“What about it?” he asked.
Her eyes lifted hesitantly. “What if I said I would do the same for you?”
This is what it meant to be choked up. To have his sanity in the hands of another person to do with what they wanted. “I’d be fucking grateful.” He caught her by the hips and dragged her close, hissing a breath when her belly finally, finally met his aching length. “But I’d also lose my mind if you were ever in that kind of danger, so please don’t ever say that out loud again.”
“It was your analogy,” Hallie teased, going up on her toes, a slow raking of tits and belly and hips up the front of his primed body, and he groaned loudly, there in the middle of the vineyard. “Thank you for telling me that.”
Oh Jesus, he couldn’t take her whispered gratitude on top of his dick being so hard. Who had sent this woman to kill him? He was hungry and desperate and ready to give up years of his life to get his hands on those breasts. “I’ll tell you anything you want, just let me kiss that goddamn mouth. Let me get on top of you.”
With a small sound of shock—did she not understand he was dying?—Hallie lurched higher onto her toes and gave up her mouth, letting him come from above and wreck it, broken and starved and needy, his hands trying to clutch and smooth every part of her at once, experience every inch. They tunneled through her hair and raked down her back, yanking her by the ass into the cradle of his lap, both of them gasping into the kiss over the miraculous friction they created. The chafe they kept alive with rubs and pushes and grinds.
“Tell me we’re fucking tonight, Hallie,” he gritted out, teeth pressed to her ear.
“Was your mouth always this dirty?” she gasped.
“No.” He urged her down onto the ground, and she went, landing flat on her back on top of his spread-out jacket, her curls bouncing out in ninety directions, a sight that made his hands shake, it was so her. “And you can blame my colorful vocabulary on the fact that you’ve been bent over on your knees outside of my office window for weeks.” He let his weight settle on top of her incredible curves, slowly, his breath escaping like air from a tire puncture, his balls throbbing like a son of a bitch. “Weeks.”
“That is the standard flower-planting position.”
He reached down, gathered the hem of her dress in his hand, and worked it up to her hips, immediately rocking into the space between her thighs, deprived at never having been there before. Being like this, with her, was where he belonged. And God, the way she moaned and arched her back, covered in moonlight and a flush, was the closest he’d ever come to magic. “Flowers are the last thing on my mind when you’re on all fours,” he gritted out, rocking again, gratification thick in his stomach when she pressed her knees open, grabbed the sides of his waistband, and pulled, urged, lifted. “I’m thinking of your bare ass slapping against my stomach.”
“G-great,” she stammered in between hot rakes of their open mouths. “I’ll never be able to do my job again without blushing.”
“Speaking of this blush.” Christ, he could barely make out his own words, they were so slurred with lust, muffled into her neck as he traced a line downward with his tongue, over the smooth patch behind her ear, the curve of her collarbone, the sweet-smelling hollow of her throat. “How far down does it go?”
“I don’t know,” she breathed. “I’ve never checked.”
“We better find out.” Julian watched her face closely as he licked a path over the hills of her cleavage, needing to know they were together in this. Continuing. “Hallie. Are you wearing that goddamn polka dot bra?”
“I . . . Yes. How did you—”
Groaning, he kissed her stiff nipples through the material of her dress, the fact that she’d worn that tormenting underwear turning his dick to stone. “Let me take it off and suck them, sweetheart.”
She struggled to pull in a breath. “Oh, wow. Key moment to pull out the endearment.”
He opened his mouth over the stiff bud, raking his lips side to side, groaning when it swelled, grew sharper. “I’ve been calling you that in my head for much longer.”
“Just pull my top down already,” she said in a rushing laugh that got his chest so heavily involved in the moment, even more than it already was, he had to press his face between her breasts and steady himself with her rapid-fire heartbeat. Inhaling through his nose and out through his mouth until the squeeze turned bearable. Mostly. “Julian . . .”
“I know.” He had no idea what that exchange meant, only that Hallie’s use of his name anchored him even more, made his mouth eager for the taste of her tongue again. And he gave in to it, traveling back up to her mouth for more kissing, more wild drawing of suction and wetness, then back down to her heaving tits. At some point, they’d started working down the neckline of her dress together, or maybe the drag of his chest up and down had done it, because her breasts were almost free of her bodice and polka dot bra, so big and lush and sweet, he whispered a prayer before his first lick across her bare nipples. “First part of you I saw up close,” he muttered thickly. “Last thing I want to see before I die.”