She was completely naked.
She didn’t care.
He prowled – there was no other word for the gait – across the carpet, his eyes locked to hers as he removed his own shirt to expose a highly muscled chest.
She’d caught a glimpse of the sculpted chest the night he’d rescued her. He’d been wearing running clothes and they’d fit his body like a second skin, leaving little to the imagination.
He stood before her and she lifted her fingers, tracing the ridges of his abdomen, her mind groaning under the weight of her desire.
“Perfect.” She lifted her eyes to his face to find him smiling at her.
“I’m glad you approve.”
“You’re like a model.”
His laugh was rich with disbelief. “Hardly.”
“No, I mean, seriously, you are really, really, really gorgeous.”
His voice took on a husky quality. “I think you are really, really, really gorgeous.”
“No,” she shook her head. “Don’t say that.”
He pulled her forward, brushing her naked body against him; her breasts crushed to his chest. “Believe me, azeezi. I do not offer praise where it is not warranted.”
And the way he said it, his words so filled with command, his tone so richly autocratic, made her blood fizz in her veins.
“Then I’ll take your praise and enjoy it,” she grinned. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He linked his hands behind her back. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”
“I know.” She licked her lower lip. “I’m nervous. But not because I don’t want to or because I don’t think it’s right. Just because …”
“It’s been a long time.” He dipped his head forward, pressing his forehead to hers. “Then let me slowly remind you what you have been missing.”
When he was turned on, his accent was thicker. He sounded like he’d strolled off the pristine deserts of his faraway land. She could listen to him speak all night.
When he lifted her up, she made a squawk of surprise. She was petite, but no one had carried her in at least nineteen years, since she’d been a toddler! He held her against his broad chest and carried her into the lounge room, laying her down on the rug, with her head beneath the Christmas tree.
“I have a bed you know.”
“And I’m sure we’ll use it,” he promised, bringing his body over hers. “But for a true die-hard Christmas angel, I want you to look at your tree, while I do this.”
“Do what?”
But he was kissing her body, just like he’d promised he would, taking her nipples in his mouth and rolling them with his tongue, tormenting each in turn with the kind of pleasure that was so foreign and so pronounced it was almost unbearable.
“Ra’if,” she arched her back, and he smiled, bringing his mouth lower to her flat stomach. He traced her stretch marks with his tongue, seeing them as she did – as added perfections and marks of her feminine power – before drawing his mouth lower. The second his tongue connected with the most sensitive folds of her skin, she cried out and scrambled to push up on her elbows. She swore, and bit down on her lip, but he didn’t stop, and she was too weak from sensation to do anything but enjoy. She fell back against the floor, not caring when her head hit the timber with a clunk.
She writhed beneath him, but before long, her body was flushed with a new kind of heat. One that seemed like liquid gold pouring over her, as pleasurable as it was frightening. She dug her nails into his shoulder as everything she’d known about sex and sensation was thrown out the window, leaving only this. Sublime, weightless, floating, wild, drowning in need, relief. She cast herself over a wave, soaring in her mind, across the ocean, feeling the world’s secrets open before her.
She was crying out, over and over again, she heard her fevered voice and couldn’t silence it. Her voice was the waves, coming from her soul, into the room. The wave broke and crashed, slowly dragging her back to earth, to the here and now, to the sublime ordinariness. She blinked her eyes open, all of the feelings she had to process jumbling through her. Her body was weak; yet it was strong. It was filled with a new kind of power. And a need to learn more.
Her breath was strained as though she had run a marathon. She pushed up on her elbows once more, her eyes locked with his. He was smiling at her, a smile that made everything hot again.
“What was that?” She said with a roll of her eyes.
He laughed. “Don’t tell me you have not experienced this before?”