To make certain Sierra didn’t try anything, Alex took her by the arm and led her out of the bedroom. Sierra left the door partly ajar so that they could hear the baby just in case he did wake up with another bout of colic.
“I’m so sorry about all of this, Alex. You’ve worked hard all day and you didn’t plan on relaxing like this,” she said.
Disappointment was evident in his green eyes as they roamed her face. “Why do you think you need to apologize for Bowie? We’re in this together, aren’t we?”
She hesitated, uncertain as to what he wanted to hear or what she needed to say. “Well…yes. I suppose we are. Without you I couldn’t have kept Bowie. Child services believe you’re going to be acting as his father.”
His brows pulled together. “I am acting as his father, aren’t I? I’m the closest thing to a daddy that the kid has right now.”
Sierra’s head tilted up and down in agreement, but her expression was clearly sad.
Seeing the woeful look on her face, Alex pulled her over to the couch and sat her down next to him. “What’s the matter, you don’t think I’m capable of being a daddy, is that it?”
She couldn’t believe he was running off on a tangent like this. It wasn’t like him. But then it wasn’t like him to take her out to dinner or to care for a colicky baby, either. This Alex was not the same sardonic friend who scolded her for having a mushy heart and useless boyfriends.
“No, Alex! That’s hardly what I was thinking.”
“Well, you had a damn miserable look on your face,” he accused. “What was that all about?”
She shrugged one shoulder. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt his feelings. Especially after the closeness they’d shared in Red’s courtyard.
“I was just thinking that you’re only a part-time daddy for Bowie.”
Something like regret tugged down the corners of his mouth and he looked away from her as he rubbed his hands against his thighs. “Yeah. Well, that’s about par for the course, isn’t it? An adopted kid wouldn’t know how to be a real dad.”
“Alex! Damn you!” she cried as she snatched a grip on his upper arm. “That’s an awful thing to say. To imply something like that is to—you’re insulting thousands of adopted men out there—”
“I’m not talking about other men,” he interrupted sharply. “I’m talking about me.” He plunked a finger into the middle of his chest. “I grew up living a lie. My own father didn’t want me. And the man who raised me didn’t have the guts to tell me the truth.”
Her fingers tightened on his arm. “Oh, Alex, why are you bringing all this up now? I believed—” She paused as her brown eyes pleaded with him. “We were going to have a nice evening together. Bowie is asleep. And the house is quiet.”
The soft, inviting tone of her voice got through to him and the angry lines on his face slowly relaxed. Sierra sighed as he smiled and reached for her.
“God, I’m sorry, Sierra. I didn’t mean to go off like that. We were coming home for other things, weren’t we?” he asked with a throaty chuckle.
Her cheeks warmed with color as she nestled her head against his shoulder. “Bowie got us sidetracked.”
Sierra slid her hands around to his back to slide closer, but suddenly her hand came in contact with something wet and gooey.
“Ugh! Your shirt!” Pulling away from him, she wrinkled her nose with disgust. “You’ve still got spit-up all over your back.”
“Sorry,” he said, then quickly suggested, “Maybe you should wipe it off for me.”
Rising to her feet, Sierra held out a hand to him. “Maybe I should wash the whole shirt. Give it to me.”
His jaw dropped as he feigned a look of shock, then with a wide, wicked smile, he stood and began to unbutton the blue, windowpane shirt. Starting with the bottom button and working his way to the top, his fingers maneuvered the fastenings until the fronts of the shirt fell away to expose a slice of male flesh.
Sierra’s pulse rate nearly doubled and her mouth went desert dry as she watched him slip the garment from his shoulders and hand it to her.
As her fingers clutched the fabric, her eyes darted to the walls, the floor and the ceiling as she tried to avoid staring at his bare chest and arms, and the hard abs that disappeared beneath the waist of his chinos.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, obviously amused at her reaction. “You look like you’ve never seen a man without a shirt on.”
