Chapter Eighteen #2
The scent of linseed oil and his soap was so intoxicating, she needed him closer and looped her arms around his neck. “We’re two intelligent, capable people. If we make up our minds, this doesn’t have to be more than this moment.”
“You think once this happens, we won’t want to repeat it?”
“It doesn’t have to be anything more than giving each other…physical pleasure.”
“Are you saying you don’t like plotting and talking with me?”
“Fine. We can be scheming friends who also enjoy each other’s bodies.”
Her face was on fire with her daring words, but she would be damned if he thought she was too embarrassed or afraid to say what she wanted.
His large, warm hands circled her waist and drew her over his lap, bringing her flush against his hard cock. “We haven't been friends for years.”
She seized the open neck of his shirt for support. “Rivals, then.”
“For what?”
They both looked surreptitiously at the emeralds around her throat.
Slowly, Diana pried her fingers away from the soft linen of his shirt and unfastened the necklace. She lifted his warm hand and placed the jewels in his palm.
For a long moment, they stared at it, both quietly contemplating her surrender.
Ian stretched his arm and placed the necklace on the bedside table. It landed with a clink, like two champagne flutes heralding a toast.
Then he bent and sealed his mouth on hers.
The kiss was slow, languid. Diana tried to deepen it, but he held her carefully as he sipped on her mouth and massaged her neck with the lightest of touches.
She broke away for a long breath. “Let’s suspend time, just for tonight.
” She wanted to forget necklaces and manipulating mothers and the distance between their fortunes.
“Can we do that? Forget everything else?” As she stroked a hand up his chest, she delighted in the delicious draw of his breath.
“Tonight, nothing else exists. Our sole purpose is making each other feel good.”
Ian clamped his hands over hers. “If you expect tenderness, you should know I can’t be that way with you.”
“You were in San Sebastian.”
“That was—” He’d started to say, a mistake, but the way he caught himself gave her hope.
That, and the very tender way he was staring at her.
“I don’t need you to be tender.” She nipped at his lip to underscore her point. “Tenderness would undermine the entire premise of this being purely physical.”
“Can you separate it so easily?” His hands explored the pockets of her skin exposed by the widening gap in the back of her dress. “I fear I won’t be able to. That we’ll do this, and we’ll get caught up in a fantasy that we could have more together.”
Lord, how his words exhilarated and wounded her. And what a tremendous relief that he suffered the same craving beneath his skin that she did. This present stolen moment together wouldn’t fully assuage it. And her heart wrenched for the shared dream they could never turn into reality.
“We won’t let it master us.” She pulled the bottom of his shirt, and he lifted it off in a effortless movement. In the firelight, his skin was smooth and tanned. When her hands ran over his chest to trace the small Maltese cross inked over his heart, they both moaned.
His mouth took hers, and he urged her back on the bed. When he finally broke away, for a breath, he pinned her arms to the mattress. His dark eyes traced the length of her body with a sizzling look.
Everything south of her waist clenched and melted.
“Is this what you imagined, Diana?”
In truth, her fantasies had never quite taken this direction, and she chided her limited imagination because she loved the weight of his body on hers and the soft, commanding way he spoke.
“Is this what you want?” He panted.
“I want to touch you.” She arched up and nibbled at his ear. “And I want my touch to bring you incalculable pleasure. I want to know what you taste like when you’re completely undone by it.”
She faintly thought speaking such obscenities out loud should mortify her, but it was exhilarating having no filter between them.
Arousing beyond measure.
With a rumbling growl, his lips came upon hers and finally delivered the pressure and heat she’d been chasing. Diana sighed in relief as she lost herself in his kiss.
Ian freed her hands from his hold so they could work together to rid her of the last of her clothes. He paused a long moment to observe her in her skin. The intensity of his attention made her overwhelmingly self-conscious.
She reached for him, but he caught both wrists in one hand. With the other, he glided a finger along her collarbone, then gently down across her breast. He traced her nipple with his nail, and an unhinged noise erupted from her throat.
It drew the brightest smile she’d ever seen him wear.
“For the last two days, I’ve been dreaming of this.”
Slowly, Ian bent and took the peak of her breast in his mouth. The heat of his tongue coupled with the sharpness of his teeth brought her dangerously close to unraveling.
