Page 57 of The Hanukkah Hoax
But oh, he fucking cared now.
Marisa was all softness, and the bloody woman mocked him with it as her generous hips swayed in front of him while she pulled him down the hall. His damn erection grew more eager, gleefully tying itself to the teasing rhythm of her body.
A body he’d soon have against him, sprawled out naked on what he had no doubt was the softest bed he’d ever deigned to sully with his sixteen stone of Scottish bulk. Hell, for the past month or so, he was used to sleeping next to an odorous mastiff fond of kicking him in the balls during doggy dreams and slobbering all over Alec’s pancake of a pillow the mutt had claimed as his own.
He’d waited—really fucking patiently, it was important to note—until the backs of her legs were brushing the bed before he resumed his worship of her mouth, still not believing for one second that he was here and being given the privilege to cherish her properly.
Alec slanted his lips over hers again, cupping her cheeks and tracing his thumbs across the smooth planes of her cheekbones. She sighed against him, delving deeper into the kiss and molding her luscious body to his. For the briefest of moments, his mind threatened to short-circuit, but then a bit of sense settled back over him as he recalled what he’d intended to do next.
“I’m coming back to this mouth of yours. Don’t you worry.”
“Where are you going?”
God, even her words had turned thick, as if he needed one more reason to happily give her every spare bit of breath in his lungs.
Alec skimmed his lips over the slope of her neck, whispering words of adulation over every smooth surface of bare skin that had painted the backdrop of his fantasies. His fingers flowed easily into the coordination his body had honed for years, working in tandem with his mouth to peel away the layer of her crewneck. Once all her wild hair was freed from the collar, it resettled over her shoulders, framing her breasts like intricate vines draping a marble goddess in a museum.
Every gasp and moan that Marisa breathed into his neck fed his hunger. Good Lord, was there anything about this woman that wasn’t bloody perfect?
He got his answer when she deftly grabbed his hands and guided them around her back to her bra clasps as if he’d been plucked from a lottery and was the luckiest son of a bitch on this earth. A few seconds of tricky fingerwork was all it took for the cotton to fall away, taking the entire reservoir of his sanity with it.
Marisa stood before him, everything above her high-waisted leggings unapologetically bare to him, while he stood there, blinking, like the daft fool he was, eyeing the sweet lushness of her displayed with all the confidence he’d clearly, and right fucking stupidly, left behind somewhere else.
She bit her lower lip, and the rosy peaks of her breasts pebbled sharply, splitting his attention in two. Or three.
He took two steps toward her and drifted his fingertips over her nipples. Her gasp of delight all but reached out, grabbed him by the cock, and pulled him over the precipice he’d been trying to avoid for weeks but now couldn’t think of a reason to stay away from.
The more he felt of her warm skin, the more he was certain there was no possible future where he could exist as a complete whole of himself without Marisa.
“I think it’s your turn,” she said, pouting as she let him ease her back onto the bed.
With military precision, he whipped his shirt over his head and bowed his allegiance to her marvelous breasts, mounding and kissing what he’d only dreamed of.
Marisa lazily drifted her fingers down the sides of his neck, then dug tiny divots into the meat of his shoulders with her fingernails when he bestowed a slow, wet kiss on one nipple before bequeathing like-minded praise on the other.
She could carve out entire craters in his back and he’d happily hand her the shovel to do so . . . and tell her to dig deeper. Fuck. He’d buy her a whole host of landscaping tools if she stayed pressed to him like that and kept dragging her hands lower.
When his cock twitched painfully against his thigh, he sat up and paused for a moment. Disappointment briefly flashed across her flushed face, but it was quickly replaced by something he was far more familiar with: a Jersey girl’s irritation.
“Why are you stopping? No no no. Don’t stop. Please, Alec. We’re not at stopping time yet.” She was borderline whining, nudging her toes into his legs and getting all squirmy beneath him, which was helping his cause not a whit.
Jesus Christ, she was trying to kill him, wasn’t she?
Alec grabbed up her wrists in one hand over her head and braced his other palm against his heaving chest. “Oh, I have no intention of stopping. I just need a minute.” Or five. Maybe ten? Would she fault a man for taking the time to lecture his soldiers lest they rebel against him?
“Is it too much? Too fast?” That worried wrinkle reappeared between her brows again, and a concerned expression swept in right behind it, which had no place anywhere near this moment between them. “This is a violation of the ground rules, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said firmly, infusing his insistence that what they were doing was right and needed and fucking perfect.
But the wrinkle remained. “Then why did you stop? Was your head bothering you? I never turned off the overhead lights. They’re still the old incandescent bulbs. My landlord won’t swap them out until he absolutely has to. Are you sensitive to light? Maybe we can?—”
“Woman,” Alec growled out, dipping his forehead against hers and impressing just enough of his weight, and his cock, upon her to make his point. As soon as she felt it, her beautiful brown eyes grew wide with wonder, and he grinned at her. “There could be a damn fireworks finale going off above my head, and I’d make you scream until the next showing.”
He wasn’t normally one to assert his prowess, but well, he really could do with a goddamn second to breathe, and if she kept looking at him like that, with her breasts molded against his slick chest and her shapely curves wriggling beneath him, he was about to come up really fucking short of what he knew he could give her. What she deserved.
And anything less than that was unacceptable.
“I want to do this right,” he said, kissing away the furrows on her forehead and releasing her hands. “I need to do right by you.”
