The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance 2016

‘What’s the problem?’

‘There’s something you should know...’

She had debated whether to say anything or not. Could a man tell the difference between a virgin and a woman who was not? Alexa didn’t know, but she knew that she would reveal the full extent of her inexperience the very second he started getting too intimate.

As he had just been doing.

‘Hasn’t anyone been intimate with you like that?’ Theo was tickled pink by that. ‘Shh... Time for me to show you what you’ve been missing...’

He didn’t want her to think about this. He just wanted her to enjoy. He gently parted her legs and felt her tense. He licked the inside of her thigh and she relaxed with a soft moan, and then, so slowly, he began to explore her.

She tasted of musk and honey, fragrant and seductive. He licked her, and then darted his questing tongue, touching the protruding nub of her clitoris. After gently smoothing her thighs he parted the lips concealing her womanhood with his fingers, so that her sensitive clitoris was even more exposed to the erotic dance of his tongue.

Alexa groaned. She could barely breathe, the pleasure was so intense.

She shielded her face with her arm and twisted away. She was so wet down there...melting like candle wax.

The pleasure became more and more intense, spiralling until she was hurtling towards the edge, and only then did Theo slowly ease his rhythm, leaving her begging for more, pleading with him to bring her to orgasm.

By which time he was so shockingly turned on that he could barely steady his hands to apply the condom. More than anything else, he wanted to come inside her, to feel her wet tightness wrap around his erection...

Alexa stayed him with one trembling hand and gulped. ‘There’s something I should tell you...’

‘Alexa... Not now... I want you so much I’m not sure I’m going to be able to withstand another conversation—not unless we pause for an intermission and I have a cold shower...’

‘It’s...it’s something you really need to know, Theo,’ she said with wrenching urgency.

Theo stilled and gazed down at her flushed cheeks. He couldn’t imagine what she might have to say that couldn’t keep. She was as turned on as he was and he could barely think straight. Add to that the fact that he was highly experienced and you didn’t need to join too many dots to work out how explosive her effect on him was.

Was she about to tell him that she was involved with someone else? It was a question he had asked of her before and she had given a negative response—but that might have been a diplomatic denial, intended to halt a sticky conversation.

With a jolt of surprise he realised that he had already formed assumptions about her, and one of them was that he believed she was genuine—and that annoyed him, because he was cynical when it came to members of the opposite sex.

‘If you’re going to break my heart by telling me you’ve got the hots for another man, then it’s a conversation I have no interest in having.’

He lay back and felt her nestle against him, propping herself up against his chest. Her long hair hung on either side of her heart-shaped face, a jumble of curls.

‘What are you talking about?’ Alexa was genuinely puzzled. ‘If I had the hots for someone else why would I be...? Well...’

Theo dealt her a slashing grin, relieved at the earnestness in her voice. He curled his fingers into her hair and tugged her down to kiss him.

‘Then what...?’ he murmured huskily. ‘Spill the beans...’

‘I’ve... I’m probably not as experienced as you think I am...’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘I’ve never...never done this before...’ Alexa said bluntly, holding her breath for his appalled reaction.

‘You’re a virgin?’

‘And you’re shocked.’ She miserably filled in the blanks.

Shocked? No. Surprised? Yes. In his experience virgins in their twenties were about as common as sightings of the dodo. But he was also massively turned on at her admission.

He flipped her over so that he was looking down at her. His woman. He should have been turned off, but he wasn’t. The opposite.

‘I’ll take my time,’ he murmured. ‘And by the time I’m ready to enter you, Alexa, you’ll be so wet and ready for me...’

Words failed him.

Who needed words? He was going to give her an experience that would live with her for ever.

He explored her body all over again. He nuzzled and licked her nipples until they were warm and throbbing in his mouth. He trailed languorous kisses along her stomach and as he did so slowly rubbed her clitoris with his fingers, readying her for his mouth.

