New Year's Resolution: Romance!: Say Yes / No More Bad Girls / Just a Fling. Leslie Kelly

Take it slow. Make it good.

      Swinging her up in his arms, he reminded himself this was for her. All her.

      She deserved a lover. A considerate lover. Not an animal that was driven by savage want. Chase was too controlled for that anyway. He used his brains, even in bed.

      That was where he took Ashley.

      Placing her on the downturned sheets, he studied the picture she made there, forcing his lungs to suck in oxygen and expel it again in a calming sequence. Her hair was spread on the pillow, and he didn’t let himself remember the fantasies he’d had of it. On the pillow, just like that, or the ends tickling his ribs, or of his face buried in it.

      Okay, he was thinking of them.

      But then she was moving, shimmying that little scrap of lace down her legs, and Chase couldn’t get the rest of his own clothes off quick enough. Then he pounced, and she giggled like a girl as he covered her. He grinned at the sound, struck by the carefree aspect of it. “You make me happy,” he said.

      Then he froze. Where had that come from? She made him happy? He was supposed to be making her happy. Sex-happy. There was nothing here about happy-happy. Not the heart kind of happy.

      Her fingers speared his hair and moved over his head, as if discovering its shape. “You make this easy.”

      That sounded better.

      Chase applied himself to making it even easier, with his lips, his tongue, his hands. She was warm as candle wax and as pliable. He turned her this way and that, finding the secret cove behind her knee, the dimples at the small of her back, the notch at her throat. When he flicked it with his tongue, she cried out, and he could tell she was close to the edge.

      So he took her closer. Now he went for the obvious places—her breasts, her belly, the hot and tender skin of her inner thighs.

      A wildness thrashed inside him. It wasn’t his way. But Ashley...she did something to him.

      Oh, he didn’t turn rough or savage or anything like that. It was his pulse that turned riotous, his heart that pounded with unruly abandon in his chest. He took her mouth again, a messy kiss that had her clutching his shoulders and moaning. His hands roamed her body, intrepid travelers of a foreign land that wanted to map every hill and every valley. She opened for him, her arms flung wide, and he felt all his sophistication fracture, then fall.