Heat filled her face and spread downward until it felt as if her whole body was blushing as she forced her eyes to meet with his. “Of course I have. But this…is…different. You’re a friend.”
Dimples bracketed his mouth as he stepped forward and slipped an arm around her waist. “And that just makes it all the nicer,” he whispered.
Her heart was beating in her throat like a nervous little wren caught in the talons of a red-tailed hawk. And when he pulled the shirt from her hand and tossed it to the floor, she could hardly speak.
“Uh—would you like for me to find you another shirt?” she offered.
The amused look on his face turned into an all-out grin and he murmured in a voice as smooth as whiskey, “What I’d like won’t require a shirt.”
She groaned. Or had she whispered his name? Whatever had come out of her mouth didn’t matter as Alex bent down and scooped her up in his arms.
“Bowie is in your bedroom. We don’t want to wake him.”
Sierra shook her head. “He sleeps soundly. We won’t disturb him.”
Assured by her answer, he began to carry her toward Sierra’s bedroom.
Except for a faint strip of moonlight from the window, the room had grown very dark. Slipping through the shadows, Alex carefully made his way to the four-poster bed and placed Sierra onto the smooth yellow comforter.
For one wild second, as she watched his smiling face bending down to hers, she panicked. Oh, what was she doing? she desperately wondered. Alex was a playboy. This didn’t mean anything to him. It was all fun and games.
Yet she couldn’t roll away from him. She couldn’t demand that he allow her up and out of the cozy bedroom. Like a deep craving that couldn’t be denied, she had to kiss him, hold him and feel her naked body pressed against his.
“Sierra,” he murmured as he moved up beside her and rubbed his nose alongside her heated cheek. “Why has it taken us so long to get here?”
Shifting toward him, she reached up and cradled the side of his face in her palm. “Are you even sure we should be here?” she asked softly.
He groaned and then brought his lips to hers. Sierra slipped her arm around his neck and snuggled closer against his chest. His skin was smooth, hot and filled her nostrils with a scent she’d come to recognize as simply Alex. It was a heady scent and she gathered it in her nostrils as her lips eagerly searched his.
“Doesn’t it feel like we should be here?” Alex asked once he’d ended the kiss.
Sierra’s breath was nearly gone and she waited a second for her head to stop spinning before she spoke. “It feels like magic, Alex. But—”
His nose and lips nuzzled the curve of her throat, the back of her ear and finally her temple. “But what?” he asked. “Do you want this all to end? Are you afraid to make love with me?”
Make love with me. Yes, that was exactly what she would be doing, Sierra thought. She’d be making love with him straight from the center of her heart. She’d be giving him her body and soul. That was enough to make her terrified. And yet her fear, as strong as it was, still wasn’t powerful enough to beat down the desire she felt for this man.
“No.”
A sigh of relief rippled past his lips and brushed her cheek. “That’s good. Because it would be hell to take my hands off you now.”
Before she could make any sort of reply to that, Alex covered her mouth with another kiss. And after that, nothing else mattered. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to worry or wonder how she’d feel once the sobering light of day arrived. Alex wanted he
r and she wanted him. That was enough for now.
As Alex kissed her, he could feel the struggle inside her collapse. Her body went limp, her mouth became even hungrier. The idea that she wanted him was a powerful aphrodisiac and his veins pulsed with heat and the throbbing need to be inside her.
Urgent now, his hands found the tie at her waist and tugged it loose. Her blouse had no buttons so as quickly as the sashes fell apart so did the front of the garment. She wasn’t wearing a bra and Alex drew in a short, sharp breath as his eyes laid upon her small, perfectly made breasts.
“Oh, woman,” he whispered, “how very beautiful you are.”
Reverently his hand reached and cupped around the soft mound centered with a rosy-brown bud. Sierra moaned and arched toward him in silent need. Alex shifted so that his mouth was level with her breasts and for a moment he buried his face between them and breathed in the sweet, womanly scent of her skin, listened to the rapid beat of her heart as it shook her left breast and caused his own hands to tremble as they slid over her warm, satiny skin.