Alexa raised her legs, squirming as he nuzzled between her legs. Just watching his dark head there was the most erotic thing she could ever have imagined. True to his word, he took his time, and she knew, inexperienced as she was, that it would require a lot of willpower for him to do so.

‘I don’t want to...to come like this...’ she gasped, as her body began sweeping her towards the edge.

Theo looked up from where he had been busy and shot her a lazy smile. ‘You won’t...’

He’d also promised to be gentle, and he was. He nudged his way into her and she felt herself open up for him, and when he began to thrust into her she was crying out for him, her hands curling into his hair, her body arching up so that he could take her completely. Any fleeting discomfort was quickly overwhelmed by a surge of want and she came with soaring intensity. It was an out-of-body experience that left her shaking.

She didn’t want to let him go. She wanted to cling, to feel his perspiring body pressed up against her. She felt him as he came, shuddering inside her on a broken groan of satisfaction. There were no barriers between them in that moment of total surrender and she wished that she could hang on to the moment for ever.

When he reared up to discard the condom, she missed him.

‘Did the earth move for you?’ Theo teased, settling down next to her and pulling her into position so that they were both on their sides, bodies pressed close together. He could have done it all again, but he would have to exercise restraint even though her nakedness was continuing to drive him crazy.

Alexa lowered her eyes, because the feeling of sudden tenderness confused her. He’d stopped being a cardboard cut-out, and that was worrying, but she felt helpless to do anything about it. She couldn’t seem to recover her anger at the situation she was in.

‘So, no men before me?’ Theo mused. ‘Tell me why...’

Alexa shrugged.

‘You’re not going to get away with that. Didn’t you have boyfriends at university?’

‘Honestly...?’ she mused pensively. ‘Like I said, I wasn’t all that confident about the way I looked. I have an old-fashioned figure...’

‘Hourglass. It’s a shape that never goes out of style.’

Alexa laughed, liking the compliment even if it wasn’t true. ‘I guess I watched what my peer group was getting up to from the age of fifteen and knew that I couldn’t compete, so I decided I was just going to find my own path and that was academic. I really threw myself into my degree. Yes, of course I went out—but in a group. I’d already decided that I would only give myself to someone if I was in a loving relationship that was going somewhere...’

With dismay, she heard just how that sounded and was quick to rescue him from any false misconceptions. Marriage or not, he wasn’t in this out of any genuine feelings for her and she knew that. It was the same for her!

‘I didn’t think that I could be physically attracted to a man unless I had deeper feelings for him,’ she admitted.

‘Are you telling me you don’t have deeper feelings for me?’ Theo drawled, amused. ‘Tut-tut... Any self-respecting husband-to-be might be offended by that! Don’t underestimate the power of attraction, Alexa. You’d be surprised how many good intentions get trampled on when two free and consenting adults find that they can’t keep their hands off one another...and I find that I can’t keep my hands off you. In fact I’d quite like to take you again. Right now. But I won’t. I’m a big man, and you’ll be sore down there...’

‘Theo!’

She traced the outline of his shoulder blade with her finger. What happens now? she wanted to ask, but when she thought about that she knew what would happen... They’d have a lavish engagement party, they’d get married and then they’d get divorced. Why did it seem so muddled when it was actually so straightforward?

‘I think we need a little time alone to get this out of our systems...’ Theo broke through her soul-searching silence.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Neither of us signed up for this,’ he told her matter-of-factly. ‘And I’m not just talking about the arranged marriage scenario. That particular bombshell was definitely not on the radar for either of us.’ He lay back and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Neither of us expected that this attraction would jump out at us, did we? But it has, and it’s something we have to deal with.’

‘Yes...’ Alexa parroted faintly, brow furrowed.

Saying that they would deal with it somehow removed the element of emotion—turned an unfortunate situation that had taken them by surprise into one that had a solution. He was right. She knew that. But she couldn’t stifle the sudden hollowness that settled in the pit of her stomach.

