His hands were beneath her dress, beneath her panties, testing for slickness and finding it. Only her panties in the way of him now but not for long, one side parting beneath his insistent tug, and then she was sinking down onto him, fast at first and then more slowly as she realised just how much of him she would have to accommodate.
‘Easy,’ he rumbled against her throat, and then again. ‘Easy.’ Right before his mouth captured hers for another of those all-consuming kisses.
He didn’t rush her. He let her take her time, and if his breathing came harsh and his hands went to the cushions on either side of him and stayed there, rigidly immobile so as not to hasten her along in any way, it was only to his credit.
‘Distract me,’ she murmured, fighting her body for every thick and pulsing inch of him. It had been so long for her. She was beginning to doubt her ability to accommodate him.
‘You don’t need distracting,’ he muttered, and brought the fingers of one hand to rest on her abdomen and set his thumb to her centre as he’d done once before. ‘You need focus.’
He started off with slow, lazy circles and she focused, heaven help her she did, and slowly, and with infinite patience on his part, she took all of him in.
She stilled his hand, holding onto his wrist with her eyes closed and her lower lip between her teeth as she adjusted to the fullness of him. ‘You should come with a warning,’ she muttered.
‘You should come,’ he whispered back, and set about making it happen.
He knew how to move inside a woman slow and easy, this man. He knew how to use the friction of penetration to drive her higher. He knew when to lave and he knew when to bite, and when she came for him and sweet moisture came with it he tumbled her onto her back on the floor and kept her there, his thrusts coming harder now because she wanted them harder, and faster, his every stroke a lesson in ecstasy as she crested around him for the second time in as many minutes.
Grey knew he was a tight fit for a small woman. Holding back was second nature to him, being patient, taking his time—it was the code he lived by, the rule he made love by. But when Charlotte clenched around him again, when her nails dug into his shoulders and she cried out and slammed against him, milking him, coming apart for him, he abandoned all thought of restraint and followed her willingly into madness.
They stayed joined together in the aftermath. Grey rolled to his side and brought Charlotte with him, still buried deep inside her, still trembling. He groaned as she moved but she was only throwing her leg across his hip to keep that connection in place as she eased her upper body back against his outstretched arm.
‘I’ve sworn off lying,’ she murmured, and the lazy satisfaction in that velvet voice of hers had his body twitching and threatening to go another round. ‘And it’s probably not quite the time for teasing either. Maybe later.’
‘Is there any particular point to this train of thought?’ he queried, and got a not quite accidental elbow in his solar plexus for his efforts.
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a very impatient man?’
‘No,’ he said dryly. ‘Never.’
‘How unusual.’
‘Charlotte,’ he said evenly. ‘Get to the point.’
‘Oh. Right. The point.’ She brought her arms above her head and slid him a laughing glance, every bit the wanton gypsy she purported not to be. ‘Damn, that was good.’
Charlotte Greenstone had a God-given talent for understatement, decided Grey upon hearing her words. She also possessed a bone-deep sensuality that he wasn’t about to forget in a hurry. One could only hope that in offering him a taste of it, she hadn’t taken possession of him in the process.
He didn’t feel as if he’d just met his soul mate.
More as if he’d walked upon a precipice and slipped twenty metres down a hundred-metre cliff and was holding onto his current position by the tips of his bruised and bloodied fingers.
He didn’t think he was in love with Charlotte.
More like he’d been run over by a truck.
Nothing to worry about though. He’d be up and about again soon. Gone soon enough, as specified by their initial agreement regarding the nature and properties of temporary liaisons.
It occurred to him, fleetingly, that he might want to run.
And then Charlotte slid her hand up and over his chest and around his neck and urged his mouth down to meet hers for a kiss so intensely erotic and full of promise that he immediately fell another twenty metres down that cliff.
‘Greyson?’ she murmured, and there was absolutely no denying that the sound of his name on her lips was going to haunt him from here to eternity. ‘You want to do that again?’
WAKING up to a sleeping man in her bed wasn’t a regular occurrence for Charlotte. She knew his name and she knew where his parents lived. She knew he had a doctorate in botany and that he’d just returned from a three-year research stint in PNG. She knew he made love like a fiend and that she ached in places she’d never ached before. That was about it for what she knew about Greyson Tyler.
It didn’t seem enough.
Not for her to have allowed him the liberties she’d allowed him to take with her last night. Not that she remembered a conscious decision to allow him anything once the touching had started.
Spontaneous, that was the word she was looking for. Last night’s spontaneous lovemaking had been a revelation. What a woman should do with this new information regarding lovemaking and her own hitherto unknown capacity for abandon remained something of a mystery.
She spared a glance for her bed partner. Still sleeping, thank you God, because she could feel a blush coming on just looking at him. He slept on his stomach, with one hand beneath his pillow and the other reaching towards the bed head. He had one knee bent, and he looked for all the world as if he were trying to scale a mountainside. He seemed to take up an inordinate amount of space in her bed.
Charlotte slipped from the bed and reached silently for her robe. Butt naked was not a regular state of being for her, though she might have to get used to it with this man around. She risked a glance back at him, he was still sleeping so she allowed her gaze to linger on those broad bronzed shoulders and the way the muscles fitted together across his back and tapered down towards his waist. White cotton sheets covered the rest of him, possibly the best of him, but she’d seen it last night and the memory was engraved on her brain.
‘Morning,’ said a deep and sleepy voice from further up the mountainside and Charlotte dragged her gaze upwards to meet his eyes.
‘You’re thinking,’ he said next.
‘No, no, not at all. I think you’ll find that I’m just looking.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come here.’
Charlotte raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘Please.’
Much better. She crossed to the empty side of the bed and perched on it, grateful for her breakfast robe, a vivid red silk wrap with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. Kitschy and glorious, and very much her style.
Grey reached up and slid his hand around her neck and drew her down into a kiss that surprised her with its tenderness.
‘You okay?’ he asked.