Standing here topless in front of a man I don’t know while he openly appraises me feels wrong on every level… except for the level where his eyes drop from my face to my naked breasts, and I finally understand what all the romance books mean when they say a man’s eyes burn, because his are blazing. His mouth opens and shuts again, this moment of silence between us stretching into eternity.

Until he grins.

It’s a dirty grin, carnal and dominating and thrilled.

‘Unfuckingbelievable. Take it off.’

I choose to take it to mean just the dress, so I leave my thong intact and push the dress over my hips, stepping carefully out of the fabric pooled around my heels. I’m barely done casting it aside when he’s on me, gathering me up in his arms and smushing my breasts to his chest, my pelvis to what is now an obscene-looking erection, so fully fledged that it’s a walking red flag all on its own.

But I’m ignoring that, because the sensation of being almost naked in the arms of a huge beast who smells divine and seems intent on ravaging me is so overwhelmingly unfamiliar and shocking and excellent that my cognitive brain withers in defeat.

I’m not prepared for his mouth to find mine, but it does, as soon as he has me in his claws, and he kisses me, hard and hungry and filthy, his lips soft and his tongue insistent as it forces my mouth open while his hands fist my hair and grope my bottom, hard, and roam as though they’re trying to map every available inch of skin.

It’s either self-preservation or good old-fashioned desire that has me hooking my arms around his shoulders as he performs this sensory onslaught. He’s not kissing me so much as fucking my mouth with deep, demanding strokes that feel like a menacing foreshadowing of what he’ll do to me shortly with other body parts. He’s consuming me, milking me, and an actual thought escapes from my cognitive cesspit:

This isn’t him giving me a sales pitch. This is him unleashed.

As if he can read my mind, he releases me from his mouth and his grasp with an anguished pant and walks me backwards until I hit the glass. ‘Stay still,’ he orders, his mouth all swollen and wet and lovely. He shoots my breasts a filthy look before bracketing my hips in a tight grip. By tugging them forward and leaving my shoulders slumped against the glass, he has me reclining slightly, and that’s when he bends and takes one nipple in his mouth, holding it oh-so lightly between his teeth as he rolls his tongue over it.

I moan in spite of myself, and my palms make a small squeak as they slap the glass for purchase.