A kiss pressed to my cheek.
“Your mind.”
Another pressed to my forehead.
“Your body.”
His hold tilts my body back, making me arch, making my head fall against his hand as he presses a third kiss to my chest. His lips close around the button just below my collarbone.
I don’t know how he does it, but his mouth slips the button out of its gap, makes the fabric flare out an inch. The smallest amount of skin is bared, and yet my entire body tingles as if he’s just stripped me nude.
“I get your past.”
Another button.
“Your present.”
Another inch.
I’m panting now, three buttons undone. Only the thinnest bandeau trimmed with dainty black lace covers my breasts.
“Your future.”
The hand from my neck glides down my back. Pinning my spine. Arching me up even more. The solid line of him digging into my ass.
“That’s what you promised me, isn’t it, Goldfinch?”
My entire upper body is balanced on his hand, my knees bent, thighs on either side of his waist. A scorch of his breath presses right over the curve of my breasts, the hook of his teeth dragging down the front fabric. The friction makes me want to catch fire.
When I don’t answer, too caught up in what he’s doing, reveling in this lust of heat, he nips me right there on my breast, making me jump. His grip on my waist keeps me locked down on his lap—on the stiffness of his cock. “Isn’t it?” he demands.
“Yes.”
He soothes the spot with a kiss, leaning back up. “That’s right,” he tells me. “Now reach up.”
“What?”
His chin jerks upward. “See that wooden loop there? It’s meant as a knocker for the driver, but I want you to grab hold of it.”
I follow this gaze to the ceiling, to the hinged circlet just above my head. “Slade—”
“Do it.”
His instruction tightens my stomach with arousal, and I swallow hard. “Bossy.”
“King,” he drawls.
Reaching up, I feel the loop of wood and pull it down, let my fingers curl around it. With my arms up, I somehow feel more exposed, more vulnerable.
More excited.
“Happy?” I counter, grip shifting, tone brazen.
He doesn’t reply. Instead, his fingers come down to the last remaining buttons on my shirt. Scooping them through the slits, letting each one come undone.
“What are you doing?”
Outside, people say too much to grasp. In here, he says nothing at all.
Somehow, that’s louder.
Both hands come up, calloused and warm, slipping the center of my shirt apart like peeling open the pages of a book. He lets the fabric rest at my sides, stomach exposed, breasts heaving inside my bandeau.
My skin crackles, every nerve ending sitting up in wait for what he’s going to do next. But I don’t expect him to slip down to the ties at my pants. To pull the string and let them loose.
One of my hands snaps down, finger and thumb circling his wayward wrist. “What are you doing?”
He pauses, black brow crooking up. “Did I tell you that you could let go of that handle?”
My heart skips a beat. “Slade…”
I receive a pat against my ass from his other hand, so swift and sharp that it makes me flinch. “Hey!”
“I want your hands up and gripping it.”
I don’t know what it says about me, but when Slade looks at me with this hunger in his eyes, when his rumbling voice slips out words of sensual command, I buckle. Boil. Burn.
My hand comes up to take hold of the loop, my chest automatically arching back up. Bending toward him.
He nods in satisfaction. “Now, where were we…”
His hand slips down to the waist of my pants, fingertips grazing inside and making the skin of my stomach jump.
“You want to climb a mountain—I’ll be right there to make sure you don’t fall,” he goes on, just as the first inch of his fingertips grazes over my panties.
“You want to build something? I’ll be handing you the tools.”
My head whirls and my nerves whip, and when his hand molds against me, when I know that he’s just found the wetness gathered there, I quake.
“Mmm, you’re wet for me, Goldfinch.”
I can’t help my wobbling breath. “Yes.” I shift my hips, an urge for him to move, to touch where I’ve begun to throb.
He answers my silent beckon. His fingers come up to my clit, rubbing and circling, making a moan drift past my lips. My hold on the loop tightens, grounding me, even as it helps me lift my hips, seeking his touch.