The Piano Man Project Page 0,92

his back. She saw his inked biceps in her head as her fingers curled around them, and felt the strength in his hands when he held her face between them.

‘Better than okay,’ she said, finding his mouth in the darkness, feeling more for seeing less.

‘I bought this bra for you,’ she said. He ran the slender velvet straps between his fingers and then traced over the lace cups, making her nipples stiffen.

‘I like you in it,’ he said, kissing her as his fingers slid beneath her to the catch. He opened it easily, the assured touch of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Honey lifted her shoulders to help him slide it from her body, loving the way he wrapped her against him. He had a vulnerability, a capacity for tenderness she hadn’t anticipated from him; he usually hid it well. He didn’t hide it from her now. She heard her own low moan when his hand moved between them to her bared breasts, his tongue an erotic slide over her lips as his thumb circled her nipple.

‘Pink,’ he murmured, not really a question. ‘Like turkish delight, or rose streaks across the morning sky.’

‘Yes,’ she said, helping him paint her picture in his head. Her heart aching for him that he’d never see either of those things again, and for herself that he’d never see her at all.

And then he moved slightly, dipping his head to take her nipple inside the warmth of his mouth, and she pushed her fingers into his hair, overwhelmed. He wasn’t the first man to touch her, but in that moment it felt brand new and more powerful than she’d ever realised it could be.

At that point other men might have stepped the gear up. If anything, Hal knocked it down, sighing low in his throat as his hips moved languidly against hers.

‘It’s been a while,’ he said.

‘Forever,’ she said, because she’d never known this before. ‘What do you see in your head right now, Hal?’

He laughed softly against her mouth, easing his weight slightly away from her. She’d have happily stayed right there forever, cradled between the back of the sofa and Hal’s body.

‘I don’t need to see you to know how beautiful you are, Honey.’ He stroked a single fingertip from the dip between her collarbone to the edge of her silk knickers, and the raw, honest edge to his words intensified the feeling tenfold.

‘My hands tell me.’ He covered her breasts with his hands; warm, firm, massaging. Honey arched into his touch when he squeezed her nipples and then lowered his head to lick each one in turn.

‘My mouth tells me,’ he whispered, sliding his lips back up her neck and pressing her against the sofa with his weight. Honey could feel her breath becoming shallow in her chest as Hal’s hand moved slowly down between her legs.

‘Your body tells me,’ he murmured, sliding his hand inside the silk. She held her breath, as if she were walking along the very edge of a cliff path, and he held still and kissed her slowly until she had a secure footing again.

He stilled her fingers when she reached for the button on his jeans. ‘Not here. Not now. And not because I don’t want to, or because we never will, but because this is yours. It’s all for you.’

He was the best man she’d ever known by a country mile.

‘Okay?’ he asked her for a second time that evening, and she couldn’t find the words to tell him how much more than okay she was. He shifted slightly to remove her knickers, and then came back again, lying on his side and gathering her against the length of him.

Being naked and held by Hal in the darkness turned out to be the sexiest thing that had ever happened to Honey in her life.

He was a sensory feast; the low sounds of pleasure in his throat, the smooth heat of his skin, the sensual weight of his body moving against hers. His hands travelled over her, sweeping her spine, cupping her backside as he rocked into her, kissing her open mouthed and breathless. When he opened her knees with his own and moved his hand between her legs, Honey could only cling on to the slick breadth of his shoulders and gasp his name into his mouth.

In those moments, it never occurred to her to wonder if he might be the first man to make her come, or if it was