Chapter 19
19
H e pushes through a door, out into a bright hall, past the open door to security. Laughing and clapping ensues from the crew inside the office, and I bury my head in his neck.
“I’m naked!” I shriek.
“They just watched us on camera. They’re not seeing anything they haven’t already seen. Which is another reason I want you all to myself.”
I don’t have the chance to speak again before Alejandro opens another door and lets it slam behind him. Now it’s dark, and Southern California’s summer evening sky shimmers all around us in a velvet hush. Frogs and crickets hum in the sultry breeze. The lights of the city beyond the hills twinkle and wink as far as I can see.
“It’s beautiful out here.”
“The fact that I would rather look at you should tell you how I feel about your beauty.”
I snap my gaze up to his. No smile. His stare is full of gravity—and rising need.
“Alejandro, maybe we should talk about?—”
“No. Tonight is about you and me. No conversation, no people, no blackmail, no cameras. I need to feel you like I’ve never needed anyone or anything before.”
I gape, totally unable to deny the breathless rush of joy at his words. Does he…care about me?
There’s no time to ponder the answer before he spirits me through the intimate cocoon of the hushed night, into his cottage, and straight to his bed. In the shadow, I can make out its straight lines and modern flair. It’s big, dark, and exotic—just like the man.
Then his mattress is at my back, and he grabs the empty cuff dangling from my wrist, and I expect him to attach it to his bed so he has me at his mercy.
Instead, he attaches the cuff to his own wrist.
We’re joined. Together. Bound.
“Alejandro?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he tosses the handcuff key somewhere on the floor, far out of reach, then covers my mouth with his own.
I expect his ravenous hunger, a hard-edged boom-fast-now sort of touch. I’m shocked instead by his soft insistence. His kiss is seduction itself. Thorough, unhurried. Slow, deep. Unabashedly intimate, as he conveys his every want, speaks with his soul, communicates only using his mouth.
It’s impossible not to fall under his spell.
A new ribbon of desire ties my stomach in knots as he trails hot kisses across my cheek, then down lower. He exhales against my neck, close to my ear, stirring sensitive skin. I shiver as his lips caress me, brand me. He sweeps a fingertip down the arch of my throat and nips at my lobe.
“ Necesito tocarte, tu cara, tu piel. Tu corazón. ”
I have no idea what his words mean, but they melt me. In that moment, whatever he wants, I want, too.
“Tell me…”
He doesn’t right away. Instead, he sweeps his mouth over mine again. The tangle of breaths, lips, tongues become a deliberate kiss of endless hunger. Eloquent, shockingly sexual as the fingers of his free hand sift into my hair, curling possessively around the strands. Sizzlingly intimate as he tears his mouth from mine to stare, penetrating me with eyes like burning coals in the pitch of night. Ensnared, I can’t look away.
“I said that I need to touch you, your face, your skin. Your heart.”
Something shocked and joyous bursts inside me. I gasp, and Alejandro swallows the sound with another drugging kiss.
With every brush of his lips, every glide of his hot palm, every male moan he pours into my mouth, he rips past my barriers until I open completely to him—parting my lips wider to accept more of his possession, clutching one hard shoulder with my free hand to keep him near, spreading my thighs to invite him inside. I sigh when his narrow hips fit right into the curve of my body as if he’s been made to fill me.
“Yes.” I arch under him, unable to hold anything back.
He nestles his free hand under the curve in my back, keeping my breasts and the damp heat of my skin against him.
“ Yo te tocaré toda la noche. Cada parte de ti conocerá mis caricias. ”
“Alejandro…please.”
The way he touches me, as if he doesn’t have another thought in his head except pleasing me… I burn inside my skin, yet I know only he can save me. He’ll shatter me into a million pieces first, then remake me into a new woman. A warning bell goes off in some distant part of my mind, but his fingers grip my hips, fitting me directly against the hard column of his erection. He winds down my body and brushes soft lips against the side of my breast.
“I will touch you all night long,” he translates. “Every part of you will know my caress.”
I have no doubt he'll keep that promise.
He suckles my nipples over and over, lavishing attention on me until they stand red, swollen, so sensitive that nothing more than his breath on me induces a shiver. All the while, his fingers free from the cuff whisper across my skin. My back, my thighs, my backside. Even my knees, calves, and toes. Alejandro puts that hand on every inch of available skin, finally drawing my leg up high on his hip so he can toy with the sensitive underside of my knee.
Gently, he rides my clit with his erection. Not pushing or grinding. Not bruising. Instead, a soft nudge of delicious pressure in a hypnotic rhythm, one that takes me higher and higher.
The seed of pleasure under my clit sprouts and blooms. I pant, trying to resist the searing pleasure for just another moment. I dig the fingers not bound by the cuff into the hard flesh of his back, pressing down his body, far down, until I grip his ass in my hand.
