Page 56 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

She pulled him down after her.

“Stop treating me like I’m going to break,” she said.

“You’re not going to break.”

“No. So stop acting like it.”

He kissed her again. Her hands found his belt. His hands found the button of her jeans. They undressed each other with the same rhythm they’d built across weeks of Tuesday meetings, efficient, wordless, two people who had learned to move around each other without asking permission.

She reached into the nightstand drawer without a word, because Lucy Wang was prepared for everything, and pressed the foil square into his palm. His hands, steady through every high-stakes room he’d ever walked into, were not steady at all.

When there was nothing between them, she pulled him closer. Her legs parted. His body settled against hers.

“Look at me,” she said.

He opened his eyes. She was looking up at him, and her expression was not lust, not hunger, not any of the categories his mind reached for. It was recognition. She saw him, the real him, stripped of the numbers and the suits and the glass office. And she wanted what she saw.

He pressed forward slowly and felt her body yield and then tighten around him. The sensation closed down every circuit he had ever relied on. He stopped breathing. He stopped thinking. He stopped being anyone except the man inside this woman, in this room, in this moment.

“Okay?” he asked.

“More than okay.”

He moved slowly at first, drawing back and pressing deep, giving her time to set the pace. Her hips rose to meet him. Her hands gripped his shoulders. Her ankles locked behind his back and pulled him closer.

“Faster,” she said.

He increased the rhythm and found an angle that made her gasp, and he held it, driving into her with a desperation he couldn’t name. Each thrust was a sentence he couldn’t speak. I didn’t know I was empty until you. I didn’t know I was waiting. I have been falling since the day you called my palate limited. I have been falling the whole time, and I never once tried to stop.

She arched beneath him, her nails raking down his back, her breath gone ragged. He could feel her tightening around him, the tremors building.

“There,” she gasped. “Right there. Don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop.

She came apart with her whole body bowing off the mattress, his name tearing from her throat, her thighs trembling against his hips. He held her through it, felt every pulse, every aftershock, and then the last of his control let go and he followed her, her name breaking out of him like a vow. When he could move again, he pressed his forehead against her shoulder and breathed.

She pulled him closer, her arms wrapped around his back, her legs still locked around his waist.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

He stayed.

He lay beside her in the dark, her head on his chest, her hand tracing patterns on his skin. The streetlight outside threw a pale stripe across the ceiling. He counted the cracks in the plaster, two, both cosmetic, and then stopped counting because counting was what he did when he was afraid, and he wasn’t afraid, not here, not now.

“That was worth the wait,” she said after a long silence, her voice rough with satisfaction.

“I wasn’t aware you were waiting.”

“Knox. I’ve been waiting since you left a card that said, ‘underpriced, fix it.’ That was foreplay and you had no idea.”

He laughed. She laughed.