by S. L. Naeole
“Wha-? Don’t you want…I mean, aren’t you…” Again, the words wouldn’t leave my mouth.
“I told you, sweetheart. You take your shower. I’ll wait on your bed.”
Rejection crushed me as if I were made of eggshells and he’d just applied his entire weight on my heart. “You don’t want to be with me,” I mumbled, hating my weakness, hating my ignorance and the cause of it.
Taking my hand in his, he pressed a kiss to my palm and then lowered it before gently placing it against his crotch, letting me feel the firm bulge hidden beneath his pants. “Sweetheart,” he whispered into my ear. “This is not what a man feels like when he does not want to be with the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. This is not what a man feels like when he does not want to kiss away all of his girlfriend’s hurts and replace them with only hot, sexy memories of the two of them together. This is not what a man feels like when he doesn’t want to lick every inch of your body and imprint your taste to memory.”
With each word he pushed closer into my hand, each syllable drawing out the pulsing heat that rested just beneath cotton and metal. My fingers began to close over the hardness beneath my palm, my eyes widening as he grew, my hands dwarfed once again only this time in a way that drew a blush from me so heated, I knew the moisture against them wasn’t from the shower. He was…large.
“God, that blush. Everything about you could tempt the devil to give up a life of sin, and an angel to pick it up,”
I looked into his eyes, my lashes dotted with tears and water from the shower, and gasped. His gaze was dark and full of hunger. I knew that look, and my body remembered. His hands cupped my face and he kissed me, not caring that his head was being hit by part of the shower spray. It was a sweet kiss, just broaching on tame but I could feel the shiver in him that had nothing to do with the chill of air hitting his wet skin.
“When it’s time, I will do every wicked thing I can think of to you, sweetheart. I will make you scream and cry and writhe with pleasure. But right now you’re vulnerable. Right now you need to be loved, not be made love to. You need to be cared for, not taken care of. So please, shower and when you’re done I’ll brush your hair and we’ll snuggle.”
Snuggle?
Snuggle?
The thought, the word, made me smile. How could it not? I’d never snuggled with anyone that wasn’t born with ovaries before, never even gave the idea of snuggling with a man a thought.
“So you’re not leaving?” I asked, hating the desperate hope in my voice.
His brows tucked in together as he frowned. “Why would I leave?”
“Because-because I’m not like them; the others you’ve been with,” I confessed, hiding my face in his chest. “I don’t even own a pair of sexy panties, Mal. I’m the queen of control-top briefs.”
The vibrations of his chest told me he was chuckling and my head picked up in indignation at him finding humor in my embarrassment. Before I could throw out an accusation, his finger pressed against the bare skin beside my breast, just over my heart. I stilled.
“Sweetheart, I don’t care about your panties. I care about what’s here, right here beneath my fingers. This strong, warrior woman that never lets me have my way is what excites me. Her tenacity is what turns me on. Her fierce loyalty is what makes me crave her.”
Swallowing because my mouth had gone dry, I blurted the only thing that popped into my head. “Maybe I want to buy some.”
“Buy some what? Sexy panties?”
Nodding and dipping my head down again to hide my blush, I stared at his hand, his finger still pressed precariously close to my breast. I found myself turning by microns, a subconscious move to edge his finger just a little closer to the slight swell.
My mind reader slid his finger across the top of the delicate globe, pulling out a whisper of a moan from my lips and causing my shoulders to pull back, which only worked to thrust my chest out further, causing his hand to slip lower until that curious finger passed over the tight pucker of my nipple. We both sucked in our breaths at the touch, all the blood in my body floating up to the top of my head before crashing down into the vortex of feelings in my belly.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he hissed before pulling himself away from me and closing the curtain between us. “I’ll be waiting for you on the bed. We’ll talk more about your…panties when you’re done.”
Air pushed in and out of my lungs like a piston as I stared at his shadow moving away from the curtain. He’d touched me. He’d touched my naked body and I didn’t freak out. More than that, I liked it. My body—I had responded to just that simple touch, that single errant finger. Maybe it was because it was only a finger that I didn’t freak. Maybe if it had been his entire hand I would’ve been clawing at the walls to escape.
