“This
is
sex, Froot Loop.”
She flounced again, but her tongue reached out to greet his. “This is torture.”
He chuckled. “You want fast and without finesse, you do it in backseats with bare-assed adolescents. You wait this long, you get the edge that experience brings.”
She wriggled again and he relented this time, letting her face him again so that they could share another long, wet kiss. Then he abandoned her mouth for another exploratory foray, but he didn’t get farther than her breasts. He’d meant to give them a grazing caress, to tease her even longer, but his sophistication—his so-called edge—began and ended when his cheek brushed one hard nipple.
Instead of moving on, he moved his head, covering the hard center with his mouth. Her body tensed, not arching, not squirming. He didn’t even think she was breathing, and when he started to suck he felt an answering quiver shoot through her muscles. He lifted his gaze to take in the flush on her cheekbones and the rosy color of her parted lips.
Cassandra . . . Wholesome, irksome Cassandra. He was doing this to her. He was putting that expression of plea sured passion on her face.
His mouth took in more of her flesh, sucked harder, as a new lust drove away the last of his concerns. His hand plumped the other full breast and then he toyed with the nipple there, pinching lightly and pulling it away from her body as her gasps and whimpers told him she was running down the path he’d set her on.
He switched his mouth to her other breast, sucking and biting with delicate care. She bowed, her shoulders pressing low, her chest lifting for more of his hungry mouth. His head spun and his lust spiked, but he clamped down on his surging desire. This was for Cassandra. This wasn’t about him.
He let his free hand slide down the center of her body to flirt with her belly button. Then he moved through the soft curls at the apex of her thighs and heard her moan as he skirted the top of her cleft. She was already flowering for him there, her labia unfurled and open for his touch. He eased the pressure on her breast as he took in the incredible feel of her silky inner flesh.
She whimpered, and he soothed her by sucking softly at her nipple. With a slow finger, he wandered around the layered heat of her sex, shuddering as silky wetness flowed into his hand. She was aroused—God, beyond aroused to enflamed—and the evidence of her desire electrified him.
Urgency clamored in his head and in his cock and he jerked his hand to his pants, shuddering as her wetness transferred itself from his fingertips to the skin of his belly. He toed off his shoes and shucked off the rest of his clothes, taking a moment to rescue the condom he’d put in his wallet as a precautionary measure the day following the Beach Shack debacle. Then he lay against her body again, treating himself to a decadent kiss as his cock slid along the slick flesh of her pussy.
He rubbed himself against her, ignoring the clamoring in his blood for action, for penetration, for completion. Her past abstinence at the forefront of his mind, he was able to take his clues from her hitched breathing, her hot skin, the way her thighs opened in sexual, needy abandon.
Rolling to his side, he propped his head on one hand and put his other into play again. Using her expression as the measure of her readiness, he watched her face as he drew the back of his fingers down her quivering belly. At the juncture of her thighs, he found the hard kernel there and circled it with his forefinger, spreading the cream of her own excitement as the small organ throbbed beneath his touch. Her eyes squeezed shut, so tight that lines fanned to her temples.
“Look at me, sweetheart,” he said. “I need to see you.” Her lashes lifted as if they were heavy and the unfocused pools of blue were darkened by the blackness of her wide pupils. His breath caught hard in his chest, and he couldn’t stop his hips from pushing forward so he could slide his cock along the side of her thigh. She gasped, too, and he gritted his teeth, reminding himself that her pleasure was the focus. This was her first time.
His fingers slid down the wet slide of her cleft to circle the entrance to her body. Shit, he thought, his finger tracing the soft skin there. Was he going to have to hurt her? The thought stilled him—hand, lust, heart.
“It might not even be an issue,” Cassandra said quickly.
It didn’t surprise him that she could read his mind.
“Activity can make it a moot point. Horseback riding. Gymnastics.”
He slanted her a suspicious look. “How much of either have you done, Froot Loop?”
“There’s a guy who rents horses at Paradise Cove every summer,” she said.
