Her Man Friday(85)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

The touch encouraged him, because the hand hovering at the lace of her camisole dipped down over the garment, and he covered her breast with sure fingers, nudging the soft fabric back and forth over her already sensitized flesh. His other hand joined the first, cupping her, palming her, owning her, until Lily felt her knees going weak. He must have sensed her infirmity, because he suddenly scooped her into his arms and carried her over to the leather sofa.

He lay her down and covered her body with his, pushing her camisole up as he came, fastening his mouth to her breast without warning, and with a hunger unlike any she’d known a person could feel. It was as if he were trying to inhale her, sucking her deep into his mouth, laving her with the flat of his tongue, teasing her with the tip, before mouthing her completely again. Lily tangled her fingers in his hair, gasped at the fever of sensation that rocked her, and silently begged him for more.

She felt his fingers at the waistband of her tap pants, and then, suddenly, the soft kid leather of the sofa beneath her bare bottom. Without slowing his assault on her breast, Leo pressed his fingers into her na**d thigh, urging her legs apart. Willingly, she allowed him the access he demanded. So he dragged his open mouth down her torso and flat belly, nuzzling the dark curls between her legs before dipping his head lower to taste her more intimately, more thoroughly. The fingers she had wound in his hair flexed tighter, and interpreting her action as a demand for more—which, indeed, it was—he buried his mouth against her.

Oh. It was so… oh.

Over and over again he devoured her, suckling, laving, plowing with his tongue. He cupped her bottom in both hands to push her higher, to facilitate his onslaught and drink his fill of her. A tight coil inside Lily wound tighter still, until she feared it would implode into a billion flaming pieces. Then, slowly, that coil began to unwind. Wider and wider, faster and faster, until she was insensate to anything but a white-hot explosion of unmitigated joy. Wave after wave pummeled her, until she could scarcely breathe, could scarcely think, could scarcely feel.

When she finally did catch her breath, if not her thoughts, she opened her eyes to find Leo positioned above her, grinning with much satisfaction, something she found odd seeing as how she had been the recipient of such utter bliss. He had shed his shirt, but still wore his trousers, and instinctively, she reached for the fastening at his waist.

"Now," she managed to gasp. "I want you inside me now."

"That may cause some problems," he said. But in direct contrast to his statement, his voice held surprisingly little concern.

Which was really neither here nor there, because Lily wasn’t listening anyway. She was too busy cursing the inventor of the zipper, and the manufacturers who couldn’t make it unzip at the speed of light. Once it was free, however, she shoved both of her hands inside his trousers, filling her fingers with him, stroking him, rubbing him, until he was ripe and erect. He growled something unintelligible under his suddenly ragged breath but didn’t discourage her actions. Not until she curled her fingers around that most sensitive part of him with loving possession. And then he jerked backward. Fast.

"Lily," he tried again. "Did you hear me? I said me being inside you right now could cause problems. I didn’t exactly come prepared for a party tonight. If you know what I mean."

So muzzy-headed was she, thanks to his skillful, savage, loving, that she had no idea what he was talking about. Nor did she honestly care.

And he finally seemed to realize that, because he told her flat out, "I don’t have a condom."

"I don’t care," she told him right back, voicing her thoughts out loud.

"I do," he said adamantly.

That sobered her for a moment, because, quite simply, she wasn’t sure how to interpret it. But since tonight was a night of revelation and truth-telling, she decided she might as well go for broke. "Leo," she said, "I want to marry you."

He smiled, then lifted a hand to her damp forehead and swept her hair back from her face. "Good. That’ll work out well. Because as luck would have it, I want to marry you, too, Lily."

A great weight that had settled in her stomach, a weight she had scarcely acknowledged before, dissolved then. In its place burst a bubble of delight that tingled and traveled to fill every empty place inside her. "Ah, that’s, um… that’s good. You’re right. This will work out very nicely indeed."

He kissed her briefly, almost chastely, then pulled back. "And someday," he added, "I want to have children with you. But not yet," he went on when she opened her mouth to say more. "I’m selfish, and I want to have you to myself for a while, and you have a lot of work to do with Kimball Technologies. We have years ahead of us to make babies, Lily. But right now, all I want is you."

She drew her hand along the length of him, slowly, seductively, and he hissed out his satisfaction at the touch. "But you didn’t—" she objected.

"Oh, believe me, I’ve had a very nice time tonight," he told her. "And it’s not over yet. In fact, with your hands in my pants that way, I think we could come up with one or two ways to take care of my… condition."

Lily nodded. "Or three or four. I’d like to try a variety of different things. I’m kind of funny mat way."

Leo nodded, too. "I like variety. Variety is good. We can do variety. Over and over again, if you want."

"I want," she told him.

"Well then, Miss Rigby," he said as he lowered his head to hers once again, "I’m your man. It looks like we have a full night—and a full life—ahead of us."

Epilogue

"Order! Order, please, ladies and gentlemen. We have a lot to cover today."

Leo smiled as he watched Lily from where he stood unobserved at the entrance to the boardroom of Kimball-Rigby Technologies, Inc. The company had moved into its new—and much less ostentatious—digs last spring, and he had to admit that he liked the new environment much better. The boardroom was surrounded on two sides by windows that offered a spectacular view of the Philadelphia skyline beyond, and sunlight poured into the room to brighten every last inch of the place. Plants hugged every windowsili, and the soft pastels of the walls and carpet were very soothing, and not a little feminine. It was vastly different—and vastly improved—over the last boardroom Kimball Technologies had claimed.

Seated at the head of the table, surrounded by her board of directors, Lily looked like exactly what she was—the leading businesswoman in the country, and the CEO of a corporation known for its cutting edge technology and its limitless philanthropy. This year alone, she’d been featured in Forbes, Inc., Working Woman, Cosmopolitan, and Cigar Aficionado magazines—that last one still bugged the hell out of Cohiba Man—and she had made appearances at dinners for the United Way, Planned Parenthood, and NOW. She was, as he had always known, a force to be reckoned with. It was something a few of her directors—the male ones—still didn’t quite get.