With a hand to the wall for support, Barbie faltered. She’d gotten mentally to sheets, and she didn’t know this guy at all. She needed more information. For example, did he have parents in the area? Siblings? Did he have an apartment, or live—again, eww—in Forest Lawn graveyard somewhere? Was his dog, the one that had ripped his leather seats, a Yorkie or a German Shepherd?
The thought of Darin with a Yorkie made her laugh out loud. This, in turn, got her another puzzled look and a brief grin from her chiseled-featured fantasy date. Zing! Another lightning strike, straight as an arrow, caused panty moistness and obliteration of the rule-book pages now flipping through Barbie’s head.
“You okay?” Darin asked.
“Sure. You?” Barbie replied. Okay, if she hadn’t ever jumped into bed with a stranger, there was always a first time, right? No one could be in charge of their needs all the time, could they? She wanted this, didn’t she?
“Barbie?” Darin said, his voice wreaking havoc with her equilibrium. “Keys?”
Barbie handed him her purse, reminding herself that beauty wasn’t everything. Some people thought snakes were beautiful, but look what damage a fang could do. Darin was downright beautiful, all right. And though his face seemed to swim in and out of focus, she was almost completely sure there were no fangs.
As for her own darned self, everything seemed to be swimming and shaking, even Darin’s hand as he held up her key. He missed the lock a couple of times before finding the slot, leaving Barbie to hope he’d be better at sticking things into small spaces later.
Weeks later.
Her door opened. Darin waited for her to cross the threshold. Trip across the threshold, actually. He waited in the hallway until she grinned at him over her shoulder. Apparently assuming it was a come-hither invitation, he followed her inside.
So it had been a come-hither invitation. What of it?
Fine. She had obliterated Rule One. So? There was little possibility the guy was a vampire or anything. It was no big deal to have him in her apartment. Not necessarily.
A tinkling sound came from behind. Darin had dropped her keys onto the table by the door, as she herself always did. He went into the kitchen and placed the doggie bag in the refrigerator, following her new Rule Two to the letter.
Circling back from the kitchen, Darin stopped Barbie when she went for the light switch. Catching her hand in his, he pulled her gently to him. Not too close, not too many touching parts. No great cause for concern yet.
Hardly any light penetrated her closed window blinds, merely enough to see that they had plenty of clothes still between them. All sheets remained in the bedroom. She was safe.
“The place has a fragrance,” Darin whispered, his mouth close to hers, his demeanor slightly antsy, it seemed to Barbie. Tense. “A strangely sweet fragrance.”
“Oreo,” Barbie said.
“What?”
“Chocolate, sugar, cocoa.”
“The smell is strong.”
“The people who make Oreo cookies know how to hook everyone. Everyone with a chocolate fetish, anyway. Those little round things are quite intoxicating once you get a sniff and a taste. Don’t tell me you’ve never had one?”
Darin’s mass of dark hair fell across his face when he shook his head, but not before it had feathered downward over Barbie’s cheek. She was sure she would pass right out of this world if he continued with that.
“Are you going to kiss me?” she asked hopefully, lips already at the starting line, her motor revving.
“No kiss,” Darin replied.
Her engine sputtered. “Why not?”
“Rushing things a bit, don’t you think?”
“Right,” Barbie agreed reluctantly. “We have to get to know each other better before kissing.” But why was that, exactly? she silently wanted to know.
Her date put a few more inches between them. Barbie didn’t need to touch him to feel the now-familiar sizzle radiating through and around their bodies. It felt like the summer sun on wet pavement.
“We’ll have plenty of time for getting to know each other better,” Darin said.
“Yes, and after Rules One through Ten are broken, then what?” she murmured.
“Rules?” Darin queried.
“Some people live by them.”
“Ah.” Darin nodded. “In that case, after Ten we’ll progress to Eleven.”
Barbie felt her date’s body twitch and took this for a sign of shared sexual tension. She cuddled up closer to the studly male, her mouth raised as if to find his. No more time-wasting, she was thinking. She wanted to find out what the kiss would be like. She wanted to find out what it would be like now, to see if there would even be a future.
