AMANDA waited as Marc forced a chair back against the doorknob and then wedged the coffee table against the chair, barricading them safely in the apartment.
He turned, bent his powerful body and scooped her into his arms. Standing in the middle of the wrecked room, legs wide, feet solidly planted, Amanda clung to his neck, her acquiescent body curled against his beating heart.
She had dreamed of this moment, of being held in his strong embrace, protected from all harm, ready to enter into his life, to be a part of him.
And the dreams were feeble compared to the reality of his flesh and blood, hot with desire, trembling with the same anticipation that coursed through her throbbing veins and filled her being with his presence.
Even yet, neither spoke. There was no way Amanda could articulate how her body and her soul felt at this moment. How it seemed that all the actions of her life had led to this particular place and this particular time with this particular man.
She was Egyptian, French, ancient Greek, all women to all the men that this man holding her tight had created in his art poses, and by creating had made her a part of his imagination and his reality.
Marc carried her into the bedroom and placed her gently on the bed. He stepped back to admire his treasure. Amanda cringed. He was still all men, but she was certainly not all women, nor even one desirable one at that moment. Her dark hair plastered to her head, the disheveled locks had been kept in place by a shove here, a quick tuck there.
Her lightweight cotton shirt stuck to her damp skin. Her bra felt constricting and tight, shoving her in all the wrong places, making her feel crumpled and misshapen.
My jeans must be filthy.She smoothed a hand down the dirty denim, streaked with the powder of broken plaster.
And those damn clunky running shoes…Amanda was proud of her feet, they were handsome, beautifully shaped, and attached to her attractive calves by slim ankles.
He had showered. He had thrown on fresh clothes. He looked like something out of the Hampton’s issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly. While she felt like…
His gray-blue eyes shone in the early morning light as he looked down at her, devouring her. Dawn was breaking, sending splinters of gold slipping through the shuttered windows and rebounding fiery in the deep recesses of his eyes. His determined jaw glowed. She imagined him naked, moist and shining in full, warm sunlight. He began to unbutton his shirt.
“No!” The sound of Amanda’s voice shocked them both. His fingers froze at the V that had opened revealing his breastbone, the center of his smooth, sculpted chest. She could hear the pounding of his heart in the silence that followed her cry.
The bed rattled as she scrambled upright to kneel and reach for him. She gently pushed his hands aside and began to unfasten the buttons herself. His eyes lowered to follow her actions, impossibly long lashes shadowing his high cheekbones. His lips curled luxuriously, sinfully. He allowed her to undress him.
She tossed the shirt aside and lay her cheek against his naked chest, feeling the blood rushing through her warming face heated to an even greater incandescence by the heat rising from him. Her hands moved over his upper body, imprinting the rise and fall of his musculature into her exploring palms.
He gasped with pleasure, his chest swelling quickly with the intake of breath, and she was startled at the force that erupted under her cheek.
The thought skittered through her brain like a flash of summer lightning far in the distance. Could she possibly contain this primal energy that she was about to unleash, that she was desperate to allow to take full possession of her being? The rumble of distant thunder from the splintering thought rolled nearer and nearer and she knew the answer as well as she knew the forces of nature.
Her head rolled over on his chest, her hair veiling the landscape of his body. She closed her lips over the nub, flicking her tongue quickly over the tiny prong.
With a roar of unleashed pleasure, Marc threw her into the bed. He was everywhere at once, covering her with kisses, his hands tugging at her shirt, her shoes, her jeans, even as he struggled out of the rest of his own clothes.
He growled and muttered and breathed fire as his eyes gorged themselves with each uncovered portion of her body. A quick inspection, a stroke, a kiss, the sweeping of his searing eyes over his new acquisition and he hurried on, flinging clothes away from them until they both were naked, she clutching at the disheveled sheets underneath her as she lay beneath him, he hovering over her, his rampant erection a bolt of reality that nailed Amanda to this electrifying moment in time.
He rolled on the condom proudly, his eyes glinting, his lip curled as he purposefully settled the ring at the base of his powerful stalk of manhood.
This was no ancient Greek focused on some distant goal, no stricken Rodin sculpture bearing the weight of the world. This was here, now: Marc Parkerson and Amanda Catherine Emerson. Every inch of her was aware of his immediate, radiating presence.
