Sweet and tender didn’t enter into it. He led her directly into a hot, explicit mating of mouths, ruthlessly fanning her banked fire. “I want you naked now,” he rasped with tangible hunger. “I have to feel you against me.” He pulled her to her feet and unfastened the buttons of her gown, drawing her into another voracious kiss.
She knew she had to take control. Pleasure this keen had to be addictive, like the hot, virile flavor of his mouth and the smooth tautness of his muscles beneath his open robe. He pushed the gown down past her hips until it slithered to the floor. She shoved his robe from his shoulders and savored the crush of her breasts against his chest.
But instead of losing herself in the rhythm of his driving tongue, she veered away to kiss his jaw, neck and chest, concentrating on her goal rather than the erotic taste of his skin. She would take control. He’d be “planting his seed” before he even knew it. And then the deed would be done, the games would be over and he could never lay siege to her again.
He swept his hands down her naked back, cupped her buttocks and lifted her against him, forcing her legs to wrap around his hips. His erection strained between their bodies and against her feminine softness as he carried her to the bed. Pleasure wended through her, but so did dismay.
She hadn’t been expecting his size and hardness. She’d already been overwhelmed by his sexual appeal before she’d known about his physical advantage. She’d clung to the hope that if she avoided his kisses and minimized foreplay, the intercourse itself would only mildly arouse her. She’d been hoping she could mentally distance herself.
Now that he held her naked against his hot, sinewy body on the way to his bed, serious doubts attacked her. There could be no dallying! No long, heated session. It was up to her to hurry things along. Get the damn seed planted. Put this night behind her.
Not easy with him kissing her throat as if he might devour her … and rocking his hardness in maddening motions against the most intimate part of her. No, indeed, not easy at all.
And then they were falling onto the bed, his mouth at her breast while his hand sought the throbbing heat between her legs. Out of sheer desperation, she grabbed his wrist and stopped him. “Cole,” she panted, “we need a condom. I … I think you should put one on now.”
“Not yet.”
“Yes, now.”
Dazed and panting with need, Cole raised himself on a forearm and stared down at her. He knew that if he were thinking straight, he wouldn’t be surprised by her insistence. He’d never made love without a condom, and the heat they’d stoked between them already burned hotter than any lovemaking he’d ever known. Maybe she was right. Maybe if he didn’t put one on now, he’d lose all sense and make love to her without it.
Oh, he wanted to. He wanted to drive himself deep into her with no barrier between them. The very thought sent a fiery surge of desire through him, threatening his self-control. He’d damn sure better put the condom on now.
But the way she’d stiffened beneath him and caught his wrist still bothered him. Was the condom the only reason she’d stopped him?
I’ve never been intimate with anyone I wasn’t in love with, she’d told him.
He nearly groaned when he remembered his answer. Then fall in love with me, Tess. Why the hell had he said it? She’d been hesitant to get sexually involved with him from the start, but he’d sensed even more uneasiness after his thoughtless response. Until, of course, he’d distracted her with his mouth and his hands and deep, hot kisses that had left his insides burning for her.
Fall in love with me, Tess. Did she think he’d been mocking her, or shrugging aside her morals? He’d said it without thinking—a gut reaction to her hesitation. And to the fact that she was in his arms only because of some damn curse … and to the thought that she’d given herself, body and soul, to another man, but never would to him. Women didn’t really fall in love with Westcott men. That was a documented historical fact. He’d come to accept it.
But he wanted her.
That wanting drove all other considerations from his mind. Would she make love to him? Could he survive this night—or the next five months of nights—if she didn’t?
Rolling away from her and onto his knees to reach across the bed, he grabbed a condom from the nightstand. As he sat back on his heels and ripped open the foil packet, she surprised him by looming up behind him, pressing her lush, hard-tipped breasts against his back and running her hands around his ribcage in light caresses. Heat suffused him, and his hands fumbled with the condom.
“Hurry,” she murmured. She then feathered kisses along his shoulder and ran her fingers in teasing circles across his chest, rousing his nipples to hardness.
