The Chocolate Temptation (Amour et Chocolat) (20 page)

And she had done it so many times, in a rush of release of all her tension, just like the rush of release now.

No, not like. This release was heavier, more vulnerable and more driving, her breasts tightening, her sex softening open and hungry.

“Yes, that’s it,” he said very softly, a stroke of praise. “I like that, Sarah.” Her coat slid down her arms, off her body, the drag of it rubbing along all her nerve endings like a deep and powerful caress. His voice went very husky. “I like it when all those little muscles yield to me.”

Her arms weren’t quite ready to be exposed bare, after the cold of the night. They felt shy and vulnerable, as if they wanted to hide against something warm. But his hand settled over the nape of her neck again, firm, holding her still. “For lack of a counter,” he muttered, rough and self-mocking.

She started to turn her head, to at least see his expression, but his thumb rubbed over her nape, and she shivered in one great collapse of strength, her eyes closing. He laughed very softly, his thumb exploring until the shivers from her nape released in waves and waves down her spine, and her nipples hurt in an unbearable need to rub against something, and her sex was a hot, damp, clingy animal thing she didn’t even recognize. She didn’t even know her sex was capable of acting like that, and now it was taking over her body.

“A-ny-thing I wanted,” Patrick murmured just behind her ear, the warmth of his breath caressing the curve of it while her fingers curled damply into her palms. Hanging by her sides, his voice in her ear all that held her upright. That same voice that made her want to melt into something boneless and his. “Right, Sarah?”

She shut her eyes tightly and tried so hard not to whimper.

“Just from this,” he murmured roughly, that soft roughness, like the callus of his thumb was rough and delicate both against that entirely vulnerable command center of every nerve in her body. “You would let me do anything, wouldn’t you?”

Yes. It feels so good.

“Wouldn’t you, Sarah?” The maddening hand on her nape when all those nerve endings were begging it to trail everywhere. To find spots that were far softer and more vulnerable than that and push hard into them, taking
them
over.

“Wouldn’t you?” he repeated again. That firm, insistent tone, trying to make her answer.

She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and managed to hold that whimper back, managed not to collapse against the door in her need for pressure and texture against her nipples.

“You know, I kind of like it that you can’t tell me.” His fingers trailed delicately down her spine, all the way over the crease of her buttocks, right to a point so sensitive that she flinched and clutched her buttocks together even at the hint of a graze through the raw silk. “As long as you let me do it.”

Do what?
she wanted to know, except she didn’t want to ask, she didn’t want to think ahead or decide what to do or how. She didn’t want to choose.

“Whatever I want,” he explained in that hot breath against her nape, as if she had asked the question.

“Right now, for example” – his hands rubbed up her bare arms, slow and thorough and so very warm after that night cold – “I want to watch this pretty, pretty body” – his hands slid down her torso, rubbing the silk back and forth against her skin – “in this pretty, pretty dress” – his hands caressed over her bottom, bunching the edge of the dress up so that her sex clenched in hope that he was going to touch it, and then instead sliding down the back of her thighs – “in these pretty, sparkly stockings” – he played with one of the crystals, over and over, driving her mad with the way his hand got stuck there, lingering, not touching the rest of her – “be entirely mine.”

One hand stroked back up her thigh, and this time he did slide between her legs and caress lightly, a gentle, teasing pressure that made her inner muscles clutch for more, and instead of that more get only the friction of her panties, unable to find pressure. “Do you like that idea, too, Sarah?”

She pressed her forehead into the door, her eyes and lips and hands and sex squeezing so hard. She never cried, for anything. And yet she wanted to sob for this. Her body wept, such desperate, eager sobs that he must feel them through panties and tights both.

“Now, I don’t want to rip these pretty stockings. Yet.” His fingers found their way up over her butt to the waistband. “So you’ll just have to be patient, Sarah.” Again, that hint of firmness that made her just writhe with need. “And stand still.”

“Patrick,” she whispered, her head turning sideways against the door. She didn’t even know what she wanted to say to him.
See, the problem is, I think I fell in love with you the first day I met you, in that workshop, and…I want this so much more than I can handle.