Theo had paused. A virgin. She had just discovered that unbridled lust had an unstoppable momentum of its own but he wasn’t a fool. She was an incurable romantic and she had lost her virginity to him. And he was destined to marry her. The last thing he needed was for her to get in too deep with him.

He fancied her, but he was all wrong for her—in the same way that she was all wrong for him. He could never give her what she wanted. He could never give any woman the sort of love that took away the ability to think clearly and behave logically. He just didn’t have it in him.

He didn’t do emotions. He played hard, but he always played with his head. She deserved someone who was willing to give her what she wanted. That man wasn’t him, and unless they established some ground rules a year might prove a very long time indeed. For both of them.

Being married to someone who might end up expecting more than he was prepared to give would be a recipe for disaster.

‘We get this out of our system,’ he said flatly, ‘and I see no reason why we won’t have a harmonious year together.’

‘Get it “out of our system”?’

‘We can’t fight this. We will be in one another’s company all the time...’

‘What if we weren’t?’

‘Then it would run its natural course. Lust fades as fast as it comes. That’s always been my experience.’

‘And you just walk away when that happens?’

‘I’m not looking for deep emotional connections, Alexa,’ he told her gently. ‘For me, a permanent partner will be someone who is prepared to accept that my work will always come first.’ He sighed.

‘A marriage of convenience with someone who is emotionally switched off...?’

‘I wouldn’t necessarily describe it like that...’

‘Would you fancy her, or would that not matter?’

‘We’re veering off topic, here.’

‘I hear your warning.’

Her drowsy contentment was fading fast. She knew what he was telling her, but just in case she missed the message he was making sure he spelt it out in words of one syllable. Don’t confuse lust with love. He could give her lust, but love wasn’t on the table, and he was probably horrified at the possibility that he might be stuck with someone who’d fall for him.

He was telling her that his boredom threshold would be reached quickly, and that once that happened they would settle into playing the game they were destined to play, with no nasty surprises along the way.

Like unnecessary emotion.

She knew exactly what she should tell him. That this had been a one-off. One of those curiosity things... Something that she had succumbed to but which she did not want to repeat.

She opened her mouth and he smoothed his hand over her, between her thighs, and her body suddenly had other things in mind.

‘But...’ he said.

‘But what?’ She tried to inject some defiance into her voice but she heard the way she sounded—helpless and breathy.

‘We have options.’

‘What are you talking about?’

He had found the damp patch between her legs and was stroking her, finding her sensitive nub and playing with it so that she couldn’t think straight.

‘You can either retreat back into fighting with me and put this down as a one-night stand...’

Alexa flushed, because that had been her first thought. She had foolishly betrayed all her principles but maybe she could persuade herself that she had put the lapse behind her—because you didn’t have to keep repeating a mistake just because you’d made it once.

But how easy was that going to be when he could do this to her?

‘I can’t...can’t think...when you’re...’

‘Let me do the thinking for you.’

‘You’re so incredibly bossy. Do you always have to take charge?’

‘Taking charge suits me. I happen to do it very well.’

But this wasn’t a decision he wanted her to make on the back of her arousal—even though watching the dazed heat in her eyes and the hectic flush in her cheeks was immensely satisfying. He reluctantly withdrew his hand and rested it in the curve of her waist.

‘You’d like to write this off and pretend in the morning that nothing really happened.’

‘You can’t say that—’

‘I can, because I know the way you think, Alexa. You had a fairy-tale dream wedding and a dream guy all mapped out in your head, but instead here we are...’

It irritated him just to voice that, because playing second fiddle to any man—even a fictitious one—just wasn’t his thing, but there was no avoiding the truth.

‘You know what those marriage vows say...’ he drawled, carefully averting his eyes from the tempting glimpse of one pouting pink nipple peeping at him. ‘For better or for worse. Loosely interpreting them, I say we should focus on the better side of things for the moment... We fancy each other, incredible though that might be...’

‘Thanks very much, Theo.’