He hurried. His heart hammered, his blood rushed. She wanted him. Her hands swept in scintillating paths from his chest to his abdomen, and her lightly kneading fingers splayed down to his groin. His arousal pulsed to an aching hardness. She wanted him!
Before he had the condom rolled all the way down his erection, he felt her weight shift on the bed. The warm press of her body left his back and glanced along his arm, and she shifted onto her knees to face him, her long, elegant legs folded beneath her slightly splayed thighs.
The sight of her took his breath away. Her luxuriant hair shimmered around her like a waterfall of fire, cascading down her shapely shoulders and around her high, full breasts. Teasing tendrils fanned and curled near her cinnamon-dark nipples. She was slender, yet pleasingly curved. Soft, yet strong and toned. Dewy-skinned. Supple. And oh so tight and hot.
He wanted her.
And it seemed she wanted him. Tense with need, he raised his gaze to meet her eyes. To search them. Read them. Glory in her heat.
But she wasn’t meeting his gaze. She glanced at his hair, his chin, his nose, his eyebrows. But didn’t meet his eyes. “Let’s do it now,” she whispered. And she raked her fingertips slowly up his thighs.
His blood surged in a dizzying rush. He had no problem with now. Smoothing the condom into place, he rose on his knees and pulled her against him, taking her mouth in a rollicking, sumptuous kiss.
Her body fused with his. His hands flowed over voluptuous curves and into moist, hot valleys. She broke away from the kiss with a breathy cry. “No!” He blinked to focus through a sensual haze, but before he could make sense of her protest, she added, “You’ve done enough. It’s my turn now.” And she slid a hand around his straining erection and nested its tip between her thighs, beneath the auburn curls of her femininity.
“Tess,” he groaned, catching at her hips in helpless reflex as she began to undulate. In all his imaginings since he’d met her, he hadn’t expected such aggression. She never failed to surprise him, though. Or to enflame him.
His hardness probed into silky wet heat, forcing a loud expulsion of breath from him. She gasped at that initial penetration, stunned into momentary stillness. Then her eyes closed and her hips resumed their sinuous revolutions. Slowly, slowly, she drew him in.
Lightly, rhythmically, he thrust up into her.
A long, deep groan rolled from her throat, and her fingers bit into his shoulders. “No!” she cried, her eyes still tightly closed. “Don’t … don’t move.”
“What?” he breathed, too caught up in currents of molten sensation to clearly understand. Had she told him not to move? She had to be kidding! Grinding his teeth, he filled his hands with her firm, flexing buttocks and gyrated harder, driving himself further up into the heaven of her tightness.
Her face began to glisten. A pulse beat wildly in her throat. “Please,” she begged, her silvery eyes flashing open. “This would be so much easier if you’d just … let … me … do … it!”
And she shoved at his shoulders, catching him off-guard, knocking him off balance. He tumbled on an awkward angle, his tight grip on her bottom bringing her with him and preventing their bodies from disjoining, though just barely. Her hair spilled over him in a fragrant, silky rush, and his arms corralled her. Panting for air, reeling with bewilderment
and frustration, he rolled onto his back and trapped her against his chest. “What are you doing, Tess?”
Evading his gaze, she pushed up and fought free of his arms. Apprehension sluiced through him. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Squaring her jaw, she tossed her hair behind one shoulder, straddled his hips and maneuvered him deeper into her.
Acute pleasure jolted from his loins, bringing his shoulders up off the bed. Too stunned to utter more than a guttural groan, he fell back and watched her in a hot-blooded daze. She braced her hands on her thighs, shut her eyes and circled her hips in sleek, powerful gyrations. Sharp pangs of sensation assailed him. Her internal muscles clenched him, stroked him.
The pleasure rose too quickly; the intensity grew too great for him to last long. But he didn’t want it to end this way. He wanted to prolong their coupling. Draw her into it. Share it.
