But his hand was on the bare skin of her thigh, so hot, so possessive. The storm inside her raged on, and she bit her lip. Ivan shifted and looked down at her, his clever eyes searching hers.
Slowly, inexorably, his hand moved higher. He held her gaze. Watching. Waiting.
Miranda’s breath sawed in and out. Raw. Almost painful. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t tell him to stop. She couldn’t seem to form a single syllable. It was as if he’d shorted out her brain.
His hand crept higher and he shifted again, moving down over her with that surprising, distracting grace of his, until he kissed her thigh, right next to where his hand rested, so close to the very heart of her need.
“Ivan.” It was so hard to speak. It was so hard to feel all of this, to feel it and not simply pass out from the pleasure. Or the deeper emotion she wasn’t equipped to handle. Or the rising panic she was struggling to ignore. She didn’t know how to feel this much—how to handle this kind of passion, this storm. “I don’t...”
“You don’t what?”
He was licking her skin, tracing a lazy path of fire along her thigh, and even as she registered the fact that he was pushing her legs apart and settling himself between them, he was there. He threw a single dark look at her, black like silk and as effortlessly seductive, intently sexual, deliciously male, and then pressed his mouth against her, hard.
As if she wasn’t wearing that tiny scrap of satin between her legs at all. As if she was already naked.
Miranda arched against him, up off the floor, the pleasure like a shock wave, coursing through her, setting her alight. She felt him in her breasts, her toes. Her skin seemed to burst into flames. He curved his hands around her bottom, holding her to him, taking her. Simply taking her as if she’d always been his.
She couldn’t understand how he could wreck her like this—how he could make her feel such huge, unwieldy things, so big they were crowding her out of her own body, so giant she could hardly breathe, love and lust and electric want—
“I don’t—”
But she was panting with that terrible, impossible need and her own slick, hot response, and he simply moved her panties out of his way, then licked his way into the center of her, where she was already molten hot and he seemed to know intuitively exactly how to drive her wild.
Exactly how to make her body arch up again, her entire being focused on the sheer mastery of that hard, perfect mouth, the things that he could do, the things that he was doing—
It was too much. It was overload. Chaos. She felt strung out, lit up. How could she survive this much pleasure and still be herself? How could she be sure she would live through this at all? How could anything feel this good?
“I don’t like—”
“This?”
He did something new with his mouth, licked into her harder. Deeper. She heard a far-off scream of pleasure almost too acute to bear and only dimly understood she’d made it.
“Or this?”
He slid two long, hard fingers deep into the core of her, as if he already knew all of her secrets, as if he’d already had her a thousand times. And Miranda writhed beneath him, mindless, unable to do anything at all but feel it coming toward her, this wildness like a terror in her veins, her flesh. This impossible crisis, inexorable and his to command. Just as she was.
“I can’t—” she began.
“You can. I promised.”
And then he took the heat of her in his mouth again, performed that magic that was only his and threw her straight over the edge of the world.
* * *
That was one promise kept, Ivan thought with deep male satisfaction as she shuddered in his arms and he had to restrain himself from simply sliding into her then and there, putting the proper end to all of this torture.
God, the ways he wanted her. He was man enough to admit, here, while she still shook herself apart in his arms, that he had wanted her long before he’d met her. That he had entertained any number of fantasies about that snooty little frown of hers that meant that overeducated brain of hers was working overtime, that entrancing sweep of dark red hair that begged for his hands, that beautiful mouth of hers that criticized him so resolutely and was so hot and wild on his.