3. Bee #3
I should leave. I should march right back across the hall, write the interview request, send it to his secretary and pretend my panties are not threatening to become a crime scene.
Instead, I stand in his darkened office with my pulse beating under my skin and his scent gathering around me, roasted coffee, dark wood and smoke tucked deep in embers.
“Skylor,” I say, softer than I mean to.
His eyes flare. “Be precise, Beatrice.”
I know what he is asking. I hate that I know. I hate that my body has already answered him in every language but the one that matters.
I lift my chin. “Kiss me.”
He waits one breath. Two. Then his hand closes around the side of my neck and his mouth takes mine.
The first kiss is not gentle. It is controlled, which is somehow worse.
He does not slam me back or crush me against him.
He holds me still with one hand at my neck and the other at my waist, and his mouth presses over mine with slow, deliberate heat.
Testing. Tasting. Letting me feel every inch of restraint he has not yet broken.
My hands lift to his chest. I mean to brace against him. I mean to keep space.
My fingers curl into his jacket instead.
His chest moves under my palms, hard with the breath he drags in through his nose. The scent of him pours over me, and my body leans into the heat, greedy and thoughtless. I part my lips because I need more air, more contact, more of the dangerous taste gathering at the seam of his mouth.
He freezes.
The hand at my waist tightens once. “Beatrice.”
My name sounds wrecked.
I should be proud. I should be alarmed. I am both, which seems unfair because one woman should not have to manage this many reactions while being kissed by alien royalty.
“What?” I whisper against his mouth.
“If I use my tongue, this changes.”
A ridiculous laugh trembles in my chest. “That is the strangest warning I have ever received.”
“It is not a joke.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Tell me no.”
My fingers grip his jacket tighter.
There is my answer.
His mouth covers mine again, and his tongue swipes once across my lower lip.
One swipe.
My body detonates.
Slick floods my panties, sudden and hot enough to make my knees buckle.
My thighs press together, but the pressure only makes it worse.
Pleasure curls low in my belly and sinks claws into me, deep and pulsing, as if that single touch has reached places his mouth has no business knowing exist. My breath breaks into a sound I do not recognize.
Skylor reels back half an inch.
His black pupils blow wide. Gold flame burns around them, bright and wild. His grip on my waist goes almost careful, but his entire body has gone rigid. A muscle jumps in his jaw. His nostrils flare as he inhales, and the sound that leaves him is too low to be human.
Holy shit.
That tongue should be a registered weapon.
I press one hand to his chest. Not to push him away. To stay upright. “What was that?”
His gaze drops to my mouth. “Proof.”
“Of what?”
“That this is not only attraction.”
My brain tries to assemble an argument. It fails.
His taste sits on my lip, warm and dark, and my body pulses around the memory of it.
My panties cling wet to my skin. The office air brushes too cool against my throat.
His hand still holds my waist, and every place he touches me feels branded from the inside.
“No,” I whisper, because denial is free and I have already paid too much for everything else. “It’s still attraction.”
“Then step back.”
I do not.
His thumb strokes once at my waist, a slow drag through the fabric of my blouse. My breath shudders out.
“That is not stepping back,” he says.
“You’re blocking my exit.”
His gaze flicks to the open space beside him. “Your exit is clear.”
“Emotionally blocking it.”
The laugh that leaves him is rough and brief, gone almost before I can enjoy it. “You are impossible.”
“You’re deflecting again.”
“Yes.”
“With kissing.”
“Yes.”
“It’s more effective than your plantation answer.”
“I know.”
I should leave. Every sane part of me lines up in neat little rows and presents the case. Boss. Prince. Secrets. Coffee plantations. Mate. Tongue. Extremely dangerous tongue. My body listens politely, then reaches for him again like the argument bored her.
His head lowers.
I meet him halfway.
The second kiss ruins the first.
His tongue slips between my lips, and this time the heat does not strike once.
It spreads. It melts over my tongue, sweet and sharp, a dark rush of coffee and mineral heat, rain hissing against hot stone.
My hands climb to his neck. His skin burns under my palms. His mouth moves over mine with fierce precision, not wild yet, not careless, but close enough to show me the edge.
My thighs tremble. His arm bands around my waist and pulls me against him.
The hard line of his body meets mine, chest to breasts, thigh to thigh, and the thick ridge behind his trousers presses against my belly.
A needy sound tears out of me. He swallows it, then gives it back with a low growl that pours straight between my legs.
The heat takes the room apart.
Desk. Window. Notebook. Brazil. Questions.
All of it stays somewhere outside the circle of his arms, still real but unreachable.
His tongue strokes mine again, and slick dampens me further, soaking into my panties until every shift of my hips makes me ache.
I am kissing my boss. I am kissing a prince.
I am kissing the one man in this building with secrets I need and a mouth that has made every moral argument in my head sit down and shut up.
His hand slides up my back, fingers spread wide between my shoulder blades.
He does not grab my ass. Does not shove my skirt up.
Does not take more than I give. Somehow that restraint makes the kiss filthier, because I can feel what he wants through every controlled breath.
I bite his lower lip.
He breaks.
A snarl roughens his breath, and then I am on the edge of his desk, lifted there so smoothly my stomach swoops before my brain catches up.
His hips press between my knees. Papers shift under my thighs.
The coffee beans in the bowl rattle again, and this time I laugh into his mouth because if I do not laugh, I might beg.
He kisses the laugh out of me.
His tongue strokes deeper, and my body answers with another slick, aching pulse. I grip his shoulders and surrender to it, to him, to the hot, impossible drag of his mouth and the gold flame of his eyes when he pulls back just enough to look at me.
“Beatrice,” he says.
My name is a warning. A plea. A line drawn with shaking hands.
I should say stop.
I should ask about Brazil.
I should climb off his desk and retrieve whatever dignity is left under his very expensive shoe.
Instead, I pull him back down by his collar and open my mouth for more.