Chapter 23
Alec had never given much thought to the finer qualities of bedrooms. Perhaps that was because they’d always been so utilitarian. A place to lay one’s head during months-long stretches of travel. A bed was pretty much a bed. Firm? Soft? He’d never bothered to care enough to differentiate.
But oh, he fucking cared now.
Marisa was all softness, and the bloody woman mocked him with it as her generous hips swayed in front of him while she pulled him down the hall. His damn erection grew more eager, gleefully tying itself to the teasing rhythm of her body.
A body he’d soon have against him, sprawled out naked on what he had no doubt was the softest bed he’d ever deigned to sully with his sixteen stone of Scottish bulk.
Hell, for the past month or so, he was used to sleeping next to an odorous mastiff fond of kicking him in the balls during doggy dreams and slobbering all over Alec’s pancake of a pillow the mutt had claimed as his own.
He’d waited—really fucking patiently, it was important to note—until the backs of her legs were brushing the bed before he resumed his worship of her mouth, still not believing for one second that he was here and being given the privilege to cherish her properly.
Alec slanted his lips over hers again, cupping her cheeks and tracing his thumbs across the smooth planes of her cheekbones.
She sighed against him, delving deeper into the kiss and molding her luscious body to his.
For the briefest of moments, his mind threatened to short-circuit, but then a bit of sense settled back over him as he recalled what he’d intended to do next.
“I’m coming back to this mouth of yours. Don’t you worry.”
“Where are you going?”
God, even her words had turned thick, as if he needed one more reason to happily give her every spare bit of breath in his lungs.
Alec skimmed his lips over the slope of her neck, whispering words of adulation over every smooth surface of bare skin that had painted the backdrop of his fantasies.
His fingers flowed easily into the coordination his body had honed for years, working in tandem with his mouth to peel away the layer of her crewneck.
Once all her wild hair was freed from the collar, it resettled over her shoulders, framing her breasts like intricate vines draping a marble goddess in a museum.
Every gasp and moan that Marisa breathed into his neck fed his hunger. Good Lord, was there anything about this woman that wasn’t bloody perfect?
He got his answer when she deftly grabbed his hands and guided them around her back to her bra clasps as if he’d been plucked from a lottery and was the luckiest son of a bitch on this earth.
A few seconds of tricky fingerwork was all it took for the cotton to fall away, taking the entire reservoir of his sanity with it.
Marisa stood before him, everything above her high-waisted leggings unapologetically bare to him, while he stood there, blinking, like the daft fool he was, eyeing the sweet lushness of her displayed with all the confidence he’d clearly, and right fucking stupidly, left behind somewhere else.
She bit her lower lip, and the rosy peaks of her breasts pebbled sharply, splitting his attention in two. Or three.
He took two steps toward her and drifted his fingertips over her nipples. Her gasp of delight all but reached out, grabbed him by the cock, and pulled him over the precipice he’d been trying to avoid for weeks but now couldn’t think of a reason to stay away from.
The more he felt of her warm skin, the more he was certain there was no possible future where he could exist as a complete whole of himself without Marisa.
“I think it’s your turn,” she said, pouting as she let him ease her back onto the bed.
With military precision, he whipped his shirt over his head and bowed his allegiance to her marvelous breasts, mounding and kissing what he’d only dreamed of.
Marisa lazily drifted her fingers down the sides of his neck, then dug tiny divots into the meat of his shoulders with her fingernails when he bestowed a slow, wet kiss on one nipple before bequeathing like-minded praise on the other.
She could carve out entire craters in his back and he’d happily hand her the shovel to do so . . . and tell her to dig deeper. Fuck. He’d buy her a whole host of landscaping tools if she stayed pressed to him like that and kept dragging her hands lower.
When his cock twitched painfully against his thigh, he sat up and paused for a moment. Disappointment briefly flashed across her flushed face, but it was quickly replaced by something he was far more familiar with: a Jersey girl’s irritation.
“Why are you stopping? No no no. Don’t stop. Please, Alec. We’re not at stopping time yet.” She was borderline whining, nudging her toes into his legs and getting all squirmy beneath him, which was helping his cause not a whit.
Jesus Christ, she was trying to kill him, wasn’t she?
Alec grabbed up her wrists in one hand over her head and braced his other palm against his heaving chest. “Oh, I have no intention of stopping. I just need a minute.” Or five. Maybe ten? Would she fault a man for taking the time to lecture his soldiers lest they rebel against him?
“Is it too much? Too fast?” That worried wrinkle reappeared between her brows again, and a concerned expression swept in right behind it, which had no place anywhere near this moment between them. “This is a violation of the ground rules, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said firmly, infusing his insistence that what they were doing was right and needed and fucking perfect.
But the wrinkle remained. “Then why did you stop? Was your head bothering you? I never turned off the overhead lights. They’re still the old incandescent bulbs. My landlord won’t swap them out until he absolutely has to. Are you sensitive to light? Maybe we can—”
“Woman,” Alec growled out, dipping his forehead against hers and impressing just enough of his weight, and his cock, upon her to make his point.
As soon as she felt it, her beautiful brown eyes grew wide with wonder, and he grinned at her.
