don’t,” he answered the question. He finished his toast and swallowed the rest of his coffee. “Want a second cup?”
“Yes. I’ll get it.” She got up, but as she went past him, his lean hand shot out and caught her wrist.
“No, you won’t,” he murmured dryly, and jerked.
She fell across his lap, gasping, one slender hand coming into sudden, shocking contact with all that bare chest. She couldn’t even protest. Her gaze fell to where her hand was half-buried. She didn’t want him to see how vulnerable she was, but it took too much work to try and hide her blatant interest.
He pressed her hand flat against him, looking at the small ovals of her nails without polish. She had nice hands, very slender and graceful. “Stop hiding from me.” He tilted her face to his so that he could see all the doubts and nervousness. His black eyes were kind for all the darkness growing in them. “This is as new for me as it is for you, so don’t think I’m going to make fun of the way you’re looking at me. I’d be staring just as hard at you if your shirt was off.”
Her lips parted. “Really?”
“Really.” He moved her hand against the thick hair and hard, warm muscle beneath it, watching the movement, feeling its instant effect on him. He laughed, the sound deep and low and pleasant in the early morning stillness. He looked up to see an arrested fascination in her eyes. “I thought I was immune. Feel.” He put her hand over his heart and let her feel its hard, heavy beat.
“I guess none of us are…immune, that is,” she whispered.
“Is yours beating that hard?” he asked softly and, still holding her gaze, his lean hand pressed just under the soft breast. But his other arm came up at the same time, arching her, and he eased her down into the crook of it while his long fingers spread. The tips of them just touched the soft underswell of her breast, bare under the jersey, and she couldn’t breathe. She began to tremble and her eyes darkened to old silver, staring up into his black ones.
“Tate,” she whispered huskily, her breath catching.
“I suppose there are rules about this sort of thing,” he said tautly, holding her eyes as his fingertips traced the swell of her breast. “Back in the Dark Ages when I was a boy, nice girls would slap a man for what I’m trying to do to you.”
“I’m a widow, not a girl,” she breathed shakily. “And I…like…what you’re doing to me.”
“You aren’t supposed to tell me that, Maggie,” he whispered as his head bent toward her. He brushed his lips over hers once, twice, and then they settled on her mouth. His hand searched for the hem of the jersey, found it and went up until it found a warm, soft mound with a hard tip that arched into his palm even as she shuddered with rapt sensation.
She moaned under his mouth. He tasted her, felt her hunger, drowned in her yielding softness.
When she tensed again, without taking his mouth from hers, he pushed the jersey out of the way and pulled her against his bare chest. She tensed, gasping as her breasts melted into the thick hair and warm muscle of him. His head lifted, because he wanted to see her face.
His dark eyes narrowed. She looked…wild. Abandoned. Her lips were swollen, her eyes half-closed, misty and faintly savage all at once. She was flushed and her body arched toward his.
His eyes went down to her breasts, and he looked at the contrasts between what he could see of her pink and mauve flesh and his hair-matted darkly tanned chest. His arm tightened, but he lifted a little away, because it had been years since he’d seen a woman without clothes, and he wanted to look at Maggie’s soft breasts.
She saw him visibly start at his first real sight of her that way. His face hardened, his eyes began to glitter. He frowned slightly, looking intently at her body. As if fascinated, one lean, dark-fingered hand came up to touch the round contour with its blatant hardness, and she gasped at that
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