Текст книги "Just To Be With You"

Автор книги: Bella Andre

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Even as caught up as he was in the grip of intense desire, he found himself smiling back at her. “Hi.”

“This is fun, taking a bath with you.” She nuzzled her cheek against his. “Way more fun than taking a bath by myself ever was.”

“Fun?” He nipped her earlobe between his teeth. “You think being with me is fun?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She rolled her hips over his erection, making him groan at just how good she felt over him. “More fun than I’ve ever had with anyone before.”

Ian had played plenty of games with women in bed, but it had always been about gunning for pleasure, never about having fun.

His surprising realization fell away as she ran one hand between their bodies to wrap her fingers around his erection. “I need you again, Ian.”

Her lips were already swollen from his rough kisses, but knowing that wasn’t enough to stop him from devouring her mouth again. Without breaking their kiss, he teased her nipples between his thumb and forefinger until she made a wild little sound that nearly had him thrusting to completion in her hand.

“Put your hands on my shoulders. Both of them.”

She licked her lips. “But I like touching you.”

“I like it, too. Too damned much.”

He moved her hands for her, putting them around his neck, and she immediately rolled her hips back against his, the slick heat of her body taking him even closer to the edge of sanity than her hand just had. The thought of thrusting into her was so damned tempting that he was nearly there…when somewhere in the back of his lust-fogged brain he remembered his promise to be gentle this time.

“I can’t just take you like this, Tatiana. Not again, not so soon after your first time.”

Tatiana rubbed her breasts against his chest. “I’m not a virgin anymore,” she reminded him in a softly seductive voice, one that now held tremendous knowledge of pleasure. “And yes, you should definitely keep taking me like this. In fact, if I had known just how amazing making love with you would be, I would have jumped you the day we met in Napa.”

He covered her mouth with his, kissing her breathless before he admitted, “The first time I set eyes on you, I wanted you so badly.”

“You could have had me, Ian.”

He shook his head, her honest words wreaking havoc with the little bit of control he still had in his grasp. “No. Jesus, no. Don’t tell me that.”

“Just think of all the time we wasted, thinking about each other, wanting each other, when all along we could have been doing this.”

She shifted her hips in an obvious move to take him into her, and it took everything in him to grip her hips and stop her from impaling herself on him. “Not yet, sweetheart. Let me make you come again. Let me make sure you’re ready—that I won’t be hurting you.”

He slid one hand over her stomach down to the slick flesh between her legs. “I love touching you,” he murmured against her mouth. “I’ve never felt anything so hot, so soft, so perfect.”

“I love it, too,” she gasped as she moved herself back and forth over his hand, her breath coming faster with every push of her hips against him. She had her arms wound around his neck and was holding onto him so tightly that he could feel her heart pound faster and faster as she rose higher, then higher still.

When she pulled her mouth from his, and threw her head back so that she could arch her hips closer to his hand, he had to taste her breasts, had to draw her nipples in between his lips to taste first one, then the other. Her cries of pleasure echoed against the tiled walls of the bathroom.

Moving his free hand to the nape of her neck, he threaded his fingers into the wet tangle of her hair. “Open your eyes, sweetheart.” She blinked once, twice, before she was able to focus. “I want to watch you come. Let me see you. I need to see you.”

As if his request, and his desperate need, had flipped a switch inside her, a heartbeat later she was climaxing...and what he saw in her eyes, and in her expression that held back nothing at all from him, touched Ian in a way nothing else ever had.

Not only pleasure, not just arousal, but a depth of emotion that had him wishing, harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he was capable of loving Tatiana the way she deserved to be loved.

But it was the sweet and trusting smile she gave him even before she’d come down from her orgasm that nearly broke him. He’d already made the mistake of stealing her innocence. He couldn’t make it even worse by making her promises he’d never be able to keep.

Lifting her out of the tub, he carefully wrapped her in a towel, and as he picked her up to carry her back to his bed, she said, “I’m ready for you to show me slow and sweet now, Ian.” She kissed him softly, just the barest brush of her lips against his, before whispering, “Although if you want to know the truth, I’m ready for fast and hard again, too.”

His hands shook as he gently laid her on the bed, the towel falling open to reveal one perfect breast and a long length of leg. He’d been little better than an animal their first time. So no matter how hard it was to hold back a little longer, her pleasure mattered more than anything else.

She seemed to believe he’d given her enough orgasms already. But she was wrong. If he showed her nothing else before the night was over, he hoped she’d come away knowing just how much pleasure she deserved.

