Chapter Eight
AT THIS STAGE in the proceedings, Leo would have marked his boundary lines out very clearly.
He didn’t feel that he needed to with Sammy, though.
She got them. She had entered this contract with her eyes wide open and she knew him for the man he was—a man who wasn’t going to ever offer her anything but the gratification of a physical need.
She wasn’t a woman rushing to climb into bed with him as a prelude to trying to stake a claim. She was a woman who had done her best to avoid climbing into bed with him and staking a claim was the last thing on her mind.
She wasn’t losing her virginity to him because he was the man she had been looking for all her life. She was losing her virginity to him because, like a minnow caught in a riptide, she just couldn’t help herself.
The chemistry between them, for all sorts of reasons he couldn’t understand, was overpowering.
‘Sometimes crazy is good,’ he broke away to rasp. Without giving her time to find an answer to that observation, he picked her up and she gave a soft little gasp because they were heading for the bedroom and that king-sized bed.
She’d definitely overestimated her ability to hang on to her self-control when he was around!
If they’d buried this and not brought it out in the open, she might have been safe but, as it stood...
She spread her hand flat against his chest and felt the hardness of muscle.
If she stopped to think about whether it had anything to do with love or affection or wanting to discover more about her, then she would go mad.
It was all about sex and lust and he was right—she had never predicted how powerful a physical urge could be.
He deposited her on the bed and then stood back and looked down at her with an expression of masculine satisfaction.
‘Hot day out there...’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m thinking we should start with a bath. How does that sound?’
‘Maybe we should just get it over and done with.’ Sammy looked at him anxiously and he burst out laughing.
He raked his fingers through his hair and gazed at her with lively amusement.
‘That’s the first time any woman has ever said that to me.
Maybe we should just get it over and done with.
..’ He shook his head and dropped onto the bed to sit next to her and she scrambled up so that she was hugging her knees, her eyes wide with a mixture of apprehension and hot longing.
Both did unheard of things to his body. His erection was so hard it was painful. He had no idea how he was going to get through a leisurely bathing session but sating their needs fast and hard was going to have to wait.
‘Is this the first time you’ve ever made love to a virgin?’ she asked quietly and he touched her cheek briefly.
‘It is, but don’t be scared, Sammy. I’ll be gentle.
I just need to make sure of one thing—I need to know if this is really what you want.
’ His voice was utterly serious. This wasn’t quite what she had expected.
She had summed Leo up as the typical wealthy, good-looking businessman who could have any woman he wanted and so took without thinking of consequences.
She’d assumed that he was selfish sexually, happy to pick up and discard women without any thought to whether he left them with broken hearts or not.
His account of what had happened behind the scenes with Vivienne Madison had subtly changed that opinion but perhaps her opinion had been changing before that.
Assailed by a moment of confusion, her mind went blank for a few seconds and then she slowly began processing that the three-dimensional man was nothing like the cardboard cut-out she had had in her head.
‘Really what I want?’ she parroted weakly.
‘You’ve spent your life saving yourself for the right man,’ Leo told her roughly.
‘I’m not the right man for you and I never will be.
I’m not on the lookout for love—I don’t have time for the complication of emotions.
If I were to describe my ideal life partner, it would be someone whose view of the institution of marriage was similar to my own.
A man like me would be no good for you any more than a woman like you would suit a man like me. ’
Sammy hugged her knees tighter to her chest. She was being given an out. She looked at him, chin tilted mutinously at an angle. ‘You were right,’ she told him. ‘I thought sex and love went together. I hadn’t banked on being swept off my feet by...by...lust.’
Leo was impressed because it was brave of her to admit that.
It would have been much easier to have buried her head in the sand, stuck it out here for the next week and then pocketed the money and put the whole thing down to experience rather than facing up to something she found uncomfortable and bewildering.
‘Is that you telling me that you want this?’
Sammy nodded and he grinned. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Sammy.’ He sifted his fingers through her hair and gently tugged her towards him. His kiss was long and deep, their tongues meshing, driving her wild.
‘Let me hear you say it...’ he encouraged, breaking apart to look at her.
