Mr. Virile and the Girl Next Door (8 page)

There is only one first kiss after an I-love-you and Holly wanted to commit it to her memory with superglue and staples. The soft glide of lips meeting lips soon became a sweet suckle as they tasted what they had denied themselves for too long. Dane deepened the kiss, growling a low sound of satisfaction. Her bones melted more with each slant of his mouth as they traded promises without words.

She became aware of a presence behind her and looked up to see Dane staring at it with one eye open. They slowed their kiss and broke away as all seven members of her book club squealed and clapped in the doorway.

Trying to come down from that kiss was difficult. The sound of her heartbeat filled her ears and her legs were like jelly. “Um,” she stated eloquently. “What should I wear?”

Dane kissed her nose. “Considering the way I dressed, if you wouldn’t mind going extra smoking hot, I’d appreciate it.”

She laughed. “Done.” She turned. “Ladies, book club is over. I need to get my sexy on.”

Before she could step away, Dane snaked an arm around her waist and whispered in her ear. The sensation of his mouth made her loins quiver before she even had the chance to make sense of the message. “Do me one more favor. Skip the panties, too.”

Dear GND,

My boyfriend thinks we should move in together, but I’m not sure what that means to him. Is shacking up a good idea?

Signed,

Closet Space

Dear Closet Space,

Ask him what that means to him. And tell him what it means to you. He may very well just be looking to cut expenses—and if that is fine with you, then go for it. But if you are hoping it’s a commitment step, then you better be sure he’s on the same page.

I may be old fashioned, but I don’t really see shacking up as a stepping stone to forever. Chances are, most people see it as a chance to “feel out the situation” with the caveat that if it doesn’t work, you can just move. I feel like that by keeping your eyes on the exit, you aren’t going to be keeping them on each other. But that is just me. You need to do what’s best for you.

Yours,

Girl Next Door

Chapter Eight

Later that night

It had been the longest God damned night of his life.

God damned speeches. God damned rubber chicken dinner. God damned small talk.

He’d known why it was necessary to go to back to the start and why he did what he did, sacrificing his pride and showing up at the reunion as if he hadn’t spent his adult life becoming the poster model of virility. But the woman he loved…
loved
…had been next to him all night in a little black dress with no panties beneath. He’d already wasted so much time, denying what his heart had known from the minute he saw Holly. He didn’t want to waste another minute and, instead, he’d had to sit for hours not touching her in the car, and then hours not touching her in a crummy hotel banquet room full of people he didn’t care about. It felt like he’d waited his whole life for this night to start and he wanted it to start
now
.

Now that they were back at the room, Dane hooked Holly by the waist as he slammed the hotel door shut with his foot. He pivoted them until her back was pushed against the door and he yanked the material of her halter dress out of his way so he could taste the column of her throat.

She turned her head to give him better access and sighed as his teeth scraped against her sensitive skin. He wanted to devour her. He was
going
to devour her.

Raw need pulsed through him. Pinning her to the door with his body, he used his other hand to snake under her dress, caressing the soft flesh above her stocking. “Do you know how crazy you have made me all night?”

He planted hot, open-mouth kisses up her neck, to her jaw, and finally her mouth. Any finesse he might have once possessed as a lover was gone as he mashed his lips against hers, practically prying her mouth open with his. He kissed her so hard and relentlessly that his glasses skewed between them and he had to take precious time away from her candied lips to tear the goddamned things off his face before he could resume the aggressive onslaught on her mouth.

Never in his entire life had he felt such intensity. It scared him as much as it emboldened him.

One hand cupped her fragile jaw firmly, holding her in place to take and take and take his feral kiss, while the other moved up and explored the sensitive seam where her leg met her body. He thrust his tongue into her mouth as if he were already fucking her hard, not relenting even a little when she shivered. He knew she liked it, the sensation of hard and soft at the same time. He knew it was almost too much to take for her too, like a tickle that bordered on torture, but he kept his touch beneath her dress light while he drilled her mouth the way he wanted to use his cock.