Moonlight spills through the open blinds, swirling in on the evening breeze as he whispers, “ Tu piel está rosácea, mi amor. Estás excitada, verdad? ”
“Tell me!” I moan. “Please…”
“Your skin is rosy, my love. You’re ripe and ready, yes?”
“Yes,” I pant. “Yes, now!”
He presses against me again, nudging my clit with his cock. The cream of my arousal spreads all over his flesh, and the next time he rocks against me, the bead of nerves he teases leaps at the slick pressure. Blood rushes south, pools between my legs, gathering need, pleasure, and anticipation right where it impacts me most. I claw, cry in his arms.
“Who’s here now, Shanna? Who’s in this room?”
“Us. Just us.”
“ Solamente tú y yo. Sin audiencia. Ni cámaras. Nosotros, ” he breathes as he gathers the crooks of my knees into his arms. “Only you and me. No audience, no cameras. Us.”
The way it should be. The thought runs through my mind unchecked, unchallenged, unstoppable as Alejandro pauses, probes, then with a prolonged glide of his hips, he penetrates me.
His hard flesh fills me. He sinks deep, deeper, then deeper still. Making love face to face? It’s totally different than being dominated by him for an audience. The slick rasp of hisengorged shaft rakes against my sensitive walls. A jolt of pleasure coils, tightens, intensifying, growing faster than I can assimilate.
“So tight, my love,” he murmurs as he draws back and brings our cuffed hands to my breast. My palm cups my flesh as his thumb caresses my nipple. It’s as if we're seeing to my pleasure together, and it drives me mad with delirious need.
All the while, the slow steady pleasure of his thrusts make me into a wild woman. I writhe, lift my hips, arch—anything to reach more of him, lure him deeper still into me.
Alejandro goes willingly; every lingering slide of his erection inside me lifts my arousal higher. My pulse pounds in my ears. Heat suffuses my body. I can barely breathe. And I don’t care.
For the first time in years—maybe in my life—I don’t just feel; I’m wholly alive, driven by something more than a statue of faux gold molded like dancers I want to someday sit on my mantle. I live for now. I live to feel the man growling words in a language I don’t understand but adore as he strains to fulfill every promise of pleasure rushing through my body.
Alejandro grips the hand joined to his by the cuff and laces our fingers together. He squeezes my hand tight as our breaths merge, our cries mingle. “Come for me.”
The request from his mouth becomes a demand from his body as he thrusts into me again.
I splinter into a million pieces, blinded by the brilliant pleasure bursting inside me. In the next moment, he follows me into the white-hot rush of shattering pleasure. Oh, god. He’s all over me, everywhere…inside me. I doubt I can wash his possession away with a mere shower. It seems unlikely that time and distance will ever free me from him.
I fear I’ve given a piece of myself to Alejandro I’ll likely never get back.
My heart.
S ated and exhausted, I pull up in the driveway of the house I was raised in. All of my siblings and I moved out years ago. Dad stayed in the rambling house alone. Why, I don’t know. The place is haunted by the ghost of my mother, a woman I vaguely remember smiling and dancing around the kitchen.
I should have gone home first. Showered, changed, and had a cup of coffee before coming here. Made sure my head is screwed on straight. If I stayed in Alejandro’s bed, he would have offered me all that and more. Instead, I pleaded for the need to use the bathroom and persuaded him to unlock the cuffs joining us. I waited a few minutes, until I was sure he drifted back to sleep, then dressed in one of his shirts and a baggy pair of sweatpants, and I sneaked out. Not that leaving matters. Alejandro is with me, in me, in a way that has nothing to do with the fact that we’ve had unprotected sex and everything to do with the fact that I care far more about him than I should.
The chilly California morning hasn’t helped to sort out my head. I’m in love with a man who will never mean to stand in the way of my dance dreams, but how can Alejandro be anything but an impediment, as consuming as he is? I’ve barely driven two miles from Sneak Peek, and I’ve begun to feel the withdrawal of his warmth, his acceptance and tenderness.
Dangerous. I’m the Ice Queen of the Ballroom because I adhere to strict discipline and a ruthless dedication to perfection. I intend to win that long-coveted trophy, damn it. When the music is high and the lights are down low, the judges don’t care what's deep in my heart. They want my dancing to be brilliant, passionate. Everything. I must not forget that.
Still, those moments in Alejandro’s arms, maybe for the first time ever, I feel adored—and not because of what I might achieve or what competition I might win. I don’t have anything to prove to Alejandro. He cares about me. He shows me that in amazing, pleasure-drenched ways every time he touches me.
Now, I clutch a bag of bagels and cream cheese, along with a portable carafe of coffee I purchased at a bakery, and let myself into the house, calling out to my dad.