“Now I can see you, taste you, with nothing in between us,” he murmured against her bare skin. “I want to savor it all when I make you come again.”
The prospect made her cry out like a wanton and he finally dropped his hold on her wrists. She plunged both hands into his hair and pulled it while he suckled her, stroked her body.
Fire crawled across her skin. She was in a beautiful agony as she hovered on a divine precipice.
“Shall I touch you again, the way I did before?” he taunted without letting up his tantalizing caress. “Perhaps I’ll tease out your pleasure. Make it last all night.”
“Don’t you dare,” she hissed.
“Impatient, are we?” His laugh rumbled against her torso. “Lucky for you, I’m an accommodating sort of devil.”
He thrust two fingers inside her. She came instantly, explosively, with a roar that rattled the ceiling.
Her heart felt as if it would never cease racing, and she wasn't entirely sure she wanted it to.
As he held her through the aftershocks, Ian’s breaths were as jagged as hers.
They stopped altogether when Diana rolled them over on the bed and palmed his erection.
“My…turn.” She drew out the words slowly, a contrast to the frantic way she pulled at the buttons on his trousers and his underclothes.
When her hands came around his cock, they both gasped.
“Show me what you want,” she whispered as she stroked him. “What you imagined.”
He groaned deeply and moved to tear off his trousers.
Diana drank in the sight of his beautiful body. The wide breadth of his shoulders. His long, narrow trunk, corded with muscles, and the soft, dark hair on his chest pointing a path to his erect cock.
“Show me,” she repeated, reaching for him.
His hand curled around hers to demonstrate the pressure and movement he liked, and when she shook him off and took up the rhythm on her own, he gave another primal groan.
When he threw his head back, she leaned down and took his shaft in her mouth.
“Diana.”
Her skin warmed all over and the ache between her legs returned as her tongue swirled around him and she took in his salty taste. His size was overwhelming, but she married the rhythm of her hand at his base with the movement of her tongue and her lips.
“Yes, tesora mia, exactly like that.” He gasped. “Christ, you are so good. You are a dream.”
The hoarseness in his voice made her clench harder as she drew him further into her mouth.
His entire body went rigid before he came, shouting her name.
And when Ian collapsed back on the pillow, boneless, and the terrible tension he carried in his brow and his shoulders had fled for parts unknown, Diana nearly wept from the beauty of his transformation.
He tucked her against his body, so her head lay on his shoulder.
“That was beyond my imagining,” she whispered.
“That was beyond anything on heaven or earth,” he confessed through labored breaths.
Diana laughed softly. “I enjoy getting what I want.”
Ian propped up on his elbow and rasped, “Are you curious what I want, tesora?”
In San Sebastian, he’d also called her his treasure. She understood now why lovers gave each other pet names; when he said it, it made her skin heat and her body ache for him.
“Well, I thought you might have wanted the same thing I did,” she hazarded. “You looked like you enjoyed it.”
“Enjoy is an inadequate word.” He crept over her to press soft kisses against her chin and teased his tongue along her throat and her chest. “Besides being accommodating, I’m also a greedy devil.”
His breath coasted over her belly as his mouth traced her hip. “I want to know what you taste like too.”
The brush of his lips at the cleft between her legs made her entire body quiver with desire.
“Will you let me?” he breathed.
“God, yes,” she whimpered.
Gently, he pressed her legs apart to make room for him to nuzzle her. His warm breath and the featherlight kisses on her thighs were a sweet torment.
Forcefully, she grabbed a hold of his silky hair and pulled him between her legs.
He devoured her. The heat of his lips and the seductive stroking of his tongue as he took his fill of her was pure ecstasy.
Pressure built inside her. But as the glorious peak approached, he retreated with softer kisses and teasing caresses.
“Ian, please,” she begged, clutching his hair.
“You’re making me hard again, love.”
“Please,” she repeated, on something like a sob.
“Does that mean you like this?”
“Yes!” she wailed. “It’s— I’m—”
“You want to come.”
“Make me,” she pleaded.
He finally slid his finger inside her, and stars burst across her vision.
When she returned to earth, she reached for the warm weight of his arms.
He nestled her against his chest as he murmured soft words in a smattering of languages.
Showing her all the tenderness that he swore he couldn’t offer her.