Total pages in book: 16
Estimated words: 13969 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 70(@200wpm)___ 56(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 13969 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 70(@200wpm)___ 56(@250wpm)___ 47(@300wpm)
He pushed off the wall, walking slowly to her and stopping barely a foot away. Cat didn’t know how it was possible that he smelled like fresh air winding through a forest, but she had to resist leaning forward and taking a deep, greedy breath. He stared gently down at her, those eyes bright even in the shadows. He really did dwarf her; her gaze was level with the solid expanse of his chest.
“And now?” he asked.
She felt the way a silent, seductive tether kept tugging at her mind, beguiling her, and her awareness of it hovered to the side, as if observing. Cat reached forward, setting her hand on his stomach. It jerked under her touch, his breath sucking in sharply, and when she glanced up at his face, an expression of disoriented wonder widened his eyes. Her fingertips felt the solid lines of his body, wandering up over his pectorals, his sternum, and she traced a single finger up the length of his throat, over his chin, and drew the shape of his mouth as it turned up into a smile.
“Are you seducing me, little lamb?”
“Shh,” she whispered, smiling, enchanted again, but this time she didn’t try to shake the tether off. She knew where this was going: She wanted him, and he wanted her to want him, and it didn’t matter where her desire ended and his invisible persuasion began. Wanting him didn’t scare her, didn’t feel impulsive or shameful or dangerous. It simply felt inevitable.
Chapter Three
Brigan didn’t know how much of this was his powerful allure and how much was Catalina’s actual desire, and he couldn’t slow his mind long enough to parse it out. It didn’t matter. Thrill haloed her skin, a honeyed, golden glow that felt like euphoria and tasted and smelled like spun sugar on his tongue, in his nostrils. Her hands were hot and brazen, fingers tracing his features, running through his hair, sliding back along his neck and across his collarbones, down to measure the length of his arms, lifting his hand to examine it with her fingertips.
When was the last time he’d been touched like this? With patient mapping and fascinated caresses? His skin felt too tight; his body was ravenous for her, but he hadn’t so much as kissed her yet and would never in a thousand years rush it. Her touch—the intention there, her patient fascination, the way she glowed brighter to him the more her hands roamed—was a balm to the tattered ruin of his heart. Brigan couldn’t remember a lover who hadn’t mindlessly devoured whatever he gave them and then greedily demanded more.
He reeled in understanding when it hit him, for it had been so long: This was what real desire looked like.
Her hand came up to the back of his neck then, coaxing him down, and he finally lifted his arms, sending them around her back and pulling her body into his. Catalina melted against him, letting out a sweetly petulant growl of hunger as he withheld the kiss, his mouth hovering only a breath away. “We might not have time to do everything I’d like to do to you,” he said.
“Then just do the most important things,” she teased, and as she spoke, her breath brushed over his lips. Brigan felt the spiraling dizziness of desire invade his limbs.
“Are you sure you want this?”
“Yes.”
He bent, exhaling into her neck, doing everything he could to force the allure down, desperate, for once, to know the truth: “Answer honestly, Catalina. Do you want this?”
She pushed back to meet his eyes, frowning up at him in confusion. “I was being honest.”
Relief and longing rushed through him, and he fit his mouth to hers.
Her lips immediately responded—soft, warm, and sweetly wet. A kiss, just a simple kiss, unlike anything he’d had since before: the slide of their mouths together, the playful slotting and tugging of lips and teeth. Brigan groaned, unable to resist deepening the contact, feeling the small, teasing slip of her tongue over his, the tight fist of her hand in his hair as she sent the other down between their bodies and over the steeling length of him. She gasped, sucking his breath from his mouth, and at the sight of her golden desire rolling in waves from her skin, instinct took over.
Shoes off, he commanded silently, and, surprisingly compliant, she kicked her shoes to the side. He wondered at it, whether the loosening of her mind with desire let him in somehow, made her malleable to his murmured commands. Brigan’s hands slid up under her sweater, hands finding velvet skin and small curves and the wildly sensitive peaks of her breasts that he stroked and pinched and teased until she kissed him with an intent and hunger that made him savage.
He pulled the sweater off and dropped it at her feet, flicked her bra free and bent to suck at her breasts as his hands dug into her leggings and underwear, coaxing them down and off. Brigan almost felt guilty for feeding, for siphoning the honeyed radiance from her skin, as if tonight wasn’t about that, but how was he meant to resist? He was accustomed to seeing desire as a pale glow—shimmering cream, the occasional soft yellow—but Catalina’s pleasure was unlike anything he’d ever seen, emanating from her in pulsing, golden waves.