It occurred to him then that she wasn’t sharing it. At least, not in the way he craved. She’d forced him deep into her body, but she’d also shut him out—avoiding his gaze; fending off his touches; withholding her kiss.
The clear, simple truth hit him. She was doing only what was necessary. Planting the seed. Taking care of business.
Teetering at the edge of an earth-shattering climax, he grabbed her hips and stopped her. Her eyes flew open. She looked dazed, wild and seductive … and very near climax herself. It didn’t help him to know that. Struggling to stave off his own imminent release, he ground his teeth, pulled her down into his arms and rolled with her.
She fought to escape his hold, but writhed against him all the while, pushing him closer to a completion he didn’t want. He tried to withdraw from her intimate heat, but she squeezed her inner muscles around him and damped her hands around his buttocks to hold him fast. She clearly didn’t want to be in his arms … yet she intended to keep their bodies intimately joined.
To finish the job.
He couldn’t let her get away with it.
“Tess.” He wrestled her down, trapped her beneath him and pinned her forearms beside her head, exerting force with his torso and thighs to subdue the movement of her body. “Tess, don’t do this.”
With a gasp and a sob, she suddenly arrested into utter stillness.
Their frantic breathing rasped loud and harsh. Their hearts thundered. He buried his face in the silky, tangled mass of her hair and called on every ounce of his willpower to stave off his climax. He wouldn’t move, wouldn’t even try to pull out of her, until he’d quelled the raging pressure in his loins.
The moment spun out in panting, simmering silence.
As the immediate threat subsided, he lifted his head, needing badly to connect with her. Needing to understand. Her flushed, glistening face radiated with an intensity that mystified him, but at least she was meeting his eyes. He urgently probed her gaze for answers.
And she probed his, searching … searching … as if he’d surprised and bewildered her as much as she had him.
But the need was still too strong to allow for clarity. The heat was banked, yet still too potent. And he was still achingly hard and throbbing within her.
Their silent communication seethed.
He flexed his grip on her hands beside her head, twining his fingers with hers, greedily absorbing the feel of her beneath him and the compelling heat of her stare.
And then he cocked his pelvis and rocked … ever so slightly … within her. Her body clenched, her breath hitched, her fingers tightened spasmodically around his. And her gaze consumed him.
Sweat beaded on his face at the effort of his restraint as he rolled his hips in an infinitely subtle thrusting. Torrential pleasure flooded him. He watched it—felt it—course through her, the same molten rivers of sensation. But desire radiated from somewhere deeper than the pleasure, and he gritted his teeth, wanting everything she was withholding.
Releasing her hands, he trapped her face between his palms and plied her with a scouring gaze. “Kiss me, Tess,” he implored in a desperate whisper, his thumbs sweeping in compulsive arcs beside her mouth. “It’s necessary. So damn necessary.”
Her gaze darkened with renewed turbulence, as if some inner battle raged. He felt her resistance. Knew that she’d refuse. And the pain of her abandonment squeezed him breathless. But while he struggled to deal with the pain, the warmest, sweetest vulnerability broke through in her stare. And though she looked like she might cry, her hands wended up his back, her arms slid around his shoulders and she gave herself over to a kiss—a moving, sharing, electrifying kiss that stoked his need hotter than anything ever had in his life. Then they made love. Heart to heart, muscle against muscle, they undulated together in a slow, erotic dance. The essence of poetry, of song. And when the need and the pleasure built to an overwhelming force, the detonation ripped through both of them with awe-inspiring power.
Tess felt as if she’d been reborn.
She knew then, as she lay gasping against his slick, quaking body, that she’d been wrong in all of her earlier self-assurances. He had taken more—much, much more—than she’d ever intended to give.
*
Chapter 7
« ^ »
Tess woke up in bed alone. She also woke up too late. On a Saturday morning, yet. The bridal shop’s busiest day. At least, in a theoretical sense. They hadn’t seen much action in the last few months, but that only made every business hour more vital. She should have opened the store an hour ago.
