Love Me Tender

  “Undoubtedly.” He didn’t seem at all concerned.

  “Don’t you care?” she cried.

  “I care too much, that’s the problem.”

  Oh, he is such a snake-oil charmer! It’s a line he’s probably used a thousand times before. But I wish…oh, God, how I wish… “This is no way to get married.”

  “No, it’s not,” he agreed. “If things could be different, though, I think I would still want…well, this isn’t the time for that.” He seemed to have trouble swallowing.

  What had he been about to say? Cynthia’s heart hammered at all the possibilities. Impossibilities, really. But her foolish heart was beyond reason.

  “I always imagined that when I got married, it would be in a church filled with family and friends,” he confessed sheepishly. “There would be organ music and tons of flowers and my bride coming down the aisle in a white wedding gown.”

  Her jaw dropped at the idea of a man harboring the typical female dream. Not her, of course, because she refused to be typical. And she’d lost her dreams long ago. “I never imagined getting married at all.” Except back when I was a little girl and still believed in dreams-come-true.

  “Oh, Cynthia,” he murmured, patting her shoulder in sympathy.

  She slapped his hand away. A pity bride? That she couldn’t countenance. “And as to the bride-in-white business, honey, well, if you’re expecting a pure-as-undriven-snow virgin, forget it. I’ve been through the slush a time or two.”

  He let out a hoot of laughter and shook his head at her. “You never let me down, sweetheart. Always have to get in the last word, don’t you? And better yet, a coarse one, guaranteed to shock.”

  “Whatever.” She glared at him for a moment, barely restraining herself from blurting out that, despite her crude boast, she wasn’t all that experienced. Instead, she pointed out, “It won’t be a valid marriage.” It was more a question than a statement.

  He nodded. “When we get back to the city, you’ll be able to unsaddle me faster than an Irish Thoroughbred.”

  She had to smile at that analogy, especially since Elmer had implied he was more a jackass. “Which of us would be the horse and which the saddle?”

  He smiled back, and her heart skipped a beat. He was so damn gorgeous. “We could take turns,” he offered, wagging his eyebrows at her.

  “I give a rough ride,” she countered, to her horror. It was especially horrifying because she never engaged in this kind of provocative flirtation. He must be repulsed by her vulgarity. She was.

  Instead, Ferrama tugged her closer and breathed in her ear. “Ah, querida, I never expected any less from you.”

  Tears smarted her eyes, and she attempted to avert her gaze.

  Cupping her chin, he forced her to look at him again. “Don’t you dare go self-conscious on me now. I have big plans. And expectations.”

  Big plans? What kind of plans? Oh, my! And expectations? Of me? Oh, my! Behind them, Cynthia heard Ruth and Naomi talking as they entered the room. Elmer put a record on the machine, Elvis’s rendition of “It’s Now or Never,” presumably the wedding march. Panic rose up in her.

  “Are we going to do the deed, Cynthia?”

  Despite her misgivings, despite all reason, despite her fears, she didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

  Suddenly, she knew. It didn’t matter if this marriage lasted for an hour or a decade. She wanted it…more than escape, even.

  He drew her to her feet and handed her the crutch. Standing close, he whispered, “I love you, Cynthia.”

  “For now,” she emphasized, seeking to dampen the wild emotion his precious words ignited.

  He shrugged, and she didn’t know if that meant he concurred or he didn’t care.

  “I love you, too,” she declared. It was only fair that she return his sentiment.

  “For now?” Oddly, he wasn’t smiling as he asked the question.

  “For now,” she said. But inside, an unsettling voice insisted, For always.

  The wedding was over in a remarkably short period of time.

  Naomi, who’d stood out of chain’s reach in the doorway, had brought two bottles of aged wine from the cellar.

  Ruth had prepared a nuptial feast of Spanish paella and Irish soda bread. And, of course, fried peanut butter and banana finger sandwiches.

  No longer angry at Ferrama, Elmer had slipped him a special gift—protection against a particular “curse.” Cynthia didn’t have the heart to tell the little Elvis, although she did confide it to her new husband later, that she was already protected and had no need for what appeared to be a gross of condoms.

