20. Toro Belly #3
I had never cared before now.
Not even when Daniel looked at me the way he had.
But with Lucas’s hands, large and powerful, grabbing me the way they were, I found I did care. Very much.
“I’m saying it’s okay if my body isn’t what you thought it would be. If now that we are here, and—and I’m on top of you—and you’re touching me—if it’s not what you need, well, you can say andIwillleaveyoualoneandpretendthisneverhappened.”
The last bit came out a one long word, and again, I tried to get off his lap.
But Lucas’s hands maintained their iron grip, holding me in place.
Only after I relaxed did they slide up my waist, then around to my bare back so he could guide me to lay on his chest. I burrowed into the warm surface dappled with surprisingly soft hair.
His heartbeat thumped against my cheek. Solid and strong.
It was a long time before he spoke.
“I’m sure your sister is a beautiful woman, Marie.” Lucas’s voice vibrated in his chest and into my cheek. “But honestly, I have no fucking clue what she looks like. Because whenever you’re in the room, all I see is you.”
I sat back up with a splash to look at him, my hands still crossed over my chest, now fully out of the water. Lucas, to his credit, didn’t look. His eyes, still promising a certain storm on the horizon, didn’t move from mine.
His hands, however, drifted down my back again and started floating to my hips, as if to memorize my curves.
“There are plenty of men who only want a woman like you to be exactly what you are,” he said.
I was distracted by the way his thumbs were tracing patterns over the indentations under my hipbones. “What does that mean?”
“Soft. Supple. Something worth grabbing on to.”
His hands found my ass and squeezed hard enough to make me gasp, and my hips rolled into the hard length of him. This movement made my hands drop to his chest for something to hold on to. But in doing that, my breasts were bared to him completely.
Lucas seemed to stop breathing as he stared openly. “Christ, Marie. You have no fucking clue how beautiful you are, do you?”
“Am I beautiful?”
I wasn’t sure. But Lucas made me feel that way.
He was a man entranced while he cupped the sides of my breasts one at a time. I watched them overflow his palms when he pushed them together, then squeezed gently before his thumbs brushed my nipples, which pebbled under his touch.
I shuddered.
“I dream about these.” His voice was ragged as he dipped his head and licked between them. Then, with a sudden move, he wrapped one arm around my waist and lifted me up so he could shove his face between my cleavage with an animal groan. “They fucking haunt me .”
I swallowed, heat blooming across my chest and up my throat as he pressed kisses there, rubbed his face into my softness. “What…what do you dream about?”
He exhaled, slow and rough. “Marie, I don’t want to scare you. You’re so—fuck, you’re so young, baby. So innocent.”
“I know,” I whispered through the thrill of hearing the sweet moniker. “But I still want to hear it.”
He groaned again as he let me slide back down his hard body, then went back to worshipping his apparently favorite body parts with his hands.
“I think about suckling them them.” His ragged voice was laced with shame. “Fucking them. Making a mess all over them. I think about how soft they’d feel wrapped around me while you look up at me with those big green eyes and beg me to paint your virgin skin.”
I trembled in his lap and rocked toward him as the hard evidence of his desire throbbed against my thigh.
“I shouldn’t,” he murmured as his mouth floated over my chest. “Fuck, I shouldn’t talk like this. I know I shouldn’t.”
“Yes, you should.” My hands found his neck, fingers slipped into the damp hair at his nape, urging him forward. “I asked you to, and I—I like hearing about it.”
It was like I’d given him permission to breathe.
With a groan of surrender, his mouth closed over one aching nipple, and everything else disappeared. There was no more onsen. No more wind in the trees. Just us, the heat of his mouth, and the shock it sent straight between my thighs that was so intense, tears sprang to my eyes.
“Lucas,” I gasped, though I’d already wrapped my around around his head, urging him on.
Again, my hips moved, but this time I rocked more fully into him, seeking the contact, the build as his erection rubbed against my most sensitive spaces.
The clit—that’s where he was. Just a few inches from my pussy. There was no reason for euphemisms. No need to fear what was happening when it felt so incredibly good.
For the first time, I saw how easy it was for people to forget themselves with pleasure—why they called it “losing” your virginity or “falling” in love.
I’d never understood when Joni or my sisters had talked about it like it happened by accident.
As if one moment, they were making out with their boyfriends, and the next, they had someone fully inside them?
But it could be that easy. Our bodies were so close, literally rubbing against each other, my core aching for more of him, hips testing the friction between his desire and mine with every roll.
It wouldn’t take much. The tip of him rubbing through me, his long length teasing. Just a slight tilt of my hips, and he would be there. Pressing in. Penetrating. Filling.
Oh, God .
A hand on my hip stilled the movements, holding me in place.
