Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(13)

And then it made Hattie think very little but yes.

She’d arrived earlier in the night to the promise that she would be met by an exceedingly thorough man who would prove a stellar assistant. But this man, with his amber eyes that saw everything, with his touch that understood everything, with his voice that filled her dark, secret corners, was more than an assistant.

This man was dominion—the kind that Hattie hadn’t imagined but now couldn’t not imagine.

And he was offering to make everything she imagined real.

Yes.

He was so close. Impossibly large—large enough to make Hattie feel small—and impossibly handsome—handsome enough to have given her pause on another, less heady night—and impossibly warm in the cold room.

And impossibly, he was going to kiss her.

Not because she was paying him; because he wanted to.

Impossible.

No one had ever . . .

The slide of his hand into her hair pushed the thought aside before it finished. “You will—”

Silence.

“—assist me—”

His fingers tightened.

“—with . . .” He held her hostage with his touch and his silence. He was making her finish the thought, dammit. The sentence. What was the thought? “. . . it?”

He met the word with a growl, a rumble of sound that she wouldn’t have understood if she weren’t so rapt. If she weren’t so eager for it. “All of it.”

Her eyes slid closed. How was it that a man could turn so few words into such pleasure? He was surely going to kiss her. That was how it began, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t moving. Why wasn’t he moving? He was supposed to move, wasn’t he?

She opened her eyes again, finding him there, so close, watching her. Looking at her. Seeing her. When was the last time someone had seen Hattie? She’d spent a lifetime becoming so good at hiding, she’d never be seen.

But this man—he saw her.

And she found she hated it as much as she liked it.

No. She hated it more. She didn’t want him seeing her. Didn’t want him cataloguing her myriad flaws. Her full cheeks and too wide brow and too big nose. Her mouth, which another man had once described as horsey, as though he were doing her a favor. If this man saw all that, he might change his mind.

And that made her brazen enough to say, “Can we begin now?”

A low rumble of assent heralded his kiss, the sound as glorious as the touch when he settled his lips to hers and gave her precisely what she wanted. More than it. She shouldn’t have been surprised by the feel of him against her—she’d kissed him quite boldly in the carriage before tossing him out—but that had been her caress.

This one was theirs.

He pulled her to him, tilting, tipping until they were perfectly matched, until his beautiful mouth was aligned with hers. And then his second hand came to match the first, to cradle her face, thumb stroking over her cheek as he took her mouth in little, sipping kisses, one after the other, again and again, until she thought she might go mad from the tease of them. Until he captured her bottom lip and licked, his tongue warm and rough and tasting like lemon sugar and making her . . .

Hungry.

That was what it felt like. As though she’d never eaten before and now here was food, rich and welcome and all for her.

Those licks made her wild. She didn’t know how to suffer them. How to manage them. All she knew was that she did not want them to stop.

She took him in hand, gripping his coat and pulling him closer, pressing herself to him, wanting his touch against every inch of her. Wanting to crawl inside him. She gave a little sigh of frustration, and he understood, his arms coming around her like steel, lifting her, forcing her to give herself up to him, her hands sliding over his massive shoulders and around his neck, the muscles of it all corded restraint and so warm.

She gasped at the heat of him, and he pulled back. Was he stopping? Why was he stopping? “No!”

Good God, had she said that aloud?

“I—” Her cheeks were instantly aflame. “That is—”

A brow rose in silent query.

“I would prefer—”

And then this silent beast of a man said, “I know what you would prefer. And I shall give it to you. But first—”

She caught her breath. First, what?

He reached for her hand, clutching his shoulder, an embodiment of the fear that he might stop before they’d had a chance to start. He pulled it away, forcing her to let him go, but not loosening his hold on her.

What was he doing? He turned her wrist over in his grasp, and set his fingers to the line of buttons along the inside of her arm. She watched for a moment. “You’re very adept at buttons.”

A grunt as he worked.

“You don’t even have a button hook,” she said inanely, wishing she could take the words back before they’d even left her silly mouth.

He removed the glove from her hand, revealing her wrist, covered in ink stains from her afternoon at the offices, poring over lading books. She twisted the limb to hide the unsightly marks, but he wouldn’t let her. Instead, he studied them for a moment, his thumb stroking over the stains like flame before he returned her hand to his shoulder. Her now-bare fingers reached for the place where his collar met the warm skin of his neck, desperate for honest touch, and he released a rumble of pleasure when skin pressed skin. The ink was forgotten.