Stop, Ria. Stop trying to find reasons to get out of this.
Stupid subconscious.
Grabbing the bottle of shampoo, I squirted some directly onto my head and began rubbing with one hand, each stroke reminding me that I had a man on my bed. I grabbed the shower pouf and added a squirt of body wash. As I rubbed the foamy webbed ball over my body my mind pictured him standing there with me, watching me. I closed my eyes and imagined it was his hand moving over my shoulders and down my breasts and belly. Every slippery glide of the pouf built up that quiet, invisible need within me, that desire for Mal to touch me again, to kiss me again, to test my boundaries and see how far I would let him go.
While I rinsed my hair and body and turned off the water, I realized that I knew exactly how far I wanted to go tonight, and as I wrapped the towel around my body and stepped out of the bathroom, I smiled at the man lying across my bed, his head resting on a bent arm. And when he crooked his finger in my direction, I knew he was willing to go anywhere I wanted.
“I feel so weird,” I confess as he brushed my hair, one hand smoothing, the other hand holding the brush. “I’m sitting here wrapped in a towel. You’ve seen me naked. And I don’t know anything about you.”
The brush sailed cleanly through my hair before he handed me my brush. “Ask away, Victoria. Tell me what you want to know.”
“What do you do? What are your hobbies? Are you religious? What’s your favorite movie? Food? Color? Band?”
Laughing at the assault of questions, he pushed my hair to the side and kissed the nape of my neck just above the bow of my shoulder. “I’m just a small businessman,” he said with a smile I could feel against my skin, the joke triggering a giggle in me. “I love reading and cooking. I was born to agnostic parents so I am, too. My favorite movie is Ratatouille. My favorite food is fried chicken. My favorite color is whatever color you’re wearing. And band? I’ve always been a Beatles fan.”
Processing his answers, I took my brush and leaned over to place it on my nightstand before turning around to face him, tucking the end of the towel back against my skin so that it didn’t unravel and expose me any more than I already had been. “Did you say that your favorite movie is Ratatouille? The cartoon about the rat that cooks?”
Mal lifted his hand and slipped a wisp of hair behind my ear as a smile split his face into two beautiful halves. “I did say that one of my hobbies is cooking.”
I smiled at him and then lifted my hand to his hair cautiously, my fingers itching to comb through the glossy locks. Exhaling, I moved my hand forward and did what I wanted, watching how my fingers disappeared behind waves of black silk before popping out again. He remained still, letting me play and explore in his hair, content to watch me with lazy eyes.
Moving my hands down his face, I traced the curve of his ear and the straight lines of his jaw and the nose. His lashes were so long they cast shadows against his cheek, and his hazel eyes swirled hypnotically with gold and dark chestnut brown. His mouth, his beautiful mouth, was turned up in a deliciously crooked smile as my fingers ran beneath the curve of his lower lip. “You’re so beautiful,” I told him as he dipped his head to nip at my fingertip.
“Thanks, I’m think
ing of entering a few pageants. Maybe win a scholarship or two,” he grinned. His hand, too, decided to trace its own fiery path, only this one navigated its way from one shoulder to the other, dipping just above the edge of the towel and dragging out a ragged breath from my throat. “You, baby, are absolutely gorgeous. Your skin is smooth and buttery, and you smell—” he lifted his nose to press against my neck, inhaling swiftly and pulling air across my throat “—like every man’s fantasy rolled up in strawberries.”
My cheeks flared up at his words and he took no time at all to brush the back of his hands across them. “God, your blush does things to me, Victoria.”
The flush deepened, and I fought to look away but he trapped my chin in his hand and clucked in disapproval. “What?” I asked as his pupils began to widen. “What does my blush do to you? And why?”
