Page 28 of Covert Temptation

And her scent—coconut shampoo, vanilla lotion—wasunravelingthe last of his resistance.

“Kennedy.”

“Dante.” His name fell off her lips with the faintest shiver.

“We shouldn’t,” he rasped.

“But we’re going to.” Her voice was whisper-soft, threaded with daring.

Then she kissed him.

He didn’t stand a fucking chance.

Her mouth met his with heat and hunger and zero hesitation. The instant their lips touched, everything inside him snapped. The tight coil of restraint, of control, of pretending he hadn’t wanted her since the very first time he set eyes on her, traitor or not—it all shattered.

He rolled into her, pushing her gently onto her back, his weight braced on one arm beside her head as his other hand slid down the curve of her waist. She gasped into his mouth, arching against him, and the sound undid him.

He’d tried to convince himself that she’d be cold and unresponsive, but he’d been lying to himself.

He deepened the kiss, claiming her tongue in an intertwining dance. She tasted like sweetness and sin, and that soft moan she made when he pressed his hips into hers had him instantly hard and already aching for her.

“Dante,” she breathed, nails grazing the bare planes of his back and raising a rumble in his chest.

“You have no idea what you’re doing to me,” he growled against her throat, kissing a path down to the hollow beneath her ear.

“Tell me.”

He tripped over her request, most of his brain cells settled in his throbbing cock. Staring down at her face, he drank in the desire glistening in her deep brown eyes.

“I’ve been trying not to want this.” His throat worked on the forbidden words.

“Stop trying.”

She touched him reverently, palms gliding over muscle and scars and skin burning with the fever of want.

“You’re so big,” she whispered.

Unable to hold back a groan or slow things down—or hell, stop—he took her mouth again. Her plump lips gave way to probing tongues.

She hitched her thigh around his hip, letting him feel every inch of her smooth leg from enticing hip to slender ankle. The nightshirt she wore bunched up to expose the heat of her.

His tongue thickened, along withevery inchof his cock.

He stilled.

She wasn’t wearing anything under the shirt. Her pussy was completely bare.

With a moan, she rocked into his already stiff, throbbing length. Christ, he wasn’t going to withstand the torture of Kennedy Bloom, not after his long dry spell and the sparks between them that he spent so much time pretending didn’t exist.

He wished he’d gone to bed in his jeans, but never in a million years could he have guessed she would come to him like this, hot and sweet and wanting.

He skated a hand down her side, fingers twitching on the wadded fabric. When he looked down into her eyes, the depths urged him to do exactly what he was thinking.

Biting off a growl, he leaned away to yank her nightshirt up, over her hipbone, the flat of her stomach and ribs. When his fingers grazed the side of her small breast, her body jerked against his and a soft cry escaped her lips.

Fuck. She was burning for him just as bad as he was her.

He told himself to stop, but the look in her eyes egged him on. Then her nightshirt came off, and he saw her—every inch of her—bathed in the moonlight streaming across the bed.

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