The Ties That Bind (6 page)

He hadn’t realized, but she’d seen it. As he reached for her, his hand shook. He was as affected as she was. He was holding taut to barely leashed control, and he was doing it for her.

Dammit, she’d waited a long time for this. She didn’t want control.

“Rick,” she said, squeezing his fingers. “I’m not made of porcelain. I won’t break.”

“I’m trying to restrain myself, Lisa.”

“Don’t try so hard.”

Rick sucked in a harsh breath, then released his fingers from hers, grabbed her shoulders, and jerked her against him. She gasped
at the sensual violence as he smashed his mouth against hers, reveled in his possession of her mouth, especially when his tongue slid through her teeth and took control, claiming her tongue, licking against it with demanding strokes.

Now there was nothing slow and easy about what he did, walking her toward the bed as he simultaneously freed her arms from the straps of her dress and drew the bodice to her waist. She felt air across her breasts and nipples, her mind trying to process too much. Her nakedness, what would Rick think, where the hell were they going. She felt the back of her legs brush the mattress. Rick pulled his lips from hers, drew back several steps, and stared at her.

“No,” he said, blowing out a breath. “We have to slow down. It’s been a long time and I want to look at you.”

He was right, of course. She expected this big explosion of a consummation, this throwing-her-down-on-the-bed-and-fucking-her-blind situation where she wouldn’t have to process, to think about anything. But their first time together after all this time was monumental, and they shouldn’t rush through it.

Now he was looking at her. Really looking at her. And for the first time, she felt shy. He hadn’t seen her naked in a long time. She didn’t have the youthful, waif-thin body of a twenty-year-old any longer. She resisted the urge to cover her breasts. This was her body now.

“I’ve always loved your body, Lisa,” he said as he shrugged out of his shirt, his gaze never leaving her chest.

She couldn’t help but smile. “You liked my boobs.”

He grinned and met her gaze again. “Well, yeah. I’m a man. We’re obsessed.”

She laughed, grateful he wasn’t taking this so seriously. She needed a little levity so she could breathe.

And he was damn beautiful, too. His shoulders had broadened, his chest had filled out, and he definitely spent a lot of his free time working out. He might be over thirty-five, but Rick was all chiseled muscle and very little body fat. She knew he ran every morning, went to the gym after work, and he ate well. It showed. She wanted to feel
that body next to hers. She reached behind her for the zipper on her dress.

“No. Let me.” Rick stepped forward, their noses practically touching as he located her zipper through the tangled mess of her dress. He drew it down, all the while staring into her eyes. So intense, intimate.

So utterly adult.

So new.

“We’re not kids anymore, Rick,” she said as he moved in, grasped her dress, and pushed it down over her hips. It draped in a puddle at her feet.

“I’m well aware of that.” He held her hand while she stepped out of the dress. She kicked it away. His grin was so damn sexy. “What’s your point?”

Her lips curled. “I have no idea.” She reached for his pants, flipping open the button and brushing his erection with the backs of her fingers as she drew the zipper down. She shuddered a breath, dizzy from nervousness, from excitement. This was all happening so fast. She wanted to slow it down and speed it up at the same time.

“Are you nervous? Should I slow down?”

He was teasing her. She cocked a brow. “I’m hardly a virgin.”

His brows waggled. “Don’t I know it, since I’m the one who took your cherry.”

She snorted. “As I recall, you were rather adept at convincing me you were the one for me.”

Once he was naked, he pushed her onto the bed and climbed on after her. “As I recall, you didn’t put up too much of a fight.”

She worked her way up onto the pillows. “So you’re saying I was easy?”

They lay side by side now. Rick palmed her stomach. It rippled under the warmth of his hand. “Nothing about you has ever been easy, Lisa.”

That might be the biggest compliment he’d ever paid her. Or was it a compliment? Did he mean she was difficult? She opened her mouth to ask the question, but Rick placed his finger against her lips.

“Shut up.”