When his mouth finally touched her nipple, desire shot through him like an arc of electricity and he felt his loins tighten with overwhelming need, his manhood pulse. The strong, sudden reaction to the woman in his arms was shocking to Alex. Wanting a woman wasn’t supposed to move this quickly!
Tearing his mouth from her breast, he reached to peel away the rest of her clothing, which consisted of only her skirt and a skimpy pair of pink panties. After tossing them to the floor, he dealt with his jeans and shoes. The items landed on top of Sierra’s with a soft thud as he turned back to her.
“I hope you have some sort of birth control here,” he said gently as he joined her on the queen-size mattress. “I don’t go around prepared for such things.”
Sierra reached for him and he growled with pleasure as she tugged him toward her. “I’m so very glad to hear that, Counselor. I thought you stayed prepared for this sort of thing.”
“Hmm, you thought wrong,” he said against her cheek.
“Well, don’t worry. I’m covered.”
His head reared back to look at her with stunned fascination. “I thought you said that you and Chad weren’t lovers.”
“We weren’t. I have to—take oral contraceptives for other—monthly reasons,” she explained.
A silly sort of relief rushed through him and he wondered why he was even thinking such thoughts. It didn’t matter who Sierra had made love with in the past or how often. What mattered was this moment and each moment forward.
“Oh. I see. That’s good. Real good.”
“Is it?” she asked.
He slid his hands beneath her back and rolled her atop of him. With his palms cupping the flare of her hips, he said, “We already have one baby. We don’t need another one right now.”
We. We have a baby. His words sounded so sweet, so much like man-and-wife talk. Was he thinking of her in those terms? she wondered. No. She couldn’t let herself imagine such a thing. She couldn’t start letting herself believe that tonight was anything more than sex.
“Alex—” She paused as his hands slid upward and over the curved indention of her tiny waist, her ribs, and finally rested upon her shoulders. “I know that you’ve had lots of girlfriends and I—”
“Stop it. They have nothing to do with you and me. They’re all in the past anyway. I don’t have anyone in my life but you. Just you.”
Her face dropped shyly away from his. “That’s—that’s not what’s bothering me,” she murmured.
He rested his head in the curve of her shoulder and speared his fingers into her hair. One by one, he pulled the pins until the long, curly mass spilled onto her shoulders and into his face.
“Oh, honey,” he said gently. “There shouldn’t be anything bothering you.”
“I—I’m not very experienced, Alex. I’ve only done this once and that was a long time ago. And it—was just a rushed fumble in a college dorm room.”
Rolling them both over, he placed her on her back and, propping his chin on the heel of his palm, studied her face in the semidarkness. All these years he’d known Sierra, he’d believed she’d been sharing “close” relationships with the boyfriends she’d paraded in front of him. To think that she’d gone so long without being intimate with anyone was shocking to him.
“Sierra, that’s awful. Why? Why haven’t you made love since? You’ve had boyfriends. Didn’t they ever want—to be this close to you?”
Her face burned with embarrassment, but she didn’t turn away or try to hide from him. She wanted him to know exactly how she was feeling. “Oh, yes, they wanted. I just wasn’t ready to give. After that one time, I decided it would never happen again until I was with someone special, someone I trusted.”
And that someone was him? Alex asked himself. The idea shook him down deep, in a spot that must have been dead before.
His heart swelled with tenderness as he reached to draw her closer. “Little darlin’, I don’t know what to say,” he murmured as he brushed his fingertips against her temple. “Except that I’m glad you’re not experienced. I’m glad that I’ll be your first real lover.”
Something between a sob and a laugh escaped her throat before she lifted her head from the mattress and latched her lips on to his.
After that, words weren’t important. Hands searched and caressed while their kisses deepened and heated to a frantic mating of lips and tongues.
Sierra was caught up in a whirlwind that seemed to be going faster and faster as her body filled with heat, her mind shut down to everything except the wondrous magic of Alex’s hands touching her breasts, her belly and thighs and the sweet mindless sensation of having their mouths connected.