“Not yet,” he murmured against her skin as he moved over her to press a kiss to the underside of her breast.

“Please,” she begged when he slid her towel the rest of the way off so that he could run kisses over her rib cage and stomach.

“We’re almost there,” he promised, nipping lightly at her hipbone, then gently putting his hands on her thighs to push them open. “But not quite.” Lord, she smelled good, and for a few moments he just enjoyed looking, just let himself breathe in her heady scent.

“Ian.” There was a faint hum of panic in the way she said his name as she looked down at how open she was to him, and then at him, clearly poised to put his mouth on her. “I promised I’d tell you if I hadn’t done something bef—”

Her confession of further innocence fell away as he licked a wet, heated path over her aroused flesh.

“Now,” he told her, “you’ve done it.”

Just as quickly as she’d taken to everything else they’d done, she was instantly lifting her hips back to his mouth for more. Wanting to oblige her every sensual wish, he cupped her hips in his hands and drew her closer. He loved her taste on his tongue, loved the way she gave herself over so completely to him every single time, loved the thrill of knowing he was driving her back up to the peak again.

He knew the instant her orgasm started to roll over and through her, when on a low moan of pleasure, she gripped his hair in her hands hard enough to make absolutely sure that he wouldn’t take his lips and tongue away. Of course, there was nowhere he’d rather be than taking her up and over another crashing climax.

She was still trembling from the force of it when he moved on to his back and tugged her over him so that she was straddling him. “You’ll control everything this way,” he explained as he reached for another condom. He was just ripping the package open when she took it from him.

“This is another thing I haven’t done.” She shifted slightly so that she could look down at his erection. She reached for him with one hand, gripping the base of his shaft to hold him steady while she slowly unrolled the condom over his tip with the other. “How am I doing?”

He was gritting his teeth so hard in his attempts at control that he could barely tell her, “So good that I might not last until you’ve got it all the way on.”

Clearly delighted with the effect she had on him, the sweet sound of her laughter filled his bedroom. He was so struck by the beauty of it that it took him a few too many seconds to realize she’d moved again so that she was levered right over him.

She moved her hips over his in just the right way to make his eyes roll back in his head, and when she laughed again, the sound was utterly sensual, and full of newfound female power...and pleasure, too.

“You know what? I think I like being in control.”

And though it just might kill him the way she took him into her one slow, torturous inch at a time, Ian liked it, too. Loved it.

Her eyes closed as she lowered herself onto him, savoring the moment as though she wanted it to last forever, and though he did, too, in the end his primal need to have her couldn’t be denied any longer.

Gripping her hips hard enough that she’d likely have marks on her skin the next day, Ian held Tatiana right where he wanted her, then thrust hard into her. She gasped as he drove deep, but he knew this time that it was pleasure rather than pain that had her pushing just as hard down over him.

“It’s so good, Ian. So, so good.”

She was practically sobbing the words as she braced her hands flat on his chest and rode him, the muscles in her thighs working hard to lift her body up, then back down, over him. Her breasts bounced, tempting him, teasing him, until he had to cup them in his hands and stroke both nipples together with his tongue.

She moved her hands from his chest to thread her fingers into his hair and tug his mouth even closer, and when the new position took him even deeper, her body eagerly opened for every last inch of him. “More. Please, Ian. I need more.”

Again and again, with words and her body, she begged him to take every last part of her...and that was exactly what he did, until they both climaxed together in a wild combination of kisses and gasps and hands that couldn’t get enough.

* * *

A short while later, Tatiana was wrapped up in his arms beneath the covers, her back to his front. He stroked her hair and breathed her in...and worked like hell not to give in to saying something in the aftermath of the moment that he wouldn’t be able to stand by come morning.

Soon, thankfully, her heartbeat slowed, and she was nestling her hips back into his and pulling his arm more tightly across her chest, holding his hand over her heart.

Ian hadn’t thought he’d be able to sleep, but Tatiana felt so right in his arms that he was nearly under himself when he thought he heard her say I love you.

But when he came, instantly, fully awake again, and waited for her to say more, she was fast asleep, breathing so soundly, so serenely, that he decided he must have been dreaming.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tatiana woke to an empty bed, but Ian’s scent still lingered so she closed her eyes and smiled as she breathed him in.

Last night had been incredible, surpassing any dreams she’d had of what lovemaking might be like by miles. No character she’d ever played or movie she’d ever watched could have prepared her for just how amazing it was to be intimate with the man she loved. The wonder of Ian’s body. The tantalizing way he stroked and caressed her. His hardness to her softness. Every whisper, every sensual command, every look of pleasure and satisfaction in his eyes, had stolen more and more of her heart. Every time she thought she’d experienced the peak of pleasure, Ian had continually found a way to take her even higher, and then higher still.

