Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Make me yours.
Never in his life had Grant been given a command he’d so desperately and instantly wanted to fulfil.
He closed the gap between them and, with a ruthless tug, crushed Cassie to him.
He let out an involuntary groan at the decadent caress of her warm, naked skin against his, and at the softness of her lips as they tried to match his battering kisses.
With an easy lift, her feet left the floor, and Grant did the very thing he’d been envisioning since kissing her the other night: he draped her onto his bed and covered her body with his.
Their fused mouths were in a war, each of them in a frenzy to reach deeper, as if to claim or punish or possess. He wanted all three, and as Cassie whimpered into his mouth, he gave in to the reckless turmoil of the conflicting desires.
As soon as he’d seen her standing within his room, a part of him had known that he would not allow her to leave it.
He’d tried. Tried to deny her, tried to stay furious with her for pushing him even further than she already had that evening.
He’d tried to be firm and send her away.
But when she’d walked for the door, attempting to maintain her pride and composure, his mind shut down.
The need he’d buried for so long had taken over, obliterating the last shred of his honor.
Cassie wanted him. This was her choice. And like hell if he wouldn’t give her what she wanted.
No more games. She didn’t have to tell him what she wanted him to do; he could read her desires as she writhed beneath him, her hands exploring his back, his hips and chest, and then, more boldly, his arse.
“Grant,” she pleaded as he trailed hot kisses down her throat, and lower. His lips closed around the mound of her breast, and she arched her back with a soft yelp.
“Yes, say my name,” he murmured as he grazed her nipple with his teeth. He wanted to wring all sorts of nonsensical sounds from her throat, but he wanted his name on her tongue the most. Cassie gave him that, gasping it, and raking her fingers through his hair as he worshipped her other breast.
As if instinctively, her hand reached toward his groin, but he caught her wrist and pinned it to the bedcover.
He was rock hard with the ache of desire.
It would not take more than a few strokes to finish him off.
But this wasn’t about him. She’d come to him with one need in mind: pleasure. Her own.
Grant eased back a little, enough to take in the divine sight of her sprawled underneath him, her lips red and puffy, her perfectly shaped breasts on full display.
“You’re so beautiful. I can’t stop looking at you,” he said as he brushed his fingers down the valley between her breasts, to the flat of her stomach, and lower, to the apex of her thighs. She squeezed them together, and Grant stopped. He waited. And then, the muscles of her thighs began to relax.
“Are you still sure?” he asked. He would never forgive himself if she’d changed her mind but had been too reluctant to tell him.
Her eyes glittered like jewels in the firelight, dusky blue and leaden with need. “I’m sure. I want this, Grant. I want you.”
Her declaration pummeled into him like one of the snowy gales battering the windows of his room.
Rationally, he knew what she meant: she wanted him to make love to her, to pleasure her, here and now, in this bed.
For this one night. Nothing beyond that.
But for a few missing heartbeats, he interpreted the words differently.
For a dangerous moment, he considered it as something potentially more.
Cassie writhed beneath him again, and he realized he was still gazing at her, still pinning her wrist to the bed.
The tension in her thighs had melted completely, and reading the invitation, Grant drew a finger along the seam of her core.
Her eyes flared, her lips parted, and he took her mouth again.
His tongue plunged in deep as her hips bucked up to meet his hand.
Grant reined in his quickly collapsing control and forced himself to breathe.
To move slower. She wasn’t a virgin, but that didn’t mean she was experienced.
At the fleeting image of Cassie underneath Renfry, of the rogue spreading her open to him, taking his pleasure and treating her as nothing but a vessel in which to slake his lust, Grant’s mind recoiled.
She wanted more than that from him tonight, and he would not disappoint her.
As he touched her, his plunging tongue mimicked his fingers, building heat and friction and wringing the sounds from her throat that he’d so desperately wanted to hear her make.
Circling her hips, Cassie’s moans vibrated through his mouth, into his chest, and when she screamed her release again and again, he swallowed the sound, rather than let it blare into the quiet of the sleeping house.