He bent and pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. The sweetness of the sensation rippled through her, even as he dragged her stockings delicately against her legs, inexorably exposing heat, heat, heat. And cold. She shivered for him, in need of his warmth.

His jaw traveled up the line of hers, sandpaper so lightly wielded. His lips lingered a moment over the earring he had given her, pressing it against her skin, and then he trailed softness of lips and the abrasion of his jaw down the nape of her neck. A smile pressed there when she made a little sound and shivered for him, and then his mouth opened, and his hand slid up from her half-bared thighs to cup her sex.

“I’m probably a bad person,” he whispered against her neck. “But I could do this to you all night.”

“I’m cold,” she whispered.
Don’t make me stand here all night separated from you.

Oh, but
– the rushing, heavy sobbing of her sex to his hand –
do whatever you want. Don’t let me do anything else but what you want.

“I want to live somewhere hot with you.” He rubbed his other hand up and down one bare arm, chasing goose bumps. “Where we don’t have these problems.” He brought his body in closer to hers, lending her warmth without giving it to her. “And with counters.” His thumb slid sure and lazy between the folds of her sex, gliding up and down between them while she bit her lip, and then that lip fell soft away from her teeth, and she did, indeed, start to whimper. “Definitely with counters. Mmm, Sarah, can you imagine the feel of cold marble against your bare nipples while I do this?”

I don’t need to imagine anything
else
kinkier or more vulnerable than this!
her brain tried to shout out. But his fantasies nevertheless worked their way through the moment, too, everything twining in her to release her mind to him, to release her body to him.

“It will be just a little too cold,” he whispered, finding her clitoris with as light and careful a touch as he might use to handle an arc of sugar placed as the final glory on a dessert. “And I won’t let you up off it until I’ve got you so hot down here you beg for the cold.”

“Patrick,” she whispered. But she couldn’t beg. Weren’t they imbalanced enough already? She had to
work
with him after this – surrounded by marble counters.

“
Chérie.
” That tender, possessive voice stroked her far more intimately than his hands ever could. “Of course,” he said, as if his name alone was a plea, and he was answering it. He pressed those most private lips of hers together and then rubbed them open again. Lazily.

Need broke her open, melted her, left her anything he wanted. She turned her cheek back into the door, shaking.

“I kind of like it, that you don’t say it,” he whispered again, and his thumb came back and played lightly over her clitoris, like his breath on her wrist when he taught her to make the sweep of a Phénix’s wings out of golden ashes…back and forth, and back and forth, that breath, until the need for more of it had rendered her mindless. “It gives me more power,” he murmured, very, very softly, his breath against the sensitive spot behind her ear as light and warm as his thumb against that secret nub.

She couldn’t speak now, even if she wanted to. He had stolen all her words. Everything in her pulled toward that need for his thumb to press harder. In just that rhythm. But something she could
feel.

“If you said
please
,” Patrick murmured, “I might not be able to refuse you. If you said,
Please, Patrick, please
, in that little voice gone all panting and helpless, I might not have the heart to tell you no.”

She sank limp against the door, mindless.
Do whatever you want.
Because she wanted to learn and feel whatever he wanted to do to her even more than she wanted to come.

“I see you see it my way,” that rough dark voice told the nape of her neck. “Oh, Sarah, you have no idea how sweet this is to me.” One heavy hand swept down her back until it pressed firmly on the very tail of her spine as that arched to him and his other hand rode her wet and clinging sex. “And dark and…
sweet
.” His thumb settled onto her clitoris like that breath coming home to rest, growing more solid, more tangible, becoming real and warm and alive as it circled, circled, circled toward home. “
Chérie d’amour
,” he whispered. “There you go,
bébé.
You can come.”

She collapsed into the door, shaking, at his word and the press of his thumb, her body falling in the waves of release until he caught her and pulled her back against him, holding her up and warm against his body while the heat flooded hers and the waves of it kept fighting their way through her, until even her brain could not resist them anymore, until they had beaten her and she was limp and held tight in his arms, her face hidden in his chest.

