Judith McNaught (39 page)

his hand around her nape and slowly nabbed his thumb over her soft bottom lip, but the deep indigo pools of her eyes were pulling him inexorably into their depths again. His thumb stopped moving, he pressed it down to force her lips apart and hungrily captured her mouth. Trembling in his arms, she leaned up on her toes and the slight increase in pressure against his rigid erection made his heart thunder

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and his fingers clench convulsively against her back.

He crushed her pliant body into his, his hands rushing

over the sides of her breasts and back, then angling across her buttocks, holding her tightly against his straining body. He was losing control, and he knew it.

Zack told himself to slow down, ordered himself to stop before he forced her to the floor and followed her down, before he behaved like the sex-starved convict he was instead of the leisurely lover he'd promised to be in his angry tirade. It was the distant, nagging memory of his promise that finally made him

try to prolong the prelude, to heed the warning of his pounding arousal that the culmination was going to happen much too quickly for her, once it began.

He forced his hands away from her breasts and settled them on the curve of her waist instead; but it was

harder by far to stop the driving movements of his tongue when she was clinging to him and answering and digging her nails into his back. When he finally pulled his mouth an inch from hers, Zack wasn't certain if it was she or he who moaned with the loss before she leaned her forehead weakly against his chest. Eyes closed, his heart pumping fast, he dragged air into his lungs and slid his arms around her back

to steady her against him. But it was no use—he had to have her, all of her, now. Drawing a ragged breath, he put his hand under her chin and tipped her face up. Her eyes were closed, long lashes lying on her creamy cheeks, as she instinctively lifted her lips to his.

Zack's control snapped. His mouth seized hers with fierce desperation, forcing her lips to part as his hands pulled the silk tie of her robe open, then shoved it apart, pushing the material down her arms and

sending it to the floor in front of the fireplace so that he could feast on the sight and touch of her skin.

Wrapped in his arms, Julie felt him lowering her to the floor, but she didn't surface from her state of mindless pleasure until he took his mouth and hands from her. She opened her eyes and saw him hurriedly unbutton his shirt and yank it out of his pants, tossing it aside, but not until he looked up at her

did she feel the first stirrings of panic. In the firelight, his eyes had a fierce glitter as they moved restlessly

over her body; passion had turned his face hard and intense, and when she lifted her arm self-consciously to cover her breasts, his voice was harsh: "Don't!"

She shivered convulsively at that stranger's voice, that stranger's face, and when he pulled her hand away

and covered her with his upper body, she realized instinctively that the preliminaries were abruptly over

and he was going to be driving into her in a matter of moments unless she slowed him down. "Zack," she whispered, trying to make him listen without just blurting out the situation. "Wait!" The word didn't register with Zack, but the panic in it struck a mildly discordant note, and so did the fact that she was shoving on his shoulders and squirming against his thigh in a way that was wildly provocative.

"Zack!"

Zack knew he was going too fast, cheating on the foreplay, and he thought she was objecting to that.

"There's something I need to tell you."

With an effort that nearly sapped his strength, he made himself move onto his side, but when he bent his

head to her breast to oblige her, she caught his face in her hands to stop him and forced it up.

"Please!"Julie said, looking into his smoldering eyes.

She spread her fingers over his rigid jaw, softening it, and when he turned his face into her palm and kissed it, her heart swelled with relief and tenderness.

"We have to talk first."

"You talk," he said gruffly, pulling her tighter to him, kissing the side of her mouth and her neck, sliding
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his hand over her breast, "I'll listen," he lied, his fingers stroking down, past her flat belly, sliding into the

triangle of curls. She jerked beneath him, grabbing his hand, and the topic she chose to discuss was, in his opinion, the most inanely inopportune one ever brought up by any woman in history at a time like this:

"How old were you the first time you made love?"

He closed his eyes and swallowed an understandably impatient retort. "Twelve."

"Don't you want to know how old I was?"

"No," he said tightly, moving up to kiss her breast since for some reason, known only to her, she didn't want to be touched more intimately. His entire body was straining with need and he was trying his damndest to touch her in the places that he remembered very clearly gave women the quickest and

greatest pleasure.

"I was twenty-six," she provided in a panicky voice when his mouth closed tightly on her nipple.

His blood was roaring in his ears; he heard the words but not the import. She tasted so good; she felt

even better. Her breasts weren't large or heavy, but they were pretty and exquisitely feminine, just like she was, and if she'd only be as receptive to him as she'd been when they were standing up, he'd give her a climax now, before he came inside her, and then afterward he'd make love to her properly. He had five

years of pent-up desire to expend; he'd be able to make love to her all damned night without stopping if

she'd just let him do this and stop clamping her legs together, and stop talking about how old she was the

… first time … she had … sex…

* * *

she said shakily.

He dropped his forehead on her breast, shut his eyes, and swore. "Christ!"

The explosive whisper made it eloquently clear to Julie that he was not pleased by her revelation—a conviction that was reinforced when he finally raised his head and stared hard at her face, his eyes minutely inspecting each feature as if he were hoping to find some proof she was lying. He was either

angry or disgusted, Julie realized with a sinking heart. She hadn't wanted him to stop, only to slow down

and not handle her like … like a body that was
used
to being handled.

Zack was not disgusted, he was dumbstruck. He was disoriented. Within his personal frame of reference, he had never heard of a twenty-six-year-old virgin, let alone a beautiful, witty, intelligent, desirable one.

But as he gazed at her lovely, apprehensive face, suddenly everything about her that had puzzled him last

night and tonight began to make some sense. He remembered her heartbroken outburst after the news program last night:

"My father is a minister!"she'd wept.
"He's a
respected man. I've spent the last fifteen years of my
life trying to be perfect."
He remembered her answer when he asked her if she was engaged:
"We're
talking about it."
Evidently they'd been doing a lot of talking and no lovemaking. And last night, Zack himself had likened her to a choirgirl.

