‘Well, I sure am.’ He tossed the water back in one long swallow and a rivulet escaped and ran down his jaw. When his mouth returned to hers it was fresh and straight-from-the-ice-bucket cool.
It didn’t last ten seconds.
They kissed a while longer but, even with her eyes closed and her mind very much otherwise occupied, she could feel the subtle shift of Oliver’s body as he leaned towards the table. A moment later, he pulled his mouth from hers and placed a half-melted ice block on her swollen lips.
Her whole body lurched as he ran the icy surprise over her top lip and then her lower one, and she lapped at the trickle of melted water that ran into her mouth, smiling as he departed for her chin. Then her throat. Then around to the thumping pulse-point at the top of her jaw. His lips trailed a heartbeat behind the melting cube, kissing off the moisture as the ice liquefied against her scorching skin until it was completely gone.
Four cool fingers slid up her thigh and tucked under the hem of her underwear while his other hand made a complete mess of her hair.
‘Those girls at school must have known what they were doing,’ he murmured hard against the ear he was lavishing.
‘What do you mean?’ She could barely remember them, and that was saying something.
‘Even as kids, they must have known a threat when they saw one. That you were capable of this.’
His fingers moved further into her underwear. Into her. She arched into his touch. ‘Such shamelessness?’
Greenish-brown eyes blazed into hers. ‘Such potential passion. And, yeah, a hint of shamelessness. No wonder the boys finally caught on.’
She couldn’t tell him she was packing a lifetime into this one night of the year. That she was hanging
way
outside her comfort zone because she knew she’d be spending the rest of her life safely inside it. Because how was she ever going to find something like this again, now that she’d tasted it?
Outside this day—outside this building—the real world ruled. It was a place where the kind of secret emotions she’d always harboured for sexy Oliver Harmer had no place being aired. And definitely not being indulged.
This was a ‘what happens at Christmas stays at Christmas’ kind of arrangement.
Casual and easy and terribly grown-up.
And the clock was ticking.
She moved against him to give him better access.
She’d grown lazy harbouring the feelings deep inside, exploiting the fact that he was
safe
to have feelings about as long as she was married. Like some kind of Hollywood star that it was okay to pant after because you knew you’d never, ever be acting on it. She held them close to her chest—clutched desperately, really—and enjoyed the sensations they brought. Enjoyed the what-if. Enjoyed the secret fantasy.
Careful what you wish for
, he’d said.
But while she didn’t dare indulge the emotional part, she was free to feed the physical part. The safe part. And Oliver was clearly very much up for the same with the hours they had left.
Because what happened here, inside the walls of this building, had nothing to do with the real world. And maybe it never had. Perhaps it had always been their weird little Cone-of-alternate-reality-Silence.
Maybe that was what made it so great.
‘The synapses in your brain are smouldering,’ he breathed, sniffing in amongst her hair. ‘Stop overthinking this.’
‘I can’t help it,’ she gasped. ‘I’m a thinker.’
‘Everyday-Audrey is a thinker. Go back to during-the-light show-Audrey. She was an impulsive and impressive doer.’
There you go. He saw it, too. There was a different set of rules for this day compared to the three hundred and sixty-four around it.
She twisted in his hold and it only pulled her dress up higher. But since both of them would have much preferred her to be out of it, that wasn’t really a problem.
‘You’re right,’ she said, settling more fully against him. ‘Enough of the thinking. Let’s go back to the feeling.’
Oliver pulled her more fully on top of him and studied her flushed face and shambolic hair.
‘Best view ever,’ he murmured.
‘That’s a big call given what’s outside the window.’
He craned his neck towards the view. ‘Good point. Change of plans.’ His warm hand slid into hers. ‘And change of view.’
She struggled to her feet alongside him, and Oliver led her, hand in hand, to an expensive, stuffed smoking chair by the window. One she’d always imagined him sitting in while he waited for her to arrive.
He twisted it square on to the view and sat before reaching for her.
‘Where were we?’