“I didn’t know… I had no idea…” she murmured, panting and mindless as she came down from her delirium.
With a small huff of laughter, he settled onto the bedcover next to her. No longer strung tight as a bow, she relaxed into his arms. The sound of her contented sigh and the rosy pink of her cheeks nearly made him forget the painful state of his arousal.
Cassie pressed her mouth to his shoulder and kissed a trail up his neck, her soft lips buzzing under his skin and adding more pressure to the granite coil of his groin.
Naked as they both were, she could not overlook the sight.
Her eyes took in his condition, and when she met his hooded gaze again, she bit her lower lip.
“Are you going to ask?” she said.
He ran his finger down the slope of her pert nose and then across her chin. God, she was gorgeous like this, her golden hair loose around her shoulders, her lips swollen, sweat glistening in the hollow of her collarbone.
“Ask what?”
That rogue hand of hers slipped again toward his hips. He caught it, stilling it. “Next,” she said.
He felt ready to explode just from that one word and the intent behind it.
“This was about your pleasure, not mine,” he said, even though he was nearly blind with the single-minded need to be inside her.
Cassie lifted her chin from his shoulder, and a curtain of her hair swung forward to cover one eye. He pushed it aside and tucked it behind her ear.
“I asked you to make love to me, Grant Thornton.” She rolled her wrist free from his grip. But she only touched a finger to his upper lip. She drew it down, tugging his bottom lip. “I’m still waiting.”
His pulse slammed in his neck. “You have no notion of what you do to me. Do you?”
Grant pushed her onto her back, and his mind silenced.
All potential consequences muted beneath the sounds of their rough breathing as he nudged her delectable thigh aside and aligned himself with her.
He clamped his mouth to hers and thrust forward, muffling her reflexive cry.
With painful restraint, Grant went still, aware he might have hurt her.
“Don’t stop,” she breathed and clutched him closer.
He exhaled in a rush and seated himself to the hilt, reveling in the tight clasp of her, of her uneven breathing as he began to rock forward and back.
She clutched the sides of his face, her nails likely leaving indentations, but he didn’t care.
Grant watched her, the tips of their noses brushing together and apart, as she began to gasp and drown in the pleasure that she’d come here for.
That she’d shoved aside all pride, all fear, all doubt, to reach for. She was bloody magnificent.
Cassie’s mewls and moans began to rise as he deepened each thrust, closing in fast on his peak.
He’d known he would not last long, and as his body tightened, he stopped breathing.
Though it was practically torture, he tore himself free at the last moment and dropped his forehead to Cassie’s.
They each struggled for air as he held her to him, their bodies slick with sweat.
“My God, Cassie—” He collapsed next to her, their legs still entwined. She wrapped her arms around his torso so tightly her heartbeat thudded against his ribs. There was an unnerving trembling in his arms and wrists as he held her to him.
Grant sealed his mouth shut without finishing the thought that had bolted into his mind. A perilous thought that frightened him with its truth. That one night with Cassandra Sinclair would never be enough.
The carriage turned onto Grosvenor Square, and Cassie’s stomach plummeted. “Oh no,” she murmured as she stared through the window.
Grant followed her gaze, his hands still adjusting his cravat. “What is it?”
“My brother.” Michael’s coach was parked near the front of her residence.
Grant sat back against the burgundy quilted cushion of his carriage. “Damn.”
They’d wasted no time at Lindstrom House, departing even before the early breakfast had concluded.
When Cassie had stepped outside her guest room that morning, Grant had been waiting for her at the landing of the stairs.
As she approached, her legs suddenly quivering like warmed honey, a wicked grin had tucked into the corner of his mouth.
It brought her mind directly back to the early morning hours spent in his room, in his bed, before returning to her own room before the servants woke.
As they descended the stairs together, Cassie had wondered if she should say anything about the night.
Or if they should pretend nothing had happened.