Page 10 of Bedding his Innocent Mistress

His smile was wry. “No. Though the fact you thought so is somehow flattering. I feel like I have way more street credibility than I’d realised.”

/> “Even in a ten-thousand-pound suit,” she agreed with her own laugh, curling her legs up underneath her and rubbing her thumb over her toenail distractedly.

“By business, I meant contract negotiations. Entertaining. All very white-collar, non-criminal enterprise. Sorry to disappoint.”

Her tummy flared with passionate awareness. “Oh, nothing about you is disappointing, believe me, Rafe Santoro.”

CHAPTER THREE

SHE’D NEVER LIKED tea with milk. The very idea of adding boiling water to cow’s milk turned her tummy, even as a child when Nanny Anderson had made little cups each morning for Ivy to sip.

Ivy liked it plain, and weak. Just a few seconds of submersion and then the teabag was removed. Nanny Anderson had taught her economy, too, so for many years Ivy would hang the tea bag over the sink, drying it for a second, third and fourth use.

Steven had always laughed at that. “Tea bags cost about four pence a pop. I think you can afford to waste a few.”

“That’s not the point,” Ivy had grinned. At the time, she’d never really noticed that he talked about ‘you’ more than he did ‘we’. It was one of the many things she got stuck on when she examined their relationship.

Back then, though, she’d used enough ‘we’s for both of them.

We’d love to have you for dinner. Oh, we love Game of Thrones. We don’t really eat spicy food, even though Ivy in fact had loved chilli at one time in her life. At what point had she stopped thinking of herself as a person, and started to see herself only as Steve’s adjunct? As someone who didn’t have a full life unless he was in it?

She moaned, low in her throat, as a warm, strong hand cupped her breasts, fanning her flesh with heat and awareness. Her lips tickled into a smile and she flipped over.

Disorientation fogged her mind for a second as the last cobwebs of her dream disappeared.

“I fell asleep,” she said quietly, her eyes latched to Rafe Santoro’s. He looked down at her and something strange lodged in her throat. Desire flooded her body.

“I noticed.” The words were a drawl, tinged with humour. His hands dragged lower, over her flat stomach.

“What time is it?”

“Midnight.”

“Mmm,” she smiled. “Still early.”

“Are you hungry?” He asked. “We didn’t eat dinner.”

His fingers were light and yet somehow demanding. They drew little swirls across her flesh and it was like the gentlest of breezes. She dragged her lip between her teeth and shook her head from side to side.

“Not yet.” She blushed to the roots of her hair when she realised what she’d said.

“Not yet?” He teased, moving closer, so that she felt his warm breath tantalisingly close to her mouth.

She dared herself to be brave; to be honest. “I want to have my way with you again and then we’ll eat.”

His laugh joined hers and it was the sexiest rumble she’d heard. It curled her toes and lifted her heart. It was silenced – all the laughter stopped – the second his lips pressed against the sensitive flesh at the top of her thigh. He was so close to her that she held her breath. Waiting. Hoping.

And he didn’t disappoint.

His tongue against her nerves was impossible for Ivy to compare to any other feeling. It was so intimate and so heaven-sent. She was immediately awash on the sea of desire. He kissed her expertly, and she cried out as the sweet, sensual invasion almost brought her to tears. On the brink of orgasm, he paused for a moment and she opened her mouth to object, but he was back, his arousal thrusting inside of her, hard and so big, giving her what she hadn’t known she needed again.

She arched her back and writhed beneath him, her nipples taut – everything taut. Her nerves were stretched beyond breaking point. She was balanced on a tightrope high above the city and with his next movement she dropped, crashing at velocity, flying through the sky, weightless and crazy with the feeling.

“You’re so sexy when you come,” he whispered in her ear.

She found it to be a bizarre thing to say – an observation that surely wasn’t true. She didn’t want to think about what she looked like while in the throes of passion, face scrunched, hair messed – but as he moved inside of her and her body tried to cope with the wave of sensations, it was easier to believe what he was saying. To let the words knot inside of her and give her the sense that she was, in fact, in some way, some manifestation of a Sexual Goddess. A wind-up one, that only he seemed to know how to operate.

His hands found her wrists and he pinned them beside her as he moved and his mouth came to her breasts now. He was all over her body and she had never felt so pleasured or turned on.

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