BoardResolution (17 page)

“How’s that?” he asked in that sensual, bedroom-hushed voice.
“Am I too heavy?”

The pressure of him on her was like the pressure of too much happiness on her heart, something so unfamiliar it was almost painful. It was a feeling close to heaven. His arms curled on either side of her head, her vision totally dominated by his handsome face, the dark eyes, that incredible mouth. Daring, she lifted her chin, reaching, and like a miraculous telepathy, he came down to meet her, with a soft, gentle kiss that was perfect. She parted her lips, shyly tasted him with her tongue, touching his lips, then his tongue, and felt the new sensation of his body tightening in response to the provocation. The friction of him against the juncture of her thighs, separated only by the trousers, pressed insistently, male power and strength held back only by his caring toward her. She closed her eyes as the kiss deepened, and a hundred things flashed through that darkness, things that had always been there, that she had refused to see. A hundred ways he had supported her, contributed to her reputation, respected her. She had focused on the battles, never allowing herself to see what else was there.

A million kindnesses.
She remembered now, in stark detail, tiny things. Him reaching toward the center of the table, filling her water glass when it was almost empty, though his was full, underscoring that he was doing it as a courtesy to her. Silly, but now it seemed full of meaning. The many times he’d called her during the week, to discuss this or that detail on their mutual business interests, but in some subtle way he’d lifted her spirits by making a dry joke or witticism about something they both understood. The fact that he’d sent her flowers every Friday since her father’s death.

She loved roses. She supposed he’d found that out from her office assistant. He’d sent her the first bouquet right after her father’s death. She’d thanked him for it, assuming it was the usual condolence gesture. Then they’d kept coming, every Friday for the past two years. She hadn’t acknowledged those bouquets at first, figuring if she ignored them he would stop sending them. He didn’t. In all those two years, he’d never sent her the same shade, and never a dyed flower.
Always beautiful palettes of hybrids from gardens all over the country.
One bouquet had even been shipped from England. At some point she’d started saving one bloom from each delivery, getting them pressed and preserved, and added them to a dried bouquet she kept in her bedroom. Often, it was what she studied as she lay down at night, somehow not feeling so alone by the simple act of gazing at them.

“You’ve always been there for me, since we first met.” She accepted it.
Said it out loud.

“Not as often as I should have been. I should have done something like this a long time ago.” He bent his head, put his lips beneath her ear and cruised down her neck. She arched, pulling on her bottom lip with her teeth as the movement rubbed her body against his, the soft skin of her inner thighs sliding against the outside of his, instinctively pushing her aching center against his hardness. She was amazed at her own wantonness, unleashing itself now that she…

He raised his head as if he felt her reaction to her own thoughts. “Savannah?”

“I trust you, Matt. I’ve never trusted anyone, not in my entire life. I think that’s why tonight was…possible. I kept asking myself why I wasn’t screaming and fighting you, why I wasn’t dialing 911 when I got free, and this was it. You knew, didn’t you?
Since that day on the desk, like you said.”

He
nodded,
his heart and his desire for her in his gaze. “I knew.”

“And that I would…” She suspected “enjoy” wasn’t the proper word. “…respond to this type of thing?” She wasn’t worldly about sex. She just knew it felt good, that she craved more.

“Yes.” He kissed her nose, lingering so she closed her eyes, savored. “I knew you were
mine
the first time I saw you, and I knew you’d be willing to be submissive to the right man, the man you could trust to take care of you when you have to be in control of everything else.

“You’re a strong, strong woman. The most basic way to prove that to you, the way the predator in you would understand, was to take you down the way another predator would. Make you expose your throat and concede my dominance over you.” He tilted her head back with a thumb to her chin, and set his teeth lightly to her jugular, flicking it with his tongue.
“As your mate.
The one who cares for you and needs you the most.
Who would never hurt
you.
”

The words were offensive, but the truth behind them was so primal, so intuitive and beyond the realm of political correctness, her pulse leaped, not in anger, but in response, and her thighs relaxed, accommodating him further, sending exactly the message he had said he would pull from her.
Total submission.

