All changed. The same man’s shoulders beneath her hesitant fingertips. But not. And she liked it.
Her stomach fluttered, and her breasts ached, and, she remembered, she was being bold. “Shall… we begin right now?”
“Yes,” he growled, surging to his feet, “we begin now.” He glanced around the room only a moment, then his attention turned to her once more. And then he was kissing her. Again. One hand at her nape and the other at the small of her back, pressing her belly against his. He twirled her across the room, and with her eyes closed, air rushing past her, the movement became a dance, a waltz of legs and arms as well as a waltz of lips and tongue.
It ended abruptly when her backside hit a hard edge.
She yelped, broke the kiss, and curled her hands around that edge. Her desk, a small thing compared to the ones below stairs, but well used through the years. Nothing but scratches in the worn wood atop it.
“I have a recurring dream,” he said between hard kisses, between the slide of her bottom lip between his teeth. “In which I bend you over my desk at the agency and make you scream my name.”
She pressed her eyes closed to hold back unexpected tears. “Recurring? Unlikely.”
He nipped at her earlobe and kissed down her neck. “It started some time ago. A few years ago.”
“You lie.” The words a mere sigh.
“Just because I do not speak of such things does not mean they do not happen.” He pulled the neck of her wrapper down her shoulder, kissed her collarbone. “In fact, I cannot speak of them because they do happen. I wake up and pretend I don’t remember, pretend the image of your arse bent over the desk didn’t force me to wake hard as stone, didn’t force me to take myself in hand.” He rolled his hips against her. Hard. Yes. He was now certainly.
She didn’t believe him. How could she? But she could pretend she did. She rolled her head to the side as he pulled down her shift to reveal the skin over her shoulder and sank his teeth into it.
“Andrew.” Her head rolled forward, rested on his chest. So much. So much at once. Exquisite and overwhelming.
He lifted his head, and his hands on her body stilled their exploration. “You are innocent. Impossible to believe.”
“I’m not a widow.”
“I know. And the knowing has been what has saved me for so long. Easier to banish lust for an innocent than lust for a widow.”
“Is it?”
“Not right now.” He closed his eyes, swallowed hard. “I want to bend you over that desk. But you?—”
“Want that too.”
His eyes flashed open. “We must go slowly.” His hand curved down her body, skimming over ribs then waist then hips then roaming backward to learn the shape of her backside. “Don’t worry. I can control myself.”
“I don’t want you to.” She turned and bent her body, resting her chest against the desktop, nestling the joint of her hips into the desk’s edge.
She felt silly. Immeasurably so. A very large part of her wanted the desk to just evaporate so she could sink through and hide beneath it. How vulnerable it felt to be bold. As if she had put every ounce of trust she owned into this man’s hands and now stood waiting to see what he would do with it. Technically, she leaned. Not stood. Was folded over? The position did not matter. What mattered was he did not touch her.
He did not touch her, and the lack of contact wound her tight. His breathing grew heavy, but still, he did not touch her. She bit her lip and rolled her eyes back. Because though a clock nearby ticked down the time, and the fire in the grate crackled its way to ash, still he did not touch her.
This had been a mistake. A horrible mistake, and though she did not want it to, shame began to seep in a little bit. Like water leaking out of a container that was not built tight enough to hold it. She clenched her muscles, intending to right herself and stand and then go throw herself into the ocean so she could sink to the very bottom and?—
His fingers found the base of her back, the outline of her spine, and then he flattened his palm on her lower back. A gentle touch, a hesitant exploration that broke into the sort of chaos seen only in a midnight sky above Vauxhall Gardens, all light and explosion as he pressed a knee between her legs. The hand not cradling the small of her back smoothed down her side and settled at the dip in her waist as he fit the front of his hips against her rear. The palm on the flat on her back trailed up her spine to tangle in the hair at the nape of her neck.
“God, yes,” he said, feral words so deep they were almost a growl. “This.” His hands tightened, and he ground his hips into her. “This is what I dreamed of. Butthis”—the word almost a sigh—“is real.” He leaned over her, the hard planes of his torso resting gently atop her, and kissed the back of her neck, and thenhe lifted the hem of her wrapper and of her shift, revealing the length of her leg to the room’s cool air.
The entire palm of his hand laid flat on her outer thigh, smoothed up and down it before wrapping around her hip and settling at the warm juncture of her legs. His lips found the shell of her ear as his fingers found the part at her center. “I can still be controlled. Not everything tonight. We will not move too quickly. We have time.”
Twelve days. Fourteen at the most. Could she convince him to stay longer? She almost laughed. Of course she couldn’t. Twelve days, perhaps fourteen. Time? Enough of it? Not nearly.
His fingers explored her sex, her curls, each movement making her roll her hips against the desk to move closer to his hand, needing something, more of what he was doing. The desk edge bit into her bones, but she barely noticed. And then his fingers were right where she wanted them to be, though she had not known it. He’d found the needy center of her body where she’d been aching since he first set his lips upon her at the beach, and the circling of his fingers there turned her body into a tightwire. Was touching him to be like an evening at Vauxhall? All tightwires and fireworks?
“Do you like that?”
“Yes.”
