‘Well, I’m not going anywhere.’
‘No,’ he said, his eyes burning into hers, the look in them making her heart thump even more crazily. ‘You aren’t.’
He slid his hands up her ribcage, skimming the undersides of her breasts as he searched for the zip of her dress and Zoe shivered.
‘Cold?’ he murmured, finding the tab at the side and beginning to tug it down, so slowly that at first her dress did nothing but gape a little.
‘Boiling.’
He pulled the zip further, all the way down until it stopped and her dress just sort of fell apart, slithering down her body and pooling at her feet.
‘Better?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’ Not when she was standing there in nothing more than a white lacy strapless push-up bra, matching knickers, nude hold-ups and shoes, with only a pearl choker for decoration, and his eyes were roaming all over her with a hunger that robbed her of breath.
‘Not one of the five per cent, then.’
Zoe swallowed. ‘Disappointed?’
‘Disappointed is not the word that springs to mind.’
‘What word does?’
‘Stunning.’
‘That one will do.’
As Dan resumed his perusal of her he appeared to descend into speechlessness and immobility and Zoe took the opportunity to balance things up a bit on the sartorial front.
Pushing his coat and then his jacket off his shoulders and letting them fall to join her dress on the floor, she went to work on the buttons of his shirt. Her hands were shaking so much it took twice as long as she reckoned it should have but, God, was it a task worth pursuing because when she parted the two panels of cotton and caught her first glimpse of his chest she realised that what was in front of her was a body that Michelangelo would have wept buckets of awe over.
There wasn’t an over-pumped muscle in sight, just an expanse of tanned skin brushed with a smattering of hair that stretched over taut flesh and tapered down over the hint of a six-pack.
Unable to hold back, she put her hands on him and when she felt him tremble beneath her palms a sense of power and amazement that she could do this to a man like him surged up inside her and addled her brain.
In mouth-watering fascination she watched her hands trail down to the fastening of his trousers as if acting entirely of their own accord. Her fingers undid the button and slid down the zip and then slipped inside to feel the hot hard length of him.
At the thought of him pushing into her, she started to ache and throb with such desire, such desperation, that she actually moaned as she curled her hand around him and began to stroke it up and down.
Dan snapped out of his rigid immobility and galvanised into action. ‘Bedroom,’ he said, wrapping a hand around her wrist and stopping what she was doing.
‘No,’ she muttered, thinking that if she didn’t get him inside her right now she might just expire right here on the floor of the hall.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Condoms.’
Good point. ‘Lead the way.’
As he pushed his trousers down and stepped out of them Zoe kicked off her shoes, then put her hand into the one he held out and followed him up the stairs that were hard to negotiate given her legs had turned to jelly. He led her into his room, flicked a switch that bathed the room in soft pale yellow light and kicked the door shut.
Zoe didn’t have the chance to look round, or even check out the bed, because her eyes locked with his and all she could see was him. Then he was walking her backwards until the backs of her knees hit something hard and he was giving her a gentle push so she fell back on the bed.
Then she found she couldn’t have checked out his furnishings even if
she’d wanted to because Dan was stripping what little remained of his clothing, rummaging around in a drawer and then slipping on a condom and as it struck her she was about to have out-of-this-world sex her mouth went dry and her head went all foggy.