He lifted her legs with gentle pressure beneath her thighs, spreading her open and sinking his tongue. Her heart burst into a sprint, flooding thick, languorous sensations along her limbs. Dizzy energy and heat, crackling static and syrup, all of it spiraled through her blood and rocked her to her core. Wave after wave of stimulation slammed through her, centering in the bundle of nerve endings at the apex of her thighs.
His lips ground against her, firm and demanding. Then his fingers penetrated her achy depths, curling, pumping, freeing the last of her tension, and sending her tumbling into oblivion.
Strength left her body as she came, moaning and trembling through the stunning, blissful high. Then she crashed, clutching at the grass beneath her, anchoring herself back to reality.
He lowered her knees and removed his jacket and tie. Unbuttoned his shirt. Gave up halfway and tore open his fly. Removing a condom from his pants pocket, he rolled it on in record time. Only then did she notice his hands shaking.
“Luke.” Dazed, she reached for him and opened her legs.
“Christ, you’re a vision.” His gaze traveled over her nudity as he lowered himself in the cradle of her thighs. “There’s no place I’d rather be. I want to spend eternity inside you.”
Where her heart had been, there was only him. A thrumming stronghold of love and raw intensity.
“Touch me.” He held his hips above hers, his hand wrapped around the root of his cock.
She eagerly did as he asked, her questing fingers finding him hot and rigid, rubber over steel, twitching against the slide of her touch.
“Someday soon…” Hips rocking in her grip, he lowered his mouth to the hollow at the base of her throat and released a vibrating groan. “I’m going to feel you without a condom.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” She teased the thick length of him, her thumb roving over the tip, her fingers squeezing.
“Enough.” He grasped her wrist, stopping her. “You make me crazy, woman. So utterly outside of my control I fear I might burst.”
She knew the feeling.
Repositioning, he took his time lining up. Gliding the plump head between her folds, he teased and tormented until sweat broke out on her brow.
By the time he pressed against her opening, the world had narrowed to the rapid hammering of her pulse. Then he pushed, sinking, stretching her body, taunting her with every agonizing inch in one unhurried stroke.
Once he was seated, his breath rushed out on a strained grunt, his face so close she could see flecks of gold in his green, dilated eyes.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispered.
“I was just thinking the same about you.”
They were still. Throbbing, tingling, clinging to each other with their arms, their gazes, and the heavy rhythm of their heartbeats.
“It’s never felt like this.” She stared up at him, searching for the right words. “Like a surreal dream. I’m afraid to blink.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Why is it like this with you?”
“It’s us. We fit, and not just on a physical plane. It’s molecular.” He began to move within her, drawing back, pushing forward. Tight, shallow strokes. “Indescribably elemental.”
“Our souls match, and I don’t think it’s accidental. It’s as if they were merged together long ago, separated, and are finally reconnecting.”
“Maybe we were born for this exact moment. Deliberately designed to find each other and bind on a level that we can’t comprehend.”
“Fated. You believe that?” She slid a hand beneath his shirt and touched his chest, the muscle there hard and ridged with definition.
“With you, anything is possible.”
A sense of peace washed over her, but with it came a spike of fear. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. “This scares me.”
“Us? Together?”
“Us, not together. I’m terrified to lose this. Everything good in my life is taken away. I can’t lose you, Luke.”
He didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep. He knew the risks, the dangers they faced ahead, and seemed hellbent on keeping her in the present. Sheathed in her wet heat, he thrust hard and deep, setting a toe-curling rhythm and effectively ending all thought and conversation.
His tongue swept between her lips, drawing hers to him. The kiss deepened, and he palmed her backside, gripping her possessively while guiding her to meet his strokes, not too soft, not too hard, but so damn hot.
He surrounded her, filled her, moving in and out as if to satisfy a desperate craving to have her in every way, beyond sex, deeper than flesh, to own her once and for all. She needed no encouragement, lifting her hips, bowing her back, and riding the tide of elation.
The temperature rose, in the air, beneath her skin, between their lips. He rubbed his tongue against hers, and she gripped his shoulders, holding him, keeping him near, aching everywhere with a thirst that couldn’t be quenched.