The Virgin Beauty

by Claire King

  Grace shook her head again. “I’m not tired.” How could she be? She thought. He was naked. Shameless. Huge.

  “Are you nervous?”

  She cupped his face in her hand. “No.”

  “You shivered,” he whispered, concerned.

  Her face went red, the blush starting at her ears and moving to her chest. “I’m not nervous,” she repeated. She moved slightly and Daniel felt the brush of her body against his again.

  A slow smile curved his lush, too beautiful mouth.

  He brought his hands between their bodies, brushed at her stiff nipples. “Are you excited, Grace?”

  She moaned, her eyes closing. “Yes.”

  He pressed his hips forward, sliding against wet satin. She whimpered and so, to his astonishment, did he.

  “So am I,” he murmured.

  She smiled, her eyes still closed. “I can tell.”

  He fumbled with a condom, barely able to separate himself from her long enough to put it on. He took her hips, guided her on top of him. “I want you to ride me, Grace.”

  Her eyes flew open. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “It’s not hard,” he said, gasping slightly as her damp body stroked the length of his arousal.

  She gave a little shimmy. “It feels like it is.”

  “What I meant was, it’s not difficult,” he muttered. He was close to begging. If she kept sliding against him that way he was never going to make it inside. “Grace, please.”

  His desperation, deeply flattering, astonishing even, cleared away all shyness, all reserve. She took him in her hands as he took her hips in his. With a guttural groan he surged upward before she had time to guide him. He knew where he wanted to be, Grace thought, giddy with the still-new feel of him inside her, and he wasn’t willing to wait until she managed it. She nearly climaxed from the excitement of being so urgently, recklessly desired.

  Daniel pushed up into her body, watched her sink down to meet him, watched her neck arch and her mouth open, her eyes glaze and her breasts tighten. It took away his breath and a good, carefully hoarded measure of his reserve against her.

  He had the strangest sensation he was in over his head with this golden-skinned and eager woman. He was suddenly afraid she was going to want much more than he’d bargained for. And that he’d try—and fail—to give it to her.

  “What do you want, Grace?” he heard himself murmur.

  She misunderstood him. She was not thinking about the future or what she’d want when this was over, what he’d want. She was only aware of sensation, of her body and his. She ran her hands up her torso, cupped her breasts in her palms and offered them for him to suckle. “Move inside me, Daniel,” she breathed. “Move—ah, yes, like that.”

  His brain dimmed at her request and he surged up from the bed to feast on her, indistinct anxiety fading in the strong pull of lust. She bucked violently when he sucked her nipple, hard, into his mouth and he met her downward thrust with an upward one of his own.

  She rode him as no woman ever had. He struggled to keep his eyes from slamming shut so he could watch the smooth, strong motion of her thighs, the contractions of her taut stomach, the supple bowing of her body. She might not have done this before, he thought, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her pistoning hips, but she was clearly a natural.

  Grace was certain she would not be able to bear the pleasure, that it would kill her before it fulfilled its promise. But she was wrong. She felt the strongest, strangest building inside her, as if every cell and nerve ending was heating and tingling and pooling low in her belly, as though there was nothing left of her but the one amazing sensation centered where her body met the pounding flesh of Daniel’s.

  She didn’t die. She exploded instead, blew apart, stunning herself and her lover by screaming out loud with the impact of it.

  Daniel watched her with slitted eyes, and thought about cattle futures, tried to remember the five-day weather forecast, ran the words to Yankee Doodle Dandy inside his head. Anything to keep from following her in. He wanted more. He wanted to give her more.

  When she trembled a long, last time and collapsed on top of him, he flipped her expertly onto her back and took her face between his hands.

  “I want to see that again.”

  Grace shook her head, dazed. “I can’t,” she moaned. “Please, Daniel. I can’t.”

  He smiled ruthlessly. “You can.”

  She did, and not once more, but twice, before he shuddered and groaned and spilled inside her. She was utterly astonished by the fortitude of her body and by the unbelievable skill and patience and endurance of his.