While shadowing him, she’d thought more than once that he was superhuman, both with regards to his drive and the way he obviously thrived on his intense workload. Now, she thought with a naughty little grin, she knew that he had just as much stamina in bed, too. And, oh how she’d thrived on it…

She knew most people would think it was crazy for her to wait this long to give up her virginity. But she’d been perfectly right to wait for Ian. Not only because she was head over heels in love with him—but because, she thought with another smile that felt wonderfully wicked and wanton on her lips, there was no way any other man could possibly compare between the sheets.

Smelling coffee, she slowly pushed back the covers and slid over to the side of the bed. In the sunlight that streamed in through his bedroom windows, she was more than a little shocked to see faint red marks on her hips. She blushed as she realized Ian had marked her in his passion, with the firm grip of his hands on her hips as he drove her over the edge of bliss again and again.

“I know I should be gentle with you, but all I can think about is how badly I still want you.” Tatiana shivered as she remembered his heated words, and her own heated response: “Then take me again.”

And oh, how he’d taken her. Rough, then sweet. Fierce, then tender. Then hard, fast, and wild again. All the while, even when he’d already pushed her body far past the limits of pleasure that she’d believed she could handle, she’d begged him for more, more, more in a blur of need and desire.

And, most of all, love.

Wanting nothing more than to be near him again, to see the way his dark eyes became even more intense whenever he looked at her, she looked around for her clothes. And then she remembered: Ian had shredded not only her dress, but her panties as well when he’d torn them off her.

She had to laugh, then, at the beautiful madness that had come over both of them yesterday. And thank God it had, because she couldn’t imagine feeling this way all by herself. Besides, she’d seen enough relationships on set to know that crazy only worked when it went in both directions.

She opened Ian’s closet and took one of his long-sleeved, blue striped shirts off the hanger. Wrapping her naked body in it, she breathed in his familiar scent as she rolled up first one too-long sleeve and then the other. Seeing his collection of ties, she decided the one she’d yanked off him the night before would be the perfect way to cap off her impromptu outfit. She headed into his home office, found his tie near the door, then quickly wrapped it around her waist.

Barefoot, she walked into Ian’s open living room and kitchen. She should have known better than to expect all wealthy businessmen to live the same way, but in the morning light she was surprised all over again at just how normal it was. All of the finishes and furnishings were of spectacular quality, of course, and the view from the penthouse had to be one of the best in all of the Pacific Northwest. But where most other men with his wealth would have owned ten thousand square feet or more just because they could have anything they wanted, she guessed his home was maybe a third that size. Probably, she figured, because he had the foundation of a great family to guide him.

Ian’s back was to her as he poured a cup of coffee and she had to stop for a moment at what a gorgeous sight he was in his well-tailored suit pants and starched shirt. Knowing exactly how broad his shoulders were beneath his clothes, and the way the muscles in his arms and thighs flexed as he levered over her and thrust deep, then deeper still, simply stole her breath away.

That was how he found her, standing and staring at him as if she could hardly believe he was real. Looking at his beautiful face, Tatiana knew she’d never been happier than she was just then as she smiled at him from across the room.

“Hi.”

As she moved closer, a dark cloud in the sky shifted precisely so that a sudden ray of light coming in through the kitchen windows behind him obscured his expression. “I hope you don’t mind my going through your closet,” she said in a playful voice. “We were in such a hurry to get my clothes off last night that they’re pretty much goners.”

Expecting him to tease her back, when he didn’t say anything, and she still couldn’t quite see his face clearly, those old nerves she always used to have around him started popping back to life.

But that was crazy. There was no way he could have touched her, kissed her, spoken to her the way he had if he didn’t feel the same way she did.

Only, when she finally stepped in front of him, he didn’t reach for her, didn’t drag her against him the way she loved so much. And he still hadn’t said a word. Instead, he was looking down at her with an expression of such clear regret that, for a moment, she almost started to worry that she’d made a mistake.

No. She couldn’t have.

Last night, Ian had shown her a hundred times over just how much he cared about her, hadn’t he? First with have-to-have-you sex and then with the care he’d taken in her pleasure until she hadn’t known where one orgasm ended and the next began.

She wanted to say something that would ease the strangely tense air between them, but before she could, he spoke first. “Tatiana, last night—”

“—was incredible.” She lifted her hand to his smooth, freshly shaved jaw. “It was the most beautiful, perfect night of my life.”

