The Little Shop of Afternoon Delights: 6 Book Romance Collection. Zara Stoneley
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her lungs escaped with that one word.
New York City was a magic carpet of light below. A gazillion twinkling pinpricks spread all around. A saxophone was playing a haunting melody, evocative, beautiful. The scarf unknotted, Alex placed the rainbow silk over her shoulders. He waited in silence while she took in the awesomeness of Manhattan by night from the top of the Empire State Building. She barely noticed the other people: dark figures, milling, chatting, laughing, looking.
Seemingly blasé about being seen, or worse, photographed, Alex turned Maggie to face him. Their eyes locked. He gave her tingles, hands gently hovering on the layer of silk between his skin and hers. A cool waft of air made the scarf flutter, rippling the kaleidoscope colors. His fingers tightened on her shoulders. She sucked in a breath. He brought her close and her heart beat faster. One arm slipped from her shoulders to circle her waist and gather her against his body. Instantly fragile, his hold turned her bones to jelly and filled her with contrary, demanding need at the same time. Alex’s magnetism rocked her world. He mesmerized her.
Tortured, hesitant, she tensed as he lowered his head, his mouth so close. Right then she crumbled, spinning like a meteorite into blissful, wanton, urgent submission. Her lips parted, dead set on a collision course with his kiss. He angled his head and his mouth took possession of hers, gentle and determined, deepening the kiss, plundering, tasting, teasing her into flames of desire. Heavenly heat swirled at her core. She wanted him. Badly. Fiery pleasure swept through her. She luxuriated in the strength of his arms, his tight hold, the warmth of his breath on her neck. She practically inhaled him, craved his masculinity with fierce need.
His mouth was divine. It was a never-ending champagne cocktail of a kiss. Long. Lovely. A moment suspended in time. He drew away slowly, leaving them both reeling, drugged on the inevitability of too-long ignored potential.
No two ways about it. Alex Wells had an intangible power over her. And she knew one certain thing. She wanted him more than anything she’d ever wanted. She needed to touch him, hold him, feel him inside her.
She searched the dark for something to fix on, picking out splashes of neon – green, red, blue and the Brooklyn Bridge – a string of light over the black East River. Sounds rose up out of the night, a foghorn, the wail of a police car’s siren. Thousands of feet up in the sky butterflies turned somersaults in Maggie’s stomach.
“Let’s get out of here.” Urgency had turned Alex’s rumbling, voice hoarse.
Anticipation with the weight of pure lead hung in the air around them. Alex summoned his driver. They descended in the elevator, packed in with other people whose presence heightened their impatience to be alone together. They went straight to the waiting limo and slipped into its interior of soft, smooth leather.
In silent expectation, primed, as if on a pre-determined path, they sat apart from each other in the dark. There wasn’t a whisper of a touch between them. Even so, they both knew exactly where they were headed.
Maggie trembled. Impatient desire for Alex held her in thrall. She couldn’t regain control even if she wanted to. A tide of emotion crashed through her. The sexual energy that blazed between them amounted to unfinished business. An ending, not a beginning, for one night only; it had no future.
There was only one sure-fire way she could do this and survive. She wouldn’t make love to Alex. She’d have sex with Jago. If she pretended that Alex was his vampire character, if she could fabricate the perfect fantasy in her mind, there was a chance that she could revel in her one-night stand and still walk away emotionally unscathed. Falling in love was out of the question. She’d been here before with this man. He didn’t do “lasting”. This time she needed to say goodbye without being doomed to be hooked on the “what if” factor of Alex Wells for the rest of her days.
The limo moved slowly along through the New York streets. Inside Maggie and Alex had slipped into a tinted-glass time warp. There was no need to speak.
He ached with desire. He imagined an invisible line between them – a force field that couldn’t be crossed, preventing him from touching her. The snarl of traffic slowed their progress towards the hotel. The ache consumed him. He’d been suppressing the yearning, ignoring her allure. So much for sticking to the strategy he’d come up with on the plane. He’d blown it when, instead of wishing her luck and waving goodbye, he’d invited her to New York. It was a big fail.
And about to get bigger. He had a deep need to finish what they’d started all that time ago. His barriers were down. Could he be what she needed for longer than one night? Absolutely not. Would she want him to be? No. They’d reached boiling point. Hot love was better than the lasting kind.
He sat with his back pressed hard against the leather of the seat and told himself to cool it. Tempting as it was, he wouldn’t jump her in the back of the limo like an adolescent on testosterone overload. Tonight would be his last chance with Maggie. He intended to savor every moment. Make it last.
He turned and looked at her profile. She was so pretty; the line of her nose, the tilt of her chin, silhouetted in the shadows of the night. No matter how badly he wanted to he couldn’t let himself touch her again, not yet. There were things that needed to be said. He wanted to be sure that they were both on the same page. No strings. Whatever this was – this infuriating electric hell that crackled between them – it would be a one-off. One night in bed together and they’d both get this unfinished thing of theirs out of their systems.
Maggie turned and looked at him, her hazel irises glimmered, green-brown flecked with amber, around bright, dilated pupils, their beauty quixotic. A mischievous smile quirked her lips and suddenly she was in his lap. Her thighs straddling his, she pressed against his erection.
“I want you. Now.”
He choked out a raucous half-laugh, half-groan as she tangled her fingers in his hair, sending delicious spirals of sensation echoing through him. She lowered her head to his, shaking loose her hair, letting it fall like a curtain around their faces. Her lips, plump and soft, found his, probing, teasing, until he kissed her back, deep and hard, sinking his tongue into her mouth. He slid his hands up and down her silken back.
Hell. So much for good intentions.
He twisted her in his arms pressing her down against the black leather. Outside the-city-that-never-sleeps was a muffled symphony of constant activity. The car wended steadily through the streets of Manhattan, its driver discreetly screened from the couple behind.
Alex broke the kiss and drew back. He placed one hand beneath the gossamer-light fabric of her dress and deftly moved upwards to the apex of her thighs. With gentle precision he pushed aside the scrap of lace and slipped his finger inside her.
“Like this?”
She moaned. Her reaction told him that she wanted more of him than he was prepared to give her, right here, right now – even though he burned to take her, enter her completely. She writhed, his rhythmic touch eliciting a response that was instant and potentially explosive. She was a whisper away from shattering. His fingertip circled, exciting her body’s sensitivity, reading her expertly, decoding her responses, heightening her pleasure, until, with perfect timing, he applied precisely enough gentle pressure to make her come. Shudders rocked her body. Her orgasm tortured him with urgent want.
If he didn’t have her tonight, he’d burn in hell.
The limo drew up in front of the hotel. Maggie smoothed her dress back down to its proper ankle-skimming length. Lips swollen from his kiss, face sexily flushed, she forked fingers through her hair, pushing flyaway wisps behind her ears.
Alex took on board a painful thought. If he did have her tonight, he’d burn in hell.
He had feelings for Maggie he couldn’t quantify. She’d crashed through his defenses. When he’d seen her with that sleazebag Italian it was as if a switch had been flicked. What he felt was deep and strong and protective; and so much more than jealousy, or the need to prove that if anyone was going to seduce her it should be him.
Technically he’d left the “friend” zone. They wouldn’t be able to re-enter the land of