One Summer (23 page)

“I’m crazy about you, too, teacher,” he said softly, then kissed her.

His mouth was very warm and tasted faintly of mint. The muscles of his upper arm, which was curled around
her, cushioning her head from the door, were hard as she nestled against them. His chin felt only faintly bristly as it brushed over her cheek, and she realized with that small part of her mind that was still capable of realizing anything that he must have shaved not many hours before. His shoulders beneath her arms and hands were wide and strong. He smelled of soap, and mint, and man.

Her heart was drumming, her eyes closed, as she kissed him back as thoroughly as he kissed her. Her fingers found the rubber band that bound his hair at the nape, and she tugged it free so that she could run her fingers through the crisp black strands.

“Ouch,” he protested, drawing back a little when her fingers got caught in a tangle.

“You need a haircut,” she told him by way of reply, already closing her eyes and tilting her mouth toward his again.

“Do I? I think you need to let yours grow. I like long hair on my women.” He continued kissing her, brief, sensuous kisses pressed to the center and then to alternate corners of her mouth.

“Do you now?” This nettled her, but not enough to make her pull away from his mouth, which was running along the side of her jaw. “Are you telling me that I may now consider myself one of your women?”

“No,” he answered, his voice faintly muffled as he explored the ear nearest him with his tongue, then pressed a heated kiss to the sensitive hollow just below it.

“No?” Following the gist of the conversation was growing increasingly difficult. She felt swooningly limp, dizzy almost, her limbs heavy and her body already beginning the rhythmic contractions of desire.

“You can consider yourself my woman. Singular. If you want.” He kissed the sensitive cord at the side of her neck, nibbled at it really. Rachel tilted her head to one side and lifted her chin to facilitate the process.

“Johnny …” All the reasons why she couldn’t be his
woman crowded into her brain. The age difference, the lifestyle difference, her respectable profession, her family, his infamy. But just as quickly as the objections flickered through her mind, they were banished by the thought that he knew her clear down to her soul—and the return of his mouth to hers. His kiss was slow, sensual, drugging. When he slid his mouth down to nuzzle the softness beneath her chin, she was so bemused that she scarcely knew where she was.

“Yes,” she murmured dreamily.

“Yes, what?” He had pulled the gentle scoop neck of her sweater aside to run his lips along her collarbone. Rachel’s toes curled, and she felt one neat blue pump loosen.

“Whatever it was you asked me.” Her thought processes had gone up in smoke.

“Mmmm. Let’s move to the back, okay? There’s not much room up here.”

Before she could even process what he had said, he somehow got the door opened and was sliding out of the car with her still on his lap. Her loosened shoe fell off, but Rachel didn’t care. She clung to him, her arms looped tightly around his neck. He stood up with her, one arm just below her shoulders, one arm under her knees, lifting her with no difficulty at all. Rachel experienced a deliciously feminine sense of fragility, of helplessness against his strength. Feeling rather self-conscious at falling prey to so atavistic an emotion, she refused to meet his gaze, looking instead at the crow-black hair freed now to wave to his wide shoulders, at the darkly handsome face, at the brawny upper arms that gave silent testimony to his strength.

“I bet you don’t weigh a hundred pounds,” Johnny said suddenly, jiggling her in his arms as if to test her weight.

“A hundred seven, actually.”

“You need to eat more.” He shut the front door with a sneakered foot, opened the rear one by bending and feeling
for the handle, while somehow managing to hang on to her at the same time, then sat again with her on his lap.

“Then I’d get fat, and you wouldn’t like me.”

Johnny tweaked her nose in teasing response and shifted her into a more comfortable position with her back against his chest. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and his arms hugged her waist before they were settled to his satisfaction. Rachel, spellbound, cast a sideways glance up and back to find that his eyes on her face were as bright and hot as the clear August sky overhead.

“You still don’t get it, do you, teacher? I’d like you any way I could get you, any way at all. Besides, I bet you’d be cute fat. A little round dumpling.”