‘I... I want this.’ Sammy felt heady and reckless. She felt as though she had one foot hanging off the side of a precipice. In a minute she would leap into the air and free fall. She was terrified and excited all at once.
‘In that case, stay right where you are.’
He padded off to the en suite bathroom, where she heard the sound of the bath being run. When she thought about the two of them in that bath she shivered. But she wasn’t going to back out.
Her mind was frantically trying to deal with images of them together when he reappeared at the bathroom door, leant against the door frame and gazed at her with his arms folded.
‘Rule number one,’ he drawled, ‘is to relax.’ He strolled towards her and she followed his lazy progress with wide blue eyes.
‘Rule number two is to stop thinking that what we’re about to do will be anything but exquisite.
And rule number three...’ he ran his fingers through her hair and gently tilted her face upwards so their eyes met, his reassuring, hers needing reassurance ‘...is that you trust me.’ He stood back and held out one hand and she took it mutely and then he led her to the bathroom, where the bath was a mass of fragrant bubbles.
‘Now...’ Leo positioned her in the middle of the bathroom and stood back, gazing at her with the eyes of a connoisseur. It was an exaggerated pose, finger lightly resting on his mouth, head tilted back, eyes half closed, and she wanted to laugh, which relaxed her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Where to start?’ he murmured. ‘With your top, I think...’
‘No—no!’ She hurriedly stepped back and hooked her fingers under the stretchy fabric. ‘I can do that myself.’
‘Should I turn my back and only look around when you’re safely concealed under a metre of bubbles?’
‘Hardly a metre!’
‘You’re not going to get away that lightly,’ he teased, enjoying the novelty of a woman who wasn’t flinging herself at him. He walked towards her and when she opened her mouth he gently placed one finger over her lips. ‘Now, remember those rules of mine?’
Sammy nodded meekly.
‘Okay. Let’s focus on rule number three, which is trust me.’ He lightly tapped her hands away from the top to replace them with his own and slowly, tantalisingly slowly, he pulled the top over her head, keeping his eyes on her face, and then he tossed it on the chair by the door.
Sammy’s mouth was dry. ‘I know I’m not exactly skinny,’ she breathed huskily and he tutted under his breath.
‘My breasts are way too big,’ she continued, just in case she hadn’t already made it perfectly clear that making love to her wasn’t going to be like making love to one of his superslender models or waif-thin actresses, and not just because she was a virgin.
Leo was finding it very hard to step back from the searing urge to rip her bra off and feel those lush breasts for himself. The last thing his aching erection needed was a description from her about just how generous they were in size.
‘You’re perfect,’ he ground out, briefly closing his eyes to get a grip.
Sammy would have launched into a question and answer session about his definition of perfection because she had eyes in her head and knew that perfect was the last thing she was, but he had slid his hands behind her back and was unclasping her bra.
She gasped and squeezed her eyes tightly shut as the bra joined her top on the chair. Her body was as rigid as a plank of wood but not for long, as he curved big hands around her breasts and then, slowly and expertly, rubbed his thumbs over the stiffened peaks of her nipples.
Leo wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep up the pretence of the sophisticated lover in control of the situation when he felt as though he was on the brink of exploding.
He was hard as a rock and throbbing. When he looked down to those heavy, abundant breasts with their circular pink nipples, he could easily have been a horny adolescent on the verge of losing his virginity. That was how turned on he was.
He continued to massage them, to play with her nipples, while she moaned softly under her breath, as if a little embarrassed to be making any noise at all.
Her inexperience hit him like a dose of adrenaline and he fumbled, in a very uncool way, with her trousers, which he somehow managed to get down her legs without his usual aplomb.
She stepped out of them. Sammy’s eyes were still squeezed shut and, whilst everything was melting, she just didn’t quite know what she should do next.
Her whole body went up in flames when she thought of those fabulous dark eyes scrutinising her body.
She took a peek and daringly made some halting attempts to get him to the same state of undress as she was.
‘Shh...’ Leo murmured, as though she had spoken. He stayed her hand.