‘Okay,’ she replied breathlessly, not sure what she was agreeing to. ‘Slow…’
A rueful smile softened his eyes, and he was looking at her as if he’d never seen her properly before. She realised she hadn’t thrown him at all. He looked intrigued.
‘It’s all about the journey, Rose,’ he told her in that deep, dark voice of his. ‘I want to make this good for you. There’s no rush to our destination.’
What that journey would involve and where it would end wasn’t clear to her, and Rose wanted to tell him that if he touched her she didn’t think she could slow down. All the pleasure points in her body were so sensitised she was beginning to ache. But he was
softly fingering the ebony curls lying in the curve of her throat, and it was crazy but she could almost sense him thinking.
‘You are so incredibly beautiful. I want to appreciate every inch of you, malenki,’ he said, almost to himself, in an accent that had thickened progressively since they’d hit this mattress.
And Rose believed him. She not only believed him, she wanted to go on this journey with him…
‘Cowboy, you say the sweetest things.’
He was so big and strong, yet that only made his hands in her hair seem incredibly gentle, pulling her kerchief loose, running his fingers through the silky curls, making her scalp tingle. She reached up and spread her own fingers through his sun-streaked brown hair. It was so thick, and surprisingly soft. It made her feel she’d discovered something about him no one else knew.
Her eyelashes fluttered closed as his mouth dipped over hers again. Maybe this slowing down was a good thing. Yes, definitely good…
Rose got a little lost in the kissing, the nipping, the grazing, the tasting. She could feel his hands under her shirt, rucking it up, and she smoothed her hands over his back, feeling the shift of muscle, the heat of his big body.
All the while she was subtly moving against him, her jeaned thighs wrapped around one of his. This was like the making out you were supposed to do as a teenager, but she’d missed out on it.
One-handed, he pulled her loose and stretchy top down to expose a pale shoulder and a portion of her practical beige reinforced bra that in all the sexy goings-on she’d forgotten all about.
Darn!
Plato made no comment. His thumb was pushing under the thick workaday strap, working it down her arm until he’d exposed the fulsome curve of flesh pushing up above the top of her bra.
‘Your skin, Rose,’ he groaned, his breath hot against her flesh as he laid open-mouthed kisses over the plumped-up upper slope of her breast. ‘It’s like fresh milk.’ He seemed to be describing her to himself as he dragged the ugly nylon a little lower. ‘And you taste so good.’ Another hot kiss. ‘And you’re so soft…so incredibly soft.’
Was she? Rose thought she’d die if he didn’t reach her nipples soon. She began to make little breathy noises she didn’t recognise as her own. He was nuzzling the deep valley between her breasts, growling her name. A moan escaped her and she decided sexy lingerie was overrated anyway.
Vaguely Rose became aware of another voice calling her name. Not one of those pesky ones from her past, telling her she was behaving like a wanton, rolling around on her bed in broad daylight with a man she’d only known forty-eight hours, giving him access all areas to her girls. No, this one was a little more immediate, and it seemed to be coming from her downstairs hallway. In fact it sounded as if it was coming up the stairs…
‘Oh, my Lord!’ She lifted her head like a Setter sensing a change in the wind.
She fought to sit up on her elbows, still half wedged under Plato’s big, pulsing body. She was breathing hard, and she was aware that her hair was all over the place and she probably had stubble rash all over her cheeks and chin and chest.
‘It’s Rob,’ she blurted out. ‘One of my clients.’
Plato said something not very nice in Russian and rolled off her.
Rose propelled herself out of bed. Or she would have if her legs hadn’t felt like jelly.
‘You stay here,’ she ordered, patting down her hair, pulling her top back into some sort of order.
Rob was in the stairwell, his eyes lighting up as he saw her.
‘Sorry, Rose. The door was wide open so I came on in.’
‘Um…did we have an appointment?’
‘Not exactly, but it was a nice day and I was passing.’ He climbed another two stairs. ‘Were you taking a nap?’
In any other circumstances Rose would have paid attention to this being a weird conversation and her barriers would have all been in place. At his last appointment Rose had picked up on inappropriate boundary issues with this man, and clearly she hadn’t been wrong. Except right now she didn’t much care about his problems. She needed him out of her house.
‘I think you need to go, Rob,’ she said a little airlessly, walking towards him with her arms held out to shoo him down her stairs. He was a tall man, or Rose had thought so. But after a couple of days’ exposure to Plato he seemed almost slightly built. She didn’t feel threatened by him.