One of his hands stays firm at my waist. The other slides slowly up my back, palm flattening between my shoulder blades as if he needs to keep me close enough that I can’t slip out of his reach. The music is slow enough to hide the way we barely know what we’re doing. All that really matters is the rhythm, the heat of him, and the slow drag of his body against mine every time he turns us another inch.
Leaning down slightly as we move, his mouth is close enough to my ear that the next words brush my skin before they fully become sound.
“You have any idea,” he says, voice low, “what you’re doing to me in this dress?”
The question sends a pulse straight through me.
My fingers tighten where they’re laced loosely at the back of his neck. “I’m sure I could take a guess.”
He exhales a quiet laugh against my temple, though there is nothing light about the way his hand slips lower at my waist for half a second before returning to something more respectable. The touch is subtle enough that no one watching would notice. I notice. My whole body notices.
“Cruel girl,” he murmurs.
The room keeps turning around us, gold light, slow music and glinting glasses blurring at the edges while he moves me. Every time the slit in my dress parts, my thigh brushes his leg, his grip shifting. Every time I glance up and catch his eyes on my mouth, the pace of my breathing changes.
His mouth finds the shell of my ear again.
“Been trying all night not to think about your lipstick on me,” he says softly. “Doing a really bad job.”
Heat floods my cheeks, then drops lower.
The hand at my back begins to travel, not hurried, not crude, just slow. It glides up over the bare skin left exposed by my dress, then back down again in a path that feels almost innocent until the weight of his palm settles at the curve of my waist and stays there. His thumb traces once, lightly enough to make me shiver.
“You’re shaking,” he whispers.
“You’re distracting.”
“That’s the point.”
The answer is so immediate it nearly makes me lose the beat entirely.
My body presses closer on instinct, chest to chest now, my arms drawing him in with less restraint than I should probably be showing in a room this public. If anyone notices, I do not careenough to stop. Let them wonder. Let them look. He is touching me like he already knows exactly where my control starts to loosen.
His fingertips skim the edge of the open back of my dress, following the line where fabric ends and skin begins. The motion is small, yet, it sends a much larger reaction through me than it has any right to.
“Silas,” I breathe.
He tilts his head, eyes darkening at the sound of his name in my mouth.
“What?”
The question is almost mocking, but the tenderness in it ruins the effect.
A slow turn carries us deeper into the music, the rest of the dance floor fading farther from me with each step. The heat of his hand moves again, this time drifting from my waist to the slope of my hip, lingering there. His thumb presses once, slow enough to make it obvious he is thinking about more than just the music.
The breath that leaves me is embarrassingly soft.
“There she is,” he says under his breath. “That look.”
I know exactly what look he means.
The one I get when he starts peeling composure off me in pieces.
He bends his head again, his lips nearly brushing the place just beneath my ear without quite kissing it. The almost is worse than contact. The almost keeps every nerve in me waiting.
“You look at me like you want me to ruin you right here,” he whispers.
I swallow hard.
