Free One Wicked Sin by Nicola Cornick

fingers. Her skin was very soft, too. He liked the voluptuousness of it when so many women were as brittle as twigs. Lottie was plump and yielding, curved in all the right places. Ethan allowed his hand to drift over her bare shoulder and down to the rounded turn of her elbow. She rolled over, reaching for him, her nipples brushing his bare chest, her breasts pressed against him in their delicious fullness. Ethan felt again the wickedly strong urge to lose himself in her. She was like a drug to him, he thought, as he started to kiss the opulent whiteness of her breast, so sweet, so tempting. At the corner of his mind fluttered a warning; he had never felt so strong an attraction to a woman and he had certainly not expected it with this one. It went against both sense and expectation.
    Involvement was dangerous . Emotion was dangerous.
    For a moment he hesitated but the fierce clamor of his body could not be resisted. It was only sex, he thought, and it only blazed so strongly because he had denied himself for so long. He had bought her. She washis, and his alone, to take. His blood burned hotter at the thought.
    Lottie opened dazed, sleep-filled eyes and smiled at him and his heart gave an odd, errant thump. She shifted accommodatingly, and he rolled lazily on top of her, making love to her in slow, dreamy strokes that heightened his pleasure beyond anything he had ever imagined. He felt as though he was giving up something of himself to her and he tried to resist, tried to hold back, but the gentle demand of her body and the greedy need of his own senses drove him on to abandon all barriers and claim her over and over as his. He was shaking when they fell apart, shocked and drained by the intensity of the experience, their bodies slick and wet with sweat, the room hot and the sun high in the sky.
    “How lovely,” Lottie murmured, eyes closed, as she pressed her lips to the point of his shoulder. Her eyelashes were spiky dark against the curve of her cheek and there was a little smile on her lips that was self-satisfied and very knowing.
    “I am so pleased you have rediscovered your enthusiasm for it,” Ethan pushed down the rumpled sheet and ran his hand over the bare swell of her hip, wondering how he could still want her when he had satiated his need over and over. He felt as though he was grasping after something he only half understood, finding it but losing it again, a never-ending quest. For so long he had been entirely self-sufficient through choice and necessity. With Lottie he felt as though he was surrendering something of himself and he fought against it even aswanted her; he wanted to know her, explore her, learn her over and over, deeper and deeper.
    It had to stop. He was bewitched.
    Ethan sat up, running an impatient hand over his hair. Physical love, he thought, should be simple. Strangely, it was proving to be damnably dangerous. He was behaving like a lovesick boy when in fact he was no more than a man enchanted by the novelty of a new mistress. He was about to pull the sheet up and turn his back on Lottie’s nakedness, demonstrating the lack of power she had over him, when he realized that she was trying to cover herself and turn away from him. Contrarily that annoyed him. He yanked down the sheet and pushed her back onto the mattress so that she was lying there completely naked and exposed to his gaze.
    “Don’t cover yourself,” he snapped. “I like you to be naked for me.”
    She toyed with the edge of the sheet, evading his eyes, trying stealthily to draw it toward her.
    “I need to dress….”
    “No you don’t. You’re a mistress and a mistress should be naked for her lover if he demands it.”
    She looked up and her eyes were defiant. “You are discourteous and I am too fat. So let me get up, damn it!”
    Ethan could not deny the first part of the sentence—the damnable need he had for her was making him churlish—but it was the second part that interested him.
    “You’re what? ”