Chapter Twelve
Marina looks different when Reggie and I get back.
I mean, not different different. She’s still Marina. Still tall and sexy and gorgeous. But there’s something in her face, in her expression, that’s changed ever so slightly.
“Everything go okay?” she asks as she carries two glasses of wine into the living room. Dusk continues to fall, and the room is dimming by the minute. She’s lit a couple of candles, and the atmosphere is warm and inviting. And romantic.
My lower body starts to throb, just to let me know I’m alive.
I unclip Reggie from his leash, and he heads right back to the chair. I glance at Marina, and she smiles and shrugs. “He’s fine.”
My relief is palpable. I know my dog is well-behaved, and it’s why I take him so many places with me, but I also know not everybody is a dog person. Marina seems to be, though, and that’s yet another tick in the Win column.
She gives Reggie a scratch as she passes the chair and moves to the couch, sits, and looks my way with an expectant arch of a dark eyebrow.
I sit next to her, and she hands me my wine.
“To our first meal together not at a restaurant,” she says and holds up her glass.
“And what a meal it was.” I touch my glass to hers. “You have ruined me for all pasta.”
“My plan all along.” She sits back and stretches her legs out, crosses them at the ankle on the coffee table. Then she raises her arm, making a cozy spot for me.
I snuggle against her warmth, her softness, and it feels like it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be. A long breath releases from my lungs, clearly conveying my comfort. “This is nice,” I say quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Definitely.” I take a moment to look around her flat once again. “I really like your place. How long have you been here?”
She scrunches up her perfect nose. “Three years? They finally put in dryers this year.”
I remember the story Serena told me about how Italians have always hung their wet clothes outside, and I fill Marina in. “Still not sure I believe it,” I say with a laugh.
“I swear to you, she was telling you the truth. Now dryers are selling like—what’s the phrase?—hot cake?”
“Hotcakes.”
“What are hotcakes?”
I pause for a moment, then shake my head. “Pancakes? I’m honestly not sure.”
“Why would something sell like pancakes?”
We’re both laughing now, and I say, “Listen, the English language is ridiculous. Things don’t make sense. The same combination of letters makes seven different sounds. I don’t know how anybody learns it.” I meet her gaze. “Your English is excellent, though.”
“We are required to learn at least a little, and we can go on if we choose.”
“And you chose.”
“Yes. I thought it would serve me well.”
“And has it?”
She tightens her arm around me. “It has allowed me to talk to you, hasn’t it?”
Our gazes hold, and we’re so close, the tips of our noses are nearly touching. Which means it only takes the slightest tip of my head, and my lips meet Marina’s.
This kiss starts off slow and soft but doesn’t stay that way.
I’m not sure if it’s because we feel we’ve waited so long or what, but a mere instant passes before we are full-on making out.
Marina’s arm is tight around my shoulders, and I have my hand gripping the side of her head, pulling her in closer, even if she’s as close as she can be.
I want more, and she must realize it, because she presses her tongue into my mouth, and I moan.
Kissing Marina is like…God, I don’t even have a proper description.
Probably because it feels like my brain is short-circuiting, cutting off the power to rational thought in order to focus on the physical pleasure of it all.
And pleasure it is. Marina kisses me like we’ve been kissing for years, and she knows just what I like.
It’s the push and pull, the hard and soft, the giving and demanding.
It’s the dichotomy that turns me on, and Marina seems to have a master’s degree in it.
She lulls me into sensuous relaxation with the softness of her mouth, the pliability of her lips, and just when I’m about to melt, she shifts things.
Increases pressure, swirls her tongue, tugs my hair.
I’m nearly on my back on her sofa, though I barely remember getting that way.
Having Marina’s gorgeous body on me is a turn-on all on its own, and I halt our kissing just so I can look at her, above me, her face flushed, her lips glistening and full, her hair hanging down like an elegant sexy curtain enclosing us.
I push it out of the way so I can see her more clearly.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” I whisper.
She responds by crushing her mouth to mine, and I am lost once again.
