She should’ve teased him. She should’ve made him work for it. Instead, the truth slipped out with uncontrolled intensity. “I want this.” Her chin lifted. “I want you.”
He crossed the distance in three strides. No smile. No pretense. His hand bracketed her jaw, thumb riding the slickheat of her lower lip, and then his mouth took hers. The kiss didn’t ask, it found. Didn’t coax, it consumed.
She rose into it with a sound that betrayed how hard she’d held herself together downstairs. He tasted like whiskey and danger, like a man who chose what he took and took what he chose. He tasted like the one thing she shouldn’t want and couldn’t resist.
The door was at her back before she knew he’d moved her. His forearm planted above her head, the other hand cinched her waist, and he kissed her until thought thinned to a thread. The thread snapped when his palm slid south, fisted in silk, and dragged her tight to the proof of what she was doing to him. Heat jolted through her. Need answered need like sparks catching tinder.
“Bedroom,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Make me walk,” she countered, breathless and reckless. “Make me earn it.”
His eyes darkened. “Then leave something behind with every step.”
Her laugh was a tremor. “Deal.”
He stepped back an inch, enough to see her, to mark the way the dress clung to her ribs and the lift of her chest. She set her palms to his lapels, smoothed downward, and tugged his jacket open. Buttons gleamed at his cuffs. She undid one, then the next, kissing the inside of his wrist when she freed it. His breath hitched, barely. She bit him there, ashallow scrape with her teeth that tasted like steel andskin.
He tipped her face up with two fingers. “You leave the heels on.”
“Yes, Boss.” She heard the surrender in her voice and didn’t flinch fromit.
“Again.”
“Yes.” She met his gaze. “Boss.”
Something in him relaxed and sharpened all at once. He tugged the zipper at her spine, the gradual glide of metal a hot line she experienced in places that had nothing to do with skin. Air kissed her back. Silk slackened and fell. She let the dress slide off her shoulders, caught it at her hips, and stepped away from thedoor.
The first thing she left behind was bronze silk that pooled at their feet like she’d melted into want. She wore lace and nothing else. Not shy. Not coy. Hot color rose under her skin while the city threw jewels across her shoulders. His gaze dragged down and back up, calculated enough to seem like hands.
He shrugged out of the jacket and dropped it on the entry table. She walked backward toward the living room, unhooking the tiny clasp between her breasts as she went. The lace loosened. He followed like a tide, coatless, sleeves rolled, hunger in his eyes and control in the lines of his body. She let the bra go when she reached the edge of a rug, tossed it aside, and watched his mouth gohard.
“Touch yourself,” he said.
Her stomach swooped. “Right here and now?”
“Here. Now.” He didn’t slow. “Show me what you’ve been thinking about since the balcony.”
She slid a hand down—the curve of her waist, the soft plane of her belly—until heat welcomed her palm. She stroked herself through the lace, shoulders braced to the window, city at herback, him in front of her like a storm she’d invited in. His gaze went heavier, hotter. He stopped within arm’s reach but didn’t close the distance.
“Under,” he ordered softly.
She slipped fingers beneath the lace and found exactly what he’d put there. Her knees nearly gave. She held herself up with a hand on the glass and breathed through the shock of it, the obscene relief of no more pretending. He watched every move, eyes flicking from her face to her hand to the pulse in her throat.
“Look at me.”
She did, and the filth of meeting his eyes while she touched herself set her skin on fire. His control looked like a loaded weapon he’d chosen not to fire yet. The room felt like afuse.
“Enough.” He finally closed the space and caught her wrist, drawing her hand out slick and shaking. He brought it to his mouth and licked her fingers one by one, eyes on hers the whole time, making a meal of her need. Heat tore through her so fast she had to lock her knees to stay standing.
“Bedroom,” he said again, voice deeper. “Now.”
She turned, intending to obey. He hauled her back the last inch and bent her over the back of the sofa instead, one palm flattening the small of her back to keep her there, his mouth at her shoulder. He bit her, not to hurt, to mark, and she arched like he’d drawn electricity across herskin.
“You said make you walk,” he reminded, lips at her ear. “You didn’t say how straight.”
She couldn’t help laughing, wrecked and bright. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m inevitable.”
