could feel Win getting closer, as if he were a magnetic force and she a length of steel. He stopped behind her, close enough for her to feel his energy and smell his scent. He did not touch her. Not yet, but it was coming, and her whole body tensed with anticipation.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked in the quiet.
Poppy blinked down at her hands, so white and clenched upon the sash. When her voice came it was a whisper. “Because you weren’t here.”
His breath caught on the inhale, then slowly left him. Win shifted his weight, and the specter of his face appeared at the window, hovering over her shoulder. Poppy closed her eyes against the pain in his expression.
“When you were gone, I never slept,” she said. “Not really.”
Win’s voice cracked between them. “Every night I ached for you.” He stepped closer, his heat and his strength bracketing her. Soft lips touched the outer shell of her ear. “Every night I counted myself a fool for leaving.” Slowly, so very slowly she might have imagined it, his hands skimmed her arms, setting off little tremors of want in their wake. “You asked me once for forgiveness.” He leaned in, his lips just touching the tender point of her neck. “Will you grant it to me?” Wide palms traced her waist, barely touching, just enough to make her tremble with the need to press against him. She stayed her course, her fists pushing against the cold window glass.
Gently, he swept her hair away from her neck, then pressed a lingering kiss there. Poppy’s knees went weak.
“I am tired of pretending,” he said. “Of spending another agonizing night lying next to you and trying to think of anything else but shagging you until my cock gives out.”
“Win.” Her voice croaked. She wanted to turn around, to tell him how much she needed him. And yet she was frozen.
“No more, Poppy.” His tongue traced a heated path along her neck, back to that spot just below her ear that made her shiver and flush. She did not move, barely breathed. Win’s attention was a fragile thing, a dream that she might wake from and find herself alone again. As if sensing her thoughts, his touch grew stronger as he ran his palm up to her throat.
His smoky voice was at her ear. “No more acting as though I am not so utterly in love with my wife that it tears my heart out not to hold her. Not another night, Poppy. It makes a mockery of what I feel for you.”
With agonizing deliberation, his fingers went to the buttons of her dressing gown. Her breath caught just as he slipped the first button free. “From the very first moment I saw you, you were all I thought about.”
Cool air crept beneath the widening gap in her dressing gown. She stood before the open window, facing the night, her pulse racing and her breath unsteady.
“All I wanted.” He paused, and then his hand slipped underneath her open gown. His palm met with her bare breast, and he groaned low and deep. “All I want.”
Gently he played with her, brushing over her areola, lightly cupping the small swell of her breast until it grew heavy and tender, her nipple aching to be pinched. Poppy gritted her teeth. Lust had her lower belly coiling tight and hot.
“Win…” Her breath caught as he worried the very tip of her nipple with his finger. “Don’t play.”
A low, seductive chuckle rumbled in his chest. His mouth closed over her earlobe, and she gasped when he bit it. “You like it when I play.”
Oh, but she did. Her lids fluttered closed when, as if opening a delicate tome, he parted her gown.
Her fists unfurled, and her palms pressed against the glass, foggy now from the heat of her breath. “Win.” Their room was dark, but not as dark as the street. Anyone passing by might see her. See them. The knowledge sent fire and ice through her sensitized flesh. Her breath grew to panting. He was exposing her, and he knew it. He knew what it did to her, how it made her heart race and her sex grow white-hot with need.
Win stood quiet, his warm breath stealing over her neck and down her bare skin. “Just look at you,” he whispered. “So lovely and strong.”
The dark street opened up before them. The sight of her own breasts jutting out, her nipples hard and dark, sent a thrill