Sultry Pleasure Read online

  “Oh!” Diana froze.

  She stared at him, her eyes traveling slowly from his face to his chest, skimming quickly over his crotch before taking the journey down his thighs to his feet. Her gaze scorched him. The flashlight abruptly clicked off.

  “Here.” Diana shoved the towel toward him.

  He took the towel but did not use it. She was cold, too, wet and shivering in her flimsy blouse and feminine fluff of a skirt. The plain white blouse that had been elegant before was indecently sheer now, plastered to her skin and showing off her torso, her dark bra, the shape of her breasts. Marcus’s hand cupped at his side from the desire to strip the wet clothes from her body and warm her with his own.

  “You should use the towel first,” he said, voice rough with desire. Although he might need it soon to cover the evidence of his lust.

  He heard her swallow. “You’re probably right,” she said. Her eyes still did not leave him.

  Did she know he could see her in the dark now? The finer details of her were lost to shadow, but he could see that she licked her lips as she watched him, touched a hand to her belly before taking the towel and stepping away from him into the closet. She closed the door.

  Marcus drew a breath and rubbed a hand across his damp chest. He tried to calm his thoughts and his want and thrumming blood, but it was impossible. His entire body was at attention. A single, hard ache. Just for her.

  When Diana emerged from the closet, she only had her bra and panties on. She dashed past him to grab one of the blankets from the couch. Once swathed in the blanket, she offered him the towel. Marcus took it, brought it to his nose and inhaled her scent. His body hardened even more in response. Sweat. Her perfume. The spicy aroma that was uniquely hers, like crushed rosemary leaves. She sat on the couch.

  Marcus dried himself, imagining the places on her body the towel had touched. The ache for her became like a dagger in his belly. He abruptly shoved away the thoughts of her naked body and toweled the rainwater from his skin. He focused instead on something that had been bothering him for days.

  “Diana.” He slowly rubbed the towel across his bare chest. “What your brother said to me the day I came to your house—what was that all about?”

  She paused for a moment, the blanket gathered around her slender frame. “Your father is not a good man. He…” She swallowed audibly. “He deliberately cheated my father out of his pension. Because of that, Papa took his own life.”

  Marcus wanted to ask her for more details, but he felt her reluctance to talk about it, felt the trailing vapor of her sorrow in the room.

  “I never knew anything about that,” he said carefully.

  His father was not a kind man. He wasn’t even a nice one. There were things he thought Quentin Stanfield was more than capable of, things he never confronted his father about.

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know anything about what happened.” She sighed. “My father’s suicide changed everything for my family.” Diana shifted restlessly on the couch. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

  Why? he wanted to protest. This is the thing keeping you away from me. “Diana.” He said her name so softly that it was barely audible beneath the sound of thunder and slap of tree limbs against the house, the relentless rain on the roof. “I am not my father.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I wish that was enough.”

  “Only you can determine that it’s enough. I’m only myself. A man who wants a beautiful woman.”

  He heard the breath leave her throat in a long, trembling sigh. “Marcus. I think that…” But she didn’t let him know what she thought.

  He told himself that he just meant to walk to the couch and sit down next to her. Talk. Ask her to see him as more than his father’s son. But at the couch, his good intentions evaporated. She looked up at him, her eyes wide and dark. Watchful. Her hands clutched the blanket around her shoulders, covering every part of her except her kissable throat, her face, that mouth he had remembered a thousand times.

  “Damn…”

  He dropped to his knees before her and she gasped softly. A wondrous and sensual sound in the half-dark. He cupped her feet in his hands. They were cold. He warmed them, massaging the smooth skin, the high arches, until her skin burned nearly as hot as his. Then his hands moved higher. To her calves, caressing, a leisurely journey to her knees, her thighs, parting the blanket as he went. He skimmed his hands over her thighs, her hips, her sides. The blanket fell completely away. Her hands fluttered down to rest on the couch on either side of her thighs.