The thought of being inside her now almost made him come in his pants. He’d never known an ache so deep, had never believed he was capable of feeling so much hunger. Dane needed to fuck her with an intensity that came close to madness, but at the same time, he wanted to spend hours making love in a slow burn that would sear her to him forever, heart and soul.

Holly might have been stunned when he shoved her against the door, but she seemed to come out her daze enough to finally remember she had arms. She used them to thrust her fingers into his hair, moaning in that throaty voice that made him wild. She arched her back, trying to get his fingers closer to her core and keening when instead he dropped them back to the lacy top of her stocking.

“All night,” he rasped. “All night I knew all I had to do was put my hand beneath your skirt and find you bare to me. I don’t even remember most of the dinner.”

She laughed. “That’s because we left before dessert. And not too subtly, either. You dragged me out of there like we were headed to your cave.”

“I’d had all the small talk I could take. You’re lucky I stopped at the front desk and that they had a vacancy or we’d be doing this in my car right now.” Dane undid the closure behind her neck and pulled the fabric of her dress down, revealing the perfect breasts he’d been dreaming about since he’d had his first taste of them.

God. How had he managed a lifetime without her? That he’d touched another woman this way almost sickened him now. The mighty fall hard when they fall.

Without the preamble he’d made himself famous for, he latched onto one pebbled nipple and sucked greedily. She bowed beneath him as if electricity were arcing through her, and maybe it was. He certainly felt like a snapped livewire. His need sparked with electric energy, a wild current of high voltage.

Holly held him to her chest tightly, as if he would be anywhere else at the moment. She whimpered his name, acquiescing to his power and control, driving him one more level into the carnal abyss.

Dane picked her up, loving the way her legs wrapped around his hips, pushing his painful erection against the juncture of her legs, the place he needed to be more than he needed to breathe. In this new position, he had even better access to her chest, and he waged a battle with himself whether to keep her pinioned to the door and ravage her there or make the long trek to the bed where he could consume and devour her spread before him like a buffet.

The new beast inside him didn’t fucking care so long as he got inside her quickly, but Dane wanted it all. He had a feeling he would always feel like this, a little sick with a desire so strong that he would never be whole unless she was with him.

He nipped her neck and started for the bed, holding her ass in his hands and squeezing. She moaned his name and sucked at his earlobe until he’d felt the bed at the back of his legs and sat, gripping her body close to him so that she didn’t feel unsafe on the way down. So she knew he was in control.

A control that slipped more every second.

“You don’t even know how turned I was tonight, Dane.” She pulled at his shirt clumsily. “Every time I looked at you, all nerded up, but knowing how sexy you are. Knowing that underneath those clothes, your skin is so hot and molded over so much muscle.”

He helped her drag the material over his head, amazed really, that she found him so much sexier when he looked like one of his unenlightened clients. He’d seen it in her eyes when she’d answered her door earlier in the day, though. Pupils don’t lie.

She drew a hot, wet circle around his nipple with her tongue and he squeezed her hips tighter, groaning. Fuck. He wasn’t going to make it. Her hands got busy stroking over his chest and back and she cooed her satisfaction. Dane would never be able to explain in words the pride he felt knowing Holly loved his body. It didn’t matter that he’d been honing it for years and it had been admired by many. Too many. It was her fascination with the way he tasted, the way he felt under her hands, that filled him with swagger.

“I’ve been wet since you told me not to wear panties, Dane.”

“Jesus, Holly.” He fumbled with the zipper at her lower back, wondering if maybe he’d just do her under the skirt if he couldn’t get it undone fast enough.

She rubbed herself against him, grinding until they were both gasping. “Every time you looked at me, I knew you were thinking about what was under my skirt.”

“What wasn’t under your skirt, you mean.” Finally, the zipper came down and he lifted the whole thing up, instead of down. His finger went automatically to her wet heat, and she held his shoulders, straddled across his lap in her black stocking and heels, writhing against his hand. He’s never seen anything as erotic as she threw her head back and let pleasure roll over them both in waves.

She was so beautiful.

“I need to be inside you,” he said in a voice not his own.

He rolled them over and undid his pants with one hand while kissing her. And it wasn’t working. Son of a…he’d spent the better part of a decade becoming the smoothest man in the universe, and now his zipper was stuck like a first timer.

