Authors: Katy Regnery
Her eyes were bright and encouraging, and he desperately wanted to say,
Stay here with you and make The Five Sisters into a profitable business. Wake up next to you every morning. Find you among the vines every afternoon. Fall asleep beside you every evening. That’s what I want.
Instead he chickened out and grinned at her. “Maybe buy my woman some Mexican grapes.”
He hadn’t planned to use the words
my woman
, and he found hearing them both silly and marvelous. Silly because he knew he didn’t
need
to say it—they’d tacitly, if not overtly, decided to start seeing each other—and labeling her as his woman was possessive and sophomoric, but it was the first time he’d ever said those words, and he was surprised by how much it pleased him to hear them. His heart swelled with pride, with hope, with something that felt so very much like love.
“Your . . .
woman
?” she asked, leaning across the table with a teasing smile.
“If you’re someone else’s woman, I’m going to be pissed. We
just
got rid of Olson.”
She laughed, a lovely, warm sound that knocked every other sound off his list of favorites. As her laughter faded away, her eyes sobered. “Is that really what I am? Your woman?”
He shrugged and considered another cute, cowardly response, but his heart throbbed with tenderness for her, and he found himself saying, “You’re a lot more. You’re my friend. My business partner. The goddess who invited me into her bed this morning,” he teased, but she didn’t smile back at him. Her eyes were wide and serious, vulnerable in their nakedness, and he realized that she was waiting for an answer to her question. “And yes, baby, my woman . . . if you’ll have me.”
Her face didn’t register a reaction to his words, but her feet slid off his lap, and she scooted her chair back, holding his eyes as she stood up. She reached for her glasses and placed them on the table. Placing one foot on the bench where she’d been sitting, she arched her back, which thrust her breasts forward, and reached for the end of her braid. The rubber band fell to the ground with a satisfying snap, and she took her time unbraiding the strands and then shaking out her gorgeous, wavy mane.
Cameron gulped.
Holy shit.
She was doing it. She was acting out his fantasy for him. Right here. Right now. His heart raced as he watched her.
Her fingers moved to the first button of her white button-down shirt, lingering for a moment before unfastening it with a soft pop.
Cameron stared, mesmerized as the second, third, fourth, and fifth buttons followed suit, revealing that she hadn’t put on a bra after showering earlier. Finally the two halves of the shirt hung loosely open, and she rolled her shoulders—
where the fuck had she learned that little trick?
—and it fell to the ground in a whisper.
She stood there like a goddess in the dying light, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and a sassy grin.
“I’ll have you,” she answered.
Then she turned her back to him and sauntered into the house as Cameron struggled to pick his chin up off the floor.
***
Margaret’s heart thundered as she walked through the kitchen and sitting room and up the stairs to her bedroom. Her nipples were taut and hard by the time she got there, both from the chilly evening air and the crazy amounts of arousal she’d felt watching his eyes darken from emerald to forest-green to black, and his lips part in surprise and excitement.
She listened for his feet on the stairs, but all was quiet for a moment as she sat down on the bed. She waited for him with an encroaching uncertainty: had she been too forward?
As she was just about to wrap her half-naked body with the bedsheets, she heard his chair skitter across her flagstone patio and crash to the ground. A second later, the kitchen door opened and slammed shut, and before she could register his ascending steps, there stood Cameron at the entrance to her bedroom, his eyes wild and focused mercilessly on her.
He paused only for a moment before closing the distance between them and falling to his knees on the floor in front of her.
“I’m going to give this everything I’ve got, Margaret. I promise you will never regret inviting me into your heart.” He reached up to clutch her head almost roughly, his eyes searching hers.
Before she could reassure him that she had no fears about the safety of her heart, he lunged forward and pulled her head forward so that his lips landed flush on hers and their teeth clashed together. He was demanding and hungry, the pressure of his palm on the back of her head making it impossible for her to move. Her only choice was total submission to his appetite . . . or matching him in frenzied enthusiasm.
She reached for his face, her nails curling instinctively into his flesh as she leaned forward, falling into him. Cameron fell back onto the floor and pulled her on top of his body, sliding his hands from her hair to her back. He caressed and kneaded her naked skin, groaning into her mouth as she pushed at the edge of his shirt, desperate to feel his bare chest pushing into hers. He reached back and pulled the shirt over his head, breaking their kiss only for a moment before pulling her lips back to his.
Margaret rubbed her breasts against his chest, and Cameron deepened their kiss, his tongue sweeping her mouth. She whimpered from the competing sensations and pulled away to look at his face.
Cameron’s eyes, which were almost predatory, dropped deliberately to her exposed breasts, then back up. Holding her eyes, he jackknifed his body into a sitting position, with Margaret straddling his lap, then dipped his head and sucked one pebbled nipple between his lips.
As one hand held her captive breast in place, his other arm slipped around her back, trapping her in place. She arched back against his arm, but his lips followed her movements, sucking strongly on her turgid flesh. Just as she thought she’d die from the intensity of the sensation, he switched hands and arms, taking her other nipple into his mouth and circling it with his tongue before alternating between hard and gentle sucking.
She threw her head back and moaned, the pressure building in her core so that she writhed on his lap. As her pelvis slammed into his, his lips went slack, and he groaned, the hum of his lips tantalizing against the painfully aroused skin of her breast.
So she did it again.
She arched her back and slammed her sex against his. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the feeling of his erection, pressed intimately against the valley between her thighs and already throbbing for release.
“Mmnh,” grunted Cameron, his hand landing on her jaw, his thumb stroking her lips.
