Ain’t Misbehaving

mouth, and then faster than she could draw breath his lips crushed hers. Her lashes fluttered closed, and her fingertips climbed up to his shoulders. Over and over his mouth seared hers, clouding her ability to think.

She tensed, involuntarily, as if her body were suddenly aware it had unleashed a sleeping giant. Mitch wasn’t a man to be led on a string, in bed or out of it, and she suddenly felt as vulnerable as a butterfly. Yes, she’d wanted him to make love to her, but it was very rapidly occurring to her that making love to Mitch was not going to be like any other experience she’d ever had.

In one swift movement, he pulled off her nightgown. On the next stroke down, his hand traced the line from her thigh to her hip with a boldness that inflamed every inch of her flesh. “You thought you needed to trick me into wanting you?” he murmured. “I’ve wanted you from the instant I first laid eyes on you. You really didn’t know that?”

“Mitch-”

“I’ve dreamed of making love to you so many times, Kay. You’re so beautiful…your skin…the feel of you…”

Even in the darkness, she could see the glowing sheen of a fierce desire in his eyes. She watched his eyes even as she felt his hand flowing over her skin, kneading it, intimately curving the shape of her breast in his palm.

“I never held back because I didn’t want you,” he said roughly. “But be very sure this is what you want, Kay, because-”

“I love you, Mitch,” she said simply.

She buried her face in his shoulder, loving the crush of his hair-roughened chest and strong, tense thighs against her. His arousal pressed against her legs, and she felt in some mystical and perfectly irrational way that it belonged to her. His hands roamed over her body, arousing delicious feminine yearnings. She felt small, soft, crushable. The tiniest lick of fear was part of that, a primal emotion, an excitement in anticipation of being possessed by one stronger, larger, infinitely more powerful.

“You’re trembling,” he murmured.

“No.”

“Kay, I would never hurt you.”

“You are not hurting me.” She had to stop this silly trembling. She was a grown woman, well aware of exactly what was to happen. She tried so hard to take the mystery out of it for her students, because making love was a natural need that one should approach responsibly…but when Mitch’s lips closed on her nipple, her spine arched in one long, bewildered shudder. She didn’t feel in the least responsible. In fact, she didn’t give a hoot in hell if the whole world caved in.

“You do like that,” he murmured.

He sounded very pleased. She surged up, sealing her lips on his, letting him know what it felt like to be pressed into the mattress like booty, to have hands roam over him as if he were treasured territory.

“Kay.”

It wasn’t her fault it had gone too far. She was so crazy in love with him she couldn’t think and didn’t care. Desire wasn’t supposed to be like this. Wanting was a nice, pleasant, natural instinct; lovemaking was a delightful expression of affection and caring. Mitch was the one who’d turned it into something else. He was the one who’d made it into a wild, fierce hunger.

His palm slid down, cupping gently over her tender core, and her teeth nipped helplessly at his shoulder. “Mitch. Don’t play.”

“Oh, yes, sweet. We’re definitely going to play,” he murmured. His voice sounded as if it had come out through a long tunnel; he couldn’t help it. Nothing could stop the pounding of his heart. There wasn’t a chance in hell he could pull back, not this time.

His hand glided up, caressing the warm satin of her skin. Slowly, his lips dipped down to the hollow of her throat and planted a kiss that was infinitely loving. He kissed once, and then twice, and then firmly, gravely, reached over her to turn on the light.

She blinked in bewilderment, and an odd shyness. Mitch’s face, above her, held no smile. His eyes met hers with such intensity that she couldn’t possibly have looked away. “You’re more than I ever dreamed of,” he whispered quietly. “I love you, Kay. I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you-but you have to know something before I can make love to you. Feel this…”

He took her palm and pressed it to his chest. She’d felt the scar before. His whole torso was covered with rough, springy hair, but there was that single smooth line. And it interested her not at all. She was concentrating on the love in his haunted, very dark, very brown, very liquid eyes.

“I caught a simple strep infection when I was fifteen,” he said in a low voice. “Only it didn’t prove quite so simple. It affected a valve in my heart. Repairing heart valves isn’t a big thing these days, and it wasn’t then, but a body can be rather fussy about what kind of foreign object it will accept. Mine was more than fussy. I tried three times.”

She swallowed, aching for him. “What you must have gone through. Dammit, why didn’t you just tell me?” She saw the moisture on his brow and fiercely brushed it away. “Mitch, didn’t you think I’d care?”

“You should have cared,” he said gruffly. His fingers combed back her hair with total tenderness, yet his body was tense as it hadn’t been moments before. “It wasn’t that many years ago that even new valves didn’t guarantee a normal…life expectancy. You have a right to know that. And to know that technology has changed for the better, Kay. Maybe I can’t give you a written guarantee that I’ll live to be eighty, but I can promise you that I have every reasonable hope…”

Yes. Her heart exulted in his talk of the future. This was no fly-by-night affair. And how she ached for him, for everything he had suffered through…but Mitch was trying, too darn hard, not to tell her something else. She could sense it in his hoarse voice, in the jammed-up thickness in his throat…

Her heart heard the words he wasn’t saying. She suddenly understood…so much. All that gentlemanly leaving her at the door, all that respect, all that not rushing her into bed…such a fraud. It had been most unfair timing for a man, to be out of commission in the years when most men were sowing their wild oats. Mitch was a virgin. And worried about it. Unable to admit it to her.

Oh, Mitch, she thought tenderly.

But Mitch was still talking about irrelevant details. “I’ll understand,” he whispered, “if you don’t feel… comfortable with that. I should have told you, Kay-”

“I love you,” she said vibrantly, and pressed her lips first to his scar, then trailed up to the hollow of his neck. Suddenly, he was totally still. Did they give out prizes for nervousness?

“I don’t take any drugs at all, not anymore. I don’t want you to think you’d be stuck with some kind of…pill factory. There’s no reason to believe…Kay…”

He wanted to talk. Her so-reticent man all of a sudden wanted to chatter. Kay, smiling in the darkness, felt the utterly delectable pleasure of knowing the man was about to be hers. She’d never before understood that peculiar satisfaction a man got from making love to a virgin; every feminist cell in her body had always scoffed at the myth.

It wasn’t a myth. How infinitely special she felt to be his first. How terribly she wanted it to be right for him. Ever so tenderly, she let her lips trace the line of his scar, then pressed a kiss on each of his male nipples, those tiny orbs buried in a mat of chest hair.

“Kay.”

Subtle as a whisper, her fingertips glided down to his thighs. “The pain you must have gone through, Mitch…”

His voice had the rasp of impatience. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all long over with. But you had the right to know…Kay.”

Her fingers closed on him, and she felt an electric volt shoot through his body, a restless heat suddenly radiate from his muscles. He shifted, pulling her closer to him when she couldn’t possibly be any closer, his lips busy-busy, all over her skin, everywhere he could reach.

“I wish I had been there for you,” she whispered. “I wish I’d been by your side through all of it. Come to me, Mitch…”

He surged over her, his mouth sealed on hers and his arms holding her as if she were unbearably precious. She welcomed the weight of him. She welcomed the huge shudder of need that ached through his body, the glaze of