admiring those pillowy lips of his. To have them on her was the strangest, most wonderful sensation.
Coupled with the fact that when they weren’t on her, they said the most alarmingly delicious things.
It was like she had special, secret nerve endings that only Leo’s mouth, with the things it did and the things it said, could light up.
“You okay, Princess?”
Oh. She was lying there like a crepe, flat and listless. Spent on account of the inaugural firing of all those newly discovered nerve endings. And, she realized with a surge of embarrassment, she’d just lain there the whole time and let him hover over her—let him dismantle her.
“What are you thinking?” Leo pressed.
He was worried. That she regretted their encounter, perhaps. There was nothing overt on his face to signal worry, but he was looking at her with the same intensity with which he had looked at Gabby in the rearview mirror of his taxi a week and a bit ago. A lifetime ago.
Marie was thinking that she could not abide this being the second time that she found release and he didn’t. She couldn’t just lie there and let him . . . do things to her.
She was certain she was going to enjoy doing things to him, too.
She wasn’t sure how to start, though. Being with Leo already felt vastly different from her experiences with boys at university.
But she didn’t have to think about it very hard before she realized she did know how to start. He had taught her that.
She lifted her hips, hitched her panties and jeans up, sparing a thought for how undignified this was and finding she didn’t care, and sat up. “I’m thinking about what I should do to you.”
He sat up, too. His lips twitched, and the intensity look receded. “Are you now?”
“Yes.” She planted a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him back down so he was on his back. “Do you have any thoughts on the matter?”
His lip twitch intensified, and her worry receded even more. “Oh, I have thoughts on the matter. Many thoughts.”
“Let’s hear them.” She undid the fly of his jeans. How was it possible that this entire time, he’d been fully clothed? She’d like to blame the cold, and the temperature did make a significant degree of disrobing impractical. But in retrospect, it seemed unfair that while she’d been lying there with her pants down, she hadn’t gotten to see him at all.
“I’d rather hear yours.”
“I am struggling with the same dilemma that plagued you.” She mimicked his earlier move, grabbing the waistbands of his underwear and jeans together and tugging. He lifted his hips to help her and soon she had his . . . manhood exposed.
His manhood. She laughed inwardly at herself. Was this a gothic novel? She was now, for the first time ever, looking at Leonardo Ricci’s penis. He would probably call it his cock.
And it was a very nice cock. It was big and pink and circumcised. She’d heard that many American men had circumcised penises. The ones she’d seen up close had not been.
“What dilemma?” he prompted, his voice sounding a little put out, but not, she was confident, because he was genuinely annoyed.
“Oh, yes. I am pondering the hands-versus-mouth question you posed earlier.”
“Princess.” It came out like a warning.
“Yes?” When he didn’t elaborate, she said, “I think hands, as you decided. It’s rather cold out here, and I think perhaps the other is best left for more comfortable environs.”
He did something then that seemed like a hybrid of a laugh and a groan, and she found she enjoyed inspiring such a sound. No. She didn’t enjoy it. She loved it. Her whole self loved it, from her brain to her lungs, which were suddenly working overtime, to the spot between her legs that was throbbing anew.
“What are you thinking now?” He was still worried. Or worried anew, because he’d dropped the worry mask a moment ago when he’d expelled the laugh-groan. She was starting to understand how much Leo worried. How much, beneath his facade of breezy defiance, there was an ever-present hum of disquiet.
“I’m not thinking anything useful,” she said. “I’m thinking too much. Overthinking, as you said a moment ago. So I’m going to stop doing that.” She settled her hand lightly on his penis, noting that doing so made the resulting laugh-groan much heavier on the groan. She used her other hand to guide his hand so that it rested on top of