Page 102 of Lease to Love

Over and over, he praised me in that low, steady voice until my self-consciousness gave way to something softer. Something safer.

And then he dropped to his knees.

This big, powerful man knelt in front of me like a sinner preparing to worship, and my heart cracked wide open.

He unbuckled one of my heels and eased it from my foot, then paused. His mouth found the maple leaf tattooed against my left ankle.

He kissed it slowly. Deliberately.

"Been wondering about this since the day I first saw it." he murmured against my skin.

I looked down at him. "You never asked."

"I know."

"Why not?"

His eyes lifted to mine.

"Figured you'd tell me when you wanted me to know."

That answer landed somewhere deeper than it should have.

He kissed the tattoo once more before moving to the other foot, giving that ankle the same attention.

His hands slid slow up the inside of my thighs, and his thumbs hooked into the waistband of my panties as he looked up at me.

"You smell like heaven," he murmured, breath ghosting over skin that had never once felt this important to anybody. "Like apples and vanilla and brown sugar. I've thought about that for weeks."

"Roman—"

"Shh… Let me finish."

His mouth was so close I felt every word before I heard it.

“I’ve thought about the way you smell. The way you feel. The way you taste… I've thought about all of it.” He said, unbearably gentle for a man on his knees between my legs, “Tonight I get to stop thinking and just have it."

He pressed his mouth to the inside of my thigh. The first kiss was soft, almost chaste. The second was wetter, his tongue tracing a slow path upward.

By the time he finally slid my panties down, I was shaking, my hands braced on the frame of the mirror just to stay upright.

He was inches away from my heat when he spoke again.

"Look at yourself," he murmured against my skin. "I want you to see what I see."

I lifted my eyes to the mirror. A woman I barely recognized looked back at me. Flushed. Breathless. Naked and impossibly, dangerously alive.

And then his tongue found me, and every thought I had scattered into static.

He licked into me with wide, slow strokes, then tight, maddening circles, then back again, and I gripped his shoulders to stay upright.

He didn’t rush. He took his time the way he took his time with everything — deliberate, unhurried, like the whole night belonged to him and he had every intention of spending all of it right here.

Every time my hips chased more, he'd pull back just far enough to press a slow kiss to the inside of my thigh and murmur something against my skin — that's it, right there, let me hear you — before sinking back in like he'd only paused to catch his breath.

"Roman." His name came out choked, barely a word at all.

He hummed low against me, and I felt it more than I heard it, and that alone nearly undid me on its own. My legs shook. The mirror rattled against the wall… and then he slid two fingers inside me and curled them forward.