Perfectly Unmatched (19 page)

“Are you sure this is what you want, Benelli?” His voice is thick with need.

It’s
unfair timing. There’s no way in hell I could back away from this now, not even if the perfect white knight in shining armor came riding up on horseback with a Tiffany diamond engagement ring in hand. All I want, all I need in this entire world, is Cormac. Now. Right now.

“Yes. Please. Yes. Please,” I plead, and the chant keeps going as he tears my shorts off, cups the insides of my thighs with his battered hands, and pushes them apart, muttering low under his breath. “What did...um, what did you say?”

My mind and body are racing like Olympic sprinters in a dash, and I’m having a hard time focusing my thoughts.

“I said I’m afraid what will happen once we do this,
Benelli. Because I know damn well I won’t be able to walk away with no regrets.”

I sit up on my elbows and his eyes are clear, piercing green. Emotion clouds his face; it’s not quite fury and it’s not quite regret. It’s something in between that shreds at my heart.

But the thoughts, the false starts, the impossible future that kept us from starting this the few times we tried before all dissolve when his mouth dips low.

He kisses me where no one ever has before, and the intimate curl of his tongue over my skin tears a whimper out of my throat. I slam back on the bed and stare at the swirling designs in the plaster on my ceiling as his tongue licks and kisses me, making
all of my nerves ratchet into tight coils.

His hands drift up and down my thighs, the light scratch of his skin at odds with the velvet press of his tongue. My eyes widen, staring at the same boring white ceiling I’ve stared at on hundreds of sleepless nights, realizing that I will never, ever look at those white whorls and
be calmed into sleepiness again. They’re now the dizzying reflections of the thousands of whirlpools of sucking, inescapable need and want that are drowning everything but him and me and the way we feel together.

I close my eyes and thrash my head from side to
side, half wanting to pull my hips back from his lips and half needing to drive closer. One of his hands slides off of my thigh. His mouth moves higher, right to the perfect, crashing center of every jumbled desire that’s wrecking through me and his finger slides into me, the necessary ignitor to the explosion that was poised to tremble through me.

And then I’m cracked.
Jarred. Panting. Fisting the sheets, hips off the bed, crying out his name, my body flexing and pulsing around his mouth and fingers, and, even in the middle of the hands down most erotic experience of my life, I have one thought:
more.

Once the last tremors quake through me, I sit up and grab him by the shoulders. “More.
More
. Now.”

He falls on top of me, and I can feel the press of his dick through the stiff denim of his jeans, chafing against my highly sensitized skin.

“We should wait,” he says, kissing all along my shoulders. When he looks up at me his hair is a tousled mess and his eyes have a sleepy, satisfied look.

“I want you now, though,” I whine, not even embarrassed over being such a baby. I reach a hand down and cup the outline of his
hardon. “And you need it, too.”

“I got everything I needed,” he says, pulling back from my touch and lying on his side, looking down at me.

“Why don’t you want to have sex with me?” The question hangs heavy between us.

“Because it would be over in two and a half seconds.”
He kisses the space between my eyebrows, and my body relaxes after his explanation. There’s something nice about knowing it isn’t me.

But it doesn’t stop me from my single-minded mission.

“It would be much nicer for me if this could be sort of awkward for both of us.” I bite my lip, and I’ll admit openly that I’m doing it just to see his pupils go dark and his nostrils flare a little. “I’m okay with being a virgin, but you don’t need to school me completely in the sex zone, Cormac. Also, I already came. Um, thank you, by the way.”

All my sexual bargaining bravado falls away when I remember the perfect
unravelling explosion that riddled my body a few minutes ago, compliments of Cormac and his highly skilled mouth and hands.

“You’re completely welcome.” He kisses me softly. “I’ve never been with anyone who, uh, responded the...way you did.”

I knit my eyebrows. “Girls don’t usually come when you go down on them?”

He blushes and presses his face into my neck to stifle a chuckle before facing me again. “You have a direct way with words. Huh. I thought a blushing virgin would be more held back.”

I roll my eyes in perfect middle-school-esque circles. “Just because I’ve never had sex doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in it. I just never found the perfect person.”

We both go silent.

And I don’t regret telling him that he’s the perfect person for me to lose my virginity with. I regret that I can’t tell him that I sometimes think he’d be perfect for so much more than a few rolls in teh hay over the course of these few weeks.

“Well, I’m very glad you had the response you did. I always thought I didn’t have a particular talent in,
er, that department, but maybe it was just a case of never being with the right person.” I want him to shift his eyes away to make it easier to hear those words, but he doesn’t break my gaze. “I may be putting the cart before the horse, but that was, hands down, the sexiest time I’ve ever had in my life.”

I wiggle under him and he groans.

“Now we have to have sex! You just threw the gauntlet down, Cormac, and I’m very competitive.” I hold his body tighter to mine, loving that I can feel the quickening thump of his heart against my chest.

“You’d be competing against yourself,” he points out.

“That makes sense, since I’m the best,” I brag, and his smile melts the last of my worry.

“You have nothing to prove to me.” He kisses me. “I’ve never questioned that fact.” My hands tighten on his shoulders, and I pull at him hard, stroking up and down his back. “
Benelli,” he whispers, “you’re making a very compelling case for sex. But I don’t have a condom.”

I reach onto my bedside table and pull out a fresh box.
Of thirty-six.

“Three dozen?”
Cormac chokes out. “Well, I guess that will have to be enough...for tonight.”

I tilt my head back and roll from side to side, laughing. “Compliments of
Lala,” I say between giggles. “She’s always got plenty.”

“We’re ready for a marathon, then,” he says, his voice suddenly serious.

