her nipple, he sucked until she arched against his mouth with a little cry. God, that was amazing. The sound filled his lungs to bursting, among other parts, and if he didn’t hurry, there’d be a mess to clean up. But her flesh on his tongue enflamed him to the point where he couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything else but revel in the sensations.
But there was more of her he hadn’t had his mouth on yet.
As promised, he dropped to his knees and slid his hands up her thighs, spreading them wider and glanced up at her. His heart stumbled over a beat. She still filled him to the brim with nothing but her eyes. Her hair draped across her bare shoulder and breast, and her heavy gaze never left his as he fingered aside her panties to take that first lick.
Heaven. He groaned as her taste filled his senses. Her hips rolled, squirming toward his mouth as she silently sought more. He gave it to her, using the flat of his tongue in broad, short strokes across her center, and then he couldn’t stand how long it was taking to get more of those cries out of her. Bending one leg up to open her further, he plunged three fingers into her slick channel and twisted until she convulsed, rippling through an orgasm that almost triggered his own.
More. He licked her to another one until she cried out. That was more like it.
Spent, she collapsed back on the desk, her legs still splayed, providing the ultimate temptation, so he pulled her skirt down over her drenched panties. But it did no good as a deterrent when he could still taste her on his lips.
He stood, and dear God, his knees were shaking. Collapsing into her chair, he seriously considered rolling it forward and starting all over again, but she slid off the desk and cleared her throat as she put her dress back to rights without looking at him.
Everything shifted, the mood, the atmosphere, her vibe. She regretted letting her guard down. Regretted letting him touch her. He could feel it, and it tripped a few wires in his head that he didn’t like. When she put her shields up, it reminded him of his own sins far too easily.
“I think you melted my bones,” she finally commented when she was all zipped up.
“Same goes.” Good. So everyone was on board with this having been nothing but sex. It wasn’t a reconnection, wasn’t anything but sex.
That was so much of a lie it was a wonder his pants weren’t on fire.
Someone had the audacity to knock on her office door. Guilt sprang into her expression and she jerked her head. “You should go.”
Leaving was a good idea. Distance might be the best plan when everything in his body strained to recreate the intimacy they’d just shared. In the course of attempting to erase Jared Anderson’s presence, he’d managed to do the exact opposite of finding closure. Instead, she’d cracked him open, and he feared he’d never dispel this bone-deep longing to fall back into the paradise they’d once created.
Impossible. Because he still wasn’t at a place where he could forgive her for Jared. Still wasn’t at a place where he could open his black box, which he’d realized somewhere in the middle of Audra’s orgasms also contained his heart.
Audra bolted awake, her eyes automatically seeking the clock. Almost nine thirty a.m.
She cursed and dragged herself out of bed. Hannah and Carly would be arriving on a ten a.m. flight from Miami to spend part of their spring break in the Bahamas, and Audra had a three-day weekend free from work to spend with her sisters. She’d been looking forward to it, but the long night spent staring at the wall wondering what the hell she was doing with Charlie had eclipsed it.
She was weak. That was her problem. It should have been easy to refuse him, easy to remember he couldn’t be trusted to stick around. Instead, he’d broken every single wall she’d built up against him with one simple, poetic sentence: That’s when you touch me the most.
And then he’d shattered everything else inside as if she were made of glass.
The intimacies she’d allowed between them had been a mistake born of vulnerabilities she hadn’t realized were still there. The last thing she could afford to do was count on a man, especially one who had smashed her heart once already. Charlie wasn’t volunteering to be that anchor