Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

Thank God for ruined women.

He was ruined, too. Ruined, and waiting for her to remove that last layer of pretense between them. To lift that cloak of anonymity and speak his name.

But she did not. And so instead of spreading Jenny’s legs, he kissed his way down her body. He trailed his tongue in her navel, and she shuddered against him. He kissed her pubic bone.

And by God, though she moaned, still his name didn’t cross her lips. He could feel her uncertain query by the tense quiver in her thighs. Her hands clutched the coverlet, bunching it into wrinkles underneath her grip. He answered the question her body asked with action. He pushed her legs apart and kissed her hot, sweet cleft. He dipped his tongue between her legs, tasting the salty sweetness of woman. She was wet and ready, but he wanted more from her than mere readiness.

His hand crept between her legs; he slid a finger into her passage. It was tight and hot, slippery and welcoming. Her muscles clamped around him, and he added a second finger, listening to her gasp. Learning the ways of her body. He found the spot right there—the one that made her moan and arch against him when he curled his finger up in a come-hither. He leaned forward and tweaked her nipple with his spare hand, and her passage contracted around his hand, harder. Heat mounted. He bent his head and ran his tongue against the sensitive spot between her legs.

Her body stiffened. Her passage clamped down on the fingers inside her. “Oh.” The word was wrung out of her. “Oh.” Again, and louder. Then—“Gareth.”

His name swept through him, a sensation as primitively powerful as the strongest release. Wave after wave pulsed through them. He tasted her pleasure, felt it throb around his fingers. “Gareth,” she screamed again, and his name on her lips seemed more intimate than the physical connection he shared with her.

She gasped so hard she could have been sobbing. Gareth was hard and erect. He levered himself over her. The erect tips of her ni**les brushed his chest. She struggled up onto her elbows and kissed him. His tongue found hers. He wanted her desperately.

You.

The full length of his erection pressed against her belly. She spread her legs, angling her hips up toward his. As soon as her slick softness touched his member, he was lost.

He was lost, but he was coming home.

Her hips shifted, and the crown of his c**k pushed against her body’s opening. And then she rose to meet him—he pushed against her—and he was sinking inch by inch into her soft, waiting flesh. She was tight, so tight, around him. Hot satisfaction gripped him. She fit. Not just her slick female passage, but her body, her hips, her br**sts. His hands were of a size to cradle her head. She molded against him as if he’d been made for her. She engulfed him. He filled her.

“Gareth,” she said again.

“Jenny. Oh, God. Jenny.”

The names came simultaneously. Gareth could restrain himself no longer. He took from her. He gave to her. It was an age-old dance, one more powerful and more riveting than logic. She was hot friction clasping him; sparking electricity tracing his veins.

She was his.

Her fingernails cut into his back. She pulled his mouth down to hers in the dark. She kissed him, and he tasted his name on her lips again. As he plunged into her, his mind filled with a coruscating fire. Heat rose around him. Beneath him, she stiffened. Her womb clamped around him in the beginning of a second release. And Gareth let himself go, let everything he had held back flood from him.

He pulled her against him in those final moments, shielding her from the chaotic storm that raged through his body. It passed, leaving him wrung out and sated, his limbs intertwined with hers.

He gulped for air and sanity. It was slow in coming.

What would she say now? Even though it was his body covering hers, his chest pressing her soft curves into the mattress, it seemed that Gareth was the one who was trapped. His lungs burned with exertion. Or emotion. No matter which, he could not find his breath again. It was buried somewhere inside her, deeper even than his still-throbbing cock, clasped in her womb.

What had he just experienced? It had been pleasure. Communion. Connection. It had been the end of a long, dark loneliness. Gareth could not bring himself to pull away from her. Because it had been everything.

Everything, that is, except the one thing she had asked it to be.

It hadn’t been goodbye.

Her chest rose and fell beneath his. Her heart beat steadily against his sweaty skin. He couldn’t see a damned thing through the dark night, but he could feel the heavy pulse in her throat thumping into the hollow cavern of his lungs.