  “You’ll kill us both,” she commented after a minute, running her hands idly down his broad back. She began to count the muscle structures with her fingertips.

  He was a dead weight on top of her, but he managed to chuckle back in his throat. “You’re just tired from foaling that mare. Sissy.”

  She grinned at her ceiling, wondering for the first time since she’d stepped back through her front door how she could possibly be making love in the middle of the morning with as gorgeous a man as Daniel Cash. It was too inconceivable to be real. Yet here he was, sweating all over her, his body twitching and softening inside hers. “No, it’s you. I’m terrified by how well you do this.”

  “Don’t be,” he rumbled against her neck. “I learned from a manual, I swear.”

  She laughed. “I don’t know whether that’s a relief or just really sick.”

  He placed a wet, sucking kiss on her shoulder. “Which would make you hot?” he asked, leering at her.

  “Neither, you pervert,” she said, laughing so hard now her chest shook. “Leave me alone. I’m finished with you.”

  He was enjoying the game, enjoying her. Entirely too much, it occurred to him, but he brushed the niggling thought aside as he watched her pretty little breasts jiggle slightly.

  “Come on, Grace. Let’s hear it. What would make you hot?”

  “Clearly, you already know,” she demurred. “You just proved it.”

  “Three times,” he gloated.

  She rolled her eyes. “I cannot believe you keep track like that.”

  “Who’s going to if I don’t?” He took his weight on his hands and knees. He started kissing her neck, smiling against her damp skin. “Talk dirty to me, Grace. Tell me what would make you hot.”

  “I will not,” she said primly, but then he hit a sensitive little spot and she couldn’t help the sigh.

  “You like when I kiss you.”

  “Of course.” Of their own accord, her arms wrapped around his neck.

  He murmured encouragement. A minute ago he’d been playing around. Now he really, really wanted to know. What made Grace McKenna crazy? He so wanted to make her crazy.

  “And when I kiss your breasts,” he said, moving his mouth to gently caress the pink tips of her breasts. “And when I suck them.”

  She lifted half off the bed. “Daniel,” she gasped.

  He rolled a nipple around his tongue. “You’re so sensitive. I touch you and you just go off like a rocket.”

  “I know.”

  Daniel heard the chagrin in her voice, decided not to let her get away with it. Even if he had to embarrass her a little. “Like out at the ranch. You were so wet.”

  “Oh, no,” she moaned.

  “Oh, yeah.” He licked her between her breasts. “I’ve had erotic dreams about it every night since. You without your pants on, rolling around in my front yard. Those long legs, Grace. I can’t get over those long legs.”

  “Stop it, Daniel,” she said breathlessly, aroused by his tongue, mortified by his words.

  “I won’t stop it, Grace.” He made love to her other breast, taking his time. “Because you don’t seem to understand how sexy you are.”

  “I’m not.” She was an oddity, a novelty. She understood that perfectly and was, to her shame, willing to be that for him as long as he wanted. When he tired of novelty, she’d jo
in a convent or something.

  “You are. You are,” he repeated. “I love the way you taste. I can’t get enough of the way you taste.”

  He was trying to, she thought. Her head moved restlessly on her pillow as he brazenly, drowsily licked his way down her body. He took a long, slow detour at her belly button, then went shockingly south.

  “Does this turn you on, Grace?” He looked up, saw her eyes squeezed shut, her hands fisted into the sheets. He dipped his tongue between her thighs and took a leisurely swipe. “You can tell me, Grace. I won’t be shocked.”

  “I’ve never—” She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “What?” He took another lingering lick. “This?”

  She shook her head, unable to beg him but wanting to, tortured by his tongue, mesmerized by his teasing, sexy voice. She knew, dimly, what he was doing, but she had never imagined seduction could be so carnal, so thrillingly naughty.

  “Grace?”

  There was a long hesitation, and then she nodded, her face red, her breathing ragged. “I’m just curious, you understand,” she managed to rasp.

  “And naturally so,” he said, smiling. The scent of her was driving him crazy. “I’m a little curious myself.”

