Just To Be With You

Thank God, she was liquid pleasure in his arms as she rocked against his hand, his fingers slipping and sliding against—then into—her in an intoxicatingly sensual rhythm.

Already, he recognized the signs that she was about to come, and he needed her mouth against his, needed to drink in her cries of pleasure. But even that wasn’t enough, not when he also needed to feel her br**sts against his chest, needed to feel her heart beating against his, needed to be able to kiss her, needed to watch her eyes dilate as she climaxed.

Temporarily moving his hands to her hips, he lifted her out of the water, spun her around, then brought her back down so that she was facing him. She laughed as water splashed over the side of the tub when their limbs got tangled and then her long, wet hair temporarily blinded them both.

When they’d brushed it away, her eyes were hazy with desire as she smiled down at him. “Hi there.”

Even as caught up as he was in the grip of intense desire, he found himself smiling back at her. “Hi.”

“This is fun, taking a bath with you.” She nuzzled her cheek against his. “Way more fun than taking a bath by myself ever was.”

“Fun?” He nipped her earlobe between his teeth. “You think being with me is fun?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She rolled her hips over his erection, making him groan at just how good she felt over him. “More fun than I’ve ever had with anyone before.”

Ian had played plenty of games with women in bed, but it had always been about gunning for pleasure, never about having fun.

His surprising realization fell away as she ran one hand between their bodies to wrap her fingers around his erection. “I need you again, Ian.”

Her lips were already swollen from his rough kisses, but knowing that wasn’t enough to stop him from devouring her mouth again. Without breaking their kiss, he teased her ni**les between his thumb and forefinger until she made a wild little sound that nearly had him thrusting to completion in her hand.

“Put your hands on my shoulders. Both of them.”

She licked her lips. “But I like touching you.”

“I like it, too. Too damned much.”

He moved her hands for her, putting them around his neck, and she immediately rolled her hips back against his, the slick heat of her body taking him even closer to the edge of sanity than her hand just had. The thought of thrusting into her was so damned tempting that he was nearly there…when somewhere in the back of his lust-fogged brain he remembered his promise to be gentle this time.

“I can’t just take you like this, Tatiana. Not again, not so soon after your first time.”

Tatiana rubbed her br**sts against his chest. “I’m not a virgin anymore,” she reminded him in a softly seductive voice, one that now held tremendous knowledge of pleasure. “And yes, you should definitely keep taking me like this. In fact, if I had known just how amazing making love with you would be, I would have jumped you the day we met in Napa.”

He covered her mouth with his, kissing her breathless before he admitted, “The first time I set eyes on you, I wanted you so badly.”

“You could have had me, Ian.”

He shook his head, her honest words wreaking havoc with the little bit of control he still had in his grasp. “No. Jesus, no. Don’t tell me that.”

“Just think of all the time we wasted, thinking about each other, wanting each other, when all along we could have been doing this.”

She shifted her hips in an obvious move to take him into her, and it took everything in him to grip her hips and stop her from impaling herself on him. “Not yet, sweetheart. Let me make you come again. Let me make sure you’re ready—that I won’t be hurting you.”

He slid one hand over her stomach down to the slick flesh between her legs. “I love touching you,” he murmured against her mouth. “I’ve never felt anything so hot, so soft, so perfect.”

“I love it, too,” she gasped as she moved herself back and forth over his hand, her breath coming faster with every push of her hips against him. She had her arms wound around his neck and was holding onto him so tightly that he could feel her heart pound faster and faster as she rose higher, then higher still.

When she pulled her mouth from his, and threw her head back so that she could arch her hips closer to his hand, he had to taste her br**sts, had to draw her ni**les in between his lips to taste first one, then the other. Her cries of pleasure echoed against the tiled walls of the bathroom.

Moving his free hand to the nape of her neck, he threaded his fingers into the wet tangle of her hair. “Open your eyes, sweetheart.” She blinked once, twice, before she was able to focus. “I want to watch you come. Let me see you. I need to see you.”

As if his request, and his desperate need, had flipped a switch inside her, a heartbeat later she was climaxing...and what he saw in her eyes, and in her expression that held back nothing at all from him, touched Ian in a way nothing else ever had.

Not only pleasure, not just arousal, but a depth of emotion that had him wishing, harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he was capable of loving Tatiana the way she deserved to be loved.

But it was the sweet and trusting smile she gave him even before she’d come down from her orgasm that nearly broke him. He’d already made the mistake of stealing her innocence. He couldn’t make it even worse by making her promises he’d never be able to keep.

Lifting her out of the tub, he carefully wrapped her in a towel, and as he picked her up to carry her back to his bed, she said, “I’m ready for you to show me slow and sweet now, Ian.” She kissed him softly, just the barest brush of her lips against his, before whispering, “Although if you want to know the truth, I’m ready for fast and hard again, too.”