Unscripted Seduction - Chapter 17
Damian snatched her up with a speed that made her gasp and lock herself around him on instinct, her arms going around his shoulders, his hands under her as though letting her go was suddenly beyond consideration. She gave a breathless, incredulous laugh against his throat that dissolved into another sound entirely when he kissed the side of her neck on the way out of the kitchen.
The house seemed all storm and shadow as he carried her through it. Thunder rolled and lamps glowed in warm pools over stone and wood and expensive silence, but none of it felt real compared to the heat of her in his arms and the raw, impossible certainty that he was far past any sensible stopping point.
By the time he reached the stairs, his pulse was pounding.
When he arrived at his bedroom door, it felt less like he was opening it and more like he was crossing a line that had been waiting for him all night.
And with Ama clinging to him, storm raging outside and the taste of her still on his mouth, Damian did not stop.
He kicked the bedroom door shut with his heel, and the sound cracked through Ama like a second pulse.
By the time he set her on her feet, she was already burning.
Embarrassment and shock were giving way to heat. To the fierce, dizzying awareness of what she’d agreed to when she let him carry her up here without protest, when she wrapped herself around him and she said no to stopping and meant it.
He stood in front of her breathing hard, his hands still fixed at her waist, his eyes dark and hungry and so unapologetically male that something low in her body clenched.
Lightning flashed in brief hard strips of white that lit the room and threw his face into sharp, beautiful relief. He looked almost dangerous in that light. Raw around the edges. As if all the control he wore like armour had finally cracked.
‘You are,’ he said roughly, ‘a spectacularly bad idea.’
Ama’s lips felt swollen from his kisses. Her voice came out lower than usual, less steady too. ‘And yet you keep touching me.’
His jaw flexed.
Then his hands slid up her sides, slow enough to make her shiver, and he bent his head and kissed her again.
This kiss was different.
Still fierce and full of all that pent-up force and arrogance and heat, but there was less punishment in it now and more need. More hunger. He kissed her like a man starved too long and suddenly furious to find himself starving at all. Like he resented every second of wanting her even as he gave in to it.
Ama made a soft, involuntary sound against his mouth, and his response was immediate. He
hauled her closer, one hand spanning her back, the other threading into her hair, tilting her head exactly where he wanted it. The intimacy of that small act nearly undid her.
‘Tell me,’ he murmured against her lips, ‘that this is still about the script.’
She let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh. ‘Tell me you believe that.’
He kissed her harder for it.
The room blurred into sensation, the drag of his mouth, the scrape of his stubble against her skin. The hard line of his body against hers. Her fingers fisted in his shirt, then slid beneath it, needing the hot skin of him, needing proof that he was real and not merely some storm-born fantasy conjured out of tension and rain and too much unspoken want.
He sucked in a breath when she touched him, and that tiny fracture in his control hit her like a spark to dry tinder.
So he was not untouched by this. Not cool, composed and above it all.
Good.
Ama pushed the shirt from his shoulders. He got rid of it the rest of the way with a violent efficiency that made her pulse jump again, then stood before her bare-chested, dark bronzed, broad and lean and hard, his skin lit gold and shadowed by the low lamps and the intermittent lightning outside.
For one suspended second she simply looked.
He noticed.
His mouth curved, but there was no ease in it. ‘That impressed, huh?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘Too late.’
Then his gaze dropped to the front of her blouse and darkened. ‘May I?’
The question, when everything else about him felt so forceful, so commanding, landed with surprising weight.
Ama answered by reaching for the buttons herself.
His hands took over after the first two, devastatingly deft and sure. The linen slipped from her shoulders under his touch, and the cool air of the room met skin already overheated. The look on his face when he saw her breasts and budded nipples nearly stole the breath from her lungs.
A touch of triumph, maybe, but beneath it something rougher. Hungrier. A kind of furious appreciation that made her feel more exposed than nakedness ever could.
‘You’re shaking,’ he said.
She swallowed. ‘That would be your fault.’
His hands slid over her again, gentler this time, though nothing about the touch felt safe. It felt reverent in one moment, devastating in the next. Every place he touched seemed to wake. Her throat. Her collarbone. The sensitive ache of her breasts under lace. The long line of her waist.
By the time he lowered her onto the bed, Ama was beyond pretending this could be contained neatly.