“You’re right, it was incredible.” His eyes gleamed with the same fierce emotion he hadn’t been able to hold back when they were making love. “You are incredible.” That was when she realized that he looked positively tormented with every word he spoke...and guiltier by the second. “But you were also a virgin, Tatiana.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Untouched.”

She didn’t know how everything could possibly be going from beautiful to weird so quickly, just that she needed to make it stop. Needed to make him see that things didn’t have to be weird or strained between them. And that she didn’t want him to spend one more second feeling guilty about being her first.

“I thought we already talked about this last night, about the fact that I wanted to do everything we did together. But maybe,” she said when she could see that she still wasn’t getting through to him, “it would help if you knew why I was still a virgin when I could have slept with dozens of guys by now?”

“Tatiana.” Her name was more a growl than anything else, but she wasn’t nearly done making her point—had barely begun, in fact.

“All the guys who wanted to take me to bed were nice men. Good-looking men. Heck, most of them were rich, famous men. But I always knew I would wait to have sex until it wasn’t just sex, but something so much bigger than that. So that’s exactly what I did, Ian. I waited until I fell in love. With you.”

* * *

Just as his body had immediately stilled over hers when he’d realized she was a virgin, now Ian’s heart stopped dead in his chest.

It was one thing to think Tatiana had whispered I love you while falling asleep against his chest. He could have written that off as heightened emotion from all the orgasms, or even pure exhaustion right before she dropped into sleep.

But hearing her say it to him in the clear light of day, her eyes bright and sure...

No, he couldn’t let himself believe her, and he needed to stop the warmth, the longing that had shot through him when she’d said it.

“You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

He didn’t want to hurt her any more than he already had...and yet that didn’t change his boundaries or his limits. If she were someone else, maybe they could have had a fling, just enjoyed each other casually the way he had with other women since his divorce. But Tatiana wasn’t like anyone else. Partly because she was going to become part of his extended family by marriage soon, but mostly because she deserved so much more than a simple no-strings affair with a man who could never give her anything else.

“We’ve only spent a few days together,” he reminded her, “and one night.”

“So what? People fall in love at first sight all the time.”

“Nobody can possibly fall in love that fast,” he insisted, despite how jumbled up his insides had felt from the moment he’d met her in Napa Valley. “You’re just trying to convince yourself that you love me because—”

“Don’t you dare try to say you know how I feel or why I feel it.” Her eyes flashed emerald fire as she moved closer. “I know what I feel, just like I know that you could never have touched me the way you did last night if you didn’t care about me, too. Maybe it’s not love yet for you like it is for me, but there’s something there inside of you for me. Something big. Something real.”

All morning long, he’d gone over and over what had happened between them, trying to figure out what could have driven him to go against everything he’d known was right. In the end, he’d decided it had to have been pure hormones and primal attraction, rather than an emotion Tatiana wanted to call love. And what man on the planet wouldn’t have been infatuated with her beauty, with the sounds she made when she came, with the thrill of being with someone so full of life and boundless dreams?

The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, but at the same time, he needed her to understand without even the barest doubt that he simply wasn’t capable of loving a woman more than he loved his company, his work, the power and the rush of business.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever have to force himself to do, hurting her now so that he wouldn’t hurt her even worse in the future, as he made himself tell her, “Of course I touched you like that. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t resist you, not after you kissed me. No one could have, Tatiana.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been with way prettier women than me. I’ve seen pictures of the women you’ve been with, not to mention your ex-wife.”

“Those women all bought their faces, their bodies, with high-priced surgeons. But every curve on your body, every expression on your face is you.”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell me—how was sex with those women compared with me?”

Just when he thought she couldn’t shock him more, she went right ahead and did it without so much as blinking. First, she’d stunned the crap out of him by actually being as innocent as she’d seemed, and then she’d blown his mind by unleashing such sweet yet wild sensuality that he could barely keep up with her. Only to find that one little four-letter word falling from her lips could send him reeling harder and farther than any orgasm had.

And now, this. Actually asking him point-blank to compare his time in the sheets with other women to being with her just hours before.

When he didn’t answer her fast enough, she just kept pushing, “Was being with any of them as good as what you and I shared last night?”

“No.” Damn it. “Not even close.”

