Keara tugged her hand back but he didn’t release it. “Um…”

He turned and looked down at her. Her teeth sank into her lush lower lip and her cheeks pinkened. “What?”

He was acting like a caveman. A horny, crazed animal. Shit. He sucked in oxygen. “I’m sorry.”

She blinked at him. He tugged her closer and put his hands on her waist. “Believe it or not, I do believe in foreplay,” he said softly, smiling.

She gave a choked little laugh. “That’s good. I know we don’t have much time, but…”

He pulled her closer, against his body, inhaled that sweet jasmine honeysuckle scent of her. He had a hard-on like a club. “We have all the time in the world,” he murmured.

“Um…your job? Shane…”

He nuzzled the side of her neck, beneath her ear, where the skin was soft and sweetly fragrant. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Oookay.” The word was a breath and he pressed a kiss to her throat, to the pulse fluttering there. His own heart was about to pound out of his chest and his cock throbbed insistently behind the zipper of his uniform trousers. He slid his hands down to her hips and then around behind her to the curves of her ass.

Her breath hissed out, her head fell back and he lifted his own head to gaze at her. Her lips parted and his mouth opened with the need to taste her. He lowered his head and kissed her, at first soft, exploring, coaxing. Then with a groan, he gathered her in his arms and brought her up tight against him, loving the feel of her in his arms, and deepened the kiss, mouth opening over hers, his tongue licking over her bottom lip and into her mouth. She tasted like sweet, delicious female and he realized he recognized the taste of her and the feel of her as if the last time he’d kissed her had been yesterday.

The shock of that jolted him like a live current, made his pulse leap, made his cock twitch. He pressed it into Keara’s softness, felt her arms slide around his neck, her fingers slipping into his hair. If they could have wrapped themselves around each other, they would have, by the feel of her straining against him. Her breasts—not big but damn cute from what he remembered—pressed against his torso.

Christ! He hauled her up by her ass, and her legs wrapped around his waist, their mouths devouring each other. He tried to carry her to the stairs leading to the bedrooms upstairs, stumbling a bit with her across the shiny white tile floor of his foyer.

“No,” he gasped as his raging lust threatened his self-control. The carpeted stairs looked good to him, and he considered stopping there and taking her.

“What d’you mean, no?” She arched against him to rub those pretty tits over his chest.

“I mean, I want to do you right here, but I promised you foreplay.”

“Screw the foreplay,” she said. “I want it now. Right here. Oh God, Shane.”

She rocked against him, her soft center rubbing seekingly against him.

Okay, the stairs it was. He lowered her to the gray carpet, two stairs above him, and started unfastening his pants while she reached up under the full skirt she wore and wriggled out of her panties.

“This is crazy,” she breathed, tossing the panties over the railing. He fell onto her, kissing her mouth, her jaw, her neck, taking himself in hand and finding her wet folds. He nudged at her, her wet heat scalding him, so tight he had to push harder.

“Don’t wanna hurt you,” he muttered, nipping her chin. She hissed.

“Don’t worry.” Her legs opened wider, her pelvis shifted and he thrust harder, submerging himself partially into her hot clasp. Another push, sensation sizzling down his spine, and then another, and he was in her, all the way, deep and tight.

He groaned, fragments of sanity flashing into his consciousness. She was bruised and sore from the accident and here he was pounding into her on the staircase for God’s sake. They hadn’t even made it to his bed.

“I’m sorry.” The words squeezed out between his clenched teeth and he kissed her again, her mouth soft and sweet beneath his, her tongue sliding against his, as urgently as his. He thrust into her once, twice, pressure building, heat spiraling.

She pressed up into him with his every downstroke, her mound bumping his lower belly, and then she cried out, her thighs tightening on his hips, her fingers digging into his shoulders.

“Ah, Keara, come for me, Keara.” He drove into her one more time and let sensation take him, let himself go, pouring into her in hot hard, pulses.

He rested his forehead on the carpet beside her while his heart slammed painfully in his chest and his lungs strained for air. “Jesus.”

“I know.” Her hands moved over his back in short, restless movements. “I know. Dear God, I know.”

When he could speak, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“I can’t believe we did this.”

“Me neither.”

Her hands continued to pet his back.

“Fuck.”

“Mmmm?”

