He growled his approval, a sound straight from the Stone Age, a dark, deep sound that rumbled into her very bones and shook them loose. She would have fallen then, if he hadn’t pulled her into his kiss, his hot mouth explosive on her lips, on her throat, as he celebrated her acquiescence, his arms like steel crushing her to him, his hands on her back, on her shoulders, capturing a breast and sweeping his thumb over her peaked nipple, sending sensation spearing down to that hot place between her thighs and making her mewl into his mouth.
‘God, I want you,’ he said, echoing the only words she was capable of thinking, as she pushed his jacket off his shoulders and he shucked off his shoes. He released her for only a moment, shrugged the jacket off and let it drop to the floor while she worked desperately at his buttons and his tie, and he turned his attentions to her zipper. She felt the slide down her spine and the loosening of fabric, the electric touch of his hands at the small of her back. Impatient to similarly feel his flesh under her hands, she ripped the last few buttons of his shirt apart, scattering them without regard.
Finally she had him, her hands on his firm chest, her fingers curling through the wiry thatch of hair, lingering over the hard, tight nubs of his nipples, relishing all the different textures of him, the hard and the hot, the wet and the insistent, and if she’d had any doubt at all that he wanted her, it was banished by the bucking welcome of that rigid column as her hand slid down to cup his length. He groaned and pushed her back hard against the wall as she grappled with his belt.
He was everywhere then, his taste in her mouth, his hands separating her from the dress, slipping the straps from her shoulders, letting it slip between them as he took her breasts, the scrap of lace no barrier against the heat from his hands. And then even that was gone, replaced by his hot mouth, devouring her, lapping and suckling at her flesh until she cried out with the agony and the ecstasy of it all. It was everything she had imagined in dreams spun in hot, torrid nights alone and more, and still it was not enough.
She clung to his shoulders as he laved her nipples, gathering her skirt as his hands skimmed up her legs, not taking his time but still taking so much longer than she wanted.
‘Please,’ she pleaded, clutching at his head, gasping as he cupped her mound, his long fingers stroking her through panties wet for him, needing him, hot and hard, inside her. Needing him now, before she came with just one more touch. ‘Please!’
‘God, you’re so hot,’ he said, dispensing with her underwear, pulling free his belt with damn near the same frenetic action.
She saw him then. Her first glimpse of him unleashed and hungry and pointing at her, a compass needle finding true north. Once she might have wanted to believe it. But she was wiser than to believe such fantasies these days, and much wiser to the consequences. Which reminded her…
‘Protection,’ she muttered through the fog of need, but he was already ripping open a sachet with his teeth, rolling it on before pulling her back into his kiss. Her breasts met his chest, the feel of skin against skin taking her breath away, or maybe it was what he was doing with his hands and clever fingers.
Her dress bunched at her waist, his hands kneading her behind, fingers teasingly close to the centre of her, driving her insane with need, as he lifted her, the wall at her back, still kissing her as he urged her legs around him until she felt him, thick and hard, nudging, testing, at her entrance.
She cried out, something unintelligible and primal, lost in an ocean of sensation, drowning under the depths. It was almost too much and yet it was nowhere near enough and she only knew that if she didn’t get him inside her she would surely die of need.
He didn’t keep her waiting. With a guttural cry of his own he lowered her, meeting her with his own thrust, until he was lodged deep inside her.
A moment in time. Just a moment, a fraction of a second perhaps, but Eve knew it for a moment about which she would always remember every single detail, the salt of his skin and the smell of his shampoo, the feel of his big hands paused at her hips, and the glorious feeling of the pulsing fullness inside her.
Could it get any better than this?
And then he moved, and it did, and flesh against flesh had never felt so good, every new moment giving her treasures to secrete away, to add to a store of memories she would take from this night, of sensations she would never forget. Sensations that built, one upon another, layer upon layer, higher and higher, fed by each calculated withdrawal, each powerful thrust.
Until there was no place to go, no place higher or brighter or more wondrous as the sensation, the friction, the furious rhythm of his pounding body all melded together into a cataclysm, taking her with it.
She screamed her release, throwing her head back against the wall, her muscles clamping down hard as he shuddered his own frenetic release.
She didn’t know how long they stood together that way, she couldn’t tell, too busy trying to replace the oxygen consumed in the fire of their coupling while her body hummed its way down from the peak. But slowly her feet found the floor, slowly her senses and sensibility returned. To the knowledge she was standing barely dressed between a wall and a near naked man she barely knew but with whom she’d just had mind-blowing sex.
‘Wow,’ she said, embarrassed in the aftermath as he dispensed with the condom and she remembered her own wantonness. Had she really pulled his shirt apart in her desperation to get inside it? Had she really cried out like a banshee?
And he laughed, a low rumble in a velvet coat. ‘Evelyn Carmichael,’ he told her with a chaste kiss to her lips, ‘you are just one surprise package after another.’
He didn’t know the half of it. She found the straps of her dress, pulling it up to cover herself before she started looking for her underwear.
‘Leave it,’ he said, his hand around her wrist. ‘There’s no point. It’s only coming off again.’
‘Agai n?’
His eyes glinted. ‘This book I was telling you about. It’s a long book,’ he said. ‘That was only chapter one.’
She blinked up at him, her dress gathered in front of her, and he pulled her arm away, letting the dress drop to her waist, then slide over her hips in a whisper of silk to pool like a lake on the floor.
And even though they’d just had sex, she felt nervous standing there before him wearing nothing more than lace-topped stockings and spiky sandals. She hadn’t been with anyone since Sam’s father. She didn’t have the body she’d once had, her belly neat but traced with tiny silvery lines and softer than it had been before bearing a child.
She held her breath. Could he tell? Would it matter?
‘You look,’ he said, ‘like a goddess emerging from the sea.’ And some tiny, futile creature somewhere deep inside her grew wings and attempted a fluttery takeoff.
‘And you look like a pirate,’ she countered, reminding herself it was just a game. It wasn’t real and that pointless tiny creature inside her would soon die a rapid death, its gossamer wings stilled. ‘Ruthless and swashbuckling.’
‘Uncanny,’ he said, his lips turning in a half-smile as he swung her into his arms. ‘However did you know?’
‘Know what?’ she asked, feeling a secret thrill as he carried her into the next room.
‘The goddess of the sea and the swashbuckling pirate.’ He winked at her and he laid her gently on the king-sized bed. ‘That’s the title of chapter two.’
It was a long and detailed chapter. There were passages Eve found agonising going, like when the pirate sampled the goddess, tasting every last inch of her except there, where she craved his detailed attentions the most, and then there were the passages that moved at what felt like breakneck speed, where he feasted on her until she was bucking on the bed.
And even when she lay, still gasping, after her latest orgasm, the chapter