom lip with her teeth then. Obviously, she had something on her mind. Finally, she blurted out, “When will you know for sure?”
Clay chuckled and said, “Maybe after we check out the hayloft.”
I love her.
It was Clay’s first thought when he awakened the next morning to bright sunlight warming the cozy bedroom. You’d think it was springtime, instead of four days before Christmas. But then, Clay recalled, he was in Tennessee…almost the Deep South.
With an openmouthed yawn, he stretched widely, becoming immediately aware of the ache in his ankle and at the back of his head. He glanced to the side, saw the bedside clock, and jolted upright, causing the dull pain to intensify. Ten o’clock! He hadn’t slept beyond six A.M. in the past twenty years.
Oh, well! First he would take a shower. Afterward he had at least a dozen calls to make, first to check with his office in New York, then to set the hotel sale in motion here in Memphis.
But there was only one thought that kept ringing through his head. I love Annie. Clay was not a whimsical person. If anyone had told him a few days ago that he would believe in love at first sight or romantic destiny, he would have scoffed heartily. He didn’t know how it had happened or why, though he suspected, illogically, that it involved that dingbat bellhop and God’s big toe and Elvis’s spirit. He’d been fated to come to Memphis. Not to sell the blasted hotel, though he would do that as soon as possible, but to find Annie. Amazing!