She silenced him with her fingers, stroking over his lips until they relaxed and his tongue darted out to touch them “Right now,” she said in a husky whisper, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to restrain yourself from anything that might aggravate my condition.”
As she spoke, she began to move her hands over the hard, ridged planes of his belly and chest, light sweeping caresses interspersed with deeper pressure to work the tension out of his body.
At last he sighed and closed his eyes, giving himself up to her ministrations. “I can tell,” she continued gravely, “that you’re not used to being at someone’s mercy.” Her fingers found the whorls of hair that surrounded his small male nipples, already rigid when her thumbs slid over them. The soft catch of his breath made her focus attention there for a long, lazy stretch of time.
“No,” he said raggedly, “I’m not.” He opened his mouth to continue, and the words were lost in a soft hiss of breath as she bent down to close her lips over the sensitive nipple, so unlike and yet so like hers.
Her tongue flicked and teased it, and suddenly the muscles in his belly clenched and rolled as he tried to surge up against her. “Jodie,” he rasped, an ineffectual threat, she was sure in her own power now and pushed him down easily.
“Well,” she drawled, “you’re just going to have to learn to take it. It just so happens I’m not like those other women.” She grinned, almost sharply, showing her teeth. “I can’t be so easily dominated. And I’m going to prove it to you, so you don’t make the mistake of forgetting.”
Luke’s eyes snapped open to meet hers, for an instant they locked wills, and then Luke gave up with a groan.
“You see?” Joey whispered. She stretched out along his length and began to explore the powerful swell of his chest, the arch and hollows of shoulder and throat.
The tension in him now, as her lips and tongue and teeth did their insidious work, was not of resistance. She gloried in the subtle reactions, the shifts in his expression, the unevenness of his breathing. It was her power, and his body acknowledged it, acknowledged that she was his match. Joey did not stop to consider why that seemed so important. For now, it didn’t matter.
She sucked at the skin where neck met shoulder, not too gently, hard enough to leave marks, while he arched against her. When her tongue slid up the corded column of his neck, his hands rose up to grip her upper arms, she could feel his attempts not to drag her more tightly to him, crush the bones in his response. “Easy,” she murmured “Relax.”
He made a sound of considerable skepticism, choked off when she caught his earlobe between her teeth. For the second time she noticed the fine hairs that grew neatly along the rim of his ear, she stroked it with her tongue. “Your ears,” she breathed into his skin, “are a dead giveaway—didn’t any of those other women ever notice?”
When Luke pushed against her this time, it was with sufficient force to set her back where he could see her face. “None of them knew, Joey,” he growled, “None of them meant anything.”
Joey gazed into his eyes, dark with passion, and felt her heart turn over. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
She used her will to carry him back down to the bed. There were no more coherent words from him for some time after, as she turned her attention to the carved, mobile planes of his face, moistening his lips with her own, tracing the edge of his jaw, his trembling eyelids with her tongue. The heat spreading through her, emanating from the place where his arousal pushed against her through the inadequate barriers of clothing, made it more difficult to keep up the light patter of conversation she needed to hold him down and at bay. The words began to catch on breaths that had become shallow and rapid with an almost unbearable awareness of him.
“I’m still not sure why I didn’t recognize you the very first time,” she managed at last, pressing a series of feather-light kisses along the straight dark line of his brow. “Your eyes should have told me And then your behavior…”