“You
sweetheart
,” he said, low and fierce, and picked her up, stepping over their dropped coats as he carried her to the bed. Her tights were tangled half down her thighs, her dress still on, and he was still completely clothed. “Let me take you, Sarah. Now. Let me take you just like this.”

Whatever you want. Aren’t we doing whatever you want? Because that’s all I want to do. Over and over.
But since he seemed to want her consent, she gave him that, just a low sound of acceptance.

He laid her down on the bed, and his eyes glittered as they swept over her in her silk dress and boots and half-removed stockings. “
Bébé
, is there somewhere I can buy you another pair of these pretty stockings? Because I would really, really like to see you with them all ragged and torn just for me. Torn just so you can wrap your legs around me.”

She couldn’t even think properly about where she had gotten her sparkly stockings. She made a soft sound of consent again. Because she wanted that, too.

He started to shrug out of his tuxedo coat and stopped at something in her eyes. “Keep it on? You like this? Me all dressed up like a prince for you everywhere but…here.” He undid his pants.

How black he looked in the night, and how wild and elegant both, with the black-on-black suit and the streetlights just glimmering here and there in his golden hair, transforming him from golden sunlight into a dark night creature dusted in starlight. Hunger came back, sudden and demanding, as if she hadn’t just been fed.

“Sarah.” He gripped her thighs and pulled her into him, sudden, hard, demanding. “You are so hot.”

Although she couldn’t figure out what
she
had done to be hot. She scrabbled under her pillow as he dragged her down to him and found that leftover packet and almost threw it at him.

He snatched it from the air with a rough, angry laugh. “Sarabelle.” He leaned over her, leaned that touch of temper and all that darkness into her just a little, until she was entirely caged in him. “I will
always
take care of you.”

Oh, God. She just flowered for him so helplessly. Everything he did and said. She wanted him desperately, and she wanted him desperate, and she wanted him just as hard and wild as he could possibly want to be.

She found it hot that he could slip that condom on so fast and sure, hot the way his pants rubbed against her inner thighs as he pulled her to him, hot the way her body dragged against the bed at
his
command. When he ripped her tights wide open so that he could take her in her crushed silk and shattered sparkles, she nearly came again right there. She felt the pressure of it, the rising, inexorable demand of it, waiting for him to release it.

He lifted her body up to him in both hands when he drove into her, and she cried out. At the cry, his eyes swept glittering over her face. “Oh, yes, you like this, don’t you?” he breathed. She closed her eyes against that glitter, against how much she liked it, turning her face into the bunched comforter as he let her upper body settle back onto the mattress. “You like me in you this deep, Sarabelle?” His darkest, roughest murmur.

She didn’t answer out loud, but then she didn’t have to. Her body clutched around him, and he seemed to understand that language very well.

“Are you going to like it when I take you this hard?”

She threw her hands over her face. “I like everything you do,” she whispered helplessly. “You know that.”

A firm hand took her wrists, both together, and pressed them to the mattress above her head. “Are you going to like it when I trap you just like this, so you can’t hide your face from me?”

The need to come swamped her again, arching her up, tightening her all around him. Oh, God, her hands imprisoned, unable to get anything right, unable to do anything wrong.
God.

His hand tightened on her wrists, just hard enough that she knew exactly how impossible it would be to break free. “Sarabelle.” That rough, rough dark voice. “You and I are going to work together very well.”

His other hand cupped under her bottom again, lifting her up tight. “All right, Sarah, give it up to me again
.
Because I can’t hold off anymore.”

And while he took her, those slow, slow, deep, insistent strokes that would not let her do anything but brace for that second when he hit his deepest in her and clutch and weep when he drew back, she rippled around him, first an aftershock of her first time, and then – as his body grew harder and faster, as the darkness seemed to overtake all his sunlight and his eyes glittered on her face and swept glittering all over her body, watching it take his thrusts in its rent stockings and slippery silk – in the mounting insistence of another wave that crested so hard it almost
hurt
, and she cried out again, lost in darkness with him as he came.