Holly giggled beneath him and it felt like rays of sunshine hitting every corner of his soul. “Stand up,” she said.

He did as she asked, and she rolled to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. She pulled him closer by his waistband and worked on his zipper. He still needed to touch her, so he stroked her hair, winding strands of it around his hands, marveling at the color and the softness. He was a goner.

The relief he felt when the zipper released and his cock escaped the confines of his pants was amazing, but not nearly as much as the feel of her hand working him from base to tip slowly while she slid his pants down his legs. She didn’t let go when he stepped out of them, but she did look up at him, making sure he watched as she slowly swiped her tongued across the tip of his cock.

“I won’t last ten seconds, babe.”

She grinned, not losing eye contact, and closed her lips around him, sucking his cock like a lollipop. His hand tightened in her hair.

“Holly,” he warned again.

She let him plop out of her mouth, but kept her hand firmly on his cock. “Promise I’ll get a chance next time?”

“Oh, baby. You can have as many chances as you want. I promise. But I want to be inside you. Now.”
Forever
.

She pretended to be sullen, sending him a flirty pout, and then let go. She got on her hands and knees and crawled to the head of the bed, teasing him with those stockings and that ass. Well, she wouldn’t be teasing long.

Dane was on her before she got the top of the mattress. He flipped her onto her back and pinned her wrists on either side of her head. “You’re a tease. I’m going to have to be very hard on you for that.”

She grinned even as she struggled to get her arms free. “I’m counting on it, Mr. Virile.”

He took both wrists into one of his hands, holding them above her head. With his free hand, he spread her beneath him, sinking his fingers back in to her, chuckling as she arched under him. “Greedy, greedy,” he taunted.

And then he could take no more. So hot and tight. He needed her, needed to drive his love into her so hard and so deep that she would never doubt his commitment and loyalty to her. For a brief moment, as he slid his fingers over her sensitive flesh and watched the play of emotion on her face, he thought about skipping the condom. He wanted to know what it felt like with no barrier between them, wanted to know what she’d look like round with his child in her belly.

The image made him pause long enough that Holly opened her eyes lazily. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“I love you,” he answered simply.

“I love you, too.”

He sheathed himself in a condom, but the idea of making a baby spurred him on regardless. And when he entered her, and the wet heat of her fisted around him, he found himself experiencing a different level of desire than he’d ever imagined possible.

Pleasure coiled tightly through him as he moved inside her. He tried to recall all the moves that earned his reputation for pleasing women in bed, but he was possessed with a need to relentlessly plunge into her depths hard and fast. Dane wanted to make it last, but Holly clawed her fingernails down his back as her sex pulsed around him in her own climax and there was nothing he could do to stop his orgasm from ripping through him. The pleasure was violent and unrelenting, as if he were being purified through fire. When the last of the flames gutted out, all he could do was hold on to the woman below him as shivers wracked their sweaty bodies and a peace overtook him.

Finally, he was home.

A good long while later, when they lay limbs entwined and sated…for now…Holly rose on one elbow and surveyed him keenly.

“What?” he asked.

She was gorgeous. Her hair tousled and her skin flushed. He started tracing her freckles while he waited for her to tell him what was on her mind.

“I’m waiting for you to tell me I was right.”

Dane pulled her across him so she was on top, fitting her mound to his groin as things started to perk up down there. “Right about what?”

She jerked her hips a little. Yeah. Things were definitely coming back to life down below. “That first night.”

“You mean when you told me you weren’t going to have sex with me? I believe I am the one who insisted you would. Looks like I was right.”

She swatted his shoulder. “No, when I told you it was better with someone you cared about.”

A fragile look passed over her face and his heart swelled up fiercely, protectively. He cupped her jaw tenderly in his hands and hoped his eyes conveyed the promises of his heart. “Oh baby, you were right.”

Holly smiled. An hour later, his foot caught in a sheet, lying sideways on a bed with no pillows, and a feminist blogger snoring quietly in his ear, Dane Martin surveyed his kingdom and was pleased.