  He moved to her arms, caressing the delicately muscled biceps, her shoulders, her neck where his hand brushed the heavy wetness of her hair. She did not move. Only breathed beneath his exploring hands. He felt her breath deepen. The heat rise under her skin. But she still did not move. He was the one who acted, parting her thighs to slip between them, to cup the back of her neck in his palm.

  “I am only me,” Marcus said, feeling the words reverberate through his entire body.

  Then he kissed her.

  She greeted his lips with her own. A soft salutation. Once. Twice. Then a third time. Marcus felt a tremor move through him, echoes of the same powerful feeling that had overtaken him the first time they had kissed. Back then, he had wanted to ravish her mouth, to roughly share with her the lust she had awakened in him. But now, it was different. Gentler. Deeper. A hard sweetness rising in him, only for her.

  Diana held herself still as they kissed. She only sighed into his mouth, caressing his tongue with the gentle movement of her own. But she did not touch him. She did nothing. It felt like she was waiting. Not for him, but for her body’s permission.

  Their mouths opened together. She tasted like carrots. And of the storm. She moaned and slid her arms around his neck, parted her thighs wider to receive him. Her breasts pressed against his chest, firm and inciting. But he only continued to touch her neck, lightly caressing the soft skin at the top of her spine.

  Then she finally touched him. Pressed her hot palms against his chest. For a moment, he thought she meant to push him away, and he prepared himself for it, to burn in his unfulfilled desire and disappointment.

  But she caressed him instead, touched the muscled hardness of his chest as a low cry of surrender spilled from her lips. Her touch destroyed his restraint. The desire jerked fiercely in him. Bucked hard. A leashed horse suddenly aware of its potential for freedom. His hand slid from her neck, down to her shoulders, then her back, unsnapping her bra.

  He was hard as a steel pike. Throbbing urgently to take her. To give to her. To share with her.

  Marcus tugged her down from the couch to the floor. She came to him with a low and lusty sigh, climbing onto him while his back hit the cool tile. She grasped the edges of his briefs, tugged them down his thighs. A hard shiver moved through him. His hands clenched on her hips, clasped her buttocks. And they kissed. Slow and gentle, the wildness in her growing to match his. Marcus could feel it. He held his own wild horse in check, waiting for the perfect moment to release it. She reached down and touched him. Clasped his hardness in her hot hands. The wild horse broke free.

  He surged up against her, hungry for their joining. She jerked with his movements but held on, her delicate fingers exploring him. Marcus hissed. Then she blinked, long lashes quivering against her cheeks. She pulled off her panties.

  “Do you have anything?” She asked the urgent question, her hand still hot around him, the breath coming quickly past her parted lips. He reached backward for his pants he had dropped nearby on the floor and pulled out his wallet and then a condom.

  Diana took it and opened the packet with a whisper of the foil, her body a sensual darkness over him. He hissed in reaction as she slowly rolled the latex onto his hardness, her hands tender yet urgent. His neck stretched back. His belly flexed as she tended to him.

  “You’re beautiful,” she gasped.

  She lifted her heat over him, grasped him in her soft, hot hands. Through his
sensitive flesh, he felt her pulse and his pulse thudding together. The tremor in her fingers as she held him. Then guided him in a slow agony of pleasure inside her.

  “Christ!”

  Heat. A vicious bliss. His breath stuttering.

  Above him, she was a poem in the darkness. Her hair in loosened wet curls moving around her face. Shadows falling between her shoulders and jaw. Dark-tipped breasts, flat belly. The writhing mystery of her sleek body on top of him, around him. Her nails dug into his chest. Her neck arched back. The pleasure stretched between them like fine toffee, a sweet lasso that anchored him to the floor as she rode him. Her soft moans. The shadows moving over her breasts, kissing their delicate weight.

  He reached between them. She gasped and spasmed around him as his fingers circled the hard bud of her desire, tightening the circles on her intimate flesh, pressing harder. Her sex clenched around him again, stoking his bliss.

