Page 102 of The Trouble with Anna

Her fingers ran up the length of it, unbearably light, and hefought not to lose it. He pulled her hand away, lifted it over her head for safety. Took a deep, steadying breath into the cloud of her hair.

But she tensed. Just the slightest hitch, but he felt it.

“You didn’t like that.” Her face was carefully blank.

His heart turned over. “I liked it. Too much.”

His lips skimmed over her neck, down into the dip of her throat, murmuring little words of praise and reassurance, and his heart only began to beat again when she began to loosen and bend once more. He struggled for control. “Christ, Anna, if you knew how much I need you.”

She swallowed. “I need you too.”

The words might as well have been a cudgel. They broke him for good, cracked his last armor into pieces, his heart leaping all over the wreckage. There was nothing to do but hand his heart over to her, place it gently in her small, callused hands.

I love you. I love you. I love you.The words were alive on his lips, his body frantic to show her. He bit them into her shoulder, breathed them into her hair, nuzzled them into first one breast and then the other. He couldn’t quite bear to tell her, but he could print it onto her skin.

Each little gasp and sigh he drew from her pushed him harder, until he felt the need to be inside her like pain. He hooked her leg around his hip, anchoring her to him even as he opened her wider and slid his cock against her.

“Julian!”

What it did to him to see her face as she raced toward pleasure. Reckless, headlong, the way she raced on the track.

He let himself slide again, slow and rough, and her breath hissed out. Her thigh under his splayed hand was a column of supple muscle.

The flat of his thumb found her clit and he stroked it, rolling it as he rolled his hips. Her leg tightened and she bowed up, sothe broad head of his cock strained at her entrance. It hurt, how much he craved the grip of her body.

“Sweetheart, are you sure?”

She nodded frantically.

He dragged himself away, reached near his bed for something that he slipped over his cock. “This is a French letter. Do you know what it is?”

Her eyes were wide and glazed. She shook her head, barely listening as he came back down to her.

“It will stop us from making a child, so we can choose when—”

Her eyes widened still further. She put her hands up to his cheeks. “All right.”

God, she was so wet and swollen. He clenched his teeth, allowed himself the slightest move forward.

Her body went still. Her mouth was a wide, wicked O.

“Am I hurting you?”

Anna shook her head furiously and stretched up to meet him. The slight movement was too much for him. He cupped her ass in his hands, gritted his teeth at each tight, hot inch.

“Anna?” Julian willed himself to focus even as his body tried to pull him under. She was somewhere far away, somewhere dreamy, but she tried to answer. Just as her lips began to move, he couldn’t help himself and his hips flexed. Her face blanked.

He dipped his head, tugged her bottom lip with his teeth. Whispered desperately, “Lightning, are you with me?”

She surfaced just long enough to answer. “Yes! Yes! Shut up and do that again.”

Which was why he was laughing as he started to move, rolling his hips as the world rolled with them. He buried himself in her heat, half-mad with the feel of it. Every noise she made, every wondering expression that lit her face, each time she took him in long, rough, and slow, drove him closer to the edge. His muscleslocked as he fought to hold on until she lost her grip, to shatter her the way she was breaking him.

“Please,” he groaned. “Anna, love, I can’t hold on—”

She arched off the bed and into the roaring deep. He had no choice but to follow, tumbling, drowning, dumb with his pleasure and her own. Waves crashed down over and over, and when the storm broke at last, there she was. Gripped tight in his arms and trembling.

Julian rolled onto his back and hauled her across him, one hand buried in her tangled hair as she burrowed into his chest, one hand making little soothing strokes up and down the curve of her spine. Her foot curled around his calf, soothing him back.

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