He hitched her skirt then tucked her neatly under him, his legs moving with practiced ease to part her knees wide.
More surprised than shocked, she stilled, bracing herself, wanting this, but not as lost in the moment as she’d been. That was okay. She’d had her fun and she wanted to remember everything about this encounter. Cataloguing the flex of his shoulders under the stroke of her hands, the weight of his hips, the roughened texture of his legs on her smooth inner thighs, she waited.
He teased her, rubbing the head of his erection against her and reawakening her senses. As she hummed a response, he kissed her, deeply, dragging her back into the well of desire she thought she’d left outside on the ramparts.
Sliding her knee up to his hip, she hooked her calf over his buttock and quite suddenly, it was happening. His flesh was pressing for entrance, stretching her. Oh, wow. It hurt, but not bad. She’d experienced pain way worse than this, but it was still very intimate. She bit her lip and concentrated on accepting him, breathing through the sting and countering her instinctive tension—
He swore and the hand in her hair tightened enough to pull, even though she suspected it wasn’t intentional. His big body shook with tension.
“I’m hurting you,” he said in a voice so gruff she couldn’t discern what kind of accent he had.
“It’s okay. It feels good. I like it.” This was so primeval. Drinking in his scent, she licked his neck, wanting this delicious, mysterious man imprinted on her for all time.
Arching, she discovered there was more of him to take. Squeezing her leg to encourage him, she met resistance. Rather than press into her, he kissed her again, using his tongue, and lifted enough to sidle a hand between them, caressing where they joined. In moments he had her twisting in excitement, and a second later, he slid deep into her.
Ah, this was what it was all about.
Eyes wide open to the dark cabana, she hugged his rugged body and learned the dip in his spine and the shape of his buttocks. His tense muscles flexed as he retreated from her depths, pulling strings of sensations through her: echoes of sting, loss, but delicious friction, too. He smoothly filled her again, his big body trembling with strain as he controlled his movements. The smart was still there, but the pleasure was incredible.
Purring, she lifted her hips to his, clasping him with her inner muscles, kissing him with extravagant joy, telling him she loved everything he was doing to her.
For a second, he let her feel his full weight, the full power of his muscles as he caged her beneath him and pressed a hard, hungry kiss on her. The fingers tangled in her hair pulled again, and he held himself in stark possession of her. She could swear she felt him pulsing deep inside her.
Then his fingers massaged her scalp in gentle apology and he lifted slightly, withdrew and slowly began to thrust again. The music dimly entered her consciousness from far away as they danced, him leading her through the erotic steps as he lowered her zip and exposed her breast to his hand and mouth.
She sang breathy notes of acute pleasure and sensual agony, wanting this twisting, exciting play to go on for the rest of her life. But everything he did made the sweet pleasure intensify. Their lovemaking grew better and better, driving her up the scale of passion to exquisite heights. When he ran his hand up the bare thigh that bracketed his hip, and branded her buttock with his palm, lifting her into his quickening thrusts, she moaned in approval, needing that faster pace, that wild stimulation.
Climax arrived suddenly and more powerfully than the first. She clawed at him, stunned by the release, fixated by the intense sensation of his fullness inside her while she orgasmed. He cried out raggedly and shuddered over her and within her, pushing to take deep possession of her, holding them both on that place of ecstatic perfection.
Suffused with bliss, she didn’t move afterward, just waited for her heart to slow and listened as his breath settled. In the distance, the music continued and voices rose in conversation and laughter.
At the first shift of his body to relax and leave hers, the first easing of his implacable lock of his hips against hers, she dropped her hands and removed her leg from his waist. Her long history with bandage changes gave her the knowledge that quick and ruthless was best, even though it hurt like hell.
He surprised her by merely shifting his weight off her a little before he pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth then nuzzled his lips down her bare cheek to her ear. “That was incredible. Thank you.”
She couldn’t help the smile that grew unseen in the dark, or the way she warmed with pride and eye-stinging gratitude. “Thank you. I didn’t expect anything like this to happen tonight,” she confessed, even though she could hear the delight in her voice. He thought she was incredible.
“I’m pleased I could make your first time memorable.”
Her heart stopped. “You could tell it’s my first time?” She felt like the most gauche girl alive.
“I come to all of these. I know the regulars, and I’ve never seen you before. I would have remembered,” he added with another buss of warm lips against her cheekbone.
Oh, God, that’s what he meant. She swallowed her relieved laughter, then stiffened as voices approached their cabana.
“We should go somewhere more private.” He gently lifted off her, chivalrously flicking her skirt to cover her as he rolled away.
Everything in her protested, but she sat up on the other side of the narrow bed. As she tucked her breast back into her dress and closed the zipper, his hand curled around her upper arm, hot and commanding, drawing her into tipping back against him.
“I’m on the top floor. Are you closer?”
“I can’t,” she whispered with genuine regret, senses distracted by the musky scent surrounding him and the damp heat of his chest so close to her nose. She tilted her face to find his lips in a soft kiss of reluctant goodbye.
He didn’t move his lips against hers except to say, “Why not?”
“It’s complicated. I shouldn’t have come out at all.” Their breaths mingled. “I hope you will remember me,” she admitted, feeling safe to reveal the bald longing here in the anonymous dark.
“I’ll always wonder why, won’t I?” he said with edgy dismay.
“And then you’ll remember I wanted to keep this unspoiled by real life.”
This time when she pressed her mouth to his, he kissed her back. Hard and thorough, so her heart rate picked up and her arms wanted to snake around his neck.
She wasn’t about to hang around until the lights came on, though. She didn’t want to see his face when he saw hers.
Pulling away, she stood and shook out her skirt, stepped her underwear off her heel and left them on the mat. Quite the cheeky Cinderella move. Her mother would never quit the slut-shaming if she knew.
Tiffany felt no guilt, however, no shame and no embarrassment as she slipped out of the cabana and up the stairs, past the pool and its raging party, toward the elevators and back to her room. Only sensual satisfaction and poignant what-ifs followed her steps.
RYZARD’S WATCH GAVE a muted beep, reminding him he had a meeting in ten minutes.
Annoyed, he rose from the small table where he’d sat for the last thirty minutes eating a meal he would have preferred to have taken in his room. He swept the breakfast room once more for a certain woman in a mask that made him think of a falcon’s smoothly feathered head. A woman who was both gloriously uninhibited, yet had been so tight, he had feared as he entered her that she would call a halt.
A light