“There could be a damn fireworks finale going off above my head, and I’d make you scream until the next showing. ”
He wasn’t normally one to assert his prowess, but well, he really could do with a goddamn second to breathe, and if she kept looking at him like that, with her breasts molded against his slick chest and her shapely curves wriggling beneath him, he was about to come up really fucking short of what he knew he could give her. What she deserved.
And anything less than that was unacceptable.
“I want to do this right,” he said, kissing away the furrows on her forehead and releasing her hands. “I need to do right by you.”
“I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything you could do wrong.”
He chuckled and moved his mouth across her stomach. “I appreciate the vote of confidence. Truly, I do.”
“Then I’m confident in your appreciation,” she said smugly.
“Little minx. This can’t be over before it starts.”
“Agreed.”
Alec proved the truth of his words by sliding off her leggings and underwear, but not before silently asking for permission with a heated stare and delicate kiss to her navel.
Marisa’s acceptance came in the form of an “Oh my God!” that had her hands covering her face and her head hitting the pillow, clearing the way for Alec to savor every goosebump as he moved his mouth lower.
Her sweet blush and all the emotions that hid behind it were the last things he saw before he dropped a stream of kisses in a trail down her inner thigh, first the left, then the right.
The curve of her legs rose to meet his palms, sinking their delicious weight into the expanse of his hands and giving him something to hang onto while he explored what her moans let him.
He allowed his tongue to play first, swiping and coaxing little mewls out of her that made her legs shake beside him.
Smiling against the playful part of him itching to come out, he shifted his shoulders so her legs rested comfortably on top of him, opening her wider to his attentions.
“Oh my gawd!” The muffled cry made him smile against her core.
“Do you want me to stop?”
The yank at his short hairline lacked the punch he suspected she craved, but it effectively delivered her message. “If you even think of stopping what you’re doing, I’ll satisfy your earlier curiosity and show you exactly how a man can die at the end of a sugar pulling hook.”
“It would probably be the sweetest death I could imagine.”
“Alec!” Marisa swatted his arse with her heel. Hard.
“Only jesting.” And he was, partially. The more he tasted her, the more of his strength he wanted to offer her, the more he realized what the days ahead without her would feel like.
And even just the slight possibility of never holding her softness to him again—or worse, imagining someone else doing so—was enough to put too frightful an emphasis on the concept of la petite mort.
The thought spurred him faster. He became more eager than ever to claim whatever he could of her, and her pleasure seemed far more desirable than any World Championship.
With a grunting scream from both of them, because, dear God, the woman hadn’t let go of his hair, Marisa came apart in his arms.
“You’re lovely when you unravel,” he murmured against the curve of her hip, the tender space between her ribs, the underside of her breasts. “So fucking lovely.”
“Alec.”
He wasn’t sure of the emotion she put behind his name, but he didn’t have a mind to question it. Her sly little fingers had already undone his trousers, found the condom in his back pocket, and gripped his cock with an urgency any red-blooded male knew not to question.
The rest of his trappings fell away and could have burned in a fire for all he cared, save for the condom she’d cleverly sheathed him with.
Because Marisa lay naked before him, bathed in all the beautiful energy-inefficient lighting her thoughtless landlord had gifted him with.
Whatever magic was in those bulbs cast a dewy sheen to her eyes and warmed her skin in a way that made Alec want to drag his mouth again over every enticing curve offered, lest he’d neglected a few the first time by mistake.
He placed his palm on the side of her face and kissed her like the universe was at his back, eyeing him for all his faults and flaws and was determined to take her away from him at any moment.
Then their bodies started to move, his strength cradling her softness, providing all the hollows for the wondrous parts of her to explore. He was more than happy to be a map of her wildest imaginings if she let him.
Slight shivers cascaded down his spine. Alec bit down and breathed through his teeth as she reached for his cock and slowly guided him to her slick entrance.
He had no recourse but to kiss her again and again, gripping her jaw firmly when her heel urged him forward, sliding him into her welcoming core.
“Jesus fucking Christ, woman,” he ground out against her mouth, shifting above her and sliding to the new natural rhythm they both set.
Marisa’s lower lip had slackened, but that didn’t stop her from gasping for breath and nodding her approval. “Wrong crowd, but I appreciate the sentiment. Oh!”
Alec lifted her leg higher and swiveled his hips, grinding forward with a ferocity that sent Marisa’s body quivering.
She whipped her head to the side and was met with the wall of his bicep.
He would have moved, but then her neat teeth sank into him, pinching the taut skin there and sending his hips pistoning with pleasure.
Whatever he’d thought was unreadable in her expression before crystallized into a snapshot of ecstasy.
Her brown hair thrown wild, her brows knitted together, her lower lip slack and swollen from his kisses.
It all screamed its own type of release, one that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the intimacy they’d forged together.
It would be the expression he’d tattoo on his heart, and when the time came that his heart was close to breaking, he’d use that image as the emotional engine that propelled him toward wherever they were headed next.
Wherever he was headed next.
He lowered his head and kissed her through the earth-shattering tremors that claimed them both, never wanting to take his mouth off hers. If he did, a terrified part of him worried he’d never find his way back.