I let out a moan. My body arched up to meet him—he was hovering so close to me. I could feel him all along my length, just an inch above me, as though if I took a deep enough breath, I would touch him. But even when I arched to reach him he knew enough to bend away from me, as though he could read my body, so connected was he with my every move.
He finished worshipping one nipple and then slowly moved to the other, where he nipped and took me by surprise. I yelped, but then I let out another groan of ecstasy. I had to put my hands beneath my ass so that I wouldn’t reach up and touch him. I wanted to so badly. Wanted to thread my hands through his hair and direct him, push him harder to show him where I wanted him more, show him where I wanted him next. I was a mess of wanton desire, and so unused to this stranger’s ways of playing. I didn’t know how to react, how to sit still. I felt like a virgin, inexperienced with that tight tug in my lower belly, unaware of what it was for, why it was happening to me, why it was winding so tightly. It was pulling all my fibers and twisting them into a braid and knotting them so carefully. I just knew that any second it would fall apart. It would unwind like a top and spin spin spin and I would be out of control. But…
“Time!”
Fucking Betsy seemed so gleeful to end my pleasure.
I was flustered. I could feel my cheeks were heated, and my body was on the verge of orgasm. I couldn’t sit still anymore, couldn’t play the game. Couldn’t be there anymore.
“I have to go. Someone take my turn.”
I couldn’t look at Nathan Sinclair as I stood up, but I heard him, right behind me as I fled toward the door. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
The same offer as last time, and this time I didn’t even turn to deny him, because if I turned, I was going to smash into him in front of everyone.
And I didn’t even care anymore enough to stop the inevitable.
I walked as fast as I could, knowing that everyone knew exactly where we were going. That was the point of these things, after all. It was only my own rules that were in danger. I made it out of the room and around the corner into the foyer before he grabbed my elbow.
I turned into him, and our lips crashed together.
We were frenzied, frantic. I couldn’t get my mouth wide enough around his, couldn’t get my lips to move fast enough across his. His hands were around my hips and on my ass and then we were backing up two steps, three, and then I’d hit a wall, and that was better because I could put my weight against it. I was eager for him, desperate. I had to come, and it had to be him who made me do it. If I didn’t come now, I knew what was going to happen. I was going to take him home. I was going to break every rule.
I stroked him through his pants. The tight bulge was heavy in my hands even with the material between us, and I knew that the minute he moved his mouth from mine he’d want to go into another room to fuck. Want me to go home with him.
And I was going to say yes because that was how badly I needed him.
As I stroked him, he found my clit, even through my dress. He didn’t even bother to go underneath. We were both too desperate. I wrapped one leg around his waist and kept rubbing and stroking him as he used two fingers to press against that sensitive bundle of nerves buried between my thighs.
My God, I was going to come just like this. I was already spinning and crying out. My eyes were watering, and I was begging him for something, I didn’t know what because I couldn’t even understand myself. His mouth was pressed so tightly against mine, his lips swallowing my sounds before they were uttered into the air. I was shaking, shaking, a bottle rocket in his hands with a lit fuse, and somehow, my hand still stroked him until he let out a groan. His body stiffened, then he came too. Both of us fully dressed, so horny for each other that we’d never even needed to get naked.
My chest was heaving as he pulled away to study my features. He wiped a tear from under my eye. “Go home with me.”
My throat was dry, but I managed to stammer, “I can’t. I have rules.”
“Break them.”
Then, maybe because I’d already broken rules with him—because he already knew more than just the mystery of my name, he knew where I worked, because he had my panties at his house—or maybe just because I wanted to so badly, because I was interested in a different story than the one I’d been living for so many years...
“Okay.”
Chapter Five
As soon as we got outside, I worried I was making a huge mistake.
It hadn’t been so long since I’d gone home with a man. I wasn’t nervous about that.
Okay, it had been at least a year, so maybe it had been a while. The last time had been a friend of someone I knew in the office. It had been even longer since I went home with someone from the Open Door—at least six years—and that had ended in a clingy month-long relationship with a man who thought that an invitation to my bed was an invitation to tell me what to do with the rest of my life.
I’d had to stop going to the parties for three months until he found a girlfriend and my body belonged once again to me.
He hadn’t been the first man to be possessive. It hadn’t been the first time my ideas about relationships clashed with traditional society.
And that was why I knew I should tell Nathan I’d changed my mind, that I’d been caught up in the moment and that I really needed to call it a night.
But every time I snuck a glance at him as we waited for a cab, the desert in my throat disappeared and every concern, every worry, felt small and trivial, like the mole I fretted about on the back of my hand but that no one else ever noticed.
I liked this guy. I liked how he looked. I liked how he moved. I certainly liked how he kissed. I liked how he knew the dirty things I wanted him to say and do to me. If this was a mistake, it was going to be worth it.
So I banished my anxiety and committed to the decision.
Once inside the cab, I slid right up next to him. I pushed my mask to the top of my head and placed my hand high on his thigh. Perhaps too high for polite company. Not that our cab driver was polite company. In the first two minutes of driving with him, he’d sworn more than my Brooklyn-born grandfather and used his hands to make as many rude gestures as my Italian grandmother. He was a true New Yorker, and I had a feeling he expected his customers to be fooling around in the backseat. Working the Saturday night shift, he probably preferred the hanky-panky to the drunks who threw up all over the worn interior.
With my guilt reconciled, I slipped my fingers toward Nathan’s inseam.
“What are you doing there, baby?” he asked, his lips hovering near mine now.
“Keeping my hands warm.” I wrapped my other hand around his neck, my palm instantly soaking in the heat of his body.
His eyes flicked to the driver and back to me. “Are you wearing panties right now?”
I shook my head, a coy smile on my lips.