  Marcus swallowed thickly as the pleasure battered him, as she twisted, wildly abandoned and beautiful, on top of him. The room was thick with the sounds of their passion. Her breath. His breath. The storm howling beyond the doors. The slap of the tree branches against the house, the fury of their bodies moving in rhythm. Together, they were darkness and heat. Sweat and moans. Sighs and hisses.

  Sensation whipped through his body, drew his spine tight along the floor, flung his hips up to meet hers as he was completely unmoored, unable to keep still any longer. He gripped her hips to thrust up inside her in frantic, hungry bursts.

  His name fell from her lips in a low chant.

  “Marcus. Marcus! Marcus…”

  She moaned as her hands flew to her hair, fingers sliding over her sweat-slick face, over her mouth, down her throat, her breasts. The pure sensuality of her beauty shocked a reaction into him. A burst of undiluted lust.

  Lightning flashed again, illuminating her body. Her parted lips. Sweat dripping down her face. Her breasts jerking up and down as she rode him.

  “Oh, God!”

  She jolted on top of him, her tight heat squeezing him even more as she gasped and shuddered, the rhythmic squeeze and release of her sex around him tilting him over the edge of his desire. The lust flashed through him. Completion. Breathless and electric, his body vibrated between hers and the floor as she cried out again and again.

  Diana collapsed on top of him. Chest to chest. Belly to belly. She nuzzled her face into his throat, and her heated breath puffed against his skin.

  The moment lingered into contented silence.

  “That was…unexpected,” she said a long while later, soft wonder in her voice.

  He settled his hands on her back, tracing the sweat along her spine. “The best things are often unexpected.”

  She only breathed softly against his skin, saying nothing. Marcus’s heart knocked in his chest in the aftermath of his desire. He wanted to lift her up, turn her over and feast between her legs, but already, he felt a distance between them.

  Diana lay on top of him, her nails scratching delicately at his chest. But she might as well have been miles away.

  Chapter 10

  Morning. Diana could feel it more than she could see it. She heard the absolute quiet of the building. No AC. No ticks and flickers from the house and its various electronic devices. Only a faint rushing of wind from what she assumed was the broken front door.

  Despite being fully aware of what happened last night—the tree falling, the storm, tumbling into bed with Marcus Stanfield—she felt calm and at peace. She was sore in places that hadn’t been in ages, her body liquid and satisfied as she lay on top of Marcus on the couch. His heart beat steadily beneath her cheek while their legs tangled together in the blankets.

  She shifted. It felt good. The sex with him had been so effortless. He had moved with her like a fantasy of lovemaking she thought she could only realize in dreams, skill and appetite coming together to make her moan his name, claw at his skin, spill over in delirious completion again and again.

  Her entire body grew warm as she remembered the things they had done the night before. How eager she had been to feel him inside her. Still blushing, Diana opened her eyes and turned her head.

  “Good morning,” Marcus murmured. His eyes were a sleepy, dark gold ringed with black. Bedroom eyes.

  She flushed again, looking away. Then she slowly levered herself up from him, carefully untangling their legs, separating the intimate nudity of her body from his. She sat on the edge of the sofa, using her arms to shield her breasts from him.

  But he saw her. He leisurely took in her nakedness, then reached over to the inside edge of the sofa, lifted his hips and grabbed the blanket that had been trapped under them as they slept. He passed it to her with a smile.

  “Thanks.”

  She wrapped the blanket around her body and stood up, looking around the room, trying to spot her clothes. Did she leave them on the chair? In the closet?

  “I love how you look in the morning,” Marcus said from behind her. Without glancing back, she knew he was still laid on the sofa, relaxed as if he didn’t have anything else to do. “It’s a sight I could definitely get used to.” His voice was low and sexy, a seductive early morning drawl. Something that she could get used to.

  “You shouldn’t,” she said. “I—”

  A frantic beeping sound cut off the rest of her words. She jerked her head toward the open door of her office just as the thud of boots and raised voices reached her. Someone was trying to get into the house.

