She sat on the edge of the lounge and scooted back, her heart thumping in her ears. She couldn’t get over the effect he had on her, his absolute focus. It was like she was the center of the universe in those lung-burning moments when he’d been touching her. Jacob Latimer was enough to make any woman go light-headed, just on his own, but combined with his intensity and the raw hunger in his eyes when he touched her . . . well, Harper was grateful he’d asked her to lie down. Her knees had gone weak.
When her feet were hanging over the ledge, he bent and removed her sandals. The skin of her ankles and feet still prickling from his light touch, she scooted back onto the many scattered pillows at the end of the lounger. Even before her head came to rest, he was coming down over her reclining form. He blocked out that sun itself, but the brilliant light shone around his dark form like a corona. Planting his left hip near her thigh, he slipped one arm beneath the small of her back. He cupped one of her breasts in his hand, holding it up for his inspection. She felt his narrow-eyed stare all the way to her sex. And then, with no further ado, he calmly leaned down and sucked her nipple into his mouth.
The contact sent a jolt of excitement through her. He sucked firmly. His tongue laved the captive nipple, as though he was determined to feel every tiny bump of the puckered flesh. Harper grasped at his head, sinking her fingers into his thick hair. Her sex went liquid and warm. She squirmed slightly against the cushion, instinctively trying to get pressure to alleviate the sharp ache at her core. His mouth moved rhythmically, drawing on her hungrily, pulling at some magical string that seemed to join her breast to her sex.
“Jacob,” she moaned.
He lifted his head, but only to resituate himself over her. He swung a long leg over her body and came up into a partial kneeling position over her. She watched, her mouth falling open. He looked so solemn staring down at her, holding both of her breasts in his hands. So beautiful. His thumb feathered a wet, erect nipple, drawing a whimper from her throat.
He glanced up at the sound. How could she express what she was feeling? Impossibly, he was making her feel like the only woman in existence.
She reached for him. He captured her outstretched wrists and pressed her hands on one of the pillows behind her. She cried out shakily at his gesture, surprised.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured, obviously mistaking her sound of startled arousal as fear.
“I’m not afraid of that.” And she wasn’t. She’d had lovers press her hands above her head in the heat of the moment before. For the most part, she’d liked it, the roughness of it, the spontaneity, although it had usually been done with some degree of hasty lust. But that wasn’t what Jacob was doing. He was restraining her firmly, but his hands were gentle. It was the deliberation of everything he did, the focused confidence and mastery of his touch, that made her so hot.
He lowered over her again, using his free hand to hold a breast. He sucked her other nipple into his mouth, treating it to the same firm suction and gentle thrashing he’d given the first. His hunger was a palpable thing. It created a sharp pain of need in a place deep inside her. After a moment, he lifted his head, kissing and nudging the swell of her breasts, running those shapely lips she’d lusted after repeatedly over her beading nipple, before he fastened on the other crest.
Harper lay there, panting and increasingly desperate, while he feasted on her like she was his first and last meal. His focused hunger and his patient, intent consumption of her made her wild. She writhed more strenuously on the cushion, calling his name, needing his mouth on hers, the feeling of his naked skin against her own and his cock filling her . . .
Just needing, so much.
He lifted his head from a glistening, swollen nipple and regarded her with a heavy-lidded stare. “Am I hurting you?”
“No. It feels so good,” she replied honestly.
He nodded and removed the hand that restrained her wrists. When she immediately began to move in order to touch him, his hand was back.
“Don’t move. Stay like that. You have no idea h
ow exciting this is for me. You’re so beautiful. I want to play with you a little more. Okay?”
A gasp of surprise popped out of her throat. She nodded. What else could she do but agree? She felt his hand slide beneath her opened dress to her back, and her bra snapped open. His fingers slipped along her shoulder blades, dragging the straps of the bra down. He pushed the cups downward, completely freeing her breasts. Using both of his large hands, he grasped both the edges of her sweater and her breasts, plumping the mounds beneath the opening.
He glanced up at her, the small, devilish smile ghosting his lips freezing the air in her lungs.
“See, I told you. Pink sweater fetish in the making,” he said with dark amusement. She started to smile along with him, but then he lowered his head and sucked a nipple into his mouth, drawing on her more tautly than before. She moaned. His hands plumped and molded her breasts while he sucked on first one crest, then the other. He held them up for his consumption, pushing the shiny, reddened nipples together for his feasting mouth. It was relatively innocent, as far as ways of lovemaking went, but his intensity made it outrageously exciting.
Now past the point of desperation, Harper lifted her hips off the cushion, needy of pressure on her sex. He’d been kneeling over her. His thighs bracketed her lower hips, but he’d kept his crotch several inches off her body. She made contact, pulsing her pelvis against the mind-blowing tease of his erection. He slipped his lips off her nipple. Harper gave a frustrated cry, partially because of the loss of his hot mouth, partially because of the feeling of how heavy and warm his cock felt through his jeans.
“Are you doing this to make up for last night, or are you just intent on driving me crazy?” she asked, panting.
A slow smile started across his handsome mouth. “Can’t it be a little of both?”
“Huh?” she asked, discombobulated. She jerked her gaze off the vision of his erect cock pressing against the front of his jeans. She watched him as he once again swung his leg over her and came down next to her on the lounge, reclining on his hip.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, as if to himself. He unfastened the remaining buttons on her pink sweater and began working on her dress. “I could play with your breasts forever. They’re uncommonly pretty.” She gasped when he reached up and pinched a hard, swollen crest gently, his fingertips sliding with the wetness he’d left from his mouth. At the sound she made, he glanced up at her face. “Your cheeks are bright pink.”
“I can’t help it,” she managed, because his quick, adept hand was now moving down her belly as he unfastened her dress, and it was highly distracting. “It’s my coloring.”
She sensed his pleasure more than saw it displayed in any obvious way on his face.
“I like that. It means you can’t hide anything,” he said. Her breath stuck on an inhale when his long fingers paused at the last button of her dress, just an inch above her mons. He opened his hand over her bare stomach and caressed her.
“Breathe, Harper.”
Her eyelids popped open at his quietly uttered words. That eerie sense of familiarity came over her yet again. She forced her eyes to focus on him. Then he slipped two fingers beneath the elastic band of her panties and buried them between her labia, and the strange feeling was washed away by a flood of lust.