Page 22 of The Roommate

She slid an inch lower on the couch, letting her body open further, the tiny movement the closest she’d ever come to a deviant act.

Josh brushed his thumb across the tender skin of her upper thigh, making her shiver. ?

?Good?”

Clara opened her mouth to respond but the words died, nervous, on her tongue.

“It’s all right,” he said in a rough voice, as if someone had taken sandpaper to his vocal cords. “You don’t have to answer.” The heat of his breath across her already hot skin was decadent torture. “I’ll learn what you like.”

As Clara tried desperately not to think, Josh kissed along the line where her panties met her leg. The contact shot through the lower half of her body like a current. It had been an embarrassingly long time since anyone had touched her with sexual intent.

Josh employed his mouth and hands like a maestro as he made his way down one leg and then the other with devious patience, but he didn’t follow any discernible routine. He tempered his touch across various pressures and patterns, never lingering on one spot for long and avoiding the most pertinent areas of her anatomy entirely. Each maddening stroke made Clara more indignant, more desperate.

Finally, his knuckles brushed against the front of her underwear, the barely-there friction against the cotton leaving her breathless. But just when she thought he’d finally give her some relief, Josh did the opposite, moving away and starting another round of openmouthed kisses down her leg.

“Oh, come on.”

“Excuse me.” Josh nipped her lightly behind her knee and Clara let out a tiny, wholly involuntary squeak. “Was there something you wanted?” He had the nerve to sound innocent.

Clara clenched the arm of the sofa and bit back a groan, not knowing how much more of this slow-burn stuff she could stand. Was it rude to politely ask him to cut to the chase?

It wasn’t that she couldn’t appreciate his technique. The slow, tender touches loosened her limbs, making everything languid and hazy. But she’d been promised an orgasm and no matter how talented he was, Josh wasn’t going to deliver one by kissing her thighs. Clara raised her hips, offering him a helpful hint.

Instead of following directions, Josh removed his hands altogether, giving her nothing but the wet heat of his mouth as he kissed the cotton covering her core. “I’m not gonna let you rush me.”

When he brushed his hand over her knee, she swore she’d go mad. Sometime in the last five minutes, all of her nerve endings had multiplied.

It felt like a punishment, though not like any one she’d ever earned, when he circled her ankle with his fingers and brought it to his mouth to suck on the thin, tender flesh he found there.

Familiar doubts and fears began to play across her mind: this was taking too long. He was going to get tired. Or bored.

Josh seemed to notice her mind drifting because he applied a particularly sharp bite to her calf. The acute press of his teeth, mingling pleasure and pain, made her gasp. Her entire lower body tingled, begging her to remove her own hand from its death grip on the sofa and provide the relief he continued to deny her.

Clara swallowed a choked breath.

“Wheaton,” Josh said, lightly. “This only works if you relax. Erase the finish line, okay? I don’t have any expectations for you to meet.”

He moved to lick a fiery stripe across her hip.

“I don’t care if this takes hours.”

Hours?

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

The timbre of his voice alone was making her sweat at this point.

“I’m going to make you feel good until you tell me you’re ready to stop.”

Clara could feel his words between her legs. Each syllable pulsed, filling her with eager emotions that she couldn’t separate, couldn’t name. They blended together into a single insistent need.

Josh pushed the heel of his hand against her sex and sparks exploded behind her eyelids. Clara made a very unladylike sound. To think, a minute ago she’d thought his teeth on her ankle felt good.

Josh ran both thumbs up and down the damp seam of her sex before bracing one hand on her leg and using the other to slowly circle her clit.

With each caress, he inspired a sharper, deeper hunger until she found herself keening, as he worked her over without mercy. It was a cruel twist of fate that for twenty-seven years she’d settled for a pale imitation of the pleasure Josh wrought as he laid siege to her senses.

To act this way with a veritable stranger, right out here in the living room, without a carefully curated playlist of R&B slow jams, the casual carnality had her drunk on rebellion. At this point, she’d take anything Josh gave her and beg for more.

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