Nine Months to Redeem Him

“I want you, Diana,” he breathed, and claimed my lips savagely.

I’d never been kissed like this before. The pallid, tentative kisses of a brief college boyfriend had left me cold. Jason’s kisses, as I said, were pleasant, nothing more. This?

This was like fire.

Edward St. Cyr wanted my body. Not my soul. Not my heart. There was no respect in his embrace, no concern for my feelings. There was no emotion at all—just physical need and reckless desire.

But my hunger matched his. He made me forget everything—the past, my broken heart, my pain. When he kissed me, I almost forgot my name. He brought me to life, like a single hot ember from cold ash. He made my body blaze like the sun.

I gripped his bare shoulders with an answering fervor that belonged to some other bolder woman—someone fearless—and kissed him back. With everything I had.

I heard his low hiss of breath, then a rising growl at the back of his throat as he pulled me tighter against his naked body. His hands ran over me possessively. He kissed my lips hard enough to bruise, then nibbled my lower lip. He flicked his hot tongue in each corner of my mouth before he slowly moved down, kissing my chin. Kissing my neck.

My head fell back, my hair tumbling down my shoulders. The cottage seemed to spin around me, as if I were at the center of a tornado. My skin felt hot, burning like the desert. I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t open my eyes. If I did, I’d see Edward St. Cyr—my handsome, arrogant boss—kissing down my neck to my chest. If I saw that, I was afraid my mind would explode—along with my body....

His hands brushed roughly over my breasts, over hard, aching nipples. He cupped them over my thin cotton shirt and bra, stroking the sensitive tips with his fingers. My breathing became ragged.

“Take it off,” he murmured in my ear, and I felt the flick of his tongue against my ear. Prickles of desire, flashing cold then hot, raced up and down my body. Leaning forward to kiss me, he whispered, “Take it all off.”

His hands were insistent against my naked belly as he reached beneath my T-shirt. He reached higher still, toward my thin cotton bra that barely seemed to contain my breasts, which felt strangely tight and heavy, heaving with every gasp of breath. He kissed my lips hard, filling my mouth with his tongue, as he reached to take a breast in his hand. He squeezed an aching nipple.

Sensation ripped through me, and I gasped, gripping his bare shoulders. Electricity coursed through my veins, and blind raging need that frightened me with its intensity.

“I’ll help you,” he whispered, and pulling on my sweatshirt, he started to push me down, back onto the massage table.

Abruptly, my eyes flew open.

I realized he intended to take me right here. In the gardener’s cottage, surrounded by gym equipment and free weights. Against the massage table. He would ruthlessly help himself to my virginity without any more thought than that he had a hard-on, and I was conveniently available to slake it.

He didn’t want me. He wanted a woman. He intended to make use of me, in the same way I’d scarfed a bag of chips, the times I’d come home from work too starving to wait for a proper meal.

When Edward had kissed me so passionately, when I’d felt his naked body hard and powerful against mine, I’d been overwhelmed with the intensity of sensation. I’d been lost in fantasy and need.

In another moment, I would have let him rip off all my clothes, or—if that was too much trouble—simply pull down my stretchy yoga pants and thrust inside me, like an animal grunting as he took his pleasure, until he left me thirty seconds later, sticky and used upon the table.

None of my romantic dreams had fantasized about that.

I pushed on his shoulders. “No.”

Edward’s heavy-lidded gaze suddenly looked confused. “What?”