Page 103 of Boss of the Year

The frown deepened. “Marie, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am notusuallywith anyone like this. I have never, relatively innocently, shared an outdoor spring every night with a woman for ten straight days only to have her climb onto my lap at the end.”

It was hard to explain the jolt of inadequacy that possibly had nothing to do with Lucas. The feeling of being a woman in a world where the media was saturated with images of cellulite-free thighs, perfectly flat stomachs, and tits that could be held up by mere strings.

My body was a thing of function, not elegance. Louis had helped me find shapes and clothes that made me feel beautiful,but I knew the truth. Compared to the creatures who graced the covers of magazines or socialites who dated men like the Lyons brothers, I was completely and totally average, full of awkward curves, thighs that needed Photoshop, breasts buttoned shirts couldn’t hold.

I had never cared before now.

Not even when Daniel looked at me the way he had.

But with Lucas’s hands, large and powerful, grabbing me the way they were, I found I did care. Very much.

“I’m saying it’s okay if my body isn’t what you thought it would be. If now that we are here, and—and I’m on top of you—and you’re touching me—if it’s not what you need, well, you can say andIwillleaveyoualoneandpretendthisneverhappened.”

The last bit came out a one long word, and again, I tried to get off his lap. But Lucas’s hands maintained their iron grip, holding me in place. Only after I relaxed did they slide up my waist, then around to my bare back so he could guide me to lay on his chest. I burrowed into the warm surface dappled with surprisingly soft hair. His heartbeat thumped against my cheek. Solid and strong.

It was a long time before he spoke.

“I’m sure your sister is a beautiful woman, Marie.” Lucas’s voice vibrated in his chest and into my cheek. “But honestly, I have no fucking clue what she looks like. Because whenever you’re in the room, all I see is you.”

I sat back up with a splash to look at him, my hands still crossed over my chest, now fully out of the water. Lucas, to his credit, didn’t look. His eyes, still promising a certain storm on the horizon, didn’t move from mine.

His hands, however, drifted down my back again and started floating to my hips, as if to memorize my curves.

“There are plenty of men who only want a woman like you to be exactly what you are,” he said.

I was distracted by the way his thumbs were tracing patterns over the indentations under my hipbones. “What does that mean?”

“Soft. Supple. Something worth grabbing on to.”

His hands found my ass and squeezed hard enough to make me gasp, and my hips rolled into the hard length of him. This movement made my hands drop to his chest for something to hold on to. But in doing that, my breasts were bared to him completely.

Lucas seemed to stop breathing as he stared openly. “Christ, Marie. You have no fucking clue how beautiful you are, do you?”

“Am I beautiful?”

I wasn’t sure. But Lucas made me feel that way.

He was a man entranced while he cupped the sides of my breasts one at a time. I watched them overflow his palms when he pushed them together, then squeezed gently before his thumbs brushed my nipples, which pebbled under his touch.

I shuddered.

“I dream about these.” His voice was ragged as he dipped his head and licked between them. Then, with a sudden move, he wrapped one arm around my waist and lifted me up so he could shove his face between my cleavage with an animal groan. “Theyfucking haunt me.”

I swallowed, heat blooming across my chest and up my throat as he pressed kisses there, rubbed his face into my softness. “What…what do you dream about?”

He exhaled, slow and rough. “Marie, I don’t want to scare you. You’re so—fuck, you’re so young, baby.Soinnocent.”

“I know,” I whispered through the thrill of hearing the sweet moniker. “But I still want to hear it.”

He groaned again as he let me slide back down his hard body, then went back to worshipping his apparently favorite body parts with his hands.

“I think about suckling them them.” His ragged voice was laced with shame. “Fucking them. Making a mess all over them. I think about how soft they’d feel wrapped around me while you look up at me with those big green eyes and beg me to paint your virgin skin.”

I trembled in his lap and rocked toward him as the hard evidence of his desire throbbed against my thigh.

“I shouldn’t,” he murmured as his mouth floated over my chest. “Fuck, I shouldn’t talk like this. I know I shouldn’t.”

“Yes, you should.” My hands found his neck, fingers slipped into the damp hair at his nape, urging him forward. “I asked you to, and I—I like hearing about it.”