Anything but Vanilla(59)
He grinned as he lay back, relaxed, arms stretched above his head, surrendering himself. ‘Help yourself.’
Afterwards, he held her until she came back down, opened her eyes onto a new world.
‘For a woman who’s waited so long,’ Alexander said, ‘you were in an almighty hurry.’
Oh, God... ‘I’m sorry. Did you...?’
‘I most certainly did,’ he said, before looping his arm around her to pull her close, so that her head was on his shoulder and they were lying together, ‘but next time we’ll take it slower. Did you say something about pizza?’
Next time... She absorbed the fact that he wanted to do it again. ‘I’m sorry about dinner.’
‘I’m not. While you owe me dinner, I have a built-in excuse to keep coming back.’
‘You don’t need an excuse,’ she said. ‘You can come any time.’
He grinned. ‘Give me a minute. I’m not a nineteen-year-old.’
‘No, thank goodness.’
He glanced at her, but his call to the pizza parlour was answered at that moment and he concentrated on ordering, checking what she liked. Only when that was done did he turn to her and say, ‘Okay. We have thirty minutes. Do you want to tell me about it?’
She shifted a limb that felt boneless. ‘About what?’
‘How you come to be the last twenty-three-year-old virgin in Maybridge. Possibly in the entire county.’
‘I’m not...’ He raised one of those expressive eyebrows. ‘I wasn’t...’
‘No? I have to tell you that the nineteen-year-old who was there before me didn’t make much of an impression.’
‘No?’ She thought about the very thorough job that Alexander had done and grinned. ‘No.’ Heady on the scent of fresh sweat, so relaxed that she was glued to the bed and aware that she was wearing a grin that would have put the Cheshire cat to shame, she said, ‘Actually he was eighteen. I was seventeen and utterly besotted.’
‘Lucky guy.’
‘I thought I was the lucky one. He was captain of rugby, had a place at Oxford and he’d chosen to take me to the end-of-year school party.’ She was going to be his summer girl, the envy of every other girl in village... ‘He’d got hold of the key to the mat store at the back of the gym, but he was a little...over-eager. And then someone was tapping on the door. Apparently he wasn’t the only one with ambitions that night.’
‘Are you saying that your disappointment was so intense that you didn’t bother again?’
‘Well, it wasn’t quite what the romance novels I’d read had led me to imagine. Awkward, fumbling...’ Not like this. ‘But I imagine, given the chance to practise, we’d have got our act together.’
‘No doubt.’ He smoothed a damp strand of hair from her forehead. ‘Believe me, if that was your first effort, I can’t wait to see what you’ll do when you’ve hit your stride.’
She grinned. ‘Maybe we should...’ she danced her fingers down his breastbone ‘...you know. Just to make sure?’
He clamped his hand over hers, holding it where it was. ‘You’re not sure?’
She could feel his heart beating beneath her palm. A solid, regular thump that her own racing pulse picked up. It steadied.
There was going to be a next time. There was no rush...
‘You can’t blame a girl for trying,’ she said, blowing on his sweat-slicked skin. ‘I’ve got a lot of time to make up.’
‘Quality, not quantity is the way to go. Tell me why it’s taken you so long to try again?’
‘Do I have to?’
She didn’t want to talk about the past. She’d been clinging to it like a drowning woman to driftwood for too long but, having cast adrift so spectacularly, she wanted it done with. If she told Alexander now, she would never have to think about it again. Never look back, only forward.
‘I’ve told you mine. It’s your turn.’
She twitched her shoulders. What did it matter? She’d never told anyone, not even her sisters, carrying the shame of it inside her, but it had all happened so long ago.
‘Okay. He’d been to a school disco, had a few swigs from a bottle of vodka someone had smuggled in and, when he got home a little bit high on mission accomplished, he did what any eighteen-year-old boy would do.’
He frowned, clearly not getting it.