  Elmer had outdone himself in performing what certainly had all the rituals of a traditional marriage ceremony, except for his closing remarks. To Cynthia, he’d said, “An Irishwoman carries her heart in her hand. Praise the Lord!” To her new husband, he’d advised, placing her hand in Ferrama’s, “Cherish the gift divine destiny has given you.”

  Then he’d raised his eyes heavenward and prayed, “May the Lord keep you in his hand and never close his fist too tight.”

  As a final clincher, he’d concluded, “In the eyes of God and all the heavenly hosts, including Elvis, I now pronounce you, Perico, and you, Cindy, to be man and wife…prince and princess for all time.”

  They were finally alone.

  P.T. took one last sip of wine and set the crystal glass aside. He didn’t require any more booze to fuel the buzz in his head…a buzz caused more by his rising arousal than alcohol.

  On the other side of the room, nervously twirling the stem of her own empty wineglass, was his blushing bride. And she was blushing, all the way down her exposed cleavage and all the way up her side slit.

  He crooked his finger at her.

  She set her glass on the card table and crooked her finger back at him.

  Well, you outrageous thing, you! I guess you showed me. Only belatedly did he realize that she had interpreted the gesture as an overbearing, presumptuous order…an imperial summons…not the seductive lure he’d intended it to be.

  But what the hell…go for it. He smiled. His lazy, I-can-do-things-you-can’t-imagine smile.

  She looked as if she’d like to bolt through the open window. Or upchuck.

  He was betting on the former, and his legendary charm. With deliberate slowness, he unbuttoned his garish jacket and shrugged it off, dropping it to the floor.

  She licked her lips, watching.

  So far, so good. The buzz in his head intensified. Holding her eyes, he undid the clasp on his belt and let it slip from his fingers. Unfortunately, it clunked to the floor…not the best mood enhancer.

  She blinked, putting a hand over her heart. And she licked her lips again. Apparently she’d missed the clunk.

  Slow down, slow down, slow down, he cautioned himself. A losing battle.

  Maybe I should reconsider this whole marriage business. Maybe some guidelines are needed before we go any farther. Maybe Cynthia and I should sit down and talk.

  Yeah, right!

  With trembling fingers, he fumbled with the Velcro fastening on his stripper slacks and let them pool at his feet. There was something to be said for stripper slacks, he thought with utter irrelevance. He wore only his shamrock shorts now. But only for a second. He shucked those, too.

  She made a soft, mewling moan.

  Only then did he crook his finger at her again.

  She raised her chin, about to balk, and flashed him one of those “as-if!” looks she did so well. But then she seemed to reconsider. With mischievous eyes dancing, she gathered her gold gown in two fists, thigh high, and began to bunch the filmy fabric so the hem rose inch by inch. She stopped at the knee. No, no, no! Then she took one step toward him. Only one. Yes, yes, yes!

  Heart hammering, he matched her one step. But it was a big one.

  Her lips turned up slightly in a Mona Lisa smile of mystery. While inching her gown up to mid-thigh, she took another hip-swaying step toward him.

  P.T. lo
ved her legs, all five hundred miles of them. He really did. And he was seeing a whole lot of them right now. More than anything, he wanted to lunge at her. But he was a prince. Princes didn’t behave in such an uncouth manner. They had a reputation to uphold. Hell! With monumental restraint, he took only one more step. But his stride was so wide it probably resembled a split.

  Was that a giggle he heard from her? No, sharks didn’t giggle. He’d forgotten to crook his finger this time.

  And still the hem was rising. In the background, Elvis was working himself into a feverish pitch, something about “temperature’s rising.” As Cynthia’s hem rose, so did Elvis’s voice, and P.T.’s body heat. Fever, to be sure.

