“Only look?” I don’t know if I want him to say yes, no, I don’t know . . . what.

“And touch,” he coaxes. He draws my leg up to his hip and pulls me closer so that I half straddle him as his fingers skim the back of my knee. Suddenly a thousand nerve receptors awaken, so sensitive to the lightest pressure of his fingertips, I moan against his throat. When he pulls my hair up and ducks his head and uses his tongue on the side of my neck, I moan deeper . . .

Usually I’d expect him to head straight for my hottest, wettest spot, but this is one knowledgeable guy and he doesn’t do anything I expect him to. His lips press to my temple as he teases with his fingers up the back of my leg and then he grazes my inner thighs with his thumbs. My breath hitches, my nipples poking into my silk top and into his chest.

I arch my neck, pulling in deeper, faster breaths that smell of his cologne and intoxicate me. I think I just moaned his name. Using one hand, he slides a few fingers along the crotch of my panties.

“Tell me you want my fingers here,” he whispers. Against my temple, he’s smiling in obvious male delight because I’m absolutely wet already. I close my eyes and wrap my arms around his neck, and I imagine us naked, moving together.

He keeps one hand caressing my inner thigh and the back of my leg while he slides his other hand under my top. A restrained squeeze on my thigh and I can tell he’s getting serious. I can already feel an earth-shattering orgasm building, and I’m starting to get more than my little share of fear.

“Sain . . . um, Malcolm . . . don’t stop touching me, I just . . . need to slow down. . . .”

He eases back, and we separate for a moment, our breathing audible. My pupils can’t focus, he’s a blur. A blur I’m supposed to write about, not to have.

“Give me your hand,” he whispers. Lightly he reaches out and holds my hand in his strong grip, and I can feel his eyes, liquid and green, watching my reaction as he dips his finger to my palm. Suddenly I’m reminded of each of the forty thousand nerve endings in this very palm. He strokes between the base of my fingers and knuckles, the caress stimulating like electricity.

I watch, transfixed, as he interlocks our fingers and uses his thumb to massage my palm up to the base of my fingers in slow little circles. My blood vessels feel too close to my skin. A fire builds in my body as he holds my hand and slowly straightens out my arm. Gently, he kisses along the inside of my elbow, fluttering his tongue across my skin and bathing the warm spot with his breath. What he’s doing feels like a drug, a drug I never want to him to stop shooting into me.

Slowly, he tugs my top upward and tucks it into my bra strap so it stays up.

I’ve read the solar plexus is a powerful nerve cluster, but I’ve never experienced it before. He starts below my breasts, caressing upward, spreading me out on the couch so that he’s kissing me softly around my belly button. When I moan, he soothes and whispers, relaxing my body, my abs uncontracting so that all the blood heads to the part between my legs that’s on absolute fire. It burns and tingles at the prospect of being touched. He’s so close and at the same time so far away. He caresses up my ribs and down. Ducking his head, he uses his tongue around my navel, then dips it, hot and wet, into the tiny nook. A dozen erogenous zones awaken to him. Nerve endings never before stimulated like this tingle and scream, my hot zones alive. All of me. Alive. I’m excited mentally, physically, emotionally.

“You have no idea how much you excite me,” I hear myself admit as I caress his hair and he lifts his head, tugs my bra down off one swollen globe, curls his fingers around my breast, and gently suctions the tip of my nipple with a hungry sucking sound.

“I want you beneath me tonight, Rachel.” His lashes sweep upward and he looks up at me, the gold rim around the green of his eyes gleaming with intent. Every breath, every undulating move of my body under his as he suckles me, everything undoes me from the very core outward. “Writhing,” he says. “Panting. Wet.”

He takes the hardened, already sensitized nipple back into his mouth. I slide down the seat, part my legs, and try to pull him above me. Instead he lets his hand slip in between my legs. My arms wind around his shoulders tight enough that I can feel the muscles flexed and taut under my fingertips as he slowly tugs my panties aside with his thumb and slides one finger inside me.

The touch triggers a cascade of pleasure through my body. I arch, a tiny sound of need and ecstasy slipping through my lips. I can see the mask of control he always wears slipping as he watches me, his lips curling with a soft smile. “For me . . . Rachel. Let go for me.”

One rub of his thumb on my clit. One deft finger inside me. Those male eyes, glittering, watching. That voice, coaxing me. And I come, twisting with a soft cry, unable to stop it, unable to tell him that I wanted him to let go for me, too.

I gasp and pant for a while longer. He shifts his big body and watches me with that soft smile as he tugs my skirt back down and lets my top drop to cover me, using a hand to smooth it back in place as he whispers in my ear, “I’ve wanted to do that since the day you crashed my Ice Box party.”

He’s teasing me. I’ve gotten to know that tone now. So I tease him back. “I was dared by friends. Guess now I can say I met you and you were the heartless bastard everyone says you are.”

“Who’s everyone?”

“Your ex-girlfriends.”

“I don’t have girlfriends.”

“Ex-lovers, whatever.”

“I have something to say about that, too.”

“Oh really, what is it?”

“I’m innocent?” He smiles.

I laugh. I want to kiss him, kiss him real hard, and fuck him harder. Oh god, I want to give him what he just gave me, but then what? “Are you having fun with me?”

“That was me actually attempting to let the lady have fun with me.”

I put my hand on his thigh playfully. “You make my world spin a little faster.”

“I’d like to rock it even more,” he rumbles, and I laugh.

He looks at me, his grin, his eyes, all of him mischief to the tenth power. Mischief and sin.

“What’s your idea of rocking a girl’s world?”

“You tell me.” He trails his eyes down my body.

“Me?!” I cry. “What do I have to do with it?”

“I’ve never wanted to rock a woman’s world the way I want to rock yours.”

It seems my lungs just froze on an in breath.