We both know the reality. No matter how much we slow this all down, this won’t be a marathon. This is a sprint, and a short one.

I try not to think about it. I try to focus on the fact that I get to race at all. I’ve spent a long time sitting in my high heels and tight dress on the sidelines.

“I can’t promise that this will be my best performance,” he warns, taking a condom out with fingers that shake a little.

“I’m just glad it’s you.” Those words could not have been a more massive understatement.

Cormac kisses me for a few long, sweet seconds, and I glide my hands down his chest, along the tight bumps of his abs, and I tug hard at the button of his jeans. Because of the way his penis is positioned, it’s difficult to get his pants undone. I finally get the button loose and manage to drag the zipper down. The result is...enthusiastic.

He shakes his head and laughs. “Rather like one of those cans magicians use.
The ones with the snakes that fly out when you open them.”

We’re laughing again, and it’s on the back of all that easy laughter that I help slide his boxers off, that our hands trip over each other’s getting the condom rolled on, and then we kiss and move our hands everywhere with a slow, easy slide that’s so perfect.
So right.

Losing my virginity winds up being slow and gradual.
Despite Cormac’s insistence that he would only last two seconds, he draws it all out into a long, sweet unravelling for me. At first he presses against me, nudging my slick skin, still sensitized from his earlier attention. I put my hand down and fit him at the apex of my thighs, and he presses with excruciating slowness, stopping at every inch or two to kiss me and allow me to reposition.

I want him badly enough that I’d be happy to grab and
and let this experience tear through to the finish. But I know we have to hang on to every second, so I trust his pace.

By the time he’s halfway in, we’re both breathing deep, foreheads pressed together, eyes locked.

“I want you in me. Please, Cormac. I want all of you.” I put my hands on his firm backside, enjoying the surprising athleticism of his body.

“Are you sure?” he grits out through his teeth.

Instead of answering, I tilt my hips up and pull on his ass, drawing him into me.

It’s not pain. It’s just a stretch, a strange, amazing stretch that’s both foreign and completely addictive. He presses his lips over mine and pulls back, then pushes in, the excruciatingly slow slide making me pant and jerk.

“Faster?” he asks.

I nod and pump my hips.

He presses in return, bracing his hands on either side of me, and pumping with swift, sure strokes that fill me with silky, liquid, recoiling heat. I open my eyes and look at the long, lean stretch of him over me, then down to the narrow v of his hips, and lower, to where he and I meet and join. My breasts tighten at the sight of us, and, since his hands are busy leveraging all that rock-hard body over me, I touch myself. And it feels so good.

His eyes fly down to my hands, pulling at my own nipples, and the face he makes looks confused and pained.

“Benelli.” He presses harder, his pace frenzied, his breathing coming out in a gasps. “I can’t...much more...I can’t...”

“Come,” I tell him, pressing hard to his body. My own words, my own hands, mixed with the drive of him against my skin spirals every feeling in me, and the centrifugal force shatters me into a million soaked pieces.
“Cormac! Fuck! Cormac!”

He moans and pumps a last two times into my body before shuddering on top of me.

For a few long seconds we just try to breathe in some kind of regular pattern or get a new clean hold on reality. When he looks up at me, it’s with a boyish grin that’s all mischief.

“So, I’m thinking we can safely categorize you as a screamer?” he says, rubbing his nose on mine.

I cover my face with my hands. “You do crazy things to me!” I accuse. “I was always a perfect lady in bed before you came crawling around.”

“Ah.” He furrows his brows in pity. “You’re no lady in bed, and that’s beyond amazing. If you were a lady before, it’s because he had no clue what he was doing.”

“So, you’ve never had a girl be a lady in bed?” I tease, watching him sit up and take the condom off with a discreet roll, then wrap it in a tissue he finds on my nightstand, and throw it into the trash methodically.

“It’s probably not a good idea to talk exes,” he says with a sour note of warning in his voice.
“But, actually, yes. My bed has been devoid of ladies. Vipers, fakers, cheaters, sociopaths by the truckload, but no ladies.” His attempt at a smile is lukewarm.

“I think the no exes rule is a good one.” I pat the bed. “And it’s not like you have to collect your money off the nightstand and go. You can hang around for awhile, cowboy.”

This time it’s a full, real laugh, and I love hearing it. “You’re just full of jokes, aren’t you?” He comes to lay down next to me, and, while I start to put my tank and shorts back on, Cormac seems perfectly comfortable in his completely gorgeous nude skin.

“So,
Lala told me you two talked,” I begin cautiously.

He clears his throat and looks suddenly, distinctly uncomfortable.
“About that? I’m so sorry. Lala is a very intimidating person.”

“It’s okay.” I reach a hand out half-way, then go ahead and touch him.
His arm, his chest, the line of his lip, the jut of his hip. I ignore my reluctance, because I have no idea how many opportunities I’ll have like this. “She’s hard to say no to.”

“I guess I wanted your friend to approve of me.” He shrugs his sinewy shoulders. “This entire situation...it’s not what I want, you know.”

“Pretend we could have it any way we wanted. What would you want?” I ask, even though I know whatever he’s going to say is going to break me in some way.

He runs his fingers through my hair, fanning it out in dark pieces on the pillow under my head. “Well, first off, I would have taken you on a few proper dates. Not just five minutes at a restaurant before I let my testosterone take over or getting you drunk in a creek and mauling you. We would have eaten and talked and kissed, and it all would have happened in its own time. Not on some arranged schedule.”

“Do you regret it?” I ask.

“No.” He shakes his head and smoothes a series of kisses along my hairline. “And I’ll never regret being your first. I feel overwhelmed and...I guess proud that you wanted to share that with me. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And thank you.” I pull his hand up and kiss his knuckles.