Page 46 of Lethal Obsession

“You have to eat,” he says, but his voice is low and hypnotic, and his arm around me draws me so close that I cling to the edges of his jacket, wanting nothing more than to stay here.

To keep him close.

I want to speak, but when I try to open my eyes, they feel leaden. His nearness combines with the darkness, drawing me down into the past and into the dreams that belong to him.

Alexei’s hard body looms over mine, his lone eye blazing a furious, intense blue that bores fiercely into my own. Despite the watching men and the danger I’m in, his intensity is strengthening rather than frightening, like being injected with some vital force that makes my blood thrum through my body. His hand slides up my thigh, higher and higher, so close to the most intimate part of me that I can barely breathe, then halts. I feel the chill touch of the blade, right at the juncture of my thigh.

“Trust me,” he breathes.

The flat of the blade presses against my outer folds, a strange, cold pressure that makes me suck in my breath. His eye holds my own, and I bite my lip as the tip of the blade pricks my skin.

The breath of his voice ripples against my ear again: “Scream . . .”

I lurch awake in my hotel bedroom with my heart racing and the scream still stuck in my throat. Momentarily bewildered, in the grainy pre-dawn, by my strange surroundings and a pillow that feels unusually hard, I shift slightly and realize it isn’t the pillow that’s hard.

It’s Alexei’s chest beneath my cheek.

I know it by his dusky, intoxicating scent and my own instant arousal, even before I glance up.

My hand is curled beneath Alexei’s chin, and my lips almost touch his jaw. One of his large hands cradles my head against his chest. The other clasps my bare thigh, holding it possessively in place over his hips.

Or more accurately, across another part of his anatomy. One that is even more insistently hard than his chest.

I become slowly aware that my dress is rucked up around my waist and my legs sprawled so widely apart that my ass is in the air, pushing my heat firmly against his hip.

Not just heat.

It’s one thing to wake from that dream wet and aching when I’m alone. Then I can slide a hand between my legs and bring myself to the quick, intense orgasm I need to fall asleep again.

Waking in that state pressed up against the actual subject of that dream is another thing altogether. Especially when the iron-hard length I’ve only ever been able to fantasize about is throbbing hungrily against my inner thigh, so close to where his hands and blade were in my dream that I barely know the difference between the two.

I don’t realize I’m moving my hips until Alexei makes a low noise in his chest that vibrates beneath my cheek. He pulls my thigh higher and wider across him, his length pounding against my bare leg, turning his head toward me so my lips graze the skin just behind his jaw.

He groans again, his hand sliding around my thigh and onto my ass, and he gathers me closer, his fingers slipping into the crease of my thigh as he rocks me effortlessly against him.

As far as my body is concerned, we’re way past the point of no return. This seductive reality is way too close to my every fantasy for me to argue with it, and I’m too turned on to want to. My thighs widen even further, my lips part against his neck, and my fingers close around his suit shirt, pulling myself closer still, orgasm so close I can feel the sensual waves lapping just on the edge of consciousness.

Clearly I’m not the only one.

Suddenly Alexei’s hands close around my hips, and he lifts my entire body like I’m a marionette, settling my legs on either side of his hips, his pants and my soaked silk underwear all that lies between me and his pulsing cock. I brace myself on his chest with my hands as his roam lazily over my ass. Groaning appreciatively, he arches upward, pressing down on my hips to rotate me against his rock-hard bulge.

“Oh,” I gasp.

He stops.

Becomes extremely still.

I open my eyes to find him staring up at me, his lone eye barely discernible in the gray light. Mortified and aroused in equal parts, I curl my hand inside his shirt neck, my entire body quivering as my fingers touch the brilliant eagle inked over his heart. Emboldened by my current position above him, his body trapped between my legs, I lean forward without thought and touch my lips to the ink.

He makes a sound low in his chest.

His hands tighten on my hips, and for a delicious, giddy moment, I think he’s going to kiss me.

Then suddenly I’m on my back, and Alexei is looming over me, his face grim. He puts his mouth close to my ear. “What the fuck are you doing?”

If your intention was to deter me, I think dimly through the intense haze of desire, you really shouldn’t have done that.

His voice in my ear is too close to a thousand dreams. To the forbidden memories only he and I share.