‘You’d be the first to agree,’ he returned wryly. ‘You were horrified to find out that you would be walking up the aisle with me.’

Alexa didn’t want to turn that flat statement back to him—didn’t want to hear that he had likewise been horrified to find himself saddled with an emotional and inexperienced girl who—horror of horrors—didn’t even have the decency to look like all his supermodel clones.

Truth hurt, and she had faced too many awkward truths recently—not least being this...her attraction to him.

‘I would have been horrified to find myself walking up the aisle with anyone who wasn’t of my own choosing.’

Theo shrugged, because one way or the other it didn’t matter.

‘I think that instead of denying what’s between us we exhaust it—after which the duration of our time together should be as plain sailing as it can be, given the circumstances.’

‘We exhaust it...?’

‘Correct.’

‘And do you have a timeline on that?’

If he got bored with all his beautiful conquests after a couple of months, then she gave herself a couple of weeks. Oddly, something inside her twisted.

‘I prefer to play things by ear—and that cuts both ways. You could be the one who gets tired of me...’

Alexa wasn’t dim enough to think that he seriously believed that for a minute, but she nodded in agreement. This wasn’t her at all, but he had cut through all the red tape and produced the bald truth of the matter, shorn of all emotion. They carried on having sex until that side of things dwindled away, at which point they would be able to function in one another’s company without that sizzle of electricity—which was something he seemed able to handle but which she had found she just couldn’t.

She couldn’t imagine ever being around him without the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end and her imagination shaking its reins and running wild. It would be like spending a year doing a high wire act without a safety net. Just thinking about it exhausted her.

He was presenting her with a choice. And why not? She couldn’t see herself wanting a man indefinitely when he basically wasn’t her type anyway. It would fizzle out. Of course it would. In the crazy, surreal world into which she had been catapulted it was the one thing that made sense.

And also...

She would be able to give herself permission to enjoy him.

She felt a guilty rush of pleasure at the thought of that.

‘I suppose it makes a weird kind of sense...’

She drew that sentence out and filled it with lots of doubt and uncertainty. She didn’t want him to feel that she was a push-over simply because she was inexperienced, or that she had become a member of his worshipful fan club. She wanted—needed him to think that it was an arrangement that suited her as much as it suited him...that he was as much a virus in her system which she wanted to dispel as she was in his.

‘I suppose we can’t help the people we’re attracted to—even though I always thought I could. I’ve been edgy around you...and not just because of the circumstances that threw us together. I haven’t liked being attracted to you, but I’m honest enough to admit that I am. Stupid, and—as you say—passing.’

Theo wasn’t sure he liked the word stupid, but he wasn’t going to get hung up on detail.

Frankly, the faster it passed, the better for him. She was unreasonably distracting and he didn’t like distraction—at least not a distraction that seemed to attack without warning and at any given time.

‘I have my guys coming tomorrow,’ he said. ‘My original plan involved a prolonged stay here, with work taking a bit of a back seat to relaxation. This...change in circumstances...requires a change of plan...’

He accompanied that with a slow, curling smile that reminded her just how dangerous a temptation he could be, so thank heavens it wasn’t going to be long-lasting.

‘How do you mean?’

‘We’ll just stay for the day. I’ll get my business done and then we’ll head to Manhattan—finish our stay there. And no adjoining rooms in a penthouse suite...’ He stroked the pink, peeping nipple and the little bud hardened under the abrasive rub of his thumb.

‘We can’t!’ Alexa gasped, responding on cue, pulses racing, her whole body slowly heating up once again and then going into meltdown as he continued to rub her nipple.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s rude! Your friends...they’ll be disappointed...’

‘They’ll be the first to understand. They think this is a love match and they’ve been trying to brainwash me into the joys of married life for far too long... They’ll be over the moon when I tell them that we have to escape for some private time because we can’t get enough of one another... I can already hear the violins in the background...’