  Diana shot to her feet, clutching the blanket to her chest. She didn’t want anyone to walk in on her and Marcus like this!

  “Someone’s car is out front,” a male voice said. “They might be in the building.”

  “Hello? Anybody in there?” someone else called out.

  She darted a look at Marcus but he was already standing, magnificently naked, and striding toward his clothes on the floor. She noted his muscular back, the notches at the base of his spine, the hard globes of his butt, firm thighs and flexing calves. Diana swallowed hard, struck dumb by the sudden flare of desire for him.

  But she had no time to pay attention to her traitorous body. It had already gotten her into trouble. She turned away from him and ducked into the closet to get her clothes. Marcus was already dressed and walking toward the front door when she emerged from the closet, still barefoot, in her wrinkled blouse and skirt. He disappeared around the corner.

  “We’re here,” he said to someone she could not see. “There are two of us.”

  Rumbling voices transmitted the information Marcus gave, discussing the best way to get them out of the building. Diana crept up behind Marcus as he said something else to the collection of city workers gathered just beyond the fallen tree. It looked even worse than it had last night. The door was broken down by the tree’s branches. Tree limbs had invaded the office, thrust through the glass and wood of the front door.

  The reception area was a mess. A whirlwind of wet and torn paper, dirty water on the floors, pens fallen off the desk, the card holder and cards swimming in the small river running over the tile floors.

  She turned, staring at the damage.

  Damn!

  And their landlord had just renovated the building a few months before. She swallowed her apprehension as Marcus peered through the broken door to the workers sawing away at the tree in a buzz of noise and activity. It was still raining, only a steady but light drizzle compared to the furious storm from the night before.

  “Is everyone in there all right?” Someone in a yellow hard hat shouted the question above the rising and falling voices and shouts from outside, the stomp of boots on the porch, the steady growl of the saw through wood.

  “We’re fine,” Marcus replied. “We just want to get out of here.”

  Suddenly, a crash came from the back of the building. Diana gasped.

  Not another tree falling!

  She spun and ran to the source of the noise in time to see the back door crack in two. Another
blow, and the door completely fell down. A firefighter in full uniform and gear shoved her way into the house.

  The metal door behind her hung open, showing the overcast day. Rain tapped against the stone steps of the small back porch and on the hard hat of a second firefighter stomping up behind their rescuer.

  The first firefighter looked Diana over with an appreciative smile then glanced behind her. His partner did the same. Diana peered over her shoulder to see Marcus approaching. In his suit and buttoned-down shirt, minus the tie she knew was in his jacket pocket, he exuded power and masculinity, his eyes snapping with authority. The second firefighter, a man with copper skin and a smear of dirt across his cheek, smirked at them. His eyes moved from Diana to Marcus with obvious speculation. She dismissed him and focused on his colleague instead.

  “You’re not hurt in any way?” the woman asked.

  “We’re okay,” Diana answered before Marcus could say anything. “Thank you for helping us.”

  “It’s our job, ma’am.” A small smile touched the woman’s otherwise hard mouth. “Come out this way.” She gestured for Diana and Marcus to follow her through the path she had created.

  Diana paused. “Do you know how long it will be until we can come back into the building?”

  “More than likely just a few hours after the power is reconnected,” the woman answered. “Definitely not anytime today, but tomorrow certainly.”

  “Thank you,” Diana said with relief. A day was nothing. She could take care of some work things at home until then.

  “You should go first.” Marcus stood to one side and gestured toward the gaping door and the fresh air that suddenly made Diana realize how claustrophobic the building had become.

  “Just one second.” Diana quickly ran to her office to grab her purse and shoes.

  With her purse over her shoulder and her shoes on her feet, she climbed over the broken pieces of the door and outside into the fresh air. The firefighters helped, allowing her to brace herself on their arms as she climbed over the splintered pieces of wood and the snapped branches, leaves and twigs, and out into the yard. Her feet barely had the chance to touch the ground before Marcus lifted her.