  Enough was enough! With a hiss of pure male frustration, he closed the distance between them, taking the teasing witch into his tight embrace. He had no idea what those disjointed words were that he was murmuring against her mouth, into the sweet shell of her ear, along the curve of her shoulder. He was pretty sure, though, that the soft purring sounds she was making indicated pleasure. That and her squirming body, which was helping to accommodate his overeager hands as they clutched the sleekness of her gown from the back, shoving it higher and higher. With a triumphant cry, he maneuvered it over her head. It flew over his shoulders and landed with a whoosh.

  For a long moment he did nothing but savor the delicious sensation of her naked body pressed against his naked body. Eyes squeezed tightly shut, he nudged her closer.

  She raised her arms and burrowed her fingers in his hair.

  He put one hand on the small of her back, the other on her nape, under her luxuriant hair. She was a tall woman—at least five-foot-eight—and their body heights conformed to each other well. Very well. His erection pressed against her lower belly, its tip nudging the curls at her vee.

  Myriad emotions swirled over and through him, like a sensory mist. There was bone-melting arousal, of course, but equally potent was the humbling need he had to not only make love to this woman, but to love her. She was his now…his, and he didn’t care if the marriage was valid or not.

  There was no doubt that soon he would give her pleasure and receive pleasure in return, but his heart unfurled with a desire to keep her at his side, to protect her, to cherish her, to fulfill her dreams, to give her children, to share her secrets, and his, and maybe even cry with her some day, if necessary. In effect, he wanted to slay all her dragons, to be her knight and live happily ever after in whatever magic castle she chose. Even on the Upper West Side.

  With that whimsical thought, he put his hands on her forearms and stepped back a pace to get his first good look at his mate. His senses reeled. “Gorgeous,” he sighed.

  “No, I’m not,” she started to demur.

  He put a fingertip to her lips. “Yes, you are. You’re gorgeous and you’re mine.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Shhh. You’re mine,” he repeated.

  She stood still, arms at her sides, as he examined her from blushing cheeks to blushing breasts to blushing belly to blushing thighs, even to blushing toes. He brushed the backs of his fingers over her nipples, which were large as berries, and hard.

  She bowed her back and keened, a low, wanton plea.

  He cupped the mounds from underneath and lifted so the points stabbed his palms.

  She whimpered.

  He placed a hand on the slight swell of her stomach.

  The muscles lurched against his skin.

  He considered touching her elsewhere but bridled the impulse. For now.

  Raising his eyes back to her face, he saw that her lips were parted and she was breathing erratically. He skimmed the pad of his thumb over her mouth, and she nipped at him.

  She put her hands on his forearms then, forcing his hands to his sides. And she began her own visual exploration.

  “You’re the one who’s gorgeous,” she said in a breathy whisper. “And you’re mine.”

  More than you know, honey. More than you know. He felt her eyes, like a caress, as they moved from his face to his flat nipples, which he wished she would touch.

  She did.

  His penis hardened and lengthened with just that passing of fingernails over sensitive nubs.

  He groaned.

  She did it again.

  “Cynthia,” he warned.

  She chuckled with satisfaction. And moved lower. Using the knuckles of one hand, she traced the path of his chest hairs, over his abs, his navel and—oh, my God!—along the rock-hard length of him.

  His mind went blank then and a buzzing roar erupted in his ears. With a triumphant howl that could be described only as a battle cry, he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her high against his body. To the pounding rhythm of Elvis belting out “I want you, I need you, I love you,” he walked her to the bed. He was only dimly aware of her nipples rubbing his, her stomach flush against his, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her legs around his hips, her cleft aligned with his shaft.

  He tossed her onto the bed and followed her down. In one fluid motion, he nudged her legs apart and entered her hot wetness, to the hilt. He penetrated so deep…to the heart of her…and then swelled even more. A perfect fit. A perfect, perfect, perfect fit.

  He didn’t move. He couldn’t.

  “Wait!” he heard through the haze of his overpowering excitement.

  Wait? Oh, no! Please, God, no nonconsummation spells now. He braced himself on extended arms and raised his head slightly to peer down at her. “Cynthia, you couldn’t possibly expect me to stop now. Chivalry goes only so far.”