She showered and dressed in a mad rush, then scrambled down the elegant grand staircase of Westcott Hall in hopes of finding her car. Cole had promised he’d have someone drop it by the house last night. He’d kept his word. Her modest old sedan sat in the circular drive, looking ridiculously out of place at the Westcott mansion.
She felt just as ridiculously out of place. What was a good little McCrary girl doing here, anyway?
Regrouping after an evening of torrid sex with Cole Westcott. Her heart turned over at the thought. She’d been putty in his hands. Hot putty. At least she had managed to pry herself from his embrace once he’d fallen asleep. She’d huddled on her side of the bed for the rest of the night, rehashing the details of her surrender.
And it had been a surrender. Unconditional. Her intentions to stay mentally detached and to keep things impersonal had gone up in a blaze. By the time he’d “planted his seed within her,” their lovemaking had become extraordinarily personal. Or rather, it had felt that way to her. And she’d started believing that he was kissing her and making love to her with a passion that meant something more than mere sex.
Not good. Delusions like those could only lead her to emotional disaster. As she drove down the tree-canopied highway toward town, she firmly reminded herself that words whispered in the heat of sexual arousal couldn’t be taken as signs of anything deeper. Fall in love with me, Tess, he’d said. Kiss me. It’s so damn necessary.
Oh, he was good. His urgent whispers, his soul-stealing gazes. If she hadn’t believed his reputation as a dangerous lady’s man, she certainly did now. How could any woman resist giving him everything he wanted once he set his mind to seduction? Then again, she supposed there weren’t too many women who would even think of resisting. He had to have legions of eager lovers.
That thought disturbed her way too much. Another bad sign. Their marriage was a business arrangement. She shouldn’t care at all about his other women.
Dismay jolted through her. His other women? Had she really thought of them as his other women? That would mean that she considered herself one of them. And she didn’t! She had married him, yes, and made love to him … but that didn’t mean she was personally involved with him.
God, Tess. How much more involved could you be? Squeezing the steering wheel until her fingers hurt, she assured herself that legal and sexual involvement did not necessarily mean emotional involvement. And wasn’t that her biggest reservation concerning Cole—her fear of becoming too emotionally attached to him?
She’d obviously been without a man for too long.
The thirteen months she’d spent alone had left her too vulnerable.
Slowing her speed as she approached city streets, she wondered if Cole had been affected at all by their lovemaking, or if he took passionate nights of sex pretty much for granted. She couldn’t help noticing that he’d left this morning without waking her. No long, hot, early morning kisses. No blazing caresses. No wild acts of passion.
At least she could be thankful for that. Very thankful.
But … hadn’t he wanted to make love to her this morning? Had he grown bored with her already?
Motoring slowly past her parents’ boutique, she found no open parking space and had to walk two city blocks from her car. When she reached the shop, she gaped in surprise. Not only was it already open, but the place bustled with activity—women rifling through dresses on the racks, trying on veils and tiaras, debating over styles. Both her mother and Kristen were there, thoroughly engrossed in helping customers.
“Hey, look. It’s her,” someone remarked. Everyone glanced toward the doorway where Tess stood, and whispers rustled like crinoline petticoats.
“Oh, Tess, thank goodness you’re here.” Her mother broke away from a cluster of women who were debating over bridesmaid dresses. “Are you okay, honey?” she whispered, clearly worried. “Did he expect you to—” With a sharp glance at a woman standing nearby who watched and listened with blatant interest, she murmured, “We’ll talk later. Will you help these ladies choose a style while I tend to Mrs. Capelli? She’s here to pick up her daughter’s gown.”
“Excuse me.” A bubbly young redhead pushed past Margaret to beam at Tess. “Do you have any more gowns like the one you wore yesterday? When I saw it on the newscast, I knew I had to have one just like it. It was gorgeous!”
A hubbub of enthusiastic agreement broke out around her. One matronly woman noticed her wedding ring and grabbed her hand for a closer look. A chorus of “oohs” and “ahhhs” sounded. Comments flowed about her dress, her hair, her flowers, the limo, the chapel … the groom…
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