Come A Little Bit Closer (The Sullivans #7)(39)

On a long exhale, she let her eyes close, and a moment later, she felt something soft being wrapped around her eyes. Before she could ask him why he was blindfolding her, Valentina smelled sugar and chocolate.

“Take a bite.”

She bit into the cake pressed softly against her lips and every one of her taste buds came completely alive. “Mmm.” She started to lick at the frosting she could feel on the corner of her upper lip, but Smith’s tongue beat hers there.

“Delicious.”

He moved the chocolate back to her lips and she took another bite. Dessert had never tasted so good before and she was more than ready to feel Smith’s mouth on hers again when he surprised her with the sensation of something cold across the tip of one breast and then the other a beat later.

“Did you know there was filling inside the cupcake?”

She was so lost in the heady anticipation of what he was about to do that she could barely get out the word no.

“I can’t tell what flavor it is. Maybe you can help me?”

“Smith. Please.”

He’d reduced her to begging yet again, but she didn’t care, not when she could feel his warm breath on her skin and then his tongue moving over her as he licked greedily at her incredibly sensitive ni**les. She clutched blindly at his shoulders as he moved to clean off her other breast in the same powerfully seductive, wickedly perfect way.

Only when every last drop was gone did he move his mouth to hers and kiss her again. When she was completely breathless, he said, “Tell me, Valentina. What flavor was it?”

Love.

He tasted like love.

The forbidden four-letter word popped into her head unbidden, not just once, but twice, startling her into going stiff in his arms.

Instantly sensing her distress, he pulled the tie he’d used as a makeshift blindfold from her eyes and ran his hands slowly down her arms. “I promised I wouldn’t do anything you didn’t want me to do tonight,” he said in a soothing voice. “Was it the blindfold?”

It wasn’t, of course. She had liked that part very, very much.

She reached for him and wound her arms around his neck. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

And he truly hadn’t. She was the one who was going to have to work like crazy to protect herself again come morning. Which was why she should be glad for the small slip. It was the perfect reminder that even as she gave him her body, she needed to hold back her heart.

Trying to recapture the playfulness from just moments before, she said, “But I do feel kind of sticky now.”

His dark eyes held hers for a long moment, until her prayers that he’d let her strange behavior go were answered. He swept her up into his arms and carried her into his bathroom.

As he started the water running, his hands roamed over her skin, his mouth playing at the curve where her neck met her shoulder. She arched into him and there was barely twelve inches of water in the bottom of the tub when he said, “I need you again, Valentina.”

“Yes,” she said as she slid with him into the shallow water. “Again.”

Somehow he found a condom and had it on just in time for her to come down onto him at the exact moment that he plunged inside. She’d have thought this second time would be wonderful, but not anywhere near as special as their first time.

And yet, when he pulled nearly clear of her before driving in so deep and fast again that she had to cling to him tighter, and as she cried out with pleasure at gentle bite of his teeth and the sweet pull of his lips over her br**sts, along with the tight hold he had on her hips with his big hands, Valentina knew that their lovemaking could never become ordinary, nor simple.

Not even if they had decades together in each other’s arms, instead of only one night.

Afterward, when they were both clean and dry again, and she felt more exhausted than she ever had before, Smith gently brought her back to the tangled sheets on his bed, tucked her in, and pulled her against him.

She had never slept well while sharing a bed with anyone, not even her sister on the nights when Tatiana had had childhood nightmares and climbed in with her. And Valentina’s decision to spend the night with Smith hadn’t included sleeping like this with him. Only sex.

But with Smith’s strong, warm arms around her, and one of his hands wrapped around hers so that both rested on top of her heart, she simply didn’t have it in her to fight the darkness of sleep...or the sweetness of being with Smith like this.

Chapter Fifteen

More asleep than awake the next morning, Valentina curled into the warm body beside her and sighed with pleasure. It wasn’t until she felt a hand stroke over her hair and soft kisses pressed to her closed eyelids that she finally woke all the way.

Oh God, she thought as she tried to keep her body from going instantly stiff against Smith’s, what had she done?

No, she hadn’t forgotten that she’d slept with him. She’d made that decision with a clear mind and didn’t regret it, wouldn’t ever let herself regret the most sweetly sensual hours of her life. But as morning light shone in through his second-story bedroom windows, she did regret breaking one very important rule: She’d stayed the night.

She was a flesh-and-blood woman full of hormones and desires. One hot night of sex was okay. Great, even, especially if it meant she could stop spending all her time and energy wondering about how it would feel to make love with Smith, and turn her focus back to her real life.