He stepped over the vacuum—if he’d been thinking straight he would have noted the novelty factor in that act—put his hands around her soft little waist and hauled her in.
Two days of anticipation hadn’t prepared him for the full impact of Rose’s made-for-sin body. He hadn’t known what breasts and round thighs and a whole lot of woman was going to do to his self-control. Now he knew, everything went a little blurry with lust.
But first he needed to do the gentlemanly thing. He dragged his hands off her body to frame her face—her lovely, big-eyed, pert-nosed, lush-lipped face—and lowered his head.
She came up on her toes to make it easier for him.
Her kiss was soft and questioning. He couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t had the last couple of frustrating nights he’d endured, or the rousing sight of her vacuuming under her bed.
But he had.
As their mouths touched, slid, fused, he opened her up and delved inside, exploring the sweet taste of her, the softness of those ruby lips, hearing the little sounds of approval she made deep in the back of her throat that vibrated against his mouth.
Perfect. Goddamn perfect.
She tasted like sunshine.
And sweet, dark liquor.
He deepened the kiss.
Rose reached up and wound her arms around his broad neck. In a minute she’d stop kissing and demand to know what he thought he was doing, just walking into her house unannounced when she’d spent a sleepless night wondering if he was ever going to call. But that was in a minute. When they stopped.
The kissing…
Lordy, the kissing.
She rubbed herself up against that big hard chest, hooked her arms over his shoulders and virtually climbed him, so he was forced to splay his hands under her bottom and she had nowhere to put her legs but to wrap them around his lean hips.
‘Chert, Rose.’
She’d surprised him—but not for long. Within seconds she was flat on her back on her newly made bed with two hundred pounds of lean, muscle-packed male bearing down on her. This was new…
He probably really could take his hands off her bottom now, but he didn’t seem inclined to do so and Rose wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t sure if she was rubbing her pelvis against him or he was doing it himself with those big hands, but… Oh, my Lord, he really was happy to see her—and now she knew he was built to scale.
Feeling a little heady with it all, female power surging along with happy chemicals, she reached down and explored him through expensive denim—big and hard, like the rest of him.
Plato went still as a rattler just before it struck.
‘Holy Hell, Rose,’ he breathed, and grasped her hand and eased her off, returned her hand palm-down to his taut belly. ‘You need to slow down, dushka, or I’m not going to last.’
He was breathing hard, and Rose took it as a compliment. She grinned at him and Plato looked a little thrown, as if something about all this was not what he’d expected. Maybe in his world girls didn’t take the initiative? Which didn’t make a lick of sense. For a moment her confidence gave a little under the weight of her past. Clear as crystal she could hear her ex-fiancé Bill giving her fledgling sexuality a beating. ‘There’s something wild in you, Rose. No man wants a wife who can’t control herself.’
She darn well could control herself. She could control herself around Bill and every other good ol’ boy who thought the woman he’d married would settle in like a mare at stud whilst he got on with his career and his carousing. Not that Bill had ever caroused. He was too uptight for that.
She just couldn’t control herself around this particular man.
Wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing?
She let go of him and lay back against the pillow, feeling all sorts of confused. Maybe she’d read the messages wrong? It wasn’t as if she was in this situation every day of the week. Or the month. Or actually even the year. And really she wasn’t just the sum of her erogenous zones, and she’d only just met him, and wasn’t he only passing through…?
‘Don’t stop, Rose,’ he told her, capturing her chin in his hand, forcing her to look into his eyes as if he knew her thoughts had gone galloping off in the wrong direction.
She blinked.
‘Just slow down a little, malenki,’ he assured her, his voice an octave deeper than she had ever heard it.
The sound thrummed through her senses as if he were plucking every pleasure string in her body.