“She squeezed her eyes shut. “No.”“Excuse me?”She sniffed, opened her eyes then looked up. “No. I don’t wish you to leave.”His eyes changed from lukewarm to hot.The iron of the seat met her back. Oh yes, definitely she was the keeper at the zoo and she’d just offered her own leg, medium-rare, to the lion.”

“As she reached back for the buckle, her fingers met Mr. Meisner’s. She jumped. “I can do this... Sir.”“Ah.” He brushed aside her fingers. “I see you’ve at least remembered the sir.”“One always calls gentlemen that, just as you--”With only a rustle of cloth to warn her, his teeth met in the lobe of her ear, sending a spark into her middle. Like the melt of winter snow, she felt heat pool in her lower body. Her fingers curled against her collarbone where her hands still rested either side of her neck.“I’m not a gentleman, Faith.”

“Everything about him enveloped her, made her crave exactly this. His possession. In her mind something relaxed; the balance shifted. She welcomed every way he could touch her, the heat from his body, the atoms of his breath. Everything.”

“Deaf and blind to all but her pants and her hazy bluebell eyes as she rocked into bliss, he clenched her hips as if she held his life in her hands.Like she already held his heart.”

“She’d run over Dankyo in an instant to get to Theo. Be a darn big bump in the road, but she’d do it.”

“She was whole and real, not someone he held in his mind and heart but whom he couldn’t touch. God, she was so alive.“Rory,” he managed, lifting his hands to frame her flushed cheeks. Her startled gasp became a moan that flowed between his lips when their mouths fused. She opened for him at once, her dark lashes falling down to hide her eyes. It didn’t matter. He tasted what she felt when her tongue tentatively curled around his.”

“Soft. She was so soft, and warm. So giving as she moved with him. Rising to take him in, the covers shrouding her back as she arched.His lips clasped her nipple and she cried out, her fingernails dragging down his hips. She clamped around him. Squeezing. Taking. Giving more.”