“Not yet, you sweet girl.” Kisses worked their way back up my neck. “Right now, you’re going to find what you need, and I’m going to help you.”
I shuddered as he took my other nipple in his mouth and sucked deeply, reverently. “Lucas…”
“That’s it,” he murmured as my hips rocked again, this time swiping my sensitive flesh over him with more urgency. “Take what you need. Fuck , use me, baby, just like that.”
The endearments, paired with his vulgar speech, sent a fresh wave of heat rippling through me, and I moved faster, chasing something I couldn’t quite name as he sucked my nipple into his mouth hard enough to hurt. Just a little.
“Please!” I squeaked, though I didn’t know what I was asking for, exactly. More? Relief? Guidance? Help finding what I couldn’t quite on my own?
As if he understood, his hands directed my hips, helping me find the angle where his cock rubbed my clit in the exact right place with each movement.
“Do you want to come?” That voice was dark velvet in my ear before teeth closed over my lobe, sending another round of shivers down my spine.
“Y-yes.” Every breath was labored. Oh, God, I was so close.
“Do you want to come all over my cock like a good girl? Ride it, Marie. Ride that dick until you fall apart.”
The combination of his words and the relentless pressure pushed me over the edge. I came with a broken cry, convulsing in his arms. He kissed me then, deep and hungry, swallowing my cries as his hands continued to pilot my shuddering movements when I couldn’t for myself.
“That’s it, sweetheart.” His words were warm whispers against my trembling mouth. “So beautiful when you let go. So fucking perfect.”
I collapsed onto his shoulder, gasping into his neck. His arms wrapped around me, holding me tight, grounding me there against the stone and in the water.
He was still hard between my legs.
Hadn’t found his release.
I wanted to help, but what would I say?
I had no idea what to do next.
“Marie.” My name vibrated in that deep baritone. “My sweet, sweet Marie.”
“Lucas,” I murmured as I started coming back to myself.
The steam reappeared in my vision. The lanterns swayed in the breeze. The silence of the ryokan and the fact that my cries had almost certainly echoed over these cedar walls, through the rice-paper doors, and all around the compound, where the rest of Lucas’s team had undoubtedly heard us.
“Lucas,” I whispered again. “Lucas, what have we done?”
His arms tightened at first, then released me as I sat up to look at him in the face and see if he felt the same dread that was creeping into my gut.
There was only awe there.
“Hey.” He pushed a bit of hair off my face. “That was beautiful, Marie. It was fucking beautiful. We did nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But…” I didn’t bother to cover myself again. After all, he’d seen everything from the waist up now and had felt much more under the water. Still, the shame was spreading through my heart. “But I’m your employee. You’re my boss.”
“Which has never meant a damn thing in this spring, and you know it.”
“And then there’s…Daniel…”
It came out like a squeak. I didn’t want to name the elephant in the spring, so to speak, but it wouldn’t be silenced.
That was when I felt Lucas deflate. Unable to bear it one second more, I scrambled off his lap and out of the pool, where I grabbed my robe off the ground and put it on with quick, jerky movements.
“Marie,” Lucas called from the spring. “Marie, stop. Baby, look at me .”
I did stop then. And like he was pulling on a string, I turned to face him, water still dripping from the ends of my hair, my skin still wet enough that it had soaked through parts of the robe, which I pulled tight around my body.
Lucas was standing in the water now, which lapped at his hips, showing off the muscled lines and the clean V of muscle pointing to that organ I’d just ridden like a harlot.
The silver in his hair and the water droplets on that carved chest glinted in the moonlight, and for a moment, I considered jumping back into the spring to finish what our bodies had clearly wanted.
God, I was a horrible person.
“You did nothing wrong,” he told me. “You and Daniel…you don’t owe him a damn thing, and I know my brother well enough to know he won’t see it that way either.
Whatever happens between the two of you—whatever you want to happen when we get back to New York—this time here between you and me belongs to us and no one else. Nod and tell me you understand.”
Unable to stop myself, I obeyed. My voice was a whisper. “I understand.”
Whether I believed it was another question.
Lucas’s eyes shuttered. “Good. Now go get some sleep. We’ve got an early flight in the morning.”
I nodded again, but it took me a few second before I managed to make my feet move properly.
“And Marie?”
I couldn’t ignore him even if I tried. “Lucas.”
His eyes were so dark, they were almost black. He did nothing to hide the naked yearning there. The intensity we both were feeling. And maybe something else that couldn’t be named.
“It will be okay,” he said. “I promise.”
With a quick, jerky nod, I darted away. How could I believe him?
I’d just had one of the most intense experiences of my life—an experience I’d wanted, practically begged for, an experience that would change me forever.
But now I had the sinking feeling I’d had it with the wrong man.
And there was no coming back from that.