“How lovely.” Laughing with a tiny catch in her voice at the picture this conjured up, Rachel gave herself over for the moment to the luxury of simply allowing him to hold her. The warmth and smell and easy strength of him engulfed her. She felt wonderfully at home in his arms, comfortable and familiar and happy and excited at the same time. It was foolishness, she knew, but then judged foolishness to be a vastly underrated commodity. What had being sensible, as she had been all her life until now, gotten her? Certainly not this.

The back seat was bench-style, covered with slate blue plush velour. It was roomier than the front, but still there was not a lot of head and leg space for a man of Johnny’s height. He came to the same conclusion and kept the door open, with one leg trailing outside. The baking heat crept into the car as the air-conditioned coolness slipped out. With the door open, the rustle of leaves as a slight breeze rattled the treetops, the squawking of a pair of battling ducks, and the gentle slosh of water against the rocky shore were as audible and immediate as if the two of them sat entwined on the grass itself.

Johnny’s hands, which had been around her waist, slid up the front of her sweater, seeking her breasts. They located their quarry, kneaded and squeezed them. Her
whole body responded with an aching quiver, but her mind, her still-functioning mind, shied away.

Rachel caught his wrists. Her voice as she spoke was faintly breathless. “Johnny, I don’t think this is such a good idea. It’s broad daylight. Anybody could come along.”

It was difficult to give voice to this objection, and it grew even more so as he kissed the eyebrow, the temple, and the cheekbone nearest him while continuing to practice his exquisite torture on her breasts. One hand finally released its prey, but before she could decide if she welcomed or regretted its departure, it slid beneath the edge of her sweater, up over her bare stomach, to find her breast again. The feeling of his warm, strong hand covering her breast with only the delicate lace of her bra between her flesh and his sent tingles of pleasure all along her nerve endings. Under the influence of that caressing touch, Rachel realized that she was rapidly losing the last vestiges of coherent thought that remained to her.

“You’ve got the sexiest tits,” he whispered in her ear as his other hand slid under her sweater to rejoin its fellow. He ran a lazy thumb over one shy nipple, then made a sound of satisfaction deep in his throat as it suddenly stood erect. Rachel almost gasped with pleasure. She loved the way his hands on her made her feel. If only there were more of her, so she could be sure that he was as excited by what he was doing as she was.

“I—I’m not very big—” The last of this whispered confession was muffled as, unable to stand the combination of mental torture and physical bliss for another instant, she turned in his arms, burying her face in the curve between his neck and shoulder. She wrapped her arms tighter about his neck, feeling errant quivers of wanting begin somewhere in the vicinity of her midsection as the heat of those long-fingered hands slid around to the bare skin of her back.

“You’re perfect. Just what I always wanted. Didn’t anybody
ever tell you that the best presents come in small packages?” He kissed her averted cheek, and his fingers found and unhooked her bra. Rachel felt the give in the band that told her what he had done. With a sigh she surrendered to his ministrations simply because she lacked further will to resist. There was nothing she could do to change her measurements, certainly not in the next five minutes. He would have to take her or leave her as she was.

He certainly gave no indication of wanting to leave her. Tugging at her sweater, he pulled it up to her armpits before her arms around his neck put a halt to further progress. When he gave another frustrated tug at the folds of bunched cotton, she unwound her arms and lifted them so that he could pull the garment off. With a slight shrug of her shoulders and a sensation of daring sinfulness, she let her bra drop forward until she was naked to the waist. When she dared look at him again and discovered him staring at the pink-tipped white curves of her breasts, she felt a tingling excitement that was engendered almost entirely by the sultry heat that filled his eyes and that had nothing whatsoever to do with her size, or lack of it.

Feeling her gaze on him, he glanced up. A touch of humor twinkled suddenly beneath the heat in his eyes.

“Besides, I’m an ass man, myself,” he said, and grinned as her face registered shock. If his grin was a little lopsided, and his eyes returned to her breasts with unmistakable appreciation, why, his hand was delving under her skirt to squeeze the part in question, just to prove his point. “And you’ve got the prettiest little ass I’ve ever laid hands on in my life.”

“Johnny!”

