LovePlay by Diana Palmer Page A

on fire for you,” he breathed as they neared his car. “It’s all I’ve thought about for days.” He turned her against the Porcshe and backed her up, so that his hips crushed her against the curve of the door and roof, letting her feel the wild hunger he’d just expressed verbally.
    She could barely breathe as she looked up into his passion-darkened face in the streetlight. “I’ve dreamed of how it would be with you,” she confessed shakily. “In bed, on cool sheets, with all the lights burning…”
    He caught his breath, searching her eyes. “Is that how you want it?
    “Yes, oh, yes,” she whispered. “I want to see you while it’s happening.”
    He groaned something, bending to kiss her slowly, roughly, with a hunger that made him tremble all over. “Let’s go,” he whispered, shaken. “While I can still find the strength to drive.”
    She sat beside him in a daze while he drove quickly to his penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan. They stood rigidly together in the elevator. It wasn’t until they were behind the locked door of the penthouse that he turned and looked at her.
    “Do you want a drink first?” he asked quietly.
    She shook her head slowly. Having waited six years, having made the commitment to him, she only wanted to be in his arms. She moved close, sliding her arms around him, pressing close with her eyes shut tightly.
    “Cul…take a long time with me, all right?” she asked under her breath.
    He caressed her back slowly. “I’ll do my best,” he whispered. His lips brushed over her closed eyelids, her nose, her lips. “I want you obsessively, Elisabet, but I’ll be as slow as I can, all right?”
    She smiled. “All right.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Cul, I don’t have anything,” she said. “Can you…?”
    He touched her mouth with his fingers and laughed with an odd bitterness. “Oh, yes, I can take care of it. Come on.” He lifted her clear off the floor and carried her into the master bedroom with its beige carpet and chocolate-and-cream decor.
    The bed was huge. King-sized, to fit a big man. He tossed her onto it and stood looking down at her with a tight smile on his lips, with glittering green eyes.
    She sat up as he dropped onto the bed. He pushed her down again with a grin. “First things first.”
    He stripped, slowly, letting her watch him. She was fascinated, never having seen a man without clothes before. Her face, she knew, was hot with color, but she didn’t look away. He was magnificent, like one of the photos in that magazine Janet had bought to show her, only much more sensuous. She couldn’t look away.
    “You aren’t shy, are you?” he teased, drawing her to her feet.
    “I think I am, a little,” she confessed, touching his hair-roughened chest with obvious fascination. “We were never quite this intimate.”
    “We were in my mind,” he said, and the smile faded as his fingers began to work at buttons and fastenings.
    She stood very still, letting him ease away the fabric from her slender, high-breasted body. And when he was through, she looked at him as he studied her from head to toe with purely masculine appreciation.
    “Has it been a long time since you’ve been with a man?” he asked.
    “Why?” she asked nervously.
    He touched her breasts with slow, tender hands. “Because if it has, I’ll have to be a lot more careful with you, of course,” he whispered, bending to kiss her. “You’d be…like a virgin for me.”
    Her lips parted shakily under his. “It…has been…a long time,” she managed.
    He smiled against her mouth and his hands went to her thighs to draw her body completely to his.
    She caught her breath and moaned, and he smiled even more. His mouth parted hers with a tenderness that took her breath, and she felt a wild kind of shock at the contact with his hair-roughened nudity. She trembled all over from it, bursting with the joy of loving and being wanted.
    He lifted her, placing her on the bed, then