Her love for him.
Overwhelmed with emotion, wanting him, needing to touch him, she broke off the kiss and began undoing the buttons on his shirt, stripping it from his broad torso as he stood and watched her with a look in his eyes that seared through to her soul.
“Too much,” she whispered, not just about him standing in front of her but about her feelings for him.
“Yes,” he said brusquely, watching her as she placed her hands on his hair-roughened chest. She skimmed her palms over him and heard him groan, loving the feel of him and the scent of him. She inhaled deeply against his skin.
In one smooth motion she reached for his trousers and pulled down the zipper, freeing him. His erection was all male and challenged her to touch him more. He rasped her name as her hand slithered around him and gripped him, moving over his hard flesh, rousing his passion, rousing her own even more.
“Not yet,” he muttered, grabbing her hand and moving her back from him. Then he stripped the clothes from her body with a quickness and hunger that astounded her before swinging her up in his arms and carrying her to bed, where he lay her down, then sheathed himself.
In one quick motion he entered her. And just like that she came. No slow crawl toward orgasm. No indulgent inching to reach the pinnacle of pleasure. Just a powerful, all-fulfilling cli**x that made her shudder and cry out his name.
And when she caught her breath, he was looking down at her with another one of those arrogantly satisfied looks on his face that somehow didn’t offend her this time. It made her feel very womanly.
And in a womanly way, she lifted her body slightly, nudging him farther into her.
“Too much,” he growled, repeating her words, and he began to move. Slow at first, then faster and faster, the muscles in his neck growing taut with strain. He allowed her to have one more glorious cli**x before groaning her name and plunging deeper into her, burning them both in a downpour of fiery sensation.
It was a long, long moment before either of them could breathe, let alone move. Brant was the first to stir, and all at once Kia didn’t want him to leave her. She wanted to stay right here, like this, forever. She tightened her arms around his back and held him close against her. She heard the rumble of his voice, but her fingers couldn’t seem to unlock themselves.
“Kia?” he repeated, giving a low, masculine laugh against her neck. “As much as I love being inside you, you’ve got to let me go sometime.”
His words finally penetrated. Her fingers loosened. He was right. She was making a fool of herself.
He lifted his upper body away from her, his eyes sexily amused yet strangely serious. “What was that all about?”
She forced a slight smile. “Just faint with hunger. I haven’t eaten much today,” she admitted. She’d been too nervous to eat.
“Then you need food, woman,” he teased. He gave her one brief, hard kiss, rolled off her and headed to the bathroom. She hardly had time to think before he was back carrying a white bathrobe.
“Here,” he said, tossing the robe toward her, his gaze sweeping over her nak*d body with male appreciation before he disappeared.
She could get used to this, she decided as she stood up and wrapped herself in the fluffy material, enjoying its warmth in the air-conditioned apartment, burying herself in its male scent.
Her eyes widened as he came back into the room wearing nothing but a pair of well-pressed jeans.
Jeans, for heaven’s sake. Brant Matthews in jeans? And black ones at that. Normally he dressed as the consummate businessman. In jeans he looked what he was—the ultimate female fantasy.
He caught her staring and his eyes smoldered back in return. “If you want me on the main menu, you only have to say so.”
A delicious shudder heated her body. “Actually, I think I’d like to keep you for dessert.”
“That can be arranged.”
They ate dinner in the small, intimate dining room. Or perhaps it seemed intimate because of the casual way they were dressed—her in his bathrobe, him in jeans.
Or maybe it was the look in his eyes. She tried to keep her cool, but that knowing look heated her cheeks and made her want to follow him like a lamb back into the bedroom.
Suddenly panicked by her loss of willpower, she said the first thing that came to mind. “Tell me about Julia,” she heard herself say, then bit back a groan of dismay, not meaning to bring up the other woman again.
Or had she? Julia still played on her mind. Oh, not because she believed Brant was having an affair with her any longer, but there was something there, something still not quite right.
His eyes hardened as he put his coffee cup down. “She’s my sister-in-law.”
“Your what! Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me believe she was—”
“One of my women?” His mouth tightened. “She was one of my women. Then she ran off to marry my brother.”
“What! Oh, Brant, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It ended up for the best.”
She frowned, not so sure he really believed that. It obviously wasn’t for the best that a woman who had mattered had left him for the one person in the world he should have been able to trust, his brother. He wouldn’t be bitter about it otherwise.
“So why is she contacting you now?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. Did the other woman want Brant back? Is this what all this was about?
His piercing blue eyes contrasted sharply with the shrug he gave. “She wants help with Royce. He can’t handle the fact that Julia and I were once an item and he’s developed a drinking problem over it. Julia asked me to speak to him and make him see sense.”
A swell of relief filled her. “Did you?”
“No.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “He’s your brother, Brant.”
“I know.”
A shiver skittered under her skin. “Surely that means something?”
“Does it?”
This, more than anything, showed her exactly how he would treat her when the time came. And come it would. When he tired of her.
Dear God, it stunned her to know how much she’d been fooling herself. Just because she’d admitted Brant had more integrity than her father didn’t mean he’d suddenly turned into Mr. Nice Guy. When he wanted her out of his life, he’d take the appropriate measures to do exactly that. No exceptions.
Well, maybe one.
Julia.
“You’re a coldhearted bastard,” she muttered, her heart twisting painfully inside her.
His eyes turned as unreadable as stone. “Feel free to think what you like.”
“Oh, I will,” she said, holding his gaze, determined he knew she didn’t appreciate this side of his character.
For a moment silence hung angrily in the air.
Then he said, “Tell me one thing, Kia. Do you think if you went to your father right now and told him how you feel about him, it would change the way he thinks?”
She frowned. “What’s my father got to do with this?”
