“I like where your hands are,” Conrad continued, pleasantly, as if she hadn’t said anything. “Keep them there.”
He paused, as if he expected her to say something else. Acknowledge him, maybe? But it was only for a scant second and then he seemed to collect himself.
And then, finally, he moved toward her.
Still looking the way he had when he’d appeared in that doorway. Like he belonged on the cover ofGQ. The only thing he’d done was remove his jacket, but otherwise, he looked rich and corporate, astonishinglycapable, and deliciously...stern.
All things that should have repulsed her.
But instead, she was standing in a converted church, pressing her hands back against a brick wall with her shirt off because he’d told her to strip, holding her breath as she waited to see what he would do next.
Something inside her, panicky and desperate, seemed to swell—
But then he touched her, and she settled.
Shesettled.
All he did was smooth his palm over her cheek.
Rory blew out the breath she’d been holding, long and shuddery.
He was so close that she could smell him. And she didn’t understand how a man so big, sointenselymale, who had been wearing ajacket, could smell good in the middle of a Parisian summer. But he did. There was a hint of something too fresh to be cologne, more complicated than soap, and the rest was simply him.
Heat, maybe. Sheer confidence, if that was possible.
And God, hishand.
His palm was hard, and large. And he moved down, slowly, over her cheek to her neck. He paused for the scantest moment, long enough for her to gulp and possibly to feel her traitorous pulse, and then he kept going.
He stood there before her, his attention on what he was doing, not her. So intense, sosure,that it didn’t even occur to her to hurry him along. Or say something to break the spell. Or attack him, more likely, because she felt so off-balance and uncertain.
And then he filled his palms with her breasts.
His eyes gleamed when she made a broken little noise. Rory waited for him to bend his head. To take a nipple in his mouth, or start treating them roughly with his thumbs, but he didn’t do any of that.
Instead he only tested their weight, noted the color on her cheeks, then moved lower.
She thought maybe he was going to do some slow, languorous thing with her navel, just to drive her truly crazy, but he ignored it. He moved instead to the waistband of her jeans. She heard a clunking sound, but only dimly recognized that as him removing her spray bottle and tossing it aside. Rory couldn’t really seem to do anything but press, and press harder, against those bricks.
Until his gaze lifted and pinned her even more firmly against that wall.
He didn’t speak. Her world narrowed to that demanding navy blue gaze while below, he snapped open her jeans.
Then slid one hand down the slope of her abdomen and directly into her panties.
She expected him to tease her. To play.
He didn’t.
Conrad’s fingers were bold and as rock hard as the rest of him. He cupped her pussy, then squeezed, and she knew the exact moment he felt her piercing.
There was another pause, and his gaze caught fire.
But all he did was stroke into her. And whatever else she might have told herself, whatever she kept telling herself about what sheshouldfeel, there was no argument here.
She was slick and wet and molten hot. Already swollen with need, the ache of it almost too much, and he didn’t wait. As if he knew.
He didn’t pause again.