The Passionate Mistake Read online

  He jerked, grabbing handfuls of the pillow and twisting it as he threw his head back. She watched, fascinated and entranced as she repeated the action, difficult as it was to focus when she wanted to just close her eyes and drown in the sensation.

  When she paused for a moment, recovering from a near-orgasmic quiver, he pushed the gusset of her panties to one side and lifted his pelvis just enough to enter her, straining to be slow. She felt the thick rod part her, let him just enter her, then she pulled up and away. He exhaled in frustration and gave her a hot stare, which she met with a raised eyebrow, lowering herself far enough to take in an inch of him then lifting away again.

  His hands left the mangled pillow and went to her hips, gentle and coaxing, luring her nearer, tempting her to come impale herself. She resisted then obliged, resisted and obliged, never more than an inch.

  When he lost patience and flipped her she gave a small exclamation of surprised disappointment the game was finished. But he didn’t press his advantage, instead kissing and sucking his way down the front of her body until he reached her underwear. He pulled it off down her legs and settled between her thighs.

  There he set up a delicate suction, waiting until she was wild and bucking against his mouth. Then he suddenly stopped to nibble delicately on the tender skin of her inner thigh, a loss of stimulation that drove her instantly insane. She hissed in frustration and glared at him. He met her eyes with a mocking smile. After a moment he laid his mouth on her again, sucking and lashing her with his tongue. She tried to keep eye contact but it was impossible. She had to writhe, trying to escape and to get closer to that wicked mouth in the same motion. Then again he stopped. She hammered the mattress with a closed fist, a whisper away from orgasm.

  “Hush,” he murmured in calm authority. At that she jack-knifed. With rough hands she pushed him from his stomach to his back, he allowing it after an instant of surprised resistance.

  She engulfed his erection in her mouth. She couldn’t take it all – nowhere near – but between her mouth and both hands she had the entire length enfolded. Tasting both his response and her own, she started a wicked rotation, each hand at counterpoint to the other and to her mouth, watching him shake with the effort to control himself, keep from thrusting or moving or doing anything that might stop the sensation.

  They had turned it into a competition between them, humor submerged in the intensity of challenge. She drew it out, watching for the signs he was near crisis, slowing and softening her stimulation to keep him back from the edge and then ramping up when he seemed to be pulling himself together.

  She loved it; the heady power of it; the control; the struggle for dominance. She knew he would turn the tables on her soon, felt the anticipation. He seemed gentler than she, more inclined to pull back. She had no such hesitation. He would say if he didn’t like something, and until he did she would please herself.

  He reached down, hooked a big hand under each of her arms and drew her – with due caution – up his body. She released her new toy in good time, a smirk on her face as she encountered his somewhat shell-shocked expression.

  “You’re a hellion,” he said, an old-fashioned, evocative term that tickled her fancy.

  She gave a triumphant laugh, ending in a squeak as he flipped her and pinned her to the bed, defenseless underneath him. His hand hooked behind her knee and pulled it upwards to his chest, tilting her pelvis at an angle that gave him easy access. She could feel his cock there, pressing at the entrance to her body. She wriggled experimentally and found there was nowhere to move. He reached a hand underneath her lifted thigh and inserted his finger into her, strumming his other fingertips delicately over her tender flesh, flicking and rubbing until she could not pick out a single sensation, there was such an overwhelming flood of sensory information.

  Then amidst the maddening glide and slide of fingers came the unmistakable feeling of stretching to take a shape that was so silky and slick and yet almost too big, no matter how slippery.

  She opened her eyes wide and found him looking down at her, all motion halted except for that slow push to enter her. Their eyes locked together, intense, intimate, boring into the other as if more than bodies were joining.

  She was holding her breath. So was he.

  It was too much, too intense, this stillness after the frantic haste of desire, the rivalry and jousting. He slid in, and slid in further, and further still, agonizingly slowly. Finally he came to rest, pelvis against hers, embedded to the hilt, absolutely nothing between them.