While part of me feels like I could make out with Marina just like this, on her sofa, another—more insistent—part of me wants more. So much more. I wrench my mouth away and wait until she looks me in the eye.
“You got a bedroom in this place?” I ask, surprised by how breathless I am.
She doesn’t even use words, just nods vehemently and pushes herself off me. Once on her feet, she holds out a hand. I grasp it and am pulled to my feet by one of the sexiest women I have ever had the pleasure of laying eyes on.
“Come with me,” she says, her voice husky.
In that moment, I’d follow her anywhere.
The level of comfort I feel with Marina is completely disproportionate to, well, me.
Sex always makes me the slightest bit self-conscious, no matter how well I know my partner, but it’s somehow different with her.
I don’t feel self-conscious at all as she slides her hand under my shirt while we’re kissing.
The feeling of her palm on the bare skin of my stomach is something I can’t describe—which says a lot, given my career—but only because my brain is on sensory overload.
We’re standing in her bedroom at the foot of her bed, our mouths fused together, kissing hungrily, and all I can focus on is sensation .
I don’t hear anything. I don’t say anything.
I don’t think anything. All I can do is feel .
And what I feel is simply…glorious. I don’t have a better word.
Marina is taller than me, fitter than me, stronger than me, and all those things come into play as she backs me into her bed.
The mattress hits the backs of my knees, and I sit, then crab-crawl backward until I’m in the middle of the bed.
She stands there for a moment, just looking at me, and there’s so much in those dark eyes of hers that a lump forms in my throat.
I clear it and crook a finger at her. “Come here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says with a sexy grin, and crawls on all fours until she’s above me once again and her mouth is on mine.
Sex with Marina is…God. It’s hard to know where to begin because, for the first time since I can remember—no, for the first time in my life —I turn off my brain and just let myself feel.
People who know me understand just how hard it is for me to do that; I’m all about the overthinking.
My anxiety and me? Super tight. So the fact that I feel totally, utterly relaxed with her is a little bit mind-boggling. But I go with it.
Kissing slides to touching, hands everywhere, clothes removed a little at a time.
Undressing Marina is like unwrapping the most erotic of gifts, baring a limb here, a swath of olive skin there.
She’s soft and smooth and hot—hot in more ways than one, and I absently think, of every woman I’ve been with in my life, I’ve never been so attracted.
Not like this. Everything about Marina is sexy.
Everything. The way she feels, the way she smells, the way she kisses, the way she sounds.
God. It’s all I can do to keep this slow pace.
Because I want to take my time. I want to savor and remember every tiny second of this experience.
I also want to rip her clothes off with my teeth, flip her onto her back, and have my way with her.
It’s a conundrum.
But I push through, and I do manage to turn us so I’m on top, and I focus on removing her clothes, because all I want is to see her naked body in all its glory.
Turns out, glory isn’t even a strong enough word.
Marina is perfect. I take a moment to simply look at her, to let my eyes roam over her body.
She’s confident and sexy and she tucks her hands behind her head, completely content to let me ogle her nakedness.
She smiles at me without worry or self-consciousness, and it’s fucking beautiful. And so incredibly sexy.
I give myself another couple of seconds to gape before I’m on her with my mouth, tasting every inch of her.
I’m vaguely aware of her hands in my hair, on my shoulders, her fingers digging deliciously into my skin, but I’m much more focused on her.
The smell of her—that warm, inviting apple scent.
The look of her skin—olive and bronze, tanned from the summer, but also part of her heritage.
The sound of her—she’s not loud, but there are small moans and little whimpers that let me know I’m doing everything right.
I want to spend hours here. Days. Weeks, even.
But my own body and my own arousal threatens to swamp me entirely if I don’t take what I want, so I work my way down her body using my lips, my tongue, until I’m settled between her legs.
A glance up her torso gives me a sexy shot of Marina biting her bottom lip in anticipation, and I wait until she raises her head and meets my gaze.
I keep my eyes on her as I take my first taste, and I listen to the breath leave her body and watch her head fall back onto the pillows with an incredibly sensual moan of pleasure.
Christ, she’s beautiful.