‘Here?’ From first-sex to chair-sex in just a few hours. Alice was well and truly down the rabbit hole tonight.
‘I wanted this upstairs. I’ve wanted it for years. You against that view. This is close enough.’
Her skin immediately remembered the cold press of glass against her hot breasts as he’d leaned on her from behind, upstairs, and her nipples hardened. There might not be the same drop sensation here on the chair a few feet back from all that glass and sky, but her stomach was doing enough flip-flops to qualify.
He took her hand and pulled her towards his lap. As she had on the sofa, she shimmied her silk dress higher to get her knees either side of his and then braced herself there.
‘God, you’re beautiful,’ he breathed. ‘Lit by all the lights of Hong Kong. It’s like a halo.’
Was there a smoother-talking man in all this world? But her body totally fell for it, parts of her softening and throbbing an echo to the honey in his voice and the promise in his eyes. She lowered herself onto his lap.
One masculine hand slid, fully spread, up the tight, silk fabric of her stomach and over her breasts while the other followed it on the other side of her body, trailing the line of the dress’s zip like someone following a rail line to the nearest town. At its end point he snagged the slider and lowered it and her loaner dress immediately loosened. It was a matter of moments before the hand at her breasts curled in the sensuous fabric and gently pulled it down her arms, revealing her uncovered breasts, and letting the beautiful fabric that he’d heated with his mere touch bunch, forgotten, around her waist.
‘Oliver...’ she breathed.
Two hands slid up her naked back holding her close as his body closed the gap between theirs and his mouth moved immediately to her breast, dined there, sucking and coiling and working his magic against the sensitive pucker of nipple.
Her skin bloomed with gooseflesh.
She twisted against the excruciating pleasure and indulged herself by doing something she’d always dreamed of—burying her fingers deep in his dark hair. Over and over, curling and tangling and tugging; luxuriating as he tortured the breasts that had barely seen sun with the rasping caress of stubble.
Her legs officially gave out, but the warmth of his lap was waiting to catch her.
As soon as she pressed down into him, his mouth came away, sought hers out and clung there, rediscovering her before dropping again to the other breast.
Behind him, the polished glass of the dragonfly habitat reflected them both against the beauty of the city skyline. She, a half-naked silhouette balanced wantonly on Oliver’s lap, and he, pressed powerfully to her chest, with the stunning beauty of the Hong Kong skyline stretching out behind them. She looked wild and provocative and utterly alien to herself.
This is what Oliver sees
.
This was how he saw her.
Liberation rushed through her. She didn’t look ridiculous. She didn’t look all wrong teetering on the expensive chair. Or not enough like the beautiful people he mixed with. She looked
just like
a beautiful person. She looked absolutely, one hundred per cent right bedded within Oliver’s embrace.
They fitted together.
Deep in her soul, something cracked and broke away on a tidal surge of emotion. Part of a levee wall, a giant fragment of whatever powerful thing had been holding back all her feelings all this time.
They
belonged
together.
And finally they were.
Oliver’s silhouette hands released her at the back and reached up to pull the struggling pins from her hair, sending it tumbling down over her bare shoulders, tickling the tops of her bared breasts. His hands framed her face and drew her gaze back down to his, hot and blazing and totally focused.
Those eyes that promised her the world. Promised her forever.
And he was the only man she could imagine delivering it.
His lips, when she met them, were as hot and urgent as the touch that skittered over her flesh, and while she was distracted with that he levered them both up long enough to get his wallet out of his trousers pocket, fumbled in it for a moment then threw the whole thing on the floor.
‘How many of those do you have?’ she breathed, needing the moment of sanity to ground her spinning mind. Nothing like a condom to bring things screaming back to reality.
‘Just the one.’
Disappointment warred with pleasure.
One
was a very finite number. The two he’d used upstairs came from a stash in the en suite cabinet, which might as well be back in Shanghai for all the use it was to them at this moment. Upstairs was a whole world away. But
one
also meant he didn’t carry a string of
twelve
in case he found himself on a desert island with a life raft full of flight attendants.
