“Did you mean what you said at Casa Escondida?” he said.
He wanted to know if I loved him.
I stared at him, frozen with indecision. Once before he’d wanted to know how I felt about him but I had been too angry, too drunk and too immature to realise it. Or to answer him truthfully. Who knows what would have happened had I been honest?
But no, I had made the wrong decision, not wanting to put myself on the line because moments like these had scared the hell out of me. They still did, but now I knew that I wanted them anyway. Moments that defined who I was and how I would live, that opened me up to pain and made me defenceless. Moments that allowed me to make a choice.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I love you.”
James’s eyes glowed but I couldn’t read them. I read his body instead, taking him into me and feeling his pleasure. I wondered if he would ever tire of being inside me, of hearing me moan his name or of wanting to wake up next to me.
“No,” he whispered, driving deep. “That would be like not wanting to breathe.”
“I can barely breathe now,” I said. “I want—”
“Tell me what you want.”
I was on the brink of an orgasm and he was holding back, torturing me with his teasing. But I couldn’t be explicit as he wanted. I’d made a promise to Francesca and I was going to keep it.
“I want you to...to...
“What?”
“To plunder me with your swollen manhood,” I blurted.
James paused. “Plunder you?”
I spoke to the ceiling. “With your swollen manhood.”#p#分页标题#e#
His face was perfectly blank. I groaned, shutting my eyes and wishing I’d never read a bodice ripper in my life.
“Francesca made me promise not to swear and it’s been bloody hard, okay?”
James dropped his face into my neck. Then his whole body trembled and he looked up at me, laughter bursting from his throat and making his eyes sparkle. I gave him my best scowl but that only made him laugh harder. He looked at me sideways, wiped his eyes and gave another chuckle.
I shoved at his arms, miffed. “I live to entertain you.”
James rolled onto his back and pulled me on top of him. He lifted my hips and adjusted me onto his thick crown. Oh, God, he was hard and as hot as a furnace. I wasn’t going anywhere and his smug look said he knew it.
“Plunder you, huh?” he said, rubbing his cock along my swollen labia. “What else should I do?”
I took him into me slowly. “Well, there’s sheath your rampant sword inside my silken lotus flower, for starters.”
“Like this?” he said, dispensing with my sensuous glide to push up with a commanding thrust.
I gasped and melted into his...
“Pulsating member,” I sighed, making him laugh.
“You can tell me whatever you want, Paisley,” he said. “Swear as much as you like when you’re in my bed. I promise I won’t tell my mother on you. Cross my heart and hope to—”
I took his hands and slammed them down on the bed, brushing my breasts against his chest. “I’m more into show than tell just now,” I said savagely, undulating up and down his shaft and owning him completely. “Like it or lump it.”
“Like it,” he gasped, his face getting the tight, painfully absorbed look that meant he would soon be beyond coherent thought.
“Paisley... Oh God... Fuck!”
“That’s the idea.”
Hours later, I drew letters on James’s smooth chest, intertwining P’s and J’s. There were no declarations of undying love from James, no promises to cleave to me forever or the sort of romantic things he’d said when he thought I was Caroline all those years ago. I told myself that I didn’t care. After all, he had loved Caroline and although I knew he wanted me in bed—liked me, even, that was a far cry from love.
Be happy with what you have, my mind ordered.
Hunger drove us out of bed. I put on James’s dressing gown and he pulled on a faded pair of SpongeBob SquarePants pyjama trousers.
“Cute,” I teased.
“Ryan gave them to me and they’re comfortable.”
The beef stew was delicious. And guess what? The meat came from a farm with golden cows that only eat ground diamonds, or so it seemed, to hear James talk. He scoffed at my Big Mac habit so I went to his freezer and pointed at the three shelves of Ben & Jerry’s.
“I can’t move in if I don’t get freezer space.”
“Bottom corner.”
I eyed his pyjamas. “You’d need to upgrade to the Incredible Hulk.”
“Incredible, huh?”
I stared into cocky emerald eyes. “Green, mean and bad-tempered.”