Page 55 of For the Gods' Sake

But the wooden circle, carved into the door, made my breath still in my chest.

Adrian had gone still against my back, too. But his breathing was ragged, the hot puffs landing heavy on the top of my head.

A dark cloud inched over the sliver of sky betweenthe buildings and I reached back to grip his arm. “Adrian, calm down.” I wasn’t in a position to give orders, but I did it anyway.

The words seemed to shock him, enough that he banded an arm around my waist and hauled me close. “Observant little thing, are you?”

“It wasn’t a far jump,” I defended in a whisper, forcefully pushing the words through the blush constricting my throat. “We’ve had horrid weather the past few weeks. And even worse the night that Gus…”

I trailed off on a hitched breath when I saw someone open the door. Adrian and I both went deadly quiet, ears straining to pick up on the exchange between them.

Thankfully, the acoustics of the worn down Roman streets were in our favor. The older man who opened the door nodded at the couple then asked, “Can I help you?”

The woman in the couple nodded and said, “Yes.Midén.”

That word was the key, it seemed. Because the man stepped aside and let them through, crisply closing the door behind them.

Adrian and I stood in silence, watching as the ritual was repeated twice more, with an elderly woman approaching alone and a group of three young men. It was after the men stepped through the door that Adrian seemed to have had enough.

He lifted me off the ground, that arm still around my waist and hauled me back around the corner and into the shadows. He opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it when we heard voices.

Our eyes flew to each other, the panic I knew was in mine slamming against the hard steel of Adrian’s.

We were still too close to the meeting place, too faroff the street for us to claim coincidence. If someone found us, they would know with certainty that we’d been onto them.

I looked down the street we’d walked down, one that seemed a lot shorter when we were coming down it than trying to fight our way back through it.

The voices got louder. As inright around the corner louder.

I turned to Adrian with wide eyes, looking at him for any indication that he had a plan to get us out of this. He looked at me with that serious expression of his, the crease between his eyebrows deepening on a surefire sign that he was devising a plan in that perfect head. One that would save us if only I was patient.

My personal brand of problem solving under pressure tended to be a lot moreact now, figure it out laterrather than the careful crafting Adrian preferred. Before he could come up with some brilliant plan to explain our presence on this beaten path, rather than the prettier, more populated streets of Rome, I did the only think I could think of.

My hands reached up of their own accord, grabbing Adrian by the face and pulling him into a kiss.

He went stock still, but I could still feel the vibration of his hands hovering over my skin, shocked into a stagnant position. His lips were warm, softer than they should have been, and my body was lighting with sparks from my face down to low in my stomach. But he wasn’tmoving.

I started to pull back, resigned to deal with whoever was about to round the corner with another excuse, but the second the pressure of my hands eased off his face, Adrian snapped into motion.

WIth a low growl that sounded like it came right from his chest, his hands descended on my hip and the junction between my neck and shoulder and he pressed me soundly into the wall behind me. The second he had me caged, he took every ounce of control out of my hands.

I would have given it to him anyway, with the way he was tipping my head back to gain better access to my mouth, his hand slipping up my neck to grab hold of my jaw.

Thank the Fates he had me pressed firmly into the wall, supported by one of his legs pressed between mine, because the second his thumb darted out to run along my lower lip, my knees almost buckled.

My hands had dropped to my sides in my shock when he took over, but they snaked up between his arms, grabbing onto the lapels of his suit for dear life as his tongue worked over mine. Something in the near desperation in my touch had him pressing harder into me, his thigh pressing right into my core.

I released a pleading sound in the back of my throat at the bolt of pleasure that shot up my center, and I wasn’t sure if I was begging him to stop or keep going. Even though we were in public and were just…

Whatever we were doing that started this, I didn’t care. Not when kissing him feltthisgood. I didn’t want to even think about how he’d gotten this skilled, how he knew just the right amount of pressure to drive me insane, how his grip on me toed the line of rough and gentle perfectly.

That would put me in a sour mood that had no place in my mind when I could focus my energies on attempting to wind my hands around his neck to pullmyself as close to him as I could, to fall even deeper into this kiss.

Adrian rocked forward, his thigh pressing hard—once—and a desperate sound caught in the back of my throat, because as good as it felt, all it made me want was more. Adrian poured a deep groan into the kiss a second later, complete with a light squeeze from the hand wrapped around my throat and jaw.

“Oh!” Someone exclaimed, shocking me out of my trance. I tried to pull back to address whoever had stumbled upon us, but Adrian held tight to my jaw, slowly peeling away from my lips like he didn’t have a care in the world.

His hand slipped from the front of my neck to behind it, resting at the top of my spine and spanning an absolutely lewd distance over my shoulders. But it gave me the freedom to turn towards our interrupters—the people we were trying toavoid, I had to remind myself.

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