But her half-laughing, half-outraged protest was silenced by a shaft of pure fire as he dipped his head to capture a pink nipple and draw it into his mouth. Rachel gasped at the exquisite pleasure, and her back arched. She lay across his encircling arm as he bent over her, suckling
her breasts. His hair brushed her skin, swept tantalizingly over her other breast. When he lifted his head at last, her areolas were puckered with wanting. Her nipples, the one shiny wet from his mouth, the other stiff and begging for attention, had darkened to a voluptuous rose pink and were pebble-hard.

He shifted, turned, and then they were lying along the seat with Rachel pressed tight against the velour backrest. One arm cradled her shoulders while the other made its way under her long skirt. His hand slid with exquisite friction over her legs in their sheer pantyhose. When he reached the juncture of her thighs, he delved between them, pressing and rubbing and squeezing with sensuous knowledge. Rachel made a little moaning sound deep in her throat as her thighs parted for him of their own accord.

“Rachel.” His voice was low, faintly hoarse.

Rachel looked up at him almost blindly by way of answer. He was looming over her now, one arm pressed stiffly against the velour to spare her the full burden of his weight.

“I’m tired of doing all the work.”

“What?” She didn’t understand. Frowning, she blinked her puzzlement up into his blazing eyes.

“Unzip me.”

The words, along with the guttural undertone in which they were uttered, were wildly erotic. Shocked, tantalized, Rachel caught her breath with shaky surprise. For a moment she could do nothing more than stare at him as his command percolated through her bedazzled brain along her nerve endings to her fingers. She did as he asked.

The metal button that fastened his jeans was stiff, and it took more than one try before she managed to work it free. Her fingers were clumsy as they sought for and found the tab to his zipper. The denim felt stiff and smooth beneath her hand, the small tab cool and hard. She worked it down, slowly, conscious all the while of the bulge that swelled to
fill the increasing opening. His erection, burgeoning forth, fought to be free.

He wore Jockey shorts. The white cotton contained him, hiding him from her eyes, shielding him from her touch. Fascinated, Rachel stared at the thick swelling that bulged through his open fly. She stretched out a beautifully manicured finger to touch it.

The cotton was soft. Beneath it, his penis was steely hard. It jerked convulsively when she ran a pink-painted fingernail down its length.

Johnny made not a sound. But something, the tension of his body perhaps, or a sudden movement, made her glance up. Rachel took one look at his glazed eyes, the harsh intensity of his face, and she knew that her touch pleased him almost beyond bearing.

“Wait.”

She was already reaching for him again when he forced the word out. Her fingers checked for just an instant, but then she would not stop, could not stop, her fingers moving of their own volition to circle him through the cotton underpants, and squeeze …

“For God’s sake, Rachel, wait!” He jackknifed into a sitting position. Before he abruptly turned his back on her, she saw that beads of sweat had broken out along his upper lip and forehead. Bemused by his action, Rachel watched him fumble in a pocket, and then fumble some more. The faint sound of something being torn reached her ears.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked, bewildered, struggling to sit up with his wide T-shirt-clad back all but blocking her in.

“A rubber,” he answered, almost growling, turning back to her and bearing her down again into the plush seat. “What kind of bastard would I be to fuck you without a rubber? What kind of fool are you to let me? The last time I wasn’t in any shape to think about it, but now …”

He was on top of her, kissing her as if he were ravenous
for the taste of her mouth, his hands bunching her skirt up around her waist and reaching between her legs to yank at the crotch of her pantyhose until they tore. He tore her panties, too, just ripped them out of his way, and then he drove into her with a savagery that made Rachel cry out.

“Oh, Johnny. Oh, Johnny. Oh, Johnny,” she sobbed. Her legs, with their delicate nylon covering still intact, were locked tight around his buttocks, and her arms were wrapped around his neck. His chest crushed her breasts. His arms were wrapped around her like iron bands. His face was buried in the curve between her neck and shoulder, and he was panting in harsh, rapid gasps as he lifted himself almost all the way out, then plunged back home, again and again and again.

“Oh, Johnny!” she cried as sensation exploded inside her. Clinging tight, she let ocean waves of ecstasy whirl her away. At her cry he gritted his teeth, drove deep one last time, and found his own release.