Page 50 of The Time for Love
Her senses leapt, then whirled as his tongue threaded past her lips, and with blatant expertise, he laid claim. Not forcefully but beguilingly. When he wished, he deployed a ready and potent charm in his speech and expressions, but when brought to bear in this sphere, the attraction was devastating.
Hunger bloomed, deep in her belly. Need tripped along her nerves and left them sparking.
In languid fashion, he supped and sipped at her lips and, with his tongue, caressed hers, and every subtle beckoning spurred her on as she kissed him back ever more confidently, ever more demandingly.
Heat flared and spread beneath her skin, and desire and passion—feelings she’d never previously felt—combined and rose in a dizzying wave.
I want him.
She pressed closer, deeper into his embrace, fitting her slender form to his harder, larger frame.
She felt the evidence of his desire, a hard, rigid rod pressing against the soft swell of her belly, and her senses swooned, and hunger and need and ever more compulsive greed surged.
Martin was as captured by the kiss as she. He hadn’t imagined kissing her would be fundamentally different to kissing any of the other women he’d indulged with over the past twenty years.
But the lure of her lips was a hundred times—a thousand times—more potent, and the satisfaction of sampling those luscious lips, of sinking into the succulent softness of her mouth, was commensurately greater as well.
Kissing Sophy was all pleasure laced with unexpected, unprecedented joy.
It was, he was also discovering, addictive. Having started, he didn’t want to stop.
He didn’t want to step back from the engagement, and some part of him had already seized on the promise of what lay beyond and was avidly clamoring for appropriate action to ensure that ultimate satisfaction.
The awareness that they stood mere yards from a bed battered at his mind and tugged at him.
No, it’s her tugging.
She’d fisted her hands in his lapels and was trying to shift him. To waltz him to a room—hers or his, he had no idea—and the insistent compulsion to fall in with her wishes was growing to clamorous heights.
He knew the signs; they were racing full tilt toward intimacy. She might be an innocent, but she was making her passionate demands crystal clear. And while most of him had absolutely no issue with her direction, some part of his brain still functioned, and that part was screamingDanger!
Through the fog of lust wreathing his faculties, he perceived the threat, the very real pit of doom toward which she and he were waltzing.
If they fell…
Momentary satisfaction was not what he was after, not with her.
They were moving too fast. Far too fast. Not for him, but for her—or more precisely, for what he wanted of her. With her.
Despite his experience, his oh-so-many lovers, he’d never been in this position before. He was sophisticated, an acknowledged expert, yet she and what she meant to him had thrust him onto an unknown stage.
In his mind, he could hear Therese laughing.
Hysterically.
It took immense effort to fill his lungs and find sufficient willpower to draw back from the kiss. To pull his lips from hers enough to say, “No. Wait.”
From close quarters, her lips rosy and gleaming in the soft light, she blinked at him. “Wait?” Her voice was strained. “Why?”
He looked into her face, lit by the glow of the wall sconces, and all but fell into her turquoise eyes, huge and luminous and shining with blatant desire…
On a smothered groan, he closed his eyes.
That didn’t help. The sight was etched on his brain.
He raised his lids and, lips thinning, met her gaze. After a second of marshaling his wits and corralling his wayward impulses, he managed, “Have you thought this through?”
His voice was the definition of gravelly.
