Page 35 of The Money Man
Then he jerked open his belt buckle and shucked off his trousers and briefs.
“Wow!” Alice said on a long breath as she took in the sculptural perfection of him. His muscles were sharply defined without bulging and she understood why his suits fit him so beautifully.
“I like that reaction.” He crawled onto the bed to settle on his side. He skimmed one hand down her torso until his fingers slid between her legs, parting her folds and slipping inside without any resistance because she was so wet. “I like this reaction too,” he rasped.
As he began to stroke in and out of her with two fingers, he shifted so that he could suck on her breast. A charge of pleasure zinged from her nipple to her belly to her clit to her toes and back again until she was mindless with pure want. “You. Inside me,” she panted when she felt herself approaching the crest of orgasm.
Her eyes were closed so she felt rather than saw him reach for the condom and heard the rip of foil. And then his hips spread her thighs, his chest brushed her nipples, and he drove into her with one smooth, deep motion. The feeling of being filled all at once nearly set her off, but she fought it down, needing to prolong the experience. She made a sound of incoherent bliss as he began to flex his hips, his thrusts powerful but sensual.
Opening her eyes, she found the sculpted angles of his face drawn taut and his eyes lit with carnal intent. An unaccustomed sense of her own power surged through her.
Wrapping her arms around his rib cage, she angled her body so he hit just the right spot with every inward stroke. That rhythmic contact, the drag of his skin on her breasts, the tang of his arousal and hers, drove her to that moment of stillness where even time seems to stop. Everything focused on the unfolding deep within her that suddenly slammed into a nuclear blast of a climax. She arched and clenched and cried out his name, every muscle in her body reeling from the force of her orgasm.
He must have been holding on to his control because as soon as she began to come down from her release, he bowed back and shouted as she felt him pumping deep inside her. An echo of pleasure rippled through her before he rolled them so that she was splayed on top of him, his chest heaving underneath her.
“Alice,” he murmured, his arms draped over her. “Alice, Alice, Alice.”
“That’s my name.” Her skin glowed with a residual tingle while everything under it seemed fluid with relaxation.
He gave a ghost of a laugh. “It’s seared on my brain and a few other body parts.”
She smiled and nestled her cheek against his hard chest, feeling quite pleased with herself and him. As his breathing slowed to normal, he began to toy with her hair, smoothing it over her back, twisting his fingers into it, tugging it softly as he fiddled. She hummed with delight, thinking that the many years of keeping it long—with all the work that entailed—had finally paid off in a big way.
He skated one hand down the curve of her back and up the swell of her bottom, his fingertips just fluttering along the valley between her buttocks before he stopped, letting his hand rest there while little thrills flickered through her. She hoped they had a chance to make love again before he left. She’d like to take it more slowly so she could remember the reality of him moving in and on her more vividly. This first time, pure feeling had taken over so her brain had gone blank.
A shiver ran through her as her bare skin began to cool. He squeezed her behind and eased her down beside him before flipping one side of the comforter over them. She rolled halfway onto him, hooking her knee over his thigh and using his shoulder as a pillow.
She lay there, wondering what to say. Her body was completely comfortable with him but her mind was spinning in ways that stole words from her. Should she be light and funny? Should she be honest? The one thing she knew she shouldn’t do was ask the questions she really wanted to. Was this something special for him? Or was she just one of many women to whom he gave this kind of mind-blowing delight?
Before she’d spent so much time with him, she would have answered it for herself without a second’s hesitation. Anyone with Derek’s looks and position had to be a player. But she was sure he’d been as surprised by the chemistry flaring between them as she was.
He’d had qualms about muddying the business side of their relationship. She’d been the one to dismiss them. His concern about the danger to her professional reputation was so genuine that he’d organized a whole trip to Texas when he had other, more important commitments.
In fact, he’d behaved like a decent human being, which had upended all her assumptions. Maybe it was the element of surprise that had shattered the barriers she usually hid behind.
Still, she didn’t expect to date him. This was an aberration, an interlude to be savored and tucked away as a memory of the one time she’d forgotten to be a careful, rational bookkeeper.
Her eyelids began to grow heavy as satiation and exhaustion combined to pull her toward sleep. The last thought she had before she surrendered was that she would never regret saying yes to his kiss.
Derek felt Alice slide into sleep, her body softening against his side. That vulnerability tugged at something in his chest. He tucked in his chin so he could inhale the fragrance of her hair, the shy, innocent violets that were at odds with the unexpected passion of her response.
He pulled the comforter farther up to cover her shoulders while he wondered how the hell he’d ended up with a naked Alice snuggled in his arms. In mere days, she’d gone from a name on a form on KRG’s website to a wild, sensual lover.
People often had the wrong idea about him. They assumed that he had his pick of women and that he would take full advantage of that. Maybe he had upon occasion in his younger days, but he’d learned that making love to a woman—even one who claimed to want nothing more—created expectations. He had learned the hard way that he didn’t have time for that, then or now.
The BalanceTrakR case had taken so much of his time and attention away from the Argon project, yet he had refused to let go of it even before ... this. Now the possibility of handing it over to his partners was out of the question. His arm tightened around Alice, making her stir momentarily before subsiding with a long exhale.
Uncertainty ripped at him. What did he really know about her? That she loved numbers as much as he did. That she depended on them for order and sanity. That she was dedicated to her job and her clients. That she had an unshakable integrity. That she made his body react with an intensity that almost shocked him.
Not much to base a relationship on.
The thought pulled him up short. He wasn’t planning to have a relationship. Courtney had made it clear that his career wasn’t compatible with relationships.
Case in point: he would be leaving for Asia in eight days. He had to cram two weeks’ worth of work into the period between now and then. There could be no relationship.
By the time he returned from his trip, he expected that both he and Alice would have gotten over this flare of inconvenient attraction.
But he had several more hours to spend in Alice’s bed, and he was damned if he was going to waste them. So he shoved the guilt into a distant corner of his brain and feathered his fingers over the curve of her breast, tracing the pink tip until she sighed and rocked against his thigh, the satin between her legs warm and wet.
