The softest smile she’d yet seen on his face only tightened the coiling tension inside her. “We can go slow,” he said. “It isn’t a race.”
It might have been the most tantalizing thing he’d ever done—knowing how she felt in her most intimate places, understanding that he held the upper hand in both experience and emotion, and still yielding all the decisions to her.
He could have seduced her. It would have been easy. She mighthave even welcomed it. But this wasn’t seduction. This was a man who recognized his own power and chose not to wield it, who set aside his own desires in favor of her comfort.
“You never have to be nervous with me,” David said.
Damn if this dangerous, goldenkeilawasn’t absolute perfection.
All at once, her misgivings disappeared and the tension snapped. She reached for him, her hand sliding around his neck as she pulled him in for a kiss.
It was nothing like yesterday, that teasing hint of temptation and a barely there graze. There was nothing slow or sweet about it. This kiss was flame and freedom, and she dove headfirst into the madness. He took ravenous handfuls of her thin undershirt, tugging her closer, and her arms flew around his neck, fingers plunging into his gilded hair.
The heat of him was everywhere. His skin. His tongue. His emotions. He was fire and she was kindling, and together they burned.
He pulled until she was flush against him, straddling him on the sofa, but it wasn’t enough. She needed things she didn’t understand. Friction. His weight on top of her.More.
“I want you,” Anna said against his lips, not knowing what to do or how to relieve this deep ache inside.
His hands spasmed on her waist, and he ripped his mouth away to look at her, to study her. “That’s a big decision, pixie girl.”
She shook her head.
Because it wasn’t. She trusted her body—it had never let her down—and her body wanted this man. It had chosen him.
His hands cupped her neck as he gazed into her eyes, thumbs grazing down the column of her throat. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, trying to breathe past her swollen heart.
“We don’t make sense, you and me,” David said.
Anna gripped his wrists. “We make more sense than anything else in my life.”
Whatever he saw in her gaze must have burned his reservationsto ash because he stood with her still wrapped around him and took her to a room down a hall, kissing her as if he needed the air from her lungs to breathe.
He kicked the door shut, then set her down atop something soft as a cloud. She took two seconds to register her surroundings—an extravagant four-poster bed with white covers and a set of matching furniture—before he was crawling on top of her.
This was his bedroom.
He’d taken her to his bedroom.
He’d put her in his bed.
This wasDavid Berkeley’sbed.
Wasn’t it just this morning that she’d decided he was too complicated to pursue?
Now she was beneath him, wanting him with a sharp, desperate savagery that felt like fingering a razor’s edge. Was lust always this overpowering? She wanted to give him things she’d never given anyone, wanted him to have parts of her no one else had.
His mouth dipped to her neck, and a ripple of tingles spread down her body. Her legs spread of their own volition to create space for him, her boots dragging against his trousers.
David lifted to his elbows to look down at her, searching, but she didn’t want him finding any reasons to stop. She flattened her hands against his chest, then slid up until her fingers twined with the gold chain at his neck. She pulled, tugging him back to her mouth. His kiss grew harder, more demanding, and his arm snaked around her waist. He pulled her tight against him, and a moan burst from her chest at the unyielding length that hit a perfect spot between her legs.
What…
She sucked in a breath when he did it again, and she felt his kiss turn into a grin. “I knew you’d be responsive.”
“That…that feels…”
