Susan Carlisle - One Summer At The Lake

Her fingers dug into the muscles of his shoulders, her legs tightening around his waist as she fought to get closer to him, her strength fuelled by the primal desire to be joined with him…be one.

Joined with her that way still, he walked blindly towards the bed.

Zoe felt as if she were falling—and then she was really falling and he was falling on top of her. A pillow beneath her head, she barely noticed the weight of his body on top of her until he levered himself off.

Panting, her eyes as dark as midnight, she gave a small cry of protest, then she saw what he was doing. Kneeling over her, Isandro was shrugging off his robe.

‘Oh, my God!’

He was long and lean, his skin gleaming like burnished gold. Not an ounce of excess flesh blurred the perfect lines of his powerful body. Every bone and sinew of him was perfect, like a bronzed statue. A rampantly, fully aroused bronzed statue.

She bit down hard on her full lower lip as heat washed her skin with a warm rosy flush. Her initial shock at the earthy image was replaced by a stomach-clenching, incapacitating, lustful longing that closed down every logic circuit in her brain.

His grin was fierce and his laughter strained as he husked, ‘If you look at me like that, querida , this thing is going to be over before it has begun.’

‘I want you,’ she whispered, pulling herself up onto her knees. ‘So badly…’ She reached out and touched him, unable to believe her daring as she curled her fingers around the shaft of his erection. Silky smooth and rock hard, he pulsed hotly against her small hand. ‘You feel—’ her breasts quivered as she gave a fractured sigh and continued to stare, fascinated, at him ‘—incredible.’

A hiss left his lips as he caught her wrist.

‘Too much,’ he muttered, pressing her body back onto the bed before he joined her. Arranging his long lean length beside her, he kissed her, a kiss full of passion and promise that made words redundant. Lifting his head, he stroked her face and held her eyes as he reached for the tie on her robe.

The embarrassment she had anticipated did not materialise but the voluptuous pleasure did as he whispered fiercely, ‘You are exquisite, flawless.’

His searing gaze swept upwards slowly, greedily drinking her in as it took in every detail from her narrow feet and ankles, the long elegant length of her legs, and over her belly. Then finally to her lovely, pertly pointed breasts.

His hand came to cover one perfect soft mound. Her skin was flawless. He could smell the perfume of the soap on her skin, and the faint but distinctive delicate, musky scent of her arousal made his vision mist red.

As he massaged the smooth skin, his touch firm but sensitive, running his thumb with slow deliberate strokes across the sensitised peaks, Zoe gasped and muttered his name. Her head thrashed wildly back and forth on the pillow. The pleasure was so intense—beyond words, she clenched her hands into fists at her sides as she felt herself losing her struggle to stay in control.

Then his mouth was on her breasts, his hands on her body, touching her awakening senses. With a soft sigh of surrender, she stopped trying and gave herself up to the desire flowing like warm wine through her veins. She almost felt like laughing with the sense of release. Who knew that losing control, feeling enough trust to give it over to someone else, could feel like this?

She reached for him, her fingers tangling in his dark hair, holding him against her as she stroked the skin of his muscled shoulders. The raw power in him, the dramatic contrasts of his hard angularity and her own softness, her roundness, was more exciting than she could have dreamed possible.

Isandro lifted his head and smiled at her with his glorious eyes, a dark fierce smile filled with promise, then he kissed her belly, drawing a hoarse gasp from Zoe, and ran his tongue over the quivering skin, drawing a line that terminated just above the apex of her thighs.

At the first touch of his hands between her legs need exploded through her. She loosed a keening cry as her hips lifted off the bed. Her entire body ached and trembled with desire; her mouth opened but she had no words, just his name, which she said over and over. And when she stopped he lifted his head and said, ‘Again, say it again.’

She did, and at the same time opened her legs in mute invitation, inviting skilful touch of his fingers over the slick, moist, swollen folds of her femininity, and the tight, sensitive nub they protected.

The first skin-to-skin contact was electric. Then, as her arched spine made contact with the bed and he pressed down on top of her, it was totally, utterly blissful, a cocktail of intoxicating physical sensations that made her senses spiral and spin. Bright lights exploded behind her eyelids as she closed her eyes.

Her hips moved in a grinding motion as she rubbed herself against his erection as it dug into her thigh, then her soft belly. The pressure building inside her made her thrash around, bite his neck as she dragged her fingers down his back, clutching at the firm contours of his tight, muscular buttocks.

Unable to bear the erotic friction of his erection against her any longer, she grabbed his hair, drawing his face to hers, and kissing him hard, whispered, ‘Please!’

With a savage smile he held her eyes as he drove deep into her body. The breath left her in a shocked gasp that was drowned out by his deep growl of pleasure. Her heart racing, her eyes closed tight, she concentrated on the intense pleasure of each slow, measured movement of his hips as he moved inside her body. There was layer after layer of sensations that she had never imagined she could feel.

Each thrust built the erotic pleasure that she encouraged with each sinuous, sensuous grind of her hips responding to age-old instincts she was delighted to discover.

When the climax hit her, she was unprepared for the strength of the expanding wave of pleasure and her eyes flew wide with shock.

‘Perfect, just go with it, my clever, beautiful…’ His eyes held her while she rode the wave. He waited until she reached the vortex of the storm before he allowed himself to find his own release and thrust one final time into her.

When Zoe floated back to earth, she was curled up in his arms, her head resting against his thudding heart, her sweat-slick limbs tangled with his.

‘Well, I never saw that one coming. I remember hearing you say you did not approve of casual sex but I never equated that with…Was there a bad experience that put you off sex I should have known about?’

It seemed the only explanation for how a woman as sexy and passionate as Zoe Grace could be a virgin. And her surrender had been total; she had held nothing back. He had sensed the passion beneath the surface, but what he had released had startled and delighted him almost as much as the discovery she was a virgin.

‘No bad experience, I just…I’ve moved around a lot and never got time to make any sort of lasting relationship. Not that this is lasting…obviously.’ There was a short awkward pause. Dear God, it was a strange world when she was embarrassed to admit that, a secret romantic, she had always felt uneasy about casual sex.

‘You must have had boyfriends.’

‘Of course I have—I’m not a freak. I had boyfriends but they all seemed to suggest I was not very…good at that sort of stuff.’ Her last date had culminated in a nasty little scene when the man who invited her to dinner had accused her of being a tease when she could not agree that the correct payment for a dinner was a make-out session in the back seat of a car.

He gave a throaty laugh of incredulity. ‘I think you have been keeping the wrong company.’

She twisted in his arms and flipped onto her stomach, resting her chin on her elbows and affording him an excellent view of her breasts. ‘And you’re the right company?’ she challenged.