“I can’t believe it,” Shane muttered. “We forgot to use a condom.”

Her body tightened beneath him. “Uh. Yeah. That was kinda stupid.”

“It’s not like I don’t have any.” He rolled his forehead back and forth over the carpeted stair. “I’ve got three jumbo boxes of the damn things up in my bedroom.”

She snorted out a laugh which made her tighten around his still-hard cock. “Really? I thought you’d been using all those.”

“Ha.” He lifted his head, and frowned down at her, smoothing her hair back from her damp forehead with one hand. “I’m sorry, Keara. Are you…protected?”

“Yes. And I think I’m safe. I am.”

“I am too.” He gazed at her. “Sorry.”

“It’s as much my fault.” She touched his cheek. He went to move off her and out of her, and she winced.

“What? Shit, I forgot your bruises.”

“This one from the seatbelt is the worst.” She touched her left collarbone gingerly.

He pulled out and shoved himself back into his pants but didn’t zip up. Rising, he held a hand out to her and she took it and pulled herself up. She smoothed the skirt down over sexy bare legs.

“Well,” she said. “You’ve still got plenty of time to get back to the office.”

He laughed. “Oh no I don’t.” And he grabbed her and swung her up into his arms. With a squeal she clung to his shoulders and he started up the stairs.

“Shane! What are you doing?”

“I promised you foreplay and I’m going to give you foreplay.”

“Uh…wouldn’t that be afterplay?”

He grinned as he reached the upstairs hall, but didn’t set her down. He carried her into his bedroom. “We’ll call it afterplay and if it leads to something, then we’ll consider it to have turned into foreplay.”

Her smile made his heart start thudding again. Damn, he liked that smile.

He carried her over to the bed and lowered her gently to the pouffy surface, a plain navy blue duvet. She sank into the down, loving the softness on her aching body. Aching from the car accident yesterday and now aching from being fucked on the stairs. Her tummy flipped at the thought.

Shane hadn’t just been doing her a favor. He’d been so hot for her he couldn’t even make it to the bedroom. The idea of that thrilled her to her melting core.

It had been so hot, so sexy, so wicked she hadn’t noticed any pain, only felt the desperate lustful longing to press herself against him, to have him deep inside her. Lord, she was melting all over again, slow liquid heat seeping down through her body to between her legs. She tightened her thighs and watched Shane start to unbutton his shirt.

Her mouth went dry and she felt her eyes widen. She’d wanted to see his chest. Dear lord, here it was. He shrugged out of the shirt and let it drop to the floor, and his chest was sooooo hot. Her eyes feasted on the ripped abs, the slabs of his pecs with dark nipples, the dust of hair between, and the thick muscles of his shoulders and upper arms.

She blinked.

And then his hands went to his pants, still unzipped and gaping open, the bulge there impressively recuperative.

Heat surged between her legs again and her nipples tingled as Shane shoved his pants and underwear down. His eyes met hers and he paused. If that had been her, standing there stripping in front of him, she’d be scarlet as Maeve’s hair and trying to cover herself. But Shane stood there unapologetically naked, supremely confident, and damn, he had good reason, because his body was a freakin’ work of art.

As a teenager he’d had a good body—nice male shape with wide shoulders, narrow hips, smooth bare chest—but he’d become so much more muscular since then. He was a man now—strong and heavily muscled and dominant. Keara’s eyes dropped to the nest of dark curls between thick thighs, and his penis jutting out, also thick, long and male-beautiful.

Her dry mouth began to water. She wanted to taste him. But at that moment Shane had other ideas and he fell to the bed beside her and began working at the buttons of her shirt.

He was going to undress her, and her heart swelled in her chest and her pussy dampened even more. It was so tender, so sexy. She longed for him to remove her clothes, ached for his touch.

She had to touch him too. She stroked over his corded arms and thick biceps as he slowly undid each button on her cotton shirt, then opened it to reveal her to his eyes. The way he studied her, with heavy lids and parted lips, was so sensual she burned. Her nipples tightened and her breasts swelled beneath the white lace of her bra. She knew she wasn’t well endowed, but Shane had never minded that, had loved her breasts and lavished attention on them. Her breasts were sensitive in inverse proportion to their size, and she derived so much pleasure from having them touched that she now longed for him to remove her bra, to reveal her to him, to touch her.