Though she didn’t say she’d ever rented one of those horses.
“And I could probably still do a headstand.”
His Froot Loop. He could barely restrain shaking his head at her, would surely have done so if she hadn’t been looking so turned on and so anxious at the same time. “I’m sure yoga counts, too,” he said, just for the hell of it.
“Yes!”
Good God. But he made it a prayer as he took his touch to another level. Blowing out a silent breath, he let his fingertip breach that tight entry. Her hot, wet flesh closed around him, robbing him of breath. On a moan, her lashes drifted down.
“No,” he said, his voice gruff. “Look at me.” To make sure he wasn’t hurting her, he needed to see her eyes.
She obeyed, slowly, her eyelashes lifting again as he inched his finger into the snug passage of her body. She moaned; he swallowed his. His muscles trembling, his gaze trained on her face, he pumped his finger in and out of her in an unhurried, gentle rhythm that his heart took up. Then that organ’s beat double-timed as a sudden blast of lust rocketed through him—urging once again for action, penetration, completion.
Cassandra, he reminded himself. Give to Cassandra.
“Gabe.” Her flush deepened and her inner muscles started tightening on him each time he withdrew. It made his next gentle invasion more difficult.
“Sweetheart. Relax. Let me in.”
She frowned, her breath panting in and out of her chest. “Can’t . . . relax.”
He tried pushing inside her again, but she was so snug he was afraid that pressing harder would cause her pain. A sneak attack was in order, he decided. Swooping down, he took her mouth for a kiss and moved up his hand for another round of play with the wet bead at the top of her sex. This touch electrified her; he could feel the energy pulsing through her body. He put all his attention into the touch and into the kiss, his heart thudding as he felt the tension in her tighten. She clutched at his forearm as if to still his pleasuring fingers, but he ignored her tight grasp to circle her sex, to kiss her mouth, to take her higher and higher until she—
Broke.
Her body arched, her lips went slack under his, then she shook, as a blissful sound poured into his mouth. He eased his touch as she quaked and shivered through her orgasm. When her movements quieted, he lifted his mouth.
“Gabe?” she said, her voice languorous. “We’re not done, are we?”
It was like the soft stroke of a brush against his thighs, his balls, his cock. “Shh, shh,” he said, quickly donning the condom he’d left on the bedside table. With shaking hands, he took off her boots and stripped her of the rest of her clothes.
Then he rolled between her thighs and smiled into her pleasure-filled face. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”
Cassandra lifted a hand to his cheek. “I’d never let you off so easy.”
But he’d make it easy for her, he promised himself.
Think how long she’s waited. Make it worth it.
The head of his cock slid into the softened entry of her sex. Her muscles were lax from her orgasm, and he pushed onward. “Don’t tense up,” he said. “Just let me in.”
And Cassandra being Cassandra, she widened her thighs and tilted her hips and gave him the generous offer of her lush sexiness. And Gabe . . . he hung on to his control, pushing without hurry into her, parting her muscles, pressing against her inner flesh, giving her all the finesse he had even as he saw pain break across her face when he surged the final inches.
“God.” Breathing hard, he laid a kiss on her mouth. “Okay?”
Her heart pumped against his. “Okay.” She didn’t sound sure.
He wasn’t sure himself. But his body remembered the moves and swung into them without his permission. On his elbows so he didn’t smother her with his weight, he pumped his hips and watched her own breathing quicken.
“Beautiful Cassandra,” he said.
This is for you. This is because you asked me to take you away from your today.
But then Gabe’s day fell away. As he moved within the soft, tight clasp of Cassandra’s body, he let go of her past abstinence, his past dramas. Her self-proclaimed loneliness and his self-imposed reclusiveness.
Gabe found himself living for the sensation of his body against Cassandra’s. He lived in the moment, this moment, of intimacy and passion.
