Passionately Yours (Hellions of High Street 3)

A groan, low and deeply masculine, rumbled in his throat as her hips touched his.

“Oh!” Momentary shock gave way to a more complex swirl of emotions. Alec was aroused by her? The thought was both frightening and exciting. Screwing up her courage, Caro pressed her palms to his chest and slowly circled them outward, reveling in the feel of his coarse curls, his flat nipples, his slabbed muscles.

“You are… wonderful,” she whispered, coiling her arms around his neck and breathing in his scent. A wisp of pine, a hint of leather, and some earthier essence that was all his own.

“And you,” he rasped in reply, “are…”

The Devil’s own harlot?

And yet,

against all reason and rules, this felt so desperately right, not wrong. Or perhaps she was still half-trapped in a dark dreamworld of need and longing.

“You are like wild Highland heather,” Alec finished, his voice so soft she almost missed his words. “Beautiful, resilient, strong, and fiercely independent.” His breath blew through the loose strands of her hair. “It will grow even in the most inhospitable ground.”

“Prickly—you forgot prickly.” She sighed. “I know you don’t really want my attentions—”

“Don’t want you?” Alec shifted, and suddenly his big muscled body was atop her. “Ye gods, I have been trying like the devil to hold my wanting in check from the first moment I met you.”

His hands found and framed her face—he was pulsing with heat and some raw emotion that seemed to be shooting sparks out from every pore.

Caro closed her eyes for an instant as his lips touched hers, perfectly willing to burn to a crisp.

“I should be roasted in Hell for this,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her mouth. “Seducing an innocent—”

A tiny laugh cut him off. “Oh, Alec, I think there’s a question of who seduced whom.” She reached up, tangling her hands in his silkspun hair. “So I’ll gladly join you in the flames.”

“Will you, sweeting? For once you make the plunge, there is no going back.”

Caro didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Yes, I am sure.”

Right and wrong. Was it the darkness or his own fierce desire that was blurring the distinction?

Alec knew what reason demanded. But all of a sudden he was tired of listening to reason, tired of keeping an iron-willed rein on his feelings, tired of pretending that his heart had truly turned to stone.

There was still a thudding of flesh-and-blood feeling deep inside, though he did his best to deny it in the harsh light of day.

Here, beneath the black velvet cover of the moment, could he give way to his wildest desires?

Caro feathered a kiss to his cheek, a sweetly tentative touch, and all restraint was lost.

Lost in a swirling vortex of need, want, and a longing so fierce that he thought every bone in his body might crack from the force of it.

“Then sweeting, I am sure, too.” Come what may.

No more thoughts. Just elemental emotion—raging, rolling, thundering with the force of a Scottish gale sweeping over the rugged lochs.

But despite the turmoil inside him, he traced his hands ever so gently over the swell of her hips and down the curve of her thighs, the gloom heightening his awareness of her softness and her strength.

“You are exquisite,” he whispered. “Exquisitely perfect.”

Her arms tightened around him. “Oh, Alec, I’m not—perfection is impossible, but that does not matter. It is the chips and flaws that make us interesting.”

“How perfectly true. You are far wiser than I am.” He pressed his lips to the corner of her mouth, savoring the softness of her skin, the tiny twitch of her lips.

A smile, unfailingly brave and bold.

He adored her smile, and suddenly wished to see it as well as taste it. With his foot, he felt for the small door and nudged it open a crack, allowing a wisp of light to penetrate the storage nook.