He knelt over her, on one knee, anxious, his mouth slack with awe as he stroked her, testing the reality of her flesh. His hands sculpted the roundness of her breasts and hovered above her nipples, swelling her chest with tantalizing anticipation. He stroked the flat plane of her abdomen, drilling teasingly into her bellybutton as she giggled before he excitedly progressed, shaping the roundness of her lower belly. He straddled her legs, his tensed, bulging thighs on each side, to stroke both hands down her body, circling the outside roundness and smoothing gently up her inner thighs toward her center.
Amanda flowed with moistness. Streams of electrified nerve endings streaked in from her extremities to gather in her middle like a shaft of pure absorbing radiance. The cool morning light illuminating the bedroom warmed with each passing second as brighter and brighter streaks of spring sunshine forced themselves into the room, seeking out Marc’s body, highlighting his shape, making his musculature glow. Her eyes danced over him. A bulging vein, a slight discoloration of skin, a mole, the way his biceps flowed into the pit of his arm before blooming into the powerful plateau of his chest. She categorized the man’s flesh, reveled in his singularity. He was Marc… alone.
He dropped his head and the center of Amanda’s being exploded. Heat flooded into heat. She gasped and writhed. She had never experienced such delicate torture.
His hands cupped her breasts, pressing urgently into the soft flesh as she clawed at his hair and he brought her to the peak of anticipation, until her nails dug into his shoulders and dragged him higher on her trembling torso, the motion pleading for his body to enter hers.
His rough cheek pressed against hers. His chest flattened her breasts, his hips moved awkwardly, seeking. She reached to guide him and suddenly felt a plunging into the center of her being that reached into depths that she had never known before.
He was a revelation inside her. Exploring, delighting, searching, finding. Animal sounds of pure rapture rumbled through him. Elemental instincts. She pulled him into her, melding their bodies, his powerful buttocks alive with energy under her kneading fingers.
Choices of what to enjoy most crackled chaotically through her until Amanda was caught up in the rhythm of his thrusts, her shallow breaths dancing over their coupled bodies, a counterpart to the deep resonance of his near animalistic pleasure in their mating, their eager beginning escalating to near violence.
The wondrous physicality deep within their united bodies excited Amanda’s senses, sending them streaking toward her extremities and beyond. The heat of his hot, fevered breath against her cheek, the scent of their consolidation, acrid and rough, smooth and manufactured, the texture of his taut, pebbled chest, the roughness of his encompassing thighs, and a thousand other instant impressions melded into a physical spirituality that made her soare, lifted her higher and higher.
Marc plunged deeper and deeper into her being, to become one with her innermost self as she welcomed him in, tantalized him deeper, captured and held him in the most secret places that he had discovered and revealed to her in his fervent explorations.
Even as she closed around him to capture his urgency inside her, the thought intruded that it was too perfect, too unbelievably blissful, too devastatingly exciting for her to contain.
She erupted in an explosion of shattering physicality that simultaneously ripped her apart and reconfigured her. She had never been so intensely completed.
He held her together as she splintered into delicious shards of delight. Erupting and fulfilling, expelling and emptying. She giggled and grunted, gasped fresh supplies of oxygen to fuel her fiery finale, her nails dragging over his body, marking her territory. Over and over she rose and fell, tsunami waves with troughs of anticipation instantly filled beyond all expectation.
He paused as she plunged to earth, his musky eyes scouring her face. His sexy smirk of satisfaction fired her senses and her sense of self-preservation giving way instantly to a second round of shivering delight.
The smart-ass raised eyebrows and crooked grin nudged her drugged ego to protest in silence.
This isn’t the first time, buddy. I’m no virgin. I’ve been around the block. Shut up. Enjoy. Thisisthe first time. It has never been anywhere near like this before.
She closed her eyes and showed him a look of pure satisfaction. A chuckle rumbled up from his toes, curled against her calves, and his frame renewed its relentless pursuit of matching her total release.
When he reached his goal Amanda was stunned. She had never had to deal with such a release of energy. To contain his joyful outbursts seemed almost impossible and yet at the same time she felt as if she couldn’t absorb enough of his elation.
He had matched her. They were one in their complete immersion in one another, the total giving into of the other’s complete accommodation.
Amanda shivered in suspended joy and dread.
