“We can’t,” she gasped, but her hands worked the button on his pants, the fly. She had never tunneled her hand into the heated front of a man’s trousers, but there was his shape filling her palm, naked and hot and silky. He was commando, shockingly bare to her touch, smooth with a graze of rough hair at the base, so steely and thickly aroused she gasped and clenched in anticipation.
He bent his knees, urging her to line him up as he shifted her underwear to the side. He traced his thick tip along her seam, parted, sliding easily against her then probing. “Do I need a condom?”
Late for that, wasn’t it? She was dying! Panting with excitement.
“I’m on the pill,” she managed to say, moving in invitation. She wanted him so badly. Now.
Their breaths mingled. His nostrils flared as he found her opening and pressed with more purpose. Nerves made her stiffen slightly, but she was eager, anxious as she looked into his eyes, wanting him to like it, wanting this to be good.
“Oh,” she whispered as he pushed the tip in, stretching her. Her gaze clouded and her breaths grew uneven. When she clenched on him, little shock waves of pleasure jolted through her. Her eyelids grew heavy and wanted to close.
He pressed farther in, his weight driving her against something that dug into her back. She wriggled, making a noise of discomfort. “The rail—”
He smoothly lifted her, one hand going under her bottom where he balanced her above that infernal rail and then he was firmly seated all the way in, eye to eye with her. It was incredibly intimate. Man and woman. Steel and silk. Their panting breaths humid against each other’s lips.
“Hold on to me,” he rasped.
She closed her legs around his waist, twined her arms over his shoulders.
He moved, watching her expression as he withdrew and returned, driving in deep, holding there a moment, then dragging out slow, tantalizing her to new heights, arousing her with each thrust. Then he built the tempo to swift thrusts that were exciting and delicious and sent her racing up the slopes of need.
She clung to him with every part of her. He was hard everywhere, tense and determined. Her lips ached to be kissed, but she needed air. She couldn’t look away from his gaze, watchful, waiting, demanding. It was too wild, too erotic, too scorchingly fast. She was there, right there, shuddering and flying apart. Finally closing her eyes as the pleasure detonated into something otherworldly.
A deeply animalistic noise left him as he arched deep and pulsed inside her, holding her in that state of ecstasy.
She gloried in the moment, body electrified as they completely possessed each other, united in this moment of culmination.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GWYN COULDN’T BELIEVE she had let him do that to her. Her legs were still trembling as she joined him inside the ballroom, having slipped into the ladies’ room the minute they left the elevator to recover herself.
“Cara, please meet some friends of mine,” he said, settling his arm around her as he introduced her.
It was different. She was different and they were different. Her world had been upended all over again. The sexual awareness was still there, but instead of being a sharp, unmet need, it was a deep, perilous knowledge. She knew what her body was capable of. He did. They both knew what he could do to her, how he could strip her of willpower and blind her with desire. She wondered if she had really done the same to him because he didn’t seem as affected.
His arm sat heavier on her, more possessive, but when his glance came into her eyes, his held the light of memory and male satisfaction, but none of her wariness.
She was suffering all the same crush and attraction and fascination, but it was even more painful now. Before, she had yearned for him to match this feeling. Now she knew it didn’t matter if he did. She was lost regardless.
It made the stares and the curled lips and the dismissive way people treated her as he introduced her all the harder to bear.
She said nothing, still wondering how on earth she would survive Vito let alone the rest of all that had happened. It made her desperate for reassurance, but he was no help, standing here looking indifferent, letting one of his executives from New York talk his ear off about some policy Vito had assigned him to write.
To her, it sounded a lot like a guy trying to impress the boss by telling him how hard he was working, rather than actually doing the work.
Meanwhile, Gwyn realized she knew the woman from the Charleston branch who had just caught her eye. Here would come a gauntlet of questions. This was going to be the worst night of her life.
The moment she tried to excuse herself, however, Vito’s arm hardened on her.
“I should say hello to Ms. Tamsin,” Gwyn said, caught between homesickness and dread. She would love to hear the news on her former colleagues, but really didn’t want to talk about herself.