“You’re asking me to go to my brother and change his mind. It’s a similar situation. And it won’t work.”
“But how do you know unless you try?”
His eyes bored into her. “Did you try with your father?”
She blinked in surprise. “Yes, I did.”
“And what happened?”
She blanched, remembering. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“Exactly.”
She sighed. Brant had a point.
His eyes softened. “Look, my uncle was an alcoholic. It ruined his family even before he killed himself and my aunt in a car accident while he was driving drunk. So don’t you see? I know I can talk until I’m blue in the face and it won’t change how my brother feels. I know I can get his promise that he’ll get help, and tomorrow he’ll break it. No, he has to want to seek help for himself. Not expect his wife to fix it for him. Or me.”
Kia heard the rough edge of emotion in his voice and knew he wasn’t as cold as he made out. “You’re right.”
He stood and pulled her up into his arms, his eyes darkening. “I don’t want to argue anymore. I want to make love to you. Let’s forget the rest of the world tonight.”
“But—”
“Enough,” he murmured, undoing her belt to slide his hands inside the robe and over the bare skin of her hips.
Hypnotized by his touch, she tingled under his fingertips. Greedily she gave herself up to him and to whatever he wanted to do to her.
“You need another lesson in some loving, Ms. Benton,” he said, nuzzling her neck beneath the collar of her bathrobe.
She gasped with delight as his hands slid up her rib cage and cupped her br**sts.
He leaned back. “Good. That’s lesson number one completed.”
Her breath caught in her throat as he squeezed her n**ples, his touch sending shock waves to every nerve center in her body. “Er…number one?”
“Always respond when I touch you.”
That was easy. “What’s…number two?”
“Always say my name when I’m inside you.”
She moaned as his hands slid up to her shoulders. “And if I don’t?”
“Then we start over until you do,” he murmured, pushing the robe off her shoulders and letting it fall to the carpet.
She licked her lips. “I was always a quick learner.”
His eyes devoured her. “That’s too bad.”
“Why?”
“I was looking forward to teaching you the next lesson,” he said huskily.
Her body was heavy with warmth. “Um…next lesson?”
“Lesson number three. How to get a man to kiss you all over.”
She shuddered. And suddenly she wanted to know what he tasted like. What he would feel like against her tongue. “Do I get to reciprocate?”
His eyes darkened dangerously. “Only if you want to.”
“Oh, I do.”
“Then that’ll be lesson number four,” he murmured, rubbing a thumb across her lips.
“When do we start, teacher?”
“Now is as good a time as any,” he drawled and pulled her closer.
Her mouth parted the instant his lips met hers and he kissed her with a hunger that shocked her. It was as if it had been years since they’d been together instead of a mere half hour.
He kissed a path down to her br**sts, anointing each one with his mouth before going down on his knees and kissing her intimately through the curls at her thighs. His tongue flicked over the hot, moist core of her, and she gasped his name out loud, grasping his head to her as his tongue did marvelous things to her over-sensitized body.
“Come inside me,” she implored, her hands pulling at his head to make him stop before she spilled over the edge. “Please, Brant.”
He paused briefly. “Soon,” he promised and returned to what he was doing, making her legs weaken as she melted around him, shuddering with intensity, suspended in time.
When he swung her up in his arms and carried her into the shower, her brain felt clouded, her body thoroughly seduced. He kissed her back to life and then led her into the bedroom.
“I want to please you like you pleased me, Brant,” she murmured, following him down on the bed.
His eyes smoldered. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
“Absolutely.”
So he told her in explicit terms how a man liked to be made love to. She didn’t need much encouragement as she kissed his chest, letting her mouth move all over him, and downward through the arrow of hair on his taut stomach, until she covered the tip of his erection with her lips.
“Kia,” he growled her name as she began her own lesson in loving that had nothing to do with experience and everything to do with womanly instinct. She wanted him. All of him. And she almost got it.
Until he pulled her head up and away from him with a growl. “No,” he muttered tightly, twisting to reach a condom on the bedside table. A few seconds later he rolled her beneath him and plunged inside her in one swift motion, quickly reigniting the fuse of desire inside her, plunging deeper and deeper until both of them shattered together in a sea of sensual pleasure.
Afterward she lay with her cheek resting against his chest. She had to ask, “Why, Brant? I wanted to.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I know, but you weren’t ready to take such a step, as good as you were.”
“But…”
“Sweetheart, let me be the judge of that,” he murmured sleepily.
Kia tilted her head back to look at the angular contours of his face. She loved the inherent strength in his features. That firm thrust of his jaw. Those undeniable lips. But she had to wonder exactly who wasn’t ready for a full sexual commitment. The man who knew the score? Or the woman who supposedly didn’t?
Brant waited for Kia’s soft breath to tell him she was asleep before he opened his eyes and looked down at her nak*d body entwined with his. She was so beautiful. So bloody gorgeous.
And she was the only woman he hadn’t let “go all the way.” He wasn’t sure why, but he did know he couldn’t let her do what other women had done for him. Maybe because she’d asked first instead of taken. No other woman had ever asked. Not even Julia.
Not that it wouldn’t have given him pleasure. It would have. Intense pleasure. But being with Kia wasn’t about mere physical pleasure anymore. Deep down he’d known that all along but today when she’d stood her ground, forced him to admit she wasn’t the gold digger he thought she was, something inside his chest had shifted. He just hadn’t realized how profoundly she touched him. Yet it wasn’t love. No, never that. He’d had one kick in the guts from a woman. He’d never let that happen again. Not even if she asked.
Chapter Nine
The next morning the telephone rang as soon as Kia stepped inside her house. Thinking it was Brant calling to tease her why she was late for work, she laughed softly and raced to answer it on legs that almost flew across the living room. For the first time she felt almost happy to be in love.