“I wasn’t gentle with you.”
“You were perfect with me.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Both of them were both seeing memories of their lovemaking in the other’s eyes.
“I could have hurt you,” he ground out, raw emotion vibrating his voice.
“But you didn’t, Christian. Not until you walked out the door after I’d just experienced the most…” Megan’s voice dropped suddenly as shyness overwhelmed her.
He was on the edge of the couch now. “The most what?”
Megan gave a helpless shrug and several tears spilled down her cheek. “The most everything. You made me come alive. Maybe you think it should have been another way. I don’t know about any of that. But the way you loved me was honest, and passionate, and…so good.” Her voice broke. “Maybe caution was what was called for, but it’s not what I needed. I needed just what you gave me. All of yourself. No half-measures. You burned me until I was clean and whole again.”
He made a ragged sound.
One second, they were feet apart, and the next, she was in his arms.
He held her face with one hand and sipped the tears from her cheeks. He kissed her eyelids, and her forehead, and her nose with passionate tenderness. When Megan opened her eyes she saw that his eyes were blazing, but moist with emotion.
“I’ve been feeling guilty.”
“I know.”
Her fingertips traced his sleek goatee. “Maybe…” She paused for a second uncertainly. Christian watched in rapt fascination as her tongue anxiously licked at the full lower lip that he’d begun to picture regularly in his fantasies. “Maybe if we did it again, you would know that everything is okay.”
The smile that ghosted his mouth made desire snake through her all the way from her throat to the juncture of her thighs.
“How is it that you keep seducing me with so much finesse, honey, when you’re supposed to be the inexperienced one?”
“I wasn’t?
?? I didn’t…”
He grinned crookedly and ducked his head to kiss her softly, then with increasing desire. Megan’s head swam under the influence of his familiar, intoxicating scent and taste. She didn’t like to think about how just this morning, she’d wondered if she’d ever taste him again. The memory made her savor him. She slicked her tongue along his straight, white teeth. She sought deeply in his mouth, curious about what lay just behind her tongue’s reach. He moaned and she swallowed, making his desire her own.
He spread his large hands, his pinky finger sunk into her waist, his middle fingers studied the structure of her ribcage and his thumbs caressed the swells of the lower curve of her breasts.
“I love how you’re made” he said gruffly while his lips molded hers. “You’re so small, I feel like I’m holding your heart in my hands.”
“You are,” she whispered. “You are.”
“Megan,” he muttered with feeling. He took her hand. She followed him down the hallway.
“I’ll have to take your word for it that you really did like making love on the couch last night. But for my part, I require a bed to make as free with you as I plan.” His eyes sparked with both amusement and desire as he looked back at her. “Not that my bed is likely to be big enough either.”
Megan smiled at his sexy playfulness, but a flicker of concern shadowed her features. “You did like it on the couch, didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes in amused exasperation. “Haven’t you been listening? If I liked it any more than I did, I probably would have had to add starving you to death to my list of crimes.”
“What does starving me have to do with it?”
He continued leading her down a short, dark hallway. Despite the dimness, Megan saw heat crowd the humor out of his blue eyes.
“Because I was sorely at risk of keeping you on that couch and making love to you until we were both too exhausted, or dehydrated, or starved to move.”
“Really?” Megan murmured with prurient interest. As he guided her into his bedroom, she smiled. “That would have been rather poor planning on our part.”
Christian glanced back over his large bedroom, which Megan noticed was decorated with the same clean lines and Asian influence that was evidenced in the living room. “Do you think I should bring in an emergency supply of food and water?”