at the paint on my fingertips.
‘Caught, red-handed,’ I quip.
He grabs my hand in his and holds it towards my chest, running my fingers down my abdomen, towards my own bikini briefs. At the elastic, he steps closer, and drops his head so he can whisper in my ear, ‘Later tonight, I want to watch you get yourself off.’
Pleasure vibrates through my gut.
‘I… I haven’t ever done that before.’ I’m glad he can’t see the mad flush in my cheeks. ‘In front of someone else, I mean.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there to lend you a hand if you need it,’ he promises, and I want to go, I want to have him, now.
But he’s intent on torturing me, clearly, because when he starts to paint my body, he’s so much better, slower, more devastatingly sensual than I was with him. He drags the paintbrush but with a feather-light touch, so I want to beg him to press harder. He trails a hint of colour over my shoulders, my arms, then back up to under my arms and the flesh at the side of my breast, so I make a soft whimpering sound. I see his smile, but it’s just a flash, then he’s back to concentrating.
I reach for a glass of wine while he works, needing to do something to steady my fluttering nerves.
He kneels at my feet, his mouth so close to my clit that I ache to push forward, to feel him there, his lips against me—knowing that it will come tonight. Later. Soon.
He drags the brush higher, lightly, over my calves, to my knees, the backs of my knees, my inner thighs, and as he paints with one hand, in the cover of the room’s darkness, he uses his other to push aside the Lycra of my briefs and slide a finger inside my wet, pulsing heat. I gasp, loudly, so he freezes, looking up at me.
‘Not. A. Sound.’
The words ring with a quiet authority I don’t think of ignoring. I don’t want to. I nod, gripping the wine glass and taking another fortifying sip before assuming a position that I hope seems normal.
As he moves the paintbrush over my legs, he moves his finger inside me, and I resist an urge—just—to buck back and forth. This isn’t designed to get me off. He’s teasing me—again. Torturing me. He knows how close I am to exploding and yet he’s pulling away, his touch too light, too brief.
‘Nicholas…’ His name comes from my lips like a snatch of need. I hear my desperation and am unable to care.
‘Yes, Imogen?’ His smile shifts over his face.
‘Please.’ Just a simple word, but it means everything because I need him in a way that had bowled me over. I thought one night would be enough. I thought once would be enough, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
‘You want this?’ he murmurs, moving his finger back inside me. No, two fingers now, and it’s instantly more fulfilling, more promising, but still…
I nod, running my hands through his hair. He draws the brush around my back, kneeling higher now, blocking me more from sight, so I do what I’d wanted earlier and move my hips to get greater purchase, to feel more of him.
‘You have to be patient,’ he teases, except I can hear his own urgency and I get it. He wants me as badly as I want him.
‘That’s physically impossible.’
His laugh is low and husky. ‘Then I probably shouldn’t tell you that I plan to take you home and fuck you until your voice is hoarse?’
‘Oh, God.’ The promise is so erotic. ‘What else?’
‘How I’m going to run my tongue along here…’ he draws his fingers out and in ‘…to taste you as you come? How I’m going to make you come again and again and I’m going to watch you, listen to you begging me for more, begging me until you can’t think straight.’
‘I’m already there,’ I promise throatily.
His laugh is a dismissal. ‘You only think you are, Imogen. Believe me, it gets worse.’
He is right.
We stay for another hour, and by the time we leave, my body is in a state of sensual torture. There’s no helicopter waiting for us tonight. We take his car, and I don’t sit too close because I feel as if one touch, now we’re alone, will result in a complete explosion, and a short car ride isn’t the place to satisfy that. I sit on the edge of my seat, staring out of the window at New York, the invisible paint we’d used in the black-lit room dry now and any hint of it concealed by the clothes we’ve put back on.
But not being able to see something doesn’t remove the evidence of it and I feel every brush stroke in the fibres of my soul.
The driver brings the car into a basement garage and I expel a sigh of relief that Nicholas clearly hears, if his soft laugh is anything to go by.
But I’m not amused.
I’m alive with feelings that are new to me and seriously intense.
I am fuelled by a hunger that I insist on owning.
Edward opens the doors and we step out, my smile polite, my mind elsewhere.
We reach the elevator and the doors open after only a second. I contemplate jumping him but for the same reason I resisted in the car, I keep my distance now, aware that he’s watching me, trying to decode me.
He has no idea what he’s unleashed.
But he’s about to find out.
The doors ping open into his apartment and the details I recall from last time flitter in my mind once more—the triple-height ceilings, a wall of pure glass, a balcony overlooking Central Park with a swimming pool and a hot tub. I know from the tour he gave me last time that there’s an indoor squash court down the corridor, a yoga studio he’s converted into a gym, four bedrooms, five bathrooms and two separate staff rooms, which he has vacant.
‘I don’t like living with other people, even if they’re at the end of the corridor.’
I get his point. I hate it too. I have a cleaner who comes once a fortnight and that suits me just fine.
As soon as the front door clicks shut, I turn around to face him, my breath dragged from my lungs, the rasping sound filling the elegant Jeffersonian lobby.
‘Didn’t you say you were going to fuck me so hard I couldn’t speak?’ I demand, crossing my arms over my chest.
His expression shows surprise but only for a moment, then he’s sweeping across the tiles, scooping me up over one shoulder as if I weigh nothing and carrying me to my heaven, my desperation, the sweetest torture I’ve ever known—his bedroom.
‘OH, MY GOD.’
I must have fallen asleep. I push up onto my elbows to find Nicholas watching me, that unbearably sexy grin on his too-handsome face, and my heart
