“I want your mouth on me.”
“Look at me while you say it,” he ordered.
Her pale lids lifted, an entire azure summer sky boiled down in her smoldering gaze.
“I want your mouth on me, Samuel.”
He eased her down on his chest, drawing her nearer to his mouth. Bearing her weight, he felt anchored. Real. An actual person with an existence of his own. Apart from his father. Apart from his family. Apart from his identity as a Kane altogether.
Then there was the matter of Arlie Banks. Naked. Alive. Wanting. Hands gripping the headboard. Her features unbearably open and innocent with expectation.
He wanted to tell her not to show so much. Not to give so much. But that had never been her. A girl who wore not just her heart on her sleeve, but her soul also.
Leaning forward, he kissed one freckle on her inner thigh, then another, following the constellation toward the source of the most intense pleasure he’d ever known.
He was torturing her and he knew it. But he didn’t want this moment to end. She was Christmas morning. All heady expectation, gifts glistening and yet unwrapped. Pure possibility.
As if sensing his hesitation, Arlie slid a hand down her stomach, long fingers moving through her downy curls and parting the seam of her sex. “I’m so wet for you, Samuel.”
Her fingers carried the scent of earth and rain as she dragged them across his lips.
Unable to wait one second longer, Samuel surged forward, splitting her with one long languorous lick.
Her sharp intake of breath felt like it had been stolen from his own lungs.
She was sin and salvation on his tongue. Sweetness and ruin. The most intoxicating combination he’d ever encountered.
If he tasted her from this moment until his dying day, there would never be enough. Dipping the tip of his tongue into her slick folds, he began a slow, deliberate exploration. And while he explored, Samuel did what he had had always done.
He studied.
Memorizing every ripple and curve. Watching to see what made her bite her lip, which places and patterns caused her breath to come faster. All the time, avoiding the hot, sensitive bundle of nerves at her apex.
Arlie’s impatient sigh was equal parts eagerness and frustration. Her hips undulating impatiently against him. Her need further swelling his own.
In the end, his motives were as simple and selfish as breathing. He needed to see her come undone like he needed air. He wanted her above him, rising like a marble statue in the moonlight, knowing that he had been the cause of something that stripped her worries away.
At last, at long last, he flicked her clit with his tongue. She gasped. Her body jerked upright like a sudden electrical current had passed through it. The culmination arriving in a single, sizzling, “Oh.”
Were he a musician, Samuel would play that note in perpetuity. He would compose an entire symphony with that as his theme. All he wanted in that moment was to hear it again. To hear it always.
Her fingers fisted in his hair, the pain and pleasure from his scalp traveling straight down into his throbbing cock. He slid his tongue over her slick bud, teasing it, memorizing the rhythm of her bliss.
She shuddered over him, her face a mask of concentration as she let herself be taken.
He had meant to draw this out. To bring her to the edge. To pull her back. To drive her as mad as he already felt. But now he couldn’t stop. He was lost in his own experience, drinking in her pleasure like soil drinks spring rain.
This was life.
Shewas life.
A rosy flush had broken out over her breasts, glowing from a fine sheen of sweat. Her stomach shuddered, her tawny nipples hard as pearls.
He quickened his pace, letting his tongue vibrate against her core, tasting the earthy nectar of her arousal.
“Samuel—” Her thighs tensed, her eyes flying open as pleasure exploded across her features, scorching the landscape like a bomb.
Samuel would have given his entire inheritance to have a painting made of her the way she looked in that exact moment.
The freedom. The pure, essential reduction of her to a woman and nothing more. A goddess capable of granting madness or bliss with the cosmos unfolding around her and within her.
Arlie went limp, collapsing against the headboard and panting into her own folded arms.
The curtain of hair fell on either side of her face, tickling his cheeks.
Samuel’s hand went to the small of her back, wandering upward until it landed at the base of her neck. They looked at each other as her breath slowed, something unsayable passing between them.
Arlie shifted her weight, moving backward until she was kneeling, straddling his hips, hands running over his mounded pectoral muscles and down the ridged washboard of his stomach.
Rocking her hips, she slid up and down his length, pausing to increase the friction when she reached his smooth, swollen head. His fingers dug into her hips, trying to hold on to his control as she teased him. Slowly. Deliberately.
Though the need to be inside her robbed him of all reason, he wanted to let her have this moment, to have dominion over her pleasure as he suspected she had over so few elements of her life.
With a wicked smile twisting her lips, Arlie positioned him between her thighs, keeping her eyes on his as she sank down over him, sheathing him in her satin warmth. Inch by maddening inch.
She was molten hot. Unbearably tight. Immeasurably soft and slick.
“Oh, God,” he ground out. “You feel so fucking good.”
“Yeah?” she asked, sinking incrementally lower.