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Now that he understood the past, he was more confused than ever by the present. Apparently, she had

withheld her virginity from her own boyfriend, who obviously loved her and wanted to offer her respectability and a future. Tonight, however, she was willing to surrender it to an escaped convict who

was incapable of loving anyone and who had nothing whatsoever to offer her. Zack's conscience chose

that moment to reassert itself for the first time in years by reminding him that Julie's almost-fiancé hadn't

coerced her into surrendering her virginity; if Zack had any scruples, any decency whatsoever, he'd keep his hands off of her. He'd already kidnapped her, verbally abused her, and subjected her to public embarrassment and censure. Compounding all of that by robbing her of her virginity was inexcusable.

But the feeble protest of his conscience wasn't enough to deter him. He wanted her. He had to have her.

He was going to have her. Fate had deprived him of his dignity, his freedom, and his future, but it had for some reason given her to him during these brief days of what was likely to be the end of his life. Neither his conscience nor anything else was going to deprive him of having her. Unaware of the passage of time,

he stared at her until her shaky voice snapped him from his thoughts, and her words were poignant testimony to her lack of experience with men. "I didn't expect you to be angry," she said, completely misinterpreting the reason for his silence.

With a harsh sigh, he said, "I'm angry with myself, not you."

Julie searched his face. "Why?"

"Because," he said gruffly, "it isn't going to stop me.

Because it isn't going to matter a damn to me that you've never done this before, not even with someone who loved you or who could stay with you if he

got you pregnant. Nothing matters to me right now…" he whispered, lowering his mouth to hers,

"but

this…"

But her inexperience did matter. It mattered enough to Zack to make him break off the kiss and try to get his lust under control, so that he could start over with her. "Come here," he whispered, gathering her into his arms and rolling onto his side so that she was facing him, her head pillowed against his shoulder.

Breathing deeply, he waited for his pulse to return to normal, slowly running his hand down her trim back in a soothing caress, while he resolved to make this good for her, even if he died of unassuaged lust in the

process. Somehow, he was going to have to arouse her thoroughly without arousing himself more than he

already was.

Julie lay in his arms, bewildered by the sudden change in his mood and terrified that, despite his words to

the contrary, she'd apparently turned him off on the idea of making love altogether. Unable to stand it any

longer, she kept her eyes on his throat and said shakily, "I didn't mean to make such a—a big deal out of

this being my first time. I was only trying to slow you down a little—not stop you."

Zack knew how hard it must have been for her to say a thing like that, and he felt another unfamiliar surge of tenderness toward her as he tipped her chin up and said with quiet gravity, "Don't spoil this for either of us by belittling its importance. The truth is, I've never had the responsibility—or the privilege—

of

being a woman's first lover, so it's a first time for me, too." Lifting his hand, he brushed her tousled hair off her cheek, slowly combing his fingers through it, watching it spill over her left shoulder as he mused aloud, "You must have been driving the boys in Keaton crazy all these years, wondering what you'd be

like."

"What do you mean?"

He pulled his gaze from her hair and smiled wryly into her eyes. "I mean that I've been fantasizing about

running my fingers through this gorgeous mane of yours since yesterday, and I'd only been looking at it
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for two days."

Julie felt a warmth begin to seep through her entire body at his stirring words, and Zack instantly sensed the change in her expression and the way her body relaxed against his. Belatedly remembering that words

could arouse a woman almost as well and as quickly as the most skillful sexual stimulation, Zack realized that was also the best way to accomplish his goal without driving himself to the dangerous extremes of lust that came with touching and kissing her. Softly and truthfully, he confessed, "Do you know what I was thinking last night during dinner?"

She shook her head.

"I was wondering how your mouth would taste on mine, and if your skin could possibly feel as soft as it

looks."

Julie felt herself sinking into a deep, delicious sensual spell as he spread his fingers over her cheek and

said, "Your skin is even softer than it looks." His thumb moved over her lips and his eyes watched the movement. "And your mouth … God, you taste like heaven." His hand slid inexorably down her throat, over her shoulder, then slowly covered her breast, and she dropped her gaze to the mat of dark, curly hair on his chest.

"Don't look away," he whispered, and she forced her gaze back to his. "You have beautiful breasts."

That, Julie felt, was so far from true that it made her doubt the other things he'd just said. He saw the skeptical look on her face, and his mouth quirked in a somber smile. "If that wasn't the truth," he said, his thumb moving back and forth over her nipple, "then you tell me why I'm dying to touch them and look at them and have my mouth on them right now." Her nipple tightened into a taut little bud against his thumb,

and Zack felt lust begin to rage through him again.

"You know it's true, Julie. You can see on my face how badly I want you."

She did see it—it was there in his smoldering, heavy-lidded gaze.

Dying to kiss her, Zack drew a long, steadying breath and bent his head, fighting to hold himself in check

as he touched his tongue to her lips. "You are so sweet," he whispered. "You are so damned sweet."

Julie's restraint broke before his did. With a silent moan, she slid her hand around his nape and kissed him with all the passion building inside of her, pressing herself against his rigid length, glorying in the

shudder that racked his body as his mouth opened over hers in a rough, tender kiss. With an instinct she didn't know she possessed, she sensed his desperate struggle to prevent the kiss from becoming too erotic, and the tenderness she felt was almost past bearing. Brushing her parted lips over his, she coaxed

him to deepen the kiss, and when that failed, she started kissing him the way he'd done earlier. She touched her tongue to his lips and felt the gasp of his indrawn breath; encouraged by that, she let her tongue make a brief, sensuous foray in his mouth, probing lightly…