by Lori Wilde
“I know Twilight is behind the times, but this is just sad.”
“What is it?”
“Hot wax.”
“Hot wax?” he repeated.
“They smear the wax on.” She motioned toward her crotch. “Then they rip the hair off.”
“Like in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin where the guy gets his chest waxed?”
“Yes, except it’s…you know…down there.”
Sam bit down on his knuckles. “God, but that must hurt like a bastard.”
“You get used to it.”
“How? You’d think no one would go back after the first time.”
“The results are worth the pain, plus it helps to have a couple of glasses of wine before you go for your appointment. The more you do it, the less it hurts.”
“And you just let strangers pour hot wax on you and yank it off?”
Emma cocked her head. “You’ve honestly never heard of a Brazilian?”
“Other than the people native to Brazil, no. It doesn’t make me a freak. In fact…” He eyed the slick V at the apex of her thighs. “If you want to talk freaky…”
“I did not come here to be insulted. I’m leaving. Where’s my clothes?” Emma pretended to be mad.
“You’re not leaving.”
“You bet I am, buster. You’re making fun of my muff!”
“Hey, hey.” He reached out to her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”
“That would sound a lot more convincing if you weren’t smiling.”
He tried to flatten his lips, but the corners kept tipping up.
Her nostrils flared. “Go on, admit it, your conventional sensibilities are insulted by my sleek, slick look.”
“It’s not that my sensibilities are insulted. You just caught me by surprise. I had an image in my head of what you looked like down there and I was expecting…well…I am a veterinarian. I like petting furry things.”
“Well, I’m an actress and I live in New York, and among my peer group, au naturel down there just doesn’t cut it.”
“You could try going native while you’re in Twilight. You’ve got a different peer group now.”
“FYI, Terri Longoria has a technician who does bikini waxing at her gym.”
“No?” Sam shook his head. “You mean there are women running around Twilight looking just like you?”
“Well, maybe not just like me. Most people just go for the bikini line, or a landing strip, not a full Brazilian.”
“Landing strip?”
“You know, a little strip of hair about this long.” She measured it off. “Like a landing strip. Don’t you watch porn?”
“No, I’m a father. I can’t have stuff like that in the house.”
“Seriously?”
“Hmm.” He scratched his head. “I guess I’m behind the times.”
“Are you imagining all the women in Twilight with bare muffs?”
“Not all of them.” Sam grinned. “But pretty much everyone under forty.”
“What happened to petting furry things?”
“You did tell me I need to open myself up to new experiences.” He reached for her. “Tell you what, I’m willing to plunge in with gusto and embrace this Brazilian thing if you’ll stay the night.”
Who could turn down an offer like that? Especially when the look in his eyes was one of pure lust. Whether Sam was willing to admit it or not, the novelty of her bare anatomy was turning him on.
“I just realized there’s something else we haven’t discussed,” she said.
“Safe sex.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a condom?”
He shook his head. “But I can run down to Walgreens. They’re open all night.”
“I have one in my purse.”
“Why didn’t you just say so? I’ll go get your purse.” He darted for the door.
“Come back without those pants on,” she called after him.
In the silence that followed in his wake, Emma took a deep breath. They’d had time to cool down. This was her opportunity to get dressed and get out of here before she did something that could not be reversed.
But she didn’t want to go. Every fiber of her being wanted Sam. She’d thought about this moment—well, okay, minus the coitus interruptus with the Brazilian thing and the condom—since she was fourteen. Honestly, he was the ideal of masculinity she’d carried around in her head. Her expectations were through the roof. What if sex with Sam couldn’t live up to her fantasy?
He came bursting back in the room, a little breathless, as if he’d run the whole way, buck naked.
Emma’s mouth dropped open. He far exceeded any daydream. His bare tight butt flexed as he stalked toward her, the pale skin contrasting with his tanned legs. Spellbound, Emma could not wrench her gaze away.
He was magnificent. She’d never been with such a well-endowed man. She would remember his body for the rest of her life.
She shot a gaze to his face.
He grinned. Clearly, he knew he had a fabulous package. But it wasn’t just this great butt and impressive penis that had her heart slamming into her chest wall. He was so handsome. She had no idea how he’d stayed unattached after Valerie’s death. His dreamy brown eyes balanced his angular jaw and prominent cheekbones. His hair shone black as oil in the muted lamplight. The shaggy length suited his steady, nurturing nature. Veterinarian, father, gardener, a man who knew how to use both his heart and his hands.
“Emma,” he said.
“Sam,” she whispered.
They kissed again, even hotter than before. Sam cupped her breasts in his warm palms. Her nipples beaded hard beneath his hands, and he thumbed them ever so slightly. And they exhaled at the same time, breathing out each other’s air.
She thought he was trembling, but then realized it was she.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured, “are you okay?”
“I don’t think my legs are going to hold me up.”
“I’m feeling just as shaky,” he admitted. “Let’s lie down on the bed.”
He threw back the quilt and climbed up on the bed, pulling her with him. They lay on their sides looking into each other’s eyes. He reached out and planed his palm over the curve of her hip. “Tell me what you like, Em, I want to please you.”
