One thing she’d never suspected him of being?
A liar.
“Here.” Marching up to him, she more or less threw the dictionary at his chest.
He caught it with a grunt. “What the devil is this for?”
“So you can look up the definition of the word hypocrite!” She whirled around, prepared to dash out in a huff of righteous indignation—if she were on stage, surely it would be an exit worthy of a standing ovation—but Kincaid spoiled her theatrical debut when he grabbed her around the waist and spun her towards him.
Their bodies collided.
Their eyes flashed.
First with warning…
…and then in recognition of the inevitable.
“Damn you,” Kincaid growled as he pushed his fingers into her hair and tilted her head back. Free of its coiffure, her wild mane tumbled over his hands in a waterfall of red silk. He cursed again while her breath quickened in anticipation. “I don’t want this.”
“Hypocrite,” she whispered.
He kissed her.
No, Joanna registered with a small stirring of alarm as he nipped her bottom lip with his teeth and then soothed the bite with his tongue.
Kincaid wasn’t kissing her. He waspossessingher. With a fierce, nearly carnal hunger that left her gasping for air when he wrenched free of her lips, cleared his desk of papers with a violent sweep of his arm, and sat her in the middle of it.
She clung to his neck as he stepped between her legs, anchored his arms on either side of her trembling body, and proceeded to devour her mouth like a man starved. He took her lips as though they belonged to him, as thoughshebelonged to him and, for once in her life, Joanna was more than happy to relinquish control.
Her head rolled limply to the side when he kissed her neck. He suckled at the deliciously sensitive juncture between her throat and collarbone, and she gasped when he went even lower, tugging her bodice down with one hand while the other cupped the underside of her breast…and raised its dusky center to his mouth.
Lust. Passion. Arousal.
Joanna had not understood their true meaning before this. Before she found herself sprawled on a man’s desk, her thighs wantonly splayed apart and her pupils dilated with desire, while a man teased her nipple through her cotton undergarments.
With his tongue.
She whimpered when Kincaid moved to her other breast; a tiny, mewling sound that only seemed to inflame his ardor. He kissed his way down her ribcage, peeling her gown off as he went. It bunched at her wrists and her waist, and his snarl of frustration made her smile.
“How do you get this bloody thing off?” he demanded, tugging at her corset.
Joanna shook her head regretfully. “I wish I knew.”
He took off his spectacles and tossed them carelessly on the desk. They skidded across and dropped to the floor, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He was too intent of ridding her of anything that separated his lips from her flesh, and she jumped when he grabbed her corset by its seams and quite simply ripped it apart.
The boning had left faint red lines in a vertical row around her torso. Anger darkened Kincaid’s countenance when he saw the marks the corset had left. She quivered when he traced them first with his fingertips and then with his mouth, following a line all the way down to the jut of her hipbone.
“Never wear one of those again,” he said, glaring at the torn corset which now laid in a sad crumple at her feet. “Such beauty doesn’t deserve to be contained.”
“All right.” Resisting the primitive urge to cover herself, she lifted her chin instead, bravely exposing every inch of her naked bosom to Kincaid’s gaze as he turned his head. “I won’t.”
The detective swallowed.
Audibly.
“Beauty,” he repeated, his voice little more than a rasp.
Joanna closed her eyes and arched her spine away from the desk when he cupped her breasts, his thumbs circling round her nipples until they were hard and aching and all but begging to be licked.
