back. His hand drifted down the curve of her hip to her ass, and she moaned as he palmed the softness.
From that moment, it was heat and flesh and sweat, a kaleidoscope of the brass and white fabric of the room when he opened his eyes, her satiny skin and his tanned arms and legs and paler chest and hips, the faint rose scent still striped on her skin, and his tongue, his hands, and his body under hers. He rolled her over for a few minutes to run his fingers and tongue over the voluptuous swells of her breasts and her hips and the sweetness between her thighs, but she arched under him too soon, thrashing and rolling him back, and he didn’t want to get rough with her.
An instant of fumbling as he managed to grab the condom and slap it on. He tried to lie still as she pushed her body onto his straining cock, but as soon as she settled, he couldn’t hold back. He gripped her hips and rocked her, forcing her clit to rub on his skin and the roughness of his body, and he watched her luminous eyes close in ecstasy.
She bit her lip, and lines gathered between her neat eyebrows.
He jutted up into her, a little rough, a little harsh, but he held all the rest back.
She was pregnant. She’d just escaped from an abusive husband. She was too fragile, physically and emotionally, for what he liked best.
This wasn’t the moment for anything more.
Her stiletto high heel dug into his thigh exquisitely.
Simone pushed backward with her arms, sliding herself over and down his shaft, a silken friction that was driving him out of his mind.
He didn’t have much time left.
It had been months since a woman had touched him.
He arched under her body, changing his angle into her, and drove her hips down on himself again and again.
Simone curled, her forehead pressed against his shoulder, and her cries sharpened as she writhed, her body out of control. She whipped back hard, straining in his hands, and cried out, and then her body throbbed around his cock.
Got her.
His orgasm gathered and took him to that dark nothingness, an eternity of bliss out of time, and then the pulses as he emptied himself into her.
Simone was gasping and lying limply on his chest, and he closed his arms over her, kissing her temple.
She groaned, “If I’d known you could do that, we would have both failed chemistry.”
He chuckled and stroked his hand down her arm, feeling the smoothness of her feminine skin under his palm.
Hey, she wasn’t crying anymore.
Chapter Seventeen
The Hugger
Gen
Gen was trying her best not to throw up over the side of the boat as Flirting with Disaster motored into the marina in Genoa, Italy. The skipper had slammed on some proverbial brakes as they’d neared the boat parking lot, and they putt-putted toward the dock at a much more sedate pace.
Thank the heavens and all the stars in the sky.
A speeding yacht was no place for a pregnant woman who was prone to morning sickness.
The boat bobbed on another boat’s wake, and her throat tightened.
“There it is!” Casimir shouted, pointing to a yacht tied up at one of the docks. He stood right on the prow of the boat, holding onto the railing and scanning the marina. “I can see the name on the bow, The Last Toy. There’s an empty slip right beside it. Have the captain pull up alongside.”
Arthur bounded up the stairs and gesticulated from inside the wheelhouse until a mahogany-suntanned white man craned his head around the side of the door to see which boat Arthur was trying to point out to him.
Gen held onto the railing with both hands and swallowed hard, thinking calm-sea thoughts. She could get off the boat soon. She just had to hold on a few more minutes.
The Genoa Cristoforo Colombo Airport lay directly beside the Marina Genova, across a small road from the Mediterranean Sea. A good-sized jet airplane roared over the boat, its huge shadow streaking darkness over the boat’s deck and the turquoise sea below.
Gen didn’t watch it. She was looking at the horizon, a sawtooth silhouette of boats and industrial buildings, maybe the airport terminal, but she sure as heck wasn’t twisting her neck to look at the plane that seemed so low that it must have nearly sheared off the yacht’s radar display on top.
As they neared the open slip next to The Last Toy, their captain turned