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Chapter Nineteen
Ethan lifted his head.Cupped her face in both his hands. And the emotion on his face had her throat clogging. “I spent more time than I care to remember cursing you for leaving. But there was never a moment that I regretted meetingyou.”
Alexa’s heart did a slow, lazy roll in her chest. “You’ll never know how hard it was to force myself to walk away,” she whispered. Decisions, made for all the right reasons, could still haunt for alifetime.
His face lowered slowly to hers. She closed the distance between them and brushed her lips lightly over his. Once. Twice. And then settled her mouth more firmly and sank into thekiss.
The gesture began achingly tender. Filled with shared pain and memories. But when Alexa drew away, when her eyes slowly opened, what she saw in Ethan’s pale blue gaze had her pulsestuttering.
Desire.
A smoky tendril of heat suffused her. The emotions she’d sought to wall off minutes earlier tumbled forth at the first taste of him. There was too much between them, and their proximity for the last few days had chipped away at the intervening years. The pain was still fresh. The chemistry still existed. And the desire was just as hot and heady as it’d been all that timeago.
Restraint had been too hard-learned to surrender it easily. But with Ethan’s arms around her Alexa felt it slipping away even as their lips metagain.
Ethan stroked a lazy path up her spine, and she shuddered in response. Now was the time to heed caution and step aside, before there were any more regrets between them. And she would, in a moment. Or perhapstwo…
His head dipped, and his teeth closed over the cord in her neck, testing not quite painfully. Reason clouded. Neither of them had escaped unscathed from the hurt of their past. But this aspect of it…She dragged her lips along his jaw, felt the scrape of whiskers against her mouth and the sensation had her senses humming. She’d long thought there was something wrong with her…something permanently broken, because no other man had made her feel like this. Combustible andalive.
There was a flare in the pit of her belly, hot and immediate. He knew how to kiss a woman, hot and devastating. With a single-minded intensity that wiped her mind clean and had the rest of the world dimming. Inner fires flaring. She opened her mouth beneath his and dove into theflames.
His tongue glided along hers. His flavor was dark temptation, lethal to her senses. Her fingers danced up the front of his shirt, undoing buttons along the way until she could slide her hands inside the fabric to skate her fingers over his hard-muscled chest, her fingers flexing inpleasure.
He cupped the back of her head in one palm, but there was nothing gentle about the gesture. His mouth devoured hers, their tongues tangling, breath mingling, teeth clashing. Swinging her around, he walked her backward until she felt the wall at her back and still he didn’t lift his mouth from hers. Her muscles melted, hot wax to molten flame. His hunger summoned an answeringrecklessness.
He urged her legs apart with his knee then stepped between them. His arousal pressed against her belly and she squirmed against him, wanting to feel him where she was empty and aching. As if aware of her frustration, his hands went to her butt and he lifted her. With her legs wrapped around his hips, Alexa rocked against him, feeling his reaction even if she couldn’t manage to drag her eyes open to watchit.
His lips lifted from hers for a moment, and immediately her system mourned the loss. She felt his hand in her hair, and her eyes fluttered open to see him drawing the pins from it one by one, dropping them to the floor. When he had the strands free, he threaded his fingers through them, his gazeslitted.
With sudden urgency, Alexa pushed the shirt over his shoulders, and he finally shifted enough to shrug out of the garment one arm at a time. Her head lolled against the wall as her fingers discovered the planes of his chest, the hollows along his ribs, the angles where bone metsinew.
He began unfastening her shirt, and her breath caught. Held. There was something exquisitely sensuous about focusing on touch alone. The languid slip of each button from its hole. The inch of exposed flesh bathed by Ethan’s clever, wicked tongue. Her skin prickled in anticipation of his lips long seconds before it wastasted.
He took his time. Each button was released with deliberate care. Every inch of bared skin treated to the same sensual exploration. Alexa lost herself in the teasing journey she mapped along his biceps. Across his shoulders, her fingers flexing on the cut muscles of his delts, iron beneath hertouch.
The rollicking in her pulse felt new. Heady. Every brush of his lips was a promise of pleasures to come. But it also fueled a quiet desperation in her system. She wanted to feel him, all of him. Flesh against flesh. Their bodies sealed so closely that not even a breath of air could fit between them. And she needed him quaking too. Wanted to unleash the primitive nature he’d learned to restrain. She wanted, quite frankly, to strip him of every defense, until there was no guard, no pretense betweenthem.
To that end, she went on a quest to unharness his control. He released her fourth button then, and her breath caught as his tongue delved into her cleavage. Danced along the top of her bra where flesh met lace. It took all the strength she could muster to concentrate on finding the places that made him shudder. The soft velvety skin beneath his arms. A fingernail scraping over one malenipple.
And the feel of his touch faltering, the hiss of his indrawn breath, was its ownreward.
She brushed her fingers along his spine, feeling the flesh punctuated by vertebrae. Her fingers faltered when they discovered a knotted ridge of skin below one shoulder blade. It was a reminder of all that had transpired since she’d last seen him. Their romance had lasted less than two years. Their separation, two decades. How, then, could the passion ignite this quickly? Thisimmediately?
His muscles quivered beneath her touch like an impatient stallion, and his hands hurried a bit as he pulled her blouse up to undo the bottom buttons. With one practiced movement, he released the front clasp of her bra, and, with the air of a man contemplating a feast, spread the fabricaside.
Her nipples were tight knots awaiting his touch. And when it didn’t immediately come, Alexa dragged her eyelids open, a demand on herlips.
It went unuttered. Ethan was staring at her with a searing intensity. It lingered on her face. Her breasts. The look was a little possessive. Slightly cruel. A man surveying a woman he meant to take at his leisure. She knew intuitively he’d pleasure and take pleasure in return and that certainty sent comets of heat through herveins.
Eyes locked with his, she arched her back, a carnal invitation. Alexa watched the color slash across his cheekbones. The glint in his eyes and his shadowed jaw gave him a sinister cast that was more exciting thanfrightening.
His jaw clenched, and she sensed that he was battling the urge to rush to fulfillment, an urge she wouldn’t protest. Alexa saw the moment he won the struggle, noted the slight curve of his lips as he reached out a finger to brush it lightly over hernipple.
Alexa slipped a hand behind his neck. Obeying her unspoken command, he sucked strongly from her. The slight scrape of teeth against her skin had hunger leaping forth like an uncaged tiger. Her fingers twisted in his hair, urging him to takemore.
Her childhood had built a wariness in her, a guard beyond her years. She’d spent decades turning her defenses into a fortress. But Ethan had always been able to dismantle it with an ease that was alarming. He could make her feel things no one else could. Still frightening. Terrifying even. But also rewarding. Because her physical response to him was just askeen.
He lifted his mouth, and the cooler air tightened her nipple almost painfully. She met his lips with her own, an edged blade of desperation slicing through her. She felt alive in his arms. Achingly alive. And the heat careening through her veins chased away the chill that solitude could bring. There was danger here. Alexa wasn’t too far gone to be aware of it. Their shared history was fraught with heartbreak and complications. But it faded in the face of the sensation that heightened unbearably everywhere they touched. Every pulse point was razor-edged.