Little will they expect that this is just a pretend game, and that this so-called need for private time will just be about sex, Alexa thought, with the sort of cynicism she’d never thought she had.

‘And your brother’s making a big effort to come over... I was quite looking forward to meeting him, maybe going to one of the local art galleries while you were busy during the day...’

Theo burst out laughing. ‘Daniel and art don’t go hand in hand. I think it stems from the fact that an art teacher once told him when he was a kid that he would be doing the world of art a service by staying as far away from pencils and paintbrushes as he could...’

‘Whereas you...?’

‘I was smart enough to work out that if I couldn’t paint anything remotely realistic then I’d paint whatever the hell I wanted and call it abstract... It worked... I’ll message my brother—tell him to skip the meet-and-greet detour and head directly to the cruise ship he wants to buy...’

‘So we go to New York,’ Alexa said slowly, ‘spend a week there...after which we should both be over this...this...situation between us. Then we return to Italy as a happy, platonic couple and serve our one year’s penance before walking away from one another...’ She forced a bright smile to her face. ‘You’re right, of course. Enjoy one another for a few days...get this inconvenient attraction out of our system...and once that little hiccup’s dealt with we’ll be able to...to look at one another without any stupid awkwardness...’

Since that was pretty much what Theo had had in mind, he was a little unnerved to hear it stated so bluntly.

‘Enough talking...’ He tilted her head and when she arched back kissed her neck, worked his way to her breasts and then levered himself up and stared down at her flushed face. ‘Now I’m going to give you a little lesson on taking charge...’

He did.

She touched him as he had touched her. She straddled him and worked her way meticulously down his body, loving every inch of muscle and sinew under her exploring hands. She marvelled that her shyness had evaporated. Something about the way he looked at her, with a sort of lazy, lingering, heated intensity, stripped her of her inhibitions and invested her with self-confidence she’d never known she possessed.

When she took him in her mouth and heard his throaty groan a heady sense of power invaded her.

There had been moments in her adult life when she had thought about her virginity. She had never been bothered by it, but there had been a nagging worry that when the time came she would be so nervous that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the experience. Sex would have become a big thing she had built up and would fail to deliver on the night.

The only consolation in that scenario had been the certain knowledge that the guy she fell in love with would be someone kind, thoughtful and patient enough to guide her slowly.

As she felt this big, arrogant, sinfully good-looking man shudder as she continued to caress his erect sheath with her mouth and her tongue a thought flew through her head, as lightning-fast as quicksilver...

He might not be a shining advertisement for kind, thoughtful or patient, but he has been kind and thoughtful and patient with me...

The roughened feel of his thighs under her fingers as she continued to arouse him with her mouth took her own physical response to a level she could barely control, and she drew back from her lingering exploration so that she could rub herself against his erection.

Theo was having to take long, even breaths to keep his control in place. He opened his eyes and inhaled sharply as he looked at her astride him.

With one hand firmly on his erection, she flung her head back as she moved her body sensuously against him. Every shudder of pleasure was reflected in her soft moans as his hardness played against her clitoris.

Her long hair was in utter, sexy disarray and her generous breasts bounced as she moved like ripe fruit, gently shaking, too succulent to pass up.

He tugged her towards him so that those breasts were closer to his mouth, and as she knelt over him, still enjoying his erection against her, eyes still shut, breathing still coming and going in little gasps and groans, he flicked his tongue over one engorged nipple and then stilled her slightly so that he could suckle more thoroughly on it.

Hands on her slender ribcage, he carried on pleasuring himself at her breasts until neither of them could handle the build-up any longer.

They were so hot for one another—but she was still cool enough to fumble through his wallet and extract his last condom, which she took her time stretching over him.

Theo was riveted in a way he had never been with any woman by the sight of her voluptuous nakedness...the satiny smoothness of her shoulders and the soft paleness of her skin in such contrast to the perfect circular deep rose of her nipples.

His feeling of absolute possession was second to none, but he easily explained that away by the fact that she had come to him a virgin.