Free The Last Time I Saw Paris by Elizabeth Adler

What’s wrong? What happened to you?”
    â€œI don’t know.… No, that’s not true, I do know.” Suddenly, she was telling him about Bill and Melissa, about how her life was falling apart. That for years she had been all these women for Bill: the young lover, the wife and helpmate, the mother. Now it hadall been taken away from her. And she was reduced to nothing. To no one.
    Dan pulled her closer, stroked her back soothingly. “Bill made you feel worthless. He doesn’t see you the way any other man would see you. The way
I
see you. How beautiful you are,
what
you are.” His hands were on her shoulders; he felt her trembling. He crushed her to him, her breasts pressed against his chest, their bellies touching.
    Then there was nothing else in Lara’s head but the way she felt at that moment. The heat of her, the need, the
urgency
to draw even closer. She wanted to breathe him, touch him, taste him.…
    And she was boneless, floating in space somewhere as they sank together onto the cool sand. She felt the hardness of his workman’s hand as he smoothed the contour of her cheek, ran a finger tenderly along the length of the bone, touched her brow softly. His mouth was on hers again, drinking her in, catching her every breath.
    He was in control, unbuttoning, lifting her arms out of her shirt, laying her half naked against the pillowing sand. Moonlight pearlized her skin, tipped her breasts with lilac, silvered her parted lips, glimmered from her half-closed eyes. She was weightless in his arms, her inhibitions gone.
    He slipped easily out of his clothes and he was as beautiful as she had imagined. Narrow-hipped, lithe, hard. Golden hair dappled his chest, and as he bent over her he smelled of sunshine and the sea wind.
    He kissed her breasts, tasted her nipples, inhaled the scent of her, and Lara wrapped closer, twining her arms around his strong young neck as if afraid he might run away before she had had enough of him.
    â€œLovely woman,” Dan breathed in her ear. “Lovelysweet woman, do you have any idea how beautiful you are? How sexy you smell, how hot you feel?”
    Passion throbbed in her belly. His hands were stroking her so gently: the curve of her hips, the tangle of dark hair, the scented moistness of her. Then his tongue explored her, tasting her essence greedily. Rocketing her to the other side of paradise.
    When she could bear it no longer, he lay over her, holding himself just inches away, looking into her eyes. “I want you so bad,” he whispered. “Tell me what you want, Lara.…” He sleeked his tongue in her ear.
    Lara groaned, a heartfelt, honest-to-God from-the-gut groan. And she was lost. She was trapped by the odd limitations of erotic language. How else could she say,
Touch me here,
what other words were there for
Love me,
for
Give me your hand, your lips, hold me, kiss my mouth, oh, please, please.
. . . The poetry was in their bodies, not in their words, in what he was doing to her, and what, astonishingly, she was doing to him. She asked herself who was this woman. Could it really be her? Her cries were small and soft, inhibited by their newness to her. She was lost in the responses her body had never known it could make.
    She reached down to touch him, felt him pulsate and the hardness that meant he wanted her as much as she wanted him. Boldly, she guided him into her, unwilling to wait a moment longer. But her cry was muted, as though she were afraid someone might hear, or that she herself might hear. She had never wanted to cry out before. Now, she wanted to yell, to dig her nails in, to grab and clutch, as the great breakers set the beach trembling beneath her.
    Afterward, he lay on top of her, still trembling. Her outflung hands were captured in his; her body, slickwith sweat, was crushed beneath his, but she did not want to move. She wanted this moment to last forever. Because even if it never happened again