Darin obliged. Lips to lips. Mouth to mouth. Followed immediately by fireworks that blasted away at the inside of the apartment. The darkness behind Barbie’s closed eyelids vanished. This small meeting of their bodies had all the subtlety of an atomic blast. They both groaned at the same time.
Darin’s mouth was lush, expert. No huge surprise there. The kiss was rich, mind-numbing, state altering, and better than chocolate. His kiss was adroit, sublime, like a flash of insight—a green flash, outlined in auburn and studded with stars. Hundreds of stars. Millions of stars. So many stars that Barbie was pretty sure they must have gotten to Rule Eleven already.
Soaring through these sensations, fueled by the wine she had ingested, Barbie was helpless to resist the ministrations of Darin’s lips. She didn’t even pretend to be offended by the deep, drowning feeling that overcame her in his arms. She didn’t try to pull away. Dessert had been served. She was enjoying being devoured.
Her mouth moved with his, countered his, accepted his, even as she wondered fleetingly what kind of a man would never have tried an Oreo. Her body shuddered continually. More moistness gathered between her thighs. Chills crashed over her with the intensity of a tsunami, except that this tsunami wasn’t water, but wind. She not only saw stars, she felt the wind on her face and in her hair. She smelled the greenery of the cemetery, tasted it in her mouth, and felt the abandon of running shoeless, damp grass beneath her feet.
Weird. Exquisite. Absolutely wonderful.
So wonderful, in fact, that Barbie was sure part of her was separating at the seams. Concentration seemed a thing of the past. She wanted to shout as Darin’s fingers moved up through the hair at the nape of her neck. Zing! Clang! Omigosh! Yet those sounds and inner cries no longer did justice to the moment. Darin’s closeness called to attention every inch of Barbie’s body, every single cell. His touch electrified all.
Their essences clashed. Steam billowed. Absurd, but true, Barbie realized in a second of perfect clarity: this was the first real kiss she’d ever had.
The realization fled. Darin’s embrace tightened. The kiss she and Darin shared intensified. Yes, even perfection had room for improvement, it seemed, as Rules Eleven though Fourteen passed before Barbie’s closed eyes—the ones about clothes in heaps on the floor, naked limbs entangled, and taking this guy home to meet her parents. Then there were the ones regarding breakfast in bed on Sundays, dual soaks in the tub, with bubbles, and long walks, hand in hand, through the. . .graveyard?
This was her final thought before Darin took his mouth back in a separation so untimely that Barbie uttered a whimper of protest. However, her date did not flee. Oh, no. His arms slipped beneath her and, reminiscent of a hero in a nineteenth-century novel, he lifted her high off the ground, off her feet. Not like a sack of potatoes this time, yet definitely uncivilized. A whole lot of insinuation was packed into this move, punctuated by the sound of her shoes hitting the hardwood floor.
“No sack-of-potatoes thing?” Barbie asked breathlessly, eyes locked to Darin’s in the semidark, her arms closing around his perfectly defined shoulders. Shoulders that were actually rippling.
“I’ve never thought of doing to a sack of potatoes what I’m thinking of doing to you,” Darin replied.
Heartthrob! Stud King!
/>
“What are you thinking of doing with me?” It was a silly question, Barbie realized, though the answer was of the utmost importance.
“Bending all those rules in half,” Darin growled.
“How?”
“By taking you to bed.”
“My bed?”
“Assuming you have one.”
Barbie could hardly draw breath. “Then what?”
“Then I’ll tuck you—”
“What?”
“Then I’ll tuck you in.”
“With a T?” Barbie laughed, giddiness morphing into euphoria. Surely what Darin meant was that the tucking would come after all the rule bending. After they did the thing that rhymed with tucking. She had no doubts that Darin, so adept at kissing, would know a thing or two about the finer art of. . .tucking.
“Not to night,” Darin whispered as though he could read her mind.
“Not. . .?”
“To night.”
“I have no idea what you mean, Darin.”
