Free Calamity Mom by Diana Palmer Page B

He’d never felt this way. Not even with his late wife when he was in the throes of first love.
    He lifted his head a few inches and looked into her rapt, vulnerable face.
    “If you were on the pill,” he said roughly. “Would you let me?”
    “I don’t know.” She rested her forehead on his chest, shivering with reaction. “It’s a big step. I’ve always believed that it belongs in marriage, between two people who are committed to each other for life.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Is that unrealistic, in a world where love is nothing more than a euphemism for sex?”
    “What a profound question.” He smiled, but a little bleakly. “I’m not the one to ask. Anyway,” he added with a forced note of humor, “where would we make love? This is hardly a deserted place, and Nan and my son are in your room. If we went to mine…” He sighed heavily. “I couldn’t. I want to, and if you were evenfaintly experienced, I would. But this isn’t for you, Shelly. As I’ve already told you, I have nothing else to offer.”
    She pressed her cheek against the warm, heavily throbbing flesh of his chest. The thick hairs tickled her nose as they stood together in the semidarkness, unspeaking.
    “If I were older,” she began. “Richer…”
    “You’d still be a virgin,” he replied simply. “And I’ve had all I want of marriage.” He tilted her chin up to his eyes. “I’ll regret this night until I die.”
    “That you kissed me?”
    He shook his head. “Oh, no. That I couldn’t strip you down to your silky skin and ease you under me, here in the sand,” he whispered, tracing her soft, swollen lips. “As intensely as we want each other, I don’t think I’d ever hurt you.”
    She nibbled on his thin upper lip, her fingers stabbing into the hair that covered him. “It would take a long time, wouldn’t it?” she whispered. “For me, I mean.”
    “Yes.” He kissed her back, lazily, tenderly. His hands found her soft breasts and caressed them in a warm silence.
    “They feel good.”
    “What?”
    “Your hands on my skin,” she said at his lips. “Do it…harder.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why?”
    He teased around her mouth with the tip of his tongue. “You know why. Your breasts are very delicate, and I’m no sadist. I don’t want to hurt you.”
    She smiled. “It wouldn’t hurt. I meant like this.”
    She guided his thumb and forefinger to the hard, dusky tip and showed him what she wanted. She gasped as it sent a wave of heat through her body.
    “Shelly,” he whispered roughly, “does it make you hot all over when I do that?” he asked at her lips. He asked somethingelse, something very intimate and explicit. “Does it?” he persisted huskily.
    “Yes,” she confessed shyly.
    It wasn’t wise. He knew it, even as he bent his head and took the nipple between his teeth. But the sensations she was describing very closely resembled those of fulfillment. It excited him to think he could give her complete ecstasy with such a small demonstration of love play. He had to know…
    When he felt her convulse and cry out in his arms, he groaned and kissed her with slow anguish. He’d never been able to do that to another woman. Was it because she was a virgin that she reacted so violently to his ardor? Or was it something more?
    He lifted his head and she hung in his arms, her body trembling, her face flushed with embarrassed shame.
    He held her up, slowly replacing her bodice and refastening the soft straps. His hands were a little unsteady. He was still blatantly aroused.
    “You shouldn’t have…!” she managed to say, flustered.
    “I think I should.” He tilted her eyes up to his quiet, wise ones. “You do understand what happened?”
    She flushed and averted her eyes. “Well, yes…”
    “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re one in a million,” he said, his voice deep and slow and tender. “Most men would kill for a woman as passionate as you.”
    “It’s embarrassing!” she