His hands were in her hair, his mouth on her neck, her cheek, her forehead. “You think I’m seriously hot?”

She reached for the buttons of his shirt, fumbled again and decided there had to be something wrong with her fingers. “No, I’m doing this to please Kathleen.” She moaned as he cupped her face in his hands and delivered a long, slow deliberate kiss to her mouth, and she thought to herself that the word kiss was too generic because she’d been kissed before and it had never felt like this. She was breathing hard, unraveled by the intimacy of his kiss and his sure, knowing touch. Her heart was doing an intensive workout of its own and she thought he could probably feel it because his hand was on her breast, teasing and then his mouth and she closed her eyes, awash with sensation as he ripped impatiently at his clothes and then did the same with hers.

They hadn’t bothered turning on the lights, but the moonlight through the window allowed them to stumble their way to the bed without bruising shins or banging elbows and she tumbled onto the mattress and grabbed his shoulders as he came down on top of her. His face was shadowed in the semidarkness, the details blurred by dim light.

She felt the weight of him, the solid power of his shoulders as he levered himself up, and then the skilled pressure of his mouth as he kissed her. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, desperate, urging him not to hold back, but he wouldn’t be rushed.

His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw, and from there to the skin of her throat and then her shoulder. He lingered there, breathing her in, tasting every segment of her skin as if she was a meal he was only going to get to savor once in a lifetime. She’d never felt so much all at once and she shifted under him as excitement escalated. Her body shivered with the contrasts—the chill of the air-conditioning and the warmth of his hands, the slow drag of his tongue over her breast and the rapid pounding of her heart. And she explored him back, touching and tasting, hearing the change in his breathing and the soft murmur of words.

His touch unraveled her but he kept up the intimate exploration until there was no part of her left unexplored, until she was quivering and writhing and focused on nothing but feelings. Muscle and strength. Heat and kisses. Arousal and need.