  She giggled, an incongruous girlish reaction whose ripples could be felt all along the length of him. “Your watch is caught in my hair. That’s all I meant.”

  “Oh.” Within seconds the strand was free, and he was braced on his arms again, staring down at her.

  “I don’t want you to stop,” she said softly.

  “Good. Because I can’t.”

  Her lips parted with a slight smile as she widened her thighs and drew her knees closer to her chest.

  And, unbelievably, he thickened and elongated even more, stretching and filling her molten folds.

  Her eyes went huge with wonder.

  He would have given himself a pat on the back for being so wonderful if he weren’t paralyzed with arousal. In some remote, idiot portion of his head, brain-shocked by bliss, he tucked away a good name for a new shoe, “Ecstasy.”

  He groaned and lowered his open mouth over hers, murmuring against her lips. “I’m…out…of…control…here…babe.”

  “Good,” she breathed, nibbling his bottom lip.

  He felt himself pulse inside her.

  And she pulsed back.

  He gritted his teeth and arched his neck to withstand the sheer ecstasy.

  Raising her bottom off the bed, she rolled her hips from side to side, once, twice, in encouragement.

  What little self-control he still maintained shattered then. “This won’t be sweet and gentle,” he warned, moving them higher on the mattress and guiding her hands upward to grasp the head rails of the bed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” She was panting as heavily as he was.

  “Jack-hammer sex,” he elaborated, wanting to be sure she understood, “isn’t the way a man should take the woman he loves for the first time.”

  She blinked several times against the misting in her eyes. “Any way you want me, love. I’m yours.”

  With a guttural male growl of exultant surrender, he pulled out of her, then slammed back in.

  Fierce shudders rocked her, and she screamed her pleasure.

  Long, excruciatingly long strokes soon shortened as he rode her hard, barely aware of her convulsing around him in repeated orgasms while he palmed her bottom, elevating her higher, or laved a deliciously pebbled nipple, or placed a hand between their slickness, strumming her to wailing heights of urgency.

  “I love you, love you, love you,” he shouted thickly as he surged into her one last time, shootin
g his essence clear to her womb as her body pumped him with continuous, nonstop spasms.

  Only dimly was he aware, as blood drained from his head and he sensed himself drifting into instant sleep, or a coma, that it was the best damn lovemaking he’d ever experienced. He smiled to himself, thinking that shark sex had to be the world’s best-kept secret.

  Or maybe love made all the difference.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Your prince has come.”

  Cynthia must have drifted off. She heard the soft words through a vapor of floating sensations…satiation, drowsiness, amazement and, most of all, a new, gently unfurling love, so intense it took her breath away.

  She opened her eyes to find her husband braced on one elbow staring down at her. “Boy, did my prince come!” she murmured sleepily.

  He tweaked her playfully on the chin. “That’s not what I meant. Your prince has come to take you away from your mundane world to a land of fantasy, where all your dreams come true.”

  Fantasy? Dreams? I have no dreams, she thought in a panic. But what she said was, “Who says my world’s mundane?”

  “Anything will seem mundane after tonight, my princess,” he boasted with silky promise.

  “You’re not short on ego are you, Lancelot?”

  “Just call me Lance.” He grinned. “Seriously, a knight must be ever confident if he is to go about storming castles.”

  “How many castles were you planning on storming?”

  “Just one,” he drawled, placing his fingertips against the pulse in her throat and lowering his lips toward hers. Before he sealed the kiss, he said thickly, “I give you fair warning, my lady, it’s going to take a long time.”

  “A slow assault?” she managed to get out as she tunneled her fingers through his thick hair, pulling him closer.

  “Very slow.”

  “Woe is me.”

  He smiled against her parted mouth. “Woe is we.”

  “The spell might fade away any minute,” she reminded him.

  “Then you’ll be back to thinking me a toad.”

  “You’re a toad, regardless.”

  He nipped her bottom lip. “You better like toads, then, because we’re going to take advantage of every minute of this honeymoon while the mood lasts.”