The kiss wasn’t long, but it was thorough and she was squirming with passion’s renewal when he pulled back.
His smile was full primeval predator. “It goes both ways, never doubt it.”
“You’re erasing the memory of other women in your bed?”
“No.”
She couldn’t stifle the sound of hurt.
He pressed her naked body to his still partially clothed one. “You cannot erase what has never been.”
The words were an eerie match to her own thoughts only seconds before and an atavistic shiver trembled through her, but he could not mean them. “You’ve been with lots of other women.”
“Never in this bed. Never with the knowledge that they owned my future.”
No matter how fleeting that ownership might be, Romi couldn’t help appreciating the sentiment. “Good.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t done. “Never has a woman responded to me like you do. Never has my own control been so tested, in the bedroom or out of it.”
He’d said things like that before, but she’d never taken it to mean much. Now she realized it really was important to him. It helped explain why he’d overcome his own relationship boundaries to offer marriage, even marriage with a time-relative, easy-out clause.
“I like testing your control.”
His laughter was deep and sexy. “No doubt.”
Max stepped off the bed to remove the rest of his clothes and she didn’t insist she get to do it. One thing she’d learned a year ago was she got extremely excited by his take-charge attitude in the bedroom. It had bothered her a year ago and maybe that was part of the reason she hadn’t been willing to compromise her own ideas about relationships even though she’d wanted to so badly.
He didn’t return to the bed immediately once he’d stripped, but stood in proud nudity and allowed her to look her fill. Like he knew she was craving just the sight of him.
Considering how well he’d known her every desire a year ago, she guessed he probably did.
Women were supposed to be less visual than men. Romi wasn’t sure who had decided that. All she knew was that the sight of Max was as tantalizing as a touch for her.
She loved his height, the definition of his muscles, the contrast of his fair Russian skin to his dark hair, the way he held himself with such confidence. And she adored the way his chest was covered in short, dark, silky curls. The hair narrowed to a V and then followed a tapered trail that led to the patch surrounding his engorged sex. Flushed with blood, it stood out from his body in truly impressive proportions.
“You are devouring me with your eyes, milaya.”
Was she? “You’re a beautiful man.” No other word fit as perfectly the work of art that Maxwell Black was naked.
From the dark hair that tempted her fingers to run through it, to the features she saw in her dreams and fantasies both, to a body covered in muscle from shoulders, to eight-pack rippling down his stomach, to thighs and calves that would make a professional athlete proud, he was complete and utter masculine perfection.
Perfection who claimed she touched something in his soul.
How soon before the feelings inside her coalesced into love so indomitable it would never end?
She didn’t know, but she refused to allow her fear of that kind of inescapable emotion stop her from reveling in every incredible sensation this moment had to offer.
“You lay there like a goddess and call me beautiful?” There was that dark, sexy laugh again.
“Hardly a goddess.”
“You inflame my senses.” There was not an ounce of sarcasm or cheesy innuendo in his tone.
Romi rolled to her side facing him and propped her head on her hand. “That’s pretty poetic for a business tycoon.”
She bent her knee and let it rest on the bed, her upper thigh crossing her lower one, giving her best “sexy goddess” imitation, which was very close to one of her favorite yoga poses.
His gray eyes sparked with approval. “I thought we agreed I am a Corporate Tsar.”
“And tsars are poetic in bed?” she wondered aloud.
“This one is, apparently.”
Privately, she agreed, pretty sure that under all those tycoon smarts and ruthlessness, lived the soul of a poet.
She brushed her hand up her own thigh and over her hip. “Are you coming back to bed?”
“Are you so sure you want to poke the bear?” he asked in a very bearlike rumble.
“If it gets you closer to me? Oh, yes.” She liked looking, but now she wanted to touch.
To be touched.
“You know what they say…”
“Be careful what you wish for,” she said.
In a smooth movement worthy of a jungle cat—no lumbering bear—Max joined her on the bed. “You just might get it.”