  “You’ve never done it?”

  He wished he hadn’t, wished, at least in this, he’d been as innocent as she. He shook his head. “Not with you,” he murmured, kissing her lightly at the top of her thighs.

  “Do you think I’m perverted?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he’d said, smiling though his body screamed. He used his thumbs to open her. “Lucky for me.”

  He brought her to peak again in minutes with his mouth, then, unable to resist the urge, slipped inside her slick and shivering body and rocked with her until he, too, felt the sweet, enervating completion.

  They stumbled out of the bedroom a few minutes later, oddly refreshed by the sex and ravenous, their big bodies craving food even more—for the moment—than each other. They scrambled eggs, toasted and split the single bagel she had in her refrigerator, and brewed coffee with silent, single-minded purpose. And left Grace’s small kitchen looking as if it had suffered through a small typhoon.

  “How old are you?”

  He looked up from his eggs. “Thirty. Why?”

  She colored. “No reason.”

  His slow grin of comprehension turned into a self-satisfied smirk. “You should have known me when I was eighteen.”

  “Oh, brother,” she said, but he caught her smile. “That wasn’t even what I was talking about.”

  He laughed. “Sure it was.”

  She gave him a prissy look, which made him laugh, and looked vaguely back at the kitchen. “I’m still hungry. I’d kill for a delivery pizza.”

  “Nobel ain’t the big city, little lady,” he said in his best cowboy voice.

  She giggled foolishly, rose from her chair, kissed the top of his head lightly. “It has some advantages, however.”

  “That’s what I’ve always thought,” he agreed smugly. He leaned back in his chair, watched her as she put her dish in the sink and started straightening the mess they’d made of the kitchen.

  He was comfortable here, with her. More than he’d been with any woman since Julie, he mused, bringing his coffee mug to his lips and studying Grace’s bottom as she bent to scrape eggshells into the trash. Maybe even more than with Julie, because he’d always been slightly competitive with his wife. He didn’t feel competitive with Grace. Or, anyway, no more than usual. He smiled slightly to himself. Okay, he felt damned competitive, but he could get over it.

  The sex was remarkable, of course. No getting over the sex. He tried to catch a glimpse of the length of her legs in her frumpy terry-cloth robe, and wondered idly if he could untie the belt with one hand.

  He liked her. She made him laugh. And he was comfortable with her.

  His coffee cup bobbled in his hand.

  Oh, hell.

  Abruptly, in the same sort of flash of self-preservation he’d felt earlier while they’d been making love, he knew, if he wasn’t careful, he could stay with this long, cool drink of water. And staying with her would make him what he was before. Vulnerable, a target for the fates, a man who could be destroyed, right down to his heart.

  He was never going to be that man again. And if it meant leaving Grace McKenna and her warm kitchen and her warm bed, well, hell, he’d leave her. He could do it.

  He hesitated as she bent to peer into her nearly empty refrigerator, ignoring the low hum in his blood as she slicked her tongue over her lips.

  He would do it.

  “There’s nothing here,” she rumbled crossly. “How can there be not one single thing here?”

  He stood. “I should go.”

  She turned, blinked. “I could go to the store.”

  He hardened his already cooling heart against the picture she made. Mussed hair, unfocused eyes, soft, soft smile. “I have to get back to the ranch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Frank—” he began, then stopped. He didn’t need an excuse. He’d made no promises. “I should go.”

  “Okay.” She kept her face carefully blank. She’d known he would go, of course. No reason to make a scene.

  “I had a good time.” God, that sounded obscene in his own ears.

  Grace nodded. “Me, too. Thanks for helping me with Hollowell’s mare.”

  “No problem.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, wished like hell for the buttons on his shirt. He felt suddenly self-conscious, exposed. How the hell had it come to this? He wanted her, sure. But he didn’t not want to feel anything for her. He knew if he didn’t get out, right now, he would. And he wasn’t ever going to risk himself for love again. The first time had almost killed him.

  “Grace, listen—” he began.

  She shook her head, smiled. “Oh, no, I don’t want to do this.”

