He turned in his seat and unfastened her seat belt and then his, leaning back as one dark hand went out to tease the hair at her throat lazily. “Do you need one?” he laughed softly.
She felt her body tingle. All evening it had been a war of nerves with him, from the way he’d played with her hand in the theater to the way he’d looked at her in the park and that almost-kiss as he’d helped her into the Jeep to come home. Now she was at fever pitch, and she wanted his mouth more than she’d ever imagined she could want anything.
“No, I...don’t think so,” she said unsteadily. Her eyes fell to his mouth hungrily.
He saw that rapt stare and his heart jumped. She was easy to read for a sophisticated woman. Perhaps it was the first time she’d reacted so strongly to a prospective lover, and that made him proud. It was one thing to turn a virgin’s head, but quite another to make an experienced woman nervous and unsure of herself.
His fingers moved to her cheek and traced it lightly and then settled at her jaw while his thumb dragged across her soft mouth in a savagely arousing motion.
She actually gasped, her eyes widening as they met his in the dim light from the dash.
“You don’t wear much makeup, do you?” he asked deeply. The feel of her mouth was exciting to him. His thumb rubbed more insistently at her lips, parting them against the pearly white of her teeth. “I’m glad. I don’t like layers of lipstick on a woman’s mouth when I kiss it.”
She felt hot all over. Winnie had warned her about Gene Nelson’s expertise and she hadn’t understood. Now, suddenly, she began to. She wanted to pull his fingers away from her mouth, she wanted to pull them closer, she wanted to run!
He saw and felt that reaction, registering it with a little curiosity and a lot of pride. He smiled softly as he caught a handful of her long hair with his other hand and pulled her face under his with easy mastery.
“Bite me,” he breathed as his mouth dragged against hers in brief, arousing kisses. She tasted mint and coffee and ice cream and pure man as he played on her attraction to him in the smouldering silence that followed. She couldn’t breathe properly. Her fingers bit into his broad shoulders, feeling the steely tautness of the warm muscle as his teeth nibbled at her lower lip.
He lifted his head a fraction and looked into her dazed hazel eyes, his own pale green ones bright with arousal. “Bite me,” he repeated gruffly, his fingers contracting in her hair to force her face back up to his. “I like it rough,” he breathed into her open mouth. “Don’t you?”
She didn’t know how she liked it or what he expected of her. She could barely think at all and the words didn’t really register. She moved closer, not needing the impetus of his strong hand in her hair to force the movement. She felt him stiffen a little as she slid her arms around his neck with a helpless moan and pushed her mouth hard against his.
The kiss was sweet and heady. His lips parted hungrily and he pressed her head back into his shoulder with the sheer force of his ardor. He made a sound deep in his throat. The taste of her was making him drunk. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like this in a woman’s arms. Her soft, eager response tested his control to the limits. For an experienced woman, she was purely lacking in seductive skills, unless this rapt submission to his mouth was some kind of feminine tactic.
At any rate, he was too involved to care. He shifted her, bringing her across his hard thighs to lie in his arms while his mouth began to invade hers.
She struggled faintly and he drew away, his breath shuddering out against her moist, swollen lips.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice almost betraying him with its deep, drowsy huskiness.
She swallowed, trembling at the feel of his hard thighs under her. Something had happened to him while they were kissing, something masculine that was totally out of her experience, and she was shy and a little frightened.
When she tried to shift away, he understood, but he only smiled mockingly. “Is this a problem?” he murmured, one steely hand pressing at the base of her spine to hold her against his raging arousal.
She gasped and stiffened in his arms.
“Too much too soon, Allison?” he murmured, his pale green eyes narrowing as they met hers. “At any rate, I can’t help it.”
“Please,” she said, flustered, and tried again to move away. He held her, firmly but gently. She knew she probably sounded like an outraged virgin—but that was what she was.
“You’re twenty-five,” he said solemnly. “Too old for little-girl games.” His hand contracted again, deliberately, and he watched her face flush, her eyes widen. Odd, that reaction, because it actually seemed genuine. Not that it could be. He refused to believe that.
“Gene,” she protested breathlessly, because incredibly the evidence of his need kindled something comparable in her. She’d never felt that knotting in her lower belly, the rush of warmth, the weak trembling that made her helpless.
He bent toward her, his lips poised just above hers, tempting them. He whispered something then, something so explicit and softly threatening that she actually gasped. When her lips parted, his moved sensuously between them, his tongue probing tenderly past her teeth as if to emphasize what he’d just said to her.
The combination of seductive whisper and equally seductive action tore a shocked moan from her throat. What he was doing to her mouth was...outrageous! Crude, and suggestive and...
She shivered. Her eyes opened to find him watching her while his tongue probed and withdrew in a soft, gentle, subtly arousing rhythm that she
