New Year's Resolution: Romance!: Say Yes / No More Bad Girls / Just a Fling. Leslie Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ mirror. His focus was still on her uncooperative dress.

      “I’m sorry.”

      “But...” She tried to rein in her thoughts. “Before the zipper predicament, I was going to come to you and thank you for last night.”

      He looked up now, and their gazes caught in the glass. “You were sad.”

      “Yes, at first. But telling you...it made me feel better. I haven’t had to say the words before, did you know that? News travels fast in Blue Arrow. So it made me feel better to know I could tell you. It was liberating.”

      “Okay. That’s good. But I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

      “Why not?” Ashley demanded. Then an unsettling thought occurred to her. “Was it a pity kiss?”

      “Definitely not pity.” He grimaced. “I tried telling myself it was for comfort, but then...”

      “Then it became very hot,” she whispered.

      He nodded. “And it made you cry. I wanted to kick myself.”

      “Oh, Chase.” She pressed her lips together because she felt like crying again. “I wasn’t sad anymore. Those tears...they were tears of joy.”

      His eyes narrowed. “What?”

      “Of relief, too. I was gratified to know I could respond to another man. It proves to me that I’ve made it to the other side of grief.”

      A strange expression crossed his face and his gaze zeroed in on her face. Because she still had one hand holding up the bodice of her dress, she could feel how that look made her heart pound. It thrummed against the center of her palm, and she pressed harder, hoping she could keep it inside her chest.

      Chase cupped her shoulders and drew her back against him. She could feel his bare skin against her spine. His mouth touched her temple. “You know I want you.”

      She wanted him, too. So much. And it was her year, right? Her year of... “Yes,” she told him.

      His hands tightened on her. Then he turned her to face him. His eyes studied her face. “You said your husband was your one and only love.”

      “He’s gone now.” She traced Chase’s lips with her fingertips. “And I don’t want him to be my one and only love.”

      “Then he won’t be.”

      Her mouth turned down. “I’m still stuck in this dress.”

      “I managed to free your hair. The zipper’s all the way down,” Chase said. He touched the back of the hand still plastered to her chest. “Let go, Ashley.”

      * * *

      LET GO. CHASE watched Ashley mouth the words, then her hand drifted away, and the dress dropped.

      Hot blood shot like fire through his veins.

      “Ashley,” he groaned, his gaze roaming all over her bare, creamy skin. Under the dress, she’d worn nothing but a pair of tiny lace panties. It made him crazy, thinking all night that she’d been just a few feet away, nearly naked.

      His hand lifted and he drew the backs of two fingers along the gentle slope of her shoulder. Her lashes drifted down, casting shadows on her pink-tinged cheeks. So lovely.

      His knuckles traced the outer curve of one breast and she trembled, but stayed in place as the circle spiraled, spiraled. When he touched the hard knot of her upright nipple, she gasped.

      “Shh,” he soothed, leaning down to press his mouth to her temple, her cheek, the shell of her ear. “You smell so good.” He’d wake in the morning with her scent on his skin, he thought. It would be a pleasure.

      But before that, other pleasures.

      His palm brushed her nipple, back and forth, as the other curved under her bottom to fit her closer to him. Lips trailing across her cheek, he went for another kiss. She opened for him immediately, and he tasted her deeply, his tongue moving forward in dominant surges.

      Just like sex.

      But then he slowed himself. Think of her, Bradley. If he’d understood her right, she’d had only one other man in her bed. Not that he cared about numbers. But he cared about Ashley, and if this was her first time being with someone in four years, he had to make it good. Great.

      One of her arms wound around his neck and her other hand slid between them. Hell! He jerked into the touch, his body disconnecting from his mind.

      “No,” he said against her mouth, and grabbed for her wrist.

      “No?” She arched against him, and he felt her hard nipples against his chest like tiny brands.

      “Okay, yes.” Yes, yes, yes. “But later.”

      “What now?” She drew her bare heel up the back of his calf and thigh to twine his hip with her leg. On tiptoe, she pressed against the placket of his pants. The heat was scalding-good. “What can I do now?”

      Chase closed his eyes, groaning again, and slid his hand downward to hold one silken cheek. Lust raced through him and he took her mouth again, plundering. She melted against him, compliant, a rose-scented treasure.

      He had to do this right. Take it slow. Make it good.

      Swinging her up in his arms, he reminded himself this was for her. All her.

      She deserved a lover. A considerate lover. Not an animal that was driven by savage want. Chase was too controlled for that anyway. He used his brains, even in bed.

      That was where he took Ashley.

      Placing her on the downturned sheets, he studied the picture she made there, forcing his lungs to suck in oxygen and expel it again in a calming sequence. Her hair was spread on the pillow, and he didn’t let himself remember the fantasies he’d had of it. On the pillow, just like that, or the ends tickling his ribs, or of his face buried in it.

      Okay, he was thinking of them.

      But then she was moving, shimmying that little scrap of lace down her legs, and Chase couldn’t get the rest of his own clothes off quick enough. Then he pounced, and she giggled like a girl as he covered her. He grinned at the sound, struck by the carefree aspect of it. “You make me happy,” he said.

      Then he froze. Where had that come from? She made him happy? He was supposed to be making her happy. Sex-happy. There was nothing here about happy-happy. Not the heart kind of happy.

      Her fingers speared his hair and moved over his head, as if discovering its shape. “You make this easy.”

      That sounded better.

      Chase applied himself to making it even easier, with his lips, his tongue, his hands. She was warm as candle wax and as pliable. He turned her this way and that, finding the secret cove behind her knee, the dimples at the small of her back, the notch at her throat. When he flicked it with his tongue, she cried out, and he could tell she was close to the edge.

      So СКАЧАТЬ