Hard Rules (Dirty Money #1)(93)

“Close your eyes, Emily.”

This time it’s a command and I have no idea why, but I not only willingly take the order, I’m wet and achy, and I want this man more than I have ever wanted anyone. My reward is the very thing I want most. Him touching me, anywhere, everywhere, and for now that means his hands cradling my neck. “Don’t open them or—”

“You’ll stop what you’re doing,” I supply.

His breath fans my ear. “I’m glad you understand.”

“You haven’t done anything to stop yet so I feel—”

He kisses me, a lush slide of his tongue against mine gone too soon. “You feel what?”

“Like I want you to kiss me again.”

“Not yet,” he says, and like his mouth, his hands are once again gone, but I can feel him close. I can feel him everywhere and nowhere. I know he is a lean away, a reach of my hands that might as well be bound. But then, I wouldn’t choose to give him control and I think … I think he is all about choices. I think I’ve given him more control than I’ve ever give anyone.

The air shifts abruptly and I know he is no longer as close as he was moments before. I listen for movement, and there are random, barely there sounds but nothing I can place. Is he undressing? I hope. Maybe? An array of sensations roll through me. Nerves. Eagerness. Arousal. I can barely take it. “Shane.”

“Open your eyes.”

I blink my eyes open and he’s sitting in front of me on a chair. Another blink and he’s moved it, and himself, closer. “Don’t let go of the railing,” he warns and I’ve barely processed that order before he’s cupping my backside and dragging me to his lap to straddle him, the angle forcing me to lean into the glass wall behind me.

Fear rushes through me, my pulse all over the place. “Shane, damn it. “What if the glass breaks?”

“Easy, sweetheart,” he murmurs, his hand flattening on my belly. “It’s reinforced and there’s horizontal steel bands supporting it. I have you and I won’t let you go. Relax.”

I inhale and try to calm my body. “You’re sure it won’t break?”

“One hundred percent.” He leans over me and kisses the spot between my breasts, cupping one of them, and looks up at me, his eyes smoldering as he says, “Trust me.”

Trust. The word guts me and throws me back into a reality I don’t want to visit but he doesn’t let me stay there long. He fingers my nipples, sending a rush of sensation through my body with the delicate, sensual caresses that become rougher and rougher. I am panting again, conflicting pain and pleasure wreaking havoc on my body.

And his assault on my senses doesn’t stop there. His mouth is still between my breasts, tongue tracking towards my nipple. I arch into him, and on some level I know I’m increasing the pressure on the wall behind me, pressing harder, but I no longer seem to be capable of caring. His mouth closes around me and he suckles deeply, and at the same moment, his hand on my belly moves lower, his thumb stroking my clit. Every part of me is alive, aroused, and unaware of anything but what he is making me feel.

I am so on edge that I barely register the way he cups my backside and shifts our bodies. There is just the moment his mouth is in the most intimate part of me, closed around my nub, while his fingers slide inside me. And he is licking and teasing and I am … I am on the edge of that cliff where I want to be but don’t want to leave. But he pumps his fingers into me, and suckles me deeper and I can’t stop it. My body tightens and I can’t move or breathe. Another second and my sex clenches around his fingers, my body spasming with such intensity I’m quaking inside and out. I slip into a sweet, pleasure-laden oblivion that seems to last forever and yet not long enough.

The present comes back to me with several blinks, and Shane seems to know, his fingers sliding from inside me, leaving me aware of the angle of my body that traps me against the glass at my back. “Shane,” I whisper, a plea he answers by flattening his hand on my back and dragging me from the wall to sit fully on top of him.

He cups the back of my head, bringing my lips to his. “Now I taste like you,” he proclaims, his lips slanting over mine, the taste of him, of his desire, raw and ripe, but there is more. There is a salty sweet taste that is me, and I don’t expect it to turn me on, but it does, or he does. And the way my hands are on his shoulders, and his arms, and he isn’t stopping me, only drives my need to a whole new level.

I moan, impossibly aroused all over again, brutally aware of the empty spot inside me yet to be filled. He deepens the kiss, and I sink into it, tunnel my hands in the thick, dark strands of his hair, but I can taste the restraint in him, the part of him he’s containing, not yet setting free. And I want it free. “You have to get undressed,” I pant into his mouth, and I have no idea what gets into me, but I reach up and grip his shirt, and yank, fully intending to repeat what he’d done to my blouse. I fail. Nothing happens aside from heat rushing to my cheeks. I look up at Shane, who is stone faced as I admit, “In my mind that went much differently.”

He stares at me, unreadable, intense, and then I don’t know how it happens but we are both laughing. “Not as you planned, huh?”

“No. But I’m not exactly what anyone would call a seductress.”

“I like you just the way you are.”