It could never, ever, be this perfect again.
MARC LAY panting, trying to remember his whole body weight was pressing down on Amanda. He felt completely wrung out. Tromped on? Marauding elephants couldn’t have done a more eviscerating job.
It was the most intense sexual experience of his life. It scared the shit out of him.
He tried to read some reaction in her melted body, lying totally receptive beneath his crushing force. He pushed himself up on his elbows, loathing the separation, entranced at the softness peeling from his skin and reblooming immediately of its own accord. She was so amazing, so beautiful, so devastatingly sexy.
He had never dealt with anyone as total as Ace. She fired him to unbelievable accomplishments, leading him, challenging him, enveloping him, absorbing him.
He lowered his head against her cheek, realizing his unshaven jaw might be rough. He took a breath to apologize and acknowledged speech was beyond him. The silence was like honey, their breathing the quiet buzzing of bees manufacturing pure bliss.
Her breath was more even now, a calm Mother Earth. Every inch, every millimeter etched itself into his tingling flesh. The roughness of her pubic hair knitted with his; the incredible smoothness of her thighs melded with his elongated packs of trembling muscle fiber- tissue developed to its limit- shorn of its blond dusting of body hair.
He regretted all the other false acts he had committed on her behalf.
He wouldn’t think about that now. He was doing his job. He was protecting her. He wouldn’t think about that now. She was slipping away.
The aftermath was usually a letdown. Nobody liked to leave the top of the mountain. But this was scary. He hadn’t only been to the top he had taken off. He had flown. He had been lifted into spaces he had never before encountered. He had heard about this stuff; he had expected some day to encounter it, to enjoy it, to embrace it as an exciting new kick.
He had enough action going that he was doing a fair sampling. Odds were, eventually, he’d connect with Someone Special.
This was nothing like he had expected. He had experienced phenomenal sex but he had also experienced flashes ofyes! Glints of‘this is what it’s all about. We’re talking hearth and home, stud. Sticking-with-this-forever, stuff’. Marc felt a knot in the pit of his stomach. His heart sang. His belly hurt. Maybe he had pulled something.
A couple of hard slam dunks and those thoughts of hearth, home, commitment were outta sight, outta mind. He slowly rolled off Amanda, careful to maintain the plastic barrier that separated them. On his back he slipped off the shield of modern sexuality and laid it carefully aside.
Maybe it could be preserved as a memento.
He snorted a derisive grunt at his romantic foolery and flung his arm over Amanda’s head, snuggling her into his side. She looked at him, amber eyes wide and mellow, dark lashes moist and glittering. He remembered her warm body against his, underneath him, encompassing him, containing him.
The tactile memory of the swell of her perfect breasts rolled over his chest. He had meant to taste the buds of her nipples as he had tasted her perfection. He had meant to tickle the firmness of her beautiful bottom with his unshaven jowls, trace the perfect indentation of her backbone with his mouth. Examine her toes, kiss the inside of her elbows, explore the classical transition from her breast to her arms. He lay drugged in a perfect state of bliss.
She murmured beside him and began to trace the line of his breastbone with her fingernail. She continued on, droopy-eyed with languorous teasing, down the rippling rises of his abdomen, into the tangle of hair at the apex of his thighs, and lower.
Her eyes widened and she sat up. “Good grief, Marc.”
They made frighteningly passionate love again.
New territories, new spaces, new intimacies discovered. He was astonished at her vastness. He could spend the rest of his life charting her.
He remembered once watching from a stormy Southern California shore the most amazing surf exhibition he had ever seen, the day violent, the waves near terrifying. He had seen a surfer ride through a death-defying barrel roll and catch a perfect incoming swell that seemed to raise the young daredevil triumphant into the glowering heavens and deposit him effortlessly onto the beach.
Marc had raced to the young man, to bathe in the aura of one who had experienced such total triumph.
Tears had streamed down the kid’s face.
“I’ve done it, man. It’ll never be like that again. Never. No matter how hard I try to find it.”
An endless pursuit of what he would never be able to achieve again. Because the experience itself had changed him irrevocably.
Marc pressed his face into the perfect nape of her neck and scrubbed the wetness from his cheeks with the waves of her hair.
The kid was way wrong. Perfection could be reattained.
Marc lay still. He had never been at this place before.