It’s the middle of day on a random weekday, so there aren’t many people at the Staircase campground. Tourists pay the twenty-five bucks to hike along the trail, but I’m willing to wager that Eros isn’t dying to see the lake.
He only suggested this outing because I told him he had to spend time with me before I’d even consider letting him out of blow-up mattress jail. He follows instructions well, which is just as much of a turn-on as anything else. How many men let what you say go in one ear and out the other? All of them. Except my alien.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t have agreed to this.
I park in a small turnout that I found a while back. There’s a tiny trail through the woods that we use to cut through to the main trail. As a bonus, this part of the national park isn’t heavily traversed, so we’re completely alone. Eros holds my hand as we stroll toward the tree line, and yeah, this is every bit a date, complete with the anticipation of what will likely happen at the tail end of it.
Maybe I should mention that he’s supposed to buy me dinner too.
I kind of laugh at myself because—excuses much? What is wrong with me? I don’t owe Eros anything other than what I discussed with Charmaine. I’m teaching him how to be American and providing a green card marriage in exchange for his agreement to play the part of my lover in front of my family. Except I am avoiding my family like the plague, which tells me I have a little more at stake here than I’m pretending.
A hush swallows us whole as we step into the forest, completely cutting off whatever sounds from the road that might have drifted this far. I have no trouble imagining that we’ve been transported to another world where the only things that exist are the two of us and possibilities.
Eros seems equally affected and for the first time since we left the house, he falls silent, his gaze drinking in the soaring vine-covered trees. His hand tightens around mine, which is unnecessary because I wasn’t going to let him go. Maybe not ever. Eventually we hook up with the main path and by mutual non-verbal agreement, we wander to the left which leads us deeper into the woods.
Sunlight filters through the canopy and dapples the ground. Coupled with the electric connection between me and Eros, it’s flat out magical. I’ve been here before, but the forest never spoke to me like this. I’m full of Eros and heat and bliss and an overwhelming sense of anticipation.
If I’d held the line and refused to let him take me on a date, I would have missed this. If I hadn’t completed that profile the way I did, I would have missed him. That tugs at my heart in a whole new way, and he glances at me as if he hears the shifting beneath my skin.
Maybe he does. Would it be so hard to believe he has some kind of special skill at reading me?
Breathless all at once, I let him capture me in his gaze and a profound heaviness creeps through my blood, freezing me in place. Which is fine, because he’s stopped too, focusing only on me. Drinking me in as thirstily as he had the forest a moment ago.
Eros crowds into my space and my back hits a tree trunk as his brutally hard body fits up against mine, pressing into me in all the right places. The crush of his lips on my mouth makes me whimper. I want more. He gives it to me, sweeping his tongue along mine in an explosion of sensation and fire and it’s all I can do to stay level. His knee slides between my thighs, chafing high and hard against my core, which is frankly the only thing keeping me from falling at his feet.
I want his hands on me more than I want to breathe.
Instantly, he skims under the hem of my blouse, his fingertips trailing heat up my side and back down again, dipping into the waistband of my jeans until he’s cupping my rear. It’s not enough. I strain forward, eager for more, grinding against his thigh, nearly delirious with need as the urgency of our kiss grows impossibly hotter.
I feel my zipper give way and his busy hands peel the rough fabric of my jeans from my body. I should help. But he’s got it well under control and eases his fingers between my legs, teasing me at my crease where I’m already wet and weeping for his touch.
When he circles his index finger over my achy center, I gasp and arch against the tree trunk, grateful for the support when everything solid in my body has been replaced by light and warmth. Eros pushes a finger inside me, setting off an avalanche of sensation and his presence winnows through my blood, seeping into every pore like hot honey. It’s almost more than I can bear and I cry out as he twists another finger inside me to join the first. I ride his hand shamelessly and his tongue laves hard and glorious against mine.
I’m about to come apart and I say his name in a throaty voice I scarcely recognize. He responds in his native language, murmuring pretty syllables to me in his outrageously sexy accent and it doesn’t matter that I don’t know the words. I hear what he’s saying with absolute clarity.