“I…I don’t want to be free to choose any longer, Matt.” She got out the words, and she meant them so deeply, it was hard to form them. “I want to belong to you.”

With an almost feral growl of need, he lifted up from her, just enough for there to be a space. “Open my slacks.”

With trembling fingers, she found the hook fastener, slipped it, took down the zipper, her wrists brushing the hard heat beneath. He reached back, pushed them off his hips.

“Matt,” she said softly, not daring to look him in the eye. “Will you…can I feel all of you at once? Will you be…
”

“Naked?” His eyes smiled at her, though his jaw was tight with his desire for her.
“Anything for you.
Anything you ask, I’ll give you.”

He lifted off her, meliorating her immediate sense of loss by taking her hand as he rose, kissing her knuckles in a gallant gesture that ran electricity down her arm, tightening her breasts and the wet folds of her sex.

Then he took off his shoes, one by one, pulled off the black dress socks, making her smile when he put his hand in one to show her the hole in the toe. His slacks were open during the process and her eyes were drawn to the play of his well-defined stomach muscles just above the band of his underwear, the black soft jersey boxers. He slid the slacks off, tossed them over one of the conference room chairs,
then
removed the boxers as well. He saved his watch for last, and she was able to watch the play of muscles in his arms and chest as he bent his elbows to perform the removal task, and look her fill at his bare body. He made no move to adjust his stance, keeping his blatant arousal, his whole body, open to a thorough appraisal.

She was shy about him watching, and he must have noticed. “Look all you want,” he said gently. “There’s no shame in wanting to look, and the way you’re looking at me just makes me want you more. This is as much your body to look at as yours is mine. I’m all yours, sweetheart.”

The heavy sac of his testicles rested against his thighs, the long, stiff cock jutting from a nest of soft, dark curls, midnight like those on his head. The outline of his hip suggested he had as fine an ass as she’d always suspected from surreptitious study of it when he was clothed.

“Did you know that I looked, sometimes?” She couldn’t take her gaze away, and in a spontaneous gesture, she wet her lips.

He groaned, gave her a half laugh. “Yeah, I did. A lot of times I caught you eyeing my ass. Once I caught you studying my crotch.” Her gaze shot up, sparking, and he laughed outright. “Well, you did. It was the airline contract.”

“Well, those were very tedious negotiations,” she defended herself. She was getting cold. She wanted him here, on her again, to feel that comfortable, solid weight pressing her into the couch. “You don’t have to remove the watch.”

“Yes, I do. It can catch a nipple or a hair unexpectedly, and I don’t want to cause you a moment more of discomfort than I have to. Savannah, have you ever used anything inside of yourself?
A vibrator?”

At her confused look, he explained, in a husky voice. “I need to know how tight you’ll be, honey. So I don’t hurt you.”

She shook her head, flushing.
“Of course not.
Good grief, Matt, I have a houseful of domestic staff. What would they think if they heard it or…found it?”

He smiled, propped an arm on the couch and came back down on her with an animal-like deftness that took her breath. He used his knee to nudge her a little further apart, and then put the other hand between them, stroking through her labia, finding her slick and warm. Savannah gasped on a moan, and his eyes darkened.

“What will they think the first time I take you to bed there, make you scream and tear the wallpaper because I have your wrists cuffed between the slats of the headboard? Ah, sweet Christ, your pussy just rippled against my touch. Feel me, baby.” And he slid his fingers into her, slow, pressing upward so she felt the flesh of his palm against her clit as he explored her pussy.

“Matt.” She gripped his biceps, holding on, her neck straining,
her
head against his shoulder as her body struggled beneath him.

“Beg your Master to take you, Savannah. Tell me you belong to me again.”

A lifetime of distrust somehow had no ability to withstand the flood of emotion that his words evoked, the overwhelming lust gripping her body, a different intensity than even what she had experienced with his men. That had been physical, she realized. This was more, a longing for fulfillment on all levels.

Now she understood what Jon had meant, the pleasure that would be ten times greater than anything else that had occurred tonight, if she recognized and accepted it. Surrender.
Love.
Full submission to the man she loved, an intense emotional and physical pleasure like she’d never known swamping her at the simple verbal declaration.

