“Stop.” His voice was a deep-throated growl.
Her fingers halted their activity. Now she wanted to finish what she’d started. He knew already how painfully inexperienced she was, had he changed his mind?
“Touch me.”
“Like this?” Her question was tentative. While she’d dreamed of touching him, the reality was hugely different. His skin tightened beneath her feather-light caress as she trailed her fingers over his chest and traced his nipples. To her surprise, and delight, they tightened into hard peaks, much like her own at this very minute. Did he ache for more, like she did?
With a groan, he grabbed her hands, halting them on their path as they trailed down past his belly button. “It’s your turn.”
“But—”
“But, nothing.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “Undo your hair.”
Holly lifted her shaking hands to slide out the pins that bound her hair, letting them scatter on the carpet at her feet and allowing the thick black swathe to uncoil and drape past her shoulders and down her back.
Connor ran his hands through the weighty length and she felt his fingers twist and curl in the tresses, gently tilting her head back. He lowered his head and captured her lips in a fierce sweep, demanding she surrender her mouth to him.
At first hesitantly, and then with increasingly more courage, Holly met his onslaught, giving as good as she got. Sucking at his tongue and swirling her own around his in a tango that turned her legs to water and her blood to molten lava.
She could feel how much he wanted her in the marble-hard lines of his body, and even though she knew it wasn’t in the same way she wanted him, she would accept everything he had to give her. Her breasts ached to be touched, to be suckled as he suckled her tongue.
His hands skimmed down, pushing her dress over her waist to slide unhindered to the floor. The irony of how easily he’d undressed her wasn’t lost, considering her inexperience in undressing him, yet she couldn’t have cared less. She needed him holding her, touching her, inside her. Finally his lips were at her breast and a new tension built deep within her. A tension she was learning to identify. The rhythmic pull of his teeth and tongue over her sensitive nipples wrought a tiny scream of pleasure from her lips.
He swooped her off her feet, lifting her from her shoes and leaving a pool of clothing where she’d stood. She felt the fire of his skin as her breast pressed against his bare chest before he placed her on top of the fine, cool sheets of his bed. There had to be an acre of cotton, she thought wildly before she felt the depression of his body next to her. The finely woven fabric felt like a caress against her sensitised skin and even in the dazed heat of passion its quality wasn’t lost on her. She had to hoard every memory, every sensation, and hold it fast to her forever.
He’d removed his clothes, and the rasp of his legs along her own made her squirm against the sheets. The hard dry heat of his erection nudged her body, causing a deep-seated contraction to ripple wildly from her core—a prophecy of what was yet to come.
“I won’t hurt you this time, Holly,” he whispered, his voice laden with more promise than mere words could imply.
“But you didn’t—” She stopped on a gasp as he traced her lips with his tongue.
“Don’t make me eat your words.” A tiny smile played around his lips as he nibbled across her jaw and over her neck.
The laugh that fought past the constriction in her throat surprised her. Humour, when she’d never felt more serious in all her days? Life was full of contradictions.
She pressed against the bed as he gently licked and nipped a line down her body, between her breasts, stopping to lave at her belly button before dropping lower.
Propped as she was on a mound of pillows, the shadowed view of his dark head against her skin made an erotic picture. She could almost separate her mind from what was happening. Almost. But when she felt his warm breath against her, through her panties, thought and reason fled on the building waves of delight that undulated through her body.
She gripped wildly at the sheets, almost too afraid to draw breath, as his tongue traced the leg line of her panties. His fingers tugged the scrap of fabric away from her to be discarded onto the thickly carpeted floor.
Holly almost sprang off the bed when he replaced her panties with the hot wet pressure of his mouth. The surging waves of pleasure built and built inside, until she hovered so close to the brink of release she thought she might shatter.
His weight shifted just before she toppled over the edge, leaving her trembling, craving for more. He slid over her, stroking the line of her body with his hands. She felt him reach past her head and heard the tear of a foil packet. He held himself away from her momentarily and then he was nestling between her thighs. Hot, heavy and totally male.