Face-Off

“No, I’m not,” she sighed. “I’m so ordinary.”

There was such sadness in the words, but how could she even think that about herself? Her neck was long, her shoulders elegant and her breasts high and firm. Her belly was slender, but slightly rounded as a woman’s should be. Her stomach didn’t sport a six-pack, but then he’d never thought a woman’s belly should be indistinguishable from a guy’s, not that he’d ever said that aloud.

She reached for his shirt and he helped her pull it off, then pulled her close again, enjoying the rub of her skin against his. “Am I too hairy for you?” He felt like an animal with a pelt, but she buried her face against his chest, licked his nipples.

“I love it,” she said.

He pushed her back on the bed, toppling her so she fell laughing onto the mattress. He traced the waistband of her panties then dipped inside for a tantalizing touch of her soft sweetness.

All he did was touch her and she gasped, her back rising off the bed. And it was as if a bomb went off inside him. He needed to touch her, lick her, take her. He wanted to take her every possible way he could think of and maybe they’d invent a few new ones.

He was panting, already wanting to pound himself inside her body when he hadn’t even begun to pleasure her yet. Steady, boy, he warned himself. He tried to remember that he’d planned to take this slowly, but then he hadn’t known that Sierra would be so unbelievably responsive, or that her eyes would half close and she’d look at him the way Cleopatra must have looked at Anthony. Or that her skin would smell like honey and taste like rain-washed waves.

She was, in a word, gorgeous. And real.

He stripped her panties off because he simply had to see her, taste her.

While he was at it he stripped the rest of his clothes off too so they were both naked.

When he joined her on the bed, he could see her eyeing him, her eyes big and trusting and sparkling with excitement.

She reached over, ran her hands over his hairy chest, then down over his belly. Her hand was so small and yet so sensuous when she touched him. Before he’d even realized her intention, she’d closed her hand around him. He felt the slight quiver in her fingers, excitement or nerves, he had no idea, but it was like a hot, vibrating glove and he knew that if she clutched him like that for much longer he’d embarrass himself.

So he flipped himself on top of her, kissed his way down her body until she was squirming, then he pushed her legs apart and put his mouth on her. Right there. Right where she was so hot and honey-sweet.

She cried out when he licked her, and once he got her going, he practically had to hold onto her hips to keep her earthbound.

When he pushed his tongue all the way up inside her, she grabbed his head, clutching his hair with her fingers and pretty much screaming as her orgasm shook her. Her inner walls spilled honey on his tongue and pulsed around him as the aftershocks shook her.

SHE. COULD. NOT. BELIEVE. What. Had. Just. Happened. To. Her.

Each thought word was more like a pant.

Oh, oh. Oh. He was so good. It was all she could think. He was soo good. Naturally, he’d had decades of practice with supermodels, but right now she didn’t care. It was as though he’d been designed with no other purpose than to give her pleasure.

He was kissing his way back up her body and her skin was so supersensitized that she experienced little shocks of pleasure everywhere his tongue touched her.

When he got up close enough to kiss her, she tasted her own pleasure, and wondered how she’d ever got so lucky as to find herself in this amazing man’s bed.

Sierra had never thought of herself as a tiger in bed. Hah. More like a stuffed animal when she’d been with Michael. Now, tonight, she wanted it all. She wanted to try everything she’d ever dreamed of, every passionate, crazy, fantasy she’d ever imagined.

Jarrad had probably done it all a thousand times, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine a man more fun to try things with.

His hands were all over her. Jarrad touched her as though he loved the feel of her. As though she were the most amazing woman in history.

When he’d kissed her mouth for so long she was lightheaded, he moved south. Kissing her chin, her throat and her chest. He spent a long time on her breasts, kissing and sucking them.

She tried to hold on to sanity long enough to remind him of the importance of protection, but he was already reaching for the night table and she relaxed, knowing that he might take chances on the ice, but he wouldn’t take chances with her.

The sound of the tearing condom wrapper reminded her that she hadn’t anticipated sex in a long time. Hadn’t wanted a man inside her as much as she wanted this one in longer than she could remember. Maybe ever.

In a second he was ready, and she opened for him as he pushed slowly inside her.

The long, slow friction was heaven. And hell. She wanted him inside her so badly, even as she realized he was a big man, and holding himself back so as not to hurt her. But she was so hot, so needy, that she couldn’t wait. She pulled him into her even as she thrust up against him.

“Oh, honey, you feel so good,” he groaned. Oh, he had no idea how good she felt. Her body was melting from the inside out, and the more he thrust into her, the more she wanted.

She was mindless, crazed, and he soon caught her mood and joined in, not taking it easy but giving her everything he had.

She cried out, she was exploding, gripping and grabbing at him as they surged and bucked against each other, hard and strong and needy.

With a helpless groan, he followed her, stretching the incredible sensations out with a few long, slow strokes that left him shuddering until he fell limply on top of her.

A drop of sweat splashed onto her breast. “Oh, baby,” he said. He turned onto his back, pulling her with him, she snuggled against him, loving the tickly feeling of his hairy chest against her cheek and the sound of his heart pounding beneath her ear.

When they’d both calmed a little, she said, “I saw your commercial tonight on TV.”

He grimaced. “My condolences. I’m no Robert DeNiro.”

“No. But you are the kind of man who is so famous he can move shaving cream.”

He didn’t seem to get her point. “They called it Ice. Can you imagine anything more lame?”

“Jarrad, you’re a celebrity.”

It was a moment before he answered, and what he said was, “I’m a washed-up hockey player.”

Wow. She’d been so caught up with her own insecurities she hadn’t even thought about what it must be like for him, to have risen so high and now be retired before he was ready.

She rose on one elbow. “You are not a washed-up anything,” she informed him. “Right now you are a hockey coach. Who knows what you’ll end up being?”

“That’s easy for you to say. Your work has meaning. Every morning when you wake up, you know you’re changing lives. You are helping kids learn stuff and grow up to be good citizens. That is so much more important than shooting a puck down the ice.”

She started to laugh. First a low chuckle that she tried to smother, then a snort emerged and finally she could hold it back no longer. She let out a huge howl of laughter.

“You are laughing? At my loss of career?”

“No. I’m laughing because I was so demoralized when I found out who you were that I would have canceled our date if I’d had your number.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He rolled over, pinned her. “I am so glad you didn’t have my phone number. Look what I would have missed.”

She didn’t even want to think about what she’d have missed.

“It’s just that, you’re, like, some celebrity that I’d see on TV and think, ‘Wow, he’s cute,’ but not someone I’d ever meet in real life. I want to know what the real man is like.”