Someone had told him he needed to rediscover this, that he needed to learn to fully feel the now again, but in three years he’d never been able to let go of the deep despair that his personal tragedy infused in every moment. In the past three years, he’d felt loneliness, lust, despondence, desire, but this was delight, in Cassandra’s skin, in the hitch of her breath, in her response as he slid deep and stroked her clitoris until he felt her second climax. It triggered his, and then the pleasure spun out, pulling from some infinite well of exquisite sensation and endless time.
If he’d had a pink gel pen, he would have written her name and how this moment was making him feel, with bows and flourishes and fat, cheerful clouds.
The success of the event was a success for him. Because his personal storm was, for this infinite moment, at bay.
Later he could laugh at how sentimental that sounded. Later he would have to acknowledge that he’d turned as schmaltzy and saccharine as she’d warned him against. But now, for once free of the rusty chains of grief and regret, he just felt happy.
“ So,” Cassandra forced herself to say in a teasing, yet dismissive tone. She had to keep this light, after all. “I waited twenty-nine years for
that
?”
She held her breath as Gabe lifted the forearm he’d thrown over his eyes after lifting from her still-tingling body. His head rolled on the adjoining pillow to meet her gaze. “Don’t even try that with me, Froot Loop,” he said, his voice hoarse. “That was some of my best work and all for your benefit.”
“So I owe
you
now?” she asked, still trying for a little attitude.
“Nah.” He moved again, this time off the bed to pad toward the bathroom. “We can call it even.”
Even? He wanted to call it even? She didn’t know if she could. She didn’t know
what
to call it, except maybe more intimate than she’d expected, and it prompted her to yank the sheet over her nude body.
The intimacy was Gabe’s fault, she decided. Some other guy—most particularly the bare-assed adolescent that she might have found herself in a backseat with ten or twelve years ago—would have touched her body but left her head alone.
But Gabe knew her so well that even before the physical act was accomplished, he’d figured out her celibacy was just another name for her virginity. His focus had changed with her admission. He’d focused completely on
her
, taking her up and then over before giving her what she’d asked for.
Him inside her body.
Because that’s what she’d wanted, more than the mere end of her virginal state. She’d wanted that intimate connection with Gabe as a distraction from the fire and the feelings it had brought out in her.
Her breath caught as he strolled back into the bedroom, apparently unconcerned about his nakedness. Through her lashes she checked out his lean body, and she flushed, remembering all the hard sinew and strong muscle pressed against her. He hesitated beside the bed, and she saw him scoop up an opened foil square lying on the bedside table.
He’d used a condom. She lifted onto her elbows. “You remembered protection. Thank you.” Her flush deepened. She should have thought of that.
Gabe scrunched the foil in his fist. “Yeah. I bought them after that morning when I woke up in your bed.” He ducked into the bathroom to toss the packet away.
“Because you thought we’d . . . indulged that night,” she said, curling her lip.
He turned, taking in the semi-scornful expression on her face. His lips twitched. “Apparently I flattered myself.”
“You think? You were falling down drunk, Gabe.”
Sighing, he sat on the edge of the bed, still naked, and reached out to trace the curve of her eyebrow with his finger. She told herself not to shiver at the touch, but it was hard to resist as the fine hairs lifted along her skin.
“Forgive me?” he asked.
She thought she might forgive him anything when he treated her to such gentleness and looked at her with those intent, dark eyes. “Maybe,” she said, to show she wasn’t so easy to win over.
His forefinger moved to trace her mouth. “What if I were to hold you now?”
Cassandra swallowed, unsure what to do. Was it right to extend the intimacy? Would it be too much like the sappi ness she’d professed she wasn’t after to ask him for his arms around her?
A smile ghosted over his face. “Why don’t
you
hold
me
?” he suggested, sliding in beside her.
He was reading her again, of course, but she didn’t protest as he turned out the light and settled her against him. There was a little soreness between her thighs and she wasn’t accustomed to sharing her bed, but she decided this decision was right.
Close against him, everything felt so right.
“In the interest of full disclosure,” he said, twirling a lock of her hair around his finger, “I have to admit I jumped to another terrifying conclusion after finding myself between your sheets.”