In a single fluid motion he’d seized her, spun her about, and now she was enclosed by the bands of his arms, held flush up against his body.
One of his hands rested at the small of her back.
The other hand rested alarmingly much lower, a scant inch or so before the curve of her derriere.
Her breasts were crushed against his chest.
His groin was pressed hard, implacably, against hers.
He held her like that, for seconds or an eternity, his breath swift and angry, his eyes searching hers, his mouth a stern line. She stared furiously up at him.
And in seconds the length of his hard, hot body went to her head like laudanum. Until the breaths she drew were unsteady and hot, and ever swifter. She went pliant with surrender. Her body had transferred its allegiance to him with alarming speed.
In that moment, she wanted, very badly, for him to do with her what he would.
He’d probably always known how it would be. He’d tried to warn her.
His hand slid up her spine to cradle her head, to urge it gently back, and when his lips touched hers she moaned low in her throat, a sound she hadn’t known she could make. All want. All relief.
Shocking in its subtlety, at first, the kiss. A delicate slide of his lips against hers. But this was how he showed her that heretofore unimagined sensations could be coaxed from her lips alone. And that those sensations could ignite her entire body until she was trembling with a need she could not quite name.
She felt his own need humming in his body.
Her lips fell open beneath his. And that’s when the plunder began.
The hot satin of his mouth was a primal revelation. When she dared to meet the search and glide of his tongue with her own, his low groan vibrated through her body and he nearly crushed her against him. Together they turned that kiss into something furious and desperate, a clash fueled by futility and the forbidden. Every second of it uncovered in her new, fresh levels of erotic hunger.
Every second eroded the boundaries of her body and time. Until she was clinging to him to keep from spinning away.
His other hand slid down, down, and pressed her up against his hard cock.
Pleasure speared her; her head fell back on a gasp. He moved against her again. And then again. “Oh my God...” she moaned. “Hugh...?”
She understood too late that if he didn’t stop this, she wouldn’t, either.
She heard her own breath sawing against his throat as he turned his head to kiss the pulse beneath her ear. He dragged his lips down, down, down to the soft swell of her breasts, to the valley between them, where her heart beat.
His lips lingered. And very gently, he kissed her there.
And that’s when he lifted his head. Slowly.
He brought his hand up to cup the back of her neck. His fingers played along the fine hairs there. Her body was still pressed hard up against his cock. And like this, he held her fast.
Their breathing mingled in a little storm, their lips still inches apart. She was as dazed as if she’d been trapped in an opium den.
“Do you see the trouble now?” He said this quietly, ironically, almost kindly next to her ear. His voice was still hoarse; the words staccato. “Now you will lie awake and think of nothing but this. You will desperately want what canneverbe. You will wonder about what awaits at the end of a kiss like this and yet I assure you, your imagination will never be able to do it justice. It isglorious. That is the curse of playing a game like this.”
She couldn’t speak.
Her eyes were closed.
Her breathing swayed against his.
“This can lead nowhere good, Lillias. Because we will not be able to stop. One day you will beg me for more. And then more. By then you will want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything. And there may come a time when I cannot help myself, and that way lies our doom.” He delivered the next words like the softest of whispered curses, right into her ear. “And rest assured... there is so... much... more.”
Her thoughts spiraled, chaotic as leaves caught in an updraft.
“Do you believe me?” His voice was low and almost stern, a little urgent. He sounded as though he were trying to shake her from sleep while the building around her burned.