But she had one last holdout, one last need to be met, and she would ask it, because she knew now she could trust his answer.

She managed to get her hands from his arms up to his neck, caressing his jaw, so their eyes were locked in a moment that was simple, mutual absorption.

“If I tell you that, will you keep me, forever and ever? Never leave me? Never leave me in any way, never stop loving me?”

Please don’t be my father. Don’t live in the same house and let your heart not be there
.

He took his fingers from her, making her shudder, and closed his hand on one of hers, laying it to his heart. “I will never leave you, not in any way, Savannah,” he said, his voice laden with emotion.
“From today forward, for all eternity.
You’re marrying me this weekend. I’m never going to let you know loneliness again. There’s a diamond ring in the pocket of my slacks, and it’s going on your finger before you leave this office tonight. That was my gift.”

The tears welled up then and as he bent to kiss one off her cheek, he shifted, his eyes still locked on hers, and his cock seated itself in her channel, just the head. Her muscles closed around him in a fist of reaction, tightening his features. “Don’t tense up, honey.”

“Who’s tense?” she gasped. “Please Matt, just
do
it. I need you inside me now.”

He slid his arm under her waist, tilting her up to him, and nodded. “Hold onto my shoulders, then.”

She did, spurred by the hoarseness of his tone, the obvious desire for her expressed by every part of him, even parts she could not see, but could feel, surrounding her, empowering her.

Her passageway was ready for him, but he eased in, using small strokes. She felt in wonder the sensations of his flesh brushing her inner thighs, the hard flesh of his abdomen, his soft hair rubbing against her belly and chest. She slid one hand down, following the plane of his back, and curved her fingers over his buttock, digging her nails into him in reaction as he stroked her again.

He growled, his body tensing under her touch, and he came all the way into her in one inexorable deep stroke, a claiming she gladly welcomed, binding her to him.

She could hear her father’s voice in her head.
It’s what all men want, Savannah.
A woman’s capitulation to their desires.
It’s a hunt, a game to us, a deadly game. Once they win, they may indulge you or even themselves that their emotions are involved, but that passes.

He’d never allowed for the reality of love, and so, being a good daughter, she’d never allowed herself to believe in it. But she knew now her woman’s heart must have protected some tiny spark of belief, like a fairy captured inside her hard ironclad soul, and kept alive all these years by the things she’d noted subconsciously. The old couple walking hand in hand in the park, not part of a slick diamond commercial, but real.
The always painful sight of a young father in the office, holding his wife protectively and proudly in the circle of his arm as he introduced the new baby daughter to his co-workers.
Or in the hospital, when her father was dying, she remembered a room where two men sat, one dying of AIDS, the other holding his hand, rubbing ice on his dry lips.

She’d only touched her father when he was in the final coma, beyond consciousness. She’d briefly held his hand, wondering if she’d feel a tightening of his grip. If she had, she knew it would have been a physical reflex only, but she could have pretended it was a response to her.

The flowers, the times Matt had called, the time at the funeral, those had been gentle insinuations into her life.
A taming more than a hunt, teaching her patiently to trust him, so when he chose to claim her, she walked willingly into his arms, into his thrall.

“Say it again,” she said softly. “Say it so my heart will hear it.”

He had stilled within her to give her time to adjust, and he pressed his cheek to hers, his breath in her ear. “You’re mine, Savannah.
Now and always.”

He withdrew slightly,
then
moved back in, and pleasure rippled through her abdomen. She raised her legs higher, tightening them over his hips, drawing him deeper. He filled her everywhere with this act of joining, and it was so easy, so clean. She wrapped her arms more tightly around his shoulders, feeling all his power, now all hers, as much as she was his, as he raised his hips, lowered, raised, lowered.
Controlling her, sliding along her passage, building up a fire that had the power of a detonation.
He was deliberately teasing it to the surface, making her cling tighter,
her
breath growing harsher against his neck. Her nails dug in again and her teeth as well, tasting his heated flesh, the cord of muscle along the line of his broad shoulder.