“I think you do.”
“No. . .untucking?” she asked quietly.
“No taking this all the way.”
All the way? Had he said “all the way”? Barbie hadn’t heard that particular phrase since the old seventies TV shows. She hadn’t actually known what it meant until college, but now that the major question facing them was in the open, Barbie wondered why. Why no untucking or tucking? Why wouldn’t they go all the way?
“Do not rebel, my lovely Barbie,” Darin urged with the singsong of a Shakespearean sonnet. “It’s for your own good that I’m making this stand.”
What? He was making a stand? Without asking her? Wasn’t the woman supposed to decide whether or not to halt a perfectly good mauling? What right did the man have to do so, chivalrous intentions or not?
“But you want to, don’t you?” Barbie said.
“You have no idea how much.” Darin shook his head. “There is no rush. This feeling won’t go away. It’s just that now is not the best time to—”
He carried Barbie to the bedroom, leaving his unfinished sentence in the hall. He had no difficulty finding his way, as there were only four rooms in the entire apartment. So there they were, in near-complete darkness, in her apartment, in her boudoir. On date one. This should have been scary. Instead, the night felt to Barbie like a howling success. Graveyard Guy had swept her off her feet—again.
Uncivilized? Hooray for uncivilized.
For reasons best left unexplored at the moment, she simply couldn’t resist this guy. One kiss wasn’t enough. Tucking wouldn’t be enough. After glasses and glasses of wine, she’d had some sort of breakthrough.
“If you’re leaving, why are you carrying me?” she asked. “More particularly, why are you carrying me into my bedroom?”
“I didn’t say I was leaving,” he replied.
What might have been a clap of thunder was in actuality the turnover of Barbie’s heart in her throat. Then again, it could have been the building collapsing. She wasn’t sure.
“You’re not leaving?” Was that her voice, up an octave?
“Not yet.”
“But we aren’t going to—”
“Plenty of other things to do, if one has time and imagination.”
Other things? A peal of thunder crashed down low in Barbie’s body, somewhere near her baby blue lace thong.
“Unless you object,” Darin said.
Object? Was he kidding? “Well, I. . .” Come on girl, finish a darned thought. They were closing in on the mattress.
“I won’t hurt you, Barbie,” Darin whispered to her. “Ever.”
The fact that a lot of guys with women in their snares had no doubt uttered this very same sentiment while trying to get into lacy pan ties was not lost on Barbie. But ever was the word he had used. This man had used the E-word.
He carefully laid Barbie down on her pink satin comforter so that her head rested on familiar, lavender-scented pillows. Distant illumination from a tiny night-light in the hall cast a faint shadow over the bedroom rug. The dial on Barbie’s retro pink princess phone radiated with a mild fluorescent glow. Otherwise, the room lay in total darkness.
Darin’s hands squished the pillows on either side of Barbie’s head. He was standing, leaning over her. His breath, as he sighed, reached her cheek.
“Bedroom,” Barbie said, wondering if he would kiss her again, this man, this Braveheart, this stallion who didn’t really seem so out of place here in the dark. All that maleness in her ten-by-twelve-foot pink boudoir. All his energy contained.
“Yes. Bedroom,” Darin said.
No kiss came. What seemed like eons passed before Barbie again encountered his touch, and then it was his fingers, not his mouth. They skimmed the front of her body, truly like a Braille reading, hesitating on the buttons of her blue silk jacket.
Fearing to move, Barbie held her breath. As she pondered what “not going all the way” might mean, in light of him having his hands on her buttons, she heard in the distance the muffled strains of her cell phone.
Darin started to unbutton her jacket. They were very small buttons. Bach was chortling out a tune in the living room. Old Bachster was ruining the moment. Bad timing, Angie! Damn the rescue call!
Darin was at button number two, over her breasts, but who was counting?
Barbie turned her head from side to side on the pillows. Unable to see Darin, she could only feel what he was doing, and she thought she might go mad with it all.
Darin had reached button three.
