Page 25 of Duplicity

At this point, Brendan crouches between my legs and finds my most sensitive parts with his lips and tongue and fingers, and my inner Mel Robbins shuts the hell up, because the fires of sensation are licking at my flesh and everything else is impossible.

His moves are filthy and decadent and carnal, and they have my nervous system ricocheting between running for the hills and setting off the fireworks.

‘I’ve wanted to do this since the second I met you,’ he mutters against my clit, sliding two fingers back inside me and twisting them in a way that’s as gratifying as it is painful. ‘Been imagining it so much. So fucking delicious.God.’ He illustrates his point with a lavish lick.

I raise my head so I can stare down at this incarnation of the vision that’s been terrifying and titillating me since Athena suggested I interview with Brendan: his broad shoulders between my open legs, dark hair dipped so I can only see the crown of his head, face hidden as he feasts on the most private parts of me, and his huge hand splayed bossily across my stomach, holding me down.

His confession is the most real, raw thing he’s said to me, and it sends a tide of heat racing over my skin. I couldn’t be more vulnerable right now, and I know this guy probably goes down on a different woman every day of the week, but he makes it sound likehe’svulnerable too, somehow. That he has skin in the game, even if I’m not much more than a conquest. A trophy sought and won.

Having this gorgeous, sexy man’s tongue on my clit is one thing, but having him admit that he’s enjoying it, that he’s beenfantasisingabout it, is the flick of the switch my body needs to go from enduring this to lapping it up. For whatever reason, it seems to get him off, and the idea of him using my body how he wants, burrowing his nose into my flesh and sucking on my clit and fucking me deeper and deeper with his fingers, is every bit as shameful as I imagined it would be and a million times hotter than I ever, ever dreamed.

There’s so much oral in my romance books. My favourite mafia men eat their women for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it seems. And I admit, I’ve tried to simulate it by myself a few times without knowing what I’m aiming for.

This is what I was aiming for.This—the wetness, the silky softness, the—oh my God, the roughness when he laps at me with the flat of his tongue, the precision when he uses the tip. It’s like Mother Nature created an all-natural orgasm provider and gave it the ten best settings it needed for totally ruining a woman.

I cannotbelievefucking Joe never did this to me!

And I can believe even less that I’m having this strong a reaction to a man I barely know, let alone a man I don’t have any feelings for. I have never understood how women can jump into bed with random men and survive it, let alone get off on it. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve judged them for it.

But it seems the joke may be on me.

The strangest, best sensations are happening to my body. Heat is pricking me all over. Everywhere south of my belly button aches with a visceral, pulsing need. My nipples are so taut with arousal they feel like they’re going to snap off. The noises I’m making are zero per cent gleaned from Meg Ryan and a hundred per cent involuntary and possibly a good seventy per cent farmyard.

I am not a woman who has ever asked for what she wants in bed. I have no language, I have no confidence, I have no tricks to seduce a guy or manipulate an outcome.

But I do recall one thing Brendan promised me earlier.

That if I screamdon’t stop, he’ll keep on going.

So I channel all this blind, crazy need, and I cast aside the tattered remnants of my inhibitions, and I claw at his hair with one hand, and I throw my head back as he hits the spot over and over and over like the fucking genius that he is.

And I shudder out my plea.

‘Please.Don’t stop.Please.’

CHAPTER 12

Brendan

I’m in a fancy club, my nose and mouth and fingers buried in the delicious—and soaking wet—cunt of a hot blonde who’s laid out naked on the sofa of a private room for my pleasure.

So far, so on brand for a Thursday night.

But that’s where this being any kind of normal Thursday night ends.

Because this isn’t a hookup.

It’s an audition. A two-way audition.

And Marlowe is not your average hot blonde bombshell who stakes out and seduces men like me so efficiently that she may as well be a professional.

Nope.

The hilarious irony is that this woman, who I’m test-driving ahead of hiringas a professional, is reacting to me in a way that’s more raw and more gratifying than any other hot blonde I’ve fucked in a very long time.

Don’t feel too sorry for me. I look like this and I’m very, very good in bed. The orgasms I coax out of the others are one hundred per cent real. But those women play the same game as me. They zero in on me for my looks or my money or my reputed prowess in the sack—usually all three. They’re practisedand cynical, and the whole endless fucking cycle of them is tired, tired, tired.

Whereas I’d bet a lot of money that no one is more surprised than Goldilocks here at the reaction her body is having to mine.

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