LovePlay by Diana Palmer Page B

stretched out beside her. The lights were bright overhead, and she felt no shame at all as he looked at her and touched her. It was like dreaming, to be held and touched by him. And she loved him so… surely loving him was excuse enough to lay her principles at his feet, wasn’t it?
    She trembled wildly as he touched her in a new way, his eyes coming up to hers to watch her reaction.
    He smiled again as his fingers probed gently and she gasped. “Oh, yes,” he breathed. “Yes, I thought so, I was almost certain….” He bent to her breasts and nuzzled his face slowly against them, cherishing them first with his nose and chin and then, finally, with his warm, open mouth.
    It was the beginning. In the minutes that followed, she learned things about herself and about him that made her explode with sensation and pleasure. He was so exquisitely slow that he almost drove her mad. She writhed helplessly, crying out, moaning, and all the time he watched, and watched.
    Finally, when it was such torment that she was crying for fulfillment, his body moved over hers. He guided her, stilled her frantic movements, and all at once it was happening.
    Her eyes flew open, agonized, straight into his, and he whispered, “Virgin.” As his mouth came down, his body came down, and the ceiling seemed to come down with them as everything blurred into feverish motion and crashing pleasure and, at last, a shuddering kind of exhausted peace.
    She felt his damp skin under her cheek after a few minutes, and her eyes opened, dazed, to stare across the swirls of hair just shades darker than that on his head. His chest still vibrated with the heavy beat of his heart, like her own.
    His fingers smoothed her long, damp hair gently. “Did you save it for me, all those years?” he whispered.
    “Save what?” she whispered.
    “Your virginity,” he replied. “Because, up until about ten minutes ago, you still had it. I knew.”
    She caught her breath. She’d thought she heard him whisper, but she’d been so wracked with pleasure that she hadn’t been sure.
    “You knew?”
    “Umm-hmmm,” he murmured lazily. “Do you mind if I feel unforgivably smug? I’ve never made love to an inexperienced woman before. And you didn’t seem to be in very much pain,” he added dryly.
    “I wouldn’t have known if I had been,” she murmured, burying her face against him. “Cul, do you mind if I love you?”
    “No,” he whispered. “I don’t mind. Because I’ve never stopped loving you.”
    She lifted her head, needing to see his face. And it was there, all of it, the passion and the tenderness and, yes, love.
    “Then why…?” she began bitterly.
    “Because you weren’t old enough,” he replied, brushing back the damp hair from her forehead to kiss it. “What we just gave each other is all I can offer you, Bett. I’m no more interested in marriage now than I was six years ago. I love you, quite desperately. But I can’t marry you.”
    She searched his eyes. “I don’t understand.”
    “I don’t expect you to, darling,” he replied. He rolled onto his side, tenderly drawing his fingers across her cheeks, her chin, in the lazy aftermath of passion. He bent to kiss her softly on her swollen mouth. “There are reasons.”
    “Then what…what do you want?” she asked.
    “I want to sleep with you, of course,” he said, letting his hand wander slowly down her body until it made her leap with unexpected sensitivity. “All the time.”
    “For how long?” she managed in a last grasp at sanity.
    “For as long as rehearsals last,” he whispered as he bent and kissed her very slowly on the mouth. “Maybe for longer than that. Can’t we just take it one day at a time, Bett?”
    “Cul, I have to know…” she began.
    But his body rolled onto hers and his mouth took possession of her parted lips, and the slow, rocking motion of it ignited new fires. It was almost dawn before they eventually slept, and she hadn’t had the breath to ask any