I stood up and put an arm on her shoulder. “Relax,” I said. I sat her down on the bed and sat beside her. Her muscles tightened and stood out like she was an anatomy drawing. “Anna,” I said. “You don’t have to make yourself do anything you don’t want to do.”
She unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. “But I want to,” she said.
“And I want you to,” I said with a mouth that was suddenly very dry. “But if you do this before you’re ready it won’t be right. You’ll regret it, and sooner or later so will I.”
She undid another button. “But how can I know when I am ready,” she said. “Perhaps only by doing am I then ready.”
It would have been hard enough to follow her slightly twisted English under the best conditions. But sitting on the edge of a bed in a cheap hotel with my heart pounding hard enough to wake the neighbors and all my concentration on the next button, I really had to work at understanding her. She got another button undone before I figured out what she had said.
“Anna, listen,” I said.
She undid one more button and put her lips on my ear. “I do listen,” she whispered.
Her breath slipped over my neck a
nd onto my face and shoulder and it felt like a live wire dragging across my skin. I could feel all the little hairs on my arms stand up and all the blood rushed from my brain straight down.
I put my arm around her and held her close. Her arms went around me, too, and we fell gently backwards on the bed. Her shirt came open. She had nothing on under it and I could feel her nipples rising, hardening as they rubbed against me. I slid a hand across them and Anna gasped softly.
Anna shrugged her shirt off the rest of the way and unbuttoned mine. She put her hands inside, on my chest, and rubbed them up, across my shoulders, pushing the shirt aside until it whispered off and fell next to hers.
She locked her hands behind my neck and pulled herself forward until our foreheads touched and our eyes were so close that when she blinked I felt the movement of her eyelashes. Then she rubbed her breasts sideways across my chest and pressed them against me hard enough to bruise me.
I ran my hands along the incredible satin smoothness of Anna’s back and up onto her shoulders. Her hands paused and she shivered. She pressed her face against my neck and shoulder and I could feel her breath coming faster. I moved my hands lightly up her spine and then down again, sliding one hand under the waistband of her jeans and onto the ripe swell of her bottom.
And as I did she caught her breath, stiffened, and pushed slightly away from me.
“No,” she said, in a half-strangled voice.
I paused. I could feel the muscles in her lower back tighten.
She gasped. It was not the sound of pleasure. “Please, no,” she said again.
I took a very deep breath and let it out. “All right,” I said. I lifted my hands away from her and dropped them down onto the bed. “Okay.”
For a long moment she didn’t move at all. Then I heard her breath catch again and felt a tear run across my shoulder. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am not as ready as I am thinking to be.”
“That’s all right,” I said, putting a hand back on her shoulder, her bare, smooth shoulder. “It’s all right.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I’m not going unless I go alone,” I told them both for maybe the sixty-third time. Anna had accepted it. She sat quietly on the bed looking worried. Since she had seen the bar and the River Rats inside she didn’t want to go back.
But Nicky was another story.
“It’s my money,” Nicky said.
“It’s my life. And I’m not tossing it away for your ego.”
“Go piss down your leg. Ego is going into this solo with no back-up. You need me there, mate.”
“Anything I can’t handle is going to be way too much for you.”
“Piss down your leg,” he repeated. “What is there to handle? Go to a bar and talk to a drunk. Think I can’t do that a damn sight better’n you? Eh?”
“There’s more to it than that. I have to be ready for something to go wrong.”
“Exactly my point, mate. And you need me there if it does.”