This is all familiar—the sensations, if not the place—but it doesn’t make it any less frightening. Then a hand grasps my wrist, a familiar shock travelling up my arm like quicksilver. It’s like a flow of recognition that everything is okay, the kind of relief that’s like being tethered to safety during a storm. I can feel the thrum of my pulse against his thumb, my heart pounding solidly though no longer in fear.
My hand is brought to the centre of a chest, a very solid and male chest, the beat of his heart keeping time with my own.
‘Hello, a girl not named Holly.’ There’s amusement in both his brilliant eyes and his dark tone. ‘Come with me,’ he says, taking my hands as he begins to walk backwards out of the crowd.
‘I thought you’d left.’
‘Not without getting you alone.’
I don’t have words, and I don’t have breath, the latter escaping in a gust from my chest.
‘I’m still cross with you.’ But that’s not true. Why aren’t I annoyed anymore, and why am I following him like he has all the answers?
‘You only tell yourself that. You’re not really annoyed. More... frustrated.’ His fingers are warm as he lifts my hand to his lips, shocking me by pressing his teeth there rather than a kiss. ‘You like me. You just don’t like that you like me.’
‘You are conceited.’
‘But I’m also right, and you also don’t like that.’ I don’t get the opportunity to argue the point as he carries on. ‘You know what you also like? This.’
His hand curls around my shoulder as he presses me against a wall, the sensation of the cold surface drawing shock from my throat. His body follows mine, the hard length of him pressed up against me, that mesmerising and wicked gaze burning down.
‘You make me so hard.’
My eyes fall closed, every one of my nerve endings, every sensory neuron coming alive in anticipation of his touch, and when his fingers feed through my hair, I try to bite back my moan.
‘Oh, I like that,’ his dark voice rasps, his words a bare breath against my lips.
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You didn’t have to. Yet I can almost anticipate how wet you are from here.’
I don’t have a comeback, not as something hot and sweet begins to twist inside me. I know I should be offended, that I should tell him to let me go, but I want more than anything for him to find out for himself.
My hair in his hand, he presses my head back and his lips travel over my neck. Each press of those divine lips and each swipe of his tongue is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, this all-consuming need to have him inside me. And then our lips meet, but it’s not a kiss. It’s a tasting. A tease. It’s my taut moans and rapid breaths as he holds me in place.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ he whispers, his mouth ghosting mine. ‘Kiss me.’
I make as though to move, shocked by the pain at the base of my skull, but that’s not what keeps me in place. It’s the heavy, wanton throbbing pulse between my legs.
‘What are you waiting for? Touch me. Use your hands.’
My mind goes hazy around the edges faced with his dark and possessive gaze. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I wet my lips and try again.
‘Maybe I don’t want to.’
‘No? Maybe you want me to make you.’
‘Oh.’ That one breathy sound is neither an adequate nor appropriate response. Neither are the images swirling through my head. My hands in one of his, held high above my head. His other in my underwear, my body undulating and chasing his touch. I have never felt like this before, this yearning for something I know is wrong.
‘I see what you’re thinking. I know what you need.’ His soft lips tantalise the skin at the base of my neck, his teeth coasting my collarbones. ‘It can be our little secret. No one needs to know you like to be pinned. Let me do this for you.’ Soft lips and grazing teeth become sucking bites, bringing blood and yearning and need to the very surface of me. ‘Let me bury myself between your legs.’
God, yes.
‘Fuck you so hard you cry my name and forget your own.’
‘Heather. Heather say yes.’
‘Yes.Yes!’ How is it possible this is happening? How can I be on the verge of—
