Alexander was there.
My eyes did not deceive me.
And I am so screwed.
I swallow thickly as the soles of his shoes scuff against the wooden floor. Maybe I should come clean and tell him when I said he didn’t have to drag me, I meant what I said.
I’d have gone willingly with him.
Probably anywhere.
And oh, my gosh, he looks so good. Moonlight falls across him, accentuating the masculine structure of his face and turning his fair hair silvery. There’s such a naked longing in his expression, and I wonder if this is somehow a reflection of my own face. Or maybe it’s just that I can’t trust my own senses. Either way, I find myself screwing my eyes and my hands tight. I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do. Throw myself at him? Get in first? Give in? To myself? To him? Run the other way?
“Holland.” There is a wealth of emotion in my name. But still, I shield myself in the darkness. Like a child hiding from consequences, I choose to tremble in the shadows.
Trembling from the weight of my need. And from the fear of it.
One step, then two, his footfalls muffled as he crosses the carpet.
The brush of his breath. The whisky scent of it.
I inhale sharply as his fingers touch my lips, swallow a longing sign as he traces my mouth, almost as though learning the shape of it. Or remembering it.
Remembering what it was to kiss me.
A breath quivers from my chest as I ache. As I long for something I shouldn’t, inhaling a soft gasp as his mouth catches the corner of my own at the same time as the pad of his thumb presses to the tiny indent at the bow. His finger drifts down, snagging my bottom lip as though in order to kiss it. To take it between his own. He swallows my next exhalation, a sound that’s desperate and greedy and the antithesis of this moment. This kiss. My mouth feels so sensitive. Every brush, every trace of his, reduces me to a puddle of need. It’s like my mouth is the centre of all feeling in the universe, and his, the source of it.
“This mouth,” he whispers. My eyes flutter open, meeting his dark and desirous ones. He begins to walk backwards across the room, my hips in his hands as he pulls me along with him. “These lips.” His hands slide around me, swapping our positions to press me back against the wall of shelves.
The next time our lips meet, his mouth raids and plunders with a fierceness, his hand cupping the back of my head, finding the root of my ponytail, he begins to wind it. One sharp tug and I’m staring into inky dark eyes and the fierceness of his regard.
“I can barely believe it.” He presses his mouth to my neck, shaping words against my skin. “You’re really here.”
“Please don’t talk.” Please hurry. Please use your mouth just to kiss me. My fingers grasp the shelves behind me to stop me from reaching out. To stop me from using the darkness as my defence because I don’t want to think—I don’t want to discuss why or how right now. I just want this.
God, I just want him.
His response is a soft chuckle as his hands find my ass, sparing me the inflexibility of the shelves in exchange for a hardness of his own. His tongue is a hot flick at the seam of my mouth, opening mine on a gasp. His lips working firmly, his tongue penetrating, twirling and twining with my own. One minute, we’re chest to chest, and the next, his thick thigh is pressed between my legs, his reaction painted in a deep and masculine groan. I drink in his want, swallowing it down as my hands roam over the firm solidness of his velvet shoulders and arms, sliding around him to grab the globes of his ass. His kilt-covered ass. Good for easy access. His chuckle reverberates between us, his eyes silver in the moonlight as I gather the thick woollen fabric.
“Feeling a draught?” My taunt earns me another dark chuckle, then a growl as I find his softly furred thighs. Strong muscles contract under my fingers, my hands slipping higher with a determination to discover what this man wears under his kilt.
“No,” he purrs, catching my hands in his and pressing them back against the shelves. “Ladies first.” His voice is as dark as midnight and like temptation itself.
“Alexander.” His name on my lips is no reprimand, no plea for time to think as his fingers and tongue conspire to loosen the buttons of my shirt. I arch from the shelves in a silent plea for haste.
“My God, how I’ve dreamed of this,” he rasps, delivering a sucking bite to the swell of my breast as it’s revealed.
“Oh, God . . .”
“How I’ve dreamed of you. Touched you so many times in my sleep only to wake, aching for you.”
“I’m here.” I run my hand through his thick hair as his tongue licks away the slight sting, kissing his way up my neck to deliver the kind of soliloquy that makes my knees weak.
“I want you, Holland. I want your taste in my mouth and your cries ringing in my ears. I want to you so damned much it hurts. Tell me yes. Tell me I can have you. Here. Now.”
“You have the mouth of a sinner.” But that can’t be true because nothing sinful could deliver such reverence.
“I have a mouth that only wants to worship you.” His expression is so full of heat and want, it scrambles my brain and liquifies my bones.
“But the dinner,” I whisper as my hands tighten in his hair. Not to push him away but to bring him closer because I know his madness. Recognise it. And I now know why I’m not at the pub tonight. Because this is fate at play.
It has to be.
“You’re all the sustenance I need.” His fingers free my breast from the cup of my bra, my pebbled nipple perched above the lace. My thoughts dissolve as his head descends, and he takes my nipple into his mouth.
With a desperate-sounding whimper, I arch from the shelves, chasing the sucking pull of his mouth.
“Fuck, you were right that night.” His gaze flicks up to mine, his lush mouth playing at a hesitant smile. “I do seem pretty bitey.” My body bows as his tongue flicks out. “It’s all you, darling. You make me want to devour you whole.”
Maybe I’d be running for the hills if his words didn’t sound so reverent. As it is, I can do nothing but moan as his tongue coasts up the underside of my breast. But as the coarse pads of his fingers begin to pluck my hose, my sense of practicalities, of propriety, are tugged. I can’t go back to work with ripped tights, looking like I’ve been ridden hard in the library on the down-low.
“But Alexander, people will come.”
“That’s very much the plan,” he says, dropping to his knees. “Let me put my mouth on you. I want to taste you.”
Oh, yes . . .
“But they might come looking for me.” And if they find me like this with one of the guests . . .
“No,” he murmurs, working my skirt up my thighs. “They know where you are. Sophie saw me lead you in here.”
“Sophie?” Her name might ring a bell, but not the alarm-sized buzzing going off in my head right now.
“Later.” His fingers slide under my now belt-sized skirt, thumbs hooking into the waistband of my hose.
“No.” I press my hands over his. I desperately want this—I want him—but that thing tugging at the edge of my consciousness won’t be ignored.
Alexander’s fingers relax, his hands curling around my hips instead. His gaze dips, the dark crescents of his lashes like a fan against his cheeks. I watch the deep movement of his throat as he swallows, the effort it takes to contain himself. And all the while, I’m wondering why can’t I just give in.