~*~
Omigod, what had she agreed to?
She’d gone one way to arm the alarm and John had gone the other way to secure Bandy. She’d protested that measure initially, but conceded it was preferable to having their calves clawed to ribbons or their ankles bit the moment they touched.
She was having second and third thoughts when he came to find her a minute later. The misgivings she might have voiced were silenced when he pulled her into his arms and covered her mouth. No thrusting tongue, no full on assault, nothing to make her draw back. Just a long, slow brushing and sliding of lips. The sweetness of it pierced her. At last, he lifted his head.
“Your living room still equipped with that nice soft couch I slept on?” he asked, his breath fanning her face.
“Yes.”
He nipped at her lower lip. “And the living room’s still through that door?”
She smiled against his lips. “Yes.”
With a quick, economical movement, he scooped her into his arms and started toward the aforesaid sofa. Despite herself, she felt her muscles tighten at being swept off her feet. He must have felt it, too.
“Want me put you down?”
Trust me, he’d said. “Not until you get to that sofa.”
His laugh was a rumble she felt go straight to her center.
Seconds later, she found herself sitting on the couch. Somehow, she’d expected him to plunk her down and come down on top of her, crushing her against the cushions, or at least to settle with her on his lap where he could ravish her. Instead, he deposited her on the cushions and sat down beside her, twisting to face her.
“Nervous?” he asked.
“No.”
Soft laughter.
“Okay, maybe a little.”
Then his hand was on her hair, stroking it lightly. “Can we take this down?”
She lifted both hands to find the clasp, releasing it. Her hair spilled down and John released his breath on a sigh.
“God, I love your hair.” He threaded a hand into it, lifting it from her scalp and combing his fingers through to the end. “Gorgeous.”
Desire, sweet and potent, stirred in her belly. “Kiss me again.”
More laughter. “So impatient.” He lifted a strand of her hair to his nose, inhaled, sighed. “There’s no destination, no finish line. Only pleasure. Just relax and enjoy.”
“I don’t know if I can.” Lord, was that her voice?
“Try closing your eyes. Stop thinking and just feel,” he suggested. “Let me worry about the rest.”
She obeyed. The cushions shifted, and she felt his lips, dry and cool, on her forehead. His hand burrowed deeper into her hair to cradle her head. Soft as a whisper, his lips roamed her face, her eyelids, her eyelashes. Somehow, that barely there contact set up a trembling deep inside. When his mouth finally found hers after long moments, it was only to nuzzle, skim, tease, his tongue a mere suggestion against the corner of her lip. Why, oh why, couldn’t all men kiss like this instead of trying to stick their tongues down your throat?
Eyes tightly closed, she savored every fleeting touch, every graze and retreat of his now moist lips. Then, between one heartbeat and the next, something unprecedented happened. She found herself longing to deepen the kiss, to draw his tongue into her mouth, to let her tongue tangle with his. Incredibly, he seemed oblivious of the need growing in her. With studious care, he kept up the torture until finally she clasped his head and pulled him down to meet her lips, opening her mouth in wet, mute supplication.
She felt a shudder pass through him. Then he leaned into her, pressing her back against the cushions, answering her demand with a fierce one of his own.
If the thrust of his tongue weren't enough to drive the last remnants of reason from her mind, the slide of his hands on her body through her silk blouse was. Hard, warm, thrilling, they skimmed her back, her sides, the outside of her breasts. Nothing could have stopped the whimper that rose to her lips.
A shift of the cushions, a cool layer of air against her skin. He was pulling away! She tried to pull him back down, but he resisted the pressure of her looped arms around his neck. She moaned again, this time at the loss.
“Hush,” he said, drawing back even further. “I just want to look a minute.”
Her eyes, which she’d kept tightly closed to concentrate on the sensations he was producing in her, sprang open. The sight of his face, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, eyes burning, made her pulse take another jagged leap. Then she dropped her gaze to her breasts, the object of his heated gaze. Against the fine material of her blouse, beneath the seamless cups of her sleek bra, her nipples jutted in unabashed arousal.
“So beautiful.”
Mesmerized, she watched the hand at her waist travel upward, pushing the silk over her sensitized skin, across her midriff, up, up... Then he lifted his hand off her, bringing it back to rest high on her chest, above her breasts this time, fingers tracing the neckline of her blouse.
“Please.” The sound of her own voice, the need in it, shocked her. Excited her.
He smiled. “Please what?”
She lifted her hand to his, drawing it down. When his fingers closed around her right breast, she cried out, closing her eyes.
His fingers tightened on the soft flesh. “You like that, baby?”
“Yes.”
“Open your eyes.”
Powerless to resist his command, she lifted her lids to meet his gaze. Impossibly dark, his eyes glittered with sex and promise and something else. Safety. She was safe here.
“Look how beautiful you are.” He drew his thumb across her hardened nipple, dragging a gasp from her. Then his hand was moving again, closing on her other breast, covering the whole of it easily with his palm. Her eyes drifted shut again, the better to savor the feel of him there, only to fly open again when she felt his fingers at the buttons of her blouse.
“I just want to look at you.”
Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than his hot gaze on her breasts. Another unprecedented development. By now, her muscles were usually tightening up, an involuntary girding against intimacies to come. But she hadn’t lost her faculties entirely. She brought her hand up to still his. “Is this a good idea?”
“Best one I’ve had all day.”
She smiled, and he bent to kiss her again. When he lifted his head a moment later, her senses were spinning.
“What do you say?” The backs of his fingers brushed her breasts through the fabric of her shirt. “We’ll stick to your mama’s rules all the way.”
“Mama’s rules.”
“Yeah, petting rules. Nothing below the belt, just like back in high school.” His fingers slipped to the next silk-covered button. “What trouble can we get into, above the waist?”
“Petting rules?” She’d stopped trying to check his progress. “That’s a conversation I never had with my mother.”
His hand paused. “I thought every girl had that talk. Every girl I ever encountered, anyway.”
“I wasn’t every girl,” she reminded him. “I was the Chief Justice’s daughter. I didn’t go parking with boys.”
His eyes widened. “Never?”
“Never.”
He worked the next button loose. “Did you want to?”
She thought about the tangle of emotions she’d been in high school. She thought about Burke Wheeler, leather jacketed, cigarette smoking bad ass. She remembered the excitement in the pit of her stomach when she thought he was going to ask her out, the disappointment when he’d walked right past her to loop an arm around her more buxom friend’s neck.
“What I wanted or didn’t want was immaterial. Nobody was going to risk my father’s wrath by asking me out.”
He unbuttoned the last button and pushed her blouse open. When he spread his hand on her flat belly, she drew her breath in sharply. He smiled, then bent to kiss the tops of her breasts above her bra.
“What do these rules say about the removal of bras?”
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She felt his smile against her skin.
“That kinda depended on the dexterity of the guy,” he said.
She sucked her breath in again as he smoothed his hand around and up her back. “And were you particularly dexterous?”
His reply was to pop the clasp on her bra.
“Oh!”
“Ummmm.” He bent to push her bra out of the way to catch her hardened nipple in his mouth.
Susannah’s world careened out of control. There was nothing left but the hot, wet tug of his mouth on her breast and the pulse of need it set off in her belly. By the time he’d ministered to both breasts, she was all but mindless with wanting him. Mindless enough that she wriggled into a semi prone position, pulling him down with her. For a second, she gloried in his weight pinning her to the cushions and the evidence of his arousal against her lower limbs.
Then he pulled back. She groaned a protest, but he scooped her up into his lap and pressed her head close to his thundering heart. Over the next minutes, with soothing words and calming hands, he gradually brought her back down again.