Which was strangely reassuring.
As though
one
made tonight somehow less casual, for him.
But clarity streamed in with the fresh air. That was crazy thinking. The fact he had a condom at all made it casual. The fact she was leaving for another country in a few hours made it casual. The fact Oliver didn’t do relationships made it casual.
But whatever it was. She still wanted it. Come what may.
And she was taking it.
She lowered herself to mere millimetres from his lips and breathed against them. ‘Don’t break it.’
His chuckle was lost in the resumption of their hot kiss and her brain had to let go of such trivialities as what happened with the condom as it focused on the rush of sensation birthed by his talented fingers and lips. The strength with which he pulled her against his hard body. The expediency with which he solved the barriers of fabric between them. She pressed back up onto her knees to give him room to manoeuvre beneath her and then he shifted lower in the chair just slightly—just enough—and used one hand at her coccyx to steady her while another worked at the wet juncture of her thighs to guide her down onto the rigid, strength of him.
‘So damned beautiful...’
His choked words only made her hotter. As it had been the first time, and the second, it was again now—like pulling on a custom-made kid glove. They fitted together perfectly. More perfectly than before, if that was possible, because gravity gave her extra fit. She rose up on her knees again, repositioned, and then sank fully down onto him, heavy and certain.
His throaty, appreciative groan rumbled through them both. Had there ever been a more heartening sound? How was it possible to feel so small and feminine and so strong and powerful at the same time? Yet she did, balanced on him like a jockey on a thoroughbred, with just as much control of the powerful beast below her through the subtle movements of her body.
She tipped her pelvis on a series of rocks and let the choked noises coming from his throat set the tempo. Steady, heavy, slow.
His head pressed back against the armchair as she ground against him, and Audrey curled forwards to trail her mouth across the exposed strength of his throat, exploring the hollow below it. Her position meant her breasts hung within easy reach of his taskless hands so he pressed them both against her flesh—as though they were the fulsome mounds he’d always secretly coveted, as though they were all his big hands could manage—circling his palms in big, hard arcs that mirrored the rhythm of her hips.
The desperate roughness of her want.
‘Oliver...’
As her speed increased so did their breathing, and she arched back in his hold. In the terrarium glass, dragonflies buzzed around her reflection like fluorescent faeries...or like living sparks generated by the extraordinary friction of their bodies. Oliver’s hands tightened and rubbed her straining breasts and every quivering massage told her how much closer to the edge he was getting. His excitement fuelled hers.
She was doing this to him.
Her.
As she watched the lithe undulations of their silhouette, tight heat coiled into an exquisite pain where they fused together and the armchair rocked with the combined momentum of their frantic bodies.
Up...
Up...
She tipped her head back and vocalised—an expressive, inarticulate, erotic kind of gurgle—as the fibres of her muscles bunched and readied themselves deep inside.
‘Now, beautiful,’ he strained on a grimace, meeting her with the powerful upwards slam of his own hips. ‘Come for me now.’
Her eyes snapped down to his—unguarded and raw—she let her soul pour out of them.
And then her world imploded.
As if the top storeys of their hotel had just
sheared away
in a landslide, and she went careening down to the earth far below on a roller-coaster tide of molten, magnificent mud. Punishing and protective. Weakening and reinforcing. Twitching and spasming. Utterly overwhelming.
She opened her eyes just in time to see them reflected in the tank, as glittering and ancient as the creatures flying around in it, and just in time to see the torsion of Oliver’s big body beneath hers as he came right after her.
A pained stream of air, frozen on the prolonged first consonant of an oath and lasting as long as his orgasm, squeezed out between his lips and teeth. She fell forward into him, weakened, and the change of angle where they were still joined—where he was still so sensitive—caused a full-body jerk in his and the oath finally spilled across his talented lips, loud and crude.
And almost holy.
‘Potty mouth,’ she gasped against his sweat-dampened ear when she could eventually re-coordinate the passage of air in and out of her lungs.