The other people got off on the twelfth and twentieth floors. The second the last person stepped off, the intimate embrace ended. Leith flipped Jen around to get at her mouth, but she’d already tilted her face up and was going in. They kissed like they hadn’t kissed in ten years, sloppy and hard. They were still kissing as he walked her backward out of the elevator on the twenty-first floor. She lost her bearings, and when she hit the wall opposite the elevator, the force knocked some of the breath from her lungs.
When she ripped away and he began to lick up her neck, she found the ability to say, “We’re not doing this in the hallway.”
“No.” He raised his head to show her that wicked grin. “We’re doing it in your apartment. Which one is it?”
She fumbled for her keys and stumbled on legs drunk more on lust than whiskey down to the end of the hall. It took three tries to get the key into the two locks because Leith was covering her from behind, one hand skimming over her chest, the other painting a light line up and down the front of her thigh.
At last she got the door open and they fell inside, tripping over each other’s feet. He was trying to direct her deeper inside, but this was her place and she knew where she liked to have sex. She got him swung around, turning the tables, and pinned him between the small table where she usually dumped her keys and the beach prints she’d bought in Cabo San Lucas. His lips curved up in what she guessed to be surprise and amusement—and something else she couldn’t quite name . . . a dare, maybe?—and then he buried his hands in the hair behind her ears and pulled her into him. She was practically climbing him already, so when he grabbed her legs and hoisted her body higher onto his, she felt like she was flying.
He peeled away from the entrance and lumbered into the living room at a speed that spelled disaster. He didn’t know the layout of her apartment, couldn’t see where the furniture was in the dark.
“Watch out for the—” she began. Too late.
He hit the low couch that was set near the floor-to-ceiling windows, lost his balance, and dropped her onto the firm black leather. As she bounced, he tripped and fell on top of her. Not the most graceful of entrances into sex.
“Thanks for the warning.” He was laughing, but his hand found her face, searching.
He must have mistaken her squirming for discomfort, because he tried to shift his weight off her, but she wrapped one leg and one arm around him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not.” He hooked his hands under her arms and pushed her farther up the couch, moving her as easily as a pillow. Pausing, testing the leather with his palms, he frowned at the long, low couch with no sides or back. “What is this thing?”
“I have no idea. A really big ottoman? Leith, I don’t care.”
He pushed up on his elbows and angled his head so he could look at the thing under the city lights streaming in. “No sides. Close to the floor. I could get you in just about any position on this thing. And you, me. Jesus, Jen, it’s a sex couch, is what it is.”
She laughed. “It is not!”
He fell back on top of her, sweeping his tongue into her mouth and setting her on fire. “It is now.”
“We’ve got all night to use it.”
At that, he rose above her, huge and glorious in the city glow, his hair mussed. He didn’t reach for her, just touched her with that eleven-ton stare.
“Yes,” he said. “We do.”
A few long, agonizing seconds later, he reached down and toyed with the hem of her dress, flipping back the flap to expose her parted thighs. He fingered the outer tie of the dress and set it free with a tug, then he released the inner clasp that held the whole thing together. With a gentle sweep, he opened the dress and bared her. She lay there, loving it.
He opened his mouth, took a short breath. Yeah, he wanted to say something, and it was troubling him, because his eyebrows pinched together and the finger running painfully slowly back and forth across the tendon in her upper thigh paused.
She refused to let him stop. She dug in her heels and arched her back, thrusting herself up into his touch. He caught his breath, shook his head as though coming back into himself.
His gaze wandered a path up her body. “God, you’re sexy.”
All she could think was: God, I’ve missed you. I was such a fool to let you go.
Where had that come from? It wasn’t like she’d been sitting here in her apartment, pining for him these ten years and moaning, If only, if only. Except . . . she’d missed him. There’d been a hole in her life where he belonged, and she’d been stepping over and around it for so long that she’d completely forgotten how that negative space affected her life.
She needed to be naked. With him. She hooked thumbs under the straps of her thong and started to push it down, but his big hands clamped over hers, slowly plucking her fingers off.
“I’m going as fast as I want to,” he murmured.
“But—”
She struggled, but even in his light grasp, she couldn’t move her hands from the couch.
“Stop thinking,” he said. “Stop trying to direct. Just . . . let me. Please.”
Those were the last of his words. He dragged her underwear down her legs with one stroke, and then he was staring down at her spread legs with an open mouth and the return of that grave, passionate expression. He pulled off her high heels without looking away from the place she could feel getting more and more slippery by the second.
Quick as a flash, he shimmied backward off the couch to kneel at its edge, simultaneously dragging her with him. He pushed her legs apart. The angle was perfect, the position heavenly. Through her legs, he gave her the king of wicked looks, and they shared an unspoken moment. He licked his lips.
Long ago, they’d taken each other’s virginity, green and fumbling but still exciting. Many men had gone down on her since then, and without a doubt Leith had done it to other women, but it was new to the two of them and there were simply no words to describe this excitement, heightened by maturity and history and the blaze of emotions that roared through her.
He bent his head, his eyes the very last thing to turn down. And then his mouth was on her. A wet, open kiss that sucked in her clit and swirled it with his tongue at the same time. She bowed off the couch, just her shoulders and heels digging into the black leather. Her loud, surprised, fantastically aroused shout filled her apartment and bounced from wall to wall.
Good Lord, the man knew how to use his mouth for something other than just grinning and flirting. His arms slid under and around her thighs, his fingers digging into their upper crease. He clasped her to him, held her in place, and feasted. In between the sparkly bits of pleasure he fed her, she could sense his greed and also how he restrained himself. The sounds he was making, those tiny groans in the back of his throat—fuck—they were the most erotic thing she’d ever heard.
And she was doing that to him.
He pulled everything from her. The orgasm was coming fast, faster than she’d ever experienced, and she didn’t know why it was scaring her so much, why it was making her panic. But she was shaking already, and he hadn’t even made her come yet.
“You . . . can . . . stop,” she stuttered, frantically grabbing for his head. Handy, that hair now.