  She couldn’t name the expression he wore. It was something like tenderness, and something like wonder, and some surprise. For a long moment – only seconds, but it seemed to last forever – they were suspended there. Then he bowed his head to take her mouth in a kiss. She felt he was searching for something. What she didn’t know, nor did she know how to give it to him.

  She pulled her arms free and put them around his neck, bringing him in close, closer. Wrapping him up in herself, twining around him. Too close to look at her again with those questioning eyes.

  He made a sound between a sigh and a groan, holding her tightly, so she was surrounded by the heat and hardness of him above, beneath and inside her. It made her feel delicately feminine. Not a sensation she was used to, as a woman who took control and demanded her due in the bedroom. She flexed, testing the bonds he had created. Pushed away, unsettled by the languorously relishing tone he introduced, his head buried in the curve where neck met shoulder, laying kisses there.

  It was too much. She wanted the battle, the clash. Not this unfamiliar . . . sweetness. It wasn’t just the expression in his eyes after all. With his whole body he told her . . . something.

  So she closed her own eyes and focused only on the sensation of it, undulating against him in a tiny movement magnified by her arousal, so the heat of his skin touching a thousand nerve endings on her own skin was a deafening orchestra. She dug her fingernails into the muscles that ran down either side of his spine, surprising a jolt and flex that drove him even deeper into her, making her gasp and tilt her head back.

  As he released his iron hold on her to prop himself up on his elbows she kept her eyes tight shut, moaning in sorrow as he withdrew then sighing with satisfaction as he returned in a controlled motion, filling her so completely. At his next withdrawal she joined the motion of reconnection, lifting to him to meet him halfway, falling into a driving rhythm that quickened and quickened again.

  Already most of the way there, her orgasm came swift and blinding, making her buck and cry out.

  “Yes!’ he said and she felt him let loose the control he held over himself, plunging into her recklessly, straining to reach his own completion. It was electrifying, the energetic thrusting of a man consumed by his pleasure, his enjoyment of her body wrapped tight around him. She was stunned to feel the swelling tension as she followed him over the edge and into a second shuddering climax.

  She turned her head away from him as she came, denying the intimacy of their shared completion, little aftershocks clenching her inside as she felt the quiver of his cock spilling into her. It was too much. Too tender and good.

  When he rolled to one side to take his weight from her, his arm gathered her and cuddled her close, a warm rumble of masculine approval resonating from the throat under her ear. She didn’t know what to say or do next, all her certainties lost in the experience of taking Mike Summers for a lover.

  Her mind raced as she lay there, trying to draw the pieces together, to arrange them somehow so this craziness that was suddenly her life would make some sense.

  He hadn’t recognized her. She hadn’t told him. There was no shared joke. But the sex was . . . something else.

  It was making love. That’s what it was. She had in no way been prepared for that. She thought it would be scratching an itch, the way it had always been. A tussle. A roll in the hay. Enjoyed and easily forgotten.

  Now suddenly she had deceived him twice over, this man who took her bod
y and gave her that experience in return.

  It was terrifying.

  She found herself scared, a piercing thrust of fear that he would any moment find out either one of her lies. Terrified of making love with him again, and even more terrified they might never make love, she might never make love like that again.

  She burrowed her head into his shoulder and clung to him, comforted despite herself by his solid male presence, the deep breathing evening out into sleep.

  This was an unholy mess, and she had no idea how to straighten it out. But for this moment he didn’t know, so it was okay. Okay to enjoy being here like this with him, another guilty pleasure stacked on the ones that had come before. One more couldn’t hurt.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten, twenty. She heard a light snore and took that as a signal it was time to extract herself, to find some distance and sanity.