  He scrubbed at his whiskered face, at a loss. “It was fun,” he said, knowing how feeble, how lame, that sounded.

  “I know.”

  “You were amazing,” he offered, then winced when she squinted at him, her mouth pursed in a rueful parody of a smile.

  “I’m thrilled you think so.”

  “I can’t stay with you.”

  She heard a deeper meaning in the statement. Knew as well as she knew her own name and the treatment for canine distemper that he didn’t mean just today.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I don’t mean to hurt you.”

  “You’re not,” she assured him, and wished fervently that he’d go before she burst into tears, humiliating both of them. “I’m a big girl, Daniel,” she reminded him. And that, she thought bitterly, was the crux of it.

  “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

  Oh, she hated him for that one. She found some satisfaction that he shifted uncomfortably under her glare. “I’ll call you with the results of the serum tests.”

  “Okay.” He nodded curtly. He started down the hallway to retrieve his shoes, stopped dead, pivoted. “You were right, back at the ranch. We’re not a good idea. I’m not ready for anything serious.” Nor will I ever be, he thought, miserable.

  Grace nodded calmly. She’d let him ramble, stumble, make excuses. But she knew the truth. A woman like her was an interesting kind of diversion, but no one wanted “anything serious” with a freak, an ambitious giant with a plain face and huge feet. Men wanted a woman who would draw the right kind of attention.

  She’d been damned careful all her life to not be anyone’s novelty, anyone’s unique, peculiar distraction. Daniel had been right when he’d generously suggested she’d probably had offers before. She had. But she’d always refused them, knowing them for what they were. She was not going to be any man’s “I once had sex with the tallest woman in the West” tavern story. She winced thinking about it. She would kill Daniel Cash if he made her into something so trivial after all she’d felt with him.

  But no, he wouldn’t. She clearly could not tru
st him with her heart, but she could trust him with her secrets. After all, he’d been honest with her from the start, and it was a lucky thing, too. She’d been careful; just her body was involved now, not her heart. It would have been really sort of tragic if she’d involved her heart.

  “Daniel, just go,” she said as casually as she could manage. “It’s ridiculous to have this conversation. We never made any promises. Let’s just see this for what it was and be happy.”

  It was exactly what he’d hoped she’d say. He could not for the life of him figure out why it didn’t make him feel better. “I know this was your first time,” he said softly. “I just want you to know that it was special for me, too.”

  Grace smiled coolly. “That’s very nice, Daniel. But I’m twenty-seven years old. I had to lose my virginity sooner or later. Let’s not attach import to it neither of us feel.”

  Daniel felt that like a slap. He studied her carefully for a minute, then nodded. He knew it was nobody’s fault but his own that she’d gone still and calm and reasonable, when literally minutes before she’d been like a long wand of fire in his arms. He knew the kind of chilly, carefully enunciated absolution she was offering him was just what he was looking for. He simply didn’t know why it made him feel like such an ass. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, a little too brightly.

  He paused at her tone. “I don’t want to leave you angry.”

  She cocked her head, gave him a dazzling smile that thinned her lips and sharpened her eyes. “But you do want to leave me, Daniel, and that’s the only decision you get to make about it.”

  Grace dropped her laptop and her briefcase down onto her desk and reached for the lab coat on the hook behind her office door. She let herself into her locked laboratory and pulled the blood cultures marked Cash Cattle from their shelf.

  Setting them aside, she pulled on a mask and gloves, smiling wryly to herself. God, it was a relief to be at work, where she was sure of herself. She’d wanted to come in Sunday and do this, but had forced herself to stay home instead, doing laundry and other neglected, domestic chores. She’d gone to Nobel’s only grocery store and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of food, then cooked herself a huge meal she didn’t eat. She’d driven out again to check Hollowell’s mare and was treated to a hearty platter of fried calf testicles, which she declined as politely as possible by telling her hostess she was allergic to testicles, something that had made both Hollowells howl with laughter. She’d cleaned her house and washed her truck and endured the weekend as though it were a death march, and it was finally over.