The Daddy Deal. Kathleen O'Brien

door, the door to her bedroom, and somehow she knew this silent hesitation would be his last question. Her heart pounding in her throat, she minutely nodded her head, trying not to think of the implications of that tiny movement. She felt his pectoral muscles shift under her cheek as he shouldered the door open with the smooth assurance of a man who didn’t give a damn for implications.

      The room smelled of roses as it always did—she kept cut blooms in a vase by her bed. But never before had the fragrance seemed so heavy, red and sensual. Still without speaking, he laid her on the cool satin tufts of her quilted bedspread, and she could feel herself sinking, sinking endlessly into its perfumed softness. Opening her eyes, she focused on the dark, featureless silhouette of his head, clutching the edges of his jacket in trembling fingers, afraid that she might lose him in this slow, bottomless descent.

      Kneeling in front of her, he kissed her again, and again and again, his mouth moving on hers with infinite variety—soft, then harder, angling from corner to corner, then coming full center, feathering lightly, then plundering deeply. It was, in some wonderful way, like talking—he was telling her things she’d never guessed, promising her things she’d always wanted. But it was better than words because she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to struggle to find the right reply. She could simply give herself over to feeling. It was so beautifully simple. She opened her lips and met his urgent questions with equally primal answers.

      When he lifted her, reaching beneath her shoulders to slide open the zipper of her dress, that seemed simple, too. She nuzzled the hollow of his shoulder, kissing the pulse that beat there, and then lay back obediently as he slipped the cool silk down her arms, dragging a trail of goose bumps along her skin. When she was free, he touched her naked breasts with his lips, and she moaned softly, a low, quavering sound that purled through the darkness like the ripple of a harp.

      He suckled her, the act so intimate, so powerful that she cried out at the piercing beauty of it and pressed his head to her with trembling fingers, needing more, begging for more.

      “Oh, yes,” she whispered as he took her deeper. It felt so miraculously natural, his teeth grazing her nipple, his quick breath warm against her breast, his hair a silken tickle against her skin. He seemed to pull some mysterious female essence from her soul.

      Strangely, she felt no shame, though it had been such a long, frozen time since any man had touched her. Ten years... And it hadn’t been a man, not back then. It had been a boy. A sweet boy, who would have liked to please her, who had tried for long, awkward minutes to coax out of her untutored body even a hint of this melting pleasure.

      And she had been only a girl, a lonely, ignorant girl. Working so hard, tense and straining, wanting to make it easy for him, knowing there should be more but unable to find the key that would unlock the magic. She thought she would cry now, thinking of that girl who had never felt like this.

      It was so sublimely different here, in this swirling darkness that smelled of her bedside roses, with this sensual man whose presence in her bedroom was so inexplicably right. No effort was needed, no clumsy straining. It was as if she were floating on some hot, bucking current, swept forcefully along toward a final, shattering perfection that waited just beyond the darkness. Taylor’s mouth was everywhere, rising to claim her tingling lips again, then back down to her swollen, aching breasts, feathering kisses along the path of sensitive skin between. And his hands, his hands...