His expression grew tight as he looked her over. A shudder quaked across his shoulders and it was a long time before he finally met her searching gaze.
She couldn’t hide how defenseless she felt, splayed before him.
“Nice,” he said in guttural English.
Nice? Her stomach plummeted at the bland word. She wasn’t even sure he meant it, but was distracted from questioning him when he grasped her wrists and slid her fists above her head. At the same time, he pressed a knee between hers and opened her legs, lowering himself onto her in a blanket of soft, crushing weight.
Clair moaned in startled delight under him, twisting against his grip, but Aleksy kept her firmly clasped.
If he allowed her to touch him right now, Aleksy thought, if he didn’t have a barrier between his tight hide and her downy skin, he’d lose it. It had been all he could do to find an English word to describe how exquisite she was.
He forced himself to remember that she was toying with him, trying to win a power struggle he hadn’t started, but was determined to win. Stroking his free hand down her arm, past her breast, over her hip and along her thigh, he curled her calf over his lower back, resenting the wool that kept him from feeling the caress of her skin against his own. He shifted and pressed his groin tight to hers, thin layers of cotton and denim between. She was utterly at his mercy and he took full advantage, rocking himself against her, wanting her to lose control before he did.
Acute arousal hued her cheeks and glazed her eyes. Her hips lifted to increase the pressure, almost sending him over the edge, but the helpless noise she made was worth the torture she was inflicting on him by drawing this out. He was winning, but barely.
Scorching excitement seared Clair’s breath from her lungs as Aleksy teased her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only whimper in ecstatic sufferance. She’d kept men at a distance all her life, feeling superior to other women because she hadn’t believed men really offered this kind of pleasure. She’d never felt this susceptible, but she was caving now. Completely and utterly. Breathing in his aggressive male scent like a drug.
He cupped her bare breast, his palm hot and possessive. Once a month her breasts felt swollen like this, overfull and incredibly sensitive, but never this sweet. His heavy touch assuaged the ache and incited it. Her nipple grew painfully engorged, ripening under his hot stare like a cherry in the sun. He drew circles with his thumb, massaged and shaped the swell, traced the aureole and refused to give her what she wanted. What she instinctively needed.
“Aleksy, please,” she begged.
He swooped like a hawk, his masculine groan muffling as he covered the tingling tip with his hot mouth. The erotic pull almost lifted her off the bed. Moist heat flooded into her sex, completely beyond her ability to rule it. All of her became a throbbing pulse of hot need. The power of the feelings daunted her, but she reveled in them at the same time, exalted by the sense of being purely woman. When he moved to her other breast, she arched to offer herself, unable to contain her ragged moan.
His hand caressed the back of her thigh, followed the sensitive inner skin to the leg of her underpants. A sure finger slinked beneath, stroking into folds that were slick and incredibly sensitive. She had thought she knew what her body was capable of, but his touch made her jerk her hips under the intensity of pleasure. The tremendous intimacy, his confidence, the way he pressed to sustain the tantalizing peak—
“Oh, Aleksy…” she moaned.
He skimmed his touch away. “You didn’t ask for that, did you?” His eyes had gone black and inscrutable. The cruel curl at the edges of his mouth told her he wasn’t as innocent as he was playing. “Do you want me to touch you? Or—” He hooked his elbow behind her knee, hitching her ankle onto his shoulder. “—kiss you?”
A fresh flood of craving poured into her loins. She instinctively tried to close her legs against the betraying reaction, but she met the resistance of his muscled back.
“Yes?” he murmured, touching a kiss to her breastbone, then lower. His hot mouth opened against her trembling belly, lightly biting before he applied suction in a delicate sting of healing. “Shall I remove your panties with my teeth?”
She couldn’t be completely naked under him while he was fully clothed. She couldn’t. “Take off your clothes first,” she gasped.
He slowly pulled away, the retreat of his body a caress that drew out the pleasure and gave her plenty of time to appreciate the cooling pain of losing him. It also brought a moment of clarity. She realized her knee lay crooked open and her panties were wet. Her stomach quivered with tension, her nipples stood taut with arousal on breasts that rose and fell with her ragged breaths.
Inhibition was gone. She didn’t care how she looked or behaved, only that he continue making love to her.
Aleksy strained under his self-imposed leash. His blazing arousal burned him alive and every male instinct in him screamed to possess her. Begged to.
She twisted her slim body, so graceful and beguiling he had to catch back a groan of pure need. Logical thoughts disappeared from his mind. All he knew was that she tasted like summer, smelled like nectarines and ran like warm honey under his touch. Hands and mouth weren’t enough to sate him. His body needed to be inside hers. His erection throbbed harder and thicker than ever in his life, desperate to spear into her.
Her taunt about going too fast was the only thing that kept him standing over her, hiding his ravenous desire behind a stoic mask while her beautiful image slithered on the spread before him. She wanted to make him crazy and it was working, but he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing it. He wouldn’t show her any more mercy than she was showing him. She could play games, but he would drive her to a screaming pitch, erasing anything from her mind except the same imperative eating him alive.
“Aleksy?” Her languid eyes darkened with a moment of doubt.
He let a slow grin steer across his face, liking that she wasn’t assured of her lead over him. “I was waiting for your command,” he mocked, peeling his pullover up and off, tossing it to the floor. There was no relief from the sweat of arousal sheening his back and chest. A conflagration of desire continued to scorch from the pit of his gut to the back of his throat, prickling his skin. Demanding action.
“Oh…” Her weak sigh might have made his lips twist in cynical amusement. It was, after all, a sound he’d heard before when he stripped, but the way she licked her lips sent a rod of need through his hard flesh, swiping other women from his mind.
“What does that mean?” he growled, barely able to find his English. “Do this slower?” He peeled open his jeans, then forced his hands to stop. One fell away to his side; the other dipped two fingers into his pocket, bringing out the condom.
Something flickered in her gaze. Confusion. Recognition. Consternation?
“You don’t want me completely naked, do you?” The thought of being uncovered for the first time in his life, in her was enough to make him need a moment to regroup. With thumbs hooked in his waistband, he fought a complete loss of control, eyes pinned to the wink and tremor of her navel.
How he wanted her.
“Naked but protected,” she eventually said, as if she thought he’d been waiting for her answer. It sounded innocent, almost as if she wasn’t confident he’d get there unless she requested it. Her voice made him shudder with hunger.
He would get there. Oh, yes. Definitely.
Carefully he eased his jeans and shorts off his hips, dropping them and kicking them away, forcing his hands to hang loose, revealing none of his excruciating tension as he straightened.
She studied him in a long, taut silence, something he allowed because he was going to look at her the same way very soon. Still, he grew unbearably hard and thick under her gaze. His skin would split if she didn’t let him have her soon.
“You’re—” she began faintly.