and drank it straight from her mouth and chased it down with the sweet taste of her until the salt was all gone and the tequila was gone and all he could taste was Evie.
By the time she drew away to take a shaky breath, Logan was hard as concrete and a delicate flush of arousal had moved in on Evie’s cheeks.
‘More,’ she demanded, and sucked her lower lip into her mouth and licked it clean.
‘More of what?’
‘Everything.’
So he poured them another tequila and this time Evie bypassed the condiments and went straight for the alcohol and then expelled her breath as if she was breathing fire. She probably was.
‘Something you want to forget?’
‘No. I want to remember it all.’ Evie smiled and pierced his heart. ‘I’m just working up the courage to let you go. Bear with me. It’s going to be harder than I thought.’
Easy words, and an easy out if he wanted to take it. Keep it light, no deep, dark emotions required. Except that sorrow lurked beneath the smile in her eyes and challenge lived there too.
‘I hope the week worked for you,’ she said.
‘It did. Did it work for you?’
Evie shrugged, and, for the moment, the challenge in her eyes won out over sorrow and goodbye. ‘You know I’m a sucker for more.’
He knew what she wanted. His gaze skated over her face, lingered on a spot covered by the fall of her glossy black hair. He couldn’t see the scar but he sure as hell knew it was there.
‘No table tops,’ she said. ‘For this we use the bed.’
And still Logan hesitated.
He’d been good all week. So very restrained. Playing at normal and it had worked. He’d wanted normal. Needed to prove to them both that he could be satisfied with it. Tonight though, he craved just that little bit … more.
They still had a few hours left. They still had the night.
And there were so many ways to spend it.
He came around to her side of the counter and pushed her back against it, got up in her space, his arms either side of her. Lips to her cheek now, the scrape of his teeth against the sensitive skin of her ear lobe, just enough to make her gasp. One hand to her throat now as he took full possession of her mouth. Finding the pulse point the better to monitor it. Tilting her head back so that his mouth fitted hers exactly the way he wanted it to.
Mine. He let that thought reach the top of the stack and his hips responded with a slow and rolling grind.
‘Mine,’ he said and his voice came low and savage.
‘Prove it.’
Oh, he was going to.
‘Stroke me,’ he said, and showed her exactly how he wanted it, and he was comfortable calling the shots, God help him, he was. Hard and rough and she leaned into him and set her lips to his jaw, and her teeth to the skin of his chin and nipped, at which point he slipped just that little bit out of sync with the rest of the world. The place he entered had far more jagged edges and ruins in it and the rivers ran red with pain beneath. Evie didn’t need to be told to take the tip of him between fingers and thumb and squeeze hard—she already knew how much he liked riding that bright flare of pain right back into pleasure.
Knew because she liked that ride too.
‘I want control tonight.’ The words came from the deepest, darkest part of him. ‘Over pleasure and pain and everything in between. All the control.’
Evie smiled as she palmed her way down blood-engorged hardness and stroked him again with a twist to her wrist that almost made him come undone. ‘Then take it.’
He swore he wouldn’t take too much; that this was just a game that when played well led to extreme pleasure for both participants. He swore to do no harm and the kitchen counter wouldn’t do, so he took her by the wrist and headed for the stairs.
The bottom of the stairs saw his shoulders braced against the wall and Logan’s hands cradling her cheeks as he set his lips to hers again. They had to get up the stairs without him reaching for her along the way. There were a lot of stairs. Evie strained against him, hands cupping his buttocks and pulling him against her.
‘Patience,’ he whispered. ‘Virtue.’ And devoured her mouth, his tongue searching and sweeping and his teeth taunting and teasing, memorising the taste of her, testing the surrender in her.
It took them for ever to get to the bedroom.
Hours, in Evie’s estimation. Or maybe it was just that time stopped so often along the way. Stopped when Logan got to sitting on the stairs with her knees either side of him, and wrapped one of her hands around the stair railing and made her put her other palm to the wall as he licked along the lacy edge of her bra, and the bra came off and he curled his tongue around a nipple before closing his lips around her and sucking hard.
Evie whimpered as passion caught a lick of pain and burned all the brighter for it.
She returned the favour when finally he let her put her mouth to him.
And then they got to the bedroom and slowly, surely, he stripped her down until the only thing that mattered was Logan’s next touch and what it would bring, and she never knew what, only that it was always exactly right.
No thought of anything but the ride as he worked her, enslaved her.
No need to ever ask for more because she already had everything she’d ever wanted and his name was
Logan and when her sky turned black he was the only thing she could see.
This, she thought when she was a mindless mess of sensation and yearning and he finally sheathed himself inside her. This man and the razor-sharp edge he brought to things.
This was what she’d been waiting for.
Evie woke in the dark, twenty minutes before Logan had set the alarm on his phone to ring. He had to get to the airport by six. By the end of the day he’d be on the other side of the world. She didn’t want to dwell on how empty that made her feel.
Instead, Evie stretched her arms above her head gingerly, and straightened her legs, testing for tenderness and finding echoes of it in unexpected places. Inner thigh muscles, upper arms, her mouth … overstretched and puffy, and she sucked at her lower lip, checking for splits and finding one. She turned towards the man sleeping beside her, only he wasn’t asleep. Sleepy-eyed, yes, but not asleep, his gaze roved over the parts of her not covered by the sheet, and then he rolled over onto his elbow, flicked on the lamp by the bed before sliding the sheet down her body and studying the rest of her in the soft glow cast by the lamp’s light.
‘Roll over,’ he ordered and Evie did as she was told and let him continue his examination. ‘Bruise here,’ he said, and ran the pad of his thumb over the curve of her hip. ‘Red here.’ A touch on her buttocks; the soft underside of her upper arms.
‘Feels fine,’ she said and slid her hands beneath
