He smoothed the silk straps from her shoulders and the dress dropped from her body like a magician’s reveal. Her gasp was drowned out by the ferocious pounding of his heart. He covered her breasts with his arm, pulling her against him, and she shifted against his arousal, her back arching her breasts against his forearm. He was wearing too many clothes, while Henna was in nothing but a midnight-coloured thong and high heels.
Her body was on fire, branded by Aleksander’s touch, by the scorching heat of his gaze, and it was glorious. Every single touch, every single lick, kiss, bite, she felt it all over her body. It was shameless and she didn’t care. Her head fell back against his shoulder and he devoured her neck with open-mouthed kisses and growls of need that arrowed to her pulsing core.
The door to the elevator opened behind them, the swooshing sound audible until she let out a delicate cry as he swept her off her feet and into his arms. Her arms instinctively looped around his neck as her shoes fell to the floor, her hands interlocking and her gaze fastened to his. The thread of humour that had begun from embarrassment at the sound of her surprise evaporated beneath the heat of his scrutiny.
He stalked through the penthouse suite and came into a room bathed in an array of colours: fuchsia, ice-blue, rich gold, lush green and effervescent purple. He laid her on the bed beneath a kaleidoscope of city lights through the window and he was still the most glorious sight she’d ever seen.
He shucked the tux jacket from his shoulders and tossed it aside. He yanked the bow tie from his throat, snapping one end free and sliding it from round his neck. She backed up on the bed as his eyes stalked over her, devouring her without laying a finger on her.
‘You are my weakness—do you know that?’ he asked as his hands pulled the shirt from his trousers, and all she could do was watch. His words were fire through the ice in her veins, heating her from deep within. His movements were efficient, impatient even, and there shouldn’t have been anything erotic about the sharp, tension-filled actions that undid buttons, but there was.
‘You could ask for anything right now and I would give it. Do you understand?’ he demanded furiously, as he tore the shirt from his shoulders and threw it across the room. His anger only fuelled her desire. Because she was angry too. Angry that he could never be hers. Angry because she suddenly understood why. ‘I have spent years ensuring that no one would ever get close enough to betray me again. But you? You wouldn’t have to. You could take everything from me and I’d still want to give you more.’
She saw it then—how vulnerable he thought she made him, how weak. She saw his thinking as if it were being written in the air between them. He had been made to pay the ultimate price in order to rule, and to make it worth it, to makeKristine’s decisionworth it, he had to be the best ruler—no weakness, no vulnerability, no emotion. She wished she could show him that there was another way to be, another way of living that didn’t involve him cutting himself off from everyone around him. But he was clinging so desperately to the belief that had enabled him to survive his grief, the belief that cutting off all emotion was the only way forward, that she didn’t dare take it from him. Tears gathered in her eyes as she nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘Henna, I—’
He shook his head, cutting off whatever it was he would have said, kneeled on the bed and pulled her into a kiss that stole as much as it gave, that thrilled as much as it drugged, that soothed even as it broke her into a thousand pieces.
His lips opened hers, worshipping her, breathing life into the far reaches of her desires, of her sense of self, and she couldn’t explain how much she wanted him, how much she needed him. She reached for the button of his trousers, pulling back to see his eyes glazed with a heady need. She palmed the length of his erection, the solid heat of his arousal just for her. He caught her wrist, stopping her when she pulled at the zip.
‘You said I could have everything tonight,’ she whispered, her desire to taste him as he had tasted her so strong it had become a mantra. Admitting it painted her cheeks with a blush that stung, and she feared he might refuse her, until he cursed and let go of her wrist.
She slid the zip down and ran the pad of her thumb delicately over the soft dull pink head of his penis where it crested the band of his briefs. His body shivered beneath her touch and she marvelled at such clear evidence of how she affected him. She swept the briefs down over his erection and hips, freeing him, and he shifted so that she could slip them from his legs.