“I like the way you’re touching me right now.”
“How much pressure?”
“Velvet soft,” she said.
“It’s a starting point.” He reached out, and with extraordinarily light strokes ran his fingertips across her belly.
Goose bumps spread over her arms.
His calloused hand contrasted erotically with her soft skin. He traced her body with his fingertips and blazed kisses with his mouth. Tenderly and thoughtfully he kissed the pulse leaping at her collarbone. Then he took tiny succulent nibbles over the length of her throat.
She tried to wriggle closer to him, she wanted to get in on the action, but he held her pinned. “My turn first,” he said.
“No fair.”
“You’ll get your chance to pay me back.”
His mouth journeyed south to her breasts now swollen with urgent need. His tongue flicked out to lick over one nipple, while his thumb achingly rubbed the other straining bud. His thigh tightened against her leg, and his penis hardened to pure, smooth steel.
“Sam…” she whispered his name on a sigh. She loved saying his name. “Sam.”
“Mmm,” he murmured, the sound vibrating erotically against her achy flesh.
He slid his hand slowly over her pubis, fully checking out her Brazilian.
She giggled until he settled directly on her most sensitive spot. His lips closed around the tiny throbbing head of her cleft while his fingers slipped into her wet entrance. In a matter of seconds, she was calling his name in a long, keening moan. Her body was locked in a surge of pleasure that rose higher and higher with each heated flick of his sinful tongue.
It was too much, she couldn’t
take it anymore. She grasped his hair to tug him away, but he reached up and manacled her wrists with his hands. Holding her pinned, driving her mad with desire.
His tongue laved her sensitive skin as he suckled her deeply. She writhed against him, trying to push her body into his, needing more at the very same time she felt utterly weak and exhausted. Barbed ribbons of fevered sensation unfurled straight to her throbbing sex. Her inner muscles contracted, quivered.
“Yes,” she hissed as he moved his mouth back and forth in a steady, unrelenting strum. “Yes, yes, yes!”
Sam worked magic with his fingers, his tongue, leading her into alien terrain. He lifted her up to a place she’d never known existed. She loved the adventure of him. Between what he was doing to her and her own vivid, artistic responsiveness, Emma’s senses short-circuited. She smelled sounds—she caught a whiff of chiming bells. Tasted shapes—a basket of circles spilled into her mouth. And heard colors—their sex noises echoed strawberry red.
Synesthesia. They used such imagination exercises in her acting classes, but she’d never actually experienced it.
Was this some kind of bizarre dream?
But this wasn’t a dream. This new sensory awareness of him awoke something inside her, and all the old failures and disappointments fell away. He pushed Emma past her knowledge of herself. She had never before been so physically possessed. His movements shook her world. The walls of the room seemed to ripple. Everything moved and changed with her consciousness, her emotions flowing in a hundred different directions.
She rode his tongue, navigating the swell of pleasure and desire and discovery, and she experienced a sense of safety that she’d never felt before.
A bittersweet longing seized her as she realized this feeling could not last. She bit down on her lip, dismissing the wistful sadness. This was enough. A sweet slice of delight. She didn’t do commitment. Had no role model for how a loving relationship operated. There was nothing to get sentimental over. They were simply having a good time. They’d both acknowledged that up front.
He kept going and going and going. The man had stamina, no doubt about it. The friction was maddening, his carnal tongue stealing away her worries until she was left whimpering and throbbing on the precipice edge.
And then everything splintered, shattering tight and hard as her orgasm broke in herky-jerky jolts.
“Emma,” he whispered.
“Uh-huh?” she managed to murmur weakly.
“Don’t think we’re done yet.”
She roused herself, propped up on her elbows to gaze at him through heavily lidded eyes.
His erection burgeoned rigid, darkening as capillaries filled to capacity. Amazed, she reached out to trace her finger over his velvety head and heard his sharp intake of breath.
He looked into her eyes, and simultaneously, they were in each other’s arms, kissing, groaning, caressing. Hands and lips and tongues were everywhere. Sam pushed her back against the pillows, nudged her knees wide open with his leg. She tilted her hips up. He looked down into her eyes and eased into her.
She inhaled on a sigh as his long, thick heat glided inside her body. She grasped his shoulders, pressing her fingers into his skin.
He held her gaze. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m so big and you’re so small.”
“You’re not hurting me.”
“I’m not all the way in.”
There was more? Impossible. “I can handle it,” she said.
He pushed against her, and she felt her body shift to accommodate his size. He watched her face, sensitive to her nuances.
Now, with him deep in her moist wetness, she felt every twitch of his muscle. He lit her up inside. She had no thoughts beyond wanting him deeper, thrust completely to the hilt inside her.
“More,” she said. “I want it all.”
“Em,” he whispered, then gave her what she craved.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and rocked him into her. Her fingers gripped his buttocks. Her turn to own him. Her turn for control.
Tumult.
Everything was urgent and desperate and frenzied. She felt like her heart encompassed the entire universe. Need. Such need. To find, to press, to soothe, to fly free.
