11

Anna

I licked it, so now it’s mine.”

Anna Collins

Darius Masoud was a beautiful man. He looked like a bronze statue, sculpted with perfect proportions to include those v-lines that were the Pied Piper of male body parts. Follow me this way, they said, so when he crawled up my body from the foot of the bed, I hooked his leg and flipped him over onto his back so that I could follow them – straight down.

He looked shocked for exactly one second, and my brain froze. Uh-oh, I did it again. But then he grabbed my hand to get my attention, and the expression on his face shifted into something mischievous.

“Show me what you just did.”

Yes!

So I did. And in case there was any question about the sexiness of naked wrestling, let the record show those moves are best done without a stitch on. We were laughing so hard by the time he mastered the leg-hook that I said out loud, “This is already the best sex I’ve ever had.”

He seemed stunned as he looked up at me. His dark chocolate eyes studied my face, and then he reached up to trace the path his eyes traveled – across a cheekbone, down to my lips, then my chin, along my jaw, and down to my collarbones. A trail of fire burned wherever his gaze touched me, and his fingers were the wind that fanned the flames.

A whole new crop of butterflies had taken wing inside my chest, and as I bent to press it against him, I took full advantage of the access it gave me to his beautiful mouth. His hands trailed their fire lightly over my back and down my sides, while his lips danced a tango with mine, giving … taking … teasing … caressing, until I ceased to be a body unto myself and became only points of contact between us.

And suddenly the points of contact were too many, and I wanted – no, I needed them to be just one. I pulled my face back and looked into the pools of heat in his eyes.

“Now’s a good time to find a condom,” I said, trying for conversational. My voice sounded alarmingly sultry to my own ears, and I cleared my throat. “Just in case.”

His mouth quirked up on one side again. “In case?”

“You know, in case we need some way to catch rainwater, or the boat springs a leak, or … something.”

He tried not to laugh, and the urge to tickle him to distract him from the sheer nonsense coming out of my mouth was so strong I had to sit on my hands.

“Mmm, do that again,” he said.

I realized I was still straddling him. “Find a condom.”

“Inside one of the Bareknuckle Bastards books. Brazen and the Beast, I think,” he said in total seriousness.

I knew the book. I’d read the book. And I laughed out loud as I reached for the one he meant. “Using it as a bookmark?”

He smirked at my expression when I opened the book to find a hollowed out middle with six foil packets inside. “Best way to keep my brother from stealing my supply. He doesn’t read romance.”

“But you cut up a Sarah MacLean book.”

“I have it on my kindle,” he said, as if that made up for the vandalism of a book I’d loved. It did though, kind of, especially since I was currently sitting on the man without a bit of clothing between us and he’d just admitted to buying Regency romance in ebook and paperback formats.

He plucked one foil-wrapped package from its hiding spot in the book, and then held it up. “Now what?” There was a mischievous grin lurking in his expression.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said as I casually leaned over him to put the book back on the shelf.

He thought of many somethings, the first of which involved his mouth capturing a nipple that flew too close to it. His tongue and the pressure of his suction sent electrical currents straight down my body, and I ground myself against him.

“Mmm, you’d better put that condom on in case you accidently slip inside me.” Those words sounded far too confident to actually have come from my mouth, so I figured he read my mind when he opened the package without losing his place on my breast.

He was apparently not someone to go up against in a game of blind man’s bluff, because he had no problem navigating the condom or himself with his eyes closed. He continued to savor my nipple as my hands moved his aside and guided him into me.

My brain ceased talking to me as my body adjusted to the fit of him, and then the music started. A song from the Twilight movie, “A Thousand Years,” played on a loop in my mind as we moved together, and the lyrics said what I felt. I’d waited a thousand years to love like this, or maybe just a lifetime to actually make love. What had started as pure butterfly-induced lust was now consuming all the air in my lungs and turning the bright flames into blue fire that danced in my veins and that filled me with heat.

He watched me with his smoky-quartz eyes, and every one of my senses focused on the most intense point of contact between us. Our eyes. All the other senses – the deliciousness of building pressure, the scent of our bodies, and wood polish, and the lake, the sound of his breathing, growing deeper with every rock of our hips, the taste of his lips still on my tongue – they found focus in the gaze that was locked on mine. His eyes held a kind of wonder that I felt all the way down to the center of my being. I sensed a connection that went far beyond the place our bodies joined, and I could see the tendrils of soul that reached out through his skin toward mine. When I came with him, a gasp of surprise went through us both. My own bits of soul had found his and recognized them as known.

I collapsed down onto him, and the music stilled in my brain, and the words stayed silent while I felt our heartbeats calm through our skin. His hand traced lazy circles on my back, and the first and last thought I was conscious of having was that his skin smelled like the bark of a cinnamon tree.