She was ready for him now, her body eager to welcome him in its slick, wet embrace—but they still had so much to explore.
When her moans rang out across the desert to the beat of his heart, he kept up the motion with an even speed and pace until she was left panting and whimpering, her fingers reaching for him desperately, seeking his skin to grip and hold.
It took all he had not to be greedy with his gift, to gobble her all up in an instant.
He had at least taken his time enough to have earned a taste. The reasoning drew him toward her center, had him kissing the core of her.
If her flavor had hinted at sweet blooms before, she was a full bouquet now, thick and syrupy and celestial. It was not enough to taste, he had to feast—and so he did.
She cried out his name, her hand finding a hold in his hair, and the sound drove him on, urging him to take more ground, and faster, like the most relentless charioteer.
To draw it out for her, he resisted, held back the will whose every whim was the status quo. A prince got what he wanted. A man could bow to her needs.
He tasted her steadily, lapping at her core until she was trembling and moaning and teetering on the edge of collapse.
Bringing his fingers to join his mouth, he traced the edges of her while devouring her, and she screamed, body going rigid for an instant before she curved around him, her thighs tightening around his head in an intimate clinch.
She remained locked around him like that for the sweetest eternity before collapsing back against the still-warm stones, temporarily gone to the world, undone by her orgasm.
A moment later, because she had been blessed to be born in the form of a glorious woman, her eyes opened, luminescent, and she smiled, the expression brighter than the moon.
Reaching toward him, she pulled him up to wrap her arms around his neck and bury her face against him, nuzzling and squeezing, her legs simultaneously curling around to hold him as if it were not enough to hold him in the embrace of just her arms. It was intoxicatingly sweet.
Without guile, she angled her body into the exact position necessary for his access, her body a beacon that his was instinctively driven to seek out, and his muscles strained while he continued to hold himself back.
There was no going back from this point; the knowledge was a truth in him as certain as his need to venture forth anyway. The last of his will faltering in the face of the heat that radiated from her, he knew he was lost.
The tip of his erection pressed along the hot core of her, and he paused.
Her focus, too, was zeroed in on the place where their bodies touched.
“I—” The word came out rough and unwelcome in the face of the perfection of this moment. “I don’t have a condom,” he finished. He hated the words for being true, himself for being unprepared on the most important night of his life. As attuned to her emotion as he was now, however, he wouldn’t take what was not clearly given.
Irritation—primal and fast and the most merciful sight he had ever seen—flashed across her eyes. But he did not move until she spoke.
“I don’t care. Don’t stop. You can’t stop now,” she demanded.
Immense relief washed through his system to mingle with everything else she stirred up. She was strategic and thoughtful. She would not be cavalier if pregnancy was a possibility.
Most important to him in this moment, however, was that she did not want him to stop.
Mindful of her inexperience, he eased in gently, he entered her, slowly and steadily relying on the controlled application of his weight for pressure, giving her body time to open and adjust to his intrusion, even as the viselike grip of her undulated and pulsed around him, dragging him close to climax faster than any self-respecting lover would admit to.
Not even during his first time had the simple act of sliding inside a woman brought him so close to the precipice.
Ever the rebel, Rita blew away what he’d thought sex was, redefining the act into something more intimate and dangerous than he had ever experienced.
His muscles strained, torn by the barrage of his conflicting needs. He needed to please her, he needed to fully sheathe himself within her, he needed to break away from her, to run before the tendrils of emotions that floated between them hooked into him and never let go.
Beneath him, she moaned, and the sound curled around him, as much of a trap as the way their bodies joined, fitting together like two pieces of the most complicated human puzzle.
And when their bodies clenched and his shaft was fully encased within her, he lost his breath, his sight momentarily replaced by flashes of light, like the twinkle of stars in the night sky, and the only thing that held him back from shaming himself was his commitment to make her come again.
After two long, slow strokes, he knew they could not continue this way, not with her breasts grazing his chest, her inner thighs caressing his flanks, and the dark wells of her eyes, incandescent and mesmerizing in the moonlight, staring up at him. She wanted him to release his ultimate core of control and give it all to her, to let himself crack open in her presence. She didn’t ask for it in words, but with her body. Her energy seducing it from him, promising that it wouldn’t hurt to be vulnerable with her, that it would feel sinfully good.
Unable to take it, he drew her up, maintaining his steady, impossibly sweet stroke as he repositioned her, bearing the bulk of the weight of her pleasure-limp form until he finally had to reluctantly withdraw in order to guide her onto her hands and knees.
He would not embarrass himself if he could no longer see her pleasure in her eyes, if her breasts did not brush against him each time their hips met. He told himself the lie even as the new vision she presented him threatened him as well.