Turning and lying back against the silk bedding, Aleksander watched her, his gaze revealing the sheer intensity of his anticipation. Sliding between his thighs and lowering, she licked slowly up the length of his hardened erection as it jerked against her tongue, the power, the heat and the dusky taste of him all for her. As she took him into her mouth, his hips bucked lightly and she clasped the base of his shaft, pushing down gently, delighted when his hips bucked again and a curse fell from his lips.
Slick and salty on her tongue, his thighs tense and corded beneath her touch, she felt the power of having Aleksander trembling beneath her, mindless with pleasureshehad brought him, and surprised by the pleasure she brought herself. Her tongue swept a caress across the head of him and this time Aleksander reached for her with both hands. ‘If I have only one night with you, Henna, do not make me wait,’ he said, staring down at her, his eyes ablaze.
He pulled her up the length of his body and kissed her with an intensity that seared her soul, that teased already taut nipples and pulsed an over-sensitised core, before he rolled her beneath him.
Braced on one arm, his hand swept down her body, his fingers hooking beneath the thin band at her hip and sliding the thong down her legs and from her feet. He clasped her calf, his fingers travelling up over her knee and thigh to luxuriate in the soft crosshatch of curls. Restless, her legs shifted against his thighs, wanting more and more from his touch, and when he finally parted her to his scrutiny, rather than feel exposed, the raw ferocity in his gaze made her feel powerful, wanted,needed.He cupped her, pressing the heel of his palm against her clitoris and teasing her with two thrusting fingers.
He was brutal in his determination to drown her in as much pleasure as he could and, unlike last time, her orgasm built with a decadent inevitability, first sweeping at her feet like the tide, then rising inch by delicious inch through her body, warming her skin with tingles and dusting it with a pink flush. Her thighs quivered as it passed, it tripped over her ribs and flooded her lungs, making her gasp for air, it filled her throat and rolled her eyes and, when it finally hit, her body arched the wave and her soul soared into the midnight sky.
‘Aleksander.’
His name was a sob on her lips and he’d seen every single second of her pleasure and it had humbled him. He couldn’t stop touching her. His palms stroked her thighs, her hip, waist, anything he could touch, because for this night only she was his. He marvelled at her skin, pebbling beneath his palm, flushing beneath his gaze, dotted with golden freckles and dark moles that were a constellation he wanted to trace each night until he had mapped her, until she wasknown.
The thought was enough to scare him. Her eyes found his, as if she had sensed the change in him. He smiled away her concern as he pressed the feeling down deep within him and bent to kiss her shoulder, her neck, and beneath his lips she arched against him.
‘Henna—’
‘Please, Aleksander.’
Her whispered words tore at his heart.
‘Even with a condom—’ he began, hating that the thought of duty and the whisper of grief had entered their bed and become stuck in his throat.
‘I am also on the contraceptive pill,’ she explained, holding his gaze with compassion, understanding and so much more than he deserved. It was as safe as it could ever be, and it was still the most dangerous thing he could ever do. ‘But I would never ask you to do something you didn’t want to do,’ she said solemnly.
He huffed out a grim laugh. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted anyone. For so many years he had kept so much to himself, bottled up, fizzing beneath the lid, and finally he felt understood by her and it was the absolute worst thing that she could do. Because she would know that it was his carelessness that had cost him and Kristine so much, even if they had only been teenagers.
But he wasn’t a teenager now, and neither was Henna. They were as protected as they could be. The slide of her thigh against the outside of his calf started a silky friction that quickly incited a firestorm of need. He couldn’t change the way he was, the way he’d made himself twelve years ago, but he could give Henna what she wanted tonight.
He reached for the bedside table drawer and withdrew a condom, her heavy-lidded gaze steadfastly on his as he tore the foil wrapper and drew the latex over the length of his erection. Turning back, he braced himself on forearms that bracketed a face he would hold in his heart until he could no longer remember anything else.
She parted her legs for him and just before he entered her, just before he pushed into the softest heat he’d ever known, his last thought before need became a crashing urgent thing was that he felt safe. But the smooth, slow slide robbed him of all thought, leaving him capable only of the growl that left his lips, met and matched by Henna’s gentle moan, as if they both finally crossed an invisible threshold that they’d fought against for too long.