Page 41 of Badd Ass
“No, I mean, I’m sorry that I told you to stop. That you didn’t get to finish the way we should’ve finished. I wanted you to…to finish inside me. But—” she fondled my now-slackened cock. “I just—I’m not—I wasn’t ready.”
“I shouldn’t have let that happen.”
She inched closer to me, laid her head on my arm and gazed at me. “I don’t regret it. I don’t, I can’t—being with you bare like that? Zane, that was…it wassoamazing. I want it like that all the time. That’s what’s dangerous about it.”
“We can’t, though, can we? I mean, I’m clean, but—”
“I’m clean, too, and I’m on the shot, so we’re protected.”
“But still.”
She nodded. “But still.”
Her room in this B&B had a tiny but full en suite bathroom; she rolled away from me and danced gracefully across the to the bathroom, beautiful, naked, and enticing. She didn’t bother closing the door; instead, she let me watch from the bed as she cleaned up. It was a strange, intense, and almost shocking intimacy, watching the way she soaked a washcloth in the sink, wrung it out, the way she wiped her skin clean with it, scrubbing her breasts and then her belly and then between her legs, then soaked and wrung out the washcloth again and wiped herself down once more. She dried herself with a bath towel, and then soaked the washcloth and wrung it out several more times before returning to the bed. She leaned over me, standing beside the bed. Gently, almost lovingly, she cleaned my cock, starting at the tip and then the head, then holding it with two fingers and angling it this way and that as she wiped me down with the warm, damp washcloth.
That was a first for me, and it was just as bizarrely, emotionally, and intensely intimate as it had been watching her wash herself. Why? I wasn’t quite sure. It just was. Combined with the fierce vulnerability we’d shared as we moved together, the moment was fraught and delicate as porcelain.
My heart hammered, clenched. My breath caught. I couldn’t look away—Mara was too beautiful, too mesmerizing. The way her hair cascaded in long sunlit waves over her shoulder, the flick and shift of her grass-green eyes, the high, full roundness of her breasts, the generous swell of her hips, the flawless ivory of her skin…
How could I ever give her up?The thought battered through my head with all the undeniable force of a Stinger missile.
I choked on the thought, froze under it, paralyzed by the ravaging intensity of it.
Holy hell, I wasn’t ready for that.
This was supposed to be a week of fun with a gorgeous, charismatic, down-to-fuck girl, with a little extra non-sexual fun on the side.
Not…this. Whatever this was.
The problem was, Mara Quinn was quickly metamorphosing from a gorgeous, DTF girl into a breathtaking goddess, into the woman of any red-blooded man’s dreams. My blood ran red, ran hot, and this woman was exactly that, the kind of woman I could see being at the center of all my dreams.
And that was scaring the piss out of me.
Chapter 9
Mara
Isaw it hit him, like it had hit me. I’d been cleaning myself up—the bathroom was so small it was nearly impossible to close the door unless you got in the tub first, so I’d left the door open. I hadn’t intended to let him watch, and it had been nerve-wracking in the extreme to stand there washing his come off my skin while he watched. It had taken everything I had to act casual about it, to not hyperventilate. But his gaze while I washed up…it had been so intense. Fierce. And the moments just before I’d stopped him from coming bare inside me, those moments as we moved together had been…searing enough to flay right out of me any notions of this being casual sex anymore.
And I saw it hit him, watched the intensity hit him, watched the moment when he realized that we were creating something between each other that I know neither of us were ready for, that neither of us had expected.
I finished cleaning him, tossed the washcloth into the tub, and re-joined him in the bed. I remembered Claire’s insistence that I try post-coital snuggles…but given the intensity we’d just shared, snuggling with Zane seemed a little too much like tempting fate.
So instead of curling up against his side, my head on his chest—like I dearly, desperately wanted to, deep down—I propped myself on an elbow next to him and drank in his masculine, muscular, rugged beauty. He didn’t reach for me, either, and I suspected he was going through a similar tangle of thoughts and emotions.
“So.” He mirrored my pose, reaching out a hand to trace my figure from shoulder to hip to thigh and back up. “Dinner?”
“With Mrs. Kingsley and the others?”
He shrugged. “Sure. Sounds like fun.”
“And then a movie?”
Another nod and shrug. “The theater here only has two screens as I remember, so the selection is limited. But that’d be fun.” He let his hand rest on the swell of my hip. “It’ll be proper date, then.”
“A real date.” I wrinkled my nose. “I haven’t been on adate-date since high school.”
He chuckled. “Me either, actually.”