He pressed his pelvis to my belly. “Grace.”
The man was so hard. Enormous.
“Ian . . . I . . . I don’t understand how you make me feel this way. How you make me want things I don’t want. Give myself in a way that I don’t.”
I watched his expression sift through a million emotions—anger and need and lust and fear.
I wanted to reach out and hold every one.
Oh, I was in so much trouble. Stumbling over the edge as the ground crumbled out from under my feet.
He pressed his hard length deeper against my trembling belly. “And you’ve been driving me out of my mind because I can’t get you off of it. Who do you think you are, Angel Girl? Stealing my time and my thoughts and my sleep?” He ticked each one off like a threat.
A quiver staked at my center, and I was speared with my own arrows of need. Greed and lust and things I didn’t realize I’d been missing. But the truth of it shined bright, red embers that singed my insides and glowed white hot at my throbbing center.
I wanted this.
I wanted it so desperately that I no longer recognized who I was.
“Do you know what you are, Grace?” he murmured at my jaw, running those soft, soft lips all the way up to my ear. “A goddamned temptation, that’s what.”
His intoxicating scent came off of him in waves.
The man an ocean. Liquid. I could feel him seeping into my veins.
He nipped the lobe of my ear, and I moaned just as he scraped his teeth across the sensitive flesh.
“Ian, what are you doing to me?”
Tingles flashed, and my entire being rocked toward him.
“I think the better question would be what am I not going to do to you, Angel Girl.”
That mouth was moving over my jaw. My chin. A whimper bled free like a pathetic plea.
A dark chuckle rumbled from Ian’s tongue that licked out to taste my flesh. “I love that sound, Grace. That I’m the one responsible for it. Do you have any idea how much it turns me on? How fucking hard it makes me?”
His words coaxed another whimper right out of me.
I could feel the wicked grin against my throat. “That’s it. Just like that. I want to hear you making those sounds all night.”
His lips traveled up and down the racing pulse at my neck. “Want to hear them growing louder until they’re screams. Are you a screamer, baby?”
Oh my God.
I couldn’t stop shaking. This man too much. Overwhelming.
Everything, everything.
His mouth moved to my ear, his words a deep, growling rasp. “Because you’re going to be tonight.”
This time the whimper was nothing but a needy moan, my body vibrating with want.
Everything stretched taut and tight, my breaths shallow. My heart was stampeding so far out ahead of me that I couldn’t catch up.
I couldn’t catch up to his touch and his hands and the words from his mouth.
The air flames and friction, his body a match.
The man was going to devour me. Ruin me. I knew it. I knew it.
I should stop. Put an end to this madness. Heed all the warnings I’d given myself when he’d first come into my space.
He nipped at my chin. “Tonight, you’re mine.”
And I knew he was right, because I wasn’t going anywhere. I was a prisoner.
Willing to lose.
If only I got to experience this one moment with him.
I felt desperate to taste him on my lips. To taste him on my tongue. I angled my head, lips parted, begging for relief. “Ian, please.”
Those eyes flashed to mine, intense and hard. But he angled back and let his fingertips flutter down my cheek.
A tease. A tease. Two seconds in, and the man was already wrecking me.
My hands landed on his shoulders, nails scraping, sinking in. I ran them up the sides of his neck, trying to get closer to him, for him to put me out of this achy misery.
My lips sought his, and he dipped down and away, his lips carving a path down one side of my quivering throat and up the other.
My head rocked back on the wall. “Ian.”
“Grace,” he murmured at my skin, the vibration traveling to my bones. Those big hands traced my sides, gripping and kneading and exploring as his mouth delved to the cleft between my breasts and licked back up again.
I chased his mouth again, and he kissed up to my ear. An unfair game of cat and mouse.
“Please,” I begged, holding onto his shoulders as I angled my head to press my lips to his.
He moved the other direction, and I tried again.
His head rocked back, and his teeth ground so tightly I could hear them grating.
“Don’t,” he forced out.
Rejection sank to the pit of my stomach. “Ian—”
Two of his fingers flew to my mouth, the pads pressing the words back inside, his tone coarse with his own desperation. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”
Confusion spun, and I searched him where he hovered two inches away. His breaths mingled with mine, his stare fierce, his eyes blazing when they captured mine in his warning.
Mouth parted, I was gripped by the overpowering emotion that spun, lost in the flare of vulnerability that erupted from the churning depths.
A silent conversation transpired between the two of us.
A wall he barely allowed me to peek over.
Hurt and misery and pain.
Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
So deep and dark that my heart fisted in my chest. Emotion squeezing so tight, the tension binding us in that bare, naked moment crushing us under its weight.
“Don’t,” he commanded again, and I knew he was back to making demands.
Pride and arrogance filled his demeanor. The man control and dominance.
And I wanted to beg that he let me in. Let me hold a little of that pain.
“Tonight, you’re mine,” he repeated, those eyes spinning that ferocity through the air as he slowly climbed down onto both of his knees.
A god making an offering.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands when he reached down and unzipped one of my boots and pulled it from my foot, then turned and did the same to the other.
Ian never released me from that unnerving gaze as he did.
His tongue darted out to wet his lips when he edged up a fraction and tugged at the button of my jeans, and I was shaking more, this moment becoming so unbelievably real.
The fact I was going to give myself to this man.
Wholly.
Completely.
The sound of him dragging the zipper down hit the air like a sonic boom.
“Oh,” I whimpered at the sound, at his stare, at the emotion that twisted so tightly, as tightly as the need that rose higher and higher inside me when he hooked his fingers into the heavy material of my jeans, digging all the way down to get my underwear in his grasp.
He dragged both down my legs.
Slowly.
Purposefully.
“Shit,” he hissed, head dropping for a beat as if maybe he could possibly be half as affected as me, those hands at my calves and working the jeans off my ankles and tossing them to the side.
“You are a fucking vision.”
Hot hands smoothed up the outsides of my legs, from my ankles, over my calves, to my knocking knees, all the way up to caress my thighs.
“Did you know the second I saw you, I wanted to get lost in these legs?” He glanced up, so damned beautiful the breath I was trying to inhale hitched. “I chased you down that night, Grace, because I couldn’t imagine not getting the chance to feel them wrapped around my waist.”
His fingers dug deeper into my thighs, but I swore that it was vulnerability that flashed through his gaze. “Because I hadn’t ever been so instantly attracted to someone in all my life.”
He pressed his nose to the inside of my thigh, inhaling deep. “It was so intense, I knew I had to take the chance and go after you. The thought of never being inside of you was almost unbearable. I wanted you that fucking bad.”
His hands rode higher, under my sweater to my bottom that was bare underneath. “And now I’m going to have you.”
Those big hands squeezed my ass.
Possessively.
As possessive as his stare as he looked up at me.
And the words were falling free before I could think to stop them. “You have me. You have all of me, Ian. You have me in a way I’d never imagined a man could.”