The Art of Inheriting Secrets(69)
I touched his waist. Nodded.
Chapter Sixteen
The drive took less than five minutes, and every foot of it raised the heat in the air between us. We didn’t speak. I took his hand and pressed my much-smaller one to it. He brought our hands up to his lips, tasted each of my fingers.
It had begun to rain again. He pulled up in front of the cottage, and we dashed for the door. He opened it, and we fell inside, kissing in the living room, madly, as if there would never be another chance, no other lips, ever, until Samir drew me to his bedroom, which smelled of that intense cologne. His bed surprised me, luxurious, covered with pillows and a duvet with a red paisley pattern. The window looked out to the back garden, the rain obscuring everything but the barest smear of color where the border was. I stood there, out of breath, and looked at him.
And this was the moment, the ordinary moment, that I would remember always. Samir, so tall, reaching for the hem of his shirt and pulling it off over his head, and standing there, waiting for me, revealed—his burnished, smooth skin, a scattering of dark hair between dark nipples, rounds of easy muscle from his work.
I pressed my palm to his heart, and that wild, intense emotion rose in me again, and I looked up, stricken, tears running down my face. “What if we hadn’t met?” I whispered.
“But we have,” he said in a low rumble and reached for me, pulled my head against his chest, his lips on my head. “We have. We’re here.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m—”
He tipped up my face. “I don’t mind.” He kissed me, gently, kissed my cheeks so that then I could taste my tears when he kissed my mouth again. “There is another famous quote from Tagore,” he said, holding my face. “‘I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.’ That’s what this is, you and me.”
“Yes.” I bent my head back to his chest and pressed my mouth to his skin. His hands moved on my scalp, over my ears, down my neck. The smell of him made me dizzy, and I suddenly, urgently wanted to feel his skin against mine. I stepped back and flung off my sweater and then the tank beneath it, then my bra, and this time, I paused.
He swallowed, reached up one hand and cupped my breast, bent to kiss my neck, my shoulders. “Beautiful,” he whispered. My skin rippled as his hair brushed my arms, my chin, and I pulled him closer, gauging the taut span of his waist. He kissed my breasts, my shoulder, the hollow of my throat, and I swayed with emotion. Desire.
Urgently, I reached for his belt, and he obliged me, lifting his hands so I could unbuckle his belt and the buttons of his jeans, pushing the fabric down muscled hips and rock-hard legs. He stepped out of them, and I took in the sight of him fully nude: long legs and that blackest nest of hair nearly made me faint. “Oh, my,” I said. “You’re beautiful, Samir.”
He smiled, touched his belly, ran a hand down his penis, as men do. “It’s all yours.”
I hesitated, thinking of my not-so-thin thighs. “I’m not quite so perfect.”
“This hair,” he said, threading his fingers through it, “is perfect. These lips, these breasts.” He brushed my mouth, my breasts. “Let’s see the rest, shall we?” He unfastened my jeans, skimmed them downward, and then I was naked too.
He ran those artist’s fingers over my squishy bits and down the sides of my thighs. “I can’t kiss all those beautiful places”—he touched the curve of my belly, my collarbones—“if we’re standing up.” I let him take my hand and waited as he flung back the duvet, and then we lay down, and I rolled close to him, and our bodies, our skin, all of it, touched, and I made the softest of sounds, reaching for him.
“God, Olivia,” he breathed, his hands on my back, my thighs, his lips brushing my mouth, my chin, my shoulder. “The minute I saw you at Rebecca’s house, I knew you.” He brushed his nose over my chin. “I haven’t stopped thinking about this since.”
“Me too,” I said and pushed him back to look at his face, kiss his mouth, softly, then more deeply, my hands running down his chest, around his ribs, down his belly and into that thicket of heat. “I just kept thinking I shouldn’t.”
“I thought I shouldn’t.” He touched my breasts, kissed one and the other, kissed my belly, and then my mouth again, and I found myself lost in it. In him, in making love, in learning the geography of his body, his throat, his mouth, his hands, and allowing him access to the hills and valleys of mine, open, trusting as he traveled the length and breadth of me. In return, I journeyed along the ridges of his hip bones and down the savanna of his broad, powerful back, tracing the valley of his spine, the forest of his beautiful long curls.
And then it was too much to wait, and we joined—fierce, not gentle in the slightest. It was roaring and wild as we moved and kissed, our limbs tangled, our tongues, our bodies slick and sticky and, then, sated.
He lay over me as our hearts slowed. I ran my hands through his hair, releasing the essence of his scent, and I floated in it, in this moment, this very one. When he tried to move, I gripped him closer. “Not yet.”
He braced himself on his elbows, dipped down to brush his mouth over mine. “I don’t want to squash you.”
“I’m rather liking it.”