She thought about objecting, but he was right. She always thought too much, and now wasn’t the time to think. Instead, she threaded her fingers through his hair. Dark as a moonless night, and so thick her fingers got lost in its depths. It felt good to touch him again, to lie side by side together in bed like this, not to feel the rush of having to fuck like they did when they were kids. There was so much more to lovemaking than just getting naked and penetration. There was touching, looking, kissing, and just being with someone you cared about.

Rick seemed to understand that, even if his erection lay prominent between them, a constant reminder of what was going to happen.

He leaned over her, brushed his lips over hers. Soft, oh so soft, it was like a feather across her mouth. And yet it was electrifying, making her nipples pucker. And when he touched her, his fingers lazily mapping her skin from her shoulders to her collarbone to the valley between her breasts, her heart rate kicked up again.

Rick deepened the kiss, pressed over her more firmly, grasped her hip to draw her closer against him. Her breasts flattened against him, her nipples rasping against the crisp hairs of his chest. He lifted her leg and draped it over his hip, putting her pussy in direct contact with the hard ridge of his cock.

She gasped as he began to surge against her, rocking his erection against her pussy. A wildfire of sensation rolled along her nerve endings, every single one connected to her pulsing clit. She dug her nails into his shoulder, tilted her head back to look at him, needing to see his face.

Lines of concentration formed along the outer corners of his eyes and across his forehead. She traced them with her fingertip, memorizing every single one. Rick grasped her hand and kissed her fingertips, then licked them, placing them one by one in his mouth and sucking them gently until she whimpered. She’d been way too long without a man to hold out much longer. Just the sliding motion of his cock against her pussy made her crazy.

“Rick, please.”

“I’m nowhere near ready to fuck you yet, Lisa. I haven’t even tasted you.”

Oh, God. He pushed her onto her back, took her mouth in a long, deep kiss that made her feel drugged, then dragged his lips over her jaw, her neck, and down to her breasts, moving his body over hers and spreading her legs apart with his knees so he could settle between them. He palmed her breasts—oh, to have them touched by someone other than herself was heaven. He caressed her nipples with his thumbs and the sensation shot straight between her legs, making her throb and squirm underneath him. He held her still with his body, continuing to torment her by rolling his fingers around her nipples, then bending down to take one into his mouth.

His lips closed over one peak and she wanted to die from the pleasure. She stilled, watching as he flicked her nipple with his tongue. An arcing shot of pure liquid heat pooled between her legs, throbbing incessantly. She rolled her hips, grinding her pussy against him.

Rick looked up at her and smiled, then licked the other nipple, grasping her breasts between both hands and torturing both with laps of his tongue until she writhed in uncontrollable delight. This was exactly what she needed, what she’d craved when she said yes to Rick. His touch, his mouth on her body, making her feel like a desirable woman for the first time in…she couldn’t recall how long.

She needed more. So much more than this. The waiting was unbearable. She wanted his cock inside her, stroking her until she screamed in orgasm.

But when he slid down her body, pressing a kiss to her ribs, the dip in her stomach, her belly button, she wanted something else entirely, now anticipating the hot, sweet pleasure of his mouth taking her right where she needed to go.

He shouldered her legs apart and she felt his breath against her thigh. It was so unbearably intimate, so familiar and yet so new. And when he kissed that spot on her inner thigh that made her laugh, she remembered how many times he’d done that in the past, how well he really did know her body—like no other man ever could. They’d
shared the intimacy of first-time lovers, because they’d been each other’s first. They’d learned about sex with each other, had explored the basics, the how-to’s, had fumbled around and figured out this whole sex thing together.

But now, as Rick laid his hand over her lower belly and let it slide lower, using the practiced moves of an adult, it wasn’t at all fumbling. It was smooth, caressing, moves meant to relax her and ratchet up the sexual tension at the same time. He knew exactly what he was doing to her. And when he pressed his mouth over her sex, laying his tongue flat over her clit so she could simply feel the hot wetness pressed against her throbbing sex, she knew it was nothing like the old days. Nothing at all.

