Page 163 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

“Is that how we’re playing?” He came toward her and cupped her head and smothered her mouth before she could finish saying, “Yes.”

His tongue swept between her parted lips, plunging her into a passionate kiss while she was still absorbing the erotic sensation of the silk lining caressing her bare bottom and thighs.

I’m not wearing underwear. He knows it.

She wore a strapless bra and wished she didn’t have that, either.

This was a very immodest way to behave, but she reveled in it. His hands roamed in circles on her backside, stimulating her with the heat of his palms and slippery glide of satin against her skin.

The press of his erection nudged where it had the other night. It was even more enticing now that she knew what he could do for her. She pushed into him, urging him to do what he had done then.

He spun her to the bed and came down on the mattress with her. His weight crushed her and his mouth plundered her lips and her only complaint was that she’d lost that delicious pressure between her thighs.

“Atlas,” she gasped, turning her head away to catch her breath.

“Tell me what you want,” he said as he levered himself up and off the bed. “This?”

Before she could respond, he adjusted her angle on the bed. Her skirt rode up as he dragged her closer, leaving her exposed to him.

She tried to pinch her thighs together, but he dropped to his knees and hugged her leg, then pressed a damp, open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her knee.

“Do you not want my mouth here,asteri mou? Or here?” He set his mouth higher on the tender skin inside her thigh, eyes bronzed with iniquity. “Tell me.”

In that moment, she knew she would never have the upper hand with him. Never.

Her heart lurched even as her pulse tripped with sexual excitement. Provoking him had unleashed a ferocity in him that she had no hope of outgunning, but as he gently sucked a love bite into her skin, she groaned in capitulation.

“Yes.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please. More.”

He teased her, making her wait for the trail of kisses to work in pinprick sensations toward the ache in her center.

“Please,” she heard herself pant again, right before his touch delicately parted her folds and the heat of his mouth captured her most sensitive flesh.

It was distressingly intimate and deeply pleasurable. Sinful, probably, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop him. She was seduced. Melted into liquid iron, heavy and glowing and molten.

“There. More.More,” she moaned.

His long finger entered her slippery channel, moving in delicious cadence with the sweep of his tongue in such a perfect dance she thought she must be levitating off the bed. She was nothing but sensation, trying to capture the most intense waves with the knowledge there was something even greater beyond the break.

Then the crash happened, cracking her in half with the force of it, suffusing her in more pleasure than she could stand. Her cries of inhibition filled the room and he kept up his caress through the crisis and into the aftermath, only slowing when her contractions were fading to twitches.

She was boneless and buttery then, still trying to recover as he closed her legs.

“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do that?” He rolled her onto her side and settled behind her so he could open the buttons down the back of her dress. “Fiveyears.”

Soft kisses peppered her shoulders and spine as he opened the dress, making her twitch in the liminal space between satisfaction and returning arousal.

“I liked making you come apart like that,” he whispered hotly against her ear. His lips nibbled along the rim. Her scalp tightened and her strapless bra relaxed. A shiver chased down her naked spine while his restless hand brushed bra and dress away so he could cup her breast. “I’m going to be deep inside you when it happens again,” he promised.

His diabolical lips trailed to her nape, but as he shifted his mouth to the side of her throat, there was a pull on her scalp.

“You’re on my hair.”

“I need a condom anyway.” He lifted off the bed and stripped his clothes. “It’s in our contract.”

He was joking, but she checked in pushing off the last of her clothes. Part of her wanted to sayYou don’t have to. She wanted to feel him. At the same time, she was disconcerted to realize he still had the capacity to think of something coldly practical when really, he could have done anything to her at this point and she would have thanked him for it.

He drew a condom from the box in the night table. “Do you need lube?”

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