The Billionaires' Brides Bundle

“Lyssa,” he said, “oh God, Lyssa…”

And then he stopped moving. Damned near stopped breathing.

Alyssa was a virgin.

For a heartbeat, he held still above her, his life, his breath seeming to hang suspended on the brink of eternity.

“Yes,” she said, “please, yes.”

Slowly, so slowly he thought it might kill him with pleasure, he sank into her. Her eyes closed. His name sighed from her mouth.

He could feel his own release rushing toward him. He wasn’t ready for it. Physically, yes, but in every other way he wanted this moment to go on and on.

He was poised on the very edge of a cliff with all the world spread out beneath him. It would take a god to stay still.

But he was only human. And when Alyssa moved, when her body arched, when her womb began tightening around him, Lucas knew he was lost.

She sobbed his name. She reached her hand to him. He caught it, caught the other hand as well, brought them to his mouth, then entwined his fingers with hers against the cool ivory sheets.

“Lucas,” she said again.

Her voice broke. She was afraid, he thought in wonder, and he bent and kissed her mouth.

“I’m here, amada,” he said thickly. “I’ll be with you this time. Just let go and fly with me. Fly with me…”

Alyssa sobbed his name. Lucas flung back his head. And, just as he had promised, they flew together into the inky blackness of the endless night.

CHAPTER NINE

WAS this really what it meant, to lie with a man?

Alyssa tightened her arms around Lucas, stunned by the transcendent passion of his lovemaking.

I’ll be with you this time, he’d whispered, and he’d kept his promise. The power of his climax had driven her higher, higher, higher…

Was this what sex was? Pure, white-hot magic?

Yes, she was a virgin but even virgins knew something about sex. That girls whispered about it and giggled. That some women rolled their eyes and said, in bored voices, it wasn’t all what it was supposed to be.

Alyssa had never had anyone she could ask. In private school, the girls moved in tight little cliques and she, shy and leggy and more comfortable around horses than people, was always on the outside looking in. By college, it was too late to ask. Feeling naive was bad enough. She didn’t want to feel stupid, too.

Once, right after her first period, she’d started to ask questions of her mother. Elena Montero McDonough had blushed, waved her hand at the horses that ran on the ranch back then and said Alyssa had all of nature for a classroom.

Maybe. But a stallion mounting a mare had nothing to do wi

th what had happened in this bed.

Sex, it turned out, was not all about the stallion’s domination and the mare’s submission.

It was about giving yourself to a man. The feel of his body possessing yours. The heat of his kiss. The touch of his hand, the knowledge that he could make you want him, want him, want him…

Want the enemy. Want a stranger.

Alyssa’s throat constricted. She wanted to weep, not for what she had done but for what it should have meant. What it had meant, those wondrous transcendent moments as Lucas made love to her.

Except it hadn’t been love. It had been lust. Calculated lust, for all she knew. It was the stallion and the mare all over again.

The mare Lucas had crossed the ocean to buy.