Margaret parted her lips, and his thumb slipped between them. She laved it with her tongue, teasing him gently before pursing her lips around it and sucking it into her mouth so hard that her cheeks caved in.
“Christ!” groaned Cameron, tightening his arm around her back and sliding her up into the very apex of his thighs, where his throbbing erection pushed insistently into her sex.
It was Margaret’s turn to moan, her lips dropping open as he thrust his hardness against her softness, dry-fucking her to wetness. She wrapped her arms around his neck and rubbed her breasts against his chest as he rolled his hips to press his erection intimately into her. Once, twice, three times, and her clit ached for more, the pressure built from his attention to her breasts and now with every upward thrust of his hips.
“Meggie,” he panted.
She opened her eyes.
“I want you naked,” he demanded. “In bed.”
She slid off his lap and stood up, her legs almost buckling as Cameron lurched to his knees and reached for the button and zipper of her jeans.
“Remember my fantasy?”
“The one . . . in the elevator?”
“I told you, baby,” he said, unzipping her fly, “the location was irrelevant.”
With one yank, he pulled her jeans and panties past her knees and bared her sex to him. She gasped, staring down at his black, wavy hair until he leaned back and looked up at her with stormy, starving eyes.
Using his thumbs, he parted the soft folds of her flesh, baring her clit. She fought to keep her eyes open, staring at him as she panted, her small breasts moving up and down with every shallow breath.
“You are a fucking miracle to me.”
Margaret’s neck fell back as his hot breath made contact with her sensitive, exposed flesh.
“Ahhn,” she whimpered, bracing her hands on the bed behind her and unconsciously widening her legs to give him passage and permission. She trembled as she waited, her whole body rigid and poised for that first exquisite touch of tongue to flesh.
Slowly, so slowly, his tongue lapped at her skin, pausing briefly on the distended bud of throbbing nerves. He groaned, the hum of his deep voice against her quivering flesh making her gasp,
Ohgodohgod
,
in a shameless litany. Her fingers curled into the bedspread as he did it again and again, his tongue licking so slowly, she feared he would pause or—
please, please no
—stop entirely, and the anticipation made the pleasure that much stronger when his tongue started moving again, slowly loving her, until she thought she’d die from needing release, from needing him to take her all the way to heaven.
Just when she was sure she couldn’t take anymore, his tongue slid directly over her clit and paused there. She trembled with anticipation when his thumbs slid away so that his hands could cup her backside and hold her steady as he clamped his lips around her clit and sucked it into his mouth.
“Cameron!” she screamed, her whole body exploding in one huge, pulsing, quivering orgasm.
Her body twitched and convulsed, a flooding wetness between her legs warm and welcome proof that her body was Cameron’s trophy, that she was helpless of anything but total surrender. Her limp form fell back onto the bed, and she was only vaguely aware of Cameron lifting her gently into the middle of the soft duvet, and pulling her panties and jeans from her ankles.
When the mattress sagged beside her, she suddenly found herself folded in his arms, her naked breasts pulled against the hard muscles of his chest, the damp fluff between her legs pressed against the silk heat of his naked erection, his lips landing gently on her forehead.
When he spoke, his voice was a desperate whisper, taut and tender at once. “I’m not just falling for you, or crazy about you. This didn’t just sneak up on me, and while it’s better than I ever expected, it’s not as new to me as it is to you. I’m in love with you, Meggie. I fucking love you. And I don’t know how to go slow. I don’t know how to slow down. I don’t know how to do anything but love you as hard as I can for as long as I can. I tried my fucking best to be careful with you, to be cautious and patient and gentle and not to scare you away. But the truth? The truth is—”
“I love you too.”
He was silent, his chest pushing relentlessly into hers with every breath he drew. Finally he leaned back and looked into her eyes as though stricken, like he couldn’t believe what she’d just said.
“What are you . . . I mean, are you—”
“I’m in love with you too. And yes,” she said, leaning forward so that her lips brushed against his when she finished, “I’m sure.”
***
Cameron had never done things in half measures, because it wasn’t his style and, moreover, it wasn’t in his nature.
When Alex English started dating his sister? He almost killed Alex.
When Jessica needed a place to get married? He built one.
When he decided that he couldn’t shoulder C & C Winslow anymore? He sold it.
He’d never deliberated on major life decisions. He’d never lived his life cautiously.
Except with Margaret Story.
He’d fallen in love with Margaret Story when he was thirteen, and it had taken him almost twenty years to tell her. And some part of him hadn’t thought beyond the moment of telling her. Some part of him didn’t want to hope—or demand—that she requite his desperate love for her. It was enough that she let him love her. He told himself it would be enough.
So hearing the words, hearing the woman he loved so desperately assure him that her heart belonged to him?
Fuck if he couldn’t stop the tears from burning his eyes so bad, he had no choice but to close them and let his kiss tell her everything that his voice couldn’t.
When he finally trusted himself to speak, he flipped her onto her back and braced his weight on his elbows, cradling her beloved face with his hands. “How is that possible?”
“Cameron,” she said, smiling tenderly as a tear escaped from the corner of her eye, “it was
always
possible.”
“I want you,” he growled, overcome with emotion.
“I’m yours,” she answered, opening her legs to him.
“Don’t look away,” he said, pulling back so that he could line up his throbbing cock at the opening of her sex.
“I won’t,” she whispered, her beautiful brown eyes focused clearly on his.
Slowly—so very, very slowly—he slid into her body while watching her eyes flinch and flutter closed before opening again. The walls of her sex pulsed around him, wet and hot, like a hug, and he felt himself swell almost impossibly within her.