The moment was over-the-top erotic. She had wanted this all along. She had forsaken the rules and willed Darin into this. Now, her lungs burned from withheld breath. Her breasts strained toward his hands. Her mind reeled from wine, excitement, and a lack of necessary oxygen.
And Darin was at button four. Out of six.
But that darned Bach was a per sis tent so-and-so. This was so not a Bach moment. Not an Angie moment. So not.
Button five. Button six. Darin had mastered the jacket. He slowly separated the silk from her skin, pressing the fabric open. The air in the room felt cool on her chest in comparison to Darin’s volcanic heat. Oh sweet heavens! There was nothing left for him to deal with now, at least on her torso, except the thinnest of camisoles, the faintest of barriers. What would he do? What would he touch?
Tomorrow, Barbie vowed, her mind swirling, chest heaving, as she waited for what was to come. Tomorrow, she’d change that damned cell phone ringtone to something more appropriate. Something in honor of Darin.
“Disco Inferno.”
Chapter Sixteen
Burn, baby, burn! She was a Barbie doll going up in flames. The flames of anticipation. Was that plastic she smelled?
What ever Darin was doing, it should have been illegal. His hands were gliding down the front of her lace-trimmed black cami, exploring, mapping, touching. Lightly, barely, almost, not quite. There was nothing about this in the rules.
Barbie’s feeling was one of frivolity. Otherwordliness. Powerlessness. Plea sure slipped in and out of focus as she labored to think. Was she enjoying this? Yes, absolutely. Should she be enjoying this?
Darin slipped her arms from the jacket. Deftly. Carefully. His lips, so warm and utterly fascinating, rested not on her mouth but on her right wrist. Like a moth across a watery surface, his long hair flitted over the naked flesh of her forearm. The tickle of his hair followed the slow upward drag of his lips.
Zing! Crash! Bam!
The glow inside of Barbie was raging fast and furious now, spurred on by the movement of Darin’s mouth, her hyperactive nerve endings, and plain old curiosity. It was probably a good thing her mind had taken a holiday. She thought she might be glowing.
Darin’s magnificent mouth brushed across her right biceps, never actually landing. Barbie undulated all over. Oh, she knew her anatomy and physiology all right, enough to know with certainty that he was a long distance from where “all the way” began and ended. Yet each touch in the
dark reminded her of what all the way might feel like. The sheer ecstasy of a good tucking was, seemingly, a universe unto itself.
Who was breathing so loudly? Her? Darin? Why did her chest rise and fall with effort now, as though the Angel of First Date Tucking might be sitting on it?
Lips! On her shoulder! Soft. Caressing. Moving on, Darin took a detour with a sensual, slow, drawn-out trail of his mouth, alternating with little kisses across her collarbone to where her satiny camisole strap lay loosely against her skin.
A brief kiss to the strap, then the tip of Darin’s tongue drew a circular pattern at the crown of her shoulder, almost like a plane coming in for a landing. He took some skin between his lips and sucked lightly, then he bit down gently with his teeth. He repeated this process on a downward angle. Lips, teeth, tongue, suck.
“God,” Barbie groaned, reaching for him. This was absolutely too much to bear. Could she have interpreted Darin incorrectly? Could all the way have meant marriage instead of sex? Because this was sex. Really good sex. They were starting it, or her initials weren’t BB.
He caught her hands before they touched him, raking her again with his nails as he held them both in one of his, against the bed. Being ravished without being able to participate was the pits.
“You are gooood,” Barbie sputtered.
“Yes, well, your four glasses of wine helped,” Darin teased, his voice as dark as chocolate chunk.
“You were counting?” Barbie asked.
“Nope.”
“I’m drunk now? I could be dreaming in a drunken stupor?”
“I prefer to think you’re under my spell.”
“Love spells are not acceptable on first dates. Definitely no love spells,” she muttered.
“What about more kissing?”
“Will tongues be involved?”
“Is there any other kind?”
He had her there. Barbie was pretty sure there was no other kind. No other kind that she wanted with him, at least. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Kissing leads to other things,” she noted breathlessly.
Barbie & The Beast Page 11