They came together like twin shooting stars falling across the sky. Saturated, she could not tell where he began and she ended. No division. No separation. No room for anything else. Their oneness banged through their whole bodies, encompassed every cell.
She teemed with ecstasy. It felt spiky and robust and brilliant. Her second orgasm of the night ripped through her, a five-alarm blaze burning her to a crisp. She was warm and gooey and completely scorched and she loved it.
When it was over and they’d floated back to reality, Emma lay panting in his arms, the total obliteration of their joining redefining everything she ever thought she knew about sex.
He shifted her into his arms, and she turned her face into his chest. She felt utterly womanly and sweetly raw. “I’ve never felt anything like that, Em.”
She heard his voice rumble through his chest. “Me either,” she confessed.
“I’ll never forget the first time we met. Even then, I knew you were special,” Sam said. “You know why I hung out with you?”
“Because I was a live wire who shook up your safe little world?”
He grinned. “That wasn’t my take on the situation.”
Emma wriggled her eyebrows. “No?”
“I saw you taking a lot of daring chances and figured somebody better pull you back before you hurt yourself or got into serious trouble.”
“Oh yeah?” She reached out to trace a fingertip down the length of his nose. “Like what?”
“What about that time you graffitied the old Twilight Bridge? If I hadn’t served as lookout you would have gotten arrested by Sheriff Clinton Trainer.”
“Please.” Emma rolled her eyes. “I could have gotten away from him without you being there. It was a total thrill for you. You’d never stayed out that late in your life.”
“Yeah, and I was grounded for two weeks because I missed curfew.”
“The life of an outlaw comes with consequences,” she teased.
“Then there was the time you tried to catch a copperhead.”
“Hey, I was from the city, how was I to know it was a poisonous snake?”
“And what about the time you ‘borrowed’ your father’s car and went joyriding and drove it into a ditch.”
“There wasn’t much joy to it,” she grumbled. “You lectured me far more than Rex did. I was a lonely kid just acting out.”
“I know,” Sam said softly, then pulled her closer to him and kissed the tip of her nose.
“How pathetic was I?”
“Not pathetic at all. Every kid longs to be loved.”
Powerful feelings pushed at her. Scary feelings. If she wasn’t careful she was going to get hurt and get hurt big. Shoving away all thoughts of love and home and family, she sat up beside him, smiled big, and said, “Wanna go again?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A quilt by any other name wouldn’t be the same.
—Hollywood actress Emma Parks
What in the hell was he going to do?
He’d told her this was nothing but fun and games, but he’d lied through his teeth, and now he was going to have to deal with the consequences. At the time, he would have said anything to get her into bed. He craved her that much.
But the rational Sam, with his brain temporarily drained of lust, knew that making love to her only made the cravings worse, not better. She couldn’t be his, no matter how much he might want it to be so. He had a child to think of. A life here in Twilight. A family who loved him. A community he served.
And Emma had her dreams of stardom, and he knew if she remained unfettered she would achieve her goals. She had the drive and determination to make her big dreams a reality. She didn’t need any complications, and he was a huge complication.
He wouldn’t stand in h
er way. Those dreams had sustained her for years. He wasn’t about to be the one to put a kink in her plans. He had only one choice open to him. Pretend that tonight hadn’t meant anything beyond stupendous sex.
Sam reached across the bed, felt the warm, small shape of her underneath the quilts. He turned onto his side, propped himself up on his elbow, and stared down at her.
The moonlight streaming in through the open curtains cast her sleeping features in a soft glow. His breathing grew shallow, and his eyes drank her in. He couldn’t believe it. Here he was with Trixie Lynn after all these years.
Don’t count on this feeling. You can’t keep her. Enjoy it for what it is and then just let her go.
But Sam didn’t know if he could do that. He’d never been casual about sex, and he’d been with only three women in his entire life. Molly Hampton in college, Valerie, and now Emma. He took relationships seriously. He wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of guy. It simply wasn’t the way he was hardwired. He wasn’t prudish, he just cared about women too much to treat them like sex objects. He knew he was a rare male in that regard. His friends and brothers teased him about it, but he was who he was.
Steady Sam.
God, how boring. What did she see in him? Why was she here? She was smart, sharp, witty, daring, gorgeous. She could have any man she wanted. Why him?
Sam pushed a hank of hair from his eyes, and his chest tightened as he studied his sleeping beauty. He loved her so much it hurt to breathe. He knew he couldn’t keep her, and the realization made this moment all the more precious.
But he didn’t regret making love to her. Being here with her was one of the most joyous events in his life.
He trailed his hand along her body, learning the slope of her shoulders, memorizing the arc of her breast, her taut flat stomach, the sweet triangle she’d removed of hair. He smiled into the darkness. Proud of her courage and spirit. She had such spirit.
“Sam,” she whispered his name like a prayer. “Sam, Sam, Sam.”
She was a warm quilt, opening her arms, welcoming him to her bosom.
He was damned. He could not stay away from her life force, her vitality. He sought her lips and branded her with his kiss. She made a soft noise of approval and snuggled closer.
