Under the Wire (5 page)

Watching her eyes, he unbuttoned his uniform jacket and tossed it aside. His shirt followed; then he sat down on the bed and drew her between his thighs. Her lovely breasts were at mouth level. With his hands gripping her waist, he drew her toward him. Savoring every moment, he bussed his nose around her velvety soft areola, absorbing the feel, the scent, the heat of her, and loving her response. Her soft sighs. Her slight trembling. Her wildly erratic heart rate. The unsteady cadence of her breath.

"You like that,
mi amor?"
he murmured when she lifted her hands to his shoulders and arched against his mouth. "Yes, I think you like that very much." He smiled against her breast and finally took her nipple with his mouth. Growling low in his throat, he opened wide, then laved and licked and sucked until the small hands gripping his shoulders clutched like talons and her sigh became a whimper.

On a low groan, he drew her deep inside his mouth and experienced her like he wanted to. With his own hunger and greed unchecked. With nipping teeth and questing tongue. He molded her in his mouth, taking as much pleasure as he gave, and fought the urge to tumble her back onto the bed and plow into her with all the finesse of a bull.

He made himself hold off. Lily was very fragile this night. She needed care. She needed special attention. He gave her both until he felt her knees buckle.

With a pleased chuckle, he gripped her by the waist. Turning at his hip, he laid her sideways across the bed. Then he stood and, very aware of her dark eyes watching him, stripped off the rest of his clothes.

"See what you do to me, darling Lily?"

She lifted a hand to touch and stroke his jutting erection. Again he smiled, but it was with great cost that he pulled away from her soft, inquisitive hand.

"Soon enough," he promised, and eased down to his knees by the bed. "There will be time for that soon enough," he repeated, and, gripping her slim calf, lifted her leg and removed first her left heel, then her right.

"Right now," he caressed her foot, lightly bit her calf, "I have something else in mind for you. And for me."

He watched her eyes go dark as he reached for her panties and slipped them down her hips. She hiked up on her elbows so she could see what he was doing. Her expression was one of shock and excitement as he brought the scrap of black lace to his face, inhaled deeply of her intoxicating woman scent and her arousal.

"Sexy woman." He breathed deep one last time, then tossed the panties to the floor.

"Will you open for me, Lily?" He covered her thighs with his hands, caressed. "Will you let me see you? Taste you? Make you come with my mouth?"

He'd shocked her again. And excited her. Her eyes were so expressive and so telling of her thoughts. Even before she opened her thighs, he'd known she would let him. And even before he draped her legs over his shoulders and gently parted her lips so he could see her lovely pink sex, he'd known she would shiver in anticipation and desire.

He skimmed his lips along her inner thigh where her skin was velvet soft and damp. "Do not look away. I want to see your eyes when I taste you. Give me that, Lily, and I will give you everything."

Her eyes were already glazed over as he lowered his mouth and kissed her there, where she was wet and hot and swollen. She jerked when he made the first sweep of his tongue, sucked in her breath on a gasp when he delved deeper, then, to his great pleasure, dissolved into a quivering mass of raw desire when he held her open with his fingers and gave her clitoris special attention. Tender nips. Slow licks. Lush, long kisses.

She collapsed back on the bed with a low, keening moan when he sucked her. He closed his eyes and indulged. In the heady taste of her languor, the liquid flow of her quick-trigger release, the indefinable taste of a woman well beyond the edge of control.

Such need. Such honest abandon. Her response amazed him, humbled him, and took him to a place he'd never been with a woman. Now, as when he'd first seen her, she touched him in ways he didn't fully understand. Of only one thing was he certain: He could pleasure Lily Campora forever if she'd let him.

Long moments later, when she'd dissolved into a tangle of limp limbs, he crawled up the bed and covered her, sheathed himself inside her tight, giving heat. Pleasure, profound and pure, rushed through his body. He whispered her name, sank in and out of her... again and again and again, dragging her with him into oblivion.

And as he spilled himself inside her, drowned himself in her essence, the notion crossed his mind that forever with Lily might not be long enough.

Lily was naked, in a bed with a stranger, in a room bathed in moonlight and the soft glow of a flickering candle.

With great effort, she opened her eyes. A soft whisper feathered across her ear.

"You are awake, sweet Lily."

Oh yeah. She was awake. Awake and aware and wasted on the most incredible sex of her life. And despite the lingering flush of back-to-back liquid, electric orgasms, she was having huge second thoughts about the reckless decision that had led her to this bed.

She glanced up at her lover's questioning eyes. And melted. Oh my. This man could be addictive. This darkly handsome and very naked man lying beside her, who had hiked himself up on an elbow and was frowning with concern.

"You are all right,
mi amor
?"

She touched her hand to her head. "Apparently. I thought the top of my head might have blown off, but it seems all is well."

He chuckled and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. The big hand that lay across her abdomen began a sensuous kneading. "You make a joke. That makes me smile. You are in a better place now, yes?"

