‘Don’t move for a sec,’ he whispers, and I nod.

‘Feel that?’

‘Yeah.’

That is his dick pulsing inside me like a racehorse desperate to get out of the gates. Yet we both hold our positions. By his standards, this is basically tantric sex. I’ve never seen such quiet, such stillness, in him, especially when he’s in this state of arousal. On instinct, I lower myself further forward so I can kiss him. His beard tickles my chin in the best possible way as he kisses me back hungrily, his fingers flexing against my thigh and his other hand finding the back of my neck, gripping me hard and pulling me further into the kiss. My nipples are brushing against the hair on his chest. Mmm.

He releases me. ‘Now you can ride me,’ he grits out. I bestow another kiss on his lips and I pull myself upright.

‘You look like a goddess. You’re how I imagined Boudica to look, all gorgeous skin and glorious hair.’

I grin. ‘If I’m Boudica, does that make you my horse?’

His laugh is pained. ‘Fuck, yeah, so you’d better fucking show me how you can ride me.’

And so I do. There’s no doubt I feel exposed, self-conscious, in this position, but I embrace it and I drink up Brendan’s avid gaze as I revel in the performance I’m putting on for him. As I drag myself up and down on his dick, that sense of exposure sharpens into something darker, more intoxicating. I’m simultaneously servicing him and taking my own pleasure from his glorious body, and it’s hot as hell.

He grips my hips hard, his powerful body undulating beneath me, his jaw flexing and hips thrusting. This is a private porno with a very lucky audience of one. He’s so bloody gorgeous, so supremely male, his voracious sexual appetites just an extension of that. I have a fleeting and totally inappropriate memory of Joe, whose intellectual arrogance and professional gravitas were undoubtedly sexier than what actually lay beneath his clothes. While I dismiss it immediately, it provides a wave of gratitude for this fine specimen of a man beneath me. I thought I was a woman who went for that tortured, cerebral, unobtainable type, but time has proven me wrong, it seems.

It strikes me that beneath those sharp suits, Brendan only ever overdelivers.

‘Fuck me harder,’ he orders me, accompanying his command with a vicious thrust, and I groan and obligingly up the intensity of my movements, grinding down on him until my thighs are burning and my skin is slick with sweat.