She clutched at his wide shoulders and stared sightlessly at the ceiling as he suckled with such tender care at that one spot. This couldn’t be happening. They didn’t have time, and that was her fault. She had set the agenda for what happened next when she called for a meeting with Carling and the Dark Fae delegation in two hours’ time.
Which had happened a while ago. Which meant the meeting was two hours from now minus something. And she should never try to do calculations or time estimates when the sexiest man she had ever known was licking up the line of her jaw to nibble at her ear, because she had never been that strong in calculus and he destroyed her utterly. Utterly.
Somehow her hands found their way to the back of his head, her fingers stroking through his hair, following blindly the whorls that were shaven in the short, silken black length. She gasped and arched against him as his teeth nipped with such care at her sensitive earlobe.
He had come for her. He had promised everything was going to be okay, and he had come for her, and he had looked so crazy-sexy. No, monstrous. No, sexy. Oh damn.
“Big trouble,” she whimpered. I’m in big, big trouble now.
“Shh,” he whispered. “Everything is all right. You’re safe, we’re not doing anything. You’re not in any trouble.”
“Tiago,” she whispered. Her lips and her thighs shook. She tried to gasp for air.
He rose over her, an immense dark man that eclipsed the daylight. “God, you’re so gorgeous,” he breathed against her trembling mouth. “I could eat you up. I want to eat you all over. I want to eat you all day. But I know we’ve got to make that meeting.”
What meeting?
Her mouth clung to him and her legs wanted to. They wanted to wrap around his waist and bring him into alignment with the aching empty cradle between her hips. She dug her fingernails into the back of his strong corded neck, and he arched against her with a shaken laugh that sent his moist, hot breath blasting along her lips.
He jerked his mouth away and gasped, “Reschedule it.”
She blinked and looked at him with a dazed, unfocused gaze. “What?”
“Reschedule the damn meeting for tomorrow,” he growled. He glanced down her little curvaceous body. He was rock hard and agonized with wanting her. “For next week,” he amended.
Memory struck. The meeting! It was supposed to be in two hours minus a significant something now, and she still hadn’t showered or put on street clothes, and she sure as hell hadn’t calmed down. A sound broke out of her, a cross between a groan and a sob.
He put his hand between her legs and pressed the heel of his palm against the part of her that throbbed with an empty aching pain. “I can make it better,” he whispered.
Her body pulsed at the dark promise in his voice. He could make it so much better. He could make it delicious, but in the process he would demolish what was left of her mind, and she needed her thinking clear and sharp if she had any hope of holding her own against Carling and the Dark Fae.
She clutched at his thick wrist and gasped, “No, Tiago. Not like this.”
He groaned and went rigid as he bowed over her body, his eyes shut tight. She looked up at the harsh dark lines of his face and wanted to bite her tongue, wanted to take it back, wanted to claw at him and demand he give her everything he had. She teetered at the brink of losing control.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. Violence and sensuality teemed in that obsidian gaze, so that for a moment she thought he was the one who had lost control, and the part of her that had already plunged over the brink was fiercely glad.
Then he pressed his lips to her forehead with extreme gentleness. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Not like this.”
Before she could protest her own edict, he rocked back on his heels and stood, and he drew her up along with him. At first her legs were too shaky to support her. She put her arms around his long, lean waist and leaned against him. They stood quietly together as he stroked the hair off her damp forehead, and for a moment she felt a crazed kind of desperate need to hang on to any part of him that she could before he slipped away and was lost to her for good.
Okay, now she was starting to scare herself. It was past time she got her careening harebrained self back on track.
She bit her lips and forced some iron into her spine. Then she stepped back, looked in the general direction of his face and gave him a sort of idiotic nod as if that meant anything. She turned away and—