Page 24 of Crying Wolfe
But the winds would come, and the lightning would drive him back. The thunder would tear at the skies. The clouds would hide her precious stars.
That was the thing about storms. They were beautiful…until you were swept away in their wake.
The small, wet tip of her tongue met his in a shy greeting.
And all the dark thoughts he harbored dissipated in a flood of pure lust. He tried to keep the kiss gentle. He really did. A lifetime of deprivation did not create a patient man. When he indulged, it was with a gluttonous greed. He’d always fucked like he fed, with the frenzy of a man who wasn’t certain of his next meal.
And he didn’t stop until they were both too exhausted to come again.
But this… This was new.
Their kiss turned thick, like golden honey warmed by the sun. Long and languid and unbearably sweet. There was nowhere to go from here. Not tonight. Nothing else needed doing but this.
He tasted her in slick, slow swipes as his mind rushed to commit every sensation to memory.
So if she was taken from him, he could remember this in the lonely dark.
His arms unclenched from around her, his hands finding the fall of silken hair down her back, learning the thick, yet fine texture of it. Charting the shape of her spine, her waist. Finding that his hands did, indeed, nearly span the circumference of it.
A small sound broke from her throat, and it vibrated between them, shivering through his bones and echoing in the chamber of his heart.
Never in his life had he been so consumed by a kiss. Never had a hundred heartbeats gone by without him noticing anything but the pleasure of the moments. Never had desire thundered through him with such strength, it shook him to the foundations of everything that made him a man.
A lightning strike of primal demand forked through him, bringing every single nerve ending alive with electric longing. With the unslakable desire that so often drove him to the brink of sanity.
All he could think about was how she would look impaled by his cock.
He tore his lips from hers with a growl, unable to disengage from the featherlight weight of her sagging against him. “Goddamn but you’re dainty,” he moaned the reminder to himself. “So easy to break.”
Her eyes were luminous, her flesh high with color and her lips swollen and abraded by his evening’s growth of whiskers. “I don’t think you’ll break me,” she whispered.
That proved how little she knew him.
Lifting a hand, he cupped her face, stroking the downy place her cheekbone melted into her hairline. “I’ll try not to, darlin’.”
What did a good man do with a wife like this? How did he keep someone so fragile and frail safe from everything in this world that would, in fact, do its best to break her?
How did he keep these deviant thoughts and primitive desires from staining her sweet, civilized soul?
Disentangling himself from her arms, he turned away and adjusted himself before he opened the door. “You should go, Miss Goode. It still isn’t proper for you to be here so late.”
She gazed at him for a quiet moment, her eyes bewildered and uncomprehending. Clearing the fog with several rapid blinks, she tasted her lips with a smile he knew she didn’t realize was full of sex and satisfaction.
Fuck. She had to go. She had to go now.
She floated toward the door as if her feet didn’t touch the ground, stopping to press her hand to his forearm in a fond gesture. “Goodnight, Mr. Wolfe,” she bade in a voice several octaves huskier than the usual trill. “I-I will look forward to seeing you soon.”
She wouldn’t. Because the next time he saw her this tenuous tether he’d clamped to his self-control would snap.
Distance was the only think that’d keep him sane until then.
Closing the door against her, he let his shoulders sag and dragged a scratchy palm over his face. Obsession. Addiction. His mother had been prone to it. So many men in his life drowned in desire for something that tore them away from what mattered.
Eli had never understood it until now.
She was just such a distraction. A complication he sure as fuck didn’t need.
One he wanted too much.
