“Not another theory?”
“No. It’s about when you kiss me.” The corner of his lips kicked up. She had him. “Between my legs.”
That corner fell quicker than a bird shot down from the sky.
She must press on and quick, so she trailed her fingers down his chest, his abdomen, until her hand rested on the hard bulge in his lap betweenhislegs. “Can I kiss you there, too? Taste you?”
He spit out a curse as her fingers outlined the shape of him. “Yes.”
“I should very much like to do so.”
“Later.”
“Now. Whoever was at the door has gone away.” She leaned closer, her lips a breath away from his. “Please.”
He kissed her. Hard. The kiss of a man whose passions had finally, beautifully broken free. She kissed him while she smiled, kissed him with the thrill of victory.
Then she slipped backward out of his lap, pushed his legs apart, and set her fingers to his fall. His hands curled over the chair ends. They were gloveless. How had she not noticed it before? Perhaps because in the last four days he’d left them off so often.
That, more than the sight of his hard shaft rising from the fall she opened swiftly, made her heart beat with joy.
Perhaps… perhaps she was not destined to lose this, lose him, after all.
He’d tried, he truly had. He’d done his best to control his growing need for her. To contain it within acceptable boundaries. The bedchamber, mainly. The nighttime, too. But how could he push this woman away when his body seemed determined to give her everything she desired? All his secrets? Hers. His humiliations? He offered them to her on a silver platter. The promise of his future? Ha. No such thing if she left him. The agency needed her.
He… he needed… Hell, right now, he needed her right where she was, running her fingers up and down his cock, placing tentative kisses along it. Better that his focus than how his need for her was changing, how that change muddied the watercolor of his future, blurred it into the shape of something else he could not yet face.
Because that felt too much like fate.
This—her hands and mouth on him—was the carnal need of two human bodies, easy to understand and satiate.
She wrapped her hand around him, and he hissed. “Your mouth,” he managed to say, “take me into you—” She did. “Yes, Amelia.”
She played with him a bit, every touch winding him tighter, and when she discovered how her gentle sucking made his hips buck off the chair, she grinned around his cock and did it again, finding a rhythm like the one he took inside her body. A rhythm that sank his hands into her hair and brought a prayer to his lips,as if he were a supplicant and she a Greek goddess. And when it grew too much, he lifted her onto his lap, straddling her legs around his waist once more, gaining from her a little, adorable gasp.
“Take me into you, Amelia,” he begged into the fragrant softness of her neck. “Please.”
And she did, raising up and sliding onto him, and riding him until he came with a cry. Out of control. Any pretense of it abandoned. Wild and wayward and pleased about it in every atom of his body. He wanted to melt into the chair, but his Amelia was not satisfied, so his hand slipped beneath her skirts while the other pulled her green bodice low, revealing her breast, teased and caressed it till her nipples pebbled and she arched into his hand.
He kissed her, rubbing his thumbs in matching motion, and it did not take much. She threw her head back and bit her lip, her scream muffled into a groan. When she collapsed against him, he wrapped both arms around her, trailing his fingertips up and down her spine, breathing her in.
His two worlds had collided—the logical daylight world of work and the nighttime dream of Amelia. And yet, the sun still shone, and the work still yet to do was not impeded. And though he’d lost control for a span of time, he could take it back. When he wished.
At the moment, he wished only for her. Just as they were. Twined together.
Her breathing slowed, and the pounding in his chest lessened, and he lifted her head from where it rested on his chest so he could look down into her face—dark lashes resting against a freckled cheek, red lips carved into a sated smile.
“You undo me, Amelia, thread by thread until I am entirely unraveled.”
“Should I not? Should I leave you quite tightly woven?”
He shook his head and kissed her softly. “I’m glad for it.”
A knock on the door. “My lord?” Bernard’s infernal voice.
“Go away,” Drew yelled at the same time Amelia said in quite the calmest voice he’d ever heard, “Just a moment, Bernard.”
“No.” Drew held her tighter.
