And I started to shake.
Moonlight glazed the bed around me as his strong hands tangled in my hair. “This is the first thing to go,” he murmured, and he pulled my headband aside. Bracing his arms on the mattress around me, he leaned forward. Gently, he kissed me. His mouth seared mine, pushing my lips apart as he pushed me back against the bed.
My head fell back against the soft pillows, and he gave my cheeks little feather-soft kisses before returning to my mouth. His tongue flicked possessively between my lips before he trailed kisses down my throat. My head tilted back as I gave a soft gasp. Feeling lost. Feeling new.
“I don’t love you,” I breathed—speaking to him? Or myself?
“No.” His dark blue eyes gleamed. “You want me. Say it.”
My voice was almost too quiet to hear. “I want you.”
“Louder.”
I lifted my gaze. “I want you.”
My voice had turned strong. Dangerous. Reckless.
He looked at me with such intensity I forgot to breathe.
“And I want you.”
Lowering his mouth hard against my own, Edward pushed me deeper into the soft white pillows. His hands stroked slowly down my body, light as a whisper, hot as a desert wind. His kiss deepened. Reaching down, he cupped my breasts that were aching beneath my prim white shirt.
I barely felt his fingertips move against my blouse. The buttons were just suddenly undone, and the unwilling thought crossed my mind that he’d had a lot of experience. He pulled my body up, and my blouse vanished into thin air, revealing my flimsy bra of blue silk.
What had made me wear my only truly pretty bra today, underneath my blouse? A coincidence? Or had I known, even before I came downstairs for dinner, that I intended to end my night this way?
“So beautiful,” he whispered, his hands touching everywhere, sliding over my bare skin. “You’ve been driving me mad....”
“Me too...” I breathed. We’d been both alone, I realized, both wounded deep inside, in injuries we’d caused ourselves. But in this moment, it felt like loneliness no longer existed. My heart and my arms were both overflowing. We were together. We were the same....
I pulled him down hard against my body, wanting to feel his weight over mine. I heard the appreciative murmur from the back of his throat as I kissed him, hard, and tried to unbutton his shirt. My hands were trembling and clumsy.
“Stop,” he said huskily, putting his hands over mine. For a moment, I was afraid he’d changed his mind. Then I realized he was unbuttoning his shirt for me, his expert fingers doing it three times as fast. Rising from the bed, he unbuttoned his cuffs and dropped his expensive tailored shirt to the dark floor. I gasped when I saw the muscles and planes of his naked chest, lit by the slanted moonlight. I’d seen his body before, during massage and occasionally when I’d taken him to swim at the local center. But never like this. Never with the full knowledge that I could run my hands over his skin, that I’d soon feel his naked body roughly take my own.
Edward’s eyes never left mine as he deliberately undid his trousers and pulled them with his silk boxers down his thickly chiseled thighs. A choked noise came from the back of my throat as he stood naked in front of me. He’d been naked in the gym that morning, but I’d been afraid to look. I was still a little afraid now. Blushing, I started to look away.
His gaze locked with mine, challenging me. With a deep breath, I lifted my chin, and looked, really looked, at his naked body.
He was not ashamed, standing there with quiet pride and giving me time to look, to accept. His shoulders were broad, and a dusting of dark hair trailed like a V from his nipples and hard-muscled chest down to a taut, flat waist. His legs were powerful as a warrior’s, and as he shifted his weight in front of me, he moved with an athlete’s grace. His thighs were hard and huge. Which could also describe what I saw if I dared to look between his thighs... But there my nerve failed me.