About Last Night

She could only lie there, too lust-wrecked to move.

“My turn now,” he said. “We’re a long way from finished.”

After shucking his jeans, he knelt above her. “I think I’ll leave the stockings on.” He fingered the loose elastic of her garters. “They make you look like a right tart.”

“They’re hot,” she complained.

“Damn right they are.” He straddled her hips and lowered himself onto his elbows, brushing his chest over her bare breasts.

“I’m going to kiss you now, Mary Catherine. And then I’m going to make you say my name some more. I rather liked that.”

“I won’t.” She probably would.

“We’ll see.”

His kiss was forceful and possessive, telling her how much her performance had turned him on and how badly he wanted her. Fingers tangled in her hair, he thrust his tongue into her mouth, matching the motion of his hips where he pressed hard into the swollen flesh between her legs. It hurt, almost. She deserved it. She welcomed it.

She started pushing back.

He kissed her again, shoved her knees up, and moved roughly inside her, making her dig her nails into his back with the pain and pleasure of it. Nev had taken charge, and she loved it. She’d expected retribution for teasing him. She’d wanted it. Half the point had been to make him wild and reckless with wanting her.

But once he was inside her, he didn’t take his revenge. Instead, he rose, bracing both hands on the mattress, and he looked at her. His eyes were outrageous—full of desire and determination, vulnerability and pain. She didn’t know what to make of it. Didn’t know if she’d done something to him or if it was just being in this house, with his family, that made him like this. It didn’t matter. He needed her. She held his gaze, wrapped her legs around his hips, and said, “Come on.”

He closed his eyes with a groan. Then he started to move.

At first, he took it slow, and she watched them, focusing all of her attention on the erotic sight of Nev disappearing inside her, then reemerging. In and out. His stomach taut. Arms taut. Jaw taut. He was beautiful. They were beautiful.

She knew why she was here. It had been pointless to pretend she didn’t. She was here because he wanted her here. She was here because she loved him. Fool that she was, she’d loved him from the first morning in his flat, when she’d learned his name and seen both sides of him. Nev and City. Hot and cold. Pink cheeks and three-piece suits. Hers.

“Harder,” she said.

“I want to make it last.”

“No. Don’t.”

So he thrust harder, and he stared down at her, his pupils black holes rimmed with green. She took him in. She accepted him. This was where he’d come from, this house, this bed. These people. Nev was the man in the parlor and the painter in his studio, the banker and the rugby player. The boyfriend who bought her prawn crisps and rubbed her back when she cried. The tender lover. The caged beast who came out to play when they got naked together. He could be any of them. She’d fallen in love with all of him.

“Nev.”

“That’s right, love. Say my name.”

She said it. She said it more times than she could count.

Chapter Fifteen

Nev poured the whiskey, measuring it out neat into each of three heavy-bottomed glasses. He made his a double. Dinner had been that bad.

Cath had done well. Better than he might have expected, given the way Mother and Winston had gone after her. They’d asked her more personal questions in the course of a single meal than Nev had dared to ask in a month. He wondered how much of what she’d told them was true—and what she’d chosen to conceal.

For his part, he’d only had to lie a bit, and that had been easy enough. It was no stretch to imagine himself married to Cath. In some ways, the lie came as a relief. He’d held off expressing the depth of his feelings for weeks, afraid he’d frighten her away. In front of his family, he could speak from the heart, safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t believe a word of it. He’d told them all he loved her, that he and Cath belonged together, and she’d smiled dismissively, as if she’d heard it dozens of times before.

He did love her. They did belong together. Seeing his rings on her finger gave him a deep, possessive satisfaction, no less strong for having no real foundation.

He didn’t want to go on pretending. He wanted Cath to belong to him, always. But he hadn’t a clue how to bring that about. Back in London, after she’d agreed to play along with his plan, they’d returned to his flat. He’d made love to her, and just as he’d been drifting off to sleep afterward, she’d said into the darkness, “You’re really pushing it, City. You know that?”

Of course he knew. It worried him how far out on a limb he’d dragged them both. In the safety of the routine they’d established in Greenwich, Cath had begun to open up to him, to tell him some of her secrets and her dreams. Here, all bets were off. Anything could happen.

None of it likely to be good.