She was delicious and shivering and his. All his, at last.
God help them both.
“Hold on,” Pato advised her, hardly recognizing his own voice, so stark with desire was it. So focused. “You’ll need it.”
He lifted her to him, smiling at the pretty scrap of blue lace that covered the sweet heat of her, and then he leaned forward to suck her into his mouth.
* * *
The shock of his mouth against the very center of her need took Adriana’s breath, so that the scream she let out sounded only inside her, ricocheting like a bullet against glass and shattering whatever it touched.
The heat. The fire. The terrible, wonderful ache.
His wicked, talented mouth, so hot and demanding, pressed against the tiny layer of lace that separated them. His hard shoulders felt massive and the fabric of his jacket rough against the tender skin behind her knees. His clever hands gripped her and held her fast, and his impossibly beautiful face was between her thighs so that all she could see when she looked down was that thick, wild hair of his, sunshine and chocolate and that delicious bit too long, and her own hands fisted in the mass of it as if they’d gone there of their own accord.
She thought she’d died. She wanted to die. She didn’t know how anyone could take this much pleasure, this much scalding heat, and live through it—
And then he made a low noise of male pleasure, shoved her thong out of his way and licked deep into her molten core.
Adriana burst into a firestorm of white-hot heat and exploded over the edge of the world, lost in a shower of shivering flames.
When she was herself again, or whatever was left of her, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. And Pato was laughing in dark masculine delight, right there against the heat of her core, making the pleasure curl in her all over again, sweeter and hotter than before.
“Again, I think,” he murmured, each syllable humming into her and making her press against him before she knew she meant to move, greedy and mindless and adrift in need.
And he took her all over again.
He used his tongue and the scrape of his teeth. His mouth learned her, possessed her, commanding and effortless. His jaw moved against the tender skin of her thighs, the faint rasp of his beard making the fire in her reach higher, burn hotter. The hands that held her to him caressed her, a low roll of sensation that made her shudder and writhe against him, into him, wanting nothing in the world but this. Him.
And that coiling thing inside her that he knew exactly how to wind tight. Then tighter. Then even tighter still.
Adriana felt the fire surge into something almost unbearable, her whole body stretched taut and breathless, heard his growl of approval and her own high, keening noise—
And then, again, she was nothing more than the fire and the need, shattering into a thousand bright, hot pieces against his wicked, wicked mouth, and then falling in flames all around him.
* * *
When Adriana opened her eyes this time, reality slammed into her like a hammer at her temples.
What had she done?
Pato had moved to lounge on the floor, his back against the couch opposite her, with his long legs stretched out and nearly tangled with hers. He wasn’t smiling. Those golden eyes were trained on her, brooding and dark, and she didn’t know how long she stared back at him, too shaken and dazed to do anything else.
But that hammer kept at its relentless pounding, and she forced her gaze from his, looking down at herself as if he’d taken her body from her and replaced it with someone else’s. That was certainly what it felt like.
She thought she might cry. Adriana struggled to sit upright, tugging her skirt back down toward her knees, aware as she did so that she could still feel him. That mouth of his all over the core of her, his hands wrapped so tightly over her bottom. It felt as if every place he’d touched her was a separate drum, and each beat in her with its own dark pulse.
Then something else hit her, and she froze. She didn’t have much practical experience, but Adriana recognized that what had happened had been...unequal. She swallowed nervously, sneaked a glance at him and then away.
“You didn’t—” She was still in pieces and wasn’t sure she’d ever manage to reassemble herself. Not the way she’d been before. Not now that he’d demonstrated exactly how much she’d been lying to herself. She cleared her throat. “I mean, if you’d like...”
“How tempting,” Pato said drily when she couldn’t finish the sentence, his gaze harder when she met it, a darker shade of gold she’d never seen before. “But I prefer screams of passion to insincere sacrifices, thank you. To say nothing of enthusiastic participants.”
And the worst part, she realized, as her heart kicked at her and made her feel dizzy, was that she couldn’t run from him the way she had that morning in London. She couldn’t find a far-off corner of his luxurious penthouse and hide herself away until she wrestled her reactions under control. They were on a plane. There was no hiding from what she’d done this time. No rationalizations, no excuses. And she hadn’t had anything to drink but water all night long.