One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“I could arrange some tryouts,” Seth says, his voice low and gravelly and teasing.

I slip two fingers under the waistband of his trousers, nothing between the hard warmth of his hip except the tail of his white dress shirt.

“That’s the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard,” I murmur into his mouth.

I pull him closer, on my tiptoes. He’s hard as a rock already and I shift my hips against his erection, his tongue in my mouth, my heart pounding. It’s all I can do not to pull down his zipper, wrap my legs around him, and let him fuck me against this wall.

“It doesn’t have to be good,” he says, as my other hand strays to his open collar, finds the next button. “It just has to work. Quit it.”

“You let me before,” I say, fingers still fumbling.

Seth grabs my wrist, pulls it away from his shirt.

“You can’t just undress me here, you know.”

“It’s just one button.”

“There are only so many on a shirt,” he says, not relinquishing my wrist. “Keep undoing them and the whole thing comes off.”

“Is that how that works?” I tease, faux-astonished. “What about pants? Same thing?”

“You can’t take those off me here, either,” he says, and lets my wrist go.

I kiss him again, my back arching. His shirt rides up under my fingers and the feeling of skin on skin sends a jolt up my spine.

My hand’s on his chest, and I find the button again.

“Just one,” I bargain, teasing.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “You know one thing leads to another and then your entire family is going to round that corner only to find me on my knees with my head up your skirt, and then Vera will never invite me to another event, ever.”

I’m silent for a moment, thighs squeezed together, grappling with the thought of Seth under my skirt, the heat inside intensifying to a slippery ache.

I haven’t had sex for two years, and now I’ve had plenty of champagne and the man whose business cards should say good with his tongue is talking about eating me out practically in public.

I’m somewhat aroused, is what I’m saying.

“I don’t think she’d invite me either,” I finally say. “She was mad enough about the tattoos.”

“And she doesn’t even know about all of them.”

“She knows about enough to hate them,” I say, playfully tugging at the button.

“But not the new one.”

“Nope.”

His nose brushes mine and we kiss, open-mouthed, as I tug him toward me by his clothes.

“She know about the garters?”

“Please.”

“How about the butterfly?”

As he asks, he puts his palm right over the spot where it used to be, the crease where my hip meets my thigh, and he squeezes. Silk slides over my skin, my dress moving slightly askew, every tiny hair on my body standing at the sensation.

I prop one foot against the wall, knee against the outside of his leg.

“What butterfly?” I ask, all innocence and eyelashes.

“The one you like licked,” he growls, his thumb moving over the spot again. “Don’t tell me you got rid of it.”

“It was a terrible tattoo.”

Now his thumb’s circling that spot, catching on the edge of my panties, and with every stroke my hips move like he’s winding them up.

“I liked it,” he says. “The garters? Don’t tell me the garters are gone.”

The button on his shirt finally pops open beneath my finger as his thumb moves and my hips respond, my other hand fisted around his belt, my knuckles against warm flesh.

“Those old things?” I tease.

“I liked those old things,” he says, and his hand moves away from my hip and down my thigh. “You can’t just get rid of all your old tattoos.”

“I could.”

His hand closes around my thigh, exactly where I’ve got a tattooed lace garter.

“You didn’t,” he says, his voice lowering. “C’mon.”

“Find out,” I tell him, bringing his mouth back down to mine.

Instantly, there’s cool air on my leg and I make a hmmm? noise into Seth’s mouth. It takes half a second for me to realize that in one flourish he’s grabbed my skirt, pulled it up, and now he’s hiking my knee against his hip and steadying me with his other arm and then pulling away from our kiss to look down.

“I meant later,” I say, a little breathless. “I was trying to be coy —”

“Didn’t work,” he says, looking down at the tattoo, then up at me, grinning. “Coy? For fuck’s sake, Delilah.”

“A girl can try.”

He runs his fingers over the inked lace, circles them to the back of my thigh where I’ve got a bright red bow tattooed, a matching one on my other leg.

After I got divorced, I went through kind of a wild phase. I wore a lot of short skirts, tried burlesque, smoked, drank too much, had my first and only one-night stand, and got lingerie permanently tattooed on my body. The phase didn’t last the year, but tattoos are more or less forever.