He brought his thumb up to rub against my bottom lip, evoking the memory of that night against the lobby door when he’d licked inside my lip. “When you blush, that’s a genuine reaction. Do you know how difficult it is to get one of those from anyone these days? And try getting one being a man that has something everyone wants. Money, power, sex; everyone wants something and they’ll say and do anything to get it. The only thing that’s ever authentic with them is their greed. You, everything about you is authentic.”
Having spent the last eight years hiding from the superficial compliments that people threw at each other, I knew a genuine compliment when I heard it, and I beamed at him because of it. “So my blush does things to you, huh? What kind of things?”
A knowing smile spread his lips wide as he dipped his thumb into my mouth, groaning when I licked the wide pad of the finger. “When I see that pink spread across your face, I want to lick its way into your mouth. I want to follow it with my tongue all over your body and see how far and how deep it goes.”
Now it was my turn to groan.
“When the heat of that blush fills your skin, I want to kiss every inch of it, touch you everywhere so that you can brand me with it. I want to drown myself in the realness of you, in the pure, unadulterated truth that is my Victoria.”
His Victoria. Oh, God. The things he says to me. There was nothing illicit in his words and yet they made my body quake, made the towel rubbing my newly sensitive skin almost too much to bear. I suckled his thumb as he brushed my shoulders with his other hand, each finger leaving in its wake a trail of fire. I leaned back, giving him more of me to touch.
“Baby, when I touch you, every reaction of yours is real. Every sound, every twitch of your body, every roll of your tongue is one-hundred-percent in reaction to me. That is such a goddamn turn-on.” His voice had lowered into a rich, velvety bass that caressed me where his hands did not and touched me where I knew he wouldn’t dare.
Slipping his thumb out of my mouth, Mal lowered his own to my lips and traced them with his tongue, teasing them until I felt brave and met his tongue with mine. That simple touch triggered an almost violent reaction in him. Bracing his hand at the back of my neck, he pulled me up against him, his other hand continuing to trail long, sultry lines up and across the top of my chest just beneath my collarbone. He slanted his mouth across mine and deepened the kiss, his tongue no longer teasing but plunging into my mouth, teaching me through swipes and licks how to kiss him the way he likes. And the deeper the kiss grew, the more I realized that I liked kissing that way, too.
My hands moved to clutch at his back and I shook with the groan that left me because my fingers were touching bare skin. I brought my hands to his chest and shuddered, the feel of his heartbeat against my palms like a scream to the Gods that he was real and he was affected by me. It wasn’t just words echoing in my head anymore, something he’d said to appease me. There was no doubting the thundering that pounded there. There was no doubting the way his chest rose and fell as his breathing grew erratic.
And there was no doubting any longer that I was affected by him just as much—if not more—when I knocked his hand away from my chest so that I could press myself up against him, the towel the only barrier between us.
“Fuck, Victoria,” he rasped into my mouth before wrapping his arm around my waist and closing the gap between us with a sharp tug. He moved to lay down, pulling me on top of him while keeping his mouth sealed over mine.
My legs fell open over his thighs, the towel loosening just enough at my hips to pull up. I gasped at the feel of his hardness against my bare flesh, taking Mal’s tongue with me even as I pressed my hips against his with a reflexive thrust. We both groaned in unison as I tore my mouth away to suck in a breath, the sensation of him pressing right at the apex of my thighs, feeling so right, so goddamn right.
“Aaah, Mal,” I groaned when he lifted his hips as I pushed down and everything fit. With one hand still clasped at the back of my neck holding me in place, his other hand moved to my lower back, and then even lower until he had me pinned to him. For one moment my mind blacked over with panic, and I almost shoved at him to get away. But in that exact moment, he lifted his hips and swiveled even as he pressed down with his hand.
Holy shit.
Spangles of light burst in my head as a tornado of sensation spun and spun between my legs. With each thrust of his Mal’s hips, I felt my fear wash away, replaced with hot, panting need.
“Mal,” I breathed. “Mal. Oh God, Mal.”
