This was absurd.
The...thing he felt for Anouk was absurd.
With her sweet smile and gentle demeanour she had succeeded in hooking him in a way he would not have believed possible a mere week ago. If he wasn’t careful, she was the kind of woman who could easily tame him long enough to put him on a leash. But what had Malachi warned him? That a leopard didn’t change its spots? That he was under some kind of spell now, but that when he came around again, all hell would break loose and the person he would most likely end up hurting would be Anouk herself?
And the idea of hurting her made him feel physically sick.
He needed to get up and move away. Now. Before it was too late.
Instead, he sat, perfectly still, not making even a sound. And still something swirled around them. He could feel it and he knew she could, too.
‘We got loads of beads,’ Libby’s excited voice reached his ears from across the room.
Just one more night, he promised himself. Just one last time with Anouk, and then he’d find a way to end it without anyone getting hurt.
And when his eyes caught hers, widening a fraction, the pulse leaping at her throat, he knew she was thinking the same thing.
‘Come home with me.’ His voice was low and urgent, more a command than a request.
Anouk nodded, seconds before the girls raced back across the gallery floor to rejoin them, and he’d never wished for two hours to pass so expediently.
* * *
Last time they had barely got through the door before Sol had pulled her to him. This time, they barely made it to the lift.
Sol claimed her with such reverent kisses it was as though he was committing every detail of her touch to memory. Inscribing himself on her soul and she couldn’t seem to get enough of him.
She could never seem to get enough. And that was the essential problem.
Even now, as he peeled off her clothing to kiss every last millimetre of her body, laying waste to her resolve and tearing down every last barrier between them, she couldn’t do anything but let him.
A slave to him. Or a slave to her desire for him. Either way, it amounted to the same thing. He was making her forget their arrangement. He was making her want more.
And more again.
Worse, Anouk couldn’t bring herself to care. So when he scooped her up to carry her through to the bedroom, muttering hoarsely about not making it past the hallway otherwise, all she could do was cling to him, pressing her body to his and meeting his possessive mouth with her own, greedy demands.
It was all she could do to ignore the tight emotions that tumbled through her when he laid her down so very reverently on the bed, removing the last of her clothes until she was naked before him, and rolling back to gaze at her, spread out before him as if she was his own personal feast.
‘I’ve waited for this all day, zolotse,’ he muttered, before lowering his mouth to her neck, kissing and licking the column of her throat, and fitting his palms to her breasts as if he couldn’t bear not to touch her a moment longer.
He trailed scorching little kisses down her neck and to the sensitive hollow at the base, taking his time, until she was urging him on with little moans. He moved across her shoulder and over the swell of her chest, inch by exquisite inch, as if he didn’t want to skip over a single millimetre of her body until finally—finally—his mouth took over from his hands.
First he sucked one hard, aching nipple into his mouth, grazing his teeth over it gently but not too gently, flicking over it with his tongue, lavishing attention on her. And only when he seemed truly satisfied did he turn his attention to the other side, to repeat the same, adoring process.
And Anouk arched up to him as though to offer u
p more of herself, her whole body feeling heavy and restless and wanting more. So much more. But he held her in place, deliberately trapping her legs so she couldn’t part them around him, couldn’t draw him against her, couldn’t nestle him where she burned for him most.
Like some kind of exquisite torture.
But if he didn’t slide inside her soon, filling her up where all these wild sensations jousted in her, she didn’t know if she could survive it.
Anouk didn’t know when it occurred to her that if he could torment her so wantonly, then surely she, too, could tease him?
Slowly, carefully, she ran her hands over his back, indulging, just for a moment or two, in reacquainting herself with those hewn muscles that not even his bespoke suit and waistcoat could conceal.
And when he murmured his approval, he answered her long and low, reverberating through her breasts and into her already molten core.