Tatiana had never been so intimate so quickly with anyone, but she and Cole had been engaged in a pas de deux for nearly a year and after denying the attraction, resisting it, there was an inevitability to being here with him akin to the sun rising every morning.
“Appetizer for two,” she murmured and licked the length of his impressive erection. He groaned against her wet folds and pleasure radiated through her.
She’d thought she was hot before, now she was gripped by a fever of want. He lapped at her while she took him in her mouth and lavished attention on his cock.
“Baby, if we don’t stop now I’m never going to make it to the main course.”
She was nearly mindless with want. She rolled onto her back and Cole rolled off the bed. He stood by the edge of the mattress. He was big and aroused and looked at her with a mixture of pure lust, adoration and possessiveness that intensified the ache between her thighs. She quivered with the need to feel his hard length inside her.
She eyed his jutting penis with a reciprocal measure of admiring lust. “I know exactly what I want for a main course.”
Cole laughed, low and wicked. He grasped her behind her knees and dragged her across the bed until her bottom was even with the edge of the mattress. Oh, baby. He hooked his arms beneath her knees and entered her in one smooth, long stroke. She cried out and rose up to take him as deep and hard as possible.
Buried to the hilt, he paused, “You don’t know how many times I’ve fantasized about you. You’re even hotter than I thought.”
Talk about the right thing to say. She clenched her muscles around him, lifting her bottom, nudging him even deeper. “I’ve had a few fantasies of my own about you, but they never felt this good.”
He set a pace of hard and fast then slow and gentle, bringing her close to an orgasm and then backing off until she was writhing frantically. His jaw was clenched with the effort not to come too quickly.
“Please…” She sank her nails into the bulge of his biceps.
“Dessert…together.”
Tremors started at her core, from somewhere deep inside her soul, something she’d never offered to any other man, and rolled through her until she was too much for herself. She screamed her release as Cole exploded inside her.
“Thank you for the cookies.” Cole’s warm breath stirred the hair at her temple.
Tatiana didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Cole had returned from a quick bathroom trip and had stretched out on the bed, pulling her on top of him…was it two minutes ago? Five?A lifetime? She was still sprawled on top of him, boneless with satisfaction. She smiled against his warm, naked, just-the-right-amount-of-hair-on-it chest and murmured, “What cookies?”
“The almond cookies that I smelled when I came into your house earlier.The ones sitting in the canister on your counter.”
“Oh, those.” She rolled off him with a grin and pulled the sheet up over them both. “I didn’t think you noticed.”
“You’re cute in that pink robe, but I didn’t miss the food.”
She smiled. She was so not cute-especially in that robe, but apparently cute was in the eye of the blinded-by-lust beholder. “Did you know when you opened them?”
“No. With the bib and the spoon I had sort of pegged you. But the cookies were too nice. I thought it must be someone else.” She threw a pillow and hit him in the head. He laughed and pinned her to the bed. “You’re never nice to me.”
She bit him on the shoulder. “Because I don’t like you.” She loved him. For better or for worse. For whatever he was or wasn’t, she loved him.
“You liked me well enough a few minutes ago.”
“I wouldn’t say actively liked. More along the lines of tolerated.”
“If you screamed that loud when you were merely tolerating me, I’m not sure my ears could stand it if you actually liked me.”
“Just imagine how deaf you’d be if I was idiot-brained enough to fancy that I loved you.”
He traced the line of her bare shoulder, his touch sending tingles through her. “Umm.Terrifying. All these years I thought I could make the decision not to care about people, not to let them close to my heart. And then you came along and I found out free choice doesn’t exist when it comes to love. The only control we have over it is what we decide to do about it.”
“Excuse me, but did you just bumble your way around a declaration of love?”
“Ladies first. Did you just snark your way through an admission of being idiot-brained?”
“I think I may have.”
“Coward.”
“I am not a coward. Ducking out of work and ditching dinner wasn’t cowardice, it was an inept attempt at self-preservation. Okay, I have a feeling you’re going to shamelessly use this against me, but, yes, I do love you. Satisfied?”
“I’m getting there.” She suddenly saw what made much more sense than where she’d been going all along. Cole obviously wasn’t on the best terms with this family. He spent Christmas with his sister but not his father or his mother. He’d worked at Connoisseur for almost a year, and never in that time had she heard of his father revisiting Mr. Creighton. “Your father didn’t get you the job at Connoisseur, did he?”
He shifted to his back, one arm beneath his head, seemingly at ease except for his wary eyes. “What makes you say that? And what difference does it make?”
“All this time I thought you’d just waltzed into a job the rest of us had to work our butts off to get.”
“Yours came back. And very nicely, if I do say so.”
“Oh, no, you’re not going to sidetrack me. Your father didn’t get you the job, but he was there and he did meet with Mr. Creighton.” She considered the type of man who would let his new wife-or, as was apparently the case, wives-allow his children to feel unwanted. “He didn’t want you to have this job, did he? That’s why he met with Mr. Creighton-to try to keep you from getting the job-isn’t it?”
He sighed. “No, he didn’t want me to have the job. And, yes, he’d told me if I insisted on working in publishing, it could at least be for a publication that he thought worthy. He had connections and he’d make sure I had a position with the Wall Street Journal or a job as a foreign correspondent if I wanted the travel aspect. I didn’t want to work for the Journal. So he paid Douglas Creighton a visit to try to dissuade him from hiring me. Luckily Creighton thinks every man succeeds or fails on his own merit.”
“You let us all think…”
“No. You thought what you wanted to think.”
“But you could’ve told us…”
“No. I learned a long time ago, people either know me and like me for who I am or they don’t.”
“Your stepmothers?”
“Yep. And stepfathers.”
She recalled his attitude toward Parker Longrehn. He wouldn’t give Parker the satisfaction of knowing he could affect his life. There were many more layers to laid-back, devil-may-care Cole Mitchell than she’d ever suspected. Or maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe she’d suspected it but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. Maybe she’d hidden behind resenting his job because it had kept her safe from the attraction she’d felt from their first encounter. If she didn’t like him, then she couldn’t possibly fall in love with him, right?
Except she had.
“I would insist on dragging you along to Connie’s house, except her munchkin has the chicken pox. Since we seem to be stuck with one another for Christmas, why don’t we go to Corfu?”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s there and we can. I want to go there with you. Christmas in Corfu has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”
“But…” She couldn’t come up with the rest, she just knew it didn’t feel right. “I hadn’t planned to go to Corfu.”