Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [63]
Worried about putting too much strain on her, he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her, keeping his body tightly joined with hers. Lowering her to the thick carpet in front of the fireplace, he followed her down.
“Have I told you I hadn’t had a lot of experience with…this…before?”
He froze for a second, wondering if she was saying she’d been a virgin. It seemed impossible in this day and age, especially with a woman as sexy as Lottie.
She apparently saw his shock because, laughing softly and cupping his face, she continued. “I mean, I’ve never done a lot beyond the basics. So I just never knew—I didn’t realize—in spite of reading sexy books or watching dirty movies.”
One eyebrow shooting up, he gave her a look of surprise. “Dirty movies?”
“Don’t get so excited, I don’t have them with me.”
Sliding deep, he moaned at her heat, the tightness of her wet body. “We don’t need them.”
She shook her head. “Definitely not. But my point was, I’ve never known how wonderful it could really be.” Kissing him sweetly on the mouth, she murmured, “So thank you.”
Thank you. With the tension building as he thrust hard, then tormented her with shallow little strokes, he almost started to laugh. The woman was thanking him during sex.
He’d been thanked afterward. But never during the, uh, heat of the moment.
“You’re one of a kind, Lottie Santori,” he said as he kissed her face, her neck, her throat.
Then he wasn’t capable of saying anything because the familiar heated sensations had begun rocking his body hard. Everything centered low, deep inside him, and Lottie’s shallow gasps of delight told him she was coming along with him.
Finally, groaning as every last bit of physical pleasure was wrung from him, he buried his face in her hair, whispered her name, and wondered how on earth he was ever going to let her go.
11
Lottie
I DIDN’T KNOW it was possible to be so happy and yet so worried at the same time.
Physically, of course, I was completely and totally immersed in sensual fulfillment. The way Simon made love to me was like something out of a fantasy, a woman’s erotic journal that she never expected to show to anyone much less actually experience in reality.
He gave me everything I’d ever dreamed of having physically. And since he’d opened up to me about what had really happened to him, I felt much closer to him emotionally.
One thing was sure—knowing what he’d been through had only deepened my feelings for the man. I wanted to crush anyone who hurt him, to ease away his scars and his bad memories and make his life go back to the way it had been before such ugliness had intruded into it.
I also wanted the world to see him the way I saw him—as an innocent, brave man forced to do something he personally found repulsive in order to stay alive.
He wasn’t a killer. Certainly not a murderer, like those hateful old people from the town below seemed to think.
I wanted them to know the real him so much that I decided I was going to get him to go down to Trouble and socialize with some of its residents. Of course, the moment I’d mentioned the two of us going to the Halloween party at the fire hall tomorrow night, he’d laughed so hard I almost smacked him. He’d never even answered, just continued to chuckle as he walked out of the room, shaking his head. Like I’d made a big fat joke.
“You are going to that party, buddy,” I whispered Friday afternoon as I sat in the basement, looking through his uncle’s papers. I wasn’t finished in the attic, but something had been bugging me. I couldn’t even say what it was, but I knew there was something I’d missed, or overlooked, about the more recent activities at Seaton House.
Damned if I could figure it out, though. I’d been down here for hours and so far hadn’t discovered a thing.
Maybe it was because my head wasn’t in the game. I couldn’t keep focused on my work because my overactive, vivid imagination—remember it?—kept replaying Simon’s awful experience in my brain.
I am not a bloodthirsty person, and I generally don’t believe in the concept of an eye for