You are mine.
It spirals through my soul as the orgasm breaks over me like a wave, crashing into me with so much force that I cry out against his mouth. He swallows it as he devours me in a hell of a kiss, drawing out my release into something so otherworldly that a galaxy of stars explodes behind my shut eyelids.
When I come back down to Earth, Eros has shifted his hands back to my waist and is holding me gently, still crooning in his alien tongue. I cannot believe how shamelessly wanton it makes me.
“We’ve skipped the date part of this date,” I mutter and his mouth curves up against my cheek.
“Penelope happy.”
“Yeah, that’s no lie.” But it doesn’t excuse the fact that everything is backward and upside down. “We weren’t supposed to do that yet.”
“Penelope want. Learn,” he insists and skims a hand down my arm, snaking beneath my blouse to toy with my bra.
I mean, I can’t argue with that. I burned for him to touch me and he did, learning remarkably fast what gets me hot. It’s almost like he knew before I did how to make me fly, which is saying something considering I have never had an orgasm like that before. Sure a few times during sex I actually come but generally I have to help things along. It’s usually an experience best described as nice. Not cataclysmic. Not to mention that doing it while standing up and fully clothed is a new one on me. I’m an instant fan of it.
“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” I say half-heartedly because he’s in the process of unhooking my bra with shocking dexterity. He pulls it apart and finds my nipple faster than I can credit. I gasp as he thrums the hard, sensitive peak.
“Penelope wife,” he murmurs in my ear as he starts a whole brand new round of seduction. “Take care of Penelope.”
Which sounds to me like he has the exact right idea. Weakly, I try to remember why I should resist and I can’t. “Can we at least go home first?”
He nods and sweeps me off my feet, rolling me into his arms as he carries me back to the car like he’s found a treasure chest full of gold in the forest. I don’t complain because it’s chivalrous and swoony and I have never been treated so well in my entire life.
Earth men take a lesson.
I drive home—somehow—while Eros keeps up a stream of foreign murmuring while leaning on the center console, totally absorbed with me. He touches whatever he can reach as he tells me things in his native tongue that I can’t conceivably understand, but I do. It all means that he adores me. That I matter to him. I inhale it as if I haven’t been able to breathe for the whole of my life until I married the only person in the galaxy who can unhitch my lungs.
Who in the hell decided he needed to learn English? He communicates just fine in whatever he calls that jumble of sounds. My heart translates it easily without benefit of anything other than the simple connection of our flesh.
And when we get back to the Victorian house where I’ve lived the most lackluster existence imaginable, Eros paints it with vivid color the moment we blow through the door upstairs. He hustles me to the bedroom and I don’t even throw up a token protest as he begins to undress me with urgency. Whatever he reveals, he kisses reverently. First my stomach, then the space between my breasts. A long trail along my collarbone.
His lips are divine as they glide over my skin, as if they were made specifically for this purpose. The ever-present fullness that I experience whenever he touches me grows teeth, swirling inside me with breath-stealing force.
Because this time, I’m not going to make him stop.
My blouse hits the floor and my still-unhooked bra follows it. Eros’s gaze devours me as he takes in my bare torso. I let him look because his expression says more to me than his alien words. He likes what he sees. I have half a moment to wonder if Torvian women resemble Earth women and then it doesn’t even register that there are other people on the planet besides us as he kneels before me to unbutton my jeans.
A being as magnificent as Eros on his knees before me is such a powerful sight that my core catches fire and turns to liquid heat. I’m slick and achy and ready for anything he wants to do next.
He follows the same kissing routine down my abdomen and legs as he peels me out of my clothes. I shiver when he gets to my knees. He doesn’t skip my feet and by the time he’s out of skin, I feel like a goddess being worshiped by her most devoted subject.
I’m naked and he takes full advantage of it, sweeping his hungry gaze over me.
“Beautiful,” he announces in English and that’s just as good as saying it in Torvian.
I wish I could pinpoint the difference in the way he says it and how some random guy on the street yells it out when I walk by. It’s in the intensity, the way his hot eyes travel over every inch of me, not solely the parts most men care about. If he said my collarbone was the sexist part of my body, I would absolutely believe he thought that.