  Yet the moment she moved his hands clenched, one on her shoulder and the other her hip, holding her still. “Stay,” he said, stroking the length of her, up and down, rolling so she sprawled on top of him, his hand free to roam everywhere, massaging, squeezing, drawing delicate designs with the tips of his fingers that make her shudder.

  It was entrancing. Impossible to move away, to disobey that sure touch that soothed and stimulated. She hesitated, then tentatively gave him the weight of her head, laid it on his chest and stopped thinking.

  Instead she felt. The generosity of that touch, savoring and . . . worshipful. Sweetly sensuous, setting her adrift with a head full of butterflies, soft fluttering flashes of sensation.

  Subtly over the long minutes the mood changed as he caressed her more intimately, finding the cleft in her buttocks, her inner thighs, the wetness between them. He shifted his legs so hers fell apart on either side of his, his erection pulsing and growing to nestle just where she was most slick.

  He pushed her thighs closed again, wrapped around that insistent silken shaft, and went on stroking and touching, his cock joining in with its own sliding motion. It was unbelievably decadent, to press her legs closed as if protecting her feminine core and still feel him there, teasing her, gliding over her clitoris, over the swollen lips that had enfolded him so recently, that surrounded him now.

  She was passive, receptive, dazed and bemused by the softness and ease of it, punctuated by electrifying tingles that swept through her so she quivered and gasped, instantly soothed by those masterful hands back into quiescence.

  Analytical thought gone. Barriers down. Lost. At peace. Outside herself and yet housed firmly in a body so overwhelmed there was no room for self-consciousness or fight.

  And when he held her hips, tilted her pelvis to suit his design and after a moment’s maneuver entered her at an angle she would have thought impossible, the exquisite delicacy slackened her muscles, every part of her suspended in a bliss like she’d never experienced. Touched inside and out, filled and stretched, the rocking motion of his body beneath, around and in her.

  It unstitched her. Her orgasm was like a wave, sweeping over her, lifting her in exultation and transporting her impossibly far from where she had been; leaving her beached on far distant shores, weeping a single strange, silent tear in awe and sorrow.

  He parted her legs again so she straddled him, sliding extraordinarily deep and then stilling, motionless so long that eventually she – senses reassembled – lifted her head. He opened his eyes to meet her gaze, half lidded and with a sensual smile curling his full lips.

  And she found herself smiling back, instinctively, with no hostility inside her, no anxiety; nothing to prove. A partner to him in his quest for their pleasure. An ally. A friend.

  He was all warmth and lazy enjoyment, unhurried and languid. She flexed up and down to watch him, and he closed his eyes to savor the movement, then opened them again to grin up at her, boyish and relaxed; trusting her.

  She could give him pleasure. She could give him that much. Out of whatever twisted and impoverished being dwelt inside her where he could not see, still she knew how to do that.

  So she rode him gently, seeing his eyes haze, his hands tightening on her waist as he absently kneaded her flanks, adding his strength to speed her descent, raising her up then pulling her down again. When she leaned forward those hands rose to cup and shape her breasts, lifting their weight and plucking at her hard nipples so her rhythm became ragged, lost in the jolt of fire that made her clench around him. He liked that. She could see it, could read his enjoyment. He liked her pleasure. As she found she liked his. Not to prove her own skill, but for its own sake, as a beautiful thing worth cherishing.

  When his breathing hastened and become harsh, the tendons standing out on his neck as he threw his head back, she didn’t feel triumph. She felt moved. Aroused and touched.

  There was no concealment in him. Again and again he sought her eyes, until it began to feel like a connection clicking into place between them, interrupted only briefly by the crises of sensation she brought him, that drove him wild for pulses of time. Yet always he returned to her.

  When he came she stopped, drinking the sight in hungrily, muscular ripples of her inner passage sucking at him, drawing him in, milking the pulses of his body spending itself within her.

  And when he was done she was there to welcome him back, to smile down at him, to let him draw her closer to lie once again on his chest. This time when he slipped over the threshold into sleep she went with him, hearts synchronized and breathing in time.