He filled my mouth with his tongue, coaxing mine out until he could suckle on it, and as soon as it was where he wanted it his pace picked up as the rhythm of thrust, twist, thrust, twist drove me closer and closer to something I knew I wanted so much. I wanted it and as I started to grind my hips into his, no longer needing the pressure of his hand anymore, my towel came loose and slipped away.
The very instant my naked breasts pressed against his bare chest, every nerve in my body exploded, my spine growing rigid and soft simultaneously as I straightened and bent over Mal’s body, pushing myself up even as my hips continued to rock. A deep, guttural moan swept up my throat and rushed out of me as a deep throb shook me inside and out. I rode that throb until it faded to a soft pulse between my legs; until my breathing slowed down and my heart skipped to catch it. Everything had changed once again, and yet I knew that one thing hadn’t and I bit back a frown.
When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the heated gaze of Mal’s darkened eyes, his mouth partially open, his lips slick as he licked them. “Goddamn, sweetheart. You’re so fucking sexy.”
Another blush pinked up my skin and Mal groaned at the sight, moving both hands to clasp at my hips before sitting up and leaning me back over the tops of his thighs. Letting go of one hip, he slid his hands down the center of my chest, his thumb brushing over the swell of one breast while his pinky grazed the other. I held my breath as I watched him, his face puckering in concentration as he floated his hand above one breast and then the other, never actually touching me but still causing my blush to bloom wider and wider across my chest.
“I’m going to kiss these one day,” he vowed. “I’m going to spend so much time on them you’re going to want to break up with me out of jealousy. But not tonight.”
Disappointment slammed into me and I was about to ask him why when he bent down and pressed a kiss to my heart. Whatever question, whatever doubt, whatever disappointment I had turned to dust as he mouthed something against my skin and brushed his cheek against the spot he’d just kissed. Lifting his head, he brought his lips to mine in a sweet, gentle kiss that swept that dust away and drizzled me in a sweet haze of emotion that pricked my eyes with moisture and filled my heart with a glorious burn.
With gentle arms, Mal cradled me against his chest as he twisted us so that we lay on our sides facing each other. He pulled me against him, tucking my head into his chest and resting my ear against the calming drum of his heart. Stroking slow circles at my the small of my back, Mal pressed soft kisses to my hair.
“You didn’t…you didn’t come, did you?” I asked quietly.
The circling fingers
stilled for a breath and then started up again. “How did you know?”
My fingers drifted up his chest and to his neck, resting against his pulse, taking in each beat of life into my skin. He grabbed my hand and brought it to his mouth, kissing the tips of each finger before returning it to his neck. I smiled. “I felt you. You were still hard between my thighs and you didn’t…didn’t feel as wet as the last time.”
“Oh, baby.” He grabbed my hand once more and pressed it against his groin and my fingers automatically moved to grasp him, as if that was what my hand had been born to do. He groaned and urged his groin into my hand, the damp fabric sticking to my skin. “Do you feel how wet that is? That’s all you, and that’s wetter than I’ve ever known.”
My lips parted at his words, at the feel of him and the result of his effect on me. “Mal. I don’t want you to be left behind.”
Chuckling, he brought my hand to his mouth and licked the stickiness there away, his eyes flashing with wickedness, his mouth pulling up in a sexy grin. “Sweetheart, with the way you taste, and the way you feel, I will never be left behind.”
“Did you just lick my…my” I couldn’t even say it.
“Yes, love. I licked your juices off your hand. And yes, you taste absolutely delicious.”
“I…I…” my eyes were wide, my heart leaping into another gallop of excitement.
Mal brought his mouth close to my ear so that only I could hear him, even though we were alone in my room and already talking so low no one listening in would’ve heard anything anyway. “One day soon, I’m going to have you spread out for me in my bed and I’m going to lick you from back to front. I’m going to split your folds with my tongue and commit to memory every single crease, every single dip inside your sweet little pussy. I’m going to feast on you, a lion lapping at the source of Heaven’s cream, and then I’m going to suck on your clit so ruthlessly you’ll scream from coming so hard.”
