He slid his arm around her waist and drew her flush to him, making a gasp fly from her lips when her breasts flattened against him and his cock found a home in the juncture between her thighs. He chased it with his tongue, capturing her next heated breath. He couldn’t get enough of her mouth, her scent, her taste. Valentine wanted to memorize it all. He almost wanted to force himself to slow down, but the passion was already beyond him, sweeping him up into the storm that was her.

“Bronwyn,” he groaned when her fingers tangled into his hair and tugged, angling his neck to one side so that she could slant their mouths together more deeply, as if she, too, could not be sated with a few shallow nips and licks. Valentine wanted to bury himself in her heat, climb inside her skin and live there for all eternity. His thoughts were nonsensical, of course, but his brain was functioning at half capacity, if that. He’d never thought himself capable of such foolish, impulsive thoughts. Climb into someone? It was absurd.

But still, a part of him yearned… What would life be like with her, if circumstances were different? If he’d courted her properly. If she wasn’t Ashvale’s sister. If they hadn’t collided the way they had. Before the ocean liner, Bronwyn Chase had always been a girl, the forbidden younger sister of his best friend, an option he could never entertain. But now, he couldn’t imagine how on earth he’d ever managed to stay away.

A small voice tried to argue that it was nothing but lust, but Valentine knew it was far beyond that.

Bronwyn Chase was…life changing.

“Valentine,” she moaned over his lips, dragging her taut nipples across his mat of chest hair and making them both gasp at the friction. He was so on edge, his skin felt like it was going to split apart at the seams, and yet, he couldn’t stop touching her, mapping every velvet inch of her curves. He never wanted to forget what she felt like.

How responsive she was. How fucking beautiful.

His hands roved her back, from her slender nape along the deep sultry channel of her spine to the sweet rise of her buttocks, drawing her closer until there wasn’t a sliver of space between them. Then he took her lips again in a drugging kiss before lying back on the bed and pulling her to straddle him. He groaned as the new position notched him right in the wet, warm haven between her thighs. “Take your pleasure, Bronwyn,” he said huskily.

Those blue eyes went wide as she rocked against him, the slow, slick glide making them both shudder at the sensation. God, he couldn’t wait to be inside her, but this was all for her. Valentine wanted every second of this interlude to be directed at her whims.