  She woke with a start in the pale, cool light of dawn, her heart racing. The unfamiliar surroundings were disorienting and for a moment she was frightened. When her gaze found him her fear changed focus, becoming sharper and more precise.

  How could she do this? How could she face him and tell him?

  This . . . thing between them, newborn and fragile . . . would surely die the instant he knew. She had not looked for something from him, but found he had taught her to want this treasure nevertheless. It was a painful, wonderful, agonizing lesson. How long had it been since she learned not to give anyone power over her? Not to let anyone exert such influence and control? Not to want what only another could bestow?

  Years gone, and a lesson hard-taught. She didn’t want to unlearn it, but here was the crux of it. Somewhere in the night she had learnt a new truth. There was something more precious than safety; more compelling than self-preservation.

  She couldn’t put words to the feeling, not even in the stillness of her own head. But the past weeks living her days near Mike, and this one night in his arms, his body against and inside her, had reshaped her knowing.

  She blinked fast, frantically, feeling the unaccustomed rise of tears to her eyes, a subtle sting.

  Now she had something infinitely valuable to lose, and every reason to believe it already lost. Just being here with him was being on borrowed time.

  It filled her with a panic she quickly stifled. Useless to feel like that. Useless and weak. So yeah, she . . . well maybe this might possibly be some sort of love. And definitely it couldn’t be returned, couldn’t grow into an actual real relationship, given everything she’d already done to him by intention and fact; every deceit, every plan to use and misuse. These misplaced feelings should be strangled at birth.

  She shifted, found his hand was on her hip, lifted it cautiously and put it down on the sheet as she sidled away.

  Running would be wise. That’s what a prudent woman would do. She was always prudent. She always cut her losses when the going got tough emotionally. Except with family, and he wasn’t that.

  So where did that leave her?

  Out the door and gone before this got any messier than it already was.

  She rolled once, to take her to the edge of the bed, pushed up until she was sitting with her feet on the floor, and looked back at him over her shoulder. In sleep his face was young, relaxed, not charged with the vitality of his wakeful presence.

  Yet . . . yet it felt different from any time before, any time she had walked away fro
m a man saying ‘too much, too complex, too wrong.’ This time it felt . . . too late. She just . . . couldn’t walk away now; couldn’t imagine the strength into herself, for all her usual ruthless determination. She simply could not bear to. Was there an alternative, a viable alternative to disappearing?

  No, nothing viable.

  But she could stay. Take a chance and find out if this led somewhere.

  Which of course it probably wouldn’t. How could it?

  She stood up and looked at him, a fierce yearning rising up in her to crawl back into those arms, wrap them around herself and take shelter; to take everything from him he was willing to give.

  She bared her teeth and panted a little, despising the helplessness of the feeling, the subjugation of it when she knew how utterly hopeless this was. It was already destroyed. Without another word or action from her it was finished and she couldn’t change that now. Pretending everything was alright, that she had just met him and never known him an instant before last night wouldn’t make it so.

  She took a single step backwards towards the door and stopped, the struggle inside straining her muscles one against another. To stay or to go? To suffer now or later?

  She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of him, lighted by the dull glow of the city, the faint moonlight falling on his face. Shut her eyes but still saw him as he lay now, as she had seen him smiling, laughing, reaching out a hand in a moment of inspiration, hunched over a keyboard, grinning with his fingers flying. A thousand pictures she had not known were stored in her brain waiting to leap out into the darkness inside her eyelids.

  How long would it take for them to fade so she could forget?

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go.

  She must stay, for as long as it lasted. And soon, soon she’d be alone again and it would . . . she measured the odd new pain in her own chest with an attempt at dispassionate observation . . . hurt. A lot.

  But that was tomorrow, and this was today, and she’d done enough destructively stupid things lately. She ought to balance it out with . . . a mistake that was about joy. Just for a change.