She turned her head, looked at his slumberous black eyes, his kiss-swollen lips, and wondered if there was a more beautiful man anywhere on earth.

She mentally shook herself.
A better place,
he'd said. That was debatable. She'd forgotten about Kara for a while, yes. He'd seen to that. Lord, had he seen to that. But a better place?

Her heart and her morality hit her a good one in the chest. This had been a mistake. A huge, huge mistake.

"I'd better go." She sat up.

A gentle but firm tug on her arm brought her to her back again. Dark brows knit together over eyes still filled with concern. "Go? Lily, no. You want to go? You want to leave this bed and my arms when we have barely gotten to know each other?
Por que
?"

He was hurt. She let out a deep breath, stared at the ceiling, avoiding the Latin black eyes that could easily suck her right back into the most lovely delights she'd ever experienced.

Ever.

"This was ... it was wonderful, Manolo—"

"No, no, no. You must call me Manny,
mi amor.
And yes, it was wonderful. But it is only the beginning for us. You will see."

It took every ounce of her resolve to shake her head. "Look. I really need to g—"

She sucked in her breath on a gasp as his big hand slid to her inner thigh, stroked, and sent a tingling shock of arousal along every erogenous zone in her body. It seemed that all he had to do was touch her and she went up in flames.

"Need ... to ..." she tried again as blunt-tipped fingers trailed enticingly along her hip point, waylaying her best intentions.

"Need ... to ... go," she finally managed in a voice made faint by his expert distractions and by the wild knocking of her heart.

"It should be against the law," he whispered, ignoring her and lowering his head to her breast, "for a body like yours to ever be covered by clothing."

Another feeble protest died on her lips when his amazing mouth opened over her nipple.

"A woman like you," he continued between eating, biting kisses and long, lush strokes of his tongue, "was made to be pleasured. Your body is so beautiful, Liliana."

He lifted his head, studied her glistening nipple as if it were a work of art, then turned to watch her face as he covered her mound with his palm and slipped a finger inside her.

She bit back a moan when he found her wet again and swollen.

"Yes, you need to be pleasured. Pleasured by me." His eyes grew dark, his voice gruff. "I could so easily fall in love with you, Lily."

Love, she thought fleetingly, was not on the table—or, in this case, the bed. Love, emotional love, was an illusion she was no longer certain she believed in.

But love, physical and fine, the way Manolo Ortega interpreted it, was something else. He could make her a believer.

She should go.

Instead, she closed her eyes, caught her breath on a gasp as sensations rose and built, and fed on the amazing manipulations of his mouth and fingers.

She arched sensuously, opened her legs wider. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be her. It was someone else naked in bed with this extraordinary lover whose deep, seductive voice rode the rhythm of words spoken in both English and Spanish. In either language, they were as thrilling as his touch.

"Tell me you do not want to leave me," he urged as he rolled to his back and brought her with him. He lifted her, fit himself to her opening, and, gripping her hips, slowly slid her down until he filled her, full and deep.

She sighed his name when he started moving inside her. Sweet friction. Amazing heat. Sensation spiked, scattered, and doubled back in on her, purging her of coherent thought. All her senses were tuned to that incredible place where their blood flowed the hottest, where he was the hardest and she ... she was lost.

She felt her eyes roll back in her head, braced her palms on his broad, smooth chest, and rode him thrust for thrust, aching for release yet never wanting this exquisite pleasure to end.

She came with a breath-claiming burst of the most incredible force. It saturated her sensitive nerve endings, imploded through her body in a series of arching, electric shocks, pulsing through pleasure points she'd never known existed. Clenching her inner muscles, she clung to the rush, crying a little...dying a little...to hold on, to hold off... wishing it would never end as he pumped one last time and held her hips tight to his.

She thought she heard him swear—both in English and in Spanish—but the ringing in her ears muffled the words as she collapsed onto his chest, utterly destroyed.

He wrapped his arms around her, pressed his face into her neck, and together they drifted down, hearts hammering, breath ragged, stamina drained.

"Tell me you do not want to leave me,
querida
,"
he whispered urgently into her hair.

"I don't want to leave you," she murmured, obedient, acquiescent, wholly and totally giving up the fight.

Lily didn't leave him. Not for a moment during the next forty-eight hours. Manny had been given a week of leave, so she put in for a long overdue weekend off herself. For two days and two nights, they only left the bed long enough to eat—sometimes not even then—to shower, and to shop for food to sustain them.

When she had to go to work at the clinic on Monday, she couldn't get back to the apartment soon enough after her workday ended. She was, in a word, enthralled, no matter that she'd been determined not to be.

Manny Ortega, Lily quickly learned, was the most sensual, giving man she had ever encountered. He was also one of the most beautiful.

Poster perfect handsome,
she thought Monday night, watching him sleep. She lay awake in bed beside him not wanting to wake him but unable to resist fingering the St. Christopher medal he wore around his neck.

Last night she'd told him how gorgeous he was.

He'd just grinned his sexy grin and taken it in stride. "As my momma says, my face, it will not break plates."