she had trailed delicate little kisses over his stomach—kisses that were driving him mad, had she but known it—she garnered the courage to take those delicate little kisses lower down.
She whimpered softly, and those little whimpers were a turn-on beyond belief. To a man with a fairly jaded palette when it came to the opposite sex and their bedroom antics, this was uniquely refreshing. She was shy. He wanted her to feel comfortable with his body, comfortable to touch him wherever she wanted, but the way she took her time...agony. He could barely breathe.
To Alexa, witnessing this big, utterly confident and controlled man lose it a little was as heady as a dose of adrenaline shot straight into her system.
Her faltering self-confidence strengthened into a growing sense of liberation. A guy who was restless and impatient, who took what he wanted whatever the cost—a guy for whom tomorrow was not a word in his vocabulary if it could be replaced by today—was letting her take charge, and that felt so good to her.
She straightened and looked down at him. She’d never been naked in front of a man in her life before, and her skin tingled and burned as he gazed at her with open, unashamed desire.
When he reached forward to graze his thumbs across her stiff nipples she moaned softly and closed her eyes. Her whole body was trembling.
She wanted more than this. She wanted him inside her, moving inside her, filling her up...
She guided his hand between her legs and even as she did so was shocked at her forwardness. When he began massaging her there she covered his hand with hers, groaned as he slid two fingers inside, unerringly finding her clitoris and sending her into spiralling, ever-increasing zones of sexual pleasure.
She felt like a rag doll. As her pleasure grew...and grew...and grew...she opened dazed eyes and levelled them at him.
‘I want more, Theo.’ She barely recognised her own voice, which was husky with desire.
‘And so do I... You have no idea... But...’ He reached for his wallet on the dressing table to extract a condom. ‘Life right now,’ he murmured, catching her heated gaze and holding it, ‘is complicated enough without adding to it...’
HE DROPPED THE condom on the side table and settled over her, grazing between her legs with his erection, nudging, but not too much. And then he slid his hands under her back, arching her up towards him. Nerves mingled with wicked anticipation, and anticipation won.
She had disposed of her nightie—flung it over the side of the bed. She knew that she should be feeling timid, quailing at his frank inspection of her body, but there was open heat in his lazy gaze. No mistaking the fact that he was hot for her. She didn’t think that his heat could match her own.
‘I’m fat...’ she confessed, burning up like straw flung to a struck match.
‘Whoever told you that? Surely not your parents...?’
He didn’t normally do pillow talk, but the openness of her admission touched him. He lay down next to her and pulled her against him. He could feel the steady beating of her heart and the squash of her breasts against his chest.
A slight delay to proceedings. There was nothing uncool about that. In fact it made sense, gave his body time to adjust to its normal tempo.
‘Gosh, no.’
This intimacy felt good. Not so much sex for the sake of sex as two people in bed about to make love. She had a gut feeling that he wasn’t the kind of guy who slowed down to accommodate anyone, and that included the women he took to his bed. But he was slowing down for her. And whilst the logical part of her knew that it meant nothing, it still felt good.
Plus... Rushing into sex...
Yes, her body was on fire for him, but her mind was tentative, filled with her own shortcomings and what he might say about them. If he’d made some great big show of trying to get her into bed she might have stood a chance at resistance, but like this...in the dead of night...here in this bed...she was powerless to fight her body’s urgings.
Talking like this might relax her...
‘The opposite.’ She traced the outline of his shoulders, liking its tough ridges and contours. ‘My parents always told me that I was beautiful and that I could do anything I wanted.’ She laughed a little breathlessly, because confiding wasn’t something she was accustomed to doing. She marvelled that she was doing it now, with this man. ‘Of course most parents say that, and I wasn’t a complete idiot. I knew I wasn’t beautiful.’
‘And you knew that because...? You had a magic mirror on your wall...?’
Alexa laughed, but there was a telling catch in her laughter and Theo experienced a moment of disorientation during which he felt weirdly tender and possessive towards this prickly, argumentative woman who had given him nothing but a hard time ever since their paths had crossed.
‘I overheard a conversation when I was eleven,’ she confessed. ‘I was in a toilet cubicle at school and I overheard some of my friends giggling about me. I’d never thought I was fat but it seems that I was...and I had also developed way ahead of everyone else. That’s a big deal when you’re a kid. Whilst all the girls in my year were busy shooting up like beanpoles I was getting...well...a figure... It seems I was something of a figure of fun...especially to boys...’
‘Boys that age can be idiots,’ Theo told her fiercely. He dropped a kiss on her forehead and held her against him, her face pressed against his neck. ‘In fact...’ he angled her so that he could look down at her seriously ‘...quite a few idiot boys grow up into idiot men.’
Was that her opinion of him? A guy who judged by appearances only?
He sensed that that was just the sort of introspective question that might not benefit from too much in-depth analysis. Her whole persona now made sense to him. Her defensiveness...her passionate interest in the intellectual as opposed to the physical...her mulish aversion to the sort of high society affairs where she might feel herself judged, yet again, on appearance instead of personality.
The fact that she was here now, playing at a relationship with the sort of man she had probably spent her entire adult life erecting walls to keep out, spoke volumes about her close relationship with her parents.
‘I suppose...’ She laughed a little self-consciously. ‘Thanks for listening...’
Theo was highly offended. ‘Of course I listened to you! Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because you don’t listen a lot when women moan and whine?’ she suggested teasingly.
Theo had the grace to flush. ‘Maybe that whining and moaning always had a certain predictable flavour...’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re having a conversation,’ Theo heard himself say.
Alexa nestled against him, nerves temporarily banished. ‘Isn’t that what you told me we had to do, considering we’re about to tie the knot?’
‘I don’t do a lot of that either,’ he admitted with a wry smile.
‘Talking