She lifted up, her body swelling with heat and need, arching toward that pleasure. He gave it to her, licking the length of her pussy, driving his tongue into her and using his hand to stroke her clit. Embarrassingly, she was already there, rocketing into orgasm like drought-stricken tinder, engulfed in a fire of the sweetest pleasure. Rick was right there with her, licking her, his hand pressing down on her as she rode out her surprising climax until she shuddered into some semblance of reality.

But he gave her no time to relax, instead climbed up her body and planted his mouth over hers. She tasted the tart sweetness of her own completion on his lips and it drove her into fresh arousal. His erection slid along her wet pussy lips, making her aware of how close they were to consummating, and how much she wanted to feel him inside her.

Tension coiled low in her belly, a desperate need that had her raking her nails along his back, to lift her hips in silent invitation. Rick rolled over and grabbed a condom from his pants pocket, tore open the wrapper, and applied it in a hurry before turning back to her and capturing her again in his arms.

“Don’t want to make the same mistake twice,” he said with the hint of a smile.

She traced his mouth with her fingertips, then palmed the back of his neck and drew him forward, needing his lips on hers. He
kissed her, his mouth pressed hard against hers, his tongue sliding inside at the same time his cock pressed between her pussy lips and penetrated her.

Feeling him inside her, joined with her, made tears spring to her eyes. It was so incredibly monumental that for a moment she felt silly at getting so choked up like this. It was just sex, after all. She shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. Yet it seemed like so much more—felt like so much more.

She really was a basket case, wasn’t she? Pushing the emotionalism aside, she concentrated on simply feeling Rick, on the way he moved inside her. Slow at first, pulling out, then sliding back in, dragging his cock over her sensitized nerve endings. Lisa dug her heels into the mattress, losing herself in the sensations, on the way her pussy tightened around his cock each time he withdrew. It was as if her own body objected to him pulling out, wanting to grip him harder to prevent him from leaving her.

Symbolism much? She really had to learn to shut her brain down. Sex was supposed to be mindless, about just feeling and not thinking. But how could she not mix the two together? Her brain was as involved in this as her body. She had to think about everything she felt—what it meant as much as the sensations zipping through every nerve ending.

She opened her eyes to find Rick staring down at her, his face hard and tight. She inhaled, the heady, exciting aroma of sex surrounding them. Their bodies were slick with sweat as they slid together, Rick’s pelvis grinding against hers in a way that stroked her clit into indescribable sensations, ever flaming the fire inside her.

Rick grasped her hands, moved them out to her sides and entwined his fingers with hers, then began to move in earnest, his chest scraping her nipples as he drove inside her, his shaft rubbing her clit as he rocked against her with hard, deliberate thrusts.

“Rick,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he said back, seeming to know she was close to coming again. He was relentless, not even giving her a second to catch her breath as she caught the wave and rode it over the crest, crying out with
the force of her climax. He stilled, letting them both feel the way her pussy convulsed around him as she came in violent bursts that left her whimpering. And then he started up again, moving slowly this time, refusing to let her even come down from the high before he brought her right back up again, rolling his hips over the sensitive spots until she was cresting again and again, mastering her body in a way that only he could until she was begging for mercy.

But he wouldn’t give it to her, not until she was limp as a rag doll and couldn’t possibly come again. And when he tensed, claiming her mouth in a heated kiss that left her wet and helpless and climbing again, that was when he went with her, groaning into her mouth as he shuddered with his own orgasm. She held tight to his sweat-slickened back and wondered that it had never, ever been like this before.

This was magic. It was amazing and frightening because she wasn’t certain she could ever give it up.

Rick stared down at the sleeping beauty next to him. Her hair had fallen over her face, shielding her eyes, though he knew they were still closed, because she was snoring.

He’d forgotten that she snored. Cute, girly-type snores, but she did snore, especially when she was exhausted. He supposed the flight, the shock of finding him there, plus the sex last night would have been exhausting.

He rolled out of bed and into the sizable bathroom to turn on the shower, unable to keep the grin off his face. So far everything had been perfect. More than perfect, actually. But he knew Lisa well. She wasn’t the type to accept at face value. She might have enjoyed the sex, but she was going to be a hard sell.