It was a dominant kiss, an expert kiss, the kiss of a man who knew he was a man, liked being one, and knew exactly what he was doing. This was no college boy kissing her, no young grad student toeing the lukewarm line between desire and political correctness. This was a man who was one-hundred-percent okay with lust, who suffered no hesitation or inhibitions.
It was exactly the kind of kiss, she realized dimly, for which she’d always been waiting. But until now, she’d not been able to define exactly what it was she’d been missing, what she’d been holding out for. She was struck by the sudden realization that the problem with her boyfriends was that they’d been just that—boyfriends, with the emphasis on “boy.”
Cian MacKeltar was a man—and a formidable force to be reckoned with sexually. She was, quite simply, out of her league with him.
She was struck by another sudden realization then: that she was going to be very, very lucky if she managed to walk out of that hotel room, at whatever point in the future they departed, the same way she’d walked in. A virgin, though she’d never admit it to any of her friends. Nobody was a virgin anymore, and peer pressure could get intense if people thought you were.
Personally, she’d never thought it was anyone else’s business whether or not she was. Only her own, and whatever man she chose to share it with. Her mom might liberally encourage baby-having, but she’d also encouraged a healthy degree of self-respect. Pick carefully, girls, Lilly St. James had advised her daughters. There are a lot of duds out there. As her mom was currently between husbands number four and five, Jessi figured she should know.
“Christ, lass, you taste sweet,” he purred.
She shivered with pleasure as he sucked her lower lip into his mouth, nipped it, then closed his mouth hard over hers, plunging deep. He kissed like a man who hadn’t had the luxury in—oh, maybe a thousand years or so—exploiting it for all it was worth, savoring all the subtle, sensual variations. Luring one moment, assaulting the next, and it made her crazy. He kissed like he wanted to devour her, maybe crawl inside her skin. He kissed like he was fucking her mouth, this sinfully gorgeous Highlander with his hot wet tongue and his hard, tattooed body. He kissed so thoroughly and possessively that she wasn’t Jessi anymore, she was a woman and he was a man, and she existed because he was kissing her and if he stopped, she might stop being.
She had no idea how they ended up on the floor.
One moment she was in his arms, being kissed senseless—literally, apparently—and the next she was flat on her back beneath his still shower-damp, big, powerful body, her nipples so hard they were poking through both her bra and sweater against his bare chest, with the steely bar of his erection jammed against her stomach.
And she wasn’t entirely certain, but she didn’t think she was feeling a towel between them anymore. And holy cow, the man was huge.
Dazedly, she wondered what in the world she thought she was doing—even as she buried her fingers in the wet tangle of his hair.
More kisses, soft and slow, hot and hard. She was drowning in man, in the taste and scent and feel of him. Her hands slipped of their own accord down the thick column of his neck, over the muscled ridges of his shoulders.
She barely noticed when he shifted position so that his legs were straddling hers, until he fit himself snugly in the vee of her thighs, and his thick ridge nudged the inseam of her jeans against her clitoris with delicious friction. She jerked at the raw intimacy of it.
When he cupped a hand beneath her bottom, tilted her hips, and began a slow, erotic bump-and-grind that was as old as Mankind itself, a distant part of her mind began sounding a clamorous alarm. But with each slow, powerful thrust of his cock, that inner alarm grew fainter and fainter, as Jessi slipped irresistibly deeper beneath Cian MacKeltar’s seductive spell.
When he rucked her sweater up to her ribs and began tracing a path from her bottom to her breasts, slowly, lingeringly, as if committing the subtle shape of each dip and turn to memory, she whimpered into his mouth, hungry to feel those big hands all over her bare body. Everywhere he was touching her, she felt as if a low-voltage electrical current was pulsing beneath her skin, jolting each nerve ending to delicious, tingling awareness. When he closed a hand over one of her breasts, heat shot straight down to her belly and lower still, and she dug her nails into his shoulders, arching hungrily up to meet his next thrust.
He sucked in a shallow hiss of a breath, and suddenly he was working at the fly of her jeans, and then the air was cool on her bare skin as he pushed her jeans and panties down. That faint alarm was sounding again, more loudly, but he was kissing her so heatedly, so passionately and—