Then there are no more words as he backs me toward the bed, gently guiding me to sit on the mattress. That’s when he indulges me to the best show I’ve ever seen—Eros stripping out of his clothes. His T-shirt whisks over his head and his gorgeous torso is enough of a visual treat to keep me busy for the foreseeable future. But then he drops his jeans without hesitation and holy God on high.
There is no way that will fit.
He doesn’t give me a chance to squeak out a protest or even properly absorb the beauty of Eros in his natural form. I am knocked flat to the mattress by the sheer force of his presence as he runs his hands up my legs and to my stomach. I can’t do anything but let him touch to his heart’s content because I’m done pretending this is not exactly what I want.
“Eros,” I murmur and slide my arms around his waist, pulling him closer, which he allows, fortunately. There is little I could physically force him to do, though he’s demonstrated over and over that he will do as I say if I somehow lose my mind and decide to ask him to stop.
As our bodies align, I gasp. There is nothing on Earth that feels as glorious as his bare flesh against mine. And then I’m proven wrong as he kisses me, dropping me into a vat of warmed syrup. Time stops. I float through another plane of existence, where only these hands can tether me to reality.
He begins to use them, learning me as he goes, slowing down over my breasts, which makes me gasp. His fingers strum me like a mandolin and my body sings in response. When he replaces his fingers with his mouth, heat engulfs me and I arch involuntarily.
He does something with his teeth, scraping across my nipple, which pours gasoline on the fire. I light up inside as heat arrows straight to my center, exploding in a flash. I need more.
Instantly, as if I have spoken out loud, his fingers drift down my stomach and to my center, toying with me until I’m restlessly bucking my hips. Begging him to keep going, to fill me. To help him along with the concept, I let my own fingers do some walking and curl them around the hard shaft of his erection.
It’s his turn to gasp and truly there is not another sound he’s made that pleases me more. Experimentally, I slide my fist down the length and now he’s growling in his throat and oh, God, I want to hear that while he’s inside me. But he’s already inside me—not physically, not yet and I want that more than I have ever wanted something. I want him.
He levers his amazing body over mine and I guide him to my entrance. Slowly, he pushes, watching me as he opens me wide, pinning me to the mattress. He stretches me tight, so impossibly tight and it’s so good. He slides through my slickness inch by agonizingly slow inch. Surely I’ve taken all of him I can. But no. He keeps going and the friction increases until I’m urging him on with one heel to his butt. My hips flex and ohmygod he’s finally fully sheathed.
I cannot take any more. It’s too much. But then he eases back and thrusts again, spiraling me into a bliss-soaked cloud of pleasure. I moan his name and he rolls his hips forward again, pushing me unbelievably higher. It’s never been like this, so much. I’ve never had sex without a condom, and I bless the fact that he came to me fully tested because wow. He’s inside me, all of me, and every molecule joins with him.
Eros puts a hand to my knee and opens me wider, then lifts his body away from mine in a half-twist so we can both watch as he pistons in and out. The position is wanton. So wicked. Heat breaks over me as I register the sensations at the same moment I see them. He goes much deeper on the next thrust and I feel it course through my whole body.
The orgasm catches me unprepared, ripping through me with the force of an F-5 tornado. I bow up. Eros’s gaze turns carnal with pleasure as I cry out and he grips my hips to hold me still as he powers through his own release, emptying himself in a spectacular finish. Then he joins me in limp-ville, rolling me into his arms to lie boneless together.
“Love Penelope,” he murmurs and nuzzles my ear.
I stiffen under the long stroke of his fingers against my side. He has no idea what he’s talking about. Surely he doesn’t understand the earthly concept of love and you definitely don’t blurt out such a thing the first time you get naked. “You don’t have to say things like that. We’re just having sex.”
He shakes his head, his cheek brushing mine. “No just. Love.”
I’m too spent to argue, so I kiss him because I can and snuggle deeper into his arms. We can debate the finer points later.