The logic doesn’t make sense, but itfeelstrue, in the way all dreams feel true while you’re dreaming them.
Still, I protest, “I don’t understand.” The scent of the fruit fills my nostrils.
“You don’t have to understand.” His free hand pushes up into my jaw, tilting my face towards his. One thick thumb presses against my jugular vein, and I wonder if he can feel how fast my heart is racing. “You just have to feel.”
“Feel what?”
He smiles then. It’s slow, predatory, and beautiful enough to break my heart. “Everything you’ve been denying yourself.”
He pushes the second strawberry past my lips. I bite down again and the sweetness floods my mouth once more, overwhelming this time, almost too much. My skin is still humming and my thighs are pressing against each other so hard that I wonder if they’ll fuse together.
“That’s it,” he praises huskily. “Take what I give you.”
His fingers thread through my hair, gripping at the root, and the slight sting makes me gasp around the fruit still melting on my tongue.
I swallow the pulp, then swallow my nervousness and look up at him again. “What do you want from me, Bastian?”
He grins wickedly like that’s exactly the question he’s been waiting for. “All of it.”
Then the levees break.
He bends down and rips me off the ground by my hips. His hands, huge and strong, cuff around my waist as he lifts me onto the cold stainless steel counter in one fluid motion. The chill of the metal is like dry ice against the backs of my thighs, even through the shabby fabric of my pencil skirt.
But he doesn’t let me be cold for long. Bastian steps between my legs, nudging them wider with his body until my skirt rides up indecently. He’s an absolute bonfire, radiating so much heat that it’s a wonder we both don’t burn to ashes on first contact.
He reaches behind me, somewhere I can’t see, when his hand returns, it’s holding a bowl of whipped cream. Fresh and cloud-soft, swirled into swooping peaks and valleys.
“I’ve been wanting to taste you properly, Eliana.” His free hand goes to the top button of my blouse and works it free. “But I think you’ll taste even better with a little sweetness added.”
He opens the next button, a little rougher than the first. The third is practically ripped. The fourth is literally torn off and cast aside.
Cool air pebbles the skin he’s exposing, and the counter is still frigid, but I’m burning up from the inside. The cream in the bowl trembles when I look at it.
His eyes stay locked on mine as the final button gives way and he swats the loose sides of my blouse away to fully reveal me.
Slowly, slowly, his gaze rakes down my body. From my eyes to my lips, from my lips to my throat, from my throat to the curves of my breasts, still hidden behind the lilac-colored cotton of Victoria’s rattiest secret.
My nipples are peaking so hard that it’s almost painful. But even more painful is the heat of Bastian’s eyes. It feels like he’s searing me with a branding iron everywhere he looks. Down my chest, my belly, to the crook of my hips meeting, a bunched-up mess of black skirt fabric and embarrassingly juvenile, pink panties with berries printed all over them hiding my most intimate parts from sight.
His mouth twists in a smirk when he sees them. “Berries and cream,” he murmurs. “It’s almost like you knew this was coming, Eliana.”
I don’t think I’ve ever been less capable of speech in my life. I’m trembling all over, choked-up beyond reason. Helpless, too. So fucking helpless.
His jaw clenches down again, lines of tension radiating down into his neck and up into his temples, and his hand tightens on my knee. He doesn’t bother with my bra. His fingers simply hook beneath the cups and yank them down. I cry out as my nipples tighten instantly.
Still pinning me into place with that hand on my knee, Bastian dips two fingers into the bowl of whipped cream and scoops outa perfect little whorl of it. He paints it tenderly onto my left nipple, then repeats the motion on the right.
The cream is cold. Shockingly so. I gasp as it starts to melt on contact with my heated skin. When I look down, I see it trickling down the curves of my breasts in slow, meandering rivulets.
Then his mouth descends.
Hot.I’m reduced to thinking in single syllables now, andhotis the best I can come up with. His tongue is so impossiblyhotagainst the chill of the cream, lapping at me in broad, lazy strokes. He cleans the cream from my left breast first, working his way up from the sensitive underside until his lips close around my nipple and suck.
I moan one of the other mono-syllables I can think of: “Fuck?—!”
His teeth graze the tip, just hard enough to make my spine bow off the counter. My hands fly to his hair and tangle in those golden curls. I’m not sure whether I’m holding on to keep him there or to try to push him away because it’s too much.
He switches to my right breast, adding another dollop of cream before his tongue follows the same torturous path. Licking, sucking, biting, over and over until I’m nothing but nerve endings and need. I know without looking that my berry panties are thoroughly soaked through.
