Page 51 of Breaking All The Rules
“Thank you.”
He slid his hand to his belly and drummed his fingers on his abs and, God help her, Bea’s gaze honed in on the movement, following it like he was tapping out some kind of code and the fate of the world depended on her cracking it.
“I’ve been told they feel pretty good, too.” His smile grew bigger as he lifted his hand from his abs and crooked a finger at her. “Why don’t you come over here and see for yourself?”
Bea would’ve liked to have been able to say in years to come that she regained her senses at that moment and politely declined his invitation. Alas, she was not that strong. It was like he’d opened the doors to Disneyland for a private tour, and Bea was a sucker for a theme park.
As if pulled by an invisible string, she gulped down the last of her wine and walked on unsteady legs to where he stood. The closer she got, the hotter things got, as if he was holding her in the beam of a laser. His smile faded as heat smoldered in his eyes and his gaze held and locked on hers. Bea’s heartbeat crashed in her ears and her breathing rasped in her lungs and rattled in her throat.
A small part of her couldn’t believe she was doing this—that she was daring. The rest of her surrendered to the burn.
She stopped in front of Austin, close but not touching. Heat radiated off his skin in waves, blasting over her like thermal steam from a geyser, tugging at her like the tide. A faint trace of his cologne tickled her nostrils as the earthier aroma of hot male flesh prickled awareness in that part of her brain that was all primal. All, You Tarzan, me Jane.
She wanted this man, damn it. And he wanted her.
With her head thumping to the pound of her pulse, she dragged her gaze from his, zeroing in on the warm bulk of his biceps at her eye level and, tentatively, she touched him there. It was only light, but the shudder of his breath was heavy, and her toes curled as her body swayed toward his. She traced her finger around his biceps, then kept going, moving around him as she trailed across his back.
Goose bumps stippled his flesh, and the honed muscles beneath her gossamer touch rippled in response. The pad of her finger found his opposite biceps, and she kept going, slowly circling his body till she was back at his front. Her finger trekked across his chest from one nipple to the other, more goose bumps following in its wake as her hand slid away and fell to her side.
They were close—so close—she could hear his heavy breathing, could see the sprout of his scruff along the hard ridge of his windpipe and the bob of his throat as he swallowed.
“Can I go lower?” she asked, her husky voice loaning a kind of desperation to the bold request. She didn’t look at him, her gaze transfixed by the thick thud of the pulse in his throat.
He made a low kind of noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between a growl and a groan. “Be my guest,” he said, his voice full of gravel, laced with the kind of desperation she recognized in herself.
Permission granted, she placed her shaking hands on his pecs and rested them there for a beat or two, liking the way her fingers looked curling into the cushion of muscle. She molded them, reveling in the soft prickle of hair and the brush of his nipples on her palms as the dizzying whisper of mine shot through her system like an illicit drug.
Slowly, she moved them down, watching her hands iron flat over his ribs, then her fingers tent and drift down his abs before just her index fingers brushed along his waistband, outward to the subtle furrow defining the inside edges of his hip bones.
She stroked her nails lightly along the grooves, feeling the muscles contract, the deep suck of his breathing the backing track to her little exploration. She glanced up, and his hot blue eyes blazed like twin lasers down into hers. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered, because he was pure male perfection, and even if she never did more with him than this, she’d die a happy woman.
“No.” He shook his head, his hands sweeping up, furrowing into her hair at the back of her head, cupping it. “You’re beautiful.”
He lowered his head then, and nothing on earth could have stopped Bea from rising onto her tiptoes to meet his lips as they crashed onto hers, hard and probing and demanding, speaking of a hunger that had been building from the moment he’d ma’amed her and bloomed with every smile, every piece of pie, every Beatriss.
And in that instant, she knew that just touching him was never going to be enough. That if she died right now, she’d become a vengeful ghost roaming the earth, pissed that she didn’t get to know Austin Cooper in the most intimate way possible.
“Jesus,” he said, pulling away, his eyes glinting with a wild kind of fever, his mouth wet, his lungs working hard, and she took a mental picture because she had done this to him. Beatrice Archer—mild-mannered, play-it-by-the-book, ex–corporate sheep—had made this sexy man pant and yearn and lust. “I think my heart is about to burst out of my chest.”
Bea smiled, slipping her hand over his pectoral muscle again, feeling the brisk, hard bang beneath her palm. She grabbed one of his hands that was still cradling her head and pulled it down, placing it over the frantic beat of her own heart, his big hand cupping her breast over the fabric of her shirt. Her left nipple went rigid beneath his palm, and his thumb stroked over it, causing her to shudder.
“You like that?” he asked, his voice low and husky as his thumb continued its maddening tease.
She nodded. “I do.”
“And this?” His hand slid away, only to find the hem of her T-shirt and push under, sliding up the bare skin of her belly and her ribs to claim her equally bare breast, his thumb returning to taunt the nipple some more.
Bea’s throat constricted, and she had to lock her knees tight as a surge of lust turned everything liquid. “Yes,” she gasped.
His other hand pushed under her T-shirt, sliding onto the other breast, his thumb working that nipple, and Bea thanked all the sweet angels and evolution, she supposed, for opposable thumbs. She actually whimpered this time as a hot pulse shot like a flaming arrow from her nipples straight down her belly, hitting a target directly between her legs.
“What do you want, Beatriss?” he asked, his blue gaze boring into hers as he continued to wreak havoc on her body. “Tell me what you want.”
Bea had never been asked what she wanted. Normally, at this stage of the sexy times, it was fairly obvious, and one thing led to another and the P in V thing happened. It was usually accomplished in the standard missionary position, because frankly, it had been too damn infrequent to get particular.
But hell, if she didn’t know exactly how she wanted this to go down.
“I want to—” Bea stopped abruptly and swallowed, hesitant again as her gaze dropped to his throat. Could she actually go there? Sure, she’d declared she was going to say whatever crossed her mind, but could she say that?
