His hot breath gushed over her skin.
‘I want to make love to you, feel you cling to me, hear you beg for release. And then I’ll hold you and kiss you in the dark, watch you fall asleep. Only to wake you by sliding down your body and devouring you with my mouth.’
Her lower abdomen clenched and turned achingly heavy, dampening her panties with wet warmth. And she wrapped her legs around his waist to grind against his thick erection in a silent plea for him to do all of that and more.
Gyrating, he ground back against her with long, animalistic groans. ‘Just…’ He scraped his teeth over the throbbing vein in her neck. ‘Just make me feel again, Luce. Please.’
Oh, God. ‘You’re about the only thing in the world I do feel…’
The last wave of doubt drifted away as a tide of longing swept over her. To give him pleasure where she could. To take his pain away while he’d allow her to.
Cupping his jaw, she lifted his head to meet her gaze.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she whispered.
It was a shockingly dangerous thing to confess, because it left her so exposed and vulnerable. But in that moment the need for him to know how deeply she felt outweighed any sense of self-preservation she had left.
He eased back, his brow creased as he studied her face. ‘Truth?’
‘Absolute truth. I’ve missed you so much. So much I ached with it.’
Ah, Luce, you never had a hope of resisting him. Of keeping your heart locked away.
Farther back he moved, withdrawing from her, and her stomach hollowed. Mind twisting, she wondered why he vibrated with rancour. And his touch…
He stroked up her thigh, burrowing beneath her floaty blush-pink sundress, his touch riding the line between pleasure and pain as if he were in the throes of anger. Suspecting she lied. His other hand roamed the curve of her waist, slid up to her midriff, where his thumb brushed the heavy underswell of her breast.
‘You’ve missed me?’ he said, flat and cool. ‘Yet how many men have touched this body since I took it, Luciana? Since I made you mine?’
Staring into his turbulent eyes, she shook her head gently. ‘Only you, Thane. There has only ever been you.’
Bizarre as it sounded, even to her own mind, she watched his barriers crumble and fall before her. Saw the floodgates to his emotions flung wide and time reversed. They stood still in the past. And there she was—his only focus, his entire world, the moon and the stars beyond. As if everything she’d convinced herself had been merely a dream was now a thrilling, breathtaking verity for her eyes only.
Her heart cracked wide open and she knew he could take it from where it lay, weak and defenceless outside her chest.
‘Luciana, I…’
He cupped her face and she could feel his hands tremble as he rubbed his nose alongside hers, faltering, as if he feared what he truly wanted to say.
Instead he murmured against her lips, ‘I…I need you.’
‘Have me,’ she choked out. ‘Take me. However you want.’
One night was all they were likely to have and she would give him everything he desired. Everything in her power to give.
Tenderly he pressed his mouth to hers, then slanted his head and thrust his tongue into her mouth in a slow, languorous lick.
Luciana parried right back, glorying in his devout advance and retreat, the touch of his tongue against hers, as he took them both to passionate heights. And higher still into oblivion as he rucked her dress up and broke their lip-lock to tear it from her body. His hands were suddenly everywhere and nowhere. Big and clever, strong and capable hands. Leaving a trail of rapture in their wake.
She trembled all the while and let loose a pleading sob. ‘Thane…I want you.’
‘You have me, angel.’
‘I want you naked. I want to feel you.’
He smiled wickedly as he stood tall, framed by the moonlit ripple of the ocean like a bronzed demigod. ‘You always did,’ he said, his voice raspy with lust.
The back of her head dug into the cushion as she craned her neck to stare up at him. Unable and unwilling to look anywhere else as inch by delectable inch his burnished skin was revealed.
Thane grabbed the hem of his T-shirt and with a sleek twist of his mighty fine torso, ripped it up and over his head.
Luciana had to slick her dry lips at the sight of his arms stretched high, thick with muscle and threaded with veins. The sculpted perfection of his ripped chest, the ridges of his twelve-pack and the sweat-slicked super-sexy V of muscle on his pelvis. The arrow that teased and tormented its way down to the thick ridge that burst past the waistband of his low-slung board shorts.