She smiled at him like she’d just made her point, and maybe it felt too much like she had, like she was getting too close, too deep again, because even though he’d already been cruel enough, he couldn’t stop himself from saying more. “You’re so tied to the fairy tales you’ve been acting out your whole life, and to the happily-ever-afters that screenwriters tie up into a neat and tidy bow, that you can’t see that nearly all of those perfect endings are just fiction. They’re nothing more than great stories meant to keep the audience coming back for more. So just because we burned up the sheets together doesn’t mean I love you. What it means is that I love your body. I love your face. I love touching you. And I love making you come. But that’s all it is, Tatiana. Just hot sex. Nothing more.”

Her skin lost more and more color as he kept going, kept swinging harder, aiming lower. But even if he had deliberately just said all those things to make sure Tatiana stopped saying how much she loved him, God, how he hated to watch her smile fall.

Hated it more than he could ever remember hating anything before in his life.

“Fine,” she snapped. “I get it. You don’t love me. You’ll never love me. And I’m a naïve idiot for ever thinking you did. Happy now?”

She spun around, ripping off his tie from around her waist and then his shirt from her shoulders. In seconds she was naked again and Ian realized, with no little fury at himself, that he was scum enough to respond to her astonishingly perfect body after he’d just done everything in his power to shove her out of his life.

“No, damn it,” he ground out, “I’m not happy about any of this.”

But she’d already hightailed it out of the kitchen toward his office. By the time he caught up to her, she was shoving her feet into her heels. She looked with obvious dismay at her shredded clothes on the floor, then stalked past him out of the office and toward his front door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going without your clothes on?”

“Home.”

He knew how mad she was, and how hard she was trying to be tough, but he could also hear the slight break in her voice in the middle of that one syllable. Her pain twisted up everything inside of him...everything he didn’t want to feel for her but couldn’t seem to find a way to stop.

She grabbed her trench coat—one that barely grazed her kneecaps—from where she’d taken it off by the front door, and as she covered her naked body with it, then did up the buttons with trembling fingers, he nearly grabbed her to make her stop. But he already knew that making the mistake of ever touching her again could only lead them back to his bedroom.

It had been hard enough to push her away once—nearly impossible, in fact. He was dead certain he’d never manage it twice.

“You can’t leave dressed like that, wearing only your coat and nothing else.”

“Yes, I can. I can do anything I want. I can even make the mistake of sleeping with a man who’s too haunted by his past and too scared of what the future might hold to let himself believe that I love him.”

With that, she threw open the door, walked quickly to the elevator, and pressed the down arrow. The metal door slid open immediately, but right before it closed behind her, he moved into the small space with her.

“I’ll drive you home.”

“I’m going to walk.”

“You’re not wearing clothes. Hell, you’re not wearing underwear!” And Lord knew that in nothing but a coat and heels, with sex-tangled hair and her lips still slightly swollen from his kisses the night before, she was his every erotic fantasy.

But he couldn’t touch her. Should never have touched her, damn it.

“Well, then I guess I’d better hope there’s not a breeze coming in off the water today, or I’ll be giving people a show they haven’t paid for. And not the happily-ever-after kind this time,” she said, echoing his harsh words in a brittle tone.

Frustration with absolutely, positively everything had him growling, “You’re going to get in my car, even if I have to throw you over my shoulder to get you there.”

“That would mean touching me again...and we both know you’re not about to risk making that mistake again. So I’m pretty sure your car is off the list.”

“I’ll hail you a taxi, then.”

When she didn’t argue, he tried to convince himself that she was finally listening to reason. Not only was she barely dressed, it was pouring outside. Hard enough that even rain-hardened Seattleites weren’t hoofing it through town and the sidewalk was completely empty.

God, how could he have screwed things up with her so badly? It was why he’d been a master of control all these years, because he’d already learned from the way things had turned out with his marriage how little he had to give to anyone else. He’d been careful not to let any of the women he’d spent time with over the past few years feel too much for him. It had been so easy to keep his heart separate from sex that he’d been certain there wasn’t even the slightest chance of being tempted to lose himself over a woman again.

But he hadn’t bet on Tatiana, on how open she was with her emotions, or that she’d choose him to be the one she gave her love and her innocence to. He’d never been able to think straight when he was around her, and mere hours after he’d had her in his bed his brain was more muddled than ever. Later, when he was able to think rationally again, he prayed he’d somehow be able to figure out a way to make all this up to her.

Right before the elevator doors opened in the lobby, she pulled a hat he hadn’t known she had with her out of her bag, jammed it onto her head, then scooted right out the front door of his building and headed up the storm-battered sidewalk at a fast clip.

Damn it, she was stubborn.

But so was he. And though he knew the very last thing she wanted was for him to accompany her home, he kept pace beside her every step of the way.