He went to open the office door, and light from the corridor spilled in, silhouetting his magnificent form. Their eyes met across the gloom while he waited for her to get her bearings. But her knees felt like soup.
Her legs like noodles.
She blinked but couldn’t focus.
She couldn’t even breathe.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her, but her mind was screaming for him to come back, for him to kiss her, for her to kiss him, for her to do anything to be kissed by Julian John. And suddenly when he swung around to leave, she blurted out, “JJ, wait!”
Her heart stopped when he froze, and for a wild instant, all that was audible in the dark room was both their uneven breathing. Their eyes met again—and something electrifying pulsed between them.
He closed the door so slowly her heart almost disintegrated, and then she heard a click as it hit the doorjamb. Darkness swallowed them again, darkness and something wild and untamable. An unbearable intensity charged the air as he took a step forward.
Molly was not thinking right, felt drunk with sensations. With expectation. Anticipation.
“What did you just say?” Julian asked. His voice was very, very soft. Dangerously soft.
Molly held her breath, her lungs near bursting. “I said JJ.”
His eyes shimmered like lanterns in the night, and her heart rattled in her chest and the blood roared in her ears as he took that last step closer.
With slow, deliberate precision, he placed his hands on either side of her head against the back wall and caged her between his arms as he leaned forward. A gravelly sound stole into his voice as he slid his fingers through her loose hair and encircled the back of her head. “Say it to my face, Molly. Say it one more time to my face. I dare you.”
Longing burst open inside her. Hunger. Want. Everything.
She knew this was crazy and wrong and yet she couldn’t help h
erself, couldn’t stop. Her body was trembling, head-to-toe, trembling. He had been playing a game with her and perhaps she wanted to play back, but this was more than a game.
Maybe?
Was it?
She didn’t know anything anymore, except that maybe she should apologize for calling him by his most loathed nickname and just leave.
Maybe she didn’t really want to be kissed by Julian John, because she wanted Garrett. Or maybe she’d truly lost her head tonight, because as she met his gaze in the shadows, she heard herself speak between panting breaths.
“I said JJ, JJ.”
* * *
The silence was deafening.
Julian’s eyes widened, for he was sure that he hadn’t heard right the first time. But this second time, he just couldn’t believe it.
Molly had called him JJ, and he was going to have to make her pay for that. Stat.
In a whiplash move, he yanked her up against him and hoarsely demanded, in a voice as jagged as torn paper, “Do you remember what I told you I would do if you ever, ever called me JJ again?”
Smiling a smile that was all mischief, Molly tilted her back, her breasts rising and falling fast. She nodded slowly, provocatively—tauntingly.
The little she-cat wanted this!
Almost drugged with the thought of exacting his punishment, Julian caressed his hands up her slender arms, savoring the feel of her smooth skin against his calloused palms. “Well, then, I’m going to have to kiss you now,” he purred, the words acting like foreplay as he leaned closer. He could almost taste the gloss on her lips already.
“O-okay, Jules,” she said, almost a squeak as she gripped the rolled-up sleeves at his elbows as though hanging on to him for dear life.
Swamped with every single emotion in the world and close to exploding with wanting her, he cupped her face between his large hands and lowered his head, his heart going a powerful baboom baboom baboom. “‘Okay, Jules’? Is that all you have to say? All right, then, you asked for it, Moo…now you’re getting it good…”