Page 208 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

He lifted his eyes to mine, unimpressed, and opened it perfectly on the first try.

“Of course you do,” I muttered.

His mouth found my breast, and the rest of the joke dissolved.

He was warm and slow and devastatingly thorough. His tongue circled, then drew me into his mouth. My back bowed off the bed, needing more. One of his hands spread across my ribs to ground me, his thumb moving over skin as if even restraint could be a kind of touch. He moved to the other breast, and I heard myself make a sound I might have been embarrassed about if he hadn’t answered it with a rough breath against my skin.

“Rafe.”

He kissed lower, over my stomach, pausing once near the soft place beneath my navel, his mouth reverent over the very human shape of me. My fingers tightened in his hair. He glanced up, and the sight nearly undid me: Rafe Virelli, exacting and untouchable and mine for this moment, kneeling between my thighs with his mouth on my skin and his eyes fixed on me like I was something he had chosen with his whole life.

His hands found the waistband of my pants. “May I?”

I nodded too quickly.

His mouth tilted. “Words, Quinn.”

That voice. That careful, serious voice asking for permission while his fingers rested at my waist and my entire body had become a yes.

“Yes.”

He eased my pants down my legs, taking my underwear with them, and kissed the inside of one knee before setting both garments aside. It was so unexpectedly tender that my throat tightened. Then he pushed my thighs apart with warm hands and settled lower, and tenderness became something else entirely.

He didn’t rush into it.

He kissed my inner thigh first, then the crease of my hip, then looked up again when my breathing changed. It wasn’t teasing exactly. Rafe didn’t strike me as a man who teased without purpose. He was learning me. Taking in every small shift, every sound I tried to swallow, every place my body softened under his hands.

“Still okay?” he asked.

I pushed my fingers into his hair. “If you stop now, I’ll become a legal problem.”

Grinning, he lowered his head.

The first touch of his tongue stole every clever thing I had ever planned to say for the rest of my life.

Heat opened low in my body, sudden and bright. I gripped the sheets with one hand and his hair with the other, not pulling him closer so much as holding on while the world narrowed to his mouth and his hands and the impossible patience of him. He learned quickly, which was both predictable and personally devastating. A small adjustment of pressure. A slower stroke. His fingers pressing into my thigh when my hips lifted toward him.

I tried to be quiet out of some last, ridiculous instinct toward dignity.

Rafe noticed. He lifted his head only enough to say, “Don’t.”

My face burned. “That’s bossy.”

“Yes.”

Then his mouth was on me again.

I broke embarrassingly fast after that.

Or maybe not embarrassingly. Maybe after weeks of wanting, after nearly losing him, after being touched like I was precious and wanted and safe all at once, my body simply made the only reasonable decision available. Pleasure gathered tight, then tighter, until I was shaking beneath him, his name coming out of me once, then again, no longer polished enough to sound like language.

I came with one hand in his hair and the other flying to my mouth.

He kissed the inside of my thigh, then climbed back up my body and gently moved my hand away.

“I want to hear you,” he said, and he removed the last of his clothing.

He kissed me before I could answer. I tasted myself on his mouth, tasted the heat beneath it, the restraint he was still holding in his body for my sake. I reached between us and found him, wrapping my hand around his hard length. His hips jerked once, involuntary and sharp, and he broke the kiss on a sound that made my entire body pulse again.