The garment loosened, more than she wanted to admit was needed, but she could breathe. Of course, she was inhaling him at the same time as the oxygen. Sun-warmed flesh, dense muscle. Feeling the touch of his hands on her and oh holy hell, what was he doing now?
Sweeping aside her hair, he laid his lips on the bump of vertebrae, just at her nape, still holding her close against his upper body.
The climax swept over her so fast, there was no anticipating it. It ricocheted up from where the ribbed seat pressed against her pussy--still spasming from the memory of his mouth--to her neck, where his lips rested now. He kept a tight grip on her hair, holding her head still beneath that erotic kiss. As she rocked herself against the seat helplessly, he grasped one of her buttocks, squeezing hard to add male demand to her jerking rhythm, working her against the friction of the seat until she was making frenzied cries, pushing against the solid wall of him. God, she wanted him between her legs, instead of a beast of metal. Hammering into her, holding her down . . .
The thought brought her down quickly, quicker than she wanted. She was shaken. Shaking, still catching her breath. As he'd pulled her up, it had yanked her ear phones free, so now the music was her own rasping breaths, the birds, the rush of water, the wind. The drumming of his heart, his own ragged sounds.
"Little idiot," he murmured, his jaw along her temple. She heard a faint Midwest trace under the blatant edge of desire. "You could have passed out."
"Well, who knew you'd be good at this?"
She said it without thinking and cursed herself. Guys got off on that kind of flattery, took it as invitation for more. She didn't want to stroke his ego, not when he'd ripped her open like that. Forced her to loosen her self-imposed restraints and turn control over to him.
Wrapping his hand in her hair, he canted her head back. Before she could think of something more quelling to say, he shocked her again by slamming his mouth down on hers, taking it over, and everything attached to it. Drinking deep, he made it everything a kiss should be. Fire, mind-altering, wet, demanding, scraping things raw that would scream in the open elements when he took his mouth away, so that she'd beg for it to return.
Raising his head when she was nowhere near sated, he held his grip so she couldn't try to follow his mouth. "I was just getting started, sweetheart."
Since he was still giving her that penetrating look, it suggested he was used to assessing things closely, determining what made them tick. But he disrupted her anxiety over that when he released her hair to run his hand beneath it, caress her nape in a way that said every time he touched her there, he'd remember what had shattered her. "Now, let me give you a real climax." As his gaze heated, she began to moisten again, anticipating. "If you thought what I did before was good, there've been too many losers in your life who didn't appreciate how they could make you sing."
A backhanded compliment for sure, she told herself, trying to keep the sensual intent of the words from muddling her mind more than he already had. Implying she was sexually deprived if she let something like a couple minutes of lip play get her off. Bastard.
"What's your name?"
She shook her head and he tipped up her chin, a trace of impatience in his eyes. "I want to know."
"A name comes with expectations."
"Identity," he agreed. "Repeat dates."
She couldn't afford a man like this in her life, for certain. He'd almost made her smile. "I'm taken."
He blinked once. "No, you're not."
Someone more inexperienced would have retorted, "How do you know?" But when words were used as weapons, she could hold the upper hand. She merely met him eye to eye and stayed silent, trying not to think about the fact she was wearing only soaked panties and a way-too-loose corset. While he was wearing a pair of shorts that should be illegal.
"If you were taken," he said, a sexy, rough edge to his voice, his hand tightening on her sensitive neck, "I'd see him, smell him. There'd be a hint of his aftershave on your breasts, where he started the day by suckling your nipples, or razor burn where his jaw scraped your tender flesh. Your lips would be swollen from his kisses." When she tried to turn her head, he dragged his jaw along the side of her
neck, then placed his mouth there, spoke against her tingling skin. "Or I'd have smelled him on your cunt. Because if he doesn't mark you as his every morning before you walk out the door, he's insane."
Hadn't she compared this man's initial approach to that of an animal? After a statement like that, he was pure animal for sure, stating possession in terms understood by beasts of the forest. As well as alpha males with a primal code like this, an undercurrent that she knew women sensed but most could never truly understand. Even as they were hopelessly drawn to it.
Still, women had their own code to survive such a devastating assault. Drawing her head back, she managed a cool smile reflected by no other part of her quivering body, but it was a starting point. "I said I'm taken. I didn't mean by a man. I'm taken by the demands of my life, and you're not part of it. Nor am I inviting you. Only into this moment."
"So that's what this is about." He dipped his finger into the crevice between her breasts, tugged at the corset.
"What?"
"You wear it beneath your clothes. It's not fashion. Control is very important to you."
"It's important to everyone."
"A woman in a corset has to be constantly aware of the state of her body," he observed. "Never getting too flustered, stressed. It's an armor of sorts, but a paradoxical one. Because while the parts so tightly laced inside it lose some sensitivity to a man's touch, the parts above and below become far more sensitive because of the constriction. The trail of a finger along the buttock, just below the corset hem. Or the lightest kiss on the pillow of a breast. Or even the nape . . ." His hand passed there again. When he put his lips back on her shoulder, she had to ball her hands into fists to keep from sliding her hands down the curve of his bare back, feeling the ridges of spine, how low those shorts came on his hips. Whether she could slip her hands beneath the band to explore the design of his lower back, the rise of his tight ass.
"Let me go down on you again, sweetheart. Let go of your precious control. Give me the bliss of eating your sweet pussy and hearing you scream for me."
She closed her eyes. I really, really want to, which is why I can't. "I need some water first. Do you have any?"
A pause. Raising his head, he studied her. "I do. I left my bike just over there. But playing the coward doesn't seem to be your style. If you're going to leave, you're the type who'd just knock a man fl at on his ass and walk right over him, not look for a running head start."