Eventually his lips left hers and she sighed as his tongue began a measured, wet descent to the hollow of her throat, then farther on to the slope of one breast. As soon as his teeth closed gently around her excited nipple, she moaned and arched upward toward the mind-tingling pleasure.
“Alex—I—I didn’t know it was supposed to feel this way!” she whimpered in astonishment.
Lifting his face, he saw her head writhing against the bed, her hair spread like tangled black vines around her face. Her eyes were closed, her sweet, wet lips twisted with something that was partly pleasure and partly pain.
Oh, but she was beautiful, he thought with renewed wonder, a dark, erotic goddess who’d never been initiated into the art of making love. Just looking at her aroused him like nothing ever had. Every nerve, every muscle in his body was pulsing to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Sweat had misted his face and lathered his body. When he spoke his voice came out in a choked, guttural sound, “Neither did I, Sierra. Neither did I.”
Dropping his head back to the opposite breast, he moistened the nipple with the tip of his tongue as his fingers worked a slow, wayward path to the soft curls nestled between her thighs.
Tensing with anticipation, Sierra clutched his muscled shoulders.
“Alex—”
“Shh. Don’t be afraid, honey. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to love you. Love you.”
The last two words came out on a desperate groan. The erotic sound merged with Sierra’s gasp as his fingers found the intimate folds of her womanhood and slipped inside.
Whimpering with need, she held on to him tightly until the ache in the lower part of her body became such a palpable throb she was certain every inch of her was going to burst into flames.
“I want you, Alex. Please, don’t make me keep waiting,” she pleaded.
With his face hovering over hers, he whispered against her lips. “Hold on to me, baby. Hold on and don’t let go.”
He entered her slowly and gently until their bodies were completely united, but all too quickly the incredible sensation of being surrounded by her warmth and wetness overcame him and he began to move with deep, hungry thrusts.
For a moment, Sierra was stunned motionless by the unaccustomed invasion, but a few seconds was all it took bef
ore her body began to sing like a taut wire in a high wind.
Clasping her arms around his rib cage, she lifted her hips and met his mind-shattering thrust until both of their bodies were slick with sweat, their breathing fast and ragged. Yet she couldn’t stop to get her breath or to even think. She had to find whatever it was that his body was offering. She had to put an end to the aching need that gripped her body.
When the climb finally ended, Sierra cried out softly as the room around them spun into a million tiny stars, shining and twirling all around them like jewels of passion.
The wonder of it stayed with her for long minutes, until finally the weight of Alex’s body began to press her into the mattress and she squirmed for enough space to draw in a deep breath.
Sensing that he was squashing her, Alex rolled on the bed and pulled her along with him so that he could keep a hand on the curve of her waist.
With her eyes still closed, she rubbed her palms against his hair-roughened chest. “Mmm. You feel so good.”
“You feel pretty incredible yourself,” he replied with a tired smile.
Scooting closer, she pressed her cheek against the region of his heart. His hand ran down the back of her head and into her hair to make her lips tilt into a contented smile.
Bending his neck, Alex placed a kiss on her crown of black curls. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean for that to happen so quickly. I wanted to give you more time.”
Sierra had never felt so close, so drawn to any man as she did to Alex at this moment. “I didn’t need more time.”
He moved his head so that his cheek was resting against hers and she made a soft, mewing noise as his hands slid down her back and cupped her bottom. “Yes, you did. We both did. But you’re just a bit too potent for me.”
She giggled with disbelief, but Alex couldn’t bring himself to laugh along with her. He was still too stunned, too dazed by what had just taken place between them. He’d expected making love with Sierra to be more than enjoyable. As far as physical pleasure went, he’d planned on it being very, very nice. He’d not expected it to be an earthquake. He’d not anticipated wanting her so quickly or so badly that he couldn’t hold himself back.
In a Texas Minute Page 10
