All Luc could see was a red haze of lust. He heard nothing but a dull pounding in his ears and was vaguely aware that it was his heart. Jesse’s breast fitted into his hand as if made for it. Her hard nipple scraped his palm and he had to bite back a groan. He squeezed the firm flesh, making her nipple even harder, and then he couldn’t wait any longer. He bent his head and surrounded that tight pointed peak in hot moisture, rolling and flicking his tongue around it, biting gently.
He could feel Jesse moving with a response she couldn’t hide, and that sent Luc’s levels of arousal into orbit. The fact that this was surpassing anything he’d experienced with a woman before was something he was in no position or state of mind to think about or acknowledge.
Jesse had never known this drugging, all-encompassing feeling. It was exquisite and torturous all at the same time. She wanted Luc both to stop and never to stop. When he pushed her shirt apart completely and administered the same attention to her other breast she was no longer coherent. One hand was on Luc’s head, keeping it pressed to her breast, her fingers tangled in silky hair. The other was clenched into a fist beside her, nails digging into her palms.
Between her legs she felt sensitive and moist. As if reading her mind, Luc let his hand travel down Jesse’s belly. This rang alarm bells, but Jesse didn’t want to listen to alarm bells—not when her levels of desire were coiling higher and higher. Luc’s wicked mouth was on her breast. Jesse said nothing. She felt him unbutton her trousers and pull the zip down. Again she said nothing.
Was she actually lifting her hips slightly, as if to tacitly tell him something her brain hadn’t caught up with? When Luc’s hand delved down, underneath the barrier of her knickers, Jesse stopped breathing. Everything zeroed in on his mouth and that hand. Silently she begged him to keep going. She’d never wanted anything so badly.
At that moment Luc took his mouth off her breast and pulled back slightly. Jesse looked up at him and watched. He just looked at her while his hand moved down an inch. He was touching her curls now, threading through them with long fingers. Down another inch. Jesse’s breath was back, but it was laboured. Her hand had slipped from his head and was tight around the back of his neck.
She squeezed it with the slightest pressure.
Luc said huskily, ‘Is that a yes, Jesse? You want me to keep going?’
An inestimable moment passed and then Jesse squeezed again, harder this time. She barely noticed the flash of satisfaction across Luc’s face because she was so intent on him touching her right … there. Jesse saw nothing but spots and flashes of light for a long second when Luc’s fingers touched her with intimate precision.
His mouth came back over hers and, starving for him, she angled her head up to his, blindly seeking and searching for him, meeting his passion head-on with her own. Meanwhile between her legs he was stoking the raging fire within her to fever-pitch, his fingers gliding up and down, spreading her dampness, touching that most sensitive point over and over again until she had to break away and sob with frustration.
Luc looked as feverish as she felt. She felt him tugging her trousers down over her hips and, realising that this would give him more access, she raised her hips off his lap. And then he was tugging her knickers down, and her legs were free and falling open to him.
He looked down her body and said roughly, ‘I want to taste you …’
Jesse didn’t know what was happening until Luc shifted, so that one of her legs was over his shoulder, and he’d moved down until his head was over her belly. He pressed a kiss to her stomach, and then her belly button. She felt the rough abrasion of his tongue and squirmed against him. She knew she should be feeling vulnerable, but somehow she felt anything but.
Now his hands were on her thighs, holding them, and his mouth was descending. At the last second Jesse realised what he was doing, and the sheer carnality of it made her try to clamp her legs together.
But Luc was ruthless. He looked up at her, and his voice was guttural. ‘No, let me, Jesse. Let me taste you …’
And then his breath was there, hot and … moist. Her head fell back. She couldn’t hold it up. Her fingers were in his hair, ostensibly to stop him, but really she was holding him there, captive.
His tongue was touching her, laving her, finding all her secrets and laying her bare in a way she’d never allowed before. And then she felt his fingers parting her, exposing her, so that he could touch his tongue right to her clitoris and send her flying so close to the sun she thought she might burn to death.
One of his hands was under her buttocks, lifting her to him, and the fingers of his other hand were penetrating where she was so wet and aching, and suddenly Jesse couldn’t stop the momentum. She collided with the sun and exploded into a million and one pieces. Nothing of herself was left. She was weightless and attached to the earth only by the man who was clamping her thighs apart with his big hands.
Luc was pressing kisses to her inner thigh when Jesse finally floated back down. In the aftermath of a pleasure more intense than she’d ever known could exist she became aware of the fact that one leg was still draped over Luc’s shoulder and the other was wide apart. She was dressed in nothing but her shirt, which gaped open. Her breasts were pushed together because she had her hands on Luc’s head, holding him to her.
And he was between her legs, looking up at her with a lazy, sexy smile and a glow of satisfaction in his eyes.
It was that which finally brought her to her senses. She couldn’t believe that one second he’d been kissing her and the next she’d been acquiescing to anything—until she was almost fully naked and he was between her legs. And she had to acknowledge the worst bit of it—she’d been a very willing participant. Begging him.
Jesse moved away from Luc so fast that she caught him unawares. She sprang up from the couch and pulled on her trousers, not even bothering with her pants. Her shirt flapped open and she scrabbled to pull it back together, but her hands were shaking too much to put buttons in holes so she just held it together with one hand.
Luc sat up, and Jesse could see with a rising sense of humiliation and abject shame that not even a button on his own shirt was askew. He was pristine—even if his hair was a little dishevelled.
‘That was a mistake,’ she framed shakily, aghast at how easily he’d slipped under her guard.
‘It didn’t sound like a mistake a few moments ago when you were screaming with pleasure.’
Jesse’s humiliation rose another notch. She sensed that Luc’s louche pose on the couch was anything but. She could feel the taut energy coming off him in waves. She wanted a huge hole to open up in the floor and swallow her whole. And, what was even worse, she was dangerously close to thinking about calling for a plane just to get him out of there and away from her. The only thing stopping her was the realisation that this was exactly what he wanted …
She struggled to hang on to her sanity. ‘It was definitely a mistake, and it won’t happen again. I won’t let you do this … toy with me, pretend to want me … just because you think I’ll give in to your demands if you seduce me.’
Jesse was shaking now, and she pointed a finger of her free hand at Luc. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, Luc Sanchis. All you’ve done is prove that I’m as humiliatingly susceptible to your overblown sexuality as the next indisciminate woman.’
‘Ouch,’ Luc said, and made a mock wincing face. Then his expression became much more stark and, sitting forward, elbows on his knees, he admitted, ‘For your information, Jesse, a man does not do what I just did for the hell of it. He generally needs to really, really want to do it.’
Jesse recalled his face as he’d looked up at her and said throatily, Let me taste you. A fresh wave of shame washed over her. She backed away towards the entrance to the room. Luc stood