His head swam, and he plunged into the heady delights of the heated haven of her mouth.
Without his conscious direction, his hands slid from her back, skating over her trim waist, then one rose to cup her breast, swollen and straining beneath her tight bodice.
It was her turn to lose her breath, then she made an inarticulate sound and wantonly pressed the firm mound and tight peak into his greedy palm.
He closed his hand and let his fingers play as, between them, the flames of desire rose ever higher.
Thiswas the moment all those previous interludes and resisted temptations had been leading to.
Thiswas the inevitable culmination—an irresistible conflagration of hunger, need, desire, and passion that razed their defenses, seized their senses, and swept them away.
Into a physical longing so deep and profound, neither had any hope of holding back.
Or even of controlling it; the urgency bit too deep.
On a gasp, she broke the kiss and, her violet eyes ablaze, trapped his gaze. “Tonight,” she all but panted, as desperately needy as he, “we don’t have to stop.”
She hauled his lips to hers and kissed him with an ardor so heated it set him alight.
Molten passion incinerated the last vestige of his control. He hauled her against him, and his fingers tangled in her hair as he gripped her head and altered the angle of the kiss, the better to devour.
Heartbeat by heartbeat, their urgency built, higher, more turbulent, more compelling, until it reared and broke like a wave over them.
Passion lashed, and desire burned, and they were helpless to hold against the compulsion. The raging tide propelled them on, eradicating any chance of either stepping back.
Neither could, not from this—from what, together, they’d fed, then unleashed.
He forced himself to draw back enough to growl, “I want you.”
Her gasped reply came instantly. “And I want you.”
From beneath heavy lids, he looked into her star-filled, violet-blue eyes and understood that, for them both, in that instant, their mutual need was the only thing that mattered. “Your room or mine?”
Caitlin didn’t need to think. “Yours.” Rory’s room was two doors from hers, and Cromwell had put her uncle across the corridor. “Definitely yours.”
Besides, she’d fantasized about finding herself in his bed.
Their lips met again, too hungry, it seemed, to part for long.
Unwilling to break from the kiss, unable, it seemed, to drag their hands from each other, they progressed down the wing in a waltzing rush, then the door at the end of the corridor was there, and he opened it, and they whirled through.
Her skin was already on fire. The instant she heard the door shut, she could no longer contain the near-ravenous need to feel his hard hands and his wickedly knowing fingers on her bare skin.
Couldn’t wait an instant longer to get her hands on him.
With her lips still locked with his, she reached for buttons and frantically undid them, his first, but hers as well, anything to get rid of all the layers between them.
This is passion. This is desire.
Both were a wonder to her. She’d never experienced either, only with him and, even then, not to this degree, to where the compulsion to know and feel—to embrace and, ultimately, to take him inside her—was an unrelentingly compulsive beat.
One that thudded inexorably through her veins and sent heat flaring beneath her skin.
Their clothes fell away, hers and his, discarded wherever they landed.
And suddenly, in the shadowed dark, when he drew her hard against him, hot skin met hot skin, and something within her positively purred.
Need and want collided, and she spread her hands, palms and fingers flat, to his upper chest. The resilience of the muscles beneath the taut skin fascinated her senses.
