An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,56

and ran. Her lips were red. Her eyes mischievous, unapologetic. Her cheeks flushed with arousal.

“Don’t worry about it. I carry an extensive selection of buttons and other trimmings on the second floor,” she gasped as he was teasing the dusky centers of her breasts.

“Of course you do,” he murmured. “At my store—”

“Shut up, Dalton. I don’t care about your store. Keep kissing me.”

Dalton kissed her.

And he dared to touch her. Tracing a finger along her bare shoulder, slipping off the sleeves, revealing more and more of her bare skin.

“I want to touch you,” she whispered, and soon enough his jacket and shirt were just fabric on the floor, relics of the day, and she was gazing at his bare chest with heated longing that she couldn’t hide if she even tried.

She didn’t seem to be trying.

So he didn’t hide how much he wanted her, either.

She bit her lip and skimmed her bare palms across the planes of his chest, the muscles of his shoulder, the bulge of his biceps. Then she leaned over and teased his nipple with her mouth, and he hissed her name and murmured, “Oh, God,” as her fingers toyed with the waistband of his trousers.

Gazes locked. She smiled mischievously. She had ideas, his Beatrice. She was no longer some enthusiastic innocent, but a woman who knew what she wanted and would take it.

“Beatrice.”

“Dalton.”

“Ladies first.”

“If you insist.”

“I do.”

A rush of fabric. A soft gasp. His hand skimmed along her silk stockings. She closed her eyes and moaned with the pleasure of his touch in the soft folds of her sex. It wasn’t their first time but it had been a long time and things had changed and it felt like they were new to each other all over again. She dug into his shoulder with her nails, clinging to him as he stroked harder, slipped one then two fingers inside.

“Oh, God.” She sighed and she moved against his hand. She knew what she wanted; he gave it to her.

He ached to be inside her. She seemed to know. Beatrice reached for him, and took his cock in hand and began to stroke the hot, hard length of it. He forgot about his store. And hers. He forget they were competitors. In this moment he was just a man at her mercy and he wouldn’t have traded places with anyone.

“Oh, God.” The invocation was drawn from his lips. It wasn’t just her touch—although she knew just the right speed, just the right pressure to swiftly bring him to the brink—it was her. The woman he felt so many tortured and twisty and complicated feelings for.

He captured her soft moans with kisses. He groaned into her hair.

When she cried out at her climax, he caught that sound, too. A moment later he, too, was biting back a shout and was spent. She sagged against him. He turned and leaned against the dressing room wall for support. He began to take note of his surroundings. A dressing room. In a department store. After hours.

God, it was like they were eighteen all over again.

“Dalton,” she gasped, when she had caught her breath.

Her pressed a kiss on her lips and said, “Next time we’ll do that in a bed.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Goodwin’s Department Store

The next morning

Well, Beatrice was never going to look at that fitting room the same way again. Or any dressing room, for that matter. Not after last night, when she’d disregarded a number of rules on proper behavior, with Dalton as her willing partner in delicious crime.

She had lost her mind, like a lovestruck young girl, but without fear of the consequences.

It was glorious.

But now she must pay attention to matters of business, not matters of pleasure. It was the start of a new day at work and she began it like any other, with a tour of each department to confer with all department heads to ensure that all was right and ready for another busy day with customers.

In the trimmings department on the second floor, she discreetly acquired a packet of buttons. In women’s undergarments on three, she did her best not to blush as she was flooded by memories of last night. The firm pressure of his mouth on hers, the way he held her, the way he touched her—strong and sure and reverentially all the same, until she was completely undone in his arms. In housewares, she reconsidered the twin beds.

Outside the reading room, everything had gone wrong.

Beatrice arrived to see a group of women standing in