were gentle but hard. Imperative. “It has to be you.”
Her heart fell, and she tried to find emotional purchase on unsteady ground, but there was none. All of her felt unbalanced.
Helplessly, she clung to him. Slipped her arms beneath the open edges of his suit jacket, curling them around his waist while he pulled her in for a deeper, longer, harder kiss. One that took and gave and was so rife with layers of emotion, it softened her knees.
Amid the taste of anguish and desperation, yearning and his irrepressible will, physical craving crept in, making each kiss last longer. Flow deeper. Their hands roamed in anxious apology and hunger to connect, rebuilding the tenuous threads that bound them.
She slid her hand down to cup him through his trousers. He was hard and hissed under her exploring touch.
“Do you want me to...?” She glanced toward the door as her fingers sought the tab on his fly.
“I want you,” he growled, reaching back to click the lock. “Isn’t that obvious?” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and set a condom next to the sink.
She widened her eyes, unable to hold back a choking laugh. “You brought that to dinner with your mother?”
“If I learned nothing else in our marriage, it was to always carry one when I’m with you because we can’t keep our hands off one another.” He crowded her toward the sink.
Her heart was still fluttering, bubbles of laughter rising in her along with a deep craving for reassurance. She needed this. Needed to feel irresistible. Needed the reflection of hunger in him that matched her own urgent desire to break down their barriers and be completely intimate.
The vanity was too small to sit on. He turned her to face it. Her eyes widened in the mirror as he guided her hands to splay flat upon it. Then he ran his hands down her sides, shaping her hips and coming back up to fondle her breasts.
“Sometimes I think you have a very dirty mind,” she accused on a pleasured gasp, arching into his palms, pushing her backside into the hardness behind his fly. “That all you think about is sex and what we’ll do next.”
“Only sometimes?” His hands were slipping into her cleavage, warming and awakening her, making her breaths catch. “It’s not sex I think about. It’s you.”
She shivered, possibly from his words, possibly from the way he teased her nipples before moving down her sides again, adjusting her, using his feet to nudge hers apart while his gaze stayed glued to hers, making sure she was with him for every breath and caress.
She was. It was blatant and lewd and they should have gone upstairs to the privacy of his penthouse, but the immediacy of their desire heartened her. It was as comforting as it was exciting. Part of her knew that it wasn’t a strength to be this physically weak, but she drank in the fact he was as anxious to be joined with her as she was. It erased the deep sense of inequality that had been hitting her again and again all day.
His hands went farther down her hips to her thighs. Her dress came up with the next caress of his hands upward, smoothing over her thighs and hips and up to her waist.
“No, keep looking at me,” he said in a jagged voice, forcing her to blink her heavy eyelids back open. “I like watching you lose focus.”
She licked her lips, watching the heat gathering in his gaze as his caresses grew more flagrant, slipping down the front of her lace underwear and—
“Oh!”
“Eyes open, lovely,” he commanded in a hypnotic tone. His free hand stole around to fondle her breast again. “Good?”
“You know it is,” she panted. His touch was moving easily in the slick moisture he’d called forth.
“The only person you have to fit with is me. Understand? And we fit perfectly, Tanja. We always have. Yes?”
“Yes,” she moaned, unable to resist rocking her hips to seek a firmer touch. Her eyelashes were fluttering as exquisite ripples of arousal rolled upward from his touch.
“Not pretending now, are you?”
“No,” she said on a shaken laugh.
He released her, staying close enough behind her she felt the brush of his hand against her cheeks, the rough-soft wool of his trousers as he opened them. The